Sunday, November 30, 2003

PPTs hot up...

Mck was here last week and this was probably the most popular pre placement talk... the lecture theater, that can hold 100, was brimming with more than a 130 of us, all listening to what the folks from McK had to say... This one is going to be an interesting outcome...

the leadership summit is almost here and frantic last minute loose ends are being tied up... its hectic work... amidst all this are some of the most demanding courses of the year... the courses this term have been outrageously demanding... assignments, submissions and some real tough classes! Its been tonnes of learning...

But that doesnt stop us from having fun can it? We had a volleyball tourney starting today... i played in both the matches today and lost both... lack of practice I must say... but we are still in the hunt and its going to be fun as the week goes by, adding to the great schedule we already have!!!

Some more updates coming in the days to follow... too sleepy now...

Saturday, November 22, 2003

Placement process starts...


This one was a bang from the blue... Here we are absolutely immersed in corporate finance, pricing and marketing and suddenly this mail from CAS... the first job posting... we thought they were testing the site when it hit us... this was for real... Crisil and Kanbay came first... and then an international position from singapore... We have to submit our expressions of interest soon... deadlines are close... interviews happen only in Jan but job postings will begin to flow in now... I really dont know if I can give out the names of the companies but certainly cannot give out details about the roles, salary figures... The first three have been somewhat attractive... There have been a couple of pre placement talks as well, and the figures quoted in them have been very very attractive... If this were any indication, the coming months can prove to be good... more updates soon...

Wednesday, November 19, 2003

Help!!!

To all those who have flown Jet Airways in India, a sincere request to spend a few minutes, filling out a small survey... this is a student project of mine for one of my courses... Please consider taking 3 minutes off your precious time for this... I will really appreciate the help...

www.geocities.com/rsramkee/jet-survey.htm
Rajat Gupta, Pramath Sinha and M F Hussain...

Those are the people we at ISB have seen in the past 3 days... Rajat Gupta was here, teaching us Leadership and Transformation... He has chosen cases from companies that went through major transformation and where these transformations were done by ex-Mck employees... He first discussed IBM and Lou Gerstner... Lou was Rajat's next door mate at McK and Rajat quoted extensively from his experiences with IBM and Lou... It was fascinating indeed... He then discussed Harvey Golub and Amex... Harvey was Rajat's mentor when he joined McK... Again, Rajat's insights, given that he had worked with both Robinson, who was the Amex chief before Golub and then Golub, were very interesting...

Pramath talked to us about Mck, consulting in general and the everyday life of a consultant... he spoke extensively about the profession, the pressures, the rewards etc. He gave a lot of useful tips about interviews, resumes and career choices... It was indeed wonderful listening to him describe problem solving and approaches to problem solving... his description of leadership, in terms of trade offs, tough decisions, sacrifices and the ability to make a difference rather than hold a specific position...

MF Hussain was a surprise from Rajat. He suddenly called us all for a talk and disguised the talk to surprise us with the great painter... Hussain saab painted a wonderful little piece for us, right in front of us... I have never seen a painter do one right in front of my eyes... it was a very interesting and novel experience...

The past 3 days have been extremely hectic and eventful too... Hectic because of the workload in the courses... Eventful thanks to all the people who have visited us... Its been an absolute non stop show, with hardly any time to breathe... Now, its easing up a bit but will pump up again when the leadership summit comes through... In the meanwhile, a big team from ISB is in IIMA for the confluence events... Lets see if they can beat the best and win a few prizes!

Sunday, November 16, 2003

Etceteras...

If someone thought it was Sachin and Sehwag who busted the kiwis yesterday, well, I thought Dravid was the one who broke their confidence completely... Sachin was brilliant and Sehwag was responsible (a pleasant surprise)... But Dravid was demolishing (ever associated that adjective with him?)... Take this from me because I was in the ground yesterday, watching Dravid put that ball away with disdain... One six, over square leg, off Oram, will remain etched in my memory forever... Flat and hit with tremendous power, it did not even cross the height of the stands in the small LB stadium before hitting the roof of the square leg cameraman's elevated platform... what a shot... the speed with which that ball travelled was a sight to see... whoever called dravid a wall, please rechristen him as the "bouncing" wall... for whatever the kiwis threw at him came back with twice the speed... long live this unsung, underrated genius of indian cricket...

term 6 starts tomm... Includes a couse called "Courses in corporate finance" by Professors Bhagwan Choudhry and the latest IMF chief economist Raghuram Rajan... I am waiting for Raghuram Rajan to start teaching us... :)

response to a comment

One issue on which I always wonder is the usefulness of courses like these. Business models and the Internet, sounds too good to be useful man.
High technology is always emerging and one with good business fundamentals would understand net business models in a giffy. Other hand, people with poor basics in economics and finance are very vulnerable when it comes to doing business in the Net, because they dont understand the core concepts of value addition, transaction costs and resources. In this context, dont you think b-schools should concentrate more on fundamental economics/finance/marketing etc? I wonder how you guys manage to grasp the fundamental theory and learn to apply it also, in just one year of the course.. Amazing indeed.


I had the same scepticism when I saw the course name, but then decided to audit it, given it was being offered by a top class faculty from Wharton... Im glad that I did for I realised judging a course by its name is like judging the book by its cover...

The whole concept of an elective is to build on your basics into something you want to explore more... "Business models and the Internet" was exactly that... It was building on the basics in Microeconomics, strategy, marketing and operations... the concept of the course was to build on what we had learnt in the core courses and see how these change and can be exploited thanks to the arrival of the Internet...

The course was hardly about technology but all about strategy on the internet, marketing and operations...

marketing was primarily dealing with price discovery models afforded by the internet, like auctions, reverse auctions, dynamic pricing and how traditional business models can benefit from these, in both B2C and B2B, and under what situations... (numerous examples)... without the basics of microecons, like revenue equivalence theorem and vickery auctions, degrees of price discrimination, we could not have made head or tail out of this stuff...

strategy was dealing with revenue models, like revenue sharing (classic example: rentrack in the US) and evolution of revenue models in B2B transactions (tracking priceline.com's model) etc.

operations was dealing with transactional efficiences, market efficiences and supply chain efficiencies and the varying degrees with which these can be implemented and used to add value... The reasons why "click and mortar" is useful than a pure play internet model and how it should be used...

It was indeed a takeaway to know that while many in the world are trying to improve only the transactional and market efficiencies, which are easier compared to improving supply chain efficiencies, maximum value is obtained by improving the supply chain's efficiency... So was it when one of our class presentations brought out the point that in "click and mortar" strategies, the value offered by "warehousing" is more in immature markets and value offered by "store picking" is more in mature markets... Now, it may seem a simple case of demand aggregation, but then, the counter intuitive point is that being tempted into a pure play internet strategy in an immature market with tie ups with established suppliers is a mistake... u may like to circumvent the demand uncertainity but then, the value offered by just the transactional efficiency and the downside of supply chain inefficiency result in a net negative effect... it was reassuring to see all this with a activity based cost breakup...

I guess it is critical to know how and when to apply which of these strategies to your business when it decides to adopt the Internet or is already doing so... I have a starting point of thought and an intuition about what leads where before I can decide my marketing or operations strategy will be... If u still think all this stuff is pretty obvious, the force is with you...

In fact, there were occasions when I felt my years of work ex was playing a part in the learning... I completed my engineering in 99, the time when the Internet was growing in India and was every techie's fascination... I worked my way through the dot com boom and bust and read a lot about all these dot com business models, primarily becase the bust hit my company hard and I wanted to know what actually happened... apart from the fact that the stock market and the snowballing scepticism among the VCs had a part to play, many of these models intrigued me... I have thought and thought and thought so much about pure play Internet businesses and came to my own conclusion that atleast a click and mortar strategy is needed to succeed... it was indeed gratifying to see all my thoughts discussed. I was actually developing on those thoughts in the class discussions and it was indeed enjoyable...

Now, if the question is how someone can manage to do the fundamentals well enough and then apply them as well in one year, I guess its just that we slog it out that much more given the short time...

Monday, November 10, 2003

Finals... 2 down, 3 more to go... Tomm is the final for the "Business models and Internet" course... the second best course I went through here in ISB... its all about auctions, e-procurement, click and mortar vs brick and mortar, revenue sharing, B2B interactions, transactional/market/supplychain efficiencies provided by the internet... extremely interesting stuff...

Today's finals were write-a-thons... made me realize how long I had been away from continuous writing and how i no longer have the stamina to write for 3 hours on the trot... today I had to do it twice in the same day... tough go...

somehow, the number of exams, tests, assignments i have given here have been so many that, i am tired of these now... the motivation to push yourself to go for it seems to be waning a bit... i do not know if its (over)confidence, having done all the work through the term or its just plain tired feeling...

im just looking forward to the term break, and the 15th for the ind-nz match in hyd... ISB will be there in good numbers I guess given the cricket fanatics that we are...

Friday, November 07, 2003

its finals time and the end of term 5... now, thats just 3 terms to go! and the course is over... yesterday, I received a mail from the academic affairs office about planning for the orientation week for the next batch... and thats when it hit me... its only seems yesterday that we were here, wide eyed aspirants... and before we realize, the placements are round the corner... interview prep is on... alums have been helpful and many of us are banking on them... fellow students talking about life after ISB already!!! Its been a rolicking 5 terms... from term 1 to ELP.... There is this temptation to sit back and recollect all that transpired... maybe I will this term break...

The other day, an interesting discussion happened in the "Business Models and the Internet" class, something worth thinking about... baazee.com, the india eBay if u may call it, has introduced MaxBid, a scheme where you get 90% discounts on stuff like bikes, Television sets etc... Check the site out when u find time... on the face of it, seems a damn unbelievable deal... so we decided to cut deeper... read carefully... its a pretty smart idea that can easily fool you...

MaxBid rules are that, every item on offer in the MaxBid auction has a max price you cannot exceed while bidding... for example, a bike worth Rs.55000 is offered at a Max price of Rs.5500, that 90% discount and you CANNOT bid higher than 5500!!!

There is a limit on the maximum and minimum number of bids... meaning, the auction can take only the set maximum number of bids and will become void if there arent the required number of minimum bids...

So who wins? not the guy who bids 5500... its the highest unique bid that wins... meaning, if two bidders bid 5500 and I was the only one who bid 5499, then I win... now thats cool aint it? people can win stuff at 5% of the original price, if thats the way the unique bid goes!!!

The first catch: the qualification to bid for these products is that you have to have a particular set of "baazee points"... You can collect these "baazee points" by successful bids for other products at Baazee... These "baazee points" expire in 6 months... Now, the moment you read that you may think, ok this is like a frequent flyer program... third degree price discrimination??? there is more to it... read on...

The second catch: You may think how baazee makes money out of these auctions... here it is: You get "baazee points" are approx 10% of the worth of goods you successfully bid to collect these points... and lets say that the minimum number of bids for an auction is 300 for the bike... and the qualification to bid for the bike is 1500 points... so, for the auction to be valid, there have to be atleast 300 bids... meaning there will be 300 bidders with 1500 points... thats 450,000 points... that means 4,500,000 worth goods sold (10 times the points value is the goods sold for bidders to collect those points)... So baazee has sold atleast that much before it decides to give away a bike worth 55000 for 5500... even if I assume a 5% commission for baazee for selling 4,500,000 worth goods = 225,000, the money that baazee makes out of this deal is (225,000) - (55,000 - 5500) = 175,500... meaning, baazee auctioned a bike worth 55000 for 5500 and still made 175,500 :)

The third catch: Why have minimum and maximum no. of bids? interesting logic... the minimum number of bids is obviously to ensure there is a big enough number of bidder population with the number of points that qualify them before you auction the bike away... the maximum number not only brings the auction to an end, it also in a way accelerates the bidding process as the count of the number of bids is displayed all the time, affecting the risk aversion as well as the urge to bid all the time...

The fourth catch: Why should the highest unique bidder and not the highest bidder win? Simple... someone will simply bid 5500 to start with and win... the highest unique bidder keeps the interest of the bidders going... given the cap on the upper limit of bids, this strategy ensures that until the maximum number of bids is reached, every bidder is kept interested...

The final big catch: Is this an auction at all? Think about it... has the highest unique bidder "won" anything in auction terms? nope... this is not an auction... this is just a simple random number generator... baazee has already got the money it wants in terms of making people collect bidding points... it accelerates that process by introducing maxbid and the urge to bid in maxbid... it ensures that the baazee points expire in 6 months, so the momentum of collecting points is kept going... then it calls MaxBid an auction where it basically masks a lottery of product at 10% of its cost as an auction and seemingly gives away a product at 10% of its cost, but in the process making people feel they have got a great deal... sure the guy who wins the bike gets the good deal in terms of getting it for 5500 but then, collectively, 300 people went about collecting 1500 points and took a big risk doing so... they do not enter an auction in MaxBid but a lottery, where the numbers they bid between 0 and 5500 are random numbers generated, with the highest unique random number generated winning the lottery...

Now, if you thought all this was obvious, read the comments about MaxBid by bidder at baazee... shows how smart people can always make money... baazee will succeed only if it gets the critical mass collecting points but then, for a site as big as it is, it should be able to...

if you want to pursue these ideas into the psychology of humans in lottery, auctions and associated risk aversion and risk taking theories, there are a lot of interesting papers to read...

Monday, November 03, 2003

here is another one... they are just rolling in...

Last year, CNBC and Smartmanager conducted a national level case contest for b-schools and every well known bschool participated... the team from ISB (now alums) has won this one... the class of 03 rocks!

the winning streak goes on and on and on...

this time it is international...

check out, http://www.innovationchallenge.net/top_20.htm

ISB is the ONLY non-US school to be in the Top 20. Also, the order below is according to 2003 US rankings, which is why ISB is at the bottom of the list – the ordering is NOT a reflection of the quality of the innovation proposed.

The ISB team consisted of:
Karthik Jayaraman
Kalyan Chakravarthy Tadimeti
Sunder Balasubramaniam
Chaitanya J Reddy
Badri P B

A total of 52 MBA schools and 154 teams with 748 MBA students enrolled for the contest. The contest spanned 6 countries.

Now thats the way to go!!!

By the way, noticed that there is not even a mention of my name anywhere here... so added a link in the sidebar to a silly website I created sometime when I joined ISB...

Also, the ISB leadership summit's web site has been running for sometime... www.isbleadershipsummit.com

Sunday, November 02, 2003

The winning streak continues... ISB's team won the first week of the IIMA fin quiz... I met karthik and ashish, back after winning from IIMB... in their words, the difference in the teams was not much but we scored a lot in the way we presented the paper... the guys from IIMA who came second had PPOs with Lehmann... ISB is right up there! Only hope Lehmann is watching...

Everytime I write "this week has been the busiest since I came to ISB", I am forced to eat my words after a few weeks... so here I go again... the coming week is unimaginable loaded with submissions, assignments, project reports and presentation, with my ELP presentation's dry run to boot... this is truly crazy is what I thought but then, I now know not to think so... for once I am thru with this, I know few weeks down the line there will be another week which will be even more unimaginably tough...

Today, there was an ISB relay conducted by the sports club... It was fun and competitive... some real good long distance runners... Attendence was not really good thanks to all the submissions, but the little crowd that turned up, including alums had good fun...

Im in the process of writing the book review and its been an interesting experience... to critique is easy they say, but to back up your criticism with solid reason, that too about a book that is considered an amazing success story is not easy... We all read lots of books but writing a solid book review is no joke... just realized...

amidst all this, if there is still something that brings the whole campus to a standstill, it is sachin.. yesterday, the cafe was a sight to see, until sachin was batting... people glued to the TV not blinking an eyelid even as food was getting cold... and then sachin gets out, and the place is half empty... including me... i thought he was literally toying with the bowling when he got himself out... i wonder what india wud have been without sachin... how we all wud have seen cricket without him... he is larger than life!

Saturday, November 01, 2003

Truth about placements

One of the comments for the post on Oct 29th asks for the true picture about placements. I am happy to first note that the post on oct 20th, which had an alum's comments on ISB, sounded rosy...

That post had an extract from a mail sent by Kanishka Sinha. He was in the placements committee last year. He knew every bit of campus placement activity that happened last year. Plus, having met and interacted with him during the orientation at ISB, I can tell you that if you wanted a ever wanted an honest opinion about ISB from an alum, you can believe him...

Read his blog when you find time... He is streets ahead of me when it comes to writing... especially interesting long posts and mails...

Today we got info that at the IIMB Vista competitions, where ISB was selected for the final rounds of the Strategy and Finance paper contest, ISB won both handsomely... Kudos to Karthik, Ashish, Anuj and Atul for a stupendous performance... We all await their return to the campus for a party... they havent won 30K for nothing ;)