Here’s an interesting phenomenon across Indian b-schools: everyone wants to be doing some kind of “strategy”. You ask a fresh-as-fuck 22 year old engineering grad what his latest live project is, he’ll say “brand strategy”. Or ask the 27 year old with 4 years experience in Infosys/HCL/Accenture/Wipro/Cognizant/you-get-my-gist, and he’ll say …
Many students in b-school find it very difficult to clearly understand the concepts of segmentation, targeting and positioning. Segmentation is easy, most grasp it immediately. After all, segmentation is simply slotting things together based on certain shared characteristics. Take Airbnb.com for example. It’s users can be divided into two primary segments: those …
A few months ago, I interviewed with Flipkart for a job. They threw me out after the second (and final) round of interviews. I was really hoping to get through, and to shore up my candidature I decided to create a show-and-tell before the d-day. It was some work/project and …
Political Puppet: A politician or other political figure who is controlled by another (sometimes illegitimate or secret) person or party. In my 25 years on our beautiful planet, whenever I have witnessed elections & politics in educational institutions, I’ve seen puppets come up. Interestingly, I’ve usually seen their downfall too. Everything …
I recently caught a good friend of mine sneaking in to the hostel at 3 AM in the morning. For the purposes of this post, let’s call him Aberle and only because it is a cool Austrian name. He was appropriately buzzed and was looking to tell someone the story …
(Image courtesy The Brads, one of my favourite webcomics) Have you ever felt like this after talking to a marketing professional, or after reading a report about the research done on brands, ads and social media campaigns? Well, it happens to me all the time. Specially when someone comes up …
Want to have a good laugh and at the same time, spend a few seconds of your life ruminating over the bullshit that we as a society are given to peddle? Well then, check out the following two links IIMC students to take honesty pledge on convocation day 83% MBAs …
Continued from my last post, probably the most difficult thing to do is bringing in “change”. In my experience, this is so usually because of the following reasons The person(s) trying to bring in the change did not completely understand the incentives that drove the activity/function as it was being …
Thanks to classmates who voted for me in the IMF (Student Body of IIFT) Elections, I’ve had the excellent opportunity of having been the Vice President for the year 2011-12. After my two startups, this counts as my most valuable learning experience so far. A few of them are Leave …
The best learning happens when people smarter & better informed than yourself challenge and rip apart your presentations. The downside to this; even the idiots think they should chip in with their DCP-esque questions, leaving you mindfucked for the rest of the day. At least in marketing, most of your peers …
(If you’ve already read this, see “Part 2: How I answer my Economics paper”) Here at IIFT, “Economics” appears in every trimester (in some form or the other), as part of our core course and I’m given to understand a similar situation exists in almost every B-school in India. Obviously, it is …
If you haven’t read “Part 1: Why I don’t pay attention in Economics class” please do so. This post makes more sense after going through Part 1. This is a question I got for a recent end-trimester Economics paper: The expected answer to 2(a) should have contained some of the …
Taken from http://williamjcole.com/2011/03/negotiating-part-2/ We’ve had some really interesting negotiation exercises in class lately and I really enjoy these sessions. Here’s a bit of what I learnt. Make the other party talk – This seems to be the golden rule to getting oneself a fair deal in a negotiation. Make the other …
We had a class yesterday. This course is taken by a guest faculty. He has years and years of experience. He’s boring and feels quite redundant because most of what he says is just a verbal representation of his powerpoint and notes. Yesterday, he got the dirty vibe form our …