INDO-PAK finals @ SPJIMR

This is what happens at SPJIMR ...



It is sure BETTER Watch a cricket match than do mundane Assignments and prepare for Surprise Quizzes.
It is definitely GREAT to watch a cricket Finals between India and Pakistan than any other match
It is almost AWESOME-O to watch the same with the entire college junta with the sound effects within the AUDI itself ....

Personal Selling workshop - Selling DimDIMA (Actual sales)

In response to the last exercise , all the students were organized into groups of 3 to sell a children magazine called DimDima, published by Bhavan's (Which also apparently under whose purview SPJIMR runs) .
The magazine as such, is definitely a hot seller in terms of content, marketing segment choice (Kids within the age group of 6-10 yrs) and also in terms of presentation. All that was left of this magic ingredients were us, a bunch of Marketeers.

Our Location : VileParle (East) - Near Railway Station
Our Target : 5 subscription copies worth 240/- each.
Our Strategy : Formally dressed, we shall get over to all the schools in those areas around 4-6 pm and sell it directly to the mom's waiting for their child.
Implementation :
We reached Vile-parle around 6 pm, much behind our schedule and dressed in half-formals .. There was much more than a disaster awaiting us. With the schools already closed, we first went on a round asking in the surrounding shops about the prospective customers in the area.

One of the Shop-keepers was kind enough to let us on the truth,"Here we have all Gujjus and Jains, you shall hardly find a single customer" and seriously he was right to the word.
We went across Apartments, and under each of them we were scootered off with strangest comments, "We have kids, he is studying in the 6th Std but he cannot read" so on and so forth.

One of the practises that helped us was, whenever we went to any apartment we approached the watchmen and asked him to direct us to the secretary and then explained our proposition to him directly. Most of the building secretaries were more than glad to help us and even gave us the exact details of the houses with children; but failed to mention that they were also run by tight-fisted moms :) Overall we had major fun, marketing to all those kids and moms and ultimately when we did sell of a couple of the issues all our frowns were turned into smiles. And not to forget the shopping we did after the episode and those endless Pani-puris :)

Lesson's learnt :
1) Know the market you are going to sell to (Here, Gujjus and jains are not great prospects)
2) Stick to your game-plan (Schools would have been a great sell)
3) Display complexity (one of our batchmates, went with their open laptop and utilized it as a show-piece attracting more customers)
4) Know the U.S.Ps
5) And last but not the least... You are not "Selling" a product but rather taking a market survey and in case the person wants to, he can buy the product as well
6)Take risks. We gave a couple of Sample issues to a few children as a freebie and most of them turned out potential customers

Monotonous Ramblings of the MBA head - PART I

        As the sliver of light enters through the flickering eyelids, the beam transports from the iris to the synaptic nerve creating a symphonic reverberation with another whisper of an mobile alarm; this cosmic serendipity acts as a cheap substitute of a shock wave awakening the senses of urgency, bedlam and chaos.

        As he slumbers across and tries to find out more about the hazy bearded picture staring across him with similar disdain in the mirror, he feels vanquished as if being captive of an sci-fi Asimov novel, struck between the parallel planets of yesterday and tomorrow within the confines of today with his brains fried clean of any other memories which he tries desperately to weave together but in the end the same questions float around him like jetsam. His only console is the adjoining zombie standing next to him trying to figure out the same as his other counterparts who have been queuing outside the hostel bathrooms.

        But he doesn’t get much time to figure out the answers to his global questions as the entire cosmos reverberates with the rhyme:

FE-FI-FO-FUM
         If you don’t want to come late better RUN
FE-FI-FO-FUM
        Either down-grade or follow the rules of the COC* Kingdom.

         Leaving everything to the same disorder within which it earlier existed, he grabs his essential items including the Laptop and the LAN cord he runs the last leg of marathon between 8.25 till 8.30 pm almost killing himself twice he launches himself as the doors shut down-BINGO he says, and then it hits him “What am I supposed to do today?”

         The healthy body it is said needs a minimum 3 Alpha stages of REM sleep cycles per day; the first of them during midnight 12 till 8 AM and the remaining two can be apportioned between 8.30 AM till 6 PM, depending on the GAS** quotient being liberated at any of the lectures.

         As he exercises his left brain, to synthesize a practical demonstration of the case study at hand he does an inventory check of his glasses and laptop, and later deciding on the exact opportunity cost decides to utilize the open frame of the laptop as the barrack behind which he could snooze off. ZzzzzzZZZZ !!!

         Within his dreams he once again goes into the land of oblivion; it has almost been 2 months of his existence in this similar state. Almost degenerated into a mechanical monster, his entire life revolves around pre-reads, quizzes, assignments and presentations; Quality seems to have lost the battle to quantity. Everyday he fights a lost battle against endless assignments armed with only the power of “Ctrl-C + Ctrl-V”

        His sporadic attempts to understand the pulse of the lecturer only ends up with strengthening his belief in the theory of parallel thought process “Two Parallel thoughts never intersect” and as these same thoughts from the profs whiz past him he can only claim ignorance.

        Even the concept of pre-reads does not come to his rescue, as with all other protagonists he lacks any time-machine to get back into the past to finish them on-time.
        Frustrated, flabbergasted and constipated his only recourse is to drown himself into the barrage of IPs, Road-Rash, FIFA and those endless GBs of movies.

         Rewinding past almost 3 months earlier, here was the same person who would read almost 2 newspapers a day and then smack off his knowledge gain with another magazine and then reel across figures of GDP and GNP. Fast forward to the current situation he can only count one figure GGP (GROSS GAS PRODUCT)

         Here dozing before you amidst the din-dain of a class is a perfect example of an MBA grad down 2 months into the production line of India’s TOP-TEN B-School.

To be continued....

        p.s: This is a part-I of my series jotting a different perspective into the much coveted MBA life. It should not be mistaken as a direct demonizing of this life; but rather to retrospect about our givings and takings and the quest to utilize every opportunity to the maximum and perhaps find out where are we going wrong in this entire rat-race.

COC* : This is a direct reference to the Code of Conduct committee which regulates the draconian rules of attendance and delay .
GAS** : This is special vocabulary that signifies the very essence of MBA ( It can only be felt, neither explained nor understood)
+ No Animals were hurt in the making of this article, but the same cannot be guaranteed with the sentiments of the MBA junta

SP's Alumni Magazines

Check out on our illustrious Alumni, through "SPANDAN" SP's Alumni Magazine

http://www.spjimr.org/alumni/emag.asp

Mr. Arun Agrawal (Country Head - Financial Institutions and International Banking at Yes Bank) will be interacting with us on Sunday(Sept 23) evening 4 pm, on ...

So many assignments, group works, presentations, quizzes and no time...
Are we missing out on learning and doing important things that really matter when we enter the corporate world?
Are we focusing too much on short term activities and losing our long term focus?

What should we be doing now to succeed in the corporations we are going to take up in a couple of years?
What should we really learn in a B School for our success in life?
What the corporate needs from a management graduate?


Just exactly what we need :)

A Relevant Management Adage... of monkeys and *&%#

Personal Selling workshop - Selling DimDIMA

Dear Class,
Dimdima is a children's magazine targetted at a certain age group. Please look up their website for more details on the magazine.This is what you are rquired to do:

• All have been divided and areas allotted, so stay with your area lest you approach the same customer.


• Please visit the allotted area between today and the 24th of September and sell subscriptions on Dimdima (target - 5 subscriptions each). Each group will be given a set of the Magazines.


• For each sale made, you are required to write out a receipt (serially numbered receipt books will be given to you), to hand over to the customer and one copy remains with you Utmost care has to be taken care of the receipt books. Each and every single receipt in the receipt book has to be accounted for. All the receipt books have to be returned, whether used, unused or partly used. There are two copies of each receipt. A carbon paper has to be used for preparing the receipt. The first copy has to be given to the customer while the second copy has to be preserved in the receipt book itself. In no case, the second
  copy of the receipt is to be detached from the receipt book Each and every subscriber has to fill up the subscription form in legible handwriting and to be given the receipt. The receipt no. issued to the subscriber has to be entered in the subscription form in the box
  provided for office use only. That way we will have the record of the receipt issued to the subscriber. For the convenience of the subscriber, (s)he has to be told to refer to
  the receipt no. in all future communications with DIMDIMA.


• Cheques have to be collected in favour of "Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan", payable at Mumbai.


• The subscription forms do not provide rates for international subscriptions. However, the same form can be used for collecting international subscriptions. The rates are Rs.1000/- for 1 year anywhere in the world.


• All subscription rates (Domestic and International) are inclusive of ordinary posting charges.


• An excel sheet (attached) needs to be filled and submitted with the unused receipts.

Finally each of you has to fill in the attached Word Doc, your experience
and let me know how it went. Please restrict your writing to the format and 2
pages or maximum 3 pages.

Initial review : This is a very good example of having a winner product, but only marketing is in the quandry. The magazine DimDima is targetted towards kids in the age group 6-16 yrs and in fact for all it's worth (20 bucks per issue) is in fact loaded with inspirational and knowledge oriented material; as i would say, "Toned down version of Tinkle" .

Getting into the market and selling this on a direct selling basis would be fun..Luckily i have got myself into a gang of localites and should not have any problems.. esp. when backed with a self-selling product.
As they say about selling ciggarrettes " It is cool, it is happening and it is addictive; what more do you need?"

MusiGally : A Musical initiative by SP Junta

Once upon a time, there was a group of four overworked B-Schoolers...
They heard Floyd, Mohd. Rafi, L. Subramaniam, Jay Z, A R Rahman, Jim Morrison, Lennon and even a bit of Reshammiya.
And as melody took over their bodies and rhythm filled their veins, one of them said, "Let there be MusIG!"
Presenting

THE Music Interest Group @ SP
here to promote anything Musical!
From the Veena to the Violin
From quizzes to RJs
From workshops to performances
From updates to shows in SP to concerts in & around Bombay
From discussions online (MusIG.blogspot.com) to discussions in the Bistro (first left after gent's loo)
And of course our own Crescendo!
We promise to bring more music to our campus than ever before! Check out www.musig.blogspot.com for futher updates

SPJIMR HRM Conclave - 8th September

Advocacy Vs. Dialogue

        It definitely has been quite a while since my fingers had singed being a GRE frentic;or rather Engliophile (Trying to bring out various nuances between very similar sounding words)as a few might clarify. After all which girl would have been interested going out with some walking-talking thesaraus who would rather confabulate rather than plain talk, perambulate more so than walk, fornicate if not f*&*k; it rather did lead to a lot of estrangement.

        So, when i suddenly came across one of our Profs explaining the differances between Advocacy and Dialogue... i was simply astonished, awestruck, fascinated, flabbergasted and marvelled.

here's quoting our Prof.
I read in the book a chapter 'From advocacy to dialogue and find following table

a. In advocacy the concept of decision making is a contest whereas in dialogue it is collaborative problem solving.
b. In advocacy the purpose of discussion is persuasion and lobbying whereas in dialogue it is testing and evaluation.
c. In advocacy the participants role is of spokespeople whereas in dialogue it is of critical thinkers
d. In advocacy the pattern of behavior is to persuade others, defend your position and downplay weaknesses. Whereas in dialogue it is balanced arguments, open to alternative and accept constructive criticism.
e. In advocacy the minority views are discouraged or dismissed whereas in dialogue they are cultivated and valued.
f. In advocacy the outcome is of winners and losers whereas in dialogue the outcome is of collective ownership.

        I am sure, that the above dialogues might not strike a chord with many of the readers, but i really urge everyone to give it some time to sink in.

        It has been observed that in general life, we come more across people who feel themselves deemed superior to be involved in Advocacy; but these exact arguments showcase how a dialogue is the right platform to be used if we have to propogate as a group.

        Maybe that's why we utilize these terms, "Diplomatic Dialogue and Political Advocacy".

        Leaving everyone with some thoughts for their own.

-Deepak