Some Interesting Management Gyan

Management Gyan for the Day ... Coincidentally both have to do something with the IIMs
  • Professor Y L R Moorthi of IIM Bangalore wrote this wonderful article that read today called 'Have Breakfast...or Be Breakfast'. Click here to read the article ... You would not regret it ...
Updates: My view after digesting the article.


A nice article … The points is well taken. But I have a few points that I can think of:
  • Its all ok to point out that competition can come from anywhere - looking in retrospect based on example of companies gone through the situations. In real life, its very difficult to predict cases of which company is going to be a threat to which company. – So a nice article .. point taken but can rarely be put into practice
  • Saying that Nokia has sold the most cameras would be stupid … In any case Sony the agile company (has mobile phones as well as cameras) …The market of cameras are more than the low end phone cameras that we are discussing … The Market of SLR and Digital SLR market (not to mention the sleek digital cameras) have its own market and its own margins …
  • Airtel. – by selling caller tunes – cannot become a music industry leader … because of caller tunes do we stop buying CDs or DVDs ??? No … So I don’t really buy that point. It’s a separate market of its own. And I really want to know how much money Airtel really makes out of selling ring tones … numbers please … I am sure it wont be much.
  • IPL killing movies is again a point that I don’t buy … I see movies when I see movies .. I see the IPL when I see the IPL … So there is a market for both to co-exist. Ask consumers do they want to see a movie or a IPL match and they will tell you they want both. No one is killing anyone.
  • I agree that alarm clocks are not in much existence .. but that doesn’t mean that markets for clocks are over … so its not that Titan or Ajanta clocks would die … people still want wall clocks and also smaller table clocks to have in their houses.

While it may seem like I am countering all that points and trashing the article, with all due respects, that is not that case … The article is nice and sensible … The points is well taken – that competition can come from anywhere and if you don’t innovate then you will perish.
  • India’s premier business school IIM-Ahmedabad did the unthinkable: it junked its day-based placement system that has been around for decades and replaced it with a cohort-based system. Read more about that here
Update: My views again on the above article.
  • Scraping the Day 0 thingie is one of the good things that IIM A has started. Earlier, placement was all about a time frame of a “placement week" with both employers and students having very little time to make their choices. Also this phenomenon of “placement week" came with a euphoria that clouded the sane thought process of students to make the correct company choice.
  • People were too hung up on the Day 0 - Students to get placed and companies to be there on the day 0. Eventually the correct student - company match rarely happened. This was bound to happen as focus was more on time – choosing Day 0 companies, regardless of whether you want to be in any of those companies or not based on the PPT (pre placement talk) that they gave.
  • I have personally seen that less than 10% people hang on to their MBA campus jobs, others switch within a year. This shows that there was something wrong with the previous system. I hope that this extra time would give time for students and companies to find a better fit / match.
More gyan later !!

5 comments:

Poornima Srinath said...

More Gyan coming up? uhh...

I think the fact about alarm clock is true. Mobile phones are part of a family from bunglows to slums and platforms.We may have fancy wall clocks or table clocks, but I doubt on the number of alarm clocks being used regularly.

Other facts abt nokia vs sony camera,airtel and IPL are just another info to make the read interesting for the reader.

Newton's law in electronic world is true but can't relate the same and say it will hold good for airfare also in future.

Air fare will come down if another Newton discovers alternate energy source!

Nice writeup as it paved way for us to discuss something unusual.

Coming to IIM-A topic:

Very few students will have goal and those will definitely land on the correct station. Others keep trying until they feel comfortable some where. If he has poor vision and decision making skill he can never do good to the company too. He would choose a better salary than job. I don't fancy this system at all. Instead let them not have placement cell in the campus , so that they will not have pressure of being not placed on day 0 or 30. Let them find their choice of companies according to their interests so that they will stick there for ever. I bet even in situations like this they will shift. "Manitha manam oru kurangu" Darwin's theorm would prove my point right!

Hariharan said...

When he was talking about Newton's law .. he was talking about Teleprasence competing with Airline industry .. Telepresence is an advanced video conferencing which gives a feeling of you being right there in the meeting room ... So this tool has reduced the frequency of short travels for one meeting abroad by business executives ... Thus affecting the Airlines industry ... Currently Telepresence is pretty costly but the author is expecting the prices to go down further ... again impacting the airlines industry.

About the placements .. The point you made ... That is one problem that cannot be solved ... if someone is not clear about their goal they would never be unless they sit and decide ... This new solution is for people who have a certain level of clarity of goal ... this new system would give them some extra time to make a sane decision .. more time than the euphoric placment "week".

Poornima Srinath said...

I understood...okay.Fate of airline industry will not suffer at any point of time. Business people may travel less frequently because of electronic revolution. But economy class passengers would increase with increasing population to compensate the loss.

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Hariharan said...

Thanks a lot !!