Tuesday, July 27, 2010

How did the great company become greater?

The word “speculation” got high publicity after global recession that I started speculating things quite often. Don’t worry! Finance is excluded from my area of speculation. I think speculation can be added to the official list of hobbies. While jogging or sitting through a boring lecture I switch myself into speculating mode. During the world cup more than the spirit of football, octopus Paul interested me so much that my recent speculation was on Paul.

The most important thing on a B-school campus is “CV point”. The more you collect, the better placed you are. Recently some of the juniors got their resume (CV) reviewed from me while I was browsing magazines in library. I gave all the required gyaan. On the way back to room I saw a huge monitor lizard. In the dim light it looked like an octopus. Now you know the source of the following speculation.

Between the walls of the meeting room of “The Great Company” a group of HR managers, recruiters are discussing that it has become really difficult to select prospective candidates. One of the recruiter expressed anguish that B-schools and Engineering schools are increasing the intake year by year. Gone were those days where it was easy to screen the resumes which were few in number. Now there is such a demand-supply gap even on the campuses all the students apply for just two-three positions we can offer. Recruitment has become a very tedious task. I am resorting to heuristics such as age, gender, location and sometimes one or two words which are bold to filter CVs out of the big heap of them. All the other recruiters in the room supported the above argument. There was obvious helplessness evident on their faces.

The senior HR manager who is inspired by lateral thinking responded, “That’s simple! You are all worrying too much”. Let us order octopuses to do the job for you. Don’t you all know how octopus Paul decided the fate of the teams in the recent football world cup? Let the octopuses filter the CVs.

“The Great Company” became greater because it got exactly the candidates it needed. The octopus phenomenon spread across the country. Octopus farming saw a tremendous growth ,CAGR of approximately 700%.

The famous Placement coach Mr. Paul ( changed his name after octopus Paul) suggested to highlight points related to water, swimming, sports that got something to do with mighty of one’s legs like running etc. Now you know whom to impress from your CV point.

Sunday, June 13, 2010

60 Days of Summers

Before joining MBA I heard a lot about understanding business at the “grassroots” level. Grass and roots kept on ringing in my ears so much that grassroots fascinated me. Later watching Harsha Bhogle’s talk at IIMC I figured that I will try out a sales job at least as my summer project (summers) although I was interested in a consulting or a marketing profile. As I got busy with the course work this thought faded away slowly. When it actually came down to summer project recruitment process I was looking at consulting or marketing profiles only. As the old saying goes “Man proposes, but God disposes”. Let me twist it a bit “God listens only to your subconscious mind”. He listened to something that was in my subconscious, “Sales”. I ended up in a sales job for my summers.

I was told to report in Gurgaon soon after my term III final exams. I thought, “Great! I shall explore the professionalism of Delhites for which they are well known”. Soon after reporting in Gurgaon I was posted to Bihar for my field work. My friends and colleagues scared me with their half-cooked knowledge of Bihar. I kept my fingers crossed.

Five of us started for Patna by Magadh express. We got deluge of information about train journey to Bihar.We prepared ourselves mentally and convinced ourselves that our reserved seats were not ours and at any time we might be asked to vacate seats by gun-toting Mafia. Nothing of that sort happened except that the train was delayed by 8 hours. We were disappointed for the lack of anticipated “excitement” in our journey.

Our half-cooked knowledge suggested that Patna will be dark and won’t even look like a small town. We were astounded to find bright light around, lot of hoardings, crowd and so much of activity all over. Our driver dropped us near our guest house in kanti factory road close to rajendranagar terminal.

The owner of the guest house welcomed us and showed our rooms which were non-AC. We asked for an AC room as it was very hot there. We decided that we will stay there although it was costly so as to beat the heat at least for 1-2 days. After having a pleasant bath we went out looking for a dhaba for food. The most striking thing we observed is that there were no street lights and almost no night life in Patna. Before falling asleep, we had a nice discussion on the telecom industry, tariff plans etc as we were going to sell telecom services from the next day.

Two of us were sent to Ranchi. The Zonal Business Manager of Bihar gave me a 30 minute induction on sales in telecom and the situation in Bihar. It was not about the tricks of selling telecom services but more about grooming me to speak firmly with the retailers and distributors as if I was a very powerful person from the company. When I asked about the technical points on sales he told me that he didn’t have time for explaining them and suggested me to pick them up from the market. Then he assigned me some key result areas (tasks). According to those result areas, I was given a list of distributors to visit. I was supposed to cover the retailers under each distributor to explain the company’s products and promotions, to observe each and every aspect of sales and distribution and report if there is any issue and last but not the least motivate the retailer to sell the company’s products.

I had to change three autos to reach Daanapur (Distributor location).I went for the retailer visits sitting behind the sales person (aka FOS: Feet on Street) on his bike. I mugged up all about the tariff plans and schemes of my company and its competitors. I spoke to retailers with full authority as if I was in telecom business for years.

I used to learn some new point every day. The telecom industry is suffering from the margin-cut due to per second plans and some other issues related to licenses. In addition to this the companies in Bihar were on the spree of giving terrific trade promotions. To qualify themselves for the trade promotions the retailers did their own calculations and came up with mind-blowing schemes for the end-user. Some of them were free sim card, Rs.50 talk time for just Rs.10 and so on. This means that there will be no single price for a plan even in the outlets that are separated by a wall. This boiled down to the situation where the one who gives the best trade promotion emerge as the winner rather than the one who gives the best network service and tariff plans.

Daily I used to come back with all the dirt on my body. In sales, dirt is the true indicator that the sales persons are indeed doing their job. Our daily expenses were giving us a heart attack. We had to shift the room from AC to non-AC. Three of us were able to convince the owner to retain the AC room for an extra charge of just Rs.50. The discussion (should I call it negotiation?) that led to convincing the owner was funny. We did so much of emotional atyaachaar that he finally agreed. At one stage my friend told him that other hotels/guest houses were providing AC for an amount much lesser than what we were paying. The owner asked us to vacate and take those alternatives in a very serious tone. I asked him to calm down and in a very requesting tone told him to just think why we were insisting to stay in the same guest house although we had so many options nearer to the office. I myself answered my question saying that we trusted him, his service was very good. I told him that charging just Rs.50 /day more instead of Rs. 300 more will also work out for him. I reminded him that he doesn’t have any guests at that time and the power cut is for at least for 2-3 hours out of 7-8 hours of our stay in the room. We told him that in case he gets guests for AC room at the normal (actually high) prices we would shift back to non-AC room. We said that firmly as we were confident that his business was really sluggish.

On the weekends we used to visit different places in Patna like Gol ghar, Gandhi maidan, restaurants, theatres etc. There is also a pub in fraser road owned by Haryana hurricane Kapil dev. Being a teetotaller I had to order the mocktails but I loved them. Their menu contained exhaustive options for both veg and non-veg starters. There were no malls in Patna city. One mall was in pipeline and would be operational in a month or so. We visited two theatres mona and regent. Mona was like any multiplex in a metro but ticket price was around Rs.200. Regent reminded me of my childhood when I used to watch Chiranjeevi’s movies in my town with lot of noise and whistling around. We watched IronMan-2 in Hindi in regent theatre. Whenever Ironman outwits Vanko there was ear crackling applause in the theatre.

Through my visits to retailers and to different places in Patna I got an opportunity to interact with different people of Bihar. A person like me who was used to upper middle class life in a city like Hyderabad would feel guilty of extravagance although I am not prodigal. Majority of the people in Bihar don’t spend much although they can. They are very price-sensitive leading companies to promote their products as the cheapest of all.

People of Bihar are very expressive. One of my colleagues took surveys on the company’s brand image. He asked them a question and they gave lot of details with appropriate punch lines like “Jhoote mein Baata, Lohe mein Tata” in order to emphasise their ideas. Being from Bihar might be a reason for still moving still shaking Shekhar suman. Every Indian loves to hear speeches of none other than Laluji.

People of Bihar are very helpful. I read about the politics, corruption, mafia etc. in Bihar. Initially I was scared to death to speak to people and to add some serious tone in my voice whenever it was necessary. Slowly I realised that media rarely highlights common man. A common man is just like any other common man either he belongs to Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Delhi, New York, London. Once I was lost and couldn’t figure out the way back home. I asked a commuter for help. He came along with me all the way till the auto stand and got an auto for me back home for right fare. All the people I worked with were from Bihar. They were very helpful on the field. Initially I couldn’t handle an unhappy retailers. My colleagues guided me appropriately to dissipate their anger.

It was almost a month and a half in Bihar. Everything became routine. I found that there was nothing new to learn. With the suggestion of our alumnus who works for the same company, I told my mentor that I learnt almost everything about the business. I asked him to assign some new work to me. He gave a sarcastic smile emphasising "everything" in my sentence. The next day I got a call from him and an instruction to immediately start for the town named Nawada to participate in the launch exercise. This gave me an opportunity to explore rural Bihar in a bus that was tightly packed with people sitting on the seats, standing inside the bus and sitting on the top of the bus.

The launch experience was terrific. It was very hectic for those 10 days. We were very enthusiastic about launch and encouraged each other. Our enthusiasm diffused our fatigue and rejuvenated us. The critical part was to educate retailers why they should invest in our company rather than others? They needed someone from the company to spend time to explain each of their doubts. That’s where I came in. We launched the service grandly and reached the launch targets.

I came back to Gurgaon and gave an informal presentation on my field study with some recommendations for improvement. After presentation, I went to Hyderabad (Home) for a week to relax.

One day at home I reflected upon the past 60 days. What has these 60 days done to me? I should say they have brought "temporary culture change" in me. Now, I bargain even in a store that says fixed price. Shopping became my hobby. Whenever I go for shopping I am watchful about the prices and keen at observing the selling process. I became, shall I say, mentally flexible. Things were so much unstructured and uncertain during those 60 days that I developed the habit of generating multiple options for multiple scenarios. Last but not the least I was able to come out of the feeling that the hardest path is the only righteous path. In fact there will be at least two righteous paths in most of the situations. Don’t take one without exploring the other.

Saturday, April 10, 2010

Almost “Acad Secy”

I was sure that I won’t be getting into politics ever in my life. I was wrong! When in B-School you would never know what you will do. After joining B-School, I did many things which I never ever thought that I would be doing. One of them is contesting for the post of academic secretary.

At B-School you don’t learn avoiding risks because it is infeasible. You learn managing risks. The fundamental approach to manage risk is to anticipate it, and address it. Anticipating involves understanding the system you are handling and thinking of possible ways of going wrong in it. This is something similar to what software testers do, exploring the boundary cases, alternatives to break the system. Addressing is not a onetime exercise. It involves educating (regularly talking) all the stakeholders about the risks and use (for the lack of better word) them to manage the risk. This is exactly the job of academic secretary. The risks involved are related to the academics. Some of them are minimising danger grades, regularly talking to professors & students on various issues and last but not the least elective allocation (ensuring that all the students select the electives of their choice for the second year. This is the exercise that happens at the end of first year in more or less every B-school).

I was Class Representative (CR) of my section. Generally CRs are known as bakras (scapegoats) because they got to do all the mundane tasks for the class/section they represent. As usual, I delivered my responsibilities to the best of the satisfaction of my class mates and professors. To my surprise everyone liked me so much and called me “Super CR “ J

When the nominations for academic secretary were opened I didn’t care about it. Later my friends, section mates constantly compelled me to contest for the post. I gave a thought to it and decided to contest, for the sake of experience and of course a CV point :P.

I put the nomination. I did all the ground work required for the manifesto and campaign. I talked to senior academic secretary and understood the old elective allocation system and other major issues. I came up with a manifesto which (I should say) was average with no grand promises and radical systemic change. My plan was to first address the basic things like elective allocation, danger zones and ensure that there is STRONG communication channel between students and academic secretary. I always felt that 99% of the risks can be prevented if there is a proper communication channel.

After the display of manifesto to the student community the contestants are supposed to address the queries on their manifestos in an open forum. Before delivering the speech, there were lots of butterflies in my stomach. Once I started with my speech I don’t know from where I got the confidence I answered the questions posed by audience confidently. Some of the audience congratulated me for a good speech which gave me a lot of “feel good” sort of thing.

Ooh! The game started. I campaigned in almost all the hostels. I went door-to-door knocking, asking for votes. I was not aggressive, making statements like, “Dude! I know your vote is mine”. I tried to pitch myself based on my credentials talking about what are the duties of an academic secretary and how can I fulfil them! I attempted to create confidence in me ensuring that, “I am a sincere worker. You can get proof of it by asking anyone from my class how I performed my duties of CR. Please make a judicious decision in selecting your academic secretary”. Here there is a catch in my argument. I projected myself to be a good worker but also as the one who may not create magic. I adhered to the scope of the duties of academic secretary. I tried to manage the expectations conveying that something beyond this scope may not be really feasible.

The campaigning was a great networking experience. I knew only 70% of my batch. Now I know 95-98% of my batch. It doesn’t mean that the campaigning went on calm and smooth. Some of the students I met were really supportive. They welcomed me into their room, talked about many other issues. They showed a sense of trust in me. I was overwhelmed with joy at their simple indication of support. Some were neutral. I could make out nothing out of their response. May be they chose not to vote.

Now! It is the turn of the ones who took lot of my campaigning time. They are the ones who are very careful in doing anything including selecting their academic secretary. They screwed me up big time. They want me to change the entire educational system. They asked a lot of questions “Why is this like that? Why not like that? What the hell are you going to do about it?” Initially, I mumbled. I myself didn’t have answers for most of their questions. I calmed myself down and tried not to give “smart ass” answers. I said, “I don’t have much information about your questions but my plan is this”. To that I got response, “Dude! We are talking of survival and you are here giving us some crap”. I realized that this was going to end with both of us shouting at each other. So I tried to end the conversation saying, “Thanks for bringing this point out. I will make a note of this. As soon as I get elected I will come back to you. I hope you will give your 100% support in addressing these problems”. To this I got this surprising response, “You know XYZ. He is the real worker. He is the Mahatma. He is working for all these issues. He never wants to be a secretary to deliver his responsibility. Why can’t you do that? Why do you need to get elected to do this?” I was shocked! This guy was not willing to let me go. I desperately wanted to cut the conversation. I said,” I am here for campaigning as a potential candidate for secretary. Holding the post of secretary gives me autonomy to work on various issues although I have righteous intentions to straighten the system as a normal student. The issues you are talking about are critical, sensitive and generic whose spirit should not be spoiled by too many cooks working in isolation. The secretary has some duties. I am confident about performing them very well. Bringing radical changes is not something a secretary can do. No single person can do it. It needs a lot of planning and a dedicated team to work. I won’t promise that I can bring all these changes. As an academic secretary I can work in mobilizing a team under the leadership of your XYZ. Thank you. Convey my regards to XYZ. Bye.”

Thus my campaigning saga ended. Thanks to all those who helped me in my campaigning. I completed it to the best of my satisfaction.

The D-day arrived! Initially, the voting turn-out was poor but later the numbers increased. There was finally a decent turn-out of numbers. The very same day we gave farewell party to our seniors. I was enjoying the fare-well party. My senior got a call saying that I lost by a single vote. She conveyed the message in a positive tone saying, “Guys! Shadab became almost acad secy”. I felt surprised, oh shit and lot more. My friends tried to console me although I was not very disappointed. I thought that I will give a decent fight to my competitors but I never thought that I will be so close to the winning line. How does it matter? “Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikander!”

Saturday, February 27, 2010

Mugging

Mugging might have a different meaning in North America but in “Indian Institute of Management, Lucknow” (in fact across IIMs) it means:

Mugging = (Reading + Memorizing – Understanding)

B-schools have such a rigorous curriculum with some boring subjects (my perception) that mugging becomes inevitable to complete the course with in the stipulated time. Many a times I heard comments from senior executives from industry that B-school students are getting deeper and deeper into “Analysis Paralysis”. We do so much of analysis, somewhere down the line we miss the point why are we doing what are we doing? This may be the result of over-mugging.

So, shall we say a BIG NO to Mugging? In one of the lectures of Human Resource Management Prof. Himanshu Rai said, “Mugging is not bad”. He gave a very nice example of a doctor. Suppose that he is a big time muggu. So in the above equation Understanding = 0. However the doctor can give the medicine instantaneously as he remembers most of the things. On the contrary let us take an example of a doctor who hates being muggu. So in the above equation Memorizing =0. This doctor needs to refer books every now and then to prescribe a medicine. Obviously, a patient will trust the first doctor.

So there is nothing black and white. If people call you a muggu, say proudly, “Yes I am a muggu”.I think that one needs to strike the OMP (Optimal Mugging Point).What is that? IT DEPENDS .

What is Management all about?

A two word answer "(Right) Decision Making”.

I will give one of my experiences to illustrate the idea of decision making. In one of my exams in the course "Operations Management" a section of the question paper contained multiple choice questions.

For one of the questions none of the choices is answer. I wasted my time on it trying to fit one of the answers. After realising that I spent a lot of time I convinced myself that option(d) is the nearest and marked it. When I checked the evaluated paper I got zero marks for the question. I asked the professor. He told that none of the choices is answer. Then I said "(Yippee) Give me the marks”. He replied back, “Why, because you marked some option? You are not studying management to make some decision. You got to take right decision. When none of the options available is the right answer you should not go for any option. Learn to make appropriate decisions. This is the penalty for not making right decision”.

My education taught me many concepts, frameworks and models. It never taught me,” Understanding the problem and addressing it”. I always loaded my gun with all those concepts, frameworks and models. Let us call them bullets. Whenever I found a problem I shot at it continuously with a hope that one or the other bullet might hit. I hope that I unlearn this by the end of my MBA course.

There is nothing like “Yes and No” or “No right answer, No wrong answer”. I don’t buy this school of thought. For any problem there is one solution. It might be that you haven’t yet identified that one solution.

Why waste so many bullets? Take time to aim the target and hit it with the right bullet!