It should feel great
Shouldn’t it. My MBA is done, grades are in and i am looking forward to a weekend of partying and yes of course my graduation. It occurs to me that i should feel a sense of accomplishment an unbridled feeling of joy(well not really) and yes some excitement for graduation but just feel relived. Maybe it is just the recession or maybe it is not a big deal anyway, completing the MBA i mean. Anyway MBA was fun, it changed me into something better… at least i think so
Trade off
Synergy. That ubiquitous word we find mentioned in every merger, alliance, partnership or business acquistion. That most elusive of things to actually realize business value from. Ok so, the most common synergy resides in cost efficiencies that are achieved through combining shared activities of two firms. It is THE easiest synergy to realize, if there was ever a low hanging fruit among synergies, this is it. Now, in order to achieve these cost efficiencies some people will lose there jobs, well someone will have to fire them. We slickly call it ‘active management of overhead’ or ‘SG&A trimming’ from a financial perspective or ‘right sizing’ in the realm of corporate strategy. Whatever it maybe, we state is so simply, in our case reports – an easy win, an obvious move. But it changes the life of people who are affected.I saw some one get fired the past week. I was a bit saddened by how quickly it happened, how quickly people forgot and moved on. The business student in me understands the logic behind it and does admire the ruthless effectiveness of the human machinery that kept on working inspite of this key ex-employee’s absence, but the person in me dislikes the way in which the termination was carried out. I felt like saying “show some respect” to those who oversaw the job termination.
Somethings must be done, like reducing staff but there is a civil respectful way of doing it and this way sometimes is not consistent with Effectiveness and Efficiency tenets and a trade off must made.
Stuck !!!
It is 3:55 AM EST and i am stuck at Newark on my way home back to Mumbai after a long 1 1/2 year away. It has been the most wretched half a day. What began with four hour delay at Columbus airport has now been surpassed by a 12 hour wait at Newark en route Mumbai. Well it is at times like these when we have time to think, you know really think – as there are limited number of things that you can do at the airport to pass time. People watching is fun but its charm wears off quickly especially as your frustration level with each passing minute rises
Isn’t it ironic that when we are physically stuck our mind races
Reluctance
Ah, when to the heart of man
Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
To yield with a grace to reason,
And bow and accept the end
Of a love or a season?
This is last paragraph of the poem “Reluctance” by Robert Frost. So so true… at least for me…
Plan the life. Live the plan
Pardon my grammar(was never my strong point) with regards to the title of this post. All i was trying to do, was to make a feeble attempt at mimicking the quote “Plan the work. Work the plan”.
I had always used the outlook calendar regularly for planning meeting at my previous job, but now that I was back to school for my MBA, I has discontinued this practice. This was mainly due to the acrimonious relationship between the outlook calender and vCalendar(used by my college to send event dates) and also due to the fact that most of the meeting requests now came through ’simple emails’ and not as ‘meeting requests’. This made recording the time of meeting in outlook calendar a troublesome task. Sometime early this year in late January, i made conflicting meeting commitments and then did not even go to a single one as it just slipped my mind in absence of reminder in outlook. This was the trigger for change.
I upgraded my outlook from 2003 to 2007 and this solved the problem that i was having with vCalendar and I also started taking the pains of entering the meeting timings and agenda from ’simple emails’ into my outlook calendar(essentially having the same effect as accepting a ‘meeting request’). In outlook 2007, you have the facility to have various categories and each of these categories has a different color. You can assign categories to emails, meetings and practically every possible item in outlook. This way i was able to get my meetings streamlined and events prioritized and segmented. Next, I extended this procedure to include other time sensitive recurring events like paying rent, electric bill, gas bill, telephone bill and Internet bill. Then, at the very start of the winter quarter in January, I chalked out the entire quarters’ timetable, with exam dates, assignment due dates, lecture dates and times. I also included reminder of 2 days for midterms, 4 days for finals and case reports. Though it looks very time consuming to put all this stuff in the outlook calendar, it really is not. Using ‘recurring event’ feature in outlook you can easily key in the class time table for the entire quarter or semester.
Having seen the results of this in terms of forward and current visibility of my own schedule which allowed me to better plan my activities better, I started scheduling everything thing in my outlook calendar. From studying for financial management to buying groceries and from following up with a contact i made in a consulting firm to doing my laundry. I am now hopelessly dependent on outlook, but it has significantly improved my life. I had always planned my life, but this level of scheduling just made living the plan easier. Being inherently lazy, easy in my mind is always better.
P.S. This post sounds like an advertisement for Microsoft… but it is not…
