It is a time for the class of 2005 to have their fifth year reunion and for the class of 2009 to have a homecoming of sorts in what promises to be three intense days of nostalgia, parties, fun events, chaos, mayhem and high quality entertainment.

In order to keep yourself posted about the latest happenings and updates regarding Solstice 2009, please check out the following links:

The official Solstice 2009 website: http://www.isb.edu/solstice2009/

The Solstice 2009 twitter page: http://twitter.com/Solstice2009

The Solstice 2009 Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/ISB-Solstice-2009/178906826548?ref=nf

Of course, you can rest assured, Dear Reader, that the weblog will be updated with relevant information as well, but those other links are way better for periodic snippets to keep yourself constantly in the know.

The best is yet to be,

The last of life,
for which the first was made” – Robert Browning.

 

In a way, ISB reminded me of this quote. We joined as the 8^th batch so that we could eventually graduate into MBAs. And graduating we are. And like every passing out, this one too raises a myriad images and memories that have gathered in the mind over the past 51 intense boiler-room weeks, housed with a set of ambitious, foresighted and diligent people who wanted to be complete professionals while keeping all odds at bay.

 

And the day has come when we will be pronounced as such. In another 26 hours, managing gowns, sprightly confident steps, gleaming flashbulbs, motivating wisdom, proud parents (or spouses), hat tosses and rejoicing friends later we will have graduated and successfully added a layer of history to the institution and a confident knock on the door of the alumni. A new relationship will evolve, a new dynamics of being an alumni and looking at the School. A lot of complaints may look illogical, a lot of stress justifiable, and a lot of policies quite obvious. Its natural, it’s called perspective. It also bestows upon us responsibilities as ambassadors of the institution and calls for us to truly convert challenges into opportunities to buttress the expectation. For in real life, it’s mostly about challenges and tough challenges.

 

As I look back, the past year has been a timeline of events and realizations … it started with lofty dreams, converted into pre-term classes and orientation week fun in the scorching sun. Soon after it was the first day of class, and to most of us, we were seeing the insides of a state-of-the-art classroom after half a decade. Fantastic professors (almost gods) followed with tough assignments to be submitted every yesterday. Every day before yesterday would be tests, pop quizzes or the spine chilling cold calls (one of the major revenue drivers of the caffeine industry). Case studies became oxygen, we didn’t just live them, we breathed them, and I wouldn’t be exaggerating to say that I have had nightmares as well (truly). The HBS logo became our bull’s eye and the word “exhibits” invoked fear. This was all before we realized that presentations, write-ups, reports, projects, financials, analyses, take home exams, open book exams, seminars, special classes, speaker sessions, tutorials also formed a part of this great family.

 

Club activities were a vital connection to the corporate world and lent the glamour feeling as well. You could see most people you read about in Businessworld walking across the aisle or picking up a coffee before the seminar. You felt the moment. This is what the dream was all about. You always dreamt to be them and a brief solemnity sets in, broken by the sudden shout of your friend asking you to join for football.

 

But as the sun went down, life took a different hue. Games, quizzes, cultural activities, myriad contests and competitions, theater, arts, pottery, photography, nature walk, social drives like blood donations and helping the underprivileged and section competitions on the field kept the batch busy. Strategies were planned, promotions designed and actively shared amongst the batch. You could see the club presidents and volunteers all around the campus opining and gesticulating wildly to win converts to their cause. Dunking and parties alone added a few more dimensions to the ISB life. The innovative themes and parties and mere excuses for throwing a classmate to the pool united the batch like no other.

 

That was then. Now is the disorientation week and the whole batch is “de-stressing on priority”. I graduate tomorrow and the day after I pass the portals of the school with a heavy heart of nostalgia and all the good times of the year. I have enjoyed every moment in the sylvan campus, the stress being a part of the ritual, and have made simply wonderful friends to look forward to. Every face is about to become a memory and every name a rainy evenings’ tale. Many of these future leaders will be known by their pen names, many by their deeds when they were high on spirits. Many will be known by their funny comments in classes and many by their impromptu interview replies. Many more will be known by the way they slept through lectures and yet excelled when it was called for.

 

But the bugle has blown and the powder is dry as the sheer fantastic Class of 2009 currently irons up for the grand finale. If history is the biography of successful people, this batch will script it like no other. It has been my proud privilege to be a part of this institution and the values and ethos it stands for and to belong to a class consisting of such remarkable batch mates who could make this the best year so far.

 

I lay down my pen, on the eve prior to the big day, with the mere hope that I could showcase some aspect of what ISB stands for through this blog, covering issues that span the mindscape of most incumbent students as well as the current ones. As Nirad C says, “to sit by the rivers of Babylon is not necessarily to weep in Hebraic sorrow”. I have gradually realized the richness of my experience and the benefits of the yearlong backbreaking rigor, which makes me more resilient and confident as I move on to the world outside. But as I move on, I realize a part of my life is forever ISB. It’s just the search for Ithaca that we move on. Here’s wishing all of my fellow friends a fantastic journey, for it’s the journey that matters.

I am an engineer by profession and my past experience at work consisted of advanced applications of what I learnt way back in college, until one day I decided to move off to study business management. The decision was the determinant of a matrix of numerous rows and columns, some easily quantifiable and the others not so, with a healthy distribution of probability spread across them. But eventually I came to the program, I studied, I enjoyed (one of the best years of my life) and now during the final week at the School, I look back upon the decision much like an outward sailor glancing at the receding beacon. And a thought does cross my mind on which I will speak in detail (I did write a blog on this once earlier but it was of a general nature)

What can an experienced engineer expect of a 1 year MBA at the ISB? I speak for the electrical sciences and computers, but for most of the branches I guess the degree of transition is the same. We spent our time all along in the hard world of circuits and voltages. Sparks flying didn’t sound as interesting as it does reading Page 3. “Burnt your hands” wasn’t considered credible experience for someone to soak in satisfaction. And “exploded on my face” is unthinkable even to the eternal optimist. Essentially we spent our time looking inward.

In return, from an MBA, what I learnt was the customer, the market, the needs, the outer world. Human beings and not technology became first priority, consciously. I learnt to analyze them, preempt them and to interpret the analysis in the light of business economics and mutual benefits of both the customer and the enterprise. As an engineer, new product management taught the essential tools to estimate market size, brand preference, the value perceived by the customer on each aspect of his product, and the future anticipated sales. These models are generic but lend itself to easy treatment for complex markets and products. For an engineer starting to conceive a new product, these inputs are not just essential, they are literally oxygen.

Personally, for me industrial marketing (B2B marketing) was enthralling. The course contained cases that talked of high-tech products, longer sales cycles, complex pricing decisions (even for the same product), branding tactics and even its dependence on the entire supply chain.

Talking of supply chain, it can be an amazing eye opener, as to how important and contributing supply chain efficiency can be to the entire product development process. It has a direct impact on demand satisfaction, inventory costs, supplier risk management etc. Each of these noticeably has an impact on product price and that’s as defined is the “willingness to pay”.

From the finance side, corporate finance (specifically project finance) dealt with various avenues for arranging capital to execute any project, the risks involved and the concomitant cost premium to be borne by the borrower. The cost of financing, understandably, remains an important factor for price, as well as the success of the project. Managerial accounting too plays its part in identifying the cost distribution in all activities related to engineering development. While the strategy courses promise to teach you about competition and how not to tackle them.

Hence in a nutshell, for an engineer completing an MBA (with the assumption that he wishes to continue in the same domain still), he learns to go behind the scenes to derive why a product is developed in the first place, for whom it is targeted, its potential and sales (= profit) expected. Once the product is being developed, the promotion blitz and branding etc. takes over.

 

In a way, he learns the economics of the business, needs of the market and understands how to sell his product. That’s what product development essentially is for, in the first place, i.e. to serve the needs of the customer and gain some profit out of the service.

What an year it has been. first the exhiliration, then stress, then tension, then worry and finally lots of relief. Class of 2009 has seen it and experienced it all. The consulting club initiated loads of activities and was clearly the most active club on campus. 

Now its up to the next batch to carry on the legacy and improve upon it. Over to Class of 2010.

I know it’s been too long since I posted here – I know I should have posted earlier – there just isn’t any excuse – I was plain lazy J. Anyways – the elective terms were a roller-coaster ride – with ups and downs you simply cannot believe; and I simply cannot document all . . . .

Term 5

We started the elective terms with a bartending workshop – and I can safely say – all who attended went back totally TALLI – and to top it all off – I had made jello shots – Vodka in Mango Jelly – and you can imagine the results.

We also had a rocking start to the flying club:

Term 6

We started by participating in the Hyderabad 10K Marathon – it was an amazing experience – running down the finish line shouting “ISB ROCKS” . . . too bad I don’t have photos of the actual run as I was running too.

Term 6 also brought mine and Gaurav’s birthdays (which we started celebrating in style at the Waterfront, followed it by the usual dunkings & cake cutting and finally a Rum Punch party at the D-Lounge)

This was soon to be followed by our beloved Doc’s birthday

With a special dunking for quad-mates who didn’t land-up at the pool

We also had a great masquerade party

And of course we had SOLSTICE:

Ending the year with an amazing boat party at the Hussain-Sagar Lake

One such label is Entrepreneurship, one of the most mystical of words across campuses worldwide. Year on year, people enter the gates to start something, with a sense of courage and purpose one can partly claim to originate from the valley and partly to the Hugo inspired minister. In engineering schools, the desire was to come up with the next big product, the most complex circuit which would resemble a Noah’s Ark of chips and batteries, and would also prove a point. Years later, in B-Schools, the desire metamorphosed (not exactly the word, but yes, you get the point) to conceive something more strategic, and of course, that’s the basic idea.

But the charm of entrepreneurship lies also in the value added during the process. It enables real income generation even multiple rungs down the activity chain. And that is the most commendable part of the enterprise, in creating, raising and maintaining an economic independence of people who are even indirectly associated with the process. And primary to this is the vision of the entrepreneur, his courage, conviction and undying commitment in the face of all odds. I plan to profile a few of our students and alumni on their journey through ideation, risks and self discovery on what they perceive their future to be.

 A new venture, which is owned by the husband wife duo of Abhishek-Chandrani (ISB, Class of 2009) and not yet a full fledged venture, is a healthy foods outlet hosted from the campus cafeteria. I have watched the execution quite closely as A-C went about planning their work till they finally decided to work their plan. The plan which started on paper during the Planning an Entrepreneurship Venture (PaEV) curriculum culminated to a big bang launch during the annual Alumni meet, Solstice 2008. PaEV is an innovative exercise @ the ISB where students can actually go the whole nine yards from ideating to creating a business venture, as a part of a credit curriculum. The plan needs to be defended on all strategic and operational aspects in front of bankers, VCs and other successful entrepreneurs.

A-C have identified the healthy foods connection, clinically separated it from “health foods”, connected with the officials at School for logistics and permissions, convinced the cafeteria authorities for space to host the outlet, managed the equipment, decided on the menu, employed a paid staff, managed suppliers and the inventory, priced products, designed the promotions, and just recently executed a masterstroke in consumer behavior by introducing an offering called Mind Booster in the placement season. All of it while they toiled the backbreaking ISB schedule. This exercise was primarily meant to assess market reactions and also to pilot execution capability. A-C have been B-School fundamentalists in motion since the owners applied in the afternoon concepts they learnt in the morning and with real investments at stake. For the owners, to identify the connection from concepts to customers will be a vital aspect of the study.

On the other end of the spectrum lies Adib Ibrahim’s Invention Labs (IL) incorporated from Chennai. A unique company which primarily does product development, its succinctly stated desire is to be “India’s inventors”. A lofty desire indeed and that makes it so much more fascinating. But unlike many new ventures that we come across from B-School alumni, IL perhaps addresses an area oft neglected in the Indian context, product design and development. It’s an area where engineering, management, creativity and consumers coalesce and who have experienced it will tell you, it is an unambiguously a tough proposition. To run your own enterprise out of that is tougher still.

And the uniqueness is there as well. In India most startups concentrate on a service which is quite different from product development. The initial stages are common across enterprises where the market research is to be established. However for product development there are myriads of other factors to be considered. Engineering factors coupled with user centric design at the high level, filtering them to low level requirement specs for the developer, modularity aspects, and complex decisions in make or buy of allied technology, all come together. The hardware design, the software algorithms, for embedded systems the accompanying board support, finally the hardware software integration followed by months of acceptance testing. Added to that, constant interaction with vendors for sourcing of components, outsourcing certain mechanical or electro-mechanical tasks to other SMEs and in between all these, preparing several reams of documentation as the product goes for an industry specific standards compliance and certification. This is the minimum that has to be done. Each of these waterfall steps are visited multiple times in an iterative fashion as the product goes for multiple reviews and defect proofing. Discrete teams and oft-changing requirements create an integration nightmare where the architecture has to be constantly smoothed and occasionally revamped.

Those who have been involved in product development would tell you, its backbreaking work and can be deeply frustrating at times. A simple one line defect can put off the schedule for weeks. The entire process takes months of intense labor with actually burning the midnight oil. Market pressure for the product release adds its bit to the process. But on the judgment day, when after months (sometimes years, depending on the industry) the machine works, it’s a feeling unparalleled in sensibility, to a level that it raises a sense of nostalgia.

Here’s wishing A-C and Invention Labs (http://inventionlabs.in/about.html) a successful road ahead.

RED: Believe what you want. These walls are funny. First you hate ‘em, then you get used to ‘em. After long enough, you get so you depend on ‘em. That’s “institutionalized.”

JIGGER: Shit. I could never get that way.

– The Shawshank Redemption (1994)

In the beginning I would have agreed with Jigger. At the end I know Red is right.

The pace of government reforms and work done by NGOs is still very slow (today India has 1.7 million NGOs)  –  and the slow growth is evident when one considers the last 50-60 years. When one talk about public access to healthcare, education, food and water, power and energy and even infrastructure,  what we have missed out on is getting people involved and bringing the power of markets to the grassroots. The solution, in my view, lies in getting the private sector involved, and ensuring that its participation goes much beyond that of the traditional approach of CSR.

SMEs, for example (the largest employment generators in the country), face various challenges: firstly, they face a severe problem in accessing financial resources (either debt or equity) and secondly, they also lack access  to knowledge networks and to good managerial talent.

Also, let us consider urbanization: clearly the world is getting urbanized. In 1800 – 3% of the world’s population were in cities; in 1900 it went up to 10% and in 2000 it has gone to over 50%. And a bi-directional linkage between urbanization and growth has been clearly proven without doubt. People in cities are more than 20 times productive than their rural counterparts. China has 138 cities with a million plus population, while  India today has only 35 cities, and that is where I think lies both, India’s challenge in urbanization, as well as its greatest opportunity – we can today build for a population of 600 million an entire infrastructure from scratch and that is not something available to the US cities. And cities in the developed countries are notoriously inefficient in terms of sustainability or resource use.

If we really talk about new business models, there are several organizations that are doing fantastic pioneering work in achieving large scale social change. The Bill and Mellinda Gates Foundation spent about USD 260 million on only their HIV intervention program in India and they used standard business principles in achieving this change. They formalized data capturing and made the process so simple that even their frontliners could use. They also had a very strong focus on measuring the social impact that they were attempting to achieve, as evidenced by the 10% spending (amounting to about USD 25-26 million) on just measuring the impact.

Another example: Pratham is another organization with what someone would call an audacious target of reaching out to 200 million children and the good news is that last year they have been able to reach out to 20 million /children across 300,000 villages. And they have done this in just 14 years.

Yet another example: IFMR Trust is a strongly mission driven organization whose rates of lending are much lower than others. They have a CCD or franchisee approach that keeps the costs of operations much lower than others operating full-fledged branches. They also remove the physical paper aspect from the entire process and drive down costs of serving a customer as much as possible.

Thus, there is a potential for big ideas to work, if one has courage and conviction and a firm belief in oneself, and that is India needs more of today.

There is this quote by Confucius that comes to my mind often: “a superior man knows what is right, an inferior man knows what will sell”. Today I think most of what management teaches us or what politicians try do is how to sell. What we need is to first do what is right and then know how to sell it.

Initially it was quite amusing, but when I started getting calls at all unearthly hours* it took a turn for the worse. After a while, I decided that I should bring the humour back into the equation and find some way to enjoy the unwarranted interruptions – so I started introducing myself over the landline as “Hello, Café”.

The reactions varied from the wary to the enthusiastically-order-10-teas. I must admit though that the number of people who quickly apologized for dialling the wrong number went up drastically when I answered the phone with the helium-voice or the Pink-Floyd-Comfortably-Numb-voice (“hello hello hello.. This is the Café Café Café”). Hmm, I wonder why. Well, at least I’m happy to say that there never ceases to be a multitude of opportunities to entertain myself.

For the moment, this is the Café
Signing off…

Oh wait, in other news, someone sent a mail today asking a lot of questions. One of them being: “Did it happen to you that you never found time to smell roses that bloomed in your backyard?” Poignant. Brilliant. But you know honey, I thought that the entire purpose of coming to ISB was so that I could first afford a backyard. Do you know the prices of one of these backyard thingies in any Indian metro? Through the roof I tell you! Ironical, considering most of them are on the ground.

*You know, 10am to 1pm – the peak of the normal sleep cycle. Hey, don’t judge me – when you’re an MBA student, we’ll talk about your sleep cycle then!