Snapshots from Hell - Book Review

You remember Murphy's Law "When you want something bad, you sure would not find it "

Well, that was exactly the case with how i read SFH; Pre-MBA days was when i was highly recommended this book as a eye-opener to MBA life, but somehow this book was never the ones to be found across the Land-marks or the cross-words and hence this tale of a fabled Stanfordian poet had eluded... until till last week, when i just chanced upon this book (with a BLACK binding) when i was aimlessly perusing through the book list in my college library.

Serendipity or cosmic connection, i must say one thing.... this book makes a lot more sense if you read if after you experience an entire year of slogging in a typical B-School, for couple of reasons; Mostly for the part that the book does get a bit technical in a few portions and you really don't want to doze off reading something arcane even before you understand their depth; later on another advantage to read as a post-MBA is that you personally emote with P.Robinson's narration when you read the experiences of many of his characters who get lost in the rigmaroles of the B-Schools; and finally the real reason why i would suggest that you read this book after you finish your first year at any B-School so that you can Mock-Pump your Hands in Victory feeling that even Standford students grow the same misery and pain as good old self in a B-School.

In the irreverent and entertaining tradition of Liar’s Poker, Peter Robinson’s Snapshots from Hell is a hilarious and enlightening insider’s answer to the paramount question every prospective student asks: what is business school really like?

During his first frenetic year at Stanford Business School, Peter Robinson began keeping a journal of his day-to-day impressions which evolved into this book, the writing of which he came to see as a "simple act of decency, like going back to the last calm bend in the river and nailing up a sign that reads ‘Waterfall Ahead’." From his first harrowing days at "maths camp" through the dizzying phalanx of core courses, the frenzy of exam week, the pitfalls and triumphs of the interview process (including a surreal interview with Robert Maxwell!) to being wined and dined by some of the most prestigious companies in the world, Robinson’s story is witty, candid and peopled with a remarkable cast of characters.

A must read for all aspirational "Masters of the Universe" as well as MBAers, Snapshots from Hell is a fast-paced, first-hand account of the nightmare world of getting a top business school MBA, one of the glittering prizes of the ‘90s.

Do check out these links about the Author (who himself was a speech-writer for President Reagan before joining Stanford University) PETER ROBINSON

Couple of articles : Book reviews

SP Jain - In Black & White

Couple of really awesome pencil sketches of SP campus by i guess one of my super seniors; couldn't catch the name.. but since they really are brilliant uploading them with due credit .

And the original for reference

The Peaceful warrior...

Top Three reasons why i abhor SELF-HELP books !!!

Point a) They are really cloying and don't have a bit of reality in them.

Point b) They preach you practices that would otherwise be symptoms of Schizophrenia (Talking to yourself a 100 times that you are "The BEST" and stuff)

Point c) Ultimately they are hinting that you life until now has been a total useless waste of time (Why else would you buy a self-help book ... Duuhhh )

Apart from the fact, that today's modern self help books are a packaged deal selling stories from panchtantra, amar-chitra or the Gita i really don't suppose they would give you anything better than a pleasant good read.

At least that's what was my opinion till i kept on reading the likes of Shiv khera or Anthony Robbins; who would have mis-used the term "POWER within" to make it sound as if each of us are living-walking ATOMIC Bombs.

Everytime i finish any one of those books, i always end up asking myself, "All that is great.... now what should i really do ??" and it always ends up with those diet fabs, when you start with purely salads the first day and end up with Beer in the nights.

But one thing that has really made me wonder is the enormous business potential about the entire stuff; and that's when it all started to make sense... Lets talk of theirs as a Business PLAN

Mission : "To make buffoons of the billions of people around them to believe that they are currently plain Zombies and are not really worth their lives and only WE can change their lives, provided of course they buy our Books, Cassettes, CDs, DVDs, Tickets to the monthly shows, membership charges for the private clubs, host dinner parties, et all"

COMPETITION & Threats : The existing spiritual networks such as GOD TV, saints and celebrities who suddenly have realized about the money in this.
(Just think for a while... the modus operandi of a self-help guru is nothing different from those of a spiritual guru... Both offer to realize your life's worth, and both would give you WISDOM if you give them your money, and both talk in strange conundrums as if we were all in some "Matrix Movie")

Business Potential : If you count the entire Population of the world - themselves and other spiritual gurus - third world countries (who cannot pay) - myself

Marketing Strategy : With the advent of modern technology; their marketing knows no bounds... perhaps a few unique ideas that have till now not been explored
1) Advertise in those 1800-helpline numbers (well, a life saved is $$ earned)
2) Sponsor the annual Ozzfest or other heavy metal bands ( All the wayward youth are HUGE money)
3) Advertise in every Tooth-paste Tubes (Change the title from "Did you brush today" to "Did you listen to me today")

Now that i have given you lot to think about, you might want to mull them over these couple of seriously life-changing books and movies.

Impact Assessment of CII's GLSDI (Grass Root Level Skill Development Initiative)

The past few weeks have been spent roaming around villages in and around the kancheepuram district, which include the tsunami-hit while NGO-rich areas such as Marakkanam or areas such as Lathur & Thirukkunakundram traveling around 3 hours in either state-transport buses or clumsy share-autos (across bumpy village roads) doing
the Impact Assessment of their GLSDI (Grass-root level Skill Development Initiative) program, which has been successfully implemented across 20 villages and trained around 3000 and odd rural youth; training them upon aptitude and job skills to make them industry-worthy.

And let me assure you, neither the travel nor the TN heat which show any signs of relenting have made it an easy assignment... but as always it is the warmth of the village folk, their simple ways and smiles which have always given us reason to believe in this assignment.

To cut it short, CII's SR (Social Responsibility) wing has started this skill development initiative; wherein it has developed an industry-standard training module to enlighten the Rural folk about the industry-trends and requirements and also provides them with aptitude and attitude skills development. This course typically runs for 10-15 days and NGO's such as Hand-in-Hand are hired (since only NGOs have easier accessibility to the rural folk and better credibility) to in the first phase command all the village folk and provide them the training.

We did our Impact assessment over three phases
Phase I : Visiting all the NGO's and then taking up the initial data of the rural folk being trained; this data would then be used for sampling.
Phase II : Developing a Questionnaire and also questions for the focus Group Discussion.
Phase III : Visiting the training centers and getting data from the trained youth, the current batch and the trainers.

Overall, our assessment proved to be really worthy for the CII cause it answered many of the questions that had been plaguing them (more so, with regards to the mentality of the Rural folk and how did they perceive to be the actual effectiveness of the course) and it was also a real eye-opener for us when it came to the workings of an NGO, rural mindset and the actual truth behind industries.

We first made our presentation across to the CII director Mrs.Stella and then were slated to present it to the Chairman himself.... the presentation will again be showcased in their industry meeting.

Our Presentation to CII can also be viewed here Presentation to CII.ppt (Be patient..)

Pic : Conducting the Focus Group Discussion in Lathur

Pic: In Marakkanam and Lathur

CII's Rural Job Fair - Providing 450 rural youths employment in a day

It was almost weeks of effort that finally paid off.... the mission was to conduct a Job Fair for the Rural youth in and around the villages of kancheepuram dist in Tamil-Nadu; but the tasks were multi-faceted ranging from converting a barren land to a mandap which can fit around 3000 village folk, contacting and convincing corporates to participate in this as a Social responsibility venture, arranging the collaterals and the processes for smooth functioning and last but definitely not the easiest would be to get all the rural folk to the grounds.

To begin with, the barren site which we had to convert to the fair (16th April,2008)



And as the magic wand waved(19th April 2008)



And then the village folk arrived in numbers reaching 2800 and more, consisting of around 600 unemployed rural youth and the remaining were their families.

And then came the chief guests

(From L to R) : Mrs.Stella (Director, CII), Mr. B Santhanam(Chairman, CII), Mr Manikam Ramaswami (Chairman, Tamil Nadu State Council), Mr Santosh K Misra, IAS (Collector, kancheepuram), Mr G R K Reddy (CMD, Marg) ,,Mr Desh Raj (Deputy Director General, Ministry of Employment & Training)

And that's me sharing some lighter moments with Mrs.Stella and Mr.Santhanam who were also incidentally our guide for the project :)
The Execution team (SPJIMR students with CII team)

And with all the corporates (15 of them including L&T, Upasana Engg, Reliance Fresh, Unicorn services, etc) who did participate recruiting 450 of the rural candidates.....

For a few more news updates new india press , The Hindu , Business Standard

Invitation to the Rural Job Fair - 19th April 2008 @ Cheyyur

The Urinal Theory

These are troubled times indeed.... inflation is showing it's apogee; economic growth has almost grinded to an abrupt stop; and madonna has released her latest but definitely not the last album. But this post is not going to address any of these issues !!!

Very recently during my tenure as a software professional, i had been witness to this modernized version of "cattle farming". YES, you read it right... just as in those days, cattle were brought together in a congested market place, bartering/bargaining of the prices (The concept of settling prices is such a complex logic, that even share market pundits fail to grasp) and later on brought together and stuffed into a already congested coup.

Times have definitely changed, the earlier market place has been re-defined as a job fair, while the pricing is currently based on concepts such as CTC (whose logic still beats me) and later on they are all dumped into a single spot of recreation, named "CUBICLE"

And here is where the urinal theory comes to play....
In my initial days, i was under the impression that the HR folk understood the need-gap analysis and could load up only as many number of people as the number of cubicles... but as an understatement i was wrong.

Not only did the number of people per Cubicle increase (From what was an acceptable number of 1 person per cubicle to the current congesting 7 people per cubicle and the numbers are rising as a trend) and to add further discomfort the size of each cubicle decrease(citing reasons of un-utilized potential of around 21% air in each cubicle);

Until ultimately they even started laying off people who do not "fit in" (for the verbosely challenged people... "fit in" is a pun used for both fitting into the organization as well as fitting into the cubicle). So i did find out much to my own chagrin of fitting into a single cubicle with 6 other IT engineers, that the maximum number of recruitment neither depends on the project requirements nor on the cubicle limitations.

But finally, after truck-loads of research and intense brain-storming i have arrived at the ultimate formula of predicting the recruitment numbers
Deepak's formula for HR recruitment a.k.a the Urinal Theory :-

"The maximum number of recruitment that would be provided by the HR officials was be based upon the number of urinals available in the office, roughly around 8.75* per urinal"

The advantages of using the urinal theory is that :-
1) It explains the huge intake of software professionals in any project.
2) Unlike Cubicles, Urinals can neither be overloaded nor shrunk.
3) You don't need to worry about employees covering up the urinals with their personal memorabilia (just as they would crowd up the cubicles with photos and stuff) and hence laying them off would be much easier

p.s: The Urinal Theory is a dedication from my end to Scott Adams who has always enlightened me with the actual knowledge of management through Dilbert.....
*: The number 8.75 is actually corroborated with another theory called BS theory.

A Day's meet with L&T Head - April 4th 2008

It was the Chennai Job Fair that gave us a unique opportunity to talk across to various CEOs and corporate HRs about our rural employment model; and it also landed us with invites from them to actually help implement the model.... but it was L&T's Vice President Mr.G.D.Sharma who really interested in a very similar system in place at L&T, inviting us to visit their skills development & excellence center and if possible take inputs for the model, that we shall present to the district collector, kancheepuram.

So here we were, all bound over to Porur to meet Mr.S.Natarajan (Head Construction Skills training, L & T) for an entire day, not only to understand L&T's recruitment procedure but also to incorporate our rural employment model to scale their existing system.

There were around 3 hours of mutual cross-talk explaining our concept and understanding where it can be incorporated in L&T's existing systems; just to provide with a few points on how critical these issues are for L&T we have state a few statistics :-
1) Every quater (3 months) L&T requires around 900 equipped workmen.
2) But lack of availability they recruit only 300 who are in-turn given training for the next 2 months.
3) During the Training 20% leave within the first 2 weeks.

L&T is almost pursuing their recruitment process as a social responsibility model to give livelihood for the rural folk; when you come across the annual costs for these process... but still they run it in-house rather than out-source their staffing to any external third-parties; mainly cause they have to provide the training...

During our brain-storming we suggested a few points that was taken with great interest
1) During the training they must have a aptitude/attitude module, wherein the trainees are shown about the advantages they had in L&T and why they should continue working here (To decrease their attrition rates).... In fact this is a practical Business Plan venture!!!
2) Recruitment drives to be conducted on a monthly basis rather than quarterly across village centers, ITIs and diploma colleges (of course, right now these drives happen unsystematically)

The PPT that we presented to Mr.Natarajan.
To end with a astonishing note (Couple of buildings in their head-quaters)

TN Vision Summit @ Taj Coromondel April 12th

Working for social causes has never been so much rewarding .... Not only we are able to meet top corporate Honchos, HR Heads and VPs; we are able to involve with them in serious discussion at the same plane of thought... It really amazes me at most of the stages that these profit oriented people are even more dedicated and enthusiastic when the topic veers towards social upliftment... and i must add that this enthusiasm has definitely rubbed more often than not at our tyro arms.

What could be even more great, is when you are invited to a corporate summit which houses the who's who of the industry for a day long event along with great food at the TAJ.... of yeah Free !!!
It was really an eye-opener at the TN Vision summit organized by CII, at the TAJ on 12th April...

It started off indeed well with M.K.Stalin's trademark address (I really am beginning to get an affinity with him, since he has been presiding over most of the Top shows in town these days), but what happened afterwards was seriously food for thought... and it was not only industrialists who were talking about Rural development, Healthcare and the ubiquitous vision & mission statements but they were rallied on the stage with various Ministers of the state showcasing their achievements, roadmap and development for Tamil-Nadu.

Each panel discussion had members of the Industry sitting side with various ministers of the same field and each giving their view-point of how the next phase of developments should happen.

Of course, the first discussion revolved around the summit's moot point - TN Vision 2025 chaired by PWC(Price Water Coopers) with their Presentation on what should be done across the state of Tamil Nadu, which included from the inane promise of delivering one Noble prize winner to understated activities that have to prolonged on a sustainable basis for education in TN. But, personally i really could not relate much to a PPT ; more so as it was after all just a presentation and not a concrete effort in jumpstarting TN to the next decade....

The real show-stealers of the entire day were these two gentlemen ... Minister Arcot N. Veeraswamy (TN Electricity) and Mr. K.V.Kamath (CEO , ICICI)
I really admire the presentation skills of any politician, even though there is much to be said about their promises, but they can convince even the pope to become an atheist. And Mr. Arcot Veeraswamy was really brilliant in the way he started talking about the various initiatives that have been taken, talking about initiatives did you hear about the concept of "Staggered holidays"

Well, it goes like this the TN electricity board used to waste around 300 Kw of power every sunday cause all the companies were on holiday, so they decided to consort with the industry in a particular belt to give holidays on Tuesday and the other belt on thursday and so on... as a result they waste only 60 Kw... that is what i really would say "POWER OF SIMPLICITY"

Mr.K.V.Kamath's topic actually threw light about how civilizations evolved; sprinkling his ideas on couple of topics such as the dissemination theory & culture synthesis... of course, this was more so beyond the purview of the summit.. but i found it really interesting !!

Of course to keep the story short and sweet.... here is a pic of the Yin-Yan Dessert at the luncheon....