12 Angry MEN

         Among the varied incentives of being in a peer group is that you shall be exposed to different experiences, different outlooks, different ideologies and the most importantly a varied set of movies. Vague, but true… when you are battled down 24x7 with assignments and hardly find any time or space to go out and enjoy your life, and the Laptop being your sole companion who accompanies you for almost every thought process. You figure out the entire way to exercise your emotional self would be to get exposed to artifacts in the form of news articles, documentaries, novels and abundant resource of movies that shall be available thanks to a few benevolent souls who cram it right up to their external HDD with a collection that boasts of almost all titles in the IMDB repository.

        Unlike my fellow MBAers, I would rather be on the left-end of the median curve as far as the numerical representation of the movie count.. when others boast of an average 2-5 movies in a day, I can hardly mutter out 5 titles which have been seen till the end for the past 3 months, and seriously this is a deficit I really need to work upon.

        A deficit that can only best illustrated best by the movie “12 Angry men” which had been sitting complacently upon my drive for almost 10 days. This movie has also been the chief inspiration for another hindi classic, “Ek rukha hua Faisla” starring pankaj kapoor.

        The entire movie, as the title suggests revolves around a single room, wherein 12 members of the Jury sit to decide the fate of a 18 yr old kid who has been accused of killing his father cold-bloodily. Despite this physical limitation of the room, the movie infact soars beyond within the limitless rationales of the mind.I must say, that this was the first movie that has made cringe every set of emotions without being overly made in any sense.

        When many of the movie reviews type-cast it as a typical “Achilles against Troy” syndrome, wherein one jury member who must try to persuade the other 11 members to acquit the suspect on trial on the basis of reasonable doubt.True that they may be on their definition, they however cannot illustrate the beauty of the movie by this single claim, and neither do I suppose I can also do entire justice to the beauty of this movie.

        Jury duty may or may not remain… but the relevance of this movie “12 Angry Men” shall definitely echo the many portals of corporate life across thy hallowed portals or board-rooms. The entire movie is a beautiful case-illustration of negotiations, influences and a perfect mixture of all the components that go along in a high-profile board-room meeting of today. More than how one Jury member convinces the others, it is a matter of how rational thinking can overcome personal prejudices.

        One of the quote that still reverberates in my mind after watching the movie is the one that Henry Fonda makes after he shows how the other Jury are making decisions on blind emotions rather than actual facts,

        “It is always diff to keep personal prejudices out of it
        Wherever u run from it; prejudice always obscures the truth”

        The movie has been used in management seminars as a case study in team building and leadership. The resolution-of-conflict techniques presented in 12 Angry Men have been analyzed and applied to employee efforts to collaborate among themselves to handle issues. The goal is to minimize or eliminate the inefficient micromanagement by company executives in areas in which they are unskilled and/or unknowledgable. This use is most widely seen in the Total Quality Management system used by the U.S. government as well as numerous private sector corporations.
        In a May 26, 1999 piece in the New York Times titled "Importance of Being Persuasive; Daimler-Chrysler Merger Made an Art of Making a Case" by Youssef M. Ibrahim, Jurgen E. Schrempp the ex-CEO of DaimlerChrysler who oversaw the merger of the two companies stated about the movie: 'It helps me put my arguments into words, focus on people'.

Need I say more ?

-Deepak

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 :)