Case… Case… Case…
… My first case competition is done. It has been a long past 24 hours. We were given a case at 8:00 AM, the case dealt with a small family company in the beer brewing business, they are faced with a shrinking market for Lager in which they are an established regional player and a growing market for light beer in which they have no presence. Now should they go forward with launching the light beer and take the risk of hurting their core brand of Lager in pursuit of higher profits in a growing market segment or stay put and leverage there core brand attributes to increase the slice of pie in a shrinking Lager market.
… There is no right answer, just alternatives that need to be supported with cogent data and arguments.
So we begin, we need to turn in the case on 8:30 AM the next day.
Day 1
8:30 AM to 10:00 AM : Me and my team mates read the case. Highlighters in full swing.
10:00 AM to 12:00 AM : A hotch potch of ideas are thrown around, no patterns emerge, somehow agree on the direction to take in the case… Lunch time…
1:00 PM to 5:00 PM : The brainstorming exercise into the chosen approach begins and quickly devolves, individual differences surface, the financial calculations go haywire and hypothesis that sounded well founded earlier, now under scrutiny of break-even, NPV and EMV analysis seem shaky. It is 5 PM and we are no way near the place where we aught to be.
5:00PM to 7:00 PM: After a cup of coffee and coke we get back to work, two people begin work on the powerpoint slides, one is digging into research papers that could support our hypothesis and I begin work on the financial & sales projections… pie charts, trend lines… the whole package…
7:00PM to 8:30 PM: We begin putting the whole presentation together, the slides, charts and embed the excel sheets showing the forecasts and financials. Things are looking good, then just then we realize that the forecasts are not in line with one of our hypothesis. We work on it, augment the hypothesis and recast the forecast and it just about fits… We call it a day
Day 2
7:30 AM – 8:30 AM: We burn the powerpoint presentation onto the CD and turn it in.
9:00 AM – 9:30 AM: Our case presentations. It goes well, we rush a bit but we feel that we answered the questions well, one of my teammate has a concern that we did not spend much time in the presentation on the financial and forecast number projection and the process used to arrive at them and it might hurt us…. His concern is overshadowed by a self confident feeling of the team… However his concern turns out to be prophetic.
12:45 PM – 1:30 PM : Results are declared, we do not win.
1:45 PM – 2:00 PM : Feedback session for the presentation – I am usually very skeptical about the feedback session, but this was very informative and extremely beneficial. These 15 minutes were the best part of the past 36 hours.
We lost, but it was great fun! I wanted to write more in this post about what we did wrong and what we did well, the feedback we got… but i am tired. The 14 hrs of intense mental workout are making we feel a bit tired and sleepy. I will write about it, some later day.
Treasure chest hidden at the depth of your soul
INSPIRATION! That is the treasure chest hidden at the very depth of your soul. Unaware of it’s existence we spend our life looking for it at every other place except inside our very self.
It is strange when we say that we are inspired by a movie, book, poem or deed; like inspiration was some kind of a foreign feeling that we derived from these objects or deeds. It is more likely that we forgot what resided in our own self and these things just reminded us of what we had forgotten. Cowards don’t become heroes because they read a book or faced something that inspired them, it is the brave that become heroes because the same things remind them of what they have forgotten, bravery. It is like ‘if he can do it then so can I’, that feeling of self confidence that rises like a Phoenix from it’s ashes. So when we search for inspiration we don’t search for something that we don’t have, we search from something that would remind us of what he already have and bring it to the surface like a catalyt does in a chemical reaction.
People find these catalyst in many things. I find them mostly in movies and sometimes in books. The journey of Duny who was later named Ged and became known as Sparrow Hawk in A Wizard of Earthsea inspires me more than any other story i have read.
Legacy
My professor of Organization Behavior, ever so frequently stresses on LEGACY, he says that it is the thing most business leader think about the most when they come into the twilight of their careers, when it is almost too late to leave the kind of legacy they want to leave behind. That got me thinking about what do i want my legacy to be, and i could not come up with anything instantaneously. The more i thought about it, the more it became clear to be that without an enduring legacy to leave behind, my life would not have matter. We always think of short and long term goals, but these goals range from 2 to 20 years. But legacy i guess is beyond that, the ultimate long term goal. So i thought it would be easier to start with immediate goals and how they lead to my legacy but that is a rather backward way of looking at it. It should be the other way round, your legacy must lead to your immediate goals and define all the actions that you take.
So what do i want my legacy to be? I want to be a person who is remembered as great a mentor who enriched the life of those he touched, the one who not only helped build & grow businesses, but also changed the landscape of the industry that he was a part of.
To leave this kind of legacy, at some point I need to be part of organizations like CII, FICCI or NASSCOM, the kind of organizations that set the tone for the direction an industry of a nation takes. I will begin my career in operations and strategy consulting, this way I will be able to work with a diverse scattering of organization and rise quickly along a steep learning curve. After working in the consulting industry for 4-5 yrs I will then take up a role in a large multinational conglomerate or a holding company and rise through the ranks into the C-suite. This may take a decade or more, it will be hard, there will be politics and bureaucracy, but the i guess one needs exposure and experience of leading large diverse organizations if one dreams of impacting an entire industry. A C level designation would be a perfect segway into a facilitator role into organizations like FICCI or NASSCOM, from here on the real work begins, to make INDIA what it aught to be, a economic powerhouse. These are just the broad strokes of my master plan :p
So what do you want your legacy to be ?
SEO – Search Engine Optimization
This intrigued me… I first heard about SEO about couple of years ago from one of my friends who was talking about this new idea of “human powered” search engines like Mahalo and the basic contrast with existing “crawler” search engines like Google. He was explaining to me how crawlers work and how SEO process tries to adapt\mold the website to make the content inside the website look juicy to the search engine. If you think about it, SEO is quite beautiful it has a single clear goal with a limited number of broad alternatives to achieve that goal, but each alternative is quite deep.
We now have firms that will provide this SEO service to websites, in business sense one can think of this as a add-on or adjunct to the marketing function. They(the SEO optimization experts) would aim to ensure that the website would show up in the first few entries in the search engine so that people will follow the links and incoming traffic to your website increases, thereby increasing your reach to the target customer i.e. you and me. SEO is a marriage of technology and marketing. When we talk about SEO we can think of the content on you website as the product, the crawler your customer, who, if it likes your website will be kind enough to rank your website highly so that it can list higher on the search results and then the other things will follow.
SEO is a growing niche expertise. As the magnitude of information on the web increases with the easy access to this information controlled by search engines and access been everything SEO industry is bound to prosperous for the foreseeable future
PS : I had my first marketing class yesterday. I am an operations guy and marketing does not catch my fancy. But strangely I liked the first lecture on marketing nonetheless I loved the operations lecture that followed 
