I have always been a troublemaker of sorts. Way back in school, as a kid in third grade, I had figured out I was the teachers pet. I realized then, at the tender age of eight, that being the teacher’s pet had a number of advantages, not the least of which was the ability to stay out of trouble by deflecting the blame in someone else’s direction.
One of the first instances I remember of putting this new found power to good use was against the school bully. I had hurt myself on the way to school – having fallen off my bike. When the teacher asked me what had happened, I said the bully had pushed me. Of course the bully tried to protest – citing that he was nowhere in the vicinity that morning. But it was his word against mine – or rather – his credibility against mine.
I later found out that one could increase one’s credibility many fold by being brave and refusing to divulge the name of the perpetrator of a misdemeanour to the teachers even when they asked. They seemed to be impressed no end by this magnanimity. Then of course this increased credibility could be put to even better use. In eighth standard, I remember we were in the Physics lab, running some experiments on Voltage and Current and Resistance. We were required to take a dozen readings and plot them on graph paper. I forget now what each axis represented, but I do remember it was tedious work. I also remember, how a classmate, after a good half-hour of work, had marked his readings on his graph paper meticulously, with dots and small, precise circles around the dots. At this point he left the lab, probably to visit the washroom. I noticed that he had not connected the dots to complete his graph before he left. I decided to help him out. I picked up a sharpened pencil, and walked over to his work bench. I solemnly added about a dozen more points on his paper, with neat precise circles around the new points. Then I went back to my own work bench and made myself busy. I noticed out of the corner of my eye his reaction as he returned to see that half an hour of work had been wasted. He placed his palm on the graph paper and crumpled it viciously looking about to choose his accused. “Who did this?” He asked. “I did.” I said as I meekly raised my hand. “Shut up Shivram. I am truly angry here. Tell me who did this.” “I did,” I said again, amidst laughter in the lab, but he wouldn’t believe me. Credibility is a strange thing.
At WIMWI, I figured, that life could be a little more fun. I needed to figure out ways of pulling some pranks on people and getting someone else to be blamed. Soon, Phoney and I were running a major racket with long lengths of wire and electrical devices. The ‘fire alarm’ was one such experiment. It involved installing a large electric bell in some dorms and running the wire to the ground floor of another dorm. At about five in the morning, just after most people had finally gone to sleep, we visited such other dorm and flicked the switch. Needless to say, there was activity in two dorms in quick succession. The first when the fire alarm ripped through and woke up a bunch of bleary eyed people who started running helter-skelter to locate a hidden bell. Then the commotion in the other dorm when the victims traced the power line slowly down the outer wall of the dorm across the courtyard into power point in the basement of the second dorm. In most cases, there was an exciting fight right there. In other cases, the victim dorm kept the bell and pulled the prank on the other dorm at a later date.
The primary problem was that we almost always lost the equipment. Fortunately, the bells did not cost much and we set up the United Bell Labs fund to buy a new bell every few weeks. We even wondered if we could collect money from the victim dorms for the fund, saying we were setting up fire alarms in all dorms. We decided against this foolish bravado.
Some time in the middle of the second term, Phoney and I were working in the computer center on a Marketing case. Our Marketing group had figured out that it was an absolute waste of time to meet for the group work. We had been falling into the same trap that most other groups were in. Marketing group meetings mirrored meetings in the corporate world a little too closely. Nothing ever was achieved. People got to socialize under the pretense of working. When managers do not wish to work, they call meetings.
We had figured a solution. We would take turns in working on the group projects. We would work in pairs, rather than in groups of six. We got a lot more work done this way. The night before the presentation in class, the pair that had worked on the project would give the other four group members a REM – or remedial session – on the work done. The other four then cross-questioned the premises and the numerical analysis. We would refine the presentation one final time and take it to class.
We were doing some research on the Internet when I happened to find a link to a website where various people had posted details of the practical jokes they had pulled in college. We wrote down the URL and decided to come back to it later.
A couple of days later, we were in the computer lab again, checking out the website and planning our activities for the coming week. Some of the pranks were amazingly simple. Some involved a lot of effort, but we intended to enlist some help.
One of the first ones we pulled was what we liked to call ‘flourmill’. It usually resulted in the victim’s room resembling a flourmill when he got back from dinner. As practical jokes go, this was surprisingly easy to pull. This of course led to multiple iterations of the prank, each a new and improved version over the previous.
Objective: To study the psychological effects of a fine layer of flour on all objects in the victim’s room
Apparatus: 2 large newspaper sheets, table fan, extension cord, two kilograms of flour.
Procedure: Lay newspaper on the floor outside the victim’s door. Pour the flour on the newspaper and slide the newspaper under the door. Make a cone out of the other newspaper and point it at the slit below the door. Plug the fan into a power source – using extension cord if necessary. Direct the blow from the fan into the open end of the newspaper cone at full blast. Repeat process until supply of flour is exhausted.
Observation: The fan blows the flour neatly and finely into all nooks and crannies on the other side of a locked door. If performed with thin layers of flour and an abundance of patience, the results are especially spectacular.
Conclusion: The subject demonstrates rapid mood swings, especially if subjected to the same treatment multiple times over the duration of a week. The primary bewilderment of thinking that it has snowed inside the room changes rapidly to anger upon realizing the futility of trying to clean a fluffy white substance off multiple surfaces, when that substance would much rather settle on another surface at the first possible opportunity.
Variant 1: Replace flour with powdered sugar for your favorite victims. The powdered sugar has a rather annoying tendency to get sticky when mopped with a wet cloth.
Variant 2: Sprinkle the flour on the blades of the ceiling fan in the victim’s room. This version has pros and cons. Pros include being able to see the victim in the guise of the flourmill operator with flour on his face, body, eyelashes, nostrils and ears – not to mention getting to watch some sneezing fits. Cons include having to gain access into victim’s room by breaking and entering. Major cons include the tendency of victims to fall sick if they are allergic to inhaled powdery substances. This can get particularly scary.
Things got so bad in a particular dorm where we had tried this more than once, that they started checking any packages anyone carried into the dorm. When we heard of this, we went out and bought a dozen packs of Frito Lays and kept going over to the dorm for some group meetings, carrying the chips in newspaper bags and resisting the search.
Another one of our favourites was ‘Toilet fire drill. This one was especially nasty. The moment we found this on the website, we knew we had to pull this one fast. Further, it was feasible in our toilets because the johns were inside these cubicles with the walls rising only to a height of seven feet.
Apparatus: Newspaper, Vegetable Oil, 2 buckets of water
Procedure: Wait for victim to go to the toilet. After the victim is comfortably seated on the john, rub the vegetable oil on the newspaper and set it alight. Place the burning newspaper near the cubicle.
The vegetable oil causes it to smoke heavily. Grab a few friends and make a lot of noise about putting out the fire – taking special care to douse the poor guy inside the cubicle while he is trying to up his trousers and get the hell out of there. Disappear rapidly before he can figure out what’s going on.
Another one we pulled on unsuspecting victims in one dorm was to apply a thin layer of Vaseline to the toilet seats in all cubicles. When a poor soul takes a seat, he is faced with a slick sticky substance applying itself to the underside of his thighs. It is important to time a visit to the said dorm under the pretense of delivering some casemats in the pre-breakfast minutes to witness the episode. The subject can usually been seen exiting the cubicle mumbling to himself about the disgusting habits of dorm members and beginning to wash his hands vigorously. It is even more fun to ask what happened and the guy finds himself unable to tell you, his imagination running wild, as he is thinking about all the substances that could find their way onto a toilet seat.
One of the best pranks we have pulled involved about four hundred paper cups, staplers and a fair bit of work. Phoney, Maarlee and I were involved in this one. We chose the victim and the date. A few minutes before the slated time, I walked over to the victim’s room and asked if he wanted to go out to town for dinner. This particular victim had never been able to refuse a free dinner. As we left his room, Phoney met me on the Louis Kahn Plaza and asked for a particular notebook, which I had managed to forget rather conveniently in the victim’s room a few minutes ago. I asked the victim for his room key and tossed it to Phoney.
Phoney and Maarlee descended on the victim’s room within minutes with the paper cups and laid them all over the floor in a neat grid. Then they stapled the tops of the paper cups together – each cup with the four adjoining ones. They even enlisted the help of the victim’s dorm-mates to finish the job. Then they filled each cup with water and disappeared.
I returned an hour later with the victim to his room. He first stared at the paper cups all over his room and then looked at me. I was the prime suspect for any practical joke by now, but I had the perfect alibi – I had been with the victim the whole time.
He peered into the paper cups, “Damn, there’s water in here.” He picked up the nearest cup, but he had not seen that they had been stapled together. As soon as he picked it up, it brought a wave of linked cups up with it – spilling water. Only now he realized the troubled he was in. It would take him hours to disentangle the cups and carry them outside. “Main lut gaya! Main barbad ho gaya.” He started saying as he sorted out his next course of action.
All this while, his dorm-mates had been watching the fun – erupting into roars of laughter when they saw the expression on his face as he realized that the cups had been stapled together. The next day, in class, even Profs sought out the nametag of the victim and smiled, nodding knowingly.
There were times when it became clear to the victims that the perpetrators had been Phoney and me. What amazes me most is that we did not get beaten up. After this, we were emboldened even further and we started pushing the limits of tolerance.
Another one we pulled on a victim in one dorm was to empty the guy’s room entirely when he had gone home for a few days. He had left a spare key to his room with his dorm-mate and we managed to convince this dorm-mate into conspiring with us.
All the stuff was moved out into other rooms – the bed into the adjacent room, the desk into another and the cupboard and suitcases to yet others. His large stereo and his casemats were also moved. Everything except his dumbbells and his barbells, which were placed carefully - plum center of his room. When the guy returned a few days later, he unlocked his door and walked into a bare room. Where’s my stereo?” was the first thing he said, “I have been robbed.” His dorm-mates slapped him on the back and then showed him to their own rooms – where all his furniture was stacked. They told him shapte had played the prank on him.
He looked at them – incredulous. “You idiots. He hasn’t played a prank on me – he has played a prank on you,” he said. “Who lugged my furniture out? I bet you guys did, with shapte just standing there – ordering you around. Who has been climbing over bulky pieces of extra furniture in their rooms for the last few days? You. Who is going to lug all of this back? You again. You are the sorriest bunch of losers I have seen. You have been grinning about you having pulled a prank on me – when it’s actually been pulled on you.” He shook his head. “Usne to saare dorm ki le li.”
We had leaked news of this incident to the entire campus. That evening, when the members of the dorm entered the mess, there were huge tempo shouts. “WIMWI ka tempo – high hain. DX ki le li – Zig Zag Zig Zag” (dorm number withheld to protect my skin). Then everyone in the mess hall clapped as the group collected their food and continued until they had made their way to their table.
Once, when we were in our second year, the target was dorm Y. Usually, maintenance work on the toilet blocks was carried out on one floor at a time. At such times, the maintenance staff would put a notice on the toilet block door stating that it would be closed for maintenance for a couple of days. We carried this a little further. We printed two similar notices and smudged with some official looking rubber stamp – that was not quite legible and scribbled some random signatures. At about five in the morning, we went to the dorm with a couple of locks and plastered these notices on the toilet blocks on both floors. We took the extra precaution of placing locks on both doors. When the juniors woke up a few hours later, they found they had no access to the toilet blocks. They ran to use the facilities next door – in adjacent dorms. There was a huge ruckus as the residents of the other dorms complained about the overload in peak hour. When the juniors got back from class, the toilets were still locked. They woke up their seniors, and asked how long the toilets would remain locked. One of the seniors did not even budge out of bed. “Just break the locks – they have probably been put in place by Shapte and Phoney.”
Another opportunity presented itself rather serendipitously. The light bulb in my room went out one evening. I bought a replacement bulb, but that didn’t work either. I traced the problem to a faulty switch at the switchboard. When I had taken the switchboard apart, I noticed that I could see through the hole in the wall, all the way to the rear of the switchboard in the next room. I smiled. I would tolerate the faulty switch for a few days.
Sometime during the week, I visited my next-door Dorm-mate and made it a point to note which switch was connected to his light. Back in my room late that night, after he had gone to sleep, I took my switchboard apart again and rewired his room light to a switch on my side. This was in series with his switch. Thus in effect, both switches had to be in the ‘ON’ position for his light to glow. I left the switch on my side ‘ON’ all the time so that my Dorm-mate would not suspect anything.
A few days later, I walked into his room and asked for his help. “You are an electrical engineer aren’t you? Something’s wrong with my room light. Could you help?“
Of course it does not take an electrical engineer to fix a light bulb, but you’d be hard pressed to find an electrical engineer who would not mind showing off his skills in fixing electrical problems.
I showed him the problem and told him I had already tried replacing the bulb. I handed him the spare bulb and after inspecting it, he came to the conclusion that the switch might be faulty. “Damn!” I said, “Now I will have to file a fault report with the electrician and he will get here sometime next week. Wish I knew how to just replace the switch.”
“It’s easy,” said my Dorm mate, “you just get the switch and I will replace it for you.”
I thanked him and returned with a new switch about twenty minutes later. He installed it and tested it a few times. I thanked him again and bought him a snack and a drink at the night retreat.
Two days later, it happened. He was studying, when his light suddenly went out. He knew I had a spare bulb, so he came to my room to ask for it. “Sure.” I said, handing it to him, smiling internally.
As he was on the chair, replacing his bulb, I flicked on my switch to his light. He switched on his new bulb and got back to work. A few minutes later, his light went out again. I could hear him curse loudly this time and I went over to his room. “God damn it, “ he yelled, “two in a row. You wouldn’t happen to have another spare bulb would you?” I shook my head. I wondered aloud why they done make light bulbs like they used to, and reached into his waste paper basket to pull out his old bulb. With mock surprise I said, “This bulb doesn’t look fused.” I showed him the old bulb. “Maybe the new one is faulty.” Maybe you should try this old one again.”
I watched him climb onto his chair and went back to my room. I raised my arms and muttered, “Let there be light! “ as I flicked on the switch. “Hey shapte, thanks – it worked. “ he yelled from his room.
I had a fair bit of fun with that switch for a few days until he got really exasperated. He replaced his switch and his bulb holder and I left him alone for a couple of weeks. When things cooled down, I was back at it again. “God Damn it!” He yelled one night – as his light went out again.
I had a switch to his room and I could connect anything to it I liked. Some days later, when I tired of keeping him in the dark or chanting, “let there be light,” I opened the switchboard and connected my spare switch to his fan.
Now I could decide when he should have some breeze. A few days later, he brought up the issue in the Dorm when we were making some coffee in the pantry. There were a few of us there – some seniors and some juniors – listening to his stories of how his light and his fan seemed to have a mind of their own. We were rolling with laughter.
“Maybe you should call the electrician,” I offered. “How long have you had this problem?” asked someone. He thought for a while. ”About a month now”. “Hmm,” I said thoughtfully, “ that’s about the time you rewired the new switch in my room. You think something went wrong then?” This was the masterstroke. I had suggested that he was perhaps to blame for the problem. Brought new meaning to Ayn Rand’s phrase from Atlas Shrugged – ‘Sanction of the Victim’.
Sunday, February 10, 2008
Friday, January 25, 2008
Chapter 6 – The Grind
After that first experience with the case, we had gotten down to studying in earnest. The competitive sprit at IIMA was intense. There were 200 of us, but McKinsey was going to recruit only seven or eight. This was clearly the dream job for most of us. Only some admitted the fact and others did not.
Every day we would have three classes in the first half of the day – from 9am to 1pm. The other 20 hours of the day, we would be studying in the dorm, or studying in the library or studying in the computer center preparing for the classes of the next day. We did not sleep in the first term.
On the first three days of the week we would have Introduction to Quantitative Techniques I (QT-I) from 9:00 to 10:10, then Computing Techniques (IC) from 10:20 to 11:30; followed by a twenty minute coffee break and finally Process and Operations Management (POM) from 11:50 to 1:00 pm. The coffee break was not just a namesake. The institute served Tea and Coffee in an open area between the classrooms and the dorms. We would gather there in the morning sunshine and over tea or coffee, chat about the nuances of the case we had just finished, or wonder about how the Prof in the next class was going to handle the case. The second half of the week – on Thursdays and Fridays, we had Human Resources Management (HR), followed by Managerial Accounting (MANAC) and Organisational Behaviour (OB).
Professor Sudhakar had earned a PhD in OR from the US.
He spoke with a strong nasal accent which most of believed made it easier for him to look down on us. Questions asked in a condescending manner in a nasal tone can have devastating effects on under-prepared students.
The very first reading in QT was about decision making under conditions of uncertain demand. It was about a newspaper boy who sold a single brand of newspapers at a single location. His purchase price was Rs 1.50 per unit and he sold them at Rs 2 per unit thus making a gross profit of 50 paise. This newspaper boy had diligently measured his daily demand for the last 6 months and found that the average daily demand was 20 newspapers with a standard deviation of 1. Demand followed a normal distribution. The question was straightforward. How many newspapers should he stock so as to maximize his profit.
The first answer that came to mind was obviously – 20. But could it be this simple? An average demand of 20 newspapers did not mean that the demand was exactly 20. On some days it was less than 20 and on other days it was more than 20. Only the average worked out to be twenty.
The problem was, there was no way of knowing what the demand would be for the coming day. If the newspaper-boy stocked too few newspapers, then he was in effect giving up his profit on some units that he could not sell because he did not have the stock to sell. On the other hand, if he stocked too many and the demand was less, then he risked losing the cost price of Rs 1.50 on the unsold newspapers. Obviously, newspapers were a perishable product and any newspapers remaining unsold at the end of the day were worthless the next day.
Other than to try and guess the number that would be demanded the next day, there did not seem to be any solution. (*Footnote – for those interested in the solution, I recommend reading Chapter 5 and Chapter 17 of the book Statistics for Management by Richard Levin and David Rubin)
The reading was followed by a more complicated case about a company that had a number of products that they sold in a number of markets. The problem facing the management was that there always seemed to be mismatched inventory. In some markets they were running short of a particular product while there were unsold stocks of this item in other markets. The company was solving the problem temporarily ( and expensively) by shipping the inventory over from the region with stock to the region with demand. Sometimes when demand was urgent, the goods were shipped by air. Needless to say, the top management was getting worried with this state of affairs. Even if the primary problem could not be solved, was there a way to minimize the transportation costs?
The case went on to state, (like many others we would see in the coming months) that the top management of the company approached the professors of a Well-known Institute of Management in Western India (WIM-WI) for advise.
Professor Sudhakar drove his class brutally. He did not have any qualms about throwing people out of class. And that was going easy on the students. His other techniques were much worse, as he demonstrated in his first session with us.
He leaned against his desk in class and asked in his nasal tone “Have we all read the case and attempted to solve the problem? Is there anyone here who has not read the case?” Nobody was about to raise their hand and confess. However, years of teaching have enabled Professors to spot the face that is just a little less confident and is giving away the lie silently. He picked on poor Sudhir up on the sky deck who was avoiding his gaze. He read the name off the plate on the edge of desk before Sudhakar, “Yes. Mr. Sudhir. Could you please come down to the board and help us through your solution for today’s case.” Sudhir fidgeted. He had had made a feeble attempt to read the case but not much had made it through into his sleep deprived brain. Sudhir tried to protest and make some excuse about not being sure of how to tackle the case, but Prof Sudhakar would have none of it. He insisted that Sudhir come down to the blackboard and show us the solution to the extent Sudhir had managed – even if it was incomplete, “We are all here to learn,” he had drawled in that nasal tone. Sudhir had no choice but to pick up his casemat and drag himself down to the board.
He had no clue about the case and decided to confess, “I am sorry sir, but I have not read the case.” He thought that this would cause the Prof to throw him out of class and end his misery. But Prof Sudhakar already knew that Sudhir had not read the case. He had other ideas. He said, “ Well you can start reading it now then.” And he settled down and got comfortable in the seat Sudhir had just vacated.
He made Sudhir squirm at the board for the remaining 55 minutes effectively wasting the entire session. When someone tried to help poor Sudhir out, he asked the other student, “Would you like to take his place at the board?”. Sensing the threat in the tone of the question, the other student wisely backed out. The class just watched Sudhir in pin drop silence. Prof Sudhakar had made his point. For good. You do NOT come to this class unprepared.
The rules were clear. You can’t win. You can’t break even. And you can’t quit the game.
A number of students took a dislike to this professor. He was ruthless. He was especially gleeful when we had an especially tough case and even the better students in class could not make much progress. On such days he would take some pity on us and walk us through some of the next steps towards reaching the solution.
POM - I
Professor Amar Kalro walked into class for the first session of Process and Operations Management. He was the acknowledged God of POM. He had an innate ability to explain complicated concepts in extremely simple terms. I had read somewhere, in a book by Issac Asimov I believe, that the true test of whether one had understood a subject was to try and gauge whether one can teach the subject matter in simple terms. Professor Kalro was the master of simplicity. The examples he chose were always real-life and elegant.
I remember distinctly, the topic he discussed with us that first day. Quality. “How many of would agree that a Mercedes Benz is a ‘better-quality’ automobile than a Maruti?” he asked. A large number of people raised their hands. I could sense by looking at their expressions that the others believed the statement to be true but sensed a trap.
Prof. Kalro then went on to explain, “Very often, we equate quality with a higher price or more features, or durability or longevity. We believe that the Mercedes is a better quality product because it costs ten times as much as the Maruti. Or because it has a more powerful engine, or leather upholstery, or ABS (Anti-lock Braking System). Or because it lasts longer. However we would then be no different from the untrained salesman who tries to defend the higher price of say a certain type of fabric just by stating it to be of ‘higher quality’ than another.” He paused for a few seconds to let us think about this and then continued,
“Quality is not a function of selling price, nor of the number of features that the product is embellished with. Actually quality is a fairly straightforward concept. Quality implies consistent conformance to promised standards. Let us go back to our example of the Maruti and the Mercedes. Let us say that the Maruti 800 has a prescribed service interval of 5000 km. This statement makes an implicit promise. That a user who takes his Maruti in for service every 5000 km, can expect trouble-free motoring during the interval between two such service events. Let us presume for a moment, that the Mercedes has a prescribed service interval of 20,000 km.” He paused again to see if any of us could see where he was leading with this line of argument. “If the Maruti 800 does indeed provide trouble free motoring for that interval – 5000 km, and if the Mercedes also provides trouble free motoring for its own, much greater, service interval, then they are both good quality products. The Maruti will not be judged against the promise made by Mercedes or vice-versa. It will only be judged against its own promise. Similarly, durability and longevity cannot be indices of quality either. How would we then ascribe quality to disposable products – with an intended and specified life of one use only. We do not say a paper cup is of poor quality because it did not last for years. We do not expect it to. The promised standard for disposable products is one use. If they conform to that promised standard then they are good quality products.
We were listening in rapt attention. Most of this was perhaps not new to some of us, but the way he explained it left no room for doubt. He had made an indelible impression on our minds. We would never again confuse quality with price or features.
Professor T.P. Ramarao taught us IC. In the first half of the term, he concentrated on showing us the power of modeling problems on spreadsheets. I had flipped through the IC casemat before the first class and I remember harbouring the impression that this was going to be a course on XL features. I could not have been more wrong. Most of us had used Microsoft Excel before, but Prof. Ramarao took it to another level. He would start with a case or a problem and show us how to model it on a spreadsheet and work with multiple scenarios. He could really make a spreadsheet come alive. He showed us how to work with large datasets on spreadsheets, the biggest one involved about 50,000 rows of data, and how to appreciate the power of What-If Scenarios. How, if we had modeled the problem elegantly, we could run large analysis modules rapidly. He taught us to implement conditional computations and If-Then-Else constructs. Among the more powerful techniques we learned to execute on spreadsheets were Linear Programming (and by extension, Quadratic and Integer Programming) and Multi-Variate Regression. He showed us an extremely powerful technique to get XL to solve for Quadratic Multi-Variate regression – this possible only with a neat way of modeling the problem that was truly elegant. Prof Ramarao laid a fair bit of emphasis on the elegance of the solution. Use of brute force computing did not impress him much and he would make his displeasure known in the grade sheet.
Prof. Ramarao was a very soft spoken person who used to bring his laptop to class, plug it into the LCD projector and walk us through the multiple ways in which the case could be modeled. He would then tell us how one method was advantageous for certain types of analysis and how another was better for a ‘quick and dirty’ back-of-the-envelope calculation. It struck me, that to these Professors, even a back-of-the-envelope calculation meant pretty serious number crunching on a spreadsheet. This was definite insight. There was zero tolerance for seat-of-the-pants decision making. 'Quick and dirty' was not an escape route. The numbers had to be done. 'Quick and dirty' only implied a willingness to sacrifice some degree of accuracy for the benefit of speed.
To use the LCD projector, Prof Ramarao had to switch off the lights in the class room and have the curtains drawn. This was a blessing for some of our batch-mates who would take this opportunity to catch up on some sleep in the resulting darkness. Others used to solve the crossword puzzle in class ( I don’t know if they carried flashlights to class – I did not notice any.)
I truly believe, to this day, that these idiots missed out on one of the best courses at IIM-A. These guys are still going around presenting grand strategies on PowerPoint slides and hoping that the IT departments or someone else within their companies will get the number-work done. Fortunately, they were a minority. Most of us paid attention in this class simply because this was the key to survival. Prof Ramarao was showing us techniques that would enable us to model and solve problems in hours instead of days.
In the second half of the term, Prof Ramarao scaled up the complexity rapidly. He got us to work in groups to model business problems on XL. He agreed to let us work in groups not because he believed in the power of teamwork. He was well aware that in any team there are some who do the work and some freeloaders. He allowed us to work in groups because the complexity and size of the problems he was getting us to work on were beyond the time available to one person. Of course, there were still some freeloaders in some groups.
To this day, every time I connect a spreadsheet to a large back-end database to run some analysis for one of my clients, I say a “Thank You” to Prof Ramarao. He showed us the Power (with a capital P) of what one can do with a spreadsheet connected to a database. He showed us how we can now model and solve problems in hours, that can take the IT departments of most companies weeks to build software for.
HR was a half credit course, and would end by the mid term. Thankfully. Of all the subjects I have studied at IIM-A this was perhaps the only truly worthless course. It taught absolutely nothing at all that was of any value. The Prof conducting the course did not help matters. If anything, he was the cause of this feeling among most of the students.
Prof Chinappa had studied in England. He was tall, rich and handsome. He owned some 200 acres of coffee plantations in Coorg and a couple of apartments in London. Rumour had it that his wife was a former Miss India. Once when a group of students were undertaking a market research project on consumer behaviour and the buying decision process for shoes, they tried to get Prof. Chinappa to be one of the respondents. He tried refusing very politely on the grounds that he had rather large feet and could not buy shoes off the shelf. He had to get them made. This group of students pressed anyway and asked where he got his shoes made to order. His answer – “There is this store on Bond Street.”
“Bond Street?” asked the students. There was a quizzical look on Prof Chinappa’s face.
“Bond Street.” He said again. “London.” The group of students quietly closed their file and left without a word.
He had an amazingly gracious style of teaching – never raised his voice, never got excited, never perturbed, and he took all questions in his stride – no matter how tough.
I had read the readings assigned for the first class and prepared the assignment – on a single sheet of paper. I could not bring myself to write any more drivel. As soon Prof Chinappa walked into class and introduced himself, before he began the class, I shot the question – which I still remember verbatim – because my batch-mates have never let me forget it. They still pull my leg over this one. “What is the point of giving us an assignment to do even before we have been taught anything in this subject - one could understand an assignment in something like Quantitative Techniques – in which at least some of us have some background?”
I think I asked the question in a slightly haughty tone of voice, because as soon as I had asked it, I could almost hear the class pull in its collective breath. There was a stony silence as people waited to see how the Prof would slaughter this insolence.
If Prof. Chinappa did not expect this, he did not show it. I was expecting him to take me on like Prof Ravichandran had indulged Brijesh in the first introductory lecture.
Prof Chinappa merely looked at me for a second and then raised his right hand above shoulder height and waved it in a wide arc slowly from his left to his right across all the students; “Would someone like to react to that?” he spoke slowly. That was it. The class let out its breath. This was a damp squib. Through the rest of the term, as far as I remember, Prof Chinappa did not teach us one single thing. No matter what the case, what the question, and who had asked it, he would stand tall in the well, wave his hand across the class and ask – magnanimously – “Would someone like to react to that?”
The one thing I learned in this course was this – You can remain cool and unflustered if you do not intend to do anything. You just deflect the problem to someone else. No accountability. No responsibility. No problems. In general this has been my view of HR and it has been corroborated by the behaviour of HR personnel in most companies. They do not have any real work to do. They contribute neither to the top line of the company, nor to the bottom line. They have just one primary objective – justify their own existence.
After the first couple of sessions of HR, I stopped reading the casemats. I had figured a brilliant way out of this. I would skim through the case quickly, read just enough to be aware of the story line, so that I knew the name of the company, the location and the names and designations of the protagonists. I would highlight these with a yellow magic marker. In class, if the Prof picked on me, I would make a couple of statements about the problem or about what I thought was the attitude of one of the characters and then deflect the question entirely to someone else by saying something like, “Just yesterday, I was discussing this case with Shalini and she had a rather interesting view on this matter. I do not agree with her point of view at all, but perhaps she can explain it first.” Then I would pause and look at Shalini who felt compelled to respond. This was fun. I could pick and choose which person in class would get it. Sometimes I even volunteered to open the case discussion. After all, I did not have to prepare for this. I just had to make some statement and then say “Kaushal has a rather interesting way of looking at this, I believe.” And toss the ball into Kaushal’s court.
Either the Prof did not figure out my gambit, or he didn’t care. But the students were definitely brighter. They figured this out and some of the ones I had picked on were waiting for revenge. One day, later in the term, when I was particularly bored with this HR mush, I decided to have fun once again. When Prof Chinappa entered the class and asked who would like to initiate the discussion, I raised my hand and picked on Brijesh and handed him the problem. Brijesh had probably been waiting for something like this to happen. Unfortunately, he had even prepared for this particular class along with Shalini – who was an out and out HR person. Brijesh looked at me, and then at the Prof, and said, “ It is interesting that Apte should state this. This case is clearly about misuse of power and then shirking of responsibility. The way Apte just did both, misused the power of being the first to speak in class and shirked his responsibility by handing the problem to me is almost symptomatic of the way in which the Operations Manager in our case has been behaving.”
I have to admit, I had not seen this coming. I knew I had been pulling too many peoples’ legs and that I was going to get it sometime.
Prof Chinappa had moved his gaze back at me to see how I would respond. In a momentary flash of brilliance, I knew what I had to do. I put on a solemn expression, raised my right hand, and swept it in a slow wide arc from my left to my right and asked the class; “Would someone like to react to that”. The class roared in laughter.
The Prof was taken aback for a second, but to his credit, he took it in good spirit. He smiled and then laughed.
Class Participation (CP) was a significant component of the total grade for any course. The only downside of all my CP in HR class and opening the discussion for all those cases, was that the Prof believed that I actually worked for this course. I got a rather good grade in HR. This was dangerous. If I kept this up, people would actually start to believe that I was good at this nonsense. Banish the thought. I could get branded as the “HR type”. The moment this thought occurred to me, I changed tack. I stopped reading the cases entirely and stopped “putting” CP in HR.
Every day we would have three classes in the first half of the day – from 9am to 1pm. The other 20 hours of the day, we would be studying in the dorm, or studying in the library or studying in the computer center preparing for the classes of the next day. We did not sleep in the first term.
On the first three days of the week we would have Introduction to Quantitative Techniques I (QT-I) from 9:00 to 10:10, then Computing Techniques (IC) from 10:20 to 11:30; followed by a twenty minute coffee break and finally Process and Operations Management (POM) from 11:50 to 1:00 pm. The coffee break was not just a namesake. The institute served Tea and Coffee in an open area between the classrooms and the dorms. We would gather there in the morning sunshine and over tea or coffee, chat about the nuances of the case we had just finished, or wonder about how the Prof in the next class was going to handle the case. The second half of the week – on Thursdays and Fridays, we had Human Resources Management (HR), followed by Managerial Accounting (MANAC) and Organisational Behaviour (OB).
Professor Sudhakar had earned a PhD in OR from the US.
He spoke with a strong nasal accent which most of believed made it easier for him to look down on us. Questions asked in a condescending manner in a nasal tone can have devastating effects on under-prepared students.
The very first reading in QT was about decision making under conditions of uncertain demand. It was about a newspaper boy who sold a single brand of newspapers at a single location. His purchase price was Rs 1.50 per unit and he sold them at Rs 2 per unit thus making a gross profit of 50 paise. This newspaper boy had diligently measured his daily demand for the last 6 months and found that the average daily demand was 20 newspapers with a standard deviation of 1. Demand followed a normal distribution. The question was straightforward. How many newspapers should he stock so as to maximize his profit.
The first answer that came to mind was obviously – 20. But could it be this simple? An average demand of 20 newspapers did not mean that the demand was exactly 20. On some days it was less than 20 and on other days it was more than 20. Only the average worked out to be twenty.
The problem was, there was no way of knowing what the demand would be for the coming day. If the newspaper-boy stocked too few newspapers, then he was in effect giving up his profit on some units that he could not sell because he did not have the stock to sell. On the other hand, if he stocked too many and the demand was less, then he risked losing the cost price of Rs 1.50 on the unsold newspapers. Obviously, newspapers were a perishable product and any newspapers remaining unsold at the end of the day were worthless the next day.
Other than to try and guess the number that would be demanded the next day, there did not seem to be any solution. (*Footnote – for those interested in the solution, I recommend reading Chapter 5 and Chapter 17 of the book Statistics for Management by Richard Levin and David Rubin)
The reading was followed by a more complicated case about a company that had a number of products that they sold in a number of markets. The problem facing the management was that there always seemed to be mismatched inventory. In some markets they were running short of a particular product while there were unsold stocks of this item in other markets. The company was solving the problem temporarily ( and expensively) by shipping the inventory over from the region with stock to the region with demand. Sometimes when demand was urgent, the goods were shipped by air. Needless to say, the top management was getting worried with this state of affairs. Even if the primary problem could not be solved, was there a way to minimize the transportation costs?
The case went on to state, (like many others we would see in the coming months) that the top management of the company approached the professors of a Well-known Institute of Management in Western India (WIM-WI) for advise.
Professor Sudhakar drove his class brutally. He did not have any qualms about throwing people out of class. And that was going easy on the students. His other techniques were much worse, as he demonstrated in his first session with us.
He leaned against his desk in class and asked in his nasal tone “Have we all read the case and attempted to solve the problem? Is there anyone here who has not read the case?” Nobody was about to raise their hand and confess. However, years of teaching have enabled Professors to spot the face that is just a little less confident and is giving away the lie silently. He picked on poor Sudhir up on the sky deck who was avoiding his gaze. He read the name off the plate on the edge of desk before Sudhakar, “Yes. Mr. Sudhir. Could you please come down to the board and help us through your solution for today’s case.” Sudhir fidgeted. He had had made a feeble attempt to read the case but not much had made it through into his sleep deprived brain. Sudhir tried to protest and make some excuse about not being sure of how to tackle the case, but Prof Sudhakar would have none of it. He insisted that Sudhir come down to the blackboard and show us the solution to the extent Sudhir had managed – even if it was incomplete, “We are all here to learn,” he had drawled in that nasal tone. Sudhir had no choice but to pick up his casemat and drag himself down to the board.
He had no clue about the case and decided to confess, “I am sorry sir, but I have not read the case.” He thought that this would cause the Prof to throw him out of class and end his misery. But Prof Sudhakar already knew that Sudhir had not read the case. He had other ideas. He said, “ Well you can start reading it now then.” And he settled down and got comfortable in the seat Sudhir had just vacated.
He made Sudhir squirm at the board for the remaining 55 minutes effectively wasting the entire session. When someone tried to help poor Sudhir out, he asked the other student, “Would you like to take his place at the board?”. Sensing the threat in the tone of the question, the other student wisely backed out. The class just watched Sudhir in pin drop silence. Prof Sudhakar had made his point. For good. You do NOT come to this class unprepared.
The rules were clear. You can’t win. You can’t break even. And you can’t quit the game.
A number of students took a dislike to this professor. He was ruthless. He was especially gleeful when we had an especially tough case and even the better students in class could not make much progress. On such days he would take some pity on us and walk us through some of the next steps towards reaching the solution.
POM - I
Professor Amar Kalro walked into class for the first session of Process and Operations Management. He was the acknowledged God of POM. He had an innate ability to explain complicated concepts in extremely simple terms. I had read somewhere, in a book by Issac Asimov I believe, that the true test of whether one had understood a subject was to try and gauge whether one can teach the subject matter in simple terms. Professor Kalro was the master of simplicity. The examples he chose were always real-life and elegant.
I remember distinctly, the topic he discussed with us that first day. Quality. “How many of would agree that a Mercedes Benz is a ‘better-quality’ automobile than a Maruti?” he asked. A large number of people raised their hands. I could sense by looking at their expressions that the others believed the statement to be true but sensed a trap.
Prof. Kalro then went on to explain, “Very often, we equate quality with a higher price or more features, or durability or longevity. We believe that the Mercedes is a better quality product because it costs ten times as much as the Maruti. Or because it has a more powerful engine, or leather upholstery, or ABS (Anti-lock Braking System). Or because it lasts longer. However we would then be no different from the untrained salesman who tries to defend the higher price of say a certain type of fabric just by stating it to be of ‘higher quality’ than another.” He paused for a few seconds to let us think about this and then continued,
“Quality is not a function of selling price, nor of the number of features that the product is embellished with. Actually quality is a fairly straightforward concept. Quality implies consistent conformance to promised standards. Let us go back to our example of the Maruti and the Mercedes. Let us say that the Maruti 800 has a prescribed service interval of 5000 km. This statement makes an implicit promise. That a user who takes his Maruti in for service every 5000 km, can expect trouble-free motoring during the interval between two such service events. Let us presume for a moment, that the Mercedes has a prescribed service interval of 20,000 km.” He paused again to see if any of us could see where he was leading with this line of argument. “If the Maruti 800 does indeed provide trouble free motoring for that interval – 5000 km, and if the Mercedes also provides trouble free motoring for its own, much greater, service interval, then they are both good quality products. The Maruti will not be judged against the promise made by Mercedes or vice-versa. It will only be judged against its own promise. Similarly, durability and longevity cannot be indices of quality either. How would we then ascribe quality to disposable products – with an intended and specified life of one use only. We do not say a paper cup is of poor quality because it did not last for years. We do not expect it to. The promised standard for disposable products is one use. If they conform to that promised standard then they are good quality products.
We were listening in rapt attention. Most of this was perhaps not new to some of us, but the way he explained it left no room for doubt. He had made an indelible impression on our minds. We would never again confuse quality with price or features.
Professor T.P. Ramarao taught us IC. In the first half of the term, he concentrated on showing us the power of modeling problems on spreadsheets. I had flipped through the IC casemat before the first class and I remember harbouring the impression that this was going to be a course on XL features. I could not have been more wrong. Most of us had used Microsoft Excel before, but Prof. Ramarao took it to another level. He would start with a case or a problem and show us how to model it on a spreadsheet and work with multiple scenarios. He could really make a spreadsheet come alive. He showed us how to work with large datasets on spreadsheets, the biggest one involved about 50,000 rows of data, and how to appreciate the power of What-If Scenarios. How, if we had modeled the problem elegantly, we could run large analysis modules rapidly. He taught us to implement conditional computations and If-Then-Else constructs. Among the more powerful techniques we learned to execute on spreadsheets were Linear Programming (and by extension, Quadratic and Integer Programming) and Multi-Variate Regression. He showed us an extremely powerful technique to get XL to solve for Quadratic Multi-Variate regression – this possible only with a neat way of modeling the problem that was truly elegant. Prof Ramarao laid a fair bit of emphasis on the elegance of the solution. Use of brute force computing did not impress him much and he would make his displeasure known in the grade sheet.
Prof. Ramarao was a very soft spoken person who used to bring his laptop to class, plug it into the LCD projector and walk us through the multiple ways in which the case could be modeled. He would then tell us how one method was advantageous for certain types of analysis and how another was better for a ‘quick and dirty’ back-of-the-envelope calculation. It struck me, that to these Professors, even a back-of-the-envelope calculation meant pretty serious number crunching on a spreadsheet. This was definite insight. There was zero tolerance for seat-of-the-pants decision making. 'Quick and dirty' was not an escape route. The numbers had to be done. 'Quick and dirty' only implied a willingness to sacrifice some degree of accuracy for the benefit of speed.
To use the LCD projector, Prof Ramarao had to switch off the lights in the class room and have the curtains drawn. This was a blessing for some of our batch-mates who would take this opportunity to catch up on some sleep in the resulting darkness. Others used to solve the crossword puzzle in class ( I don’t know if they carried flashlights to class – I did not notice any.)
I truly believe, to this day, that these idiots missed out on one of the best courses at IIM-A. These guys are still going around presenting grand strategies on PowerPoint slides and hoping that the IT departments or someone else within their companies will get the number-work done. Fortunately, they were a minority. Most of us paid attention in this class simply because this was the key to survival. Prof Ramarao was showing us techniques that would enable us to model and solve problems in hours instead of days.
In the second half of the term, Prof Ramarao scaled up the complexity rapidly. He got us to work in groups to model business problems on XL. He agreed to let us work in groups not because he believed in the power of teamwork. He was well aware that in any team there are some who do the work and some freeloaders. He allowed us to work in groups because the complexity and size of the problems he was getting us to work on were beyond the time available to one person. Of course, there were still some freeloaders in some groups.
To this day, every time I connect a spreadsheet to a large back-end database to run some analysis for one of my clients, I say a “Thank You” to Prof Ramarao. He showed us the Power (with a capital P) of what one can do with a spreadsheet connected to a database. He showed us how we can now model and solve problems in hours, that can take the IT departments of most companies weeks to build software for.
HR was a half credit course, and would end by the mid term. Thankfully. Of all the subjects I have studied at IIM-A this was perhaps the only truly worthless course. It taught absolutely nothing at all that was of any value. The Prof conducting the course did not help matters. If anything, he was the cause of this feeling among most of the students.
Prof Chinappa had studied in England. He was tall, rich and handsome. He owned some 200 acres of coffee plantations in Coorg and a couple of apartments in London. Rumour had it that his wife was a former Miss India. Once when a group of students were undertaking a market research project on consumer behaviour and the buying decision process for shoes, they tried to get Prof. Chinappa to be one of the respondents. He tried refusing very politely on the grounds that he had rather large feet and could not buy shoes off the shelf. He had to get them made. This group of students pressed anyway and asked where he got his shoes made to order. His answer – “There is this store on Bond Street.”
“Bond Street?” asked the students. There was a quizzical look on Prof Chinappa’s face.
“Bond Street.” He said again. “London.” The group of students quietly closed their file and left without a word.
He had an amazingly gracious style of teaching – never raised his voice, never got excited, never perturbed, and he took all questions in his stride – no matter how tough.
I had read the readings assigned for the first class and prepared the assignment – on a single sheet of paper. I could not bring myself to write any more drivel. As soon Prof Chinappa walked into class and introduced himself, before he began the class, I shot the question – which I still remember verbatim – because my batch-mates have never let me forget it. They still pull my leg over this one. “What is the point of giving us an assignment to do even before we have been taught anything in this subject - one could understand an assignment in something like Quantitative Techniques – in which at least some of us have some background?”
I think I asked the question in a slightly haughty tone of voice, because as soon as I had asked it, I could almost hear the class pull in its collective breath. There was a stony silence as people waited to see how the Prof would slaughter this insolence.
If Prof. Chinappa did not expect this, he did not show it. I was expecting him to take me on like Prof Ravichandran had indulged Brijesh in the first introductory lecture.
Prof Chinappa merely looked at me for a second and then raised his right hand above shoulder height and waved it in a wide arc slowly from his left to his right across all the students; “Would someone like to react to that?” he spoke slowly. That was it. The class let out its breath. This was a damp squib. Through the rest of the term, as far as I remember, Prof Chinappa did not teach us one single thing. No matter what the case, what the question, and who had asked it, he would stand tall in the well, wave his hand across the class and ask – magnanimously – “Would someone like to react to that?”
The one thing I learned in this course was this – You can remain cool and unflustered if you do not intend to do anything. You just deflect the problem to someone else. No accountability. No responsibility. No problems. In general this has been my view of HR and it has been corroborated by the behaviour of HR personnel in most companies. They do not have any real work to do. They contribute neither to the top line of the company, nor to the bottom line. They have just one primary objective – justify their own existence.
After the first couple of sessions of HR, I stopped reading the casemats. I had figured a brilliant way out of this. I would skim through the case quickly, read just enough to be aware of the story line, so that I knew the name of the company, the location and the names and designations of the protagonists. I would highlight these with a yellow magic marker. In class, if the Prof picked on me, I would make a couple of statements about the problem or about what I thought was the attitude of one of the characters and then deflect the question entirely to someone else by saying something like, “Just yesterday, I was discussing this case with Shalini and she had a rather interesting view on this matter. I do not agree with her point of view at all, but perhaps she can explain it first.” Then I would pause and look at Shalini who felt compelled to respond. This was fun. I could pick and choose which person in class would get it. Sometimes I even volunteered to open the case discussion. After all, I did not have to prepare for this. I just had to make some statement and then say “Kaushal has a rather interesting way of looking at this, I believe.” And toss the ball into Kaushal’s court.
Either the Prof did not figure out my gambit, or he didn’t care. But the students were definitely brighter. They figured this out and some of the ones I had picked on were waiting for revenge. One day, later in the term, when I was particularly bored with this HR mush, I decided to have fun once again. When Prof Chinappa entered the class and asked who would like to initiate the discussion, I raised my hand and picked on Brijesh and handed him the problem. Brijesh had probably been waiting for something like this to happen. Unfortunately, he had even prepared for this particular class along with Shalini – who was an out and out HR person. Brijesh looked at me, and then at the Prof, and said, “ It is interesting that Apte should state this. This case is clearly about misuse of power and then shirking of responsibility. The way Apte just did both, misused the power of being the first to speak in class and shirked his responsibility by handing the problem to me is almost symptomatic of the way in which the Operations Manager in our case has been behaving.”
I have to admit, I had not seen this coming. I knew I had been pulling too many peoples’ legs and that I was going to get it sometime.
Prof Chinappa had moved his gaze back at me to see how I would respond. In a momentary flash of brilliance, I knew what I had to do. I put on a solemn expression, raised my right hand, and swept it in a slow wide arc from my left to my right and asked the class; “Would someone like to react to that”. The class roared in laughter.
The Prof was taken aback for a second, but to his credit, he took it in good spirit. He smiled and then laughed.
Class Participation (CP) was a significant component of the total grade for any course. The only downside of all my CP in HR class and opening the discussion for all those cases, was that the Prof believed that I actually worked for this course. I got a rather good grade in HR. This was dangerous. If I kept this up, people would actually start to believe that I was good at this nonsense. Banish the thought. I could get branded as the “HR type”. The moment this thought occurred to me, I changed tack. I stopped reading the cases entirely and stopped “putting” CP in HR.
Chapter 5 –The Seniors – and life in the Dorm.
A couple of weeks later, when we got back to our dorms after class, we met a few new faces. The seniors had returned from their summer training. The first year classes commence in early June and the seniors come back to campus towards the second half of the month.
One of the first things the seniors did after their arrival was to call a dorm GBM – a General Body Meeting. After the introductions, the seniors set the fraternity rules. They impressed upon our impressionable young minds, the place of pride that the dorm held in the scheme of things. Indranil Mukherjee (Indro), said solemnly, “From now on, in life, the Dorm comes first, then your family and then your job.” It was anathema to even think that another dorm was better than one’s own. “Other dorms can be referred to as ‘dorms’ ” he advised us, “but one’s own dorm was always ‘The Dorm’ – with a capital D”. People who requested a change of rooms to another dorm in the second year were looked upon as traitors.
The seniors introduced us to few dorm traditions in rapid succession. On a sunny Friday afternoon a couple of days later, they got us juniors to assemble below the Dorm for a group picture. Sasi, another senior, brought out his camera and was telling us where we should stand – while Indro played ringmaster – directing the event. Renny, a third senior – a guy with a permanent impish smile plastered on his face – ran upstairs to get his camera too.
Sasi was spending far too much time in trying to ensure that the juniors were in the perfect position. We were all beginning to think that he was taking his job a little too seriously. Actually this was rather true. He WAS trying to get us in the perfect position. Because unknown to us, while were out there taking orders from Sasi and Indro, Renny and the other seniors were busy filling up about a dozen huge buckets with cold water. When Sasi finally shouted, “Say Cheese… three… two… one… NOW!” - it wasn’t for our benefit. It was to time the dunk. The picture was taken at the precise moment when a quarter of a ton of water hit us. The ease with which we were suckered is incredible. There was roar of laughter and we looked up to see the other seniors grinning at us from the balcony of the Dorm.
Looking up was a mistake. They were waiting for us to do precisely that. We noticed another flashbulb firing in our peripheral vision. The second picture caught on film a bunch of idiots staring up at another deluge of water coming at them. Straight in the face. Twice in a row! Damn! We had to get our revenge. We would, but not until much much later.
Later that evening – they told us they were taking us out for the welcome treat to a snack-and-ice-cream parlour called Chills Thrills and Frills – CTF for short. The reason for this show of affection and generosity became clear to me later. They were going to get us again and I was the target of this one. After we had chatted through dinner, the seniors were about to order ice-cream when Ujjwal Deb (Bappa) announced that we would also be electing the new Dorm Representative to take over the mantle from Sasi. Sudhakar and Sapnakanta nominated each other and were seconded by myself and Neeraj.
Somewhere in the commotion, I was nominated and seconded. “It is a three way race,” Indro announced, “for the coveted position of Dorm-Rep of the most respected Dorm on campus.” The twelve of use were given small pieces of paper on which we were expected to write the name of the person we voted for. Ujjwal collected the pieces of paper and put them into a bowl. Vijay Chauhan would be in charge of the counting. Vijay was a senior with a grand demeanour. He was tall Rajput with deep commanding voice.
Vijay pulled the first vote out of the glass bowl and unfolded it. “Apte” he announced. Then another “Apte again”. The third and the fourth were also votes for me. “I must be popular.” I remember thinking. The next two votes went to Sudhakar and Sapnakant. Then Vijay pulled out the next one and unfolded it. “Apte” he read. And the next one was “Apte again” I had already won. Six votes out of twelve. They did not need to open the remaining votes.
Indro and Sasi picked me up on their shoulders and there were cheers of Hip-Hip-Hurray.
Ujjwal then said that Dorm tradition dictated that I would be required to eat an entire brick of ice-cream – a full pack. I would be allowed to choose the flavour though. I figured Vanilla would be the easiest to manage and Vanilla it was.
I started out in earnest, downing the ice-cream with Indro and Sasi egging me on. They told me that no Dorm-Rep in the history of D-3 had ever managed to finish the entire brick. I was so charged and so overcome with stupid joy, that I did not bother to think how they would know this to be true. Was there a log somewhere in the dorm where this worthless statistic was maintained? Between shouts of “Come on – Apte” I was swallowing the cold ice-cream in large gulps. My plan was to down it before my stomach could sense it was full. The last couple of bites were nearly impossible. But I managed.
“Yes!” exclaimed Indro and slammed his fist on the table. “I had bet you could do it.” Sasi and Renny and Vijay pulled out their wallets and handed Indro a tenner each – all shaking their heads. “Speech. Speech.” Encouraged the seniors and made me stand up on my chair. This was getting a little embarrassing. But the frat rules dictated that I do not douse the enthusiasm. Ujjwal pulled out a small cassette recorder and held it before my face like a mock microphone. I tried to make up a solemn speech. But try speaking after you have been through a liter of frozen ice cream. Most of what I tried to say came out something like “Tank oo. I am honouled to take this lisponsib… lisponsility . Oooble the yeals, the Dolm Thlee ……” I could not continue. The other people in the restaurant were staring at me with a bemused look on their face. My dorm-mates were roaring with laughter - holding their stomachs – rolling on the floor. I blinked. I suddenly realized how stupid I looked. I stepped off the chair and sat down.
Indro took charge of the situation. He raised his glass of Coke and announced to all and sundry in the restaurant. “Ladies and Gentlemen. We have witnessed history.” He was struggling to maintain a serious tone of voice while people in the restaurant were giggling. “Never befole has a person finished an entire blick of ice-cleam and lived to make a speech. This will go down in the annals of IIM-A.” I then got my first sample Alok’s lethal choice of words, “It will go down Apte’s annals too,” he announced as he raised his glass. The place errupted with laughter while I tried to hide my face in the napkin.
We drove back to the Dorm. The worst was yet to come. When I woke up the next morning, I found the glass bowl outside my door. The pieces of paper with the votes were still inside. I picked them up and unfolded them. I had not been the winner at all. And the whole Dorm-Rep election thing was a setup. A Sham. I had been had. I groaned and looked up to find the seniors grinning at me. They all clapped and laughed and slapped me on the back. Ujjwal then handed me the cassette recorder so I could play back the tape and hear what a complete ass I had made of myself. It was all in good humour.
Another dorm tradition in most dorms was the namakaran sanskar – the naming ceremony during which the seniors accorded the juniors new names. In most cases there was a rather convoluted logic (if any) to the manner in which names were chosen. These names, were by and large, quite weird and inexplicable for a commoner.
Imagine bright young individuals being called Kaali, Maarlee, Bogs, Cramps, Bhangi, Paro, Chumma, Bugs, Hypo, Makoda, Bogie, Daku, Nifty, Frustu, Goriya, Foxy... Quite amazingly these (and many many more) names stuck.
Each dorm had its own peculiarities. Prashant Gupta in dorm 17 became Phoney because he was always the first to pick up the phone when it rang in the dorm. We did not have a phone in each room then – unlike now. Some dorms had a preference for a category of words – for example dorm 7 used names of animals and birds (ahem) like Cock and Pussy for its inhabitants. Dorm 2 had an interesting solution to the problem of coming up with new dorm names every year. The person who occupied the room closest to dorm 1 on the first floor became Dedh-Singh (One-and-a-half Singh) The person occupying the room directly above Dedh-Singh on the second floor became Dhai Singh (Two-and-a-half) and the poor guy in the basement room below Dedh Singh became Aadha-Singh (Half Singh).
Some stories on how dorm names came to be were downright hilarious. Legend has it that some years before our arrival there was a guy called Bipin Rathore in dorm 6 who, to his misfortune was given the email id BRA@pgplan.iimahd.ernet.in
Even before the poor guy spoke to the system administrators to get this changed, the news leaked out and he became “bra” on campus. He sighed and probably resigned himself to be called “the bra” for the two years on campus – and perhaps forever by his batch-mates. However imagine the plight of the poor guy who occupied the room directly below the bra. For the sole reason that he happened to be occupying the room right below the bra – the poor guy was promptly christened “Panty”. This is not all. To make matters worse, dorm-mates in the dorm find this combination so funny, that they ensure that the names remain. Every year – the poor souls chosen by the warden to occupy those two rooms are stuck with Bra and Panty for dorm names. Some years hence – perhaps nobody will even remember why this is so. There might be a management lesson hidden in here – “It has always been this way.”
Some dorm names are chosen by seniors to be an anti-thesis of the character of the recipient. Polished pseude guys from places like St. Stephen’s Delhi and La-Martz Calcutta would invariably end up with rather crude and unflattering names such as “chaddi” or “langot”. Yet other dorms trapped the juniors into choosing a dorm name for themselves and then warping it. Fortunately in The Dorm, we were spared this humiliation as Indro declared in the GBM that The Dorm was above all these frivolities and there would be no dorm-names in The Dorm. However our relief was short lived. I soon became “shapte” on campus (my login id was 7shapte), Neeraj soon became the GoAT (God of All Things) and R.D. Sudhakar became RDX. But these were definitely preferable to bra and panty. I have often imagined what the parents thought when they called their son on campus and the guy who answered the phone yelled out stuff like, “Pan-teeee– Tera phone!” at the top of their lungs. Some parents, no doubt started to harbour misgivings about their ward’s sanity, or cross-dressing tendencies – or perhaps both.
As the weeks passed, the work-load skyrocketed. After the last class for the day ended at 1:00 pm, we used to head for the mess and get some lunch. Then most of us walked back to our rooms or to the library to start reading for the next day. The readings easily took up three or four hours and then we still had to start grappling with the cases. However, at about 5 pm we took a break - Most of us headed back to the mess for tea or coffee. This was followed by a game of Frisball on the LKP lawns and on the D18 lawns. (The guys from D12 launched a major campaign in our second year to re-christen this area the D12 lawns; but this ended in failure).
Frisball was played with a Frisbee but the game was a mix of the rules of football (soccer) and basketball. The objective was to get the Frisbee tossed through the goal posts of the opposing team as in soccer. And a-la basketball, running with the Frisbee was not permitted. One leg had to remain pegged to the ground while you held the Frisbee. The number of players per team was flexible – dictated by the number who turned up to play and the size of the field available. Others played Badminton on one of the 6 courts located at multiple places on campus. Yet others preferred Tennis or Basketball on the courts behind the Comp-C. After an hour or two of play, and dinner between 7 and 9 pm, we were back at work.
Most of the cases required us to work on a computer. The Computer Center (Comp-C) was open twenty-four hours a day and was populated by students all through the night. It was not unusual to be walking back to the dorm room at three in the morning after working in the Comp-C for 8 hours straight after dinner. What was perhaps unusual, although we did not even notice it at the time, was that while we were walking back to our rooms, other students were heading towards the Comp-C at three in the morning. These people were planning on working through what remained of the day and arrive straight to class at nine am without sleeping. I often wondered if these guys remembered to brush their teeth.
On nights when we were studying in the dorms, it was perfectly normal to see lights burning in almost all the rooms at three or four in the morning. There were times when one of the dorm mates would decide he had had enough of studying and would come out of the room and loudly announce a game of cricket. A bat and a ball would materialize seemingly out of nowhere. Most of the others would pour out of their rooms in an instant and the game would begin. The cricket was played in the Dorm – with the usual quirky rules of galli cricket – a ball sent flying full toss out of the huge round windows of the Dorm meant Out; a ball hit full-toss above the door frames was a Six; it was also a Six if the fielder was touching a wall when he ‘caught’ a batsman; the boundary was delineated by the external wall of the Dorm on the North and the East Side and by the closed doors or the rooms on the South and East side. If one of the rooms was open then the boundary was the far wall of the room.
After this game – which could be anything between four and five in the morning, we would walk to the Night Retreat – a privately run café above the mess. The contractor there served Tea and Coffee apart from Dosas and Noodles.
On good days, we could catch some sleep for a couple of hours between six and eight in the morning. At eight, the alarm clocks went off and we trooped to the washrooms for our SSSB and then to breakfast and then back to class – to get embarrassed all over again by the profs.
One of the first things the seniors did after their arrival was to call a dorm GBM – a General Body Meeting. After the introductions, the seniors set the fraternity rules. They impressed upon our impressionable young minds, the place of pride that the dorm held in the scheme of things. Indranil Mukherjee (Indro), said solemnly, “From now on, in life, the Dorm comes first, then your family and then your job.” It was anathema to even think that another dorm was better than one’s own. “Other dorms can be referred to as ‘dorms’ ” he advised us, “but one’s own dorm was always ‘The Dorm’ – with a capital D”. People who requested a change of rooms to another dorm in the second year were looked upon as traitors.
The seniors introduced us to few dorm traditions in rapid succession. On a sunny Friday afternoon a couple of days later, they got us juniors to assemble below the Dorm for a group picture. Sasi, another senior, brought out his camera and was telling us where we should stand – while Indro played ringmaster – directing the event. Renny, a third senior – a guy with a permanent impish smile plastered on his face – ran upstairs to get his camera too.
Sasi was spending far too much time in trying to ensure that the juniors were in the perfect position. We were all beginning to think that he was taking his job a little too seriously. Actually this was rather true. He WAS trying to get us in the perfect position. Because unknown to us, while were out there taking orders from Sasi and Indro, Renny and the other seniors were busy filling up about a dozen huge buckets with cold water. When Sasi finally shouted, “Say Cheese… three… two… one… NOW!” - it wasn’t for our benefit. It was to time the dunk. The picture was taken at the precise moment when a quarter of a ton of water hit us. The ease with which we were suckered is incredible. There was roar of laughter and we looked up to see the other seniors grinning at us from the balcony of the Dorm.
Looking up was a mistake. They were waiting for us to do precisely that. We noticed another flashbulb firing in our peripheral vision. The second picture caught on film a bunch of idiots staring up at another deluge of water coming at them. Straight in the face. Twice in a row! Damn! We had to get our revenge. We would, but not until much much later.
Later that evening – they told us they were taking us out for the welcome treat to a snack-and-ice-cream parlour called Chills Thrills and Frills – CTF for short. The reason for this show of affection and generosity became clear to me later. They were going to get us again and I was the target of this one. After we had chatted through dinner, the seniors were about to order ice-cream when Ujjwal Deb (Bappa) announced that we would also be electing the new Dorm Representative to take over the mantle from Sasi. Sudhakar and Sapnakanta nominated each other and were seconded by myself and Neeraj.
Somewhere in the commotion, I was nominated and seconded. “It is a three way race,” Indro announced, “for the coveted position of Dorm-Rep of the most respected Dorm on campus.” The twelve of use were given small pieces of paper on which we were expected to write the name of the person we voted for. Ujjwal collected the pieces of paper and put them into a bowl. Vijay Chauhan would be in charge of the counting. Vijay was a senior with a grand demeanour. He was tall Rajput with deep commanding voice.
Vijay pulled the first vote out of the glass bowl and unfolded it. “Apte” he announced. Then another “Apte again”. The third and the fourth were also votes for me. “I must be popular.” I remember thinking. The next two votes went to Sudhakar and Sapnakant. Then Vijay pulled out the next one and unfolded it. “Apte” he read. And the next one was “Apte again” I had already won. Six votes out of twelve. They did not need to open the remaining votes.
Indro and Sasi picked me up on their shoulders and there were cheers of Hip-Hip-Hurray.
Ujjwal then said that Dorm tradition dictated that I would be required to eat an entire brick of ice-cream – a full pack. I would be allowed to choose the flavour though. I figured Vanilla would be the easiest to manage and Vanilla it was.
I started out in earnest, downing the ice-cream with Indro and Sasi egging me on. They told me that no Dorm-Rep in the history of D-3 had ever managed to finish the entire brick. I was so charged and so overcome with stupid joy, that I did not bother to think how they would know this to be true. Was there a log somewhere in the dorm where this worthless statistic was maintained? Between shouts of “Come on – Apte” I was swallowing the cold ice-cream in large gulps. My plan was to down it before my stomach could sense it was full. The last couple of bites were nearly impossible. But I managed.
“Yes!” exclaimed Indro and slammed his fist on the table. “I had bet you could do it.” Sasi and Renny and Vijay pulled out their wallets and handed Indro a tenner each – all shaking their heads. “Speech. Speech.” Encouraged the seniors and made me stand up on my chair. This was getting a little embarrassing. But the frat rules dictated that I do not douse the enthusiasm. Ujjwal pulled out a small cassette recorder and held it before my face like a mock microphone. I tried to make up a solemn speech. But try speaking after you have been through a liter of frozen ice cream. Most of what I tried to say came out something like “Tank oo. I am honouled to take this lisponsib… lisponsility . Oooble the yeals, the Dolm Thlee ……” I could not continue. The other people in the restaurant were staring at me with a bemused look on their face. My dorm-mates were roaring with laughter - holding their stomachs – rolling on the floor. I blinked. I suddenly realized how stupid I looked. I stepped off the chair and sat down.
Indro took charge of the situation. He raised his glass of Coke and announced to all and sundry in the restaurant. “Ladies and Gentlemen. We have witnessed history.” He was struggling to maintain a serious tone of voice while people in the restaurant were giggling. “Never befole has a person finished an entire blick of ice-cleam and lived to make a speech. This will go down in the annals of IIM-A.” I then got my first sample Alok’s lethal choice of words, “It will go down Apte’s annals too,” he announced as he raised his glass. The place errupted with laughter while I tried to hide my face in the napkin.
We drove back to the Dorm. The worst was yet to come. When I woke up the next morning, I found the glass bowl outside my door. The pieces of paper with the votes were still inside. I picked them up and unfolded them. I had not been the winner at all. And the whole Dorm-Rep election thing was a setup. A Sham. I had been had. I groaned and looked up to find the seniors grinning at me. They all clapped and laughed and slapped me on the back. Ujjwal then handed me the cassette recorder so I could play back the tape and hear what a complete ass I had made of myself. It was all in good humour.
Another dorm tradition in most dorms was the namakaran sanskar – the naming ceremony during which the seniors accorded the juniors new names. In most cases there was a rather convoluted logic (if any) to the manner in which names were chosen. These names, were by and large, quite weird and inexplicable for a commoner.
Imagine bright young individuals being called Kaali, Maarlee, Bogs, Cramps, Bhangi, Paro, Chumma, Bugs, Hypo, Makoda, Bogie, Daku, Nifty, Frustu, Goriya, Foxy... Quite amazingly these (and many many more) names stuck.
Each dorm had its own peculiarities. Prashant Gupta in dorm 17 became Phoney because he was always the first to pick up the phone when it rang in the dorm. We did not have a phone in each room then – unlike now. Some dorms had a preference for a category of words – for example dorm 7 used names of animals and birds (ahem) like Cock and Pussy for its inhabitants. Dorm 2 had an interesting solution to the problem of coming up with new dorm names every year. The person who occupied the room closest to dorm 1 on the first floor became Dedh-Singh (One-and-a-half Singh) The person occupying the room directly above Dedh-Singh on the second floor became Dhai Singh (Two-and-a-half) and the poor guy in the basement room below Dedh Singh became Aadha-Singh (Half Singh).
Some stories on how dorm names came to be were downright hilarious. Legend has it that some years before our arrival there was a guy called Bipin Rathore in dorm 6 who, to his misfortune was given the email id BRA@pgplan.iimahd.ernet.in
Even before the poor guy spoke to the system administrators to get this changed, the news leaked out and he became “bra” on campus. He sighed and probably resigned himself to be called “the bra” for the two years on campus – and perhaps forever by his batch-mates. However imagine the plight of the poor guy who occupied the room directly below the bra. For the sole reason that he happened to be occupying the room right below the bra – the poor guy was promptly christened “Panty”. This is not all. To make matters worse, dorm-mates in the dorm find this combination so funny, that they ensure that the names remain. Every year – the poor souls chosen by the warden to occupy those two rooms are stuck with Bra and Panty for dorm names. Some years hence – perhaps nobody will even remember why this is so. There might be a management lesson hidden in here – “It has always been this way.”
Some dorm names are chosen by seniors to be an anti-thesis of the character of the recipient. Polished pseude guys from places like St. Stephen’s Delhi and La-Martz Calcutta would invariably end up with rather crude and unflattering names such as “chaddi” or “langot”. Yet other dorms trapped the juniors into choosing a dorm name for themselves and then warping it. Fortunately in The Dorm, we were spared this humiliation as Indro declared in the GBM that The Dorm was above all these frivolities and there would be no dorm-names in The Dorm. However our relief was short lived. I soon became “shapte” on campus (my login id was 7shapte), Neeraj soon became the GoAT (God of All Things) and R.D. Sudhakar became RDX. But these were definitely preferable to bra and panty. I have often imagined what the parents thought when they called their son on campus and the guy who answered the phone yelled out stuff like, “Pan-teeee– Tera phone!” at the top of their lungs. Some parents, no doubt started to harbour misgivings about their ward’s sanity, or cross-dressing tendencies – or perhaps both.
As the weeks passed, the work-load skyrocketed. After the last class for the day ended at 1:00 pm, we used to head for the mess and get some lunch. Then most of us walked back to our rooms or to the library to start reading for the next day. The readings easily took up three or four hours and then we still had to start grappling with the cases. However, at about 5 pm we took a break - Most of us headed back to the mess for tea or coffee. This was followed by a game of Frisball on the LKP lawns and on the D18 lawns. (The guys from D12 launched a major campaign in our second year to re-christen this area the D12 lawns; but this ended in failure).
Frisball was played with a Frisbee but the game was a mix of the rules of football (soccer) and basketball. The objective was to get the Frisbee tossed through the goal posts of the opposing team as in soccer. And a-la basketball, running with the Frisbee was not permitted. One leg had to remain pegged to the ground while you held the Frisbee. The number of players per team was flexible – dictated by the number who turned up to play and the size of the field available. Others played Badminton on one of the 6 courts located at multiple places on campus. Yet others preferred Tennis or Basketball on the courts behind the Comp-C. After an hour or two of play, and dinner between 7 and 9 pm, we were back at work.
Most of the cases required us to work on a computer. The Computer Center (Comp-C) was open twenty-four hours a day and was populated by students all through the night. It was not unusual to be walking back to the dorm room at three in the morning after working in the Comp-C for 8 hours straight after dinner. What was perhaps unusual, although we did not even notice it at the time, was that while we were walking back to our rooms, other students were heading towards the Comp-C at three in the morning. These people were planning on working through what remained of the day and arrive straight to class at nine am without sleeping. I often wondered if these guys remembered to brush their teeth.
On nights when we were studying in the dorms, it was perfectly normal to see lights burning in almost all the rooms at three or four in the morning. There were times when one of the dorm mates would decide he had had enough of studying and would come out of the room and loudly announce a game of cricket. A bat and a ball would materialize seemingly out of nowhere. Most of the others would pour out of their rooms in an instant and the game would begin. The cricket was played in the Dorm – with the usual quirky rules of galli cricket – a ball sent flying full toss out of the huge round windows of the Dorm meant Out; a ball hit full-toss above the door frames was a Six; it was also a Six if the fielder was touching a wall when he ‘caught’ a batsman; the boundary was delineated by the external wall of the Dorm on the North and the East Side and by the closed doors or the rooms on the South and East side. If one of the rooms was open then the boundary was the far wall of the room.
After this game – which could be anything between four and five in the morning, we would walk to the Night Retreat – a privately run café above the mess. The contractor there served Tea and Coffee apart from Dosas and Noodles.
On good days, we could catch some sleep for a couple of hours between six and eight in the morning. At eight, the alarm clocks went off and we trooped to the washrooms for our SSSB and then to breakfast and then back to class – to get embarrassed all over again by the profs.
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Chapter 4 - The First Case at IIMA
I walked to CR 5 a few minutes before nine. The classrooms at IIMA are huge square rooms with the desks arranged in four concentric semicircles rising up in an amphitheater sort of layout. Each classroom has two entrances, one on either side of the blackboard. Two aisles go up diagonally from the bottom center of the room to the two far corners.
I ran up the aisle to take my seat on the uppermost row – a swiveling wooden chair mounted on a steel plate bolted to the floor. A short sinewy guy bounded up the stairs and took the seat next to mine. We smiled and introduced ourselves. He was Shirish Kher – a chemical engineer from IIT-Kanpur. Another one! This place was teeming with people from the IITs.
At precisely 9 am, Prof Ravi entered our classroom. About five-foot-six, slightly stocky, and a brisk walker, he quickly scanned the classroom reading our names on the desk placards, sizing us up. He returned to the well of the classroom and wrote his name out on the blackboard. “Welcome,” he said in a thick South-Indian accent. “It is always good to meet bright young people here. Of course we shall soon find out that some of you are – well – not very bright. Sorta – like Type II errors. But we shall handle those cases later. For now, I have to presume that all of you are bright.”
He spoke rapidly, not pausing between sentences. It took a while for us to get used to this. Not only did we have to listen to him carefully to identify the gist of what he was saying, but we also had to figure out on the fly, where he intended the sentence breaks to be.
”My objective today is to introduce to you the case study method that we follow here. Fortunately for you, this case will not be graded. We would not want to start off by seeing so many people get a failing grade.” We all laughed at his joke. Us? Fail? Did he forget that he was addressing some of the brightest young minds in the country? He stared at us as we laughed, and his stare caused us to stop laughing. He was serious.
He walked back to the teacher’s desk and picked up his copy of the case we were going to discuss. The case study method meant that the professors did not ‘waste’ any time teaching us any theory. We were expected to bring our analysis to class. And to defend our choice of course of action and back it up with the theory we had read.
The first case was about a manufacturer of automobile tyres in western India. The case stated that tyres were sold in two ways – Original Equipment (OE) to automobile manufacturers for new vehicles, and Replacement Market – to the retail trade – where vehicle owners bought tyres for replacing their worn out ones. The company was a major supplier to the large auto majors like Maruti Udyog Ltd, Tata Motors and Hyundai Motor Corporation of India among others and OE sales made up the majority of their revenues.
The new CEO of the company, who had been brought in after a very successful stint in a Consumer Durables company, was given the mandate to ensure that their dominance in the OE market was protected over the coming years. And he planned to do that by building a stronger brand and increasing sales in the replacement market. This, argued the CEO, would ensure better top-of-mind recall among consumers when they needed replacement tyres. The case ended by asking us to think about how the company should take this forward.
Most of us had spent a few hours on the case digesting the data provided in the appendices to the case, the manufacturing costs and sales and distribution overheads among other things. We had worked out in detail, the marketing plans for the company and the financial implications of the advertising and distribution budgets for penetrating the replacement market where our brand was relatively unknown.
Prof Ravi looked around the class and asked for a volunteer to begin discussion on the case. Brijesh raised his hand. He sat in the first row, near the blackboard on the professor’s right.
“I would agree with the CEO. The company needs to invest in their brand,” he began. “One way would be to launch a massive campaign on National Television with a budget of Rs 4.80 crores or 48 million.” He went on to describe how he had arrived at that figure. The number of viewers he wished to reach – based on the number of vehicles, the number of spots per week, the cost per 30-second spot on National channels, the duration of the campaign and the expected impact in terms of incremental sales. Prof Ravi nodded eagerly.
....Edited....
I was beginning to appreciate this case study approach. He was asking the right questions, and causing us to think about the issues that matter. This place was already beginning to prove that it could indeed change the way one thinks.
He looked at his watch. I glanced at the clock on the wall behind me. The hour had flown past. It had seemed like minutes. My respect for the case study approach climbed rapidly.
He noticed that some of our faces were rather glum. He had succeeded in making us feel like morons. He decided to be nice to us. Of course Professor Ravi’s way of being nice was to rub it in a little more – but he did it with a little humour. “Look,” he said.” I know you sorta feel like a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn’t there.” He smiled as he gave us a minute to absorb the futility alluded to in that rapidly spoken statement. “It is understandable that you feel a little inadequate – especially because of your poor effort at this case. But don’t worry. There are lots of cases to be done and a little bit of time to improve your ‘processing power’. Of course, it is not going to be easy. You will have to work very hard. We know that we will put you under a tremendous workload. You will feel overwhelmed in the beginning. You will not be able to cope. There won’t be enough hours in the day.”
He noticed the looks on our faces. Some were starting to show signs of panic at the thought that he might not be kidding. Others showed obvious disbelief at all this exaggeration.
“We only have a couple of minutes left.” He said as he glanced at his watch. “Let me tell you a story. It is about a guy who goes to visit an astrologer. The astrologer looks at his palm and then his horoscope and then shakes his head sadly. ‘The next few months are going to be worst patch in your life. You will lose all you money and your achievements will be reduced to nothing. Your ego will take a beating and you will lose the respect of others and even your self-esteem.’ The man was shocked. ’That sounds really bad. But you said the next few months. Will the situation improve after those few months?’
Professor Ravi grinned and continued, “ ‘ No. The situation is not going to improve. But within a few months – you will get used to it.”
Some of us laughed. But after our performance on this first case, it was not the hearty laughter of a having heard a good joke. It was the nervous laughter of trepidation.
Next Chapter ... Life in the dorms at IIMA
I ran up the aisle to take my seat on the uppermost row – a swiveling wooden chair mounted on a steel plate bolted to the floor. A short sinewy guy bounded up the stairs and took the seat next to mine. We smiled and introduced ourselves. He was Shirish Kher – a chemical engineer from IIT-Kanpur. Another one! This place was teeming with people from the IITs.
At precisely 9 am, Prof Ravi entered our classroom. About five-foot-six, slightly stocky, and a brisk walker, he quickly scanned the classroom reading our names on the desk placards, sizing us up. He returned to the well of the classroom and wrote his name out on the blackboard. “Welcome,” he said in a thick South-Indian accent. “It is always good to meet bright young people here. Of course we shall soon find out that some of you are – well – not very bright. Sorta – like Type II errors. But we shall handle those cases later. For now, I have to presume that all of you are bright.”
He spoke rapidly, not pausing between sentences. It took a while for us to get used to this. Not only did we have to listen to him carefully to identify the gist of what he was saying, but we also had to figure out on the fly, where he intended the sentence breaks to be.
”My objective today is to introduce to you the case study method that we follow here. Fortunately for you, this case will not be graded. We would not want to start off by seeing so many people get a failing grade.” We all laughed at his joke. Us? Fail? Did he forget that he was addressing some of the brightest young minds in the country? He stared at us as we laughed, and his stare caused us to stop laughing. He was serious.
He walked back to the teacher’s desk and picked up his copy of the case we were going to discuss. The case study method meant that the professors did not ‘waste’ any time teaching us any theory. We were expected to bring our analysis to class. And to defend our choice of course of action and back it up with the theory we had read.
The first case was about a manufacturer of automobile tyres in western India. The case stated that tyres were sold in two ways – Original Equipment (OE) to automobile manufacturers for new vehicles, and Replacement Market – to the retail trade – where vehicle owners bought tyres for replacing their worn out ones. The company was a major supplier to the large auto majors like Maruti Udyog Ltd, Tata Motors and Hyundai Motor Corporation of India among others and OE sales made up the majority of their revenues.
The new CEO of the company, who had been brought in after a very successful stint in a Consumer Durables company, was given the mandate to ensure that their dominance in the OE market was protected over the coming years. And he planned to do that by building a stronger brand and increasing sales in the replacement market. This, argued the CEO, would ensure better top-of-mind recall among consumers when they needed replacement tyres. The case ended by asking us to think about how the company should take this forward.
Most of us had spent a few hours on the case digesting the data provided in the appendices to the case, the manufacturing costs and sales and distribution overheads among other things. We had worked out in detail, the marketing plans for the company and the financial implications of the advertising and distribution budgets for penetrating the replacement market where our brand was relatively unknown.
Prof Ravi looked around the class and asked for a volunteer to begin discussion on the case. Brijesh raised his hand. He sat in the first row, near the blackboard on the professor’s right.
“I would agree with the CEO. The company needs to invest in their brand,” he began. “One way would be to launch a massive campaign on National Television with a budget of Rs 4.80 crores or 48 million.” He went on to describe how he had arrived at that figure. The number of viewers he wished to reach – based on the number of vehicles, the number of spots per week, the cost per 30-second spot on National channels, the duration of the campaign and the expected impact in terms of incremental sales. Prof Ravi nodded eagerly.
....Edited....
I was beginning to appreciate this case study approach. He was asking the right questions, and causing us to think about the issues that matter. This place was already beginning to prove that it could indeed change the way one thinks.
He looked at his watch. I glanced at the clock on the wall behind me. The hour had flown past. It had seemed like minutes. My respect for the case study approach climbed rapidly.
He noticed that some of our faces were rather glum. He had succeeded in making us feel like morons. He decided to be nice to us. Of course Professor Ravi’s way of being nice was to rub it in a little more – but he did it with a little humour. “Look,” he said.” I know you sorta feel like a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn’t there.” He smiled as he gave us a minute to absorb the futility alluded to in that rapidly spoken statement. “It is understandable that you feel a little inadequate – especially because of your poor effort at this case. But don’t worry. There are lots of cases to be done and a little bit of time to improve your ‘processing power’. Of course, it is not going to be easy. You will have to work very hard. We know that we will put you under a tremendous workload. You will feel overwhelmed in the beginning. You will not be able to cope. There won’t be enough hours in the day.”
He noticed the looks on our faces. Some were starting to show signs of panic at the thought that he might not be kidding. Others showed obvious disbelief at all this exaggeration.
“We only have a couple of minutes left.” He said as he glanced at his watch. “Let me tell you a story. It is about a guy who goes to visit an astrologer. The astrologer looks at his palm and then his horoscope and then shakes his head sadly. ‘The next few months are going to be worst patch in your life. You will lose all you money and your achievements will be reduced to nothing. Your ego will take a beating and you will lose the respect of others and even your self-esteem.’ The man was shocked. ’That sounds really bad. But you said the next few months. Will the situation improve after those few months?’
Professor Ravi grinned and continued, “ ‘ No. The situation is not going to improve. But within a few months – you will get used to it.”
Some of us laughed. But after our performance on this first case, it was not the hearty laughter of a having heard a good joke. It was the nervous laughter of trepidation.
Next Chapter ... Life in the dorms at IIMA
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