Saturday, October 21, 2006

Save Little Wonder Aditya

Let us do our bit in helping the little boy Aditya who is suffering from relapse of Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL), a form of Blood Cancer. If you are able to help / will be able to help monetarily / otherwise , Please Click here

Tuesday, October 17, 2006

Bustling Bengaluru

I hope i got that right.

Bangalore grooms its people to be managers.LIKE IT OR NOT!!!

I say this out of my personal experience.I went into MBA without work experience primarily because i felt that work experience as a manager post-MBA is much more valuable than to be a softy and do nothing(apart from probably training to represent the country in Table Tennis!!). I stand corrected. I shouldve spent a few months doing nothing but living in bangalore.Why??Here goes

1. Bangalore is a natural competitive landscape as far as the roads are concerned.And everyday is a new learning.You will have to start out with a roadmap(again literally too) everyday morning. A business starts with a vision.A vision is something that is overarching and difficult to achieve.One's vision is to reach the office and yes,it can be classified as a vision.And the road is one place where your competition will literally run you over if you dont move!!! Objectives are broad statements of intent.Like, "I wish to reach the office in one piece".And then come the goals that quantify or atleast very specifically state how to measure one's achievement of objectives.It could range from something as overtly ambitious as "I will reach the office in one piece within one hour without getting caught in more that 7 traffic jams(which in bangalore are long enough to make your bread and jam) and not getting frisked more than twice" to something that is very simple but notoriously difficult as "I will reach the office in one piece today without getting conned by the autowallah".

2.What Bschools dont teach.

Of late, bschools have become the favorite punching bag of many, right from the government to the common man who do not realise the extent to which MBAs solve the world's gas problems.So here is my disinterested attempt in violently lashing out at bschools and the grossly overpaid MBAs.

When you make a decision, you live with it.In bschools, you create a framework(even if you are asked for directions),then define the parameters and then go about to dissect in a arcane manner what was a simple thing before.And make a vague recommendation.Like "Restructure the distribution system" or "productise the intangibles linking the open border organisations without commoditizing the feedback mechanism".But then business world is one-way.Just like the traffic on bangalore roads is.Miss a turn and you could find yourself in a traffic jam at the wrong end of the city.And then reaching your destination(which is a vision)could involve necessary unwanted discussions in different languages(which is pretty much like trying to talk to all the divisional managers for a course-correction of the business activities)

3. Why couldnt the chicken cross the road??

Guess why.Because it was in Bangalore!!Leave the chicken.Even the homosapiens and nomads find it difficult to cross the road here and this is an ideal training ground for the wannabe manager. A manager in daily life has to deal with the expected and the unexpected, with what he can see and what he thinks he sees.Very much like when you are trying to guess the speed with which different vehicles are coming, how much time do you have before your suicidal tendencies begin to take you over, the angles at which the vehicles are being driven, anyone struggling out there with whom you could partner and struggle(also called partnerships in biz parlance). You will develop instincts over a period where your body parts will involutarily coordianate amaong themselves for the flee and fight, just like what experienced managers call gut feel when they have to take important decisions with inadequate information.

To sum it up all, "It cannot be summed up"

Thursday, October 05, 2006

Truths of Office Life

Most people live in what they think is reality but is actually an illusion.But the ultimate truth of office life is that DILBERTISM is everywhere!!!I might probably the 7594098732th guy to say this and it is no illusion.

Was at client location and discovered an amazing way(it is also called control and it earns me my dough)in which employers ensure that employees get caught if they are trying to steal chairs.Create a open cubicle and keep chairs in that.An open cubicle(is not an oxymoron by the way) looks like the follows

---- -----
|a b|
| |
|c d|
---- -----
My computer can be blamed for the incoherent drawing(there are no openings at the vertices, just one on either side).So four employees sit in the above cubicle(a,b,c,d) and have around 6 chairs within this den.They key is to ensure that the chair is heavy enough so that a normal human being would have to heave it in order to lift it.At the same time, the openings on the sides have to be big enough for a corpulent person to get through but not enough for the chair to slide through.And the cieling should be a low rise one and voila.You have the ultimate theft-proof, "look at me Im stealing a chair mechanism" where the culprit himself turns on the alarm.Every employee who tries to steal a chair(everybody claims that they were only trying to see if the mechanism is foolproof and yes, it proves them all to be fools) ends up hitting the cieling with the chair thereby causing all the employees(who claim and put up a good show that they work)to stop the earth-shattering work to observe the cieling shattering work of the poor guy who never read Dilbert!!!

By the way.Did i mention that i was not trying to steal a chair yesterday??!!

Thought for the moment

You pay for what you sow