A random blog

One marble at a time

2006-11-22T02:42:00.000-08:00

The story below is one of those junk e-mails that one is asked to pass forward. I have often talked of quality of life isues on this blog and I thought this story would be relevant here... especially if you are an MBA who doesn't see her/his familyfor weeks on end.

"The older I get, the more I enjoy Saturday mornings. Perhaps it's the quiet solitude that comes with being the first to rise, or maybe it's the unbounded joy of not having to be at work. Either way, the first few hours of a Saturday morning are most enjoyable.

A few weeks ago, I was shuffling toward the garage with a steaming cup of coffee in one hand and the morning paper in the other. What began as a typical Saturday morning turned into one of those lessons that life seems to hand you from time to time. Let me tell you about it:

I turned the dial up into the phone portion of the band on my ham radio in order to listen to a Saturday morning swap net. Along the way, I came across an older sounding chap, with a tremendous signal and a golden voice. You know the kind; he sounded like he should be in the broadcasting business. He was telling whom-ever he was talking with something about "a thousand marbles." I was intrigued and stopped to listen to what he had to say

"Well, Tom, it sure sounds like you're busy with your job. I'm sure they pay you well but it's a shame you have to be away from home and your family so much. Hard to believe a young fellow should have to work sixty or seventy hours a week to make ends meet. It's too bad you missed your daughter's "dance recital" he continued. "Let me tell you something that has helped me keep my own priorities." And that's when he began to explain his theory of a "thousand marbles."

"You see, I sat down one day and did a little arithmetic. The average person lives about seventy-five years. I know, some live more and some live less, but on average, folks live about seventy-five years.

"Now then, I multiplied 75 times 52 and I came up with 3900, which is the number of Saturdays that the average person has in their entire lifetime. Now, stick with me, Tom, I'm getting to the important part.

It took me until I was fifty-five years old to think about all this in any detail", he went on, "and by that time I had lived through over twenty-eight hundred Saturdays." "I got to thinking that if I lived to be seventy-five, I only had about a thousand of them left to enjoy. So I went to a toy store and bought every single marble they had. I ended up having to visit three toy stores to round up 1000 marbles. I took them home and put them inside a large, clear plastic container right here in the shack next to my gear."

"Every Saturday since then, I have taken one marble out and thrown it away. I found that by watching the marbles diminish, I focused more on the really important things in life.

There is nothing like watching your time here on this earth run out to help get your priorities straight."

"Now let me tell you one last thing before I sign-off with you and take my lovely wife out for breakfast. This morning, I took the very last marble out of the container. I figure that if I make it until next Saturday then I have been given a little extra time. And the one thing we can all use is a little more time."

"It was nice to meet you Tom, I hope you spend more time with your family, and I hope to meet you again here on the band. This is a 75 Year old Man, K9NZQ, clear and going QRT, good morning!"

You could have heard a pin drop on the band when this fellow signed off. I guess he gave us all a lot to think about. I had planned to work on the antenna that morning, and then I was going to meet up with a few hams to work on the next club newsletter.

Instead, I went upstairs and woke my wife up with a kiss. "C'mon honey, I'm taking you and the kids to breakfast" "What brought this on?" she asked with a smile. "Oh, nothing special, it's just been a long time since we spent a Saturday together with the kids. And hey, can we stop at a toy store while we're out? I need to buy some marbles."

"Hard work is about risk"

2006-08-09T20:36:00.000-07:00

I was cleaning my mailbox and found this article I had mailed to friends:

"The meaning of hard work in a manual economy is clear. Without the leverage of machines and organizations, working hard meant producing more.
Those days are long gone. Most of us don't use our bodies as a replacement for a machine - unless we're paying for the privilege and getting a workout at the gym...
Even if you're a workaholic, you're not working very hard at all.
Sure, you're working long, but "long" and "hard" are now two different things. In the old days, ... hard work meant more work...
The future is not about time at all. The future is about work that's really and truly hard, not time-consuming.
Hard work is about risk. It begins when you deal with the things that you'd rather not deal with: fear of failure, fear of standing out, fear of rejection. Hard work is about training yourself to leap over this barrier, tunnel under that barrier, drive through the other barrier. And, after you've done that, to do it again the next day."

The Shy Guy

2006-06-19T04:45:00.000-07:00

Some people like dogs, some cats, others fish. But perhaps the least troublesome is the introvert. "Caring for Your Introvert" seems to suggest so. Actually it is a pretty accurate description of what goes on in an introvert's head and life. I should know, I am one.

I've had questions about an MBA being suitable for the introvert. I think the question confuses your job with your life. I've done some extremely uncomfortable stuff at my various jobs - cold calling and going to conferences to network. But that's part of the job. Like the article says, after a long day (or night) of 'extroversion', I just need some quiet time.

Asking if an MBA is suitable for introverts is like asking if an MBA is suitable for an optimist. Don't confuse your personality with your work or your life.

Battling the Bulge

2006-06-13T19:27:00.000-07:00

The Institutional Investor has a nice one on the growth of M&A boutiques and their race against the bulge bracket firms.

A few snippets:

Joseph Perella has a classical philosophy of what makes a great investment banker.

"It is one of the few remaining industries that follow the renaissance model," says the veteran merger adviser. "You don't pick up a book to learn how to do it. You learn on the job under an experienced hand, like going to the studio of Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo to chisel marble."

But this da Vinci code may be in peril, suggests the 64-year-old Perella, who has tutored generations of merger bankers during more than three decades on Wall Street. "The renaissance model requires that the mentors be around to teach the people coming in," he explains. "Whenever there is an exodus of senior people, that model is going to get tested."

Now is one of those times.

...the strong showing by boutiques [is not] a one-off event. As recently as 1999, independent firms were involved in fewer than 10 percent of global public-company mergers... By last year [2005] their market share exceeded 25 percent.

...Many observers, at both small and large firms, now see the independents not as a fly-by-night phenomenon but as a permanent and significant fixture of the M&A landscape -- for a host of reasons.

...Today's M&A boom ensures that there's more than enough business to go around: Rainmakers at the top four M&A firms -- Goldman, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup and J.P. Morgan -- generated an astronomical $5.9 billion in advisory fees last year, up from $4.8 billion in 2004, according to their financial statements. Global M&A volume reached $2.2 trillion last year, twice 2002's level and the highest since the bubble-inflated record of $3.4 trillion in 2000.

New look

2006-06-12T00:13:00.000-07:00

I was getting bored of the old look. So I decided to waste the weekend getting the new look up. But things did not go smoothly.

For the 3 guys who use the RSS feed: in changing the blog template, I screwed up the feed. You should be able to receive the old feed for about 20-30 days before it finally dies. Please re-subscribe. Sorry about the mess.

On risk

2006-06-11T05:20:00.000-07:00

For those unwilling to risk their heart, career or money

"To laugh is to risk appearing a fool,
To weep is to risk appearing sentimental
To reach out to another is to risk involvement,
To expose feelings is to risk exposing your true self
To place your ideas and dreams before a crowd is to risk their loss
To love is to risk not being loved in return,
To hope is to risk despair,
To try is to risk to failure.

But risks must be taken because the greatest hazard in life is to risk nothing.
The person who risks nothing, does nothing, has nothing, is nothing.
He may avoid suffering and sorrow,
But he cannot learn, feel, change, grow or live.
Chained by his servitude he is a slave who has forfeited all freedom.
Only a person who risks is free."

- William Arthur Ward

Thanks to Michael Covel for the pointer

If the losses don't get you...

2006-06-09T00:12:00.000-07:00

If you've been on a turbulent flight, you know how I feel.

I've been dribbling (think leaky faucet, not Beckham) the hard-earned into stocks since August 2004 and my portfolio average investment date is September 2005. At the peak, I was up 50% (per annum, not absolute). Despite the fall, things haven't been too bad. I was up 20% even till a few days back. But yesterday, I would have been better off in a bank fixed deposit... treading water and about to go under.

Today, as I write, the market's up. If my (notional) losses don't get me, the volatility will. Nevertheless, we intend to stay the course and dribble away.

The alphabet vs. the letter

2006-06-07T21:12:00.000-07:00

I have seen this too often to let this rant fester any longer. The two sets of people who have no business getting this wrong are teachers and journalists and yet somehow I only seem to see them make this mistake.

The alphabet is a set of letters. Each element of the alphabet is a letter. "A" or "B" or..."Z" are not "alphabets", they are letters.

The only correct use of "alphabets", is when referring to the letters of two or more languages.

Phew!! Am already feeling better getting that off my chest.

Investment banking: A positive post... almost

2006-06-07T02:14:00.000-07:00

For those sick of my usual anti-investment banking rants, here is a positive post.

My friend just joined an international investment bank in Mumbai. He is in the very sexy M&A division and even though he is a lowly analyst, he says the work environment is great. After asking for my advice before taking the job, he turned the tables yesterday and suggested I consider rejoining the ranks.

In my defence, he is young and the job is new. :-p

The Entrepreneurial Gene

2006-06-06T22:14:00.000-07:00

A study suggests that the propensity to be entrepreneurial (or self-employed, if French words are not your thing), could be genetic.

That's not very good news for me. I'm trying to be entrepreneurial (though I am self-employed, a.k.a. on the dole. Now you know the difference.) But there is little evidence from my family's employment record to suggest any entrepreneurial instinct in the gene pool.

Guess I had better look for a job.

Mutual funds getting pricier

2006-05-31T20:41:00.000-07:00

According to a Times of India story, mutual funds will now charge 2.25% on Systematic Investment Plans instead of 1%.

Wharton has done a piece on why investors choose high-fee mutual funds despite the lower returns. The story says

format of fee information is more important than just fees information
low levels of financial literacy probably cause this problem
regulators should require fee information "that is shorter, more digestible and more informative"

In India, unlike the US where the majority of fund managers underperform the index, a larger proportion of fund managers beat the index.

I suspect this is due to the nature of the Indian stock market rather than the superior ability of our fund managers. Perhaps, the higher SIP fees are justified by the higher returns offered.

BTW, if you want to lower your mutual fund costs consider these:

Nifty BeES is a passive index fund i.e. it intends to give you the same returns as the Nifty index.
Morgan Stanley Growth Fund is a closed-end actively managed fund. The interesting thing is that the fund is trading at a significant discount to its NAV. (NAV = 41.77; Price = 36.52 on 31May06). The discount is probably because of the illiquid nature of the fund, i.e. the fund will not liquidate its holding till 2009.

You can buy and sell these funds on the NSE (and BSE for MSGF). The entry "load" is the borkerage that for me is under 0.7% (significantly less than the 2.25% that the other funds are threatening to charge).

Don't-sue-me-notice: Investing (and not investing) can be injurious to your financial health. If you don't feel financially competent, get advice from someone you trust (or pay).

Financial capability

2006-05-30T22:09:00.000-07:00

The Financial Services Authority (FSA) - UK's financial services regulator - conducted a survey to measure financial capability. The most interesting part was that 31% of people sometimes run out of money at the end of the week or month, and 9% of people always run out.

Difficulty in making ends meet is not restricted to people with low incomes. Similar proportions of people on higher and lower incomes complain of this problem.

People as rich as Larry Ellison (Larry Elison's spending worries his accountant) and Michael Jackson (Michael Jackson restructures finances) have had trouble making their ends meet.

If you want a good DIY guide to financial management, try Risk Is Still a Four Letter Word by George Hartmann.

Business lies

2006-05-29T05:14:00.000-07:00

I've disagreed with The Godfather for a long time and finally I found someone who agrees with me:

Lie: "This is business, it isn't personal."
Truth: "Everything's personal."

FastCompany has a nice one on The Five Most Common Lies in Business.

...but you gotta be lucky!

2006-05-26T06:37:00.000-07:00

If I mislead you by saying hard work will lead to success (in my last post), I apologise. You need a bit of luck as well.

In The Making of an Investment Banker: Macroeconomic Shocks, Career Choice and Lifetime Income, Paul Oyer concludes:

First, random factors play a large role in determining the industries and incomes of members of this high-skill group (graduating Stanford MBA class).

Second, there is a deep pool of potential investment bankers in any given Stanford MBA class. During the time these people are in school, factors beyond their control sort them into or out of banking upon graduation.

Some other interesting bits from the paper:

...bull markets cause GSB (Graduate School of Business) graduates to be less likely to become entrepreneurs or consultants.

...investment bankers earn a substantial premium relative to other GSB alumni. The premium varies from about 60% for a new MBA on Wall Street relative to one in management consulting to over 300% for an investment banker fifteen years after leaving Stanford relative to an average alumnus with the same amount of experience in any other industry.

...a new MBA that goes to Wall Street can expect between $2 million and $6 million in discounted additional lifetime income (using $1996) relative to what he would earn if he took a job elsewhere.

This premium can be interpreted in various ways, but may simply reflect the disutility associated with working in investment banking relative to other fields. (i.e. bankers are paid more because their jobs suck :->)

Oyer quotes a few of other papers:

...graduating in a recession lowers wages early in employees’ careers, though it does not have a noticeable effect on employment... wage differences fade over the first ten years or so after graduation as those who graduated in recessions move from small, low-paying firms to larger firms...

and

... workers who accept low-paying jobs are stuck with low wages for at least several years... Those who switch jobs undo some of the ill effects of starting a job at the “wrong” time, but not all.

Together, the papers lead to the conclusion that luck early in one’s career has important long-term effects

So what can you do besides praying for bul market in your graduation year? Oyer says "short the stock market upon entering school".

Success is hard work

2006-05-23T22:01:00.003-07:00

If you can, read this piece on Ryan Seacrest in The New York Times (free registration required).

At 31, Mr. Seacrest appears to have found his rhythm. In addition to his "Idol" duties, he now has his own daily show on KIIS-FM in Southern California from 5 to 10 a.m., is the host of the nationally syndicated radio show "American Top 40" and, if that weren't enough, in March he became the anchor of "E! News Daily" on the E! cable channel.
...
He has also invested in eight restaurants — six in Los Angeles, two in Las Vegas — started his own clothing line and is now the executive producer and host of the New Year's Eve show on ABC that Mr. Clark made famous. "Equity, ownership, production fees, license fees: those are the vocabulary words that are exciting to me," he said, flashing a perfectly aligned smile. "If you really want to be in this business for a long time, you have to be more than just one moving part."

What happened to the good old 9-to-5?

Monkey market?

2006-05-09T04:01:00.000-07:00

Having made modest investments in the Indian stock market, I am sitting nervously on unrealised profits waiting for the inevitable(??) correction. And then I got this story (below) today.

I got in as a forward. If you or someone you know is the author, I would be glad to give credit.

Once a man appeared in a village and announced that he would buy monkeys for Rs.10.
The villagers went in the forest and started catching monkeys. The man bought thousands and as supply started to diminish he announced that he would now buy monkeys at 20 rupees.
This renewed the efforts of the villagers and they started catching moneys again. Soon the supply diminished even further and people started going back to their farms.
The offer rate was increased to Rs.25 but one could not see a monkey let alone catch it.
The man now announced that he would buy monkeys at Rs.50! However, since he had to go to the city on some business, his assistant would now buy on his behalf.
In the absence of the man, the assistant told the villagers, "Look at all these monkeys in the big cage that the man has collected. I will sell them to you at Rs.35 and when the man comes back
you can sell it to him for Rs.50."
The villagers queued up with all their saving to buy the monkeys.
Phir na woh aadmi mila na us ka assistant.....
...... Sirf Bandar hee Bandar.....

The bears don't find this story funny. Do you get out of the only investment that seems to be beating inflation, or do you stay invested and deal with the correction when it comes?

The bulls have heavyweights like Ruchir Sharma (MD, Morgan Stanley Investment Management) with them. He thinksthe current bull run is made of sterner stuff:

Emerging markets are in the middle of a long-term uptrend. Their run will be punctuated by corrections, as was the case with the US in its 18-year mega bull-run, but these markets are likely to be surprisingly resilient..

Making it through an IIM

2006-05-04T01:48:00.000-07:00

AP wrote:

"Some good news....I've cleared IIM!!

Could you please write an article which would help us make the best of our 2 years at a B School. Anything from "strategic guidance" to "daily operational tips" would be very helpful....I am a little anxious about the programme....how demanding can I expect it to be? I have heard some real horror stories....I don't have a clear idea about what I want to specialise in - marketing, finance, operations, i.t., etc....what are the things I should keep in mind while taking a decision... "

I am stuck on the list idea from the earlier post. So here are 2 lists:

At the IIM

Things will be tough. To get an idea read "Snapshots from Hell".
Get to know the people in your class. There is a lot of team work and the more people you know the more team-member options you have.
Forget last-minute studying. Regular work is your best friend.
Search the web for effective studying and note taking tips.
Focus on the purpose of being there - to get a good job. Research your target employers (seniors, classmates, profs).

On choosing a specialization:

Good news: all first year courses are mandatory. All choices are left for year 2.
Look for a short internship before you hit the IIM if you have the time.
Talk to the profs, seniors and classmates with work-ex to get a sense of the specialisations
Use your summer internship - figure out if you like the work you are doing on not: elect or eliminate
Use your summer internship - even your internship is in marketing, go talk to the guys in finance, hr, ops, etc to get a feel for the work.
Use your courses to figure out what excites you and then choose your area.
Don't be too narrowly focused, you will need finance, marketing, hr, ops, etc. skills in the future when you are CEO of GE.

BTW, I had no clue what to specialise in either. I think it is a common ailment.

Work or study?

2006-05-04T01:37:00.000-07:00

My friend wants to work after college. I have been telling her to get an MBA. Here are my reasons:

1. More education means more pay.

2. You will probably get better job offers.

3. You will be working for a long, long time... unless your rich uncle dies early. Enjoy the student life while you can.

4. It's hard to get back to studying from working. It's hard to readjust to boring lectures, assignments and having no money.

Any other reasons? (Contrary ones are welcome too).

"Some marks required" - IIMs

2006-05-04T00:54:00.000-07:00

Jagat wrote to ask if his GPA would be acceptable. Frankly I don't know. This GPA business keeps me confused despite having gone through it at IIMB.

I know that the IIMs want a minimum 50% but what GPA does that translate into? Write in if you know.

Jagat's mail was more specific: does his high extra-academic achievements compensate for his low academic ones?

As I understand it, a good MBA class has a mix of backgrounds and expereinces. That makes for interesting class discussions. As I told Jagat, a class of IIT toppers could be fairly dull, no. :-)

Economics of a Music Video

2006-04-30T23:41:00.000-07:00

See this nice video by Sarah McLachlan.

It describes the cost of making a music video.

And how that money could make a difference to the poor.

The Art of Pitch

2006-04-25T05:27:00.000-07:00

I went through tons of presentations at my B-school on both sides of the OHP - for the younglings, old people like me used to make do with Over Head Projectors. These were glorified light bulbs used to project slides printed on transparencies.

And that is one thing most fellow b-schoolers still cannot get away from - presentations (not OHPs).

So I thought I would mention two very sharp ones that you can see on Google Video:

1. Who Owns Culture? by Lawrence Lessig - This is a 20 minute thing that tends to drag at times. But I enjoyed the discussion on creativity and how we deal with new technologies like the Napster that threaten to eat into the artists IPR/copyright.

2. Identity 2.0 by Dick Hardt - This is a very slick corporate/business idea promotion. The idea is techy but the presentation style makes it easy to understand.

PS: Don't forget to the funny videos on Google Video.

Work-life balance?

2006-04-17T01:45:00.000-07:00

In October '04, Fast Company wrote Balance is Bunk!:

The truth is, balance is bunk. It is an unattainable pipe dream ... that offers mostly rhetorical solutions to problems of logistics and economics. The quest for balance between work and life... isn't just a losing proposition; it's a hurtful, destructive one.

...the balance movement is fatally flawed. For those of us trying desperately to keep up with everything that needs doing, it poses two mythical ideals. If we work hard enough at it, one goes, we can have everything. Or if we cut back, we can have just enough to be truly content. The first obliges us to accomplish too much, often at too high a price; the second doesn't let us accomplish enough. Either way, balance is a relic, a fleeting phenomenon of a closed, industrial economy that doesn't apply in a global, knowledge-based world.

There's a better way to think about all this, one that requires us to embrace imbalance. Instead of trying to balance all of our commitments and passions at any one time, let's acknowledge that anything important, and anything done well, demands our full investment. At some times, it may be a demanding child or an unhappy spouse, and the office will suffer. At others, it may be winning the McWhorter account, and child and spouse will have to fend for themselves. Only over time can we really balance a portfolio of diverse experiences.

And now they have gone and written about Sophie Vandebroek:

Ten years ago, Vandebroek's husband died suddenly, leaving her alone with three small children and no other relatives in the U.S. She responded not just by sticking to her career, but by taking on a string of increasingly challenging, high-profile roles. Her latest is chief technology officer at Xerox, a job she won in January.

How does she do it? By sticking to strict rules for travel, refusing relocations, and living simply. She hires someone to do laundry and grocery shopping, and doesn't sweat it if things don't go perfectly. "So many things we worry about," she says, "are not important." She keeps the family schedule uncluttered--only one sport or activity per kid per season--and chooses simple weekend activities and vacations, as well. She even keeps her hair short to make the morning routine quicker.

At work, she instructs her assistant not to plan any meetings before 9 am or after 5:30 pm. When traveling, she avoids scheduling meetings before 10 am, so she can fly in and out the same day.

And she always has accepted new jobs, no matter what crisis was unfolding at home. "The more senior jobs you get, the easier it is," she says. "You get less control over how busy you are, but you get more over decisions about when you're busy and how you're going to do things."

I guess Superwoman is alive and well at Xerox.

Don't confuse work for life

2006-04-07T04:17:00.000-07:00

A friend sent around an old piece from the FT that can still be found here and here. Here are some excerpts:

"Today's generation ... maintain that their personal fulfilment comes from their jobs and the hours they work."

"The idea has grown ... that work should not be just a means to an end, a way to make money, support a family, or gain social prestige but should provide a rich and fulfilling experience in and of itself. Jobs are no longer just jobs; they are lifestyle options."

"Because fulfilling and engrossing work ... often requires long hours ... it is easy to slip into the idea that the converse is also true: that just by working long hours, one is also engaging in fulfilling and engrossing work. This leads to the popular fallacy that you can measure the value of your job ... by the amount of time you spend on it."

"Jane, a 29-year-old corporate lawyer who works in the City of London, tells a story about working on a deal with another lawyer, a young man in his early 30s. At about 3am, he leant over the boardroom desk and said: "Isn't this great? This is when I really love my job." What most struck her about the remark was that the work was irrelevant (she says it was actually rather boring); her colleague simply liked the idea of working late. "It's as though he was validated, or making his life important by this," she says."

"Unfortunately, when people can convince themselves that all they need do in order to lead fulfilled and happy lives is to work long hours ... (and) to think of their employment as a lifestyle, fulfilling and rewarding of itself - and in which the reward is proportional to hours worked - people rapidly begin to substitute work for other aspects of their lives."

"(Jane) remains ... concerned ... about finding fulfillment at work. "I am constantly questioning whether I am doing the right thing here ... There's an eternal search for a more challenging and satisfying option, a better lifestyle. ..." she says."

"The notion that one can do anything is clearly liberating. But life without constraints has also proved a recipe for endless searching, endless questioning of aspirations. It has made this generation obsessed with self-development and determined, for as long as possible, to minimise personal commitments in order to maximise the options open to them. One might see this as a sign of extended adolescence.
Eventually, they will be forced to realise that living is as much about closing possibilities as it is about creating them."

Finally, Stephen Pollan says:

"Stop looking to be fulfilled at work. We’re taught to follow our passions, and the money will come but fulfillment should come from your personal life, not your job. A job should be seen as something that supplies income and security and hopefully is something you do well — not as a substitute for experiencing life."

The entrepreneurial life

2006-04-06T22:10:00.000-07:00

If you are keen on "doing your own thing", here are a few cautionary words.

Slate, ran an excellent piece on starting a food business:

"I opened a charming neighbourhood coffee shop. Then it destroyed my life."

It is a first person account of starting and closing a cafe.

"I never realized how ubiquitous the dream of opening a small coffeehouse was until I fell under its spell myself. Friends' eyes misted over when my wife and I would excitedly recite our concept...

The dream of running a small cafe has nothing to do with the excitement of entrepreneurship... The small cafe connects to the fantasy of throwing a perpetual dinner party...
The failure of a small cafe is not a question of competence. It is a sad given."

There are some good rule-of-thumb numbers for the cafe business:

"There is a golden rule, long cherished by restaurateurs, for determining whether a business is viable. Rent should take up no more than 25 percent of your revenue, another 25 percent should go toward payroll, and 35 percent should go toward the product. The remaining 15 percent is what you take home."

Now what should I do with my life?

2006-04-05T20:29:00.000-07:00

If you think this post is about Bronson's book with a similar title, it's not. This one is about success.

I feel envious of the ones who succeeded early - the mathematicians and the business whiz-kids who made their mark in their 20s and 30s. I am already done with my 20s and the 30s seem to be going darn fast too.

But here is the interesting thing: I look at the ones who succeeded early and then they start thinking "How do I top that?"

Sabeer Bhatia seems to be a case in point. While he must have pots left over from Hotmail, the lack of new peaks must be frustrating... I know it would be for me.

When Fast Company profiled Kamran Elahian, I felt that answering the question in the title of this post must be tough:

"Startup star Kamram Elahian has enjoyed big wins, suffered expensive flops, and launched a bold initiative to wire the world's schools. In the process, he has become a master at making a fresh start."

The fresh start intrigues me. Is it that easy? Probably not if you look at the list of one-hit wonders. And I don't think the money makes it easier either. Perhaps struggling for the first peak is better than to stand in Alexander's sandals:

"When Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept for there were no more worlds to conquer."

Or perhaps I am rationalising.

VC/PE blogs

2006-03-29T19:45:00.000-08:00

Carrying on with the spirit of "what kind of work is it?" [see posts on FMCG and I-banking] there are a bunch of venture capitalists and private equity dudes (and dudettes) in the blogosphere.

While I enjoy two that are risqué,

Going Private
Sand Hill Slave

some others are pretty good in talking about the kind of work they do:

Who Has Time For This?
[an Indian one:] Venture Woods
South East VC

A good one by Noam Wasserman is on his research on entrepreneurship.

Tell me about some good ones if you know any.

Beware the IRR

2006-03-29T19:26:00.000-08:00

With the huge run-up in the (Indian) stock market, I was trying to calculate the return on my portfolio. With all the cash in- and outflows, I used IRR. But as I read at CFO.com it is not the best tool.

Here is a piece from CFO.com (originally from the McKinsey Quarterly) on the perils of using Internal Rate of Return.

Check out the exhibits/diagrams for an excellent explanation of the problem. (Hint: reinvestment of cash outflows at the IRR may not be possible).

I-Banking: A Life of Greed

2006-03-21T18:13:00.000-08:00

Greed is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for getting an I-Bank job. I was rejected in an I-Bank interview for not being greedy enough.

Why is greed so important? Because the work generally sucks. But there is a ton of money to be made. So if you are not driven by money, and feel moral pangs in screwing your clients out of their money, you may not earn enough for the bank. After all the bank makes a multiple of what you get to take home.

As Rasmi Bansal wrote in Businessworld:

“No one enters investment banking, unless he is motivated by an all-consuming desire to make scads of money on an order of magnitude several times greater than what other highly-compensated professionals earn.”

By the by there is a nice aside ("Is i-banking Really worth it?") in the same article on an IIM grads summer experience at an I-Bank.

There is a somewhat positive view of the business from Ashutosh Ghanekar of Mosaic Capital in an article on Rediff. But he admits:

"Let's face it. Nobody goes into investment banking to save the world. The lure of investment banking lies in the money made."

But here is a piece at Rediff by Rohan Siddhu that is closer to my view of I-Banking. He talks about the work, the life and the greed. His view is stripped of the glamour:

"The travelling sucks. Big time!

A friend once told me the easiest way to spot an investment banker in the lobby of a five-star hotel is to look for those who look sleepless and harried. ...

The first time you travel, it is nice. The second time too. Maybe even the third. The fourth time it is tolerable. After that, it's a drag. ...

If that sounds cool, consider yourself walking around like a zombie at some airport, looking at the ticket to figure out where you are even as your biological clock frantically tries to adjust to crossing three time zones in two days."

For a factual view of Investment Banking see this entry in Wikipedia.

Admission consultants

2006-03-08T20:04:00.000-08:00

The Economist has an interesting piece on consultants helping students with admissions to US B-schools.

These "admissions consultants ... offer clients a range of services; from tips on essay writing and interviewing to advice on which schools best meet their needs."

One such consultant is Clear Admit. They say that they also work with Indian students but they don't have an Indian office yet.

The article quotes a survey that showed that 11% of Harvard Business School students used consultants.

Some schools like Wharton are not happy about this business but others like Tuck work with consultants. Sounds like the early days of Kaplan when colleges did not like the idea of SAT-prep.

BTW, if you are looking for help with undergrad admission in the USA, you can try my friends at The College Source. They are a US company with a presence in India.

"FMCG - a glam life"

2006-03-05T19:32:00.000-08:00

This piece came to me from my IIMB e-mail list. Am reproducing it here warts and all. I have tried to trace its author but without success. If you are (or know of) the author, I would be happy amend, edit, delete, etc. this piece to protect your copyright.

I like it for several reasons:
1. I have been in the same boat. Before turning to finance for refuge, I flirted with marketing briefly and spent a summer working for HLL. Ended up visiting the backwaters of UP listening to housewives in group discussions on the merits of washing powders and sachet sizes.
2. The piece highlights the joota ghisna behind the glamorous newspaper reports on the multiple figure salaries.
3. Love the guy's sense of humour.

Enjoy:

"In the newspaper-periodical industry of India, there come several annual rituals. The most famous among them is the year-end 'special issue'. Another such ritual is a cover story on sexual liberalization and/or social Talibanisation.

The most favorite of the business papers and less so for the general interest ones comes in February-March - the b-school salary report, complete with details of hi-tech interviewing (video-conferencing), foreign postings (Wall Street), ESOPs (nowadays, every Tom, Dick and Infosys) and the like.

In these kinds of the reports, the darlings of the media are always the I-bank/consultancy types. They are the ones who get the six-figure (dollar, not rupees) salaries, look like Charlie Sheen and throw attractive sound-bites ("the challenge of the job... the money is immaterial").

There is always a footnote in these articles about the FMCG industry - which takes in the maximum numbers at the lowest salaries (okay, okay - not the lowest but one of the lowest!) - and never offer foreign postings or dollar salaries. Forget foreign - they don’t even offer metro (10 lakh+ towns - i.e. includes Patna and Raipur) postings... this industry solely attracts people on the basis of the Theory of Minimum Resistance. Once inducted into the company, they are sent to the remotest corners of the company (preferably where you particularly clueless about the language)

It all started with my first assignment on a rural sales van in Tamil Nadu. We had been on the van for an inordinately long time – winding our way through tiny hamlets. I was singularly unsuccessful in spotting the 'rural boom' predicted by all the marketing gurus.

Maybe the dusty unmetalled roads and the half-naked kids blurred my vision a bit. If my linguistic limitations were somewhat problematic in Madras, they were insurmountable in these places. Tired of being an observer for a majority of the journey, I tried to make a sale in one of these stops. Finding a reasonably affluent-looking shop, I suggested a few products to the retailer - all of which were accepted without too much of a protest. The salesman accompanying me did the translation – and the retailer spoke a smattering of English. Emboldened by my initial successes, I tried to extend the products sold on these kind of routes. I suggested shoe-polish... by suggesting the brand name of the product. Too much of marketing post-mortems at b-school led me to the illusion that every person on the face of the earth would be familiar with the name - if not the development of the brand.

"What's that?" - asked the retailer. "Shoe polish" - I answered, even demonstrating the product efficacy by pointing to my shoes. This caused a lot of mirth in the shop - as the retailer told the salesman something in Tamil, trying to stop laughing all the time.

The salesman looked despondent - as he translated. "Sir - he has offered a challenge. He has asked you to wait in his shop for the whole day. If you manage to find one - just one - shopper who wears shoes like yours, he will buy our entire stock at double the price." A more adventurous person might have taken up the challenge.

A similar place later threw up a different twist to the tale while I was trying to convince the retailer about the latent demand of the soap - by playing the ultimate trump card of popularity of the times. "It is being advertised on all episodes of KBC" - I said. "But nobody watches KBC here", he calmly countered. Seeing the look of incredulity on my face, he explained, "Star is a pay channel, you see... while you can get Zee for free." Here was a town that time forgot... so did the television ratings people.

Just when one is all set to write the obituary of the Indian ICE dream, there comes another small-town which changes the ending yet again. I had reached the distributor's office ahead of the appointed hour – and it hadn't reopened after lunch. I resigned myself to an hour’s wait in the scorching sun. After all, Kanchipuram did not look like a place with a coffee-pub to while away an hour. In between the millions of sari-shops that lined the main road, I suddenly spotted an 'Internet - E-mail - Chatting' signboard. Quite elated at the sight of a 'connected world' - and a way to while away the lunch hour. I tried to locate the Internet parlour but there seemed to be only the sari shops.

One of the salesmen approached me with an oily grin and oilier hair. Very optimistic, I thought - if he wants to sell me a Kanchipuram silk. "Ganihelbyou, saar?" "Um - I was trying to locate the Internet place..." "Thizwaysaar." - and he waved me to come inside. Inside this sari shop? I must have looked very unconvinced as I started to step in.

"Shoes oudside please." I took off my shoes and followed him over yards of silk and satin - into an air-conditioned anteroom. Eight terminals lined the walls - all of them complete with speakers, printers and the works.

As I logged onto to Hotmail through the lightning-fast connection, I thought my experience of the Indian contradiction was complete. Till of course, the time when I was greeted with four adjacent Internet parlours in Cudappah - but there was no power (for the next four hours) to run the Pentium III machines there.

When through with spotting contradictions, one has to contend with the backbreaking, skull-splitting modes of transport that connect the dots on the landscape. While jet-setting friends take a stopover at Geneva, one has to wait at Bellary for the connecting bus to arrive - and one can amuse oneself with the calculating the Frequent Traveller Miles accumulated by travelling in the state government buses for the past 181 days and 11200 miles. Just as a point of interest, the social hierarchy is very clearly mentioned in the buses of the Andhra Pradesh State Road Transport Corporation (APSRTC). The first double seat is 'Reserved for MP'. The next is 'Reserved for MLA'. The next three are 'Reserved for Ladies'. Down South, they treat their ladies very well - but put them after their gods. The unending bus-trips to the innermost recesses of the states also lead to spinning of great epics of fantasy. The profusion of cinema theatres and the paucity of the fairer sex prompted romantic epics, mostly.

Innumerable re-hashes of the "boy-meets-girl" theme abound, all suited to fit the yuppie-in-the-jungle mould. A sales trainee (boy) is on his way to a sales point on the overnight bus where he meets another sales trainee (girl) going to the same place. Love blossoms amidst cartons of soap and sacks of detergents - ad nauseum. But then, what else can one do when a ramshackle behemoth of a vehicle is hurtling over the countryside at 70 mph - with the potholes outside and the blaring video inside making it impossible for a minute's sleep.

In fact, sex seemed to be on everyone else’s minds as well – especially the surrogate kind. If the hotel had a TV in the rooms, it had to have FTV. Without fail. There were diversions of other kinds available as well. I got off the bus at Tirupathi - and looked like the archetypal yuppie-on-a-hike, at least in those surroundings. Backpack, Bisleri bottle and all that. Trying to remember the directions given by the office, I tried to navigate my way to the T.P. Area, where all the inexpensive (not "cheap"!) hotels promised to be. At this point, I was approached by a gentleman (for the want of a better word) in a check-lungi and a t-shirt that read, "I met my friends at batchmates.com". Having been warned sternly about the perils of talking to strangers ever since I was three, I tried to ignore him and walked in the general direction of the exit.

Trying to keep pace with me, he offered - "Hotel, saar?" I slowed down a bit now. The ride was an arduous one and I desperately needed some sleep before I attacked my distributors. He tried again - "Good, clean, cheap..." I was very tempted now, as the prospect of locating the fabled T.P. Area seemed distinctly uninviting. His trump card of his offer came through - "Ladies also, saar. No problems, very safe..." In my fresh-out-of-school innocence, I thought he meant that the hotel would be very safe for any ladies who may be accompanying me. So I said, "No - no ladies" in the halting Tamil-accented English that had seen me through most of small-town South India. His eyes brightened up - "No ladies, saar?

Young boys then? Also very safe..." This was when I broke into a run. Despite this and more than its fair share of other hazards, the job has its perks - however quirky and far-fetched it might be. And where can it be better demonstrated than the state of Bihar, which Microsoft Word insists, I change to Bizarre!

There was a crowd assembled in front of the distributor's office-cum-godown as I alighted from the car. The mood was distinctly restless - and it was definitely too big to be a lowly sales manager's reception party. The distributor broke away from the group as he saw me - and looked terribly gratified. As he shook (almost tore away, actually) my hand, he expressed his abject delight that an area sales manager had 'desired' to 'set feet' on his humble town. After the initial pleasantries completed in his office, I asked him the reason for the anxious assembly outside. "Oh nothing serious", he said. "A van of mine got looted in the morning - they got away with about 30000 bucks." "Uh - nothing? 30000 bucks?

Won't you file a FIR or something?" He smiled - "Kya hoga, saab? Nothing's going to come out of it - only a hell of a lot of problems. Yeh to roz ka maamla hain, lekin ASM thoda hi roz aate hain?"

A hard-nosed businessman feels my visit is worth more than 30000 bucks - I don't know whether that was a tribute to me, the MNC I work for or Laloo Prasad Yadav. But it is quite a high, all the same.

Just as it is a bit of a low to encounter places from history and literature, which turn out to be nothing like what they promised to be. Especially rivers have this uncanny knack of disappointing - in fact, Wordsworth institutionalised it ever since he visited Yarrow. The bus grounded to a halt - somewhere in the middle of nowhere. My neighbour in half-mime
half-Telugu explained that the engine needed some water before it could make the final 10-minute stretch to reach Kurnool town (Rayalseema, Andhra Pradesh). A river lay ahead of us - a dilapidated board said 'Tungabhadra'. Adolescent memories of one of the best historical novels to be written came back. "Tungabhadrar Tirey" (On the banks of Tungabhadra) a Bengali novel by Saradindu Banerjee - recounted the tale of a thriving civilisation on the banks of the eponymous river, which was something like the seminal fluid. Romantic visions of a throbbing river were dashed by the sight of a trickle of water, meandering its way through rocks and silt. The ten-minute break was simply not enough to philosophise about adolescent fantasies and their untimely demise.

This sales training exercise is a marketing textbook, travelogue, Dale Carnegie handbook, newspaper - all rolled into one. It is an attempt by the companies to stop its managers from reducing the marketplace into a matrix (plotting, say, affluence vs propensity to spend or something equally arbitrary!) - in which anything and everything can be reduced a coloured circle at a given co-ordinate. And of course, underlining the basic paradox (or the hopelessness) of trying to sell chocolate chip cookies in Western Orissa.

But what actually comes out of the training?

1. A rudimentary grasp of the language/dialect (and accent) of the region of training.

2.Knowledge about the cheapest beer-bars of the town of posting.

3.Endless cups of tea consumed at the largest wholesale counters there.

4.A shift in reading habits - from A&M to Stardust because the friendly bookshop owner has never heard of the former.

5.A healthy disrespect for the b-school curriculum. An even healthier contempt for the country's infrastructure.

And of course -

6. The extremely misplaced confidence that shows through when somebody asks "What do you do?" and one answers, "I sell soap in Bihar"."

Dholakia on b-school ratings

2006-03-04T00:01:00.000-08:00

Even though the IIMs have withdrawn from B-School surveys, IIMA's Prof.Dholakia does not seem averse to the idea of a b-school rating.

"Mr Dholakia, who is also the chairman of National Accreditation Council (NAC), has proposed to the government that independent rating agencies be hired to rate all the B-schools in India, based on the standards set by NAC. The rating can then be a part of their admission prospectus and corporate brochures.

“The idea behind the rating scheme is to give a clear perspective to the students taking the management exams, and for corporates to chose where to go to recruit their young managers,” said Mr Dholakia. The B-schools also stand to gain as they work to improve their ratings."

If the rating organisation does not need to make money from selling magazines, perhaps there will be more substance and less hype in the process.

"The only way to win is to stop playing"

2006-02-24T01:02:00.000-08:00

"Coping With Psychopaths @ Work" is a pessimistic piece from Fast Company about tough stuff at the work place. The article is not as interesting as the comments.

Bad bosses are as common as dandruff and the over-achiever-MBA-ego often cannot stomach the thought of quitting "just because it is a tough work environment". Life's too short and opportunities too plentiful to sit around taking shit from someone who has been promoted to his/her level of incompetence.

Advantage MBA

2006-02-19T19:20:00.000-08:00

According to the Businessworld-Gallup Salary Survey, on average, an MBA from any management institute earns 26% more than a graduate and 22% more than a non-MBA post-graduate.

I would like to see some numbers on the salary gap between IIM and non-IIM MBAs. And I would like to see these numbers over a career i.e. at graduation and then at (say) 5-year intervals as the MBA moves up the organisation.

My hypothesis would be that the difference would be significant at graduation. But the gap between the IIM and 2nd tier b-school grads would vanish over time.

PS: The link to the Survey (above) may change as the story is moved into the archives at BW. If you have a problem, let me know and I will try sort it out.

Are IIM-grads smarter?

2006-02-17T03:07:00.000-08:00

I have often groused that institutions like the my alma maters – St.Stephen’s College and IIMB – unfairly arrogate to themselves the success of their alumnus. Places like the IITs, Presidency College and St.Xavier’s College turn out successful graduates because they take in successful students. Are these elite institutions alchemists or merely gold smelters?

In his article “Getting In”, Malcolm Gladwell writes about the "alchemist or smelter?" issue. He talks also questions the effectiveness of tests like the US law entrance exam (LSAT) to pick good lawyers.

The LSAT seems to suffer from the same problem as the CAT - it is a filtering tool, not a measure of legal/management ability.

While I recommend the entire (longish) piece, here are some bits I found interesting:

"Social scientists distinguish between what are known as treatment effects and selection effects. The Marine Corps, for instance, is largely a treatment-effect institution. It doesn't have an enormous admissions office grading applicants along four separate dimensions of toughness and intelligence. It's confident that the experience of undergoing Marine Corps basic training will turn you into a formidable soldier. A modelling agency, by contrast, is a selection-effect institution. You don't become beautiful by signing up with an agency. You get signed up by an agency because you're beautiful.

At the heart of the American obsession with the Ivy League is the belief that schools like Harvard provide the social and intellectual equivalent of Marine Corps basic training-that being taught by all those brilliant professors and meeting all those other motivated students and getting a degree with that powerful name on it will confer advantages that no local state university can provide....

The extraordinary emphasis the Ivy League places on admissions policies, though, makes it seem more like a modeling agency than like the Marine Corps...

Most élite law schools, to cite another example, follow a best-students model. That's why they rely so heavily on the L.S.A.T. Yet there's no reason to believe that a person's L.S.A.T. scores have much relation to how good a lawyer he will be. [Nor would, I suspect, your CAT score say how good a manager you would be. - Ed] In a recent research project funded by the Law School Admission Council, the Berkeley researchers Sheldon Zedeck and Marjorie Shultz identified twenty-six "competencies" that they think effective lawyering demands-among them practical judgment, passion and engagement, legal-research skills, questioning and interviewing skills, negotiation skills, stress management, and so on-and the L.S.A.T. picks up only a handful of them. A law school that wants to select the best possible lawyers has to use a very different admissions process from a law school that wants to select the best possible law students. And wouldn't we prefer that at least some law schools try to select good lawyers instead of good law students?

This search for good lawyers, furthermore, is necessarily going to be subjective, because things like passion and engagement can't be measured as precisely as academic proficiency. Subjectivity in the admissions process is not just an occasion for discrimination; it is also, in better times, the only means available for giving us the social outcome we want.…

The endless battle over admissions in the United States proceeds on the assumption that some great moral principle is at stake in the matter of whom schools like Harvard choose to let in-that those who are denied admission by the whims of the admissions office have somehow been harmed. If you are sick and a hospital shuts its doors to you, you are harmed. But a selective school is not a hospital, and those it turns away are not sick. Élite schools, like any luxury brand, are an aesthetic experience - an exquisitely constructed fantasy of what it means to belong to an élite - and they have always been mindful of what must be done to maintain that experience."

The Father of Test Prep

2006-02-16T06:19:00.000-08:00

Came across this superb piece on Stanley H. Kaplan written by Malcolm Gladwell of the Blink / Tipping Point fame. A few bits that I liked and they apply equally to the CAT and GMAT:

"At the Educational Testing Service, "it was a cherished assumption that the S.A.T. was uncoachable,"...

The whole idea... was that mental tests are a measurement of a psychical property of the brain, analogous to taking a blood sample. By definition, the test-taker could not affect the result. More particularly, E.T.S.' s main point of pride about the S.A.T. was its extremely high test-retest reliability, one of the best that any standardized test had ever achieved... . So confident of the S.A.T.'s reliability was E.T.S. that the basic technique it developed for catching cheaters was simply to compare first and second scores... E.T.S. was sure that substantially increasing one's score could be accomplished only by nefarious means.

But Kaplan wasn't cheating. His great contribution was to prove that the S.A.T. was eminently coachable--that whatever it was that the test was measuring was less like a blood sample than like a heart rate, a vital sign that could be altered through the right exercises.

...

Does being able to answer [a tough SAT] question mean that a student has a greater "aptitude" for math? Of course not. It just means that he had a clever teacher. Kaplan once determined that the testmakers were fond of geometric problems involving the Pythagorean theorem. So an entire generation of Kaplan students were taught "boo, boo, boo, square root of two," to help them remember how the Pythagorean formula applies to an isosceles right triangle. "It was usually not lack of ability," Kaplan writes, "but poor study habits, inadequate instruction or a combination of the two that jeopardized students' performance." The S.A.T. was not an aptitude test at all.

...

In proving that the S.A.T. was coachable, Stanley Kaplan did something else, which was of even greater importance. He undermined the use of aptitude tests as a means of social engineering. In the years immediately before and after the First World War, for instance, the country's élite colleges faced what became known as "the Jewish problem." They were being inundated with the children of Eastern European Jewish immigrants. These students came from the lower middle class and they disrupted the genteel Wasp sensibility that had been so much a part of the Ivy League tradition. They were guilty of "underliving and overworking." In the words of one writer, they "worked far into each night [and] their lessons next morning were letter perfect." They were "socially untrained," one Harvard professor wrote, "and their bodily habits are not good." But how could a college keep Jews out? Columbia University had a policy that the New York State Regents Examinations--the statewide curriculum-based high-school-graduation examination--could be used as the basis for admission, and the plain truth was that Jews did extraordinarily well on the Regents Exams. One solution was simply to put a quota on the number of Jews, which is what Harvard explored. The other idea, which Columbia followed, was to require applicants to take an aptitude test. According to Herbert Hawkes, the dean of Columbia College during this period, because the typical Jewish student was simply a "grind," who excelled on the Regents Exams because he worked so hard, a test of innate intelligence would put him back in his place. "We have not eliminated boys because they were Jews and do not propose to do so," Hawkes wrote in 1918: We have honestly attempted to eliminate the lowest grade of applicant and it turns out that a good many of the low grade men are New York City Jews. It is a fact that boys of foreign parentage who have no background in many cases attempt to educate themselves beyond their intelligence. Their accomplishment is over 100% of their ability on account of their tremendous energy and ambition. I do not believe however that a College would do well to admit too many men of low mentality who have ambition but not brains.

...

Ability cannot be separated from effort. The testmakers never understood that, which is why they thought they could weed out the grinds.

...

That's why Stanley Kaplan was always pained by those who thought that what went on in his basement was somehow subversive. He loved the S.A.T. He thought that the test gave people like him the best chance of overcoming discrimination. As he saw it, he was simply giving the middle-class students of Brooklyn the same shot at a bright future that their counterparts in the private schools of Manhattan had. In 1983, after years of hostility, the College Board invited him to speak at its annual convention. It was one of the highlights of Kaplan's life. "Never, in my wildest dreams," he began, "did I ever think I'd be speaking to you here today."

...

The truth is, however, that Stanley Kaplan was wrong. What he did in his basement was subversive. The S.A.T. was designed as an abstract intellectual tool. It never occurred to its makers that aptitude was a social matter: that what people were capable of was affected by what they knew, and what they knew was affected by what they were taught, and what they were taught was affected by the industry of their teachers and parents. And if what the S.A.T. was measuring, in no small part, was the industry of teachers and parents, then what did it mean? Stanley Kaplan may have loved the S.A.T. But when he stood up and recited "boo, boo, boo, square root of two," he killed it.

Recruiters Target Undergrads

2006-02-14T19:55:00.000-08:00

"It’s raining cash for IITians
Mumbai/Kolkata/Kanpur

IIT GRADUATES have never had it better. Four out of every five have already been recruited by top companies — at top salaries — in the course of campus interviews that have been on since December.
Top notchers appear to be two engineers from IIT-Kharagpur, who have been hired by petro-giant Shell and construction major Schlumberger at annual packages of $80,000. Four young engineers from Mumbai have been offered $65,000 a year (Rs 30 lakh) by Capital One for California-based jobs.

The maximum Indian salary offered so far has also been given by Shell and Schlumberger — Rs 18 lakh per annum, disclosed Dr Vinod Tare, in-charge of recruitments at IIT-Kanpur. At IIT-Kharagpur, an unnamed company has offered Rs 11 lakh, while Goldman Sachs hired a Mumbai engineer for Rs 10 lakh per annum. The larger companies like Fair Issac, Google, ITC and HLL are doling out an average of Rs 8.5 lakh per annum per engineer.

Not only are these figures exceptionally high, but average annual pay packages have gone through the roof. Mumbai has seen an average hike of 40 per cent over last year, while Kharagpur has almost doubled from Rs 3 lakh per annum to Rs 5.5 lakh per annum. In two months since recruitments began, most students have been placed, and the season lasts till June.

A. Subash Babu, professor-incharge of placement, IIT-Bombay sees two reasons for this: a booming economy, where companies are earning huge profits which they want to pass on to employees; and the fight "to get the best brains". The placement cell gets calls from companies wanting to get earlier campus visits than competitors, so they can get to the cream of student body first. The competition has meant that even public sector companies are matching the salaries of multination als. A job with Indian Oil Corporation will pay about as well (around Rs 7-8.5 lakh) as one with Goldman Sachs.
Brain gain ¦ Highest foreign package for an IITian: $80,000 a year ¦ Highest Indian package: Rs 28 lakh a year ¦ Over 70 per cent IITians have been hired through campus interviews"

Earn more with an Economics degree

2006-02-09T20:49:00.000-08:00

This is what the ET Intelligence Group has to say:

"...A package of about Rs 6 lakh is what an average economist from the country’s top schools can take home, which is about 50% higher than what they got last year. While those from other schools may not get these packages, they are still getting salaries that are double or triple what they were getting three-four years ago.

...The situation is a far cry from five-six years ago, when most economists headed abroad for studies and came back to settle in a teaching or a research job, while a few were absorbed in the corporate sector.
The trend, however, has changed as a growing number of corporates and equity firms are beefing up their research teams with economists (usually with an MBA degree, in addition to an economics background). Some of these organisations include Crisil, the ABN Amro economics research unit and JM Morgan Stanley. Among corporates, the Aditya Birla group and Tata group of companies already have such cells in place. Rating agencies are also expanding their economics teams.

...Ajit Karnik, professor in the department of economics at Bombay University, says: “There is an increasing demand for economic students with strong quantitative/econometric skills, and there has been close to Rs 3-4 lakh increase in economist salaries in the past five years.”

...With each passing year, the average salary package that a fresh economics post-grad takes home has been increasing. While last year, the average salary was Rs 4-5 lakh per annum, it is expected to be more than Rs 6-7 lakh this year at the Delhi School of Economics."

Not bad, what?

211,010 GMATs taken during 2005

2006-02-09T20:28:00.000-08:00

The Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC) says that the number of GMATs taken during 2005 rose 3.6% to hit 211,010.

Over 65% of the GMATs were taken in the USA. But the tests taken outside the US rose 11% in 2005. So getting into US B-Schools will be tougher this year.

Compare that to the 115,000 odd CATs taken in 2005. The GMAT numbers are not strictly comparable as 21% of these were repeat tests in the the same year. [You can take GMAT five times a year versus just once for the CAT]. So adjusting for the repeats, approximately 166,698 GMATs were taken against the 115,000 CATs.

While that still means more people taking the GMAT than CAT, more b-schools accept GMAT scores. So the CAT is tougher to crack i.e. convert into an admission.

Work Satisfaction

2006-02-09T04:19:00.000-08:00

Prof. E.L. Kersten, cofounder of Despair Inc., and author of The Art of Demotivation has a few interesting thoughts on "Why They Call It Work".

The 20th idea in HBR's list of "Breakthrough Ideas for 2006", a short (just 604 words) piece by the good professor, says that perhaps our expectations from our jobs are out of whack.

And I have a long list of friends (myself not excluded), to support the claim.

Firengi MBAs want a taste of Indian summer

2006-02-09T04:09:00.000-08:00

Seems the US-India corridor is now a two-way street for MBAs abroad. Check out the piece from the New York Times on "M.B.A. students bypassing Wall Street for a summer in India".

Can we now expect more IIM students in the suburbs of Delhi?

On Investment Banking

2006-02-02T19:57:00.000-08:00

Hi,

My name is Joel D’Souza. I am a B.Com graduate. I aspire to take up a career in finance and investment banking has caught my attention. I heard about you through your blog. I just wanted some information about I-banking:

Which publications can I refer to if I want to update myself on what’s going on in the I-banking world?

How good should be my quant and analytical skills be? As you know most commerce students are not in touch in with maths + stats, how do I upgrade myself as far as maths is concerned?

What books on I-banking would you recommend to read?

Could you give me some additional advice/suggestions/tips that would be helpful to a person trying to venture into I-banking?

Thanks.

Yours Sincerely,
Joel D'Souza

Joel, a thousand apologies, you mail got buried and was lost for too long.

Let me take the easy way out. Try the section on investment banking on Wikipedia for a general outline of the structure of the industry.

To keep up with the news, ET is doing a pretty decent job of reporting on a whole bunch of M&A and private equity deals. And my favourite business magazine - Businessworld - continues to do a good job as well.

You will need good quant skills for investment banking. But unless you want to be part of the R&D part of the business that develops the pricing tools, you don't need anything more than a basic grasp of maths, stats, calculus and probability.

Books... there are a whole bunch of novels (and movies) that have helped glamorise the profession but they are not very accurate. But here are some that I enjoyed:

Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco by Bryan Burrough & John Helyar

Liar's Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street by Michael Lewis

Monkey Business : Swinging Through the Wall Street Jungle by John Rolfe, Peter Troob

If you have more specific Qs, send 'em in.

Cheers

"What are your views on the state of the economy?"

2006-02-02T19:34:00.000-08:00

Aditya has (one again) has woken me from my Kumbhakarnesque state with this e-mail:

Hi Amit,

I came across this article on the net. I didn't make much of it because of my limited understanding of economics etc. but thought that you may be able to give an opinion about it. Who knows, It might also motivate you to wake up from your "blog-slumber" and pen down your thoughts.

http://www.rupe-india.org/39/infrastructure.html

Cheers,
Aditya.

For those going for GDs and interviews a discussion on the state of the economy can be somewhat dauting. The article that Aditya points towards is an example of why most of us find it hard to put together a few coherent thoughts on the direction of economic development.

But here is one article - Confounding Critics - written by David Loyd, Chairman, Langham Capital, that is a fantastic example of how once can consider 'weighty' economic issues in a very simple (but not simplistic), coherent and most importantly clear manner.

If you want a more pessimistic view, try the piece - Still in Slow Motion - by Mark Tully in the same issue. Mr.Tuly highlights the socio-political obstacles to India's development.

These articles appeared in the December 2005 issue of Seminar in which the dicsussion was on "2010 a symposium on India at the end of the decade".

Enjoy!

Pranks - Do you know any good ones?

2006-01-19T05:42:00.000-08:00

Here is an article in The Economist on what makes for a good prank. Check out the one in this article that Yale pulled on Harvard.

If you know of a good one you may want to write to The Economist:

"...we invite readers to nominate their contender for the finest prank in history, explaining in 750 words why it deserves the title, to reach us by January 20th. The three best entries will be announced in February and published on Economist.com. Entries, please, to pranks@economist.com."

Reservation in schools

2006-01-18T21:52:00.000-08:00

This is offtopic for this blog but it is a pet peeve.

I have been of the belief that at a policy level we will soon recognise the need for the privatisation of education to tackle the twin issues of quality and quantity.

The previous (BJP) government gave some indications of pushing forward on this path. But the current Left-leaning government seems bent of making things worse. I suppose it is darkest before dawn.

The following is an article on reservations in schools that appeared in the Delhi TOI on Tuesday, 17th January 2006. It is written by Mr.Kanti Bajpai, Headmaster Doon School.

----
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid-1375639,curpg-1.cms

"The NDA and UPA governments have pro-mised to bring about reservations in educational institutions. At least three Bills in the past two years have indicated that they are quite serious. Should we go ahead with reservations? Together the Bills imply at least the following.

First, all educational institutions will reserve seats for socially and economically backward groups including scheduled castes and tribes (SCs and STs), other backward classes (OBCs), below poverty line families (BPL) and any other categories specific to a state.

Second, schools will not be allowed to use admission tests to select reserved category students. In the case of BPL children, schools must choose randomly from the neighbourhood to fulfil their quota of 25%.

Third, governments will fund these students only to the extent that it would cost to educate them in state-run schools.

While this seems like a simple enough scheme, it is fraught with difficulties. Let me present just five, from the vantage point of someone working in a private school.

First, we could have reservation levels close to 80-90% of all admissions: 22.5% for SCs and STs, 27% for OBCs (after Mandal), 25% for BPL families, and let us say another 6-10% for any other categories that a particular state may choose to add on (e.g. religious minorities).

Is this sustainable socially? Supporters of reservations compare India to the US's affirmative action of the 1960s. Unfortunately, India's problems in this respect are much more complicated.

Where the US had to deal with affirmative action for a black student population of 12%, we in India may have to reserve for up to six or seven times that level. Surely at the very least such massive integration must proceed in phases.

Whether even this is credible is an open question. Second, what is the legality of reservations pegged at such high levels? The courts have indicated that reservations cannot exceed 50%. With Mandal, reservations in total rose to 49.5%: 22.5% for SCs/STs and 27% for OBCs.

If we now add the BPL category of at least 25% reservations, we shall be at 75%. If so, is the new policy legal and will it stand up to challenge? Whatever the final legal judgment, how should schools act in such an uncertain environment?

Third, the practicalities of selecting students in the various categories seem stupendous. This could be such a complex task that schools may collapse administratively. Indeed, the local administration, which will have to help monitor the process presumably, will find it impossible to cope.

From where shall schools recruit the SC, ST and OBC students? Most governments and many educationists will reply: the neighbourhood. Leaving aside questions about the definition of neighbourhood, to select from the vicinity will require schools and the district authority to verify the status of all those eligible for admission.

The government suggests that voter identification, ration cards, and other certifications will be verification enough! The faking of most of these certifications is so easy that this is an incredible suggestion.

Can one imagine a district authority plus an equally stressed school administration determining the authenticity of (i) the residential status of the claimants for admission and (ii) the SC/ST, OBC, and BPL status of prospective students?

Further, how will schools choose from among the many candidates who qualify? If randomly, who will monitor the tens of thousands of private schools all over India to determine that they have indeed been chosen randomly?

If the choice is by government edict, who will regulate the thousands of regulators to ensure that the system is not riddled with corruption and favouritism? Fourth, at 80-90% reservations, what will remain of the financial viability of private schools?

Given that schools may not charge their regular fees for reserved category students and given that government transfers on behalf of the reserved category are likely to be nominal per child, will private schools survive?

Even if they survive, will they be in any position to provide quality facilities? The financial crunch facing private schools will be dire indeed given the government's insistence that fee increases are to be regulated.

Combine this with the Supreme Court's ruling against cross-subsidy and one has to wonder where funding for the reserved students and for school facilities will come from? Finally, let us consider the demographic scope of the Bills.

India has about 113 million students between the ages of six and 14 who would qualify for reserved seats. The total number of seats in private schools is one-tenth that. Thus, over 100 million reserved category students will be outside the private school system.

If so, it is the government and not private schools that will make a difference in bringing disadvantaged groups into the educational net.

In sum, the social, legal, administrative, financial and demographic implications of reservations in education are daunting.

It is a pity that the government did not involve educational institutions more closely in formulating a policy of greater inclusiveness.

The writer is headmaster of Doon School."

"Even an MBA can do it!!"

2006-01-12T08:30:00.000-08:00

So you think you are so smart you can be an MBA?

Think again. Maybe FedEx can help you see the light.

Enjoy!!

CAT'05 Results To Be Out On Monday 2Jan06

2005-12-30T23:39:00.000-08:00

From the Business Standard website:

"Indian Insititues of Management will declare the results of Common Admission Test - 2005. IIM has short listed the list of candidates for group discussion and personal interviews of each of the six IIMs and will be put up on the websites of the respective IIM on Monday, January 2. Candidates are advised to look up the websites of IIMs on Monday.

The scorecards of all eligible candidates would be put up on the websites of all the IIMs on Friday, January 6. Candidates can view their scores by visiting the websites on or after January 6."

All the best guys.

Smoke and Mirrors - The Debate Continues

2005-12-30T22:08:00.000-08:00

I love a good debate and Aditya has set the stage well. From Aditya's comment:

To believe in Art for Art's sake is what Oscar Wilde famously said in the preface of his immensely controversial novel "The Picture of Dorian Gray" which allegedly advocated and justified immorality. But just look where it took that immensely talented individual. He was convicted of being a bad influence to society and sent to jail. But ofcourse that was the 1890s and this is 2005. Today even though a section of people may shout vociferously at the top of their voices against Khushboo, it is reasonable to assume that she will be acquitted. But, we digress.

In India we have something called the Censor Board for Films which ascertains what is and what is not appropriate for our audiences. Whether we like it or not but the final decision about whether the hero should be more polite when it comes to asking the villain to refrain from his urge to rape women at the first given opportunity, is in the hands of some wise old men members of the board. Moral Policing is a part of our culture and even if our neo liberals find it hard to digest, it is also endorsed by a large majority of our people. To see for yourself you might even consider asking the friendly neighbourhood aunty about it.

Now that we have established the relevance and acceptance of moral policing in our society the question before us becomes a more narrower one. I believe it is the same question the Union Health Ministry must have asked itself before taking this decision. Does the portrayal of smoking (which is invariably very slick) on the big screen influence an individual's decision to start smoking himself. To answer this question with some sincerity would compel us to ask ourselves another question which strikes at the root of the issue. Why does a twenty year old someone starts on a life long mission to screw his healthy lungs by starting to smoking? What are the factors that influence him? Of course there are myriad factors at work here and one of them is an attempt to emulate the coolness radiated by superstars stylishly smoking onscreen. It is this factor that the Ministry wants to eliminate and hence ban has its heart in the right place.

Extrapolating the logic further to bribery, rape, etc. is fallacious as these are punishable offences and the inherent revulsion that we as humans have towards crime is a strong deterrent. There is a subtle glorification when it comes to smoking which is definitely not attached to these heinous crimes. I suppose the comments about devdas and coke are added only for their dramatic effect and hence do not merit comment.

And here is my point-wise response to Aditya:

1. If everyone jumps into a well, I will not follow. I do not find moral policing acceptable irrespective of how many people accept it.

2. We have an acceptable and softer version of moral policing – it is called customs and traditions. And it does not include beating young people in the gardens of Meerut. I suspect that when Aditya talks of “relevance and acceptance”, he is talking about these customs and traditions and not the moral-policing of the Meerut police.

3. Aditya’s argument included a low blow that I must point out. Attacking the person behind an argument is often a potent way of dismissing an argument. Aditya’s post suggests that because the liberals in discussion are “neo”, somehow their arguments are child-like and best dismissed. Tut-tut Aditya, that’s a yellow card for you.

4. Does the silver screen glorify smoking? Absolutely it does, no debate there. But, and I repeat my argument, if the government is concerned about the hazards of smoking, why not strike at the root of the problem? Why not ban cigarette production? If you can’t buy it, you can’t smoke it, right?

The on-screen ban does not have its heart in the right place. The fact of the matter is, that the government wants to earn votes by assuming the moral high ground. But it does not want to lose the huge amount of tax revenue generated by the tobacco industry.

5. Aditya’s extrapolation of logic is riddled with contradictions. If “the inherent revulsion that we as humans have towards crime is a strong deterrent”, perhaps we can do away with the judiciary all together.

6. More importantly, Aditya seems to have missed some of the most interesting movies from Bollywood like Sholay and Bunty Aur Babli. The list of movies that glorify criminal behaviour is hardly short. Bunty Aur Babli makes no bones about saying that there is little hope for the honest and one may as well cheat and steal. In case you missed it, there was a news item about some guys who undertook a bit of kidnap-and-ransom in imitation of Bunty Aur Babli.

Sholay, an evergreen movie if there ever was one, is about a policeman who takes the law into his won hands and hires a couple of criminals to do his dirty work. But then if the policeman was Sanjeev Kumar and the criminal duo Amitabh and Dharmendra, then I guess we can just ignore the moral issues and just get on with enjoying the movie.

Forget the glorification of crime and consider the glorification of dangerous behaviour. Watching fast bikes and car chases in movies like Dhoom give me a serious case of accelerator-foot.

To state my case simply –

I DO NOT endorse crime or dangerous behaviour.
The ban on on-screen smoking is a cynical vote-grabbing attempt. A government concerned with health issues would strike at the root of the problem and ban cigarette production itself.
A ban on art is a restriction on the freedom of expression. Art is a very important reflection of society. Those who follow these things closely tell me that there are fewer movie heros who smoke on-screen now compared to a couple of decades ago. And this is because there is a growing common idea that smoking is not acceptable. Art does reflect real life. But banning art will not stop real life.

Smoke and Mirrors

2005-12-18T19:42:00.000-08:00

With GD season on the horizon, thought I would share some thoughts on topical issues and get a load off my chest about things I feel strongly about.

The kick-off topic is on the smoking ban on Bollywood.

The purported reason for this ban is the negative influence smoking has on young people. I suspect even some older people find smoking quite cool. After watching Clint Eastwood chew that cheroot in The Man with No Name series, I am quite keen to try out that hard-bitten look m'self. :^)

So does art reflect life or life reflect art? The Union Health Ministry is clearly of the view that life reflects art. And so perhaps, we should seriously consider banning violence, murder, abuse, prostitution, crime, alcoholics, superstition, and so on and so forth in movies. Where does the government draw the line? It certainly should not stop at smoking. There is a world of bad influences to conquer.

The second part of my argument is on the effectiveness of moral policing. If we ban movies on corruption, will it lead to the end of bribery? I believe that the arts hold a mirror to society. It can act as a trigger for personal and social improvement. But even if you believe that life reflects art, censoring Sharukh Kahn will not dry up cigarette sales. The government has more potent weapons in its arsenal to do that. But then ITC pays taxes by the sackful. So no point killing that golden goose. Bollywood, on the other hand, will pay roughly the same amount in taxes whether or not you let Sanju smoke on screen.

My final argument is "art for art's sake". Would Devdas have the same pathos if he were asked to drown his sorrows in a bottle of Coke? Or perhaps even that would be forbidden in the cinema halls. After all, soft drinks are bad for children - fattening drinks that rot the teeth and are allegedly potent insecticides.

George Orwell & Subroto Bagchi

2005-12-14T02:59:00.000-08:00

Aditya Patil had some very nice things to say about my writing. But more importantly, he pointed me to George Orwell's Politics and the English Language. It's a bit long for those of us who prefer their words of wisdom in bite-sized chunks. But I highly recommend it. Thanks Aditya.

The other bit of writing that I am enjoying these days is Subroto Bagchi's column Times if Mind in the Friday's TOI. His most recent piece was relevant for those chasing the MBA gravy train. In this most recent piece Mostly Bad Apples, he begins by saying:

"Most of what goes by the term MBA in India is a racket."

You can catch the archives of Bagchi's articles here.

PS: While I am happy to answer generic questions about MBA/CAT/etc on this blog, I realise that some may need a conversation and not a monologue. If so, drop me a line and we can "talk" on Yahoo chat.

"How appropriate is CAT?"

2005-12-06T00:29:00.000-08:00

In case you did not catch this debate in the ET, it is page 15 of the Delhi edition. You can find it on the e-paper of ET (free but needs registration).

Mr.Gupta of ATK points out one of my favorite bugbears in the 'new' education: let's not test students as failure will devastate them. Fact is, you can't avoid tests. They are all around you from the time you try to walk, cycle or drive, get married, have kids, save for your retirement, etc. You do well on some things and not so well on others. My advice echos Mr.Gupta's sentiments - get used to it.

Mr.Ratnam of IMI discusses my other favourite punching bag - the CAT is not a test in the strict sense of the word; it is a filtration device.

"Studies to validate the appropriateness of the tests found that there is very little correlation, if any, between test scores, performance in MBA and performance later in one’s career."

So should we do away with the CAT? Not until we can find a better alternative. Till then heed Mr.Ratnam's words:

"People who score very high marks in CAT score often do so, in my judgment — and I wish I am wrong — not because they are the best, but they are the most hard working who had taken similar tests umpteen times to acquire limited proficiency to beat the system (or test)."

As is usual, the only points I found interesting were those that echoed my own arguments. Perhaps I missed some other interesting stuff, hmm?

Looking for an expert?

2005-12-01T00:10:00.000-08:00

Here is a book review that warmed the cockles of my heart. It's from The New Yorker. Louis Menand says:

It is the somewhat gratifying lesson of Philip Tetlock’s new book, “Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?” (Princeton; $35), that people who make prediction their business—people who appear as experts on television, get quoted in newspaper articles, advise governments and businesses, and participate in punditry roundtables—are no better than the rest of us.

The bite-sized version:

"...people who make prediction their business... are no better than the rest of us."

After doing a bang up job with the review, Menand ends with:

"But the best lesson of Tetlock’s book may be the one that he seems most reluctant to draw: Think for yourself."

So what the heck am I doing posing as an expert on careers and b-schools? The job of this blog is simple: help you think for yourself. Set a framework, raise some questions and get a conversation going on what next. Make sense?

Coaching and Questions

2005-11-29T20:28:00.000-08:00

Apologies for the long absence esp. to the guys who wrote to me about their CAT blues.

First about the coaching I had promised in the last post. I get a bunch of e-mails from people who need guidance on issues that a CAT coaching center can't handle. Example:
- should I join XYZ institute instead of waiting to make it to an IIM?
- I am not making the cut-off in the mocks; should I take the CAT?
- I haven't made in 2 attempts; should I make a 3rd?
- I am an engineer; should I go for an MBA now or after a few years of work-ex?

I have been trying to answer these Qs on this blog. But these are general responses. Without a one-on-one discussion, the issues cannot be resolved satisfactorily.

This is the service that I intend to offer - help you resolve your specific issues: what b-school, how many CAT attempts, career progression, guidance for GD and interview, etc.

I do not intend to give out CAT prep material as there is a lot of material around. You can choose the one you like and we can discuss that - cut offs, errors, scores, etc.

Some other issues (delivery, pricing, etc.) are in the process of being worked out. Will keep you guys posted.

With a new project on hand, I cannot offer to coach. But your e-mails are welcome and I wil try and answer them as promptly and as well as I can.

---

For those of you who wrote in:
Balaji, sorry to hear about your repeated problems with CAT prep. I need to know more about your academic background and your plans for the future to be able to help you decide on what you should do.
---

Aditya wrote:

Hi Amit,

I've been reading the 'catinator' on and off during my CAT preparation and its been a nice experience. Great job, man!

I have appeared for CAT this year and then checked my answers with the answer key at TIME and PT. I am getting an aggregate score of around 51 ( maths - 7, english - 20, DI & LR - 23 ). I made a few "silly" mistakes in maths and couldn't clear the cut-off. Mathematics has always been achilles heel. Through out my preparation I have never managed to clear the cut off in this section. Somehow when it comes to problem solving my brain just goes on strike! I had lots of time on hand for the preparation and gave it my best shot. I may never ever get even this good a score.

I am an I.T. engineer recently recruited by a software major. I am clear I want to for an MBA, if not this year then I will try harder next time. I want to take a realistic and rational decision when it comes to choosing a b school. Ofcourse, like everyone else I want to study at the IIMs but given my shortcomings in maths it maybe unrealistic to keep waiting and trying every year for the elusive IIM call.

What would your advise be? Should I settle for just another B school or try next year. I realise there are no definite answers to such questions but I hope you could help me develop the framework on how to think about the question.

Thank you very much for your time. Looking forward to your reply,

Aditya Patil

I am never quite sure how to react to an engineer who tells me that their math is weak. After all, as an engineer, you should have an edge over the non-engineers who have done much less math in their degree courses. Now that you are working, we need to consider your options: IIM, top tier b-schools other than IIM or working for a few more years and then looking to go to a foreign b-school. Choosing among these options depends on how you see your career going forward - techie with a management degree, a manager with some tech background or perhaps a complete switch away from tech i.e. derivatives trader with a bank. Hope this helps you set-up the framework you asked for.
---

Biju wrote

Hello Amit,
I am aspirant who is looking forward to take the CAT 2006. So before this I thought to clear the doubts which are haunting me whenever I think about CAT.
I am a software Engineer by profession and been working in this industry for the past six years. These six years are with two well known software MNCs . Now I see / feel that to get a promotion / get a break in my career path I need an MBA . I have decided that if at all I am taking an MBA it will be from an IIM so that is where the CAT matters.
From academics I am just an average scorer, did MCA in 1999 from a college in Tiruchirappalli Tamilnadu. Prior to that did PGDCA(1995) and was working in a software company. My basic qualification is B.Com (1993), there I was a poor performer, this is because I didn't do well / little enjoyed, during my graduation. Does this really matter in CAT and the life after CAT?
On subjects I don't hate Maths , and I believe I can crack this after going thru proper coaching and through preparation . I like the domain, Finance, in my software experience most of the projects are from this domain. I like reading, this year I am concentrating on reading biographies, keeping in mind that one book a fortnight.
In Language/ Communication skills I believe still there are some rooms for improvements, but I believe I can over come these two hurdles, but the question is , is that possible in the next 12 months?
I will be really thankful if you could answer my queries.
Thanks much
-Biju

Biju, congratulations on your communication skills. Your e-mail provides a lot of the info that a counsellor needs to be able to do a decent job of guidance.
I don't think your past academic performance matters a whole lot for the CAT per se. With a basic grasp of Mat and English, you can very well crack the test. But you may face some problems in the IIM. The course is very rigorous and it takes a lot of effort even for the academically strong to maintain a good GPA. The trick is to look at the output you expect from the b-school versus what you can put into the system. What kind of finance job do you want? If you want to join a Lehman or Deutsche then you have no choice but to go to one of the top 3 IIMs. If you are willing to settle for a general finance manager / bank job with Indian or local MNC bank kind of thing, even a 2nd tier b-school will give you pretty good shot there.
12 months is plenty of perp time. Use some of that time to research post b-school jobs that you would like, the b-schools that would help you get there, the academic curriculum of these schools, etc. in addition to the enrance test prep of course :^)
One option you must consider is overseas b-schools. With a good GMAT score you can even get a scholarship. The GMAT is less competitive than the CAT and with your work-ex, you may have an edge there.
---

On resilience

2005-11-16T19:20:00.000-08:00

This is probably my last post before CAT'05.

I know from experience that at this point many people start thinking of quitting. The enormity of the task, the stress of the exam and the fear of failure start plaguing you.

But whatever you do, don't quit now. This is the last stretch. Take your chances. So what if your score is no that good. Give it a shot, you may get lucky.

Two thoughts:
1. "It's not the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog that matters." (- Archie Griffin, US football player) Be resilient, persevere, fight on. Don't be cowed down by the size of your opponent.

2. "The race is long, and in the end, it is only against yourself." (- Dunno who said that) Don't worried about those zipping ahead while you are yet to get into second gear. Run the race at your pace but be clear that you will finish the race. That is the only way you will have a shot at winning.

All the best guys.

~~Advertisement:~~
~~I am starting a coaching service. Details will be available in the week following CAT.~~

~~If you need coaching for~~

post-CAT'05 GD/Interviews, or

CAT'06

please send an e-mail
to: mail2adw-blog@yahoo.com
subject: Coach

With a new project on hand, I am not able to offer coaching services anymore. But I will continue to answer questions e-mailed to me.

What do you read?

2005-11-05T21:24:00.000-08:00

Here are some numbers on Indian readership:

Newspapers and magazines reach more than 66% of SEC A and B families (i.e. the top socio-economic categories) (Source: IRS 2005 Round 1)
42% of the 12 years + urban population reads at least one newspaper/magazine. (Source: IRS 2005 Round 1)
Pune seems to the most up-to-date with 64% of the population reading at least one local language publication. Bombay follows at just over 50% and Delhi, despite its brawns beats brains appeal, was a respectable 46%. (Source: IRS 2003-4 Round 1)

My friends in the publishing business say that they sell just 60 copies of newspapers per 1000 population.

It all seems pretty horrible. Low literacy and low awareness. How do we expect this 'largest democracy' to function when hardly anyone knows the issues?

But my rant is different. I think these numbers hugely overstate the case. Based on a sample set of two young people (one student and one professional), I believe that young educated people hardly read anything.

Young people hardly read newspapers or magazines. And they certainly don't read good literature. In this rant, reading Sidney Sheldon and Robin Sharma don't count. Now while I don't expect a 20 year old to get cosy with Thomas Hardy (did I hear someone say "Who?"), I certainly expect a passing familiarity with current events.

At this point, I expect a 23 something to jump up and say that she reads the TOI. Sorry, reading the Delhi/Mumbai/Bangalore Times does not count. Sudoku is not required reading and the latest party thrown by the glitterati don't count as current events.

I must add that I don't entirely blame the young reader. The publications are to blame for their dumbing down tactics. The desire to cater to the lowest common denominator, the attempts to turn tabloid is epidemic in proportion.

For the Catters, here is a recommended reading list in order of my preference. Try read at least one in each of the following categories:

Newspapers:
1. Times of India
2 Hindustan Times

Business Newspapers:
1. Economic Times
2. Business Standard - I love the weekend BS for the columns esp. Kishore Singh and Lucy Kellaway
3. Financial Express

Magazines:
1. Outlook
2. India Today

Business Magazines:
1. Businessworld
2. Business Today

International magazines are a tad expensive and but here are some that I would love to read regulalrly:
1. The Economist
2. Fast Company
3. Business Week

We don't need no education

2005-10-27T20:25:00.000-07:00

While Donald Trump and Jack Welch have their followers, my personal hall of fame has pictures of Warren Buffet, NR Narayana Murthy and Subroto Bagchi. I guess I prefer the quite, thinking businessman to the aggressive, testosterone driven manager. I particulalry like Mr.Buffet's down to earth sense of humour.

I mention this as a prologue to Subroto Bagchi's piece in today's (28Oct05) ToI. I can't find a link to this piece on the ToI website.

Interpreting the piece in line with the slant of this blog, Mr.Bagchi says that doing just one thing on and on is not enough. You must be broad based and develop new skills as you move along your career. He bases his story on the way Google has developed into an Internet giant.

So here are my 2 bits on it. The day of job for life is over. Even if you choose/manage to stick to one employer for the rest of your life, you will need to learn new skills and do new work as you go along.

And to do this, you must have a strong academic base. Not in the sense of high grades, but rather in the sense of a broad base. So when you get your MBA, take a variety of classes. Learn a bit about all aspects of business even if you are set on being a banker.

Harsh said:

A good query and a great answer Amit. [See "Is MBA a suitable option for introverts?"] Your reply has however raised a question in my mind . My sole purpose of doing an MBA is to learn something more, not to lose any complexes or to learn to become a leader. i have gone through some of the books and courses that are taught in a MBA programme. As i have mentioned before i would like to do something connected to branding. But whenever i hear or read about life at a B-school . I hear about presentations, projects and constant stress and pressure. But admist all this , i feel the real teaching gets neglected. The student has hardly anytime to relax and take stock of the situation and really do proper research on a subject of his choice.
Do correct me if i am wrong in saying all this because this is the impression that i have developed....
Cheers

What I think Harsh is trying to say is that while you do learn a lot in an MBA programme - leadership, teamwork, public speaking, coping with stress and pressure - there isn't enough emphasis on academic work.

Well that is true and it is because of the nature of the programme. An MBA is vocational education and not liberal education as a college degree in say Economics or English Literature. The idea of an MBA is to give you an overview of the job ahead and to give you some rudimentary swimming lessons before pushing you into the deep end. It is not to teach you the aerodynamics of swimming.

Most b-schools run doctoral courses - called the Fellow Programme in Management at the IIMs. These require an in-depth study of some aspect of business. These are probably closer to what Harsh has in mind.

But, in my opinion, b-schools have a quick and dirty approach. For studying aspects of business with academic rigour, you are better off with a good masters' or doctoral programme in Economics. Of course, the problem is that you would get this rigour only in a foreign university. When I studied Economics in the '90s, I studied theories that were out-of-date in the '70s, but the Delhi University was yet to wake up and smell the coffee.

PS: Subroto Bagchi has written a nice piece about an ambitious young man and his financial aspirations. It's required reading for the salary-hungry MBA. :^)

You can read Mr.Bagchi's old columns here (but his latest is not up there yet). And if you have the time and the inclination, I highly recommend reading "Making of the MindTree". It's in two parts and bit of a long read but worth the effort for the MBA and the entrepreneur.

"Is MBA a suitable option for introverts?"

2005-10-23T20:38:00.000-07:00

Vishwajeet Nambiar (VRN) sent me an e-mail, two of them actually, and I have been remiss in not responding sooner. Apologies VRN.

He writes

Hi Amit,
I am an electronics and telecommunications engineer from Mumbai university( 2003 batch passout). I am an IIM Aspirant and am going to appear for CAT for the third time. I just have a few questions to ask:

1) Is MBA a satisying career option for introverts? Are there any specialisations in MBA which are suitable for introverts i.e Is there any MBA specialisation which could one a give a job which does not involve interacting much with people? I do not enjoy handling teams ...I feel I am basically a follower and not much of a leader..which brings me to the next question..

2) Does the MBA programme teach one to move from being a follower to a leader ? I have avoided being a leader as I do not feel very comfortable as a leader. I cannot make out whether to drop the idea of doing an MBA or to do an MBA in the hope that I will enjoy the role of a leader with the skills I gain through the MBA course.

Is the MBA programme suitable for me?

Please help me out as I am at crossroads as far as my career is concerned. I cannot make a decision. I feel that the MBA course is not suitable for me because of my introverted nature and dislike of assuming the role of a leader.

Am I right in feeling this way?

My main reason for wanting to do an MBA is , I admit, the salary packages which come along with it. But I also want to make my career in something which I will enjoy doing and will be comfortable in. Hence my question to you as I am wondering whether I will enjoy my career in the MBA field .

I am really looking forward to your inputs.

First off, they say third time lucky. So all the best VRN.

The introvert issue is an interesting one and I count myself as one. They say that "man (and woman) is a social animal". Given our gregarious nature, an introvert is naturally at a disadvantage in aspects not restricted to business and career.

It's a free country and if one intends to remain an introvert, an MBA is most certainly not a good option. Try a career in scientific research or lighthouse operation. Working in a business requires teamwork that a strongly introverted person would find uncomfortable.

But, if you are looking to change your introverted nature, an MBA is an excellent option. It will give you plenty of opportunity to speak publicly, work in and lead teams, etc.

In b-school, you will be required to speak up in class. There are marks for this, known popularly as CP (class participation). You will be asked to make presentations.

I have friends who are intensely uncomfortable with public speaking; some even get physically sick when asked to make a presentation. I am moderately uncomfortable with public speaking as well. Despite a long track record of public speaking and debating, I still feel nervous, and stammer and stutter when asked to read aloud or speak publicly.

If you feel that your introversion, discomfort with teamwork, etc. is something you want to correct then take on the MBA. I am glad to hear you say what I have said on occasion - do what you enjoy, the money will follow, and even if it doesn't, at least you are happy. :^)

As for your second Q re learning leadership, it is a much-debated issue in management literature - "Are leaders/managers born or made?"

My answer to this question may sound confusing - yes and no.

I believe that we can learn just about anything including leadership. If this were not true, we'd still be swinging from trees with our hairier cousins.
But, leadership is not a subject fit for a classroom. It's like trading (stocks, bonds, fx, etc.). It's requires learning-by-doing. It's the kind of work that depends on your personality. What works for Jack Welch would not have worked for Mother Teresa.

Bottom line:
1. Don't chase the MBA if you intend to remain an introvert. Chase it if you want to change your personality.
2. If you do an MBA, you may have some classes on leadership. But you will learn more about it in your teamwork and later on when greatness is thrust upon you.
3. Absolutely and positively, look for work that you enjoy and are comfortable with. Forget what you hear about the MBA salaries. It's pretty tough to earn that money especially when you are not having fun.

Cheers

IIPM, an MBA Salary survey and other goodies

2005-10-20T03:19:00.000-07:00

As usual, the intention to blog more often fails to materialise. I wonder how many bloggers write that line.

Rumours from IIPM:
Have heard rumours that Arindam Chaudhuri has been doing the rounds of editors of leading publications pleading IIPM's innocence in the imbroglio.

Other stuff I found out later:
Varna was sent a legal notice as well. And then Mr.Saxena denied sending the notice in this comment on her blog:

Varna,
It's obvious you know who I am; so I'll cut it short. We didn't send you any legal notice. It's obvious that, with just 21 years on your side, either you've cooked it up to increase the number of hits to your site (which is clever of you as you've finally even forced us to reach here); or some guy or girl who wants to pull your leg has succeeded in befooling you.

I consider both these options quite possible so will not deliberate on either.

We've denied having sent you any email even in the mainstream media (so now you are a celebrity too). We have no intentions in sending you any legal notice. You can relax on that front.

You obviously know that the phone number that you used when you logged on to post the false legal notice has been noted down by us with support from Google. For your sake, I'll mention only the last three figures: 011-xxxx4388

My advise is, stop the childish posts. It'll only help you stay clear.

Regards...
A.Saxena | 10.15.05 - 12:35 am |

Funny how even this "clarification" has an ominous note to it - sort of a "we know where you live". But then, perhaps, like the legal notice, Mr.Saxena did not write this comment either.

Anyways, let us to pleasanter things employ.

MBA Salary Survey
Businessworld has a put up this MBA salary survey. BTW their B-school microsite seems to have a problem when accessed using Firefox. Stick to Internet Explorer for visiting.

Interesting stat from the survey:

50% employers prefer students with 1-4 years work-ex;
41% prefer 4-8 years
Under 5% each prefer less than a year or more than 8 years.

Of course, this is an international survey. So it doesn't account for the truckloads of Indian MBAs with zero work-ex.

But it does have one number for Indian MBAs. The survey says that Indian MBAs got 23,750 in (presumably) 2004. With the units not quoted, it could well be peanuts but I suspect they mean US dollars. That would mean an average annual salary of just over Rs.10 lakhs. Nice!!!!

Free Mock CATs
Businessworld has also put up some free mock CATs for you to download. It promises to upload new ones every week.

A Better B-school Survey
Thanks to the IIPM story, I got to see this b-school ranking - one I actually like for a change. JAM grades b-schools instead of ranking them. Wisely so as the year-on-year volatility in rankings can hardly account for the fact that teaching at a b-school changes gradually and not like the stock market.

Dare to think beyond the IIMs and we'll slap you with a legal notice

2005-10-16T23:43:00.000-07:00

That's IIPM's tag line for bloggers and journalists.

Here is why:
In July 2005, Outlook "clarified" the ranking they had assigned to IIPM in their b-school survey. You can read an excerpt below or the full text here.

Subversive stuff:
Outlook requires you to register to read their stuff. But if you, like me, don't want to, try BugMeNot. These guys let you share login ids for so that you can "Bypass Compulsory Web Registration".

Anyway, back to the main issue. Outlook said:

"1. IIPM doesn’t figure in any of the Outlook – C Fore Business School rankings for the year 2004.

2. The ranks mentioned in the ads for IIPM were for the year 2003... through the ads, the institute has been misguiding the potential students... the institute doesn’t disclose facts truly and correctly. Hence, ... we are withdrawing all the rankings given to IIPM forthwith. "

The story got more interesting when JAM wrote an article on "The Truth About IIPM's Tall Claims". This article seemed to stir a hornet's nest and brought the editor of JAM, Rashmi Bansal, an IIMA alumnus, a lot of flak on her blog called Youth Curry. Some of it is downright nasty.

But Rashmi has the lesser role in this story. The protagonist of the story is Gaurav Sabnis.

Gaurav ran a post on his blog called "The Fraud that is IIPM" in August and linked to the JAM story.

He also provided a link to a blog called The Truth About IIPM. The anonymous author of this blog claims to be an ex-student and an ex-employee and makes some strong accusations against IIPM. Personally, I am disinclined to believe anonymous sources.

Be that as it may, Gaurav ended up bearing the brunt of the reprisal. His views on IIPM and Arindam Chaudhury - the pony-tailed, rock-star professor you've seen in the IIPM adverts - brought him a legal notice and cost him his job.

In his link page, Gaurav also pointed to another blog that carried what was presumably a copy of The Truth About IIPM blog. Interestingly enough, this mirrored copy is no longer available. Most probably thanks to what Gaurav suffered at the hands of IIPM.

On October 4, Gaurav received a legal notice from IIPM over e-mail. In essence he was being sued by IIPM. The institute claimed damages of over Rs.125 crores. And they threatened to have him arrested if he did not remove his postings, etc.

125 crores??? Wow!! A little birdy, a.k.a. my legal eagle, tells me that unless IIPM sent a legal notice by post, the e-mail has no leg no stand on. I wonder if IIPM sent a legal notice to Outlook as well and threaten to have Vinod Mehta arrested. Probably not. I suspect it's easier to bully a salaried blogger than an established magazine with a large legal budget.

To add injury to insult (and not the other way around), apparently IIPM called up Gaurav's employer - IBM - and complained. The story is best read in Gaurav's words:

"...apparently, the Dean of IIPM wrote him [a Senior Executive at IBM] a mail saying that the IIPM Students Union had decided that if my blog posts were not deleted, then they would gather all the Thinkpads they had been given by the institute, and burn them in front of the IBM office in Delhi. Yes, that's right. Burn laptops!"

According to Gaurav, IBM did not pressure Gaurav into any action or inaction. However, to prevent any damage to IBM or their laptops, Gaurav resigned. He did not, however, remove, his posts on IIPM.

BRAVO GAURAV!! BRAVO!! I wish I could say that I would have done the same. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.

IIM vs IIITM; a.k.a. do I need 2 MBAs?

2005-10-13T20:13:00.000-07:00

Manish Chauhan wrote:

I wonder if you could give me a few pointers towards my MBA prep.

I am doing a Dual Degree Program(5 yrs duration) from Indian Institute of Information Technology & Management(IIITM), Gwalior.

I have the option of choosing MBA or M.Tech in this dual degree program, after my B.Tech.

I am really keen on pursuing MBA form IIM's. I am lost on whether I should choose MBA/M.Tech from this college !! The placements are equally good in both streams. But the relative national ranking of M.Tech from our college is better than MBA from our college.

Does going for MBA@IIM directly after a not so 'hot' MBA make sense?

Currently I'm in 3rd year. I've 2 more years to go. And I'll be apearing for CAT'07. As I've lots of time on my hands, what should be the long term strategy towards CAT'07 ?

I've got a bright academic career at High/Secondary School level.

Some of my batch-mates from IIMB chose to get a 2nd MBA degree from a foreign b-school. They did it for a better chance at the top end $-salary jobs.

While there is some truth in that, personally, I think it's a waste of time. Anyone getting into a decent b-school in India has a pretty strong chance at getting into a top US b-school. So don't waste your time at an IIM and go straight for the US b-schools.

Manish, your case is a bit different. An MBA from IIITM doesn't seem worth the effort. Instead, you are probably better off choosing the M.Tech. program and then trying the CAT after that.

In case, you can leave IIITM after your B.Tech., you could possibly try for the CAT right after. Of course, that depends on whether your program allows you to leave prematurely with just a B.Tech. and on whether you are interested in getting your M.Tech.

As for the long term CAT strategy, work on the basics - Math and English - and then gradually work towards the small tests and then the full-length tests. Use the time to catch up on reading. Read good books that will help develop your vocabulary and grammar. Also look for books that help develop your views on a variety of subjects like politics, history, economics, business, etc. that would be useful in your Group Discussions.

All the best.

Zero Income, $100,000 debt? You must be an MBA

2005-10-07T21:04:00.000-07:00

Rediff has put up an interesting piece for those looking at Wharton for an MBA.

I particularly liked these quotes from Thomas Caleel, Director for MBA Admissions and Financial Aid at Wharton in the article:

"Why would you give up two years without a salary and get into significant debt for an MBA?"

"Do your homework. Wharton is not the right place for everyone."

You can read the piece at Rediff.com.

MBA specialisation - Yeh hi hai right choice baby?!

2005-10-07T00:46:00.000-07:00

Harsh came back with an interesting concern.

Ty Amit for the advice .. i have been getting a bit worked up the past few days over CAT so took a break yesterday and it did me good ...
Now there is another issue that bothers me a bit .. I am very clear that i want to make my career in branding. as a Brand Manager or as an Account Planner .. Now is there any distinct advantage i shall gain by doing the Brand Communications course offered by MICA .. or will a PGDBM in Marketing from a reputed B school offer me similar or better benefits...?
Cheers

I want to adress this in 2 parts. First about the specialisation (Brand Man.) and then about the b-school.

Issue #1: Specialisation
B-school aspirants, especially those without work-ex are like the six blind men of "Indostan". In his poem "The Blind Men and the Elephant", John Godfrey Saxe told of 6 blind men who each touches a different part of the elephant and cannot agree on the nature of the beast.

I have reproduced the poem at the bottom of this post. It is worth a read through. Besides, it will help make sense of what I am writing.

2 points to be made:
a. The elephant is one and each part works with the other. Specialisations are fine but moving up the corporate ladder will require at least a basic grasp of the various parts of the elephant. Caveat: Recruiters, unfortunately, require you to demonstrate interest in job through some degree of specialisation in b-school.

b. Without the benefit of work-ex (and sometimes despite it), choosing a specialisation is like buying a car without test-driving it.

Bottom line: Specialise, by all means, but not at the expense of getting a well-rounded education.

Issue #2: B-school
Whatever your specialisation, an IIMA/B/C is a better deal than a specialised school like MICA. The former will give you more choice of study while in school and more recruiters at the end of it. My uninformed guess would be that very few, perhaps zero, recruiters visit specialised schools but not the big boys.

Bottom line: Marketing from a reputed B school with some study of other areas of specialisation will most certainly be the best option.

PS: Someone asked me how I know what the answers to your questions are. Well I don't. These are opinions and not facts. Besides, I doubt there are any right answers here.

And now for the poem:

The Blind Men and the Elephant

by John Godfrey Saxe

It was six men of Indostan
To learning much inclined,
Who went to see the Elephant
(Though all of them were blind),
That each by observation
Might satisfy his mind

The First approached the Elephant,
And happening to fall
Against his broad and sturdy side,
At once began to bawl:
“God bless me! but the Elephant
Is very like a wall!”

The Second, feeling of the tusk,
Cried, “Ho! what have we here
So very round and smooth and sharp?
To me ’tis mighty clear
This wonder of an Elephant
Is very like a spear!”

The Third approached the animal,
And happening to take
The squirming trunk within his hands,
Thus boldly up and spake:
“I see,” quoth he, “the Elephant
Is very like a snake!”

The Fourth reached out an eager hand,
And felt about the knee.
“What most this wondrous beast is like
Is mighty plain,” quoth he;
“ ‘Tis clear enough the Elephant
Is very like a tree!”

The Fifth, who chanced to touch the ear,
Said: “E’en the blindest man
Can tell what this resembles most;
Deny the fact who can
This marvel of an Elephant
Is very like a fan!”

The Sixth no sooner had begun
About the beast to grope,
Than, seizing on the swinging tail
That fell within his scope,
“I see,” quoth he, “the Elephant
Is very like a rope!”

And so these men of Indostan
Disputed loud and long,
Each in his own opinion
Exceeding stiff and strong,
Though each was partly in the right,
And all were in the wrong!

Moral:
So oft in theologic wars,
The disputants, I ween,
Rail on in utter ignorance
Of what each other mean,
And prate about an Elephant
Not one of them has seen!

Courtesy: Word Focus

If you enjoyed that, another favourite of mine is The Walrus and the Carpenter by Lewis Carroll. It's a hilarious one about youth, betrayal, hypocrisy and cruelty. Enjoy!!

Countdown to CAT 2005

2005-10-04T23:27:00.000-07:00

Harsh wrote:

damn neat and informative blog Amit .. with 47 days left for CAT the pressure is building up .. and i am stuck in the 95 %tile range in my mock cats ..so hopefully will be able to make full use of the remaining days .. any tips on what to focus on these remaining few days ..
cheers

Thanks Harsh. Your comment inspired the idea of a countdown clock to CAT 2005 at the top of the page.

The newspapers seem to be full of tips for CAT prep and am sure the coaching guys are drilling you with a whole bunch of stuff too.

My advice is a tad generic and based on my own CAT appearance almost a decade back.

The final lap to the test should ideally be spent on full length tests. Do a lot of critical study of the tests you take. Look for and correct silly errors, conceptual gaps and speed bumps.

Most critically, try to relax. Get good sleep. Watch some movies ( I missed a good film festival the year I took the CAT), read some books, meet your significant other if they have been playing second fiddle to your prep. :^)

Stress on Test Day can undo all the good work.

Get rich quick; drink instant coffee

2005-09-29T21:05:00.000-07:00

I can't get no satisfaction. That's playing on the radio as I write this. Life seems to be in the slow lane. Can we please live in fast-forward instead of 'play' mode?

Hi amit,
I am a fresh passout of a Delhi engineering college and presently working for an leading software services provider in Bangalore.
I am interested to shift my domain and move iahead in life.How can MBA/CAT/IIM help me ? Is dec'06 the right time for me to give cAT ? By december 2006 i will be having 18 months experience is that enough for a good management guy? I want to start early for the preparation so I would like to take your advice.
Waiting for your reply.
Regards,
Rohit Talwar
Software Engineer

Let me rephrase the question here: 'how much work-ex is enough?' ['How can MBA/CAT/IIM help me?' is for another day]

I don't believe in get-rich-quick, lose 30kgs in 30 days or instant coffee. Well I believe that instant coffee exists :^) but I prefer coffee made the old fashioned way.

Some things take time and there is no rushing it. The only way to get work experience is to do the time. There are, however, caveats to this 56th Law of Wilson.

30 years of work experience can easily be 1 year of experience repeated 30 times. On the other hand 18 months as the executive assistant to the CEO of a big, honking corporation can be worth its weight in gold.

So how do you know if you are ready, if you have enough work-ex for b-school? Tough call but I would suggest 3 ways to think about it.

The first one is the emotional decision, the gut-feel. Do you feel ready? If you want the MBA to get away from your present job or for a reason that has nothing to do with the MBA per se, then you are not ready.

The second (rational) way is to use the metric that most B-schools use: 2 or more years for ISB and as much as 3 to 5 years for good schools in the US.

Third, consider the 'resume effect' of your pre-b-school work-ex. Will recruiters to your b-school of choice give weight to 18 months of your work-ex? This one is probably the toughest.
Pre-b-schoolers often do not know what kind of jobs/recruiters they will face at the end of their year(s) . Besides, beggars can't be choosers.

Bottom line, 18 months of work-ex seems to be little. But speak to senior colleagues to gauge the value of the work you are involved in or will be involved in. Use that to answer the 'recruiter-resume' question.

PS: My response to this e-mail like many responses before suggest ways of thinking about issues rather than giving a 'correct' answer. It may seem frustrating to the person writing in but there really isn't any 'correct' answer. The answer depends on the person. The outcome of a choice is not a constant.

More dirt on B-School ranking

2005-09-26T21:13:00.000-07:00

The latest shocker in the B-school survey world is from "Which MBA?", a B-school survey from the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), a sister organisation of The Economist.

For the first time, a non-US B-school has topped an international survey. The winner is IESE Business School of the University of Navarra, Spain. It ranked 9th last year.

IIMA is the only Indian B-school to feature at rank 69 - sandwiched between EGADE-Tecnológico de Monterrey (who??) at 68 and Southern Methodist University's Cox School of Business (where??) at 70.

My own school (IIMB) does not make it to the top 100. :^( Surprising as it is so close to IIMA in the Indian rankings and looks like its going to upset the old timer soon.

The Economist article on the survey complains about the absence of Harvard Business School (HBS) and the Wharton School, UPenn. Both of them have chosen not to participate in any more B-school rankings. These schools were ranked 4th and 6th respectively last year.

In a telling comment, the Economist quotes the deans of the 2 truant B-schools:

"Patrick Harker, the dean of Wharton, who made the first decision not to co-operate with the listmakers, also argues that “the ranking methodologies are severely flawed.” When asked by what criteria he would like his school to be judged, Kim Clark, who was the dean of HBS until the end of July, said “the achievement of its alumni”. But that is a lagging indicator. It might not make sense to choose HBS today just because its students of 30 years ago are now running many big companies."

And this is why I respect The Economist. Harker's attack on B-school surveys that undermines the efforts of The Economist, along with the rest of its tribe, have not been purged.

In our little neck of the woods, ISB has never participated in B-schools surveys. Part of the reason is that they don't make the cut-off: they have a one year programme as opposed to the 2-year programmes surveyed by most publishers. The other part is (reverse?) snobbery of not being lumped with the hoi-polloi.

This year on, the IIMs have chosen to follow the example of their two US brethren and not participate in any of the B-school surveys. FMS of Delhi University has, according to those in the know, taken an odd stance where they will not participate in the Indian survey but will share information with foreign publications.

So I guess choosing your B-school will be as tough as it was for us old-timers in the days before surveys.

If you screwed up your CAT 2005 app...

2005-09-24T21:36:00.000-07:00

Today's HT (Delhi edition) has a "Notice to all Common Admission Test (CAT) 2005 applicants" from the 6 IIMs.

CAT 2005 applicants - please check if your application was rejected.

Do this on any of the IIM websites on 1st October 2005:

If you have an error in your application, you can correct the error on or before 7th October 2005. For correction, you must visit the IIM you sent your application to.

All the best!!

Money, Time and the MBA Way

2005-09-18T21:28:00.000-07:00

Anonymous had posted this some time back and I just did not get the chance to respond:

Now working with a top PSB (Ed: Public Sector Bank presumably). IIM kida is being rejuvenated. What Is it really worth having: loads of money but no time to spent or otherwise. Hope you got the real question.

It is a very important question. I faced it 2 years back when my son was born. I barely saw him for the first 6 months of his life. He would be asleep when I would leave for my work at an MNB [Multi National Bank :^)] and he would be asleep when I would get back in the evening.

Most MBAs I know work crazy hours and claim they love it. I guess some of them do. The others don't want to opt out until thrown out. The money is pretty good. Plus it always helps the ego to be able to say that you work for Big Brand Bank or Mega Brand Soap Maker.

When you work for a Citibank/HLL, the answer to "what do you do?" is easy. Your identity is strongly connected to your employer's.

For someone to quit a big brand organisation to join a smaller set-up, the first dhakka is having to explain to friends and family what you/your company does. No Citibanker ever had to explain her job.

Assuming I have got the 'real question', the answer is this: getting an MBA and having time to spend are not mutually exclusive.

There is a tradeoff between having time or having the money. When I told my boss I wanted better work-life balance, he assumed I was a slacker. Big money means having to work your ass off and not asking for time to spend with your family.

BUT, you can still choose time over money even after getting your MBA. Accepted wisdom is that once you've been to an IIM, don't waste your education and get on with earning money.

I disagree. Even after you have been to an IIM, you can choose to take on work that gives you a better work-life balance... provided you did not take a loan for your MBA :^).

PS: I started this blog to answer these kinds of Qs... relating to life as a MBA and not just how to get an MBA. More Qs please!!

Gopal says: "HOW TO BELL THE CAT the McKinsey Approach!"

2005-08-29T23:19:00.000-07:00

Gopal is

"...a consultant working as an Associate – Technology for Sapient Corporation, who gave up any notions of cracking CAT after having failed for the third time last year)"

I read his blog and loved it. It's a bit of a long read but I enjoyed reading it and loved what he had to say.

Here is the part I liked best in his blog:

"At the end of the day it is a just an exam. Nothing more. Nothing less. No reason why you should treat it differently. No reason why you should worry more. No reason why you should not think about other things in life. No reason why you should not keep your cool."

Many Catters take on way too much pressure when attempting the CAT. I've said this before and will say it again: cracking the CAT is not attaining nirvana. Post CAT is a long and often painful road that several are pushed off and many choose to get off.

I know for example, IIM graduates who are now journalists, who are working for NGOs for peanuts, who have chosen to bear children and focus on the family.

One man's meat is another man's poison. Pick yours carefully.

Finding the Catinator on the Internet

2005-08-29T02:58:00.000-07:00

I use 2 services to track traffic on this blog. One of them is Nedstat that I use for historical reasons (it was the first one I ever used). The other one - BlogPatrol - is a better service.

With a management degree (sorry diploma) and a specialisation in finance, I cannot help but analyse things to death.

So here is the interesting thing: It's easier to find this blog using MSN Search and Yahoo than from Google.

BlogPatrol ranks Google as the 6th most often used route to the Catinator.
MSN Search and Yahoo are tied for the 3rd/4th spot.

Mind you, the ranking might suggest a close contest but hides a chasm between the search engines. It's a complete rout.

The funny thing is that BlogSpot (the Catinator's host) is part of the Google family and yet Google cannot find my blog as easily as the other two do!!

It is saddening to see Google - my favourite search engine - losing in The Great Internet Search Engine Race. I've never been a Bill Gates / Microsoft fan but there is no denying the quality of MSN Search.

One could convincingly argue that one swallow does not a summer make but if Google cannot locate my blog as well as the others, I can hardly join the chorus of "How Great Thou Art".

Now for the methodology, or the lack of it :^)

My rant is based on the following data (courtsey BlogPatrol) that lists the key words that were put into the corresponding search engines. The search results led to the Catinator.

Top 25 Keywords (and the search engine used):

careerlauncher (MSN)
how to crack cat (MSN)
cat 2005 notification (MSN)
CAT IIMs (MSN)
CAT test taken in Gujarat for MBA programme (Yahoo)
english for cat for iim's (Yahoo)
GOOGLE JOURNALISM INSTITUTE IN NOIDA (MSN)
how to prepare CAT 2005 IIM (Yahoo)
IIM + CAT + last date (MSN)
iim cat 2005 bulletin (Yahoo)
iim cat blog (Yahoo)
iim+cat+"application form"+download (Yahoo)
IIM-B (MSN)
iims pune (MSN)
List of colleges in india taking CAT scores for Management Program (Yahoo)
list of mba schools in india which accept cat scores (Yahoo)
notification of cat-2005 (MSN)
recruitment in broadcast news channel of rajdeep sardesai in sep 2005 (Google)
regarding cat exam in madurai (Yahoo)

The assumption is that surfers would be searching for these and similar keywords in Google and not reaching my website.

I tested this hypothesis by searching for the phrase "how to crack cat" in the 3 search engines.

MSN Search - 8th search result led to the Catinator
Google & Yahoo - no link to the Catinator in the first 5 pages of results.

I retested for the phrase "how to prepare CAT 2005 IIM"

MSN Search - 1st result
Yahoo - 20th result
Google - no link to the Catinator in the first 5 pages of results.

If you have any hypotheses or analyses I'd be happy to air them on this blog.

PS: Sorry if this is a little too off-topic for the Catters

Digging for gold

2005-08-19T05:21:00.000-07:00

Uday wrote:

Good Good.
people write ....but i want someone who can train me with him for 2 months before CAT and then prepare and mentor to be in IIM. r u ready?
i m serious.
taking gold n making it jewellery is challenge!!!

Uday, congratulations on being as good as gold, but my skills as a goldsmith are yet untested. Having said that, a small part of the inspiration behind starting this blog has been to gradually grow into a goldsmith. There are things about the prep process that interest me and parts that I wouldn't touch with a barge pole.

Here is the deal:

I am not interested in teaching Data Interpretation. If you didn't learn your fractions in school, I can scarcely hope to enlighten you now. Besides, there are enough shops out there selling prep material for me to add to the noise and competition.

I am, however, interested in helping young people figure out their choice of career, in acting as a sounding board, in sharing my own experiences in the "real" world.

The problem is that I cannot think of a curriculum to do all this. Every person has a unique need in this regard. For some the need is greater while for others the career path is clear as crystal.

This blog is an attempt to do what I am interested in. But if you can help me create a better structure/framework for this guidance/mentorship/whatever, I will take your challenge of becoming a goldsmith.

In the meantime, send me your concerns and questions and I will do my best to help.

Cheers

Don't believe B-School rankings

2005-08-19T04:07:00.000-07:00

I've never been a fan of B-school rankings. You can find my previous post/rant (from my now extinct blog) on this subject at the end of this one.

The reason for revisiting the issue is a piece in today's Economic Times - "B-Schools mean wrong training only". Poor grammar aside, the story is about "What's Really Wrong With U.S. Business Schools?", a paper published by 3 B-School profs.

If you are looking to go abroad for your MBA, I high recommend you read the whole thing. The paper is about 25 pages long but is surprisingly readable. You can download it from the Social Science Research Network.

The paper points out why you cannot believe B-School rankings and how these rankings are adversely affecting the quality of education in these places.

While the paper is US focused and talks primarily about the negative impact that Business Week ranking has had on B-Schools, it makes for interesting reading even for the Indian MBA graduate and aspirant.

Here are some of the reasons why these rankings are inaccurate:

"...their underlying criteria are far too narrow to capture any real quality differences that might exist among business schools..."

"Because schools teach students to...address future problems that are unknown today, recent graduates...will come to appreciate that value only as their framework proves useful in repeated trials over time."

"The opinions of recent graduates...place undue weight on...their...job search. And that outcome obviously reflects personal characteristics, such as age, appearance, communication skills, prior education, and job experience, in addition to the value added by their MBA."

" For many years, these schools [Chicago, Harvard, MIT, Stanford, and Wharton] have had stable and very high quality senior faculties...Their curricula have evolved, but their emphasis on providing a conceptual education...remains materially unchanged. And so the true value of an MBA from one of these institutions likely changes little over one or two years."

"...during the dot-com boom, the graduating Stanford MBA class apparently alienated traditional corporate recruiters with their arrogance, causing a drop in Stanford’s rating. This ratings decline obviously was not indicative of a true decline in the educational quality of the Stanford MBA program, let alone of real erosion in Stanford’s position as one of the “best” business schools overall."

"...the media have no incentive to disclose the statistical noise problem [errors due to lack of clear data] with their rankings...it is in their narrow self interest to obscure their rankings criteria...and also to exploit (and exacerbate) the imprecision in their measurement technologies. Why? The 1988 Business Week with the initial business school rankings was their best selling issue ever... Fewer magazines would be sold with headlines that truthfully advertise that “the same five (or whatever number) universities continue to have the very best business schools in the world, we can’t really tell which of them is #1 and which is #5, and we surely can’t detect any reliable change in the quality of any one of these institutions since the last time we did this survey.”"

The paper points out that because of this ranking system - inaccurate or not - B-Schools are using resources for cosmetic changes rather than long-term improvement.

"From a dean’s perspective, however, encouraging faculty to incorporate timely topics into their lectures has little public relations sizzle compared to some exciting new program or course that can be readily marketed to the media and donors as evidence of that dean’s policy of continual “improvement” while “managing for excellence.”"

"As one dean at a top-rated business school stated, “The reality is that, independent of whether you believe rankings accurately reflect quality, the perception of the outside world is [that] it does and consequently resources flow to schools who are highly ranked”"

This is leading to the dumbing-down of education in these hallowed institutions.

The other big problem with these rankings is the ethical issue:

"“…schools attempted to manage the meaning of the rankings by focusing on “creatively interpreting” the reporting criteria that produce the rankings. This practice took several forms, including 1) putting some incoming students (especially international students) into a special “pre-admission” class so their numbers would not count toward the final tabulations reported for the autumn MBA “entering class,” 2) admitting lower quality candidates into a Masters of Science program and then transferring them to the MBA class after their first year, and 3) only reporting the average bonus for those receivingbonuses instead of reporting the average bonus for the whole class.”"

While the Indian B-School environment has not become as bad as the US one, the ethical problem is already apparent in India. I remember seeing an advert from one of the Indian B-School ranking agencies saying they had dropped some B-school from their ranking because the school provided inaccurate data.

Finally, here is my (somewhat edited) previous post on the topic:

Here is something that I wrote for Businessworld. You may have to login to read it though. Its a pain but at least its free.

Declarations first - I am a fan and a regular reader of the publication. I think they do a great job though there are issues when I find nothing interesting to read. But given the generally abysmal level of journalism in the country, BW is right up there with the best.

BW has an interesting section called "B-Schools". It has an impressive BW MBA Advisory Panel and I am reliably informed that BW makes sure that the panellists do answer the questions posted there. It's not some young journalist making up the answers. :^)

But my punching bag section on the website is The Best B-Schools in India.

First of all, do you really want to be told that the B-School you went to ranked 98th last year and now has risen up to the 95th position. Wow!! What an Improvement (with a capital I)!!??

And then there is the Q of whether we need yet another survey?

Business Today runs one.
So does Outlook.
As does AIMA.
I believe Business India also runs one but I can't be bothered to find that one on the web.

And I am not going to get into which one came first - the chicken or the egg.

Now in my days (jab main chota baccha tha), we didn't have well educated and equally well paid people at Cosmode and BW asking B-Schools a bunch and Qs and then telling me which are the top 100 in the country.

If you were looking to get into a B-School you knew which ones were top tier, the second tier and the ones being run out of someone's garage. It was strictly word of mouth and even though IIMA was considered better than IIMB (heck even IIMC was considered better than IIMB back then, but considered being the operative word), we didn't know that the difference was merely 7 points on a 1000 point scale. But then do we really need to know that.

The good people at BW would have you know that yes we do need to know that. Their B-School issue far out sells their other issues. OK so it's popular demand. But that just shifts the burden of a low IQ from those who conduct and publish these surveys to those who buy them.

My rules are:
1. Try and get into the best B-school possible.
2. If you need a survey to figure out if your chosen B-School is a good one, look for another B-School or another career. For the serious ones, the survey is superfluous.
3. If you are looking at B-School placement salary surveys to decide things, oh boy!! You need to read my next post on "The Big B-School Salary: What Not To Expect!!"

Ciao

PS: I never got around to writing the one on the "The Big B-School Salary: What Not To Expect!!" One of these days, when I have the time...

CAT Coaching Institutes

2005-08-17T21:21:00.000-07:00

First my gratitude to Bhavesh for writing:

nice blog...helpful... Made me think a lot about my decision to take the CAT.

The Imposter asked:

would joinin a cat coaching instt be of ne help?

There's a whole bunch to be said on this. Coaching institutions (CIs) can help in 2 parts: for the CAT and for the interview/Group Discussion (GD).

For the second part (interview/GD), you should definitely sign up. Most Catters have never been in a GD and few have been in an interview. The experience will at least give you a sense of things to come.

The first part is a little more complicated. Most CIs offer classroom coaching as well as material that you can use at home (distance learning). The classroom coaching can be over varying periods of time - from 2 years to a crash course in a few weeks.

The material is very useful for the prep. But classroom coaching itself can be a mixed deal. They teach you tips and tricks for the CAT in these classes. The test in these classrooms can give you a feel of your relative performance.

But here are 2 downsides:
1. The quality of the mentors/coaches at these CIs.
The people who coach and mentor you are not necessarily graduates of b-schools. Even if one were an IIMA grad, that does not necessarily qualify you as a coach/mentor. In my limited experience, the quality of the coaches at these CIs is abysmal. Given the proliferation in these classes, its not surprising that getting good faculty is hard. Besides, finding good teachers is a challenge even for the IIMS. You can scarcely expect hole-in-the-wall CIs to do better.

2. CIs regularly get their guys to take the CAT and other such tests to keep track of the pattern. The problem is that at least for the CAT, the pattern is often changed to keep the Catters (and the CIs) on their toes. So this pattern tracking is of limited utility.

FYI, here is what I did - I used the IMS correspondence course for the CAT prep and the PDP program from Career Launcher for the interview/GD. BUT, this was almost a decade ago, so my recco on the best prep material in the market is most likely out-of-date.

Bottom line:
1. Yes, the prep material is useful
2. Classroom coaching is of limited use. Take the tips and the decide whether they suit your style of test taking (it should show in the mock test scores).
3. Think for yourself before you accept advice from 'mentors/coaches' at the CIs.

All the best folks!! The time is nigh.

PS: Check out this occasional blog (and this one) by KS Baskar, the guy running Ascent Education, another CI.

Can you crack the CAT twice?

2005-08-04T20:57:00.000-07:00

Arnav wrote:

Hi! Great blog this! I'll refer it to everyone who's preparing for CAT. Really liked your posts on English, and the others were nice too.

I am a final year dual degree Chem Engg student at IIT Delhi. This would be my second attempt this year; got through all the IIMs last year, but screwed up my final year project and wasn't let off on time. I have been told that I can still manage IIMB (the place I wanted to go to over IIMA) if I get a decent enough percentile. What do you think?

Thanks Arnav. I'm glad to see IIMB earn its rightful place in the sun.

Having been successful last year, it must be pretty tough to take the CAT again. Unfortunately for you, unlike the GMAT/GRE, the CAT is valid only for a year. So you will need to take CAT 2005.

But if you were offered admission by IIMB last year, it may be good to let IIMB know about that.

Call the admissions office at IIMB. Speak to the Dean for Admissions (not the admin guys in the office). Tell him/her about your situation and that you prefer B over A. A little flattery goes a long way ;^)

If you make it through CAT 2005, it may help you and IIMB to know that you were a successful candidate last year but could not join for reasons unrelated to the admission process.

All the best for CAT 2005.

MBA + Journalism - Double Career - Possible?

2005-07-27T21:10:00.000-07:00

I got this HUGE e-mail from Reshma. You can read the e-mail and my response below.

For those in a rush, the point is very simply this: Journalism, medicine, engineering, etc are careers. An MBA is not a 'career' per se. It is education in managing businesses, which could be in journalism, medicine or engineering. Even a lawyer looking to run a partnership could benefit from an MBA.

The gory details of the e-mail exchange are below.

Reshma wrote:

I am a young highly ambitious girl, 17 years old,
still studying in the 10+2 course in Bangalore and am
the only child to my parents. My dream is to get into
IIM-B from where you did your MBA. I have a long
academic and career related question to ask you.
Please bear with me and please answer my question in as much
detail as possible because my future academic course
and career will depend on your answer and advise.

I am very passionate about a course in Mass
Communications and Journalism as I wish to pursue a
career in the Television Media. I am a brilliant girl
and have excellent English communication skills and am
very good in the English language. Between the ages of
14-16, about 8-10 of my fact and fiction stories and
articles were published in 2 newspapers and a
teenager’s magazine in the Middle East. I am a
voracious reader and can easily gobble up a 800 page
book in 2 days flat. But over time now, I am
concentrating more on my academic excellence and hence
haven’t been able to contribute much to any
publication. I am a people-centric person. I love to
interact with people and meet different kinds of
successful personalities – especially those who make
news. But my father is not very keen on this and is
always advising me that I should do MBA with
specialization in Human Resources Management or
Finance. Being a girl, he says the erratic time
schedule of the electronic media will not suit me —
more so because I come from a very conservative family
where ethics and values (certain prohibited topics) in
life are of paramount importance. Moreover, as a
Journalist and TV Anchor, I may have to cover issues
and topics that may be taboo in my conservative
family. My father says that a career in Journalism is
limited and I can’t go far whereas the scenario is
altogether different if I do MBA.

I have arrived at a compromise formula so that I don’t
regret not heeding to his advise sometime later in
life. I have decided that it should not be tough to do
both the courses and I would perhaps only gain in the
long run.

I plan to first do a professional Journalism course
from a reputed recognized college after my degree and
simultaneously do an evening college part time MBA
course from another reputed recognized college or vise
versa.

Question 1:
Now, my question is, does a part time evening college
MBA course (of 3 year duration, I think) have the same
value as a full time day college MBA course (of 2 year
duration) from a premier B-School? Are such part time
MBA students equally sought after by the industry
without any discrimination in value and preference? Do
such part time MBA students also get to participate in
high value internship programs just like the full time
MBA students? Are such part time MBA students also
equally sought after in campus recruitment like the
full time MBA students? Do such part time MBA students
also get to participate in Twinning Programs?

Question 2:
Or will it be better for me to do a 2 year Full time
Day college MBA course and simultaneously do a evening
college part time course in Mass Communications &
Journalism? In that case, is a student of part time
Journalism course equally sought after by the industry
without any discrimination in value and preference
just like a full time day college Journalism course
student? Do such part time Journalism students also
get to participate in high value internship programs
just like the full time Journalism students?

Question 3:
On the other hand, if I do a combination of both the
above professional courses, will it add any value to
my CV at all, in case I decide to ultimately pursue a
career in the Television broadcasting industry itself?
Will I have chances to reach the level of a CEO or a
COO in any particular TV Channel? I know I can conquer
great heights in Management with MBA. For that matter,
can I pursue a double career in life?

Question 4:
Having said all the above, if I do two entirely
unrelated courses like Journalism and MBA, when I look
out for a job, will prospective employers feel that I
wasn’t focused and that I am confused about what to
pursue as a career? Will they eventually reject me as
a candidate? Will they take me seriously at all when
they get to know that I did Journalism with MBA or MBA
with Journalism?

Question 5:
I am right now in the 10+2 stage of II Year Pre
University Course with Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics
and Computer Science combination. I have absolutely no
knowledge of Accounts or Finance. Can I still do MBA
with Finance as Specialization after my degree? Where
can I learn the basics of Finance then? What should I
choose in degree? BBM or BBA? What is the difference
between BBM & BBA? Do we have majors or specialization
in BBM & BBA too?


CONCLUSION: WHAT I WANT IN LIFE:
I am fascinated by the idea of being a leader and a
Manager – leading and directing a team. In fact, I
always wanted to be a leader. I am excited at the
thought of doing MBA though I am interested in
Journalism.

In pursuit of my academic goal, to expand and enlarge
my knowledge base, I have already started reading
magazines like
India Today
Business Today
Business India
Business World
Business Week
Outlook

and books like
“The Tipping Point and How it Works with Blogs” by Malcolm Gladwell
“The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Globalized
World in the 21st  Century”  by Thomas Friedman
“Only the Paranoid Survive” by Andy Grove
“Winning” by Jack Welch
“India Unbound” by Gurcharan Das
“Shaping the Future: Aspirational Leadership in India
and Beyond” by Arun Maira
“Rethinking India” by Vinay Rai
and many more such books.

I also manage to read 4 different newspapers everyday.

I am looking for Indian Management Journal in my
college library.  I also regularly read the special
editions of the “Top 100 B-Schools in India” annual
survey done by five leading magazines. With all these,
am I on the right track? In all these and everything,
my father is of course, the guiding force.

Now, both professional courses have become my passion.
It is also because I don’t want to regret later in
life that I want to do Journalism as well, just in
case I need it in life.

Within 10 years after my MBA, I see myself as the CEO
of a large multinational organization, with more than
atleast 30,000 employees, job base either in India or
overseas. Or as the CEO of a multi-channel Television
Broadcasting Company.

One last point. I regularly read all your answers to
career related questions from various readers every
week in the Economic Times. Can you please not compile
them all into one concise book and publish it for the
benefit of readers like me, with all questions and
answers in one book, perhaps one volume every year,
from all your articles and newspaper contributions? I
know you contribute to several newspapers.

Considering all my above points, please do answer me
and guide me. I will be desperately waiting for your
reply and answer by email or in print.

Thank you for your precious time and valuable advise,
in advance.

Yours sincerely,
Reshma Ravikanth

My "edited" reponse:

Reshma,

I haven’t received such a long e-mail in some time. I
have several things to say so let me go one by one.

1. I agree with you that you have excellent English
communication skills. This was the subject of one of
my recent blogs on catinator.blogspot.com. I am glad
to see that at least some MBA aspirants can string
together a proper sentence. Congratulations also on
being a published writer.

2. Here’s my opinion on journalism, values and
‘certain prohibited topics’. Forget what career you
choose, your values will be challenged often in life.
You can hardly reject a career because it may
challenge your values. You may as well choose to hide
under your bed for the rest of your life if you don’t
want anything to challenge your values. Shouldn’t
values be your compass to deal with the ‘certain
prohibited topics’?
As a manager, there will be ample opportunity and
scope for lying, cheating, stealing and defrauding.
There are several well-publicized corporate examples
of this like Enron. By choosing to be a manager and
not a journalist, I doubt you will escape having to
deal with ‘prohibited topics’ that offend your values
and ethics.
Onto ‘certain prohibited topics’: I assume these are
topics like drugs, murder, rape, exploitation of women
and children. First off, these are delicate topics
unfit for discussion with young children. But as
responsible adults and citizens, we cannot turn a
Nelson’s eye to these issues. Should a journalist not
bring these issues to light? Should journalists bury
the news and ask the victims to accept their fate, as
these are ‘prohibited topics’? I hope you understand
that these issues are not to be put away in a closet
but to be discussed so that injustice and exploitation
can be countered.

3. Let’s talk about the other two objections to
journalism: erratic work hours and scope for a career
in journalism. First on the work hours, as a manager
you would have equally if not more erratic work hours.
My friends in the corporate world work crazy hours. If
you want to be home for evening tea, consider teaching
or working for the government.

Regarding the scope of journalism versus management.
There are plenty of MBAs who get no where in their
careers and I know by reputation Prannoy Roy, Ronnie
Screwvala, Barkha Dutt, Vikram Chandra, Rajdeep
Sardesai, and so on and so forth.

4. A few words about the MBA. Every Tom, Dick and Hari
wants to do an MBA today because it is seen as the way
to riches and job security. It’s neither. The
management world is a world of hire & fire. Forget
about job for life. It’s also a world where a few get
the lion’s share. Witness the income disparity in most
companies between the CEO and the lower rungs of
management and the blue collared workers. You are
either good - in which case you are likely to be rich
and successful in anything that you do - or you are
not.

5. You do know that you don’t need a degree in
journalism to work as a journalist, or a degree in
management to be a manager? Look at education as a
tool for the work you choose to do after. Why not
study Economics if you want to be a business
journalist or a Political Science to cover political
beats? Having said that, I have a very low opinion of
the education system and its ability to provide
practical tools. So to be a journalist, study
whatever. Getting a job in journalism is dependent
more on your college than on your subject of study.
But then as a Stephanian, I have a warped view of
this.

6. Before I answer your questions let’s talk about
journalism and the MBA and how they fit together.
Journalism is a specific career. Management is not.
You can be an engineer, doctor, journalist or a lawyer
and yet need management skills because you manage an
organisation.

In your shoes, I would probably look for a job in
journalism after college after studying something that
I find moderately interesting like English Literature
or History or Economics.  I would work for a few years
as a journalist and understand the business. Then, I
would take a break to get a good MBA degree. I would
then use my education in a media company.

7. To your questions:
I. No. Top B-schools do not offer part time courses.
IIMB does not. Once you are past the top few
B-schools, even the full time students of these 2nd
tier schools do not get value and preference.

II. I have no clue about how internship and placement
works at mass-comm schools. But I know this, in the
top tier B-schools, you will have no time for anything
else. You will barely have time for all the work
expected of you from the MBA programme. So, forget
about part time journalism with full time MBA.

III. Doing both the courses together will not add
value. Your chances of becoming a CEO/COO/conquering
heights in management depends more on you than on your
degrees. As I said, it is not a double career.
Speaking of double careers, I know enough people who
have switched careers to suspect that career-for-life
may be as dead as job-for-life.

IV. If you came to me with two degrees and no
experience I would not hire you. That’s too much of
hedging your bets, trying to take the safe way out,
and possibly too much book knowledge that would get in
the way of learning on the job. As I said, a few years
of journalism work experience followed by an MBA could
lead to be an excellent career in media.

Va. I studied Biology, Physics, Chemistry, Math and
English in +2. I specialized in finance in IIMB. No
reason why you can’t.

Vb. You can learn the basics of finance at a B-school.
Suggest you wait for that.

Vc. BBA and BBM are pretty useless. So are most other
under-grad courses in the country. The bigger problem
with these is that none of the big name colleges of
the country offer these degrees. Suggest you join a
decent college instead of pursuing these degrees. I
don’t know about these courses. Check with the
institutions that offer them. I'm sure they will be
happy to tell you the difference between a BBA and a
BBM and the specializations available if any.

8. A word on your reading. I am impressed by the
reading list. But do you understand much?
ET used to be tedious even when I was at IIMB. Business
India put me off completely.

The other books on the list are pretty heavy duty. I
am quite surprised that you have read them. I wonder
what you gained from them. They are pretty interesting
for someone who is a manager. But for a school-girl
they must be dreary.

Reading is like eating. Read only what you can digest
not everything that you can swallow.

Regards

"Heck I'm not a engineer, can I do it?"

2005-07-27T20:42:00.000-07:00

In case you didn't see this in the comments, Uday wrote

hi! Amit. good blog but i m so pessimistic about my past acdemics that i think i will not getinto IIM's. lets see what u say about this. i have 72%in SSC and about 69% in commerce and i did bcom from open university with more that 65%. so what do u say ? i spent 1100 bucks juss like that and got pathetic score of 56%ile. i have now 120 days. i have no IIT,Sriram,Ststephens, et al.Heck i m not a engineer,can i do it? and how? i dont remember geometry either....

Well, heck Uday, I'm not an engineer either. :^) Though I must confess I am a Stephanian. The second confession is that half my class did better than me at the exams.

The CAT is not about how good or poor you are at academics. Getting through (as opposed to into) a good B-school, though, is about good academics.

The CAT is a filteration device (am I repeating myself??). So all the exams you have taken so far were "absolutes" and not "relative". What counts in those exams is whether or not you know something.

The CAT is about how well you do relative to the other who take the exam.

About the 56%ile, you can either take it as an indicator of what you are (i.e. not suitable for a B-School) or spur to improvement.

That's your call but my answer is "Yes, you can!". [Did you see my post on that topic?]

Step I: Believe that you can.

Step II: Work your ass off preparing for the test. Not necessarily in terms of time but in terms of discipline. Regular work even for a few hours each day is much better than 20 hour marathons a week before the CAT.

Step III: Be smart about the prep:
- Pace yourself.
- Get the basics right. You'd be surprised to see how easy class X math seems now that you have done your B.Com.
- Join a classroom coaching program for tips and tricks. BUT take only that which suits your style of test taking. Not all tips are created equal.

Step IV: Relax before the CAT. Get good sleep. Do things that calm anxiety - movies, friends, light reading.

Remember its only a test and life has a bunch of opportunities. The CAT is NOT the only way to success and riches. Too many people without a proper education have succeeded in business (Messrs Gates and Dell for example) and I have begun to wonder whether I should have just flunked out of education. :^)

Simple English - for CAT and otherwise

2005-07-19T19:57:00.000-07:00

Short words are best and the old words when short are best of all.
- Winston Churchill

The Economist Style Guide has the following to say about "short words":

Use them. They are often Anglo-Saxon rather than Latin in origin. They are easy to spell and easy to understand. Thus prefer about to approximately, after to following, let to permit, but to however, use to utilise, make to manufacture, plant to facility, take part to participate, set up to establish, enough to sufficient, show to demonstrate and so on. Underdeveloped countries are often better described as poor. Substantive often means real or big.

So when Ruchir says:

its quintessential to add new things through such a communicative place

...he means

its important to add new things to this blog

Point taken Ruchir. I shall try to post more frequently.

FYI, quintessential is not the same as essential.

quintessential: Being the most typical
essential: Basic or indispensable or necessary

I highly recommend the Economist Style Guide. It will help you write better and perhaps even improve your verbal skills for CAT 2005.

CAT 2005 announced

2005-07-19T05:01:00.000-07:00

The announcement for CAT 2005 came out over the past weekend. You can download the notification or you can read the notification on the IIMC website.

A summary of the notification is below but PLEASE read the notification and bulletin properly:

Note: The notification says that the CAT is only for the programs at the six IIMs, but several other B-Schools also accept CAT scores.

Important Dates:

Issue of CAT Bulletins starts: July 18, 2005 (Monday)

Issue of CAT Bulletins by SBI ends: August 22, 2005 (Monday)

Issue of CAT Bulletins by IIMs ends: August 26, 2005 (Friday)

Last date for receipt of completed applications: September 09, 2005 (Friday)

Common Admission Test : Novemebr 20, 2005 (Sunday)

CAT scorecard to be mailed out by: January 9, 2006 (Monday)

Test Centers: Ahmedabad, Allahabad, Bangalore, Bhopal, Bhubaneswar, Chandigarh, Chennai, Delhi, Gurgaon, Guwahati, Gwalior, Hyderabad, Indore, Jaipur, Jamshedpur, Kolkata, Kozhikode, Lucknow, Mumbai, Nagpur, Noida, Patna, Pune, and Vishakhapatnam.

CAT Bulletin:

- contains the CAT Application Form and other information

- can be obtained at branches of State Bank of India listed below

- price: Rs. 1100/- (Rs. 550/- for SC/ST candidates)

- you only need one CAT Bulletin irrespective of the number of IIMs you apply to.

- send 3rd Copy of Bank's/IIMs' Pay-in Slip with the CAT Application Form.

- SC/ST candidates to submit a copy of SC/ST Certificate to the Bank/IIM at the time of obtaining the CAT Bulletin.

- ensure your eligibility to appear in CAT before buying the CAT bulletin. Applications of ineligible candidates and those with incomplete information will be rejected. NO REFUND.

When (a) bulletins are exhausted in the nearby bank branch or (b) the bank branch is inaccessible or (c) the bulletin sale through banks closed:

- the Bulletin can be obtained from any one of the IIMs

- by sending a crossed demand draft for Rs. 1200/- (Rs. 600/- for SC/ST candidates with a copy of the SC/ST certificate)

- drawn in favour of the respective IIM

- Enclose a cloth-lined self-addressed unstamped envelope of size 12" x 10"

All the best guys!!

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

IIM addresses:

Admissions Office, Indian Institute of Management, Vastrapur, Ahmedabad – 380015 (Phone: 079-26324632)

Admissions Office, Indian Institute of Management Bangalore, Bannerghatta Road, Bangalore–560076 (Phone: 080-26993188)

Admissions Office, Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, D.H. Road, Joka, Kolkata – 700104 (Phone: 033-24679178)

Admissions Office, Indian Institute of Management Indore, Pigdamber, Rau, Indore - 453331 (Phone: 0731-5058785)

Admissions Office, Indian Institute of Management Kozhikode, IIM Kozhikode P. O., Kozhikode - 673570 (Phone: 0495-2809213)

Admissions Office, Indian Institute of Management, Prabandh Nagar, Off Sitapur Road, Lucknow - 226013 (Phone: 0522-2734028, 2736682)

List of SBI Branches:

Where location of the SBI Branch is not indicated, go to the main branch in the city.

ANDHRA PRADESH: Hyderabad (Bank Street), Kakinada, Kurnool, Secunderabad (Rashtrapati Road), Tirupati, Vijayawada, Vishakhapatnam, Warangal (Hanamkonda);

ARUNACHAL PRADESH: Itanagar; ASSAM: Dibrugarh, Guwahati;

BIHAR: Bhagalpur, Muzaffarpur, Patna (West Gandhi Maidan);

CHATTISGARH: Bhilai (Sector I), Bilaspur, Durg, Raipur (Jaistambh Chowk);

DELHI: New Delhi (IIT), New Delhi Main Branch (Parliament Street), Delhi (University of Delhi);

GOA: Panaji (Near Junta House);

GUJARAT: Ahmedabad (Bhadra), Ahmedabad (IIM Branch), Anand, Baroda (Opp. Jamunabai Hospital), Bhavnagar (Diwanpara Road), Rajkot, Surat (Chowk Bazar);

HARYANA: Ambala City, Gurgaon (Mehrauli Road), Karnal, Kurukshetra University, Rohtak;

HIMACHAL PRADESH: Shimla (The Mall)

JAMMU & KASHMIR: Jammu, Srinagar;

JHARKHAND: Dhanbad, Jamshedpur, Ranchi;

KARNATAKA: Bangalore (Jayanagar II Block), Bangalore (St. Mark’s Road), Gulbarga (Super Market Complex), Hubli, Mangalore, Mysore (Sayaji Rao Road);

KERALA: Kozhikode, Kochi (M.G. Road), Thiruvananthapuram (M.G. Road);

MADHYA PRADESH: Bhopal Main, Gwalior, Indore, Jabalpur, Rewa;

MAHARASHTRA: Amaravati, Aurangabad (Kranti Chowk), Mumbai (Bombay Samachar Marg), Mumbai (Shivaji Park), Mumbai (Mahim), Nagpur, Nasik, Pune, Thane;

MANIPUR: Imphal;

MEGHALAYA: Shillong (Kacheri Road);

MIZORAM: Aizawl;

NAGALAND: Kohima; ORISSA: Berhampur (Ganjam), Bhubaneswar (New Capital P.O.), Cuttack (Collectorate Compound), Dhenkanal, Koraput, Puri, Rourkela, Sambalpur;

PUNJAB: Jalandhar (Civil Lines), Ludhiana, Patiala;

RAJASTHAN: Ajmer, Bikaner (Dauji Road), Jaipur (Sanganeri Gate), Jodhpur, Kota (LIC Bldg.), Udaipur;

TAMILNADU: Chennai Main (Anna Salai), Chennai (IIT), Coimbatore (Bank Road), Madurai (West Veli Street), Salem, Tiruchirapalli, Tirunelveli;

TRIPURA: Agartala (Hariganga Basak Road);

UTTARANCHAL: Dehra Dun, Pant Nagar; Roorkee;

UTTAR PRADESH: Agra, Aligarh, Allahabad (Allahabad University), Bareilly, Gorakhpur, Jhansi, Kanpur (The Mall), Lucknow, Meerut, NOIDA (Sector-2), Varanasi;

WEST BENGAL: Burdwan, Durgapur, Kharagpur, Kolkata (Ballygunge), Kolkata Main (Strand Road), Kolkata (Manicktala), Kolkata (Park Street), Kolkata (IIM Joka), Siliguri;

CHANDIGARH: Sector 17;

PONDICHERRY: Pondicherry (Rue Suffren)

Jargon and Angrezi in the Economic Times

2005-07-11T19:20:00.000-07:00

The Sunday ET carried a piece on how the Delhi Metro is pushing up real estate prices. The slug, which does not feature on the web site, read "... prices are going over the roof..."

Over??!! Over the roof!!! Surely you mean "through the roof". Going over the roof doesn't bother me. That way they come and go and affect me not. But through the roof means I have a roof to fix. :^)

Here is another beauty from today's ET (12th July 2005):

Actis in talks to buy majority in Nutrine
...According to sources, it is possible that Actis may buy majority stake in the company and current promoters — the Reddy family — may continue to run the day-to-day operations. In other words, it will be a management buy-out (MBO)....

What is beautiful is that this is the exact opposite of the correct definition of a management buyout. In a management buyout, managers become promoters and not the other way around as ET would have you believe.

It gets my goat that when it is so easy to Google for the correct definition, the writers (yes, two people co-wrote this piece and yet they couldn't get it right) want to get creative.

Syndication

2005-07-10T23:56:00.000-07:00

I have added content syndication to The Catinator!!

BlogSpot only allows Atom format syndication. No RSS. Sorry!

You can see the Atom feed icon below and in the right panel.

For more on Atom, RSS and syndicating your blog.

Thank you for the suggestion, Vijay:

Yours is an interesting blog. Could you provide a RSS feed URL for it? I think it would increase traffic to it, making it more interactive and interesting.

Plus, the added traffic gets you adsense dollars ;-)

- Vijay

I still have to figure out the adsense program for syndication. No dollars flowing in yet. :^)

"My English is weak" - CAT Impact

2005-07-07T23:52:00.000-07:00

I've already ranted on about language skills. But let me rehash something I wrote on Rediffblogs sometime back:

"My English is weak"

I have heard this one from several people - those who took the CAT with me and those whom I counseled recently. Guess some things never change.

First, this CAT problem does not have a quick fix. You have either read a whole bunch and are comfortable with the language... or not. Word lists won't help. Neither will ploughing through a stack of books in a few months... because reading must be done for pleasure, at leisure and its not Maggie noodles.

But all is not lost. The vast majority of those taking the CAT are NOT strong in English... most are engineers :^) sorry!!!

Jokes apart, even with a passable command over the language, it is possible to get through. Believe me, I have suffered enough pidgin English in classroom presentations at IIMB.

So the bottom-line? Even if your English is not too strong, you can make it. But be prepared to do a huge amount of reading in your two years...three if you can't make it in two. ;-)

Language matters - for IIM CAT and elsewhere

2005-07-04T22:31:00.000-07:00

Language is tricky business. If it doesn't adapt and evolve, it dies. If you can't get enough people to use it, it dies. And yet, as it evolves, purists say that the changes in the language are destroying it.

The classic example is the use of "new" English in SMS, chat and to an extent e-mail. There are abbreviations, acronyms... hell even keyboard art - better known as smilies - are used to communicate emotions... and they do a pretty good job.

But here is the problem: the younger folks who have grown up in this language environment see it as the norm and not the exception. [Do I sound like an old fogey yet?] They don't understand that this is casual expression and meant for informal conversation.

The "new" English is not meant for formal communication or even for semi-formal communication i.e. when writing to people whom you don't know. Case in point is the following e-mail I got:

Subject: suggession required plz help sir

hello sir,
i read your article in business world as to whether u sholud take MBA or not and i need a piece of advice ,as u are an experienced campaigner in this field.sir i m doing my B tech(comp sc final year) n am placed in WIPRO ,I am not able to decide whether to take CAT right now or after 2 years experience i m very much interested in project management especially if that deals software ...but am baffled up as some say it would be nice if you take experience and then go for MBA kindly help me out i would be deeply indebted to you ....looking forward for your reply
thanking you

For the other old fogies reading this let me attempt a translation:

plz: please
u: you
i: I
i m: I am or I'm
n: and

Poor spelling apart, the e-mail is a classic case of the "dumbing down" of the language thanks to new media of communication.

How does this relate to the IIM / CAT? For one, if your spelling, grammar and command over the language over the language is anything like this person's, I suggest you take English language classes before you can even think of getting a half decent MBA.

Even if know your Wren & Martin but write this way, get with it dude. Don't write fomal / semi-formal e-mails / letters like this. It puts the other person off. It suggests ke maa-baap ne padhaya likaya nahi hai.

BTW*, what the heck does "experienced campaigner in this field" mean?

* This is NOT formal communication. :^)

ISB: Work-ex and women applicants

2005-06-30T21:49:00.000-07:00

Shyama wrote back asking me if ISB takes people without work-ex.

The short answer is "Yes,but...."

ISB web site on admissions says:

We strongly prefer a minimum of two years of post-qualification work experience. However we will admit students without any experience, in exceptional cases, where the candidate is truly outstanding.

So, if you are an "outstanding" candidate, then, under "exceptional" circumstances, you could get admission to ISB without the requisite two years work experience. Interesting to note the vagueness of "outstanding" or "exceptional". :^)

The unspoken [by ISB] and little known bit of info for the ladies is that the school is keen to improve its women to men ratio in the classroom. So, they are willing to make exceptions for women applicants.

That's all folks!!

Preparing for the CAT outside India

2005-06-30T02:24:00.001-07:00

I got an e-mail from someone in the Middle East trying to prep for the CAT:

hi...
my name is Shyama [name changed for privacy] and lets just say im a MBA aspirant.....i read ur article [need to register (free) to read it] in Business World and well it really shook me up!

Im an engineer and Im currently working in Saudi Arabia as a design engineer under training.Just graduated from college this year and am seriously thinking of trying out the CAT this year.

Gave it a shot last year...and got a pretty decent score but it wasnt good enough for the IIMs...the only institutes i applied for..I didnt keep much options open...

Now my problem is....im in another country and so I'll have to do all my preparations on my own...how possible is that???And how do you really whether you are cut out for an mba?

I always thought i had it in me to face challenges but the picture you painted....was out of Dali!! I never have quit anything I set my mind upon before but right now Im really confused...and I would really appreciate if you could maybe mail me back..

And here was my reply:

Hi Shyama,

the idea of the Businessworld article was not to shake up or frighten. It was to help you get into this thing with your eyes open.

Having taken the CAT before, you would now have a good feel for the exam and what you may need to do to get a better score this year.

But this time, do apply to more schools. Some others like ISB, XLRI, FMS and a few in Mumbai are pretty good. Besides, if you get them, you have the option to join or not. Not applying at all closes out all options.

The year I took the CAT, I applied to as many schools as I could. It costs marginally more, the exam prep effort is not significantly higher but it keeps the doors open.

Now to the heart of the matter. Being in Saudi should not hinder your efforts at all.

First, I know that Career Launcher has a center in Dubai where they offer classroom prep. See this site:
http://www.careerlauncher.com/location/gulf/dubai/services.html
I don't know if you are in Dubai to take advantage of this.

Second, most CAT prep programs have a correspondence course. These not only help you prepare but also provide mock CATs to gauge your efforts. I used the IMS correspondence course in my year. I had no classroom coaching except for the PDP program of Career Launcher after I had got a few calls. See this site:
http://www.careerlauncher.com/pegasus/programe/pdp.html

You wrote: "And how do you really whether you are cut out for an mba?"

My answer may sound vague but here goes anyway:
First, only you know whether you are cut out for an MBA. You know it because you are interested in business and management and a career in the corporate world (or even in a managerial role in the non-profit world)

Second, the CAT is not really a test of your aptitude for management. It is a filter. They could have admitted people height-wise but I guess there was too much legal risk in that. :^)

So, are you cut out for an MBA? Yes, if you want to "manage" businesses and organisations you probably are. But you probably won't know it till you actually do it after B-schools etc etc. Vague enough for you?

I can understand the confusion but decide once that you are going ahead with this and then just do it (thank you Nike).

Finally, please consider Van Gogh's "Wheat Field with Cypresses". Dali is a little too depressing for my taste....interesting but depressing.

If you know of any other centers outside the country that help in CAT prep, please leave me a comment on this blog.

Cheers!!

Choosing a B-School: For those with work-ex.

2005-06-29T00:50:00.000-07:00

Over the weekend, I had a very interesting conversation with a friend who has been working for several years and is planning on taking the GMAT. Several points came up that are worth a discussion for anyone considering an MBA after work-ex.

Points to ponder (thank you Reader’s Digest):
1. Why MBA?
That’s an easy one: to fast track your career. But I know enough people who go for an MBA – sometimes even after having got one from India – to get away from things: bad jobs, emotional distress, even boredom. If you must get an MBA after working for a few years, get the reasons right, especially if you intend to go abroad for it.

2. Financial considerations
a. The problem of going back to school once you have started working is that it can be financially difficult. You go from earning money to zero income and significant outgo.
b. If you decide to go abroad for your MBA you will probably have to take a loan. That means, you need to live overseas at least till you have repaid your loan as you are unlikely to repay $100,000 with a job in India.

3. Work-life consideration
With a firangi MBA, you may have to live abroad for a few years. It may not sound like much like hardship but there are those who would rather earn a few dollars less than live outside the motherland. [You can’t beat the fact that it’s so cheap to hire domestic help – cooks, ayahs for the baba-log, drivers, cleaners, etc. But that is a blog on it’s own.]

4. Why go abroad?
My friend said something most interesting. She said that Indian B-Schools have too many non-work-ex students. This means that classroom discussions boil down to theoretical prattle rather than a discussion based on experiences and practices. I think that is a thought worth its weight it gold.

So if you are a non-MBA minion of the corporate world and want to become a major minion, get an MBA. If you just want the stamp, any decent Indian B-School will do. But for quality of class participation [a.k.a. CP], a foreign MBA is worth a try:
a. They are easier to get into.
My GMAT score was off the chart [almost :^)] but I didn’t get a call from IIML [sob boo hoo] assuming a strong correlation between GMAT and CAT.
b. They are easier to graduate from.
My friends who struggled in Indian colleges and B-Schools are acing their way through good US B-schools.
c. But they cost an arm and two legs and a decade of slavery for the firangi before you are free and clear to return to the land of our birth.

Jai Hind!!

Taking the CAT for the right reasons

2005-06-20T05:43:00.000-07:00

Here is another one of my posts on Rediff. Original post 2May05. This is the edited version:

Let me talk of the things I hear most often when listing the reasons for taking the CAT.

"I am sitting for the CAT because my friends are doing it, my parents asked me to, my cousin is in an IIM, the newspapers tell me that MBA earn mega bucks."

I find this 'analysis' pretty scary. It's like getting married because you like the colour of her lipstick or buying a car because it is red (which I did incidentally and the Fiat Palio Sports is doing very well thank you).

The CAT needs to be taken for the right reasons. You need to think through several things -

what does it take to get through the exam,
what does it take to make it through (and not just to) a top tier b-school
and finally what does it take to have a successful career in management.

For most, getting a call is usually "that's all". My advice - beware!!!

Think about why you want to do it and whether or not you are suited to it.

My young friends who are leaving college are quite confused about choice of career. There are several possibilities and they are afraid of shutting doors at this point.

When I was leaving college, I had the choice of joining one of the big 4 accounting firms (or is it 5 or 3? I can never seem to keep track of all this M&A) to do a CA or go to IIMB. And believe it or not, those were the days when both career options were equally attractive. There were no foreign placements and no dollar salaries.

I don't believe that the choice has become easier since then. But clearly, given the media coverage and the salary hype, more people are choosing to try their luck with no thought to their suitability to this profession.

This is one of my favourite rants and I will come back to it in the future.

Cheers

We don't need no stinkin' counselling... for CAT prep

2005-06-15T02:18:00.000-07:00

This was my first blog on Rediff. Original entry 29Apr05. Now edited:

A few months back, I had the dubious honour of being asked to be a "counsellor". I was to "counsel" some students of a CAT coaching institution on their mock CAT scores.

Now I have never been a CAT prep instructor. My qualification was an IIM stamp. A bit of arm-twisting from friends had me counselling an assembly line of CAT aspirants. The idea was to discuss their success or (mainly) otherwise at the recent mock CAT.

Here is the strange part. Most of these guys were not worried about their Math or English scores. Well, they were... but there were bigger fish to fry. They were suffering from a severe lack of self-confidence.

I think most of these guys caught the CAT fever for the wrong reasons. And, bless their poor souls, had not had any guidance on the matter.

Now a coaching institution is unlikely to say: hey buddy don’t bother with buying the prep material from us because you are not clear on what you want to do. It makes for a poor revenue model.

Yet, a bit of one-on-one introspection would have gone a long way in clarifying goals and matching talents to targets.

This blog is a sort-of attempt at solving this problem. If you are starting CAT prep and have doubts, questions, issues, whatever, drop me a line.

For the rest, we'll carry on ranting about the CAT and the IIMs.

Do svidaniya!

Get email when blog is updated!!

2005-06-14T02:01:00.000-07:00

I have added an e-mail alert to The Catinator, i.e. this blog. You can see this in the right hand side column [that is this way ---->], below "Archives".

The good people at Blogarithm provide this service. They will send you an alert whenever I update this blog.

When you type in your address, Blogarithm will create an account for you. Password and e-mail verification required. Sorry! :^)

You can use this account to get alerts from other blogs as well.

Hope you find this useful. Let me know if you have any problem using it.

Cheers

Books for the MBA aspirant

2005-06-13T23:59:00.000-07:00

I wrote a review of The Fiefdom Syndrome for Businessworld that just got published. This is my 3rd book review. Links to the previous ones are in the 'Links' on the right.

Besides the shameless self-promotion :^) I have a point for the prospective MBA aspirant.

Fiefdom... is a particularly bad book from the writing standpoint. But it has some interesting stories that can give you a feel for life as an MBA grad.

The Business Book Industry is booming. There are a bunch of books you could read to understand the MBA career. But my #1 book is about life at a top B-School: Snapshots from Hell: The Making of an MBA.

You can read reviews at Amazon. And you can purchase it at First&Second (Rs.483/-).

I read it when I was already in IIM Bangalore and the cords of sympathy really twanged. Even though it is about Peter Robinson's experiences at Stanford Business School, it could well have been IIMB. Besides being very well written, it is good reading for those who feel the call of the MBA.

Caveat: The story is meant to be humorous but Stats and Accounting are tough, have no doubt about that.

Cheers

The movie connection

2005-06-13T01:36:00.000-07:00

In case you missed the "movie connection", the url is a take off on the movies of the now honourable governor of California, USA. And the site description quotes Morpheus from The Matrix.

I used to blog at Rediff. But I suspect that the site admin has kicked the bucket. Their Latest Entries on the main page haven't changed in a decade. I sent them a nice mail about a typo on their site. They didn't bother to acknowledge it or to correct the typo:

So much for soliciting feebback (sic).

I will gradually move bag and baggage to Blogspot. But for now am running 2 shops.

This blog is about the MBA, IIMs and other B-schools, the CAT and the like. I have a bunch of stuff to say about it all and you can read it here. If you have thoughts, ideas, comments, questions or just want to kick off some new controversy, feel free to put down a comment below. I promise to weave in your rants.

Cheerio!!