My Pre-MBA Beliefs (which went terribly wrong)
Posted on | October 22, 2010 | 2 Comments
Filtered from a huge collection:
1. MBAs don’t need to do HARD work; they need to work only SMART.
2. MBA means Money, Good Job, BIG brand, Foreign Trips AND ……
3. MBA means strategy, not execution
4. MBAs are in great demand among the matchmakers
5. MBA + MBA is a great bonding
6. MBAs get consistent hike of 20+% yoy
7. MBAs play with Bulls while Bears rest in zoo
8. MBA shouldn’t utter “I don’t know”
9. MBAs are valued in workplace
10. MBAs are exceptions of Demand & Supply equation
And I learnt (in the hard way) that:
1. Murphy visits MBAs more often than he visits others
2. Having a mentor always helps
3. Complexity is a sin
4. Jargons help….. only to make you look stupid
5. Even “It depends” is a stupid answer
6. It doesn’t matter what you do, if you do it well
7. Smile is important.
8. So is humor
9. Honesty (too) is an investment
10. People, unlike machines, can’t be Managed, they can only be encouraged
Anyone with similar experience? 
What is the secret of happiness?
Posted on | August 27, 2010 | 1 Comment
Happiness
We all seek happiness irrespective of who we are. However, very few people are actually as happy as they want to be and thus leading us to the question “What brings happiness?”
Some of us attribute happiness to money, job, family, friends etc. If we buy this logic then rich people should be happier. But, they don’t seem to be getting a hang of it as they struggle to protect/multiply their wealth.
There are some people who always seem to be happy even if they are going through the most critical phase of their lives. On the other hand, the default emotion for most of the people is unhappiness. In my opinion, being happy is an internal feeling rather than a function of material gain. This feeling has very little to do with the external factors.
And happiness can be practiced too. Every moment, we have a choice to make; whether to be happy or not. Unhappy people wonder when others are happy; however, happy people feel good about themselves.
So for achieving happiness, it’s important to focus inward and appreciate whatever strengths we have got in our very existence. The rest will be taken care of by the mind itself!
Internet as an Image Makeover Tool
Posted on | June 21, 2010 | 1 Comment
Della was never too-social right from her school days. In course of graduation too, she devoted much of her time for studying and earned the nickname “Miss Mugger”. Till now all these worked for Della to build an excellent resume and to get one of the best paying jobs in campus (Did I forget to mention that she has just got a Research Analyst job in a famous Investment Banking firm?).
However, as the times flows, she learns that Networking is an essential part of her job and obviously her personality is not well suited for that. So, she has two choices now: to change her personality or to change the job. Sensibly and as if to keep this writing going, she chooses the option no. 1. She rightly identifies that she does not need to change too much as a person and all that she needs is to change people’s perception about her. And what can be better platform for doing this than Online Media?
People are leveraging Web for changing their personal image. The fact is that it hardly takes any effort and easy to implement while it can be highly enjoyable. Here are some oft-used techniques to project yourself as you dream to be seen by others as:
- Social Media Profile: A Lot of peoples really care what you have actually written about yourself eventhough it’s considered to be mostly nonsensical. Again, a few sentences about the “ideal you” might fetch you the attention needed.
- Status Update: Another weapon in your armoury especially for the attention seekers. “It’s 3:30 in the morning and I am still awake”, “F*** study”, “$@$##$+_HJ^&**&*” and bingo, you are there!
- News, Link, Communities: All these apparently can make you a subject matter expert. The comments you choose to make and the comments you choose not to make can make or break your Online profile.
- Email id: cutee.void@*****.com or lovemealways@******.com will create a sense of fuzzyness and randomness about your nature. After all, how many of us really believe in name_something@email.com format?
- Email Signature: Many people like to be different and a quotation in your email signature will add that much needed X-factor to it.
- Blogging: Blogging is ubiquitous and bloggers are doubly ubiquitous. For many of us, blog is medium for being heard. Period.
- Number and nature of Friends (Connections): “You know I have a friend who has 6000+ Facebook friends. Isn’t that cool?” “Well, I have roughly 3100 but I know all of them personally.” Who wins? You decide.
- Photo Album, Video: Nothing works like a visual. An apt profile picture based on the motivation will go places. Also, the album titled “Sultry Saturday” will attract more visitors than “My Friends” for obvious reasons.
- Job Sites: Irrespective of your profession, you should always be sure about what to share and what to not in a jobsite! Also, there is a domino effect as recruiters share your “sensitive” information with others (such as Credit Card issuers, Collection agents or even your present employer) in exchange of money or some other favour.
- Privacy Settings: Are you bothered about the people’s reaction when they come across your profile? If you are, make sure that your boss doesn’t get to see “Working with a Pervert” kind of update from you!
The comprehensive impact of following all these is yet to be researched thoroughly. However, as the saying goes WYSIWYG, Internet has been an effective medium to make people believe what we want them to believe. Thank God, Goebbels did not have a broadband connection!
The saga of Product Management
Posted on | February 15, 2010 | 1 Comment
For the last few weeks, I was exploring the possibilities in my new job responsibility. As an Associate Product Manager of a comprehensive healthcare information portal, I am to enhance the experience of the users interacting with the site. Eventually this would mean more business and more money. Sounds impressive? No? Well, at least I thought I deserve that!
Recently, I read somewhere that Product Managers must feel like CEOs of their own products. It got to be a very optimistic evaluation indeed considering the fact that very rarely Product Managers have sole access to the very resources they need to make a Product that the customers will value. So, here we have a bunch of CEOs who have to meet with stakeholder’s demand without having any employee reporting to him. Although, it may sound weird, I have even seen frustrated Product Managers doing the job of a Designer, Developer or SEO guy to get their job done.
A major part of a Product Manager’s job comprises of negotiating for the availability of the Developers/Designers with their reporting managers. Here the art of persuasion (and coercion) works more than anything else. No wonder, people skill is an important asset for them.
However, in every problem there lies some opportunity and Product Management is no exception. The resource-crunch works as a safeguard for the products from being too much complicated as the Product Managers have to strike a balance between usability and feasibility while conceptualizing his baby. Gradually, he might even reach some orderliness out of adhocracy as the earlier challenges starts becoming his experience.
Alcohol: An alternative perspective
Posted on | January 19, 2010 | 2 Comments
I used to hate people who drink alcohol. And I still do. Even after being an active drinker (not drunkard!) for almost 6 years now, I can’t find any reason why people should consume it. Probably, that’s the reason I ended up hating myself!
Jokes apart, when I think of alcoholic beverages, the only positive point from society’s point of view I can see is employment to millions of people either in organized or unorganized format. And think of its perils: violence, loosing self control (and self-dignity too?), wastage of time and money, spoiling relations…..and the list never ends.
The poor guy who invented alcoholic drinks probably is still serving his term in hell because of the curses of zillions of people who have been affected by it. However, we must give due credit to the guy who did the branding for alcohol in those ancient or may be pre-historic times. He got to be a marketing genius. Just think of any damn situation, mood, event, occasion, party and you can add liquor to spice it up. I think one example from my college days will be apt here. When I was a first year student in Engineering, I heard a senior telling his batch-mates “Today’s exam was pathetic, so let’s drink Rum to forget about it”. And the very next day I heard the same guy addressing the same bunch of students with something like this “Today’s paper was great, why not celebrate with Whisky”? The message that comes out is that, (for the connoisseur of it) alcohol can be best fit in for the entire bandwidth of psychological feelings we can ever imagine ourselves to go through.
Consumption of alcohol impacts GDP in a favorable manner as it also increases the sale of related products like soft drinks, aerated water and snacks. Without any doubt, the Government is the largest patron as the revenue earned from liquor selling is quite significant and helps the wheel of economy to move smoothly. And globally, alcohol has been a powerful tool for the politicians to rule the poor people by letting them indulge in temporary amnesia and to forget about their daily misery.
However, what will happen if we ban alcohol? Most likely, people who are addicted to it will find other means to get it. According to economics, as the good/service becomes scarce, the price goes up and the black-market takes over. And probably Gujarat is the biggest example where ban has actually helped liquor dealers to earn super-normal profit.
So my suggestion is that, lets treat it as a normal drink like coke/juice. By this, I mean that the social stigma associated with alcohol be removed. In my experience, many young people start drinking as they find it a way to protest against the society and its established norms. Also, Government should reduce the taxes on liquor as the correlation between price and consumption of alcohol is still a guess-work. For any increase is the price it’s the poor anyway who is more affected than the well-off. So, restriction and regulation will merely enhance the desirability and fan-following.
There are two kinds of people among the volunteer drinkers. One group enjoys drinking and another group takes public pride in drinking. If there is not enough motivation, the second group will gradually lose interest. Reducing the price will also be a turnoff for people who want to display their affluence by throwing generous booze parties. Efforts will be spent to make drinking a common-man affair so that nobody gets glued to drinking for the supposedly glamour part of it. Who knows, this might bring results which traditional methods have failed to achieve.
Social Networking Sites…2 b r nt 2 b?
Posted on | December 23, 2009 | 2 Comments
I really get intimidated by the number of popular social networking sites in the Internet. Earlier, it was only Orkut. Then gradually people started using Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter etc. Last week, when I was working on this site, I came to know that there are at least 79 SNSs available to communicate through. Although we say that each of the platforms serves different purposes, most of the time, defining the purpose becomes a challenge.
In my opinion, the biggest reason one registers himself/herself into these sites is peer pressure. One month back, one of my friends asked me to follow him in Twitter. When I replied that I am not using it, I was given such a pity look that was saying “Who says dinosaurs are extinct”? So, the very next day, I started following him and he also returned the favour.
It’s beyond doubt that sites like Orkut, Facebook make it easy to remember/track so many events that we can’t even think of life without it. Yet, if we do a cost-benefit analysis of the whole concept, it’s very unlikely to break even. Recent study says, organizations are losing 2-3% productivity because of employee’s addiction to SNSs. Family life is also getting hampered by the urge to stay connected 24X7, albeit virtually.
Yes, having a huge virtual network can definitely be an ego-booster. People often flaunt this in order to justify their importance/power/influence. However, the correlation between the two is yet to be discovered properly as the connection can grow either by push-method or pull-method. So, the classic tradeoff between quantity and quality still remains.
We are living in an era where everybody wants to be heard. May be SNSs give us an opportunity to make our actions/reactions visible to others. So, don’t worry if you haven’t met with your friends since long; you can always send them scraps saying how busy you are. They will also understand that we are moving from emotion to e-motion! After all, being social was never so easy!
Dealing with Multiple Stakeholders
Posted on | December 15, 2009 | 2 Comments
Professionals usually deal with more than one stakeholder. The more one grows, the more essential it becomes to cope with a plethora of parties like clients, top management, suppliers, partners, subordinates, end users (and colleagues too). An employee is answerable to all of them and is expected to propose solutions to minimize the impact of their conflicting interests. So, her job becomes balancing the individual expectations by means of negotiation and compromise so that everyone feel that he/she has got the biggest pie of the cake. However, doing that is not easy as there are many classic examples of things going wrong simply because one of the stakeholders turning hostile.
And this also can become an ethical issue more than a professional one. Think of a situation that Alex works as a Project Manager in an IT company X; and an insurance company Y is one of their clients. Kathy, a Senior Analyst in Y, has been working with Alex since long. So, when Kathy resigns from her job, the post was offered to Alex as he has gathered enough domain knowledge about insurance sector. After a little consideration, Alex accepts the offer.
Now from company X’s viewpoint, this is not acceptable as they have just lost a precious employee who knows all their trade secrets and is now (unfortunately) a client. However, company Y can rejoice as they have got someone who knows the processes of both the sides and can possibly earn them an advantage on the negotiation table. For Alex, it’s purely a trade-off between opportunity and loyalty. The decision, in all probability, has been influenced by factors like Party, Profile, Place, Pay-package, Promotion (5 P’s of a job?).
Searching for the mutual agreement can be threatening as well. While reconciling, knowingly or unknowingly, one tends to find a party who is more equal than the others. For example, many employees become client’s men and that impacts their organization’s performance at least in the shorter term. Although most of the organizations encourage their employees to continuously exchange information with their partners across the value-chain, they always resist them from overdoing it. So, the question becomes, how close should one be to the clients or any other third party?
Multiple stakeholder theory can be extended to family, friends, society as they can impact/can be impacted by the performance at workplace. For many of us, getting an increment or a promotion is more desirable than having a work-life balance. However, it may so happen that the people we are ignoring today will start discounting us tomorrow and thus leaving us fewer stakeholders to deal with!
Handle Your Boss (With Care)
Posted on | December 8, 2009 | 3 Comments
Although nobody likes it, we all do have bosses except the entrepreneurs. Your boss can be good or bad, smart or dumb, cool or psycho; however at the end of the month (assuming that most of the readers are monthly-wagers) he is still your boss. In job, our one and only responsibility is to make our boss look smarter, the rest will follow. Now, to make your boss look smarter (believe me, in most of the cases it’s hell of a job) I have some simple theories to share.
1. Long hours in Office: Believe me, many of the bosses are no better than a timekeeper. Also, dedication is often measured by punctuality/long hours.
2. Never Surprise your Boss: He should never be under the impression/illusion that you are trying to ignore him. Always keep him in the loop. Firstly, you will be seen as a loyal employee. Secondly, if something goes wrong, you can always say it was his plan.
3. Don’t Argue only State: If anything can go wrong, it will. Why bother possibly at your expense only?
4. No Badmouthing before him: If you think that you can make him happy by abusing others, probably he is smart enough to understand that you exercise the same right about him when he is not around.
5. Praise him whenever possible: Use all positive adjectives while describing him to others. Even if your boss tells jokes that nobody laughs at, take the pain of rearranging your facial muscles, you will be perceived as intelligent (only by your boss and much to the annoyance of your colleagues).
6. Don’t be shy of Apologizing: Even if it was the idea of your boss that failed, apologize for the debacle as it will surely boost his/her ego.
7. Always take his side: You will be amazed to see how you score over your smarter and more dedicated colleagues.
8. Never communicate directly with your boss’s superior: Most likely, it will make him insecure and uncertain about his capability.
9. Keep the secret of your boss to yourself: Self explanatory.
10. Never share this article with your boss.
If you have tried all the tricks mentioned here and still nothing happened to your favor, then it’s time that you either leave my blog or leave your boss!
Plight of an MBA !
Posted on | December 1, 2009 | 5 Comments
Being an MBA is a no nonsense responsibility these days. People expect you to be smarter than what they are, even worse, smarter than what you actually are! Till the point they can understand what MBAs are saying, everything becomes so general and intuitive.
So, to combat this mindset, we have armored our vocabulary with esoteric jargons which make very little sense even to their creators. However, the more one uses those keywords, the more fame one can hope to accumulate in the shorter time frame. So the usage of words like “Core rigidity”, “26 Ps of Marketing”, “Lean Organization”, “Exotic Option” is on the rise. Apart from these, we always carry more than one latest cell phones and loads of junk documents to make us look busy throughout the day.
As for myself, I am a true engineer who dislikes shaving daily, regular grooming and wearing formals all the time. So, after “managing” to obtain my MBA degree, I now see myself in utter disorder. Appearance-wise, vocab-wise, intellect-wise I am so non-MBA. Even some of my good friends suggest that I should change my rustic and common-man like attitude and put myself into their shoes.
Actually I am very lazy to the point that non-verbal communication suits me better! If one message can be expressed in 100 words, I cannot extend it to 500 words (obviously with the help of 400 words which are at best ONLY words). And I think it’s very unfair to waste my audience’s time as well. So, my sense of (ir)responsibility prevents me from elongating the conversation.
Then again, MBAs are not expected to utter the phrase “I dont know”. Even if you can’t understand the question, you must reply with a universal “It depends”. It frees you from the sense of ignorance and installs deep respect for you in the mind of the naive audience. In case you are about to be grilled further, just say “I will get back to you”. You will be heard as saying “Please don’t pull my pants further down!” No wonder there are so many “quality” abbreviations for the term MBA! (http://www.abbreviations.com/MBA)
Normally, people from the same profession defend each other. Engineers are specially known for their universal brotherhood. However, we are talking about an exceptional breed. First there is stark division among MBAs from different specializations like Finance, Marketing, HR, Operations, Systems. Every person of other categories denotes total wastage of money. Add to this, the variation of pay packages. As there is no standardized compensation structure available in the market and knowledge of an MBA is often measured by his wage, there is more than one economic segment among the MBAs.
The state of affairs is more perplexing for someone who came from tier-2 B schools (In MBA lingo A-, B+ or at max B grade), because the guys from A+ or A schools think he is dumb and the rest think he is just lucky. In the end, he is left with no other choice but to ask himself, “Am I the Best among the Worst” or “Am I the Worst among the Best”?
