Category: MDI Gurgaon

Here at MDI, placement season is in. For some people (including me) this is the reason why they joined a business school and why they slogged their behinds for two years. I can see tensed people running around with CVs, books, reading material etc. clenched as if they were the last cigarettes of a person in prison.

People with work experience have already been placed. I cannot divulge the exact number, as this information is classified ;). It feels great to be a part of something classified. I can now understand the excitement in the dull lives of spies.

For the past 5 hours, I have been sitting in the computer center and filling up forms and answering questions on my weaknesses, strengths, creativity, social responsibility, my hobbies, my criminal record and dunno what else. About 5 minutes ago I yelled if someone can tell me my biggest achievement till date. And someone told me a magic answer that would work for just anyone.

Some questions are appropriate – my educational background, projects etc. But most of the questions are totally, utterly obnoxious and could be avoided. A question wants me to talk about my creativity. I want to somehow explain to them that creativity is something that can not be put into words. I want to post some of the actual questions but as I have already told, it’s classified.

I don’t understand why these companies want us to fill 5-page, 6-page forms to evaluate our application? In the end experience tells us that the company with the longest form would use *JUST* our CGPA to shortlist and select people. They would not even read the CVs.

I sometimes think that this is some kind of race between the companies to have the biggest and longest and toughest form. Some companies for the very purpose of making a form complex would put in* INTERESTING* questions. They think that we (applicants) judge a company on the basis of length of the form they get filled from us.

Few questions do indeed come to my mind right now.

1. If you are a company, shouldn’t the selection be based on more than just your CGPA, or your resume or your form for that matter? You aren’t buying a computer according to the specifications but you are trying to select a guy to work with you and each guy HAS to be different. A form does not do any justice at all. What is the guarantee that the chap with the maximum CGPA would be the smartest? I can see that a lot of people with higher CGPA are not exactly the brightest.

2. I see everyone running after the biggest salary. Shouldn’t your first criteria be the kind of work you do rather than how much money you would make? Isn’t this similar to some of the things that you would openly cry out against (something like bar-girl-ing) where you are forced to work against your wishes to make some money?

3. Why do we (applicants) start reading books, articles, newspapers just before the placement season? I can see everyone trying to cram every last word written by the God or Marketing, Mr. Kotler. If they think that knowing what Kotler knows would help them get that dream job, they are in a big trouble. Can’t they think that there would be millions of others would read even better than them? And don’t they realize that Mr.God would not be there in their workplace to help them out? And what’s up with newspapers? Knowing the news for a week would definitely not help anyone. Interviewers are smart enough to realize that people read only a week before the interview. Didn’t we join a business school to *LEARN* rather than *PREPARE*?

Confused, tired and form-ed !

Just when I was packing up this text I realized I have to talk about the great enemies that would surely spring up in placement season. People would give anything to strip you out of your jobs, interviews and discussions even if they don’t want it themselves at all. Experience tells that placements make the best of friends into worst of enemies. Everyone is so incentivized to cheat, stab in the back that no antidote would ever work. Placement offers an interesting study into behavioral decision making.

More on this later …

24th June 2004. I landed with a couple of bags at MDI. My new home for next two years.

23rd June 2005. One year of the two is over and when I look back, there sure is something that I have been fortunate enough to learn in this year. This post, although is a bit late, has few pearls of wisdom that I could gather in this year at one of the best business schools in India.

As they say, management education is about participating in class and contributing to other people’s learning and understanding. There are times when some of us tend to overdo it a bit. Everyone must have seen, heard or experienced some obnoxious people who love to speak up their minds. A component of evaluation is based on the contribution you make to the learning of other people in class. And there are people who want to make a killing with this component. They would keep their loooong arms stretched out all the time. I don’t know if they have something to add, but they would keep their arms as stiff as a scarecrow’s. This phenomenon is called DCP. DCP is an acronym for Desperate Class Participation and is used very conviniently for people who speak without adding anything substantial to the class.

Next thing that I learnt at my BSchool is a word called Arbit. If you try searching for it on Dictionary.com, you would not find it. Why is that? Because this word is used exclusively in management studies. In fact I think that this is the most commonly used word in business schools after the sacred F word. Lets try to learn the meaning and origin of this word. Many enlighted souls say that this word is a short form of the word called arbitrary.

“Determined by chance, whim, or impulse, and not by necessity, reason, or principle” – Source:http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=arbitrary

This sounds like a plausible explanation. When people speak up their minds, get creative, determine by whims, forget reason, ignore logic, what comes out is called Arbit !!!!. I can post a few examples here. Lets say the entire class is involved in an intellectual discussion about a car being an HIP (High Involvement Product). A reasonable addition to discussion would be that a HIP is something whose selection involves a lot of thought process and an arbit addition would be that a HIP is something hep. Hip as in hep and happening. Hip as in

“Very fashionable or stylish.” – Source:http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=hep

I might not be able to give a very good example of arbitness because am not talented at that and am certainly not the gifted one. By the way a lot of people say that this statement that I just made itself is arbit.

Saurabh

ORIGIANALLY POSTED ON July 10, 2005
REPOSTED FROM ABOUT2EVOLVE TO SEPTEMBERTHE22ND

In the last 6 hours, I have been told twice that Common Sense although appears very common but in fact, in reality it’s very uncommon. The first person to do that was Prof. Ahluwalia when he came to teach us Advertising Management and the second was Prof. Sanjay Bakshi when he came to teach us BFBV. I talked about him in my other BLOG at http://egyaan.blogspot.com/2004/12/prof-sanjay-bakshi.html

I had been waiting for this cause ever since Term 3 started and today I finally got to see him. As they say, the looks could be deceptive, I expected him to be a funky kinda person, who would have an athletic, lean body type, would be wearing Denims to class. I expected him to be very informal kinds but when I finally saw him, I realized that I shouldn’t make presumptions about people.

I thought I was the biggest techie around until I saw his desktop. He had about 20 icons lined up on QuickLaunch, and I could not recognize most of them. His taskbar was as heavy. He of course had minimal icons on the desktop. Just like any other techie 😉

Coming on to the class, he talked about Mental Models today. Everything was fine and going good until something called Backward Thinking was introduced. Simply put, Backward Thinking is not doing things that are not expected. For example, you want to run a business effectively. You list down things that you should not do to avoid ruining the business. And you make sure that you don’t do the things in the list. Sherlock Holmes said

It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

So everything is fine, he said it, gave a few supporting arguments and that was that. But when you actually think about it again, you realize that Backward Thinking is just another tool to just be in the rat race, not win it or emerge as a winner.

Here is a very simple example to illustrate this further. You are among a batch of 100 students in a school. Assuming that you won’t be expelled until you fail in academics, your objective is to pass through the school, you just need to get passing percentage in the examinations. For passing percentage, you don’t have to read the entire text, don’t have to attend all the classes etc. You do just the bare minimum. The result: You are not expelled, you pass but you don’t perform exceptionally or you don’t top the class.

Extending this further, assuming that the objective is not to just pass the course but actually come first in the class. Now not to be the first among the class, you don’t have to skip anything (means read everything), not miss any class etc. Two inherent problems here are identifying the right variables (you are never sure that the thing you are not doing is the right thing to not do), interaction of variables (you don’t know how other variables that you have not considered affect the outcome). Bottom-line is that you do not do the things that you decided not to do and still might be far from the objective.

I know due to the amazing control over the language, I have made Backward Thinking absolutely gibberish… 🙁 Wish I was better at English.

According to backward thinking, if you want to prove something as correct, assume that it is incorrect and prove that it is not incorrect and hence the original proposition is bound to be correct. Taking an example where Backward Thinking has been applicable (according to Prof. Bakshi) and extending it further to prove it wrong. He says that

Instead of thinking how to make your business better, think how to ruin it, and then simply avoid those things.

is an example of application of Backward Thinking.

Our ultimate objective here is to make the business better. We list things that would ruin it. A list could be ignoring the daily operations, getting the wrong people for the wrong situations, taking decisions without analysis etc. Assume that there are no interactions and the list of variables is complete. Now to achieve the objective (to make the business better), we just have to make sure that we don’t do these things. We do the opposite. We concentrate on day to day operations, get the right people and processes in place, and take decisions rationally (another word and concept I am fond of). The result? We run our business just normally, not exceptionally. We end running the business the way others do. We thus should be able to get the result others are getting. Others are doing well, We also do well, X also does well, the level of average is raised and end of the day everyone is pretty much same. We do not achieve the objective. The preposition is thus wrong. Backward Thinking thus failed.

More Later …

Comments
chirayu said…
how about thinking “not to be placed below the top 10% in the class” ?
Sunday, September 18, 2005 2:55:17 AM

ORIGIANALLY POSTED ON Tuesday, September 13, 2005
REPOSTED FROM ABOUT2EVOLVE TO SEPTEMBERTHE22ND

I talked about MDI, Exams and Highlighters in a previous post. There is yet another thing that people are MDI are very passionate about – taking reading material to examination halls.

Examinations at MDI are a cake walk. Most of the exams are open book. One can carry any number of books, presentations, printouts, handouts, notes, reference, newspapers etc. in the examination hall. Before coming to MDI, I was not even aware that this kind of concept even existed. It was like a dream. But as it happens very regularly, dream shattered when I realized the realities of rankers.

Rankers = People who secure good marks, good CGPAs and can boast about their ranks at MDI.

Few Observations

1. Except for the top three rankers and bottom 20 rankers, the amount of reading material carried in the examination hall is directly proportional to the marks you get. This is unsensical (yes… unsensical) to me. If you are fourth from the top, you should not carry a single thing. You should know a lot more and if I am fourth from bottom, I should be the one who should carry stuff to the hall, be tense all the time and rush to the photocopy shop. But strangely it’s opposite.

2. The photocopy shop becomes the favorite hang out of all the rankers. People with high ranks are seen making umpteen numbers of trips to the photocopy shop at odd hours. They would know of every photocopy machine in the vicinity of the hostel and would know the amount of carbon left in it, the schedule of power outage and what not.

3. Not to forget networks and group work. Rankers work in groups. They follow a Hub and Spoke model with one person stationed at the photocopy shop and rest of the group spread at vantage points in campus (computer centre, library, rooms of other toppers etc.) to collect as much reading material as possible and bring it to the photocopy shop to get as many copies as possible.

As always More to come later …

I had this on my mind for a long long time now and since I don’t have anything special to do right now, I think this would help me kill some time…

So we at MDI are having our End Term examinations for the fifth term. It’s been almost two years at MDI and there are few things that still surprise me. I will be talking about them in this post. I hope to change certain trends and expect people to follow them.

There are people with different and (if I may use the term) interesting idiosyncrasies. And suddenly these are highlighted during the examinations.

1.People would take at least 4 different shades of highlighters to the examination hall and highlight their answer sheets as if it was an entry for drawing competition.

2.I am not talking about someone with Arts background (we have a diverse range of profiles in our batch), but I am also talking about people who have spent five years in the industry, people who most probably have never touched anything similar to a colored pen in their lives before MDI and people who have been toppers all their lives (ofcourse before coming to MDI).

3.Yes, there are people who would not use highlighters in examinations but surprisingly they are amongst the lowest ranked people at MDI. I see a high correlation between the number of different shades, amount of color on your answer sheet and beauty of the handwriting with the grades.

4.There are a few statistical aberrations. For example, I can vouch for the current topper at MDI, she happens to be a very god friend and she does not uses these colored highlighters.

5.I have never seen someone with bad handwriting get good marks. I can not think of an aberration in this one. You have to have a good hand writing.

6.You should be able to use English effectively. I have seen people talking totally arbit stuff and getting applause and accolades from professors because the arguments were constructed beautifully. I can recall one recent incident when the participant was saying something to the effect that Mercedes is priced lower than Maruti 800, the professor agreed and the participant was given highest marks.

7.And from the above few lines, it would be clear to you (if someone actually took time to read the entire post) that I can never get good marks in management education.

8.And finally as usual the opinions expressed here are solely my own.

Why is the question …

The very next thing that comes to my mind – why does something like this happen at a place like MDI with people like us? I think the answer is simple. Basic human psychology. Again I am no expert on the topic, infact I don’t even know 0.00001% of the things. I can, however, make certain assumptions and see that people follow suit without thinking and this is why we see answer sheets spread with yellow, orange, green, blue and what not colors. And ye I forgot to mention the three different colors of pens used by people – Blue, Green and Black.

Fundas for Management Education

1.Get your handwriting fixed. If you want to do well and subsequently get a nice job, get the handwriting in order.

2.Learn English. Join some call centre, work there for some time before coming to a Business School. No matter what people say, your command over language commands a commanding premium in the market 😉

More to come later …

After completing a couple of events at MDI, there was yet another party with free booze and an entertaining DJ.

As usual people were having fun and time of their lives. And guess what, I was forced to have some alcohol. It tasted like hell and the throat still burns from the mere thought of it. I wow not to have it again.

I am surpised why people take it in first place when the outcomes can only be negative…

Poster for Advent 2005, MDI Gurgaon.
2005 November: Advent Poster

The idea was Divya‘s, the conceptualization and implmentation was mine.

Image Credits: brokenarts a.k.a Davide Guglielmo and

So this morning we are having breakfast in the mess and my dear roomie Mr. Pochu Prasad tells us that in Mahabharats there was a character who was childhood friend of Lord Krishna. Once they grew, that friend would take the same thing we are eating to Krishna when Krishna became the king. I agree. Perfect. 10 on 10.

Here is the interesting part …
Pochu says that his name was Kucheludu or something like that and I yell like crazy that he was Sudama. I now have a lot of attention and I ofcourse sit down but the argument continues and we are deadlocked.

I give him a challenge that go ask ANYONE, anyone on the road, hostel and just mention three words – Lord Krishna, Childhood Friend and Poor and you would get the name. I am winning 5 – 1 right now and he has been outta room most morning tryng to find people to help him.

And here is another interesting part …
Since Pochu is from Hyderabad, he asked yet another andhraite and he also said Kuchar.

And it wont get more interesting than this …
Pochu is at this very moment on the phone with his mom asking the name of the poor friend. I dunno what her reply would be but as they say … Curosity Kills and this reminds me of one of the mental models taught by Prof. Bakshi – Social Proof !

Do the epics change as we move from North India to South India? I know people are known with different names but is it possible that someone is famous as Mr. X in these neck of the woods and Mr. Y in other?

Edit: The name was changed from Kuchar to Kucheludu on a special request from my roomie …

When the class is so boring,
And everybody around is snoring,
Garg gets up to his antics,
and discusses 3M optics,
what a pity… we have to hear,
Cos its a course subject we have to bear …

This is yet another thing that 04p030 wrote for me! I think I need to boost up my creativity and write better bigger and filthier poems on her !

There is this girl in my class and she can play the Nokia Snake like no one else. I think she is addicted to snake and there was this Strategy Lecture where I was not so interested in the topic being covered so I came up with this sort of poem for her …

Once there was this lady
and then there was Nokia’s Snake
She would do anything
anything in the world she could make
She had the drive to go endlessly
but the snake would put the brake
People around her would give her advice
the dear advice that she won’t take
04p030 @ 98100***** won’t listen
won’t listen cos she was ADDICTED TO SNAKE

And as they say Tit for Tat, she came up with this …

Here’s was this guy who didn’t like snake.
Who loved to chatter without any break.
On every silly thing, he has the silliest take.
Check him out on the blog he makes.

Certainly far far better than what I wrote but things din’t end there. She had to say the following also…

Saurabh
And
Unstoppable
Rambling
Are
Best/Bitter (take ur pick!)
Humour

Thats Saurabh Garg for you!!