(Prologue: this is an
autobiographical account of my journey towards getting a management diploma …I
have a WARNING for the readers ,though… This
article is definitely not for weak hearts..I am referring to the studious folks
. Also, as with any autobiographical account, the narration is utterly biased…
if you can live with these truisms, read on at your own risk…)
I will blame it on my Father; he
has this habit of asking the right questions at exactly wrong times…one such
favorite question of him to me is : “Son,
have you arrived in Life, yet?” So, after
my twelfth standard, I presumed that
getting an engineering degree would help me arrive! I struggled to get through my
Engineering course. With a lot of huff and puff, I passed the course and I had thought I arrived,only to find that my friends
were joining Ivy League and I was, roaming the streets of Chennai with an 1-page
resume on hand.
After the luck ran out, , I
thought a masters degree in engineering would help me arrive on the scene! With
a lot of struggle for 2 years…lo behold ! I now had a masters degree in
engineering now…I checked with my father…he nodded his head sideways ….I had still
not yet arrived!
And then I sneaked into the
corporate world in, due to what must have been the biggest hiring fiasco committed
by the HR manager…. My struggle to climb through the corporate ladder is
nothing to speak about..there was no place for me to land my foot or hand in
the Ladder! …. I looked around in Linkedin
and Facebook…I was left gasping… My college friend who had a world-record for
arrears and collected 3 mark-sheets every semester , was smiling with his LandRover
in Facebook page …Need I have to ask my father ?
And then someone whom I
considered to be my mentor asked me : “Have
you thought of an MBA yet?…you gotta to do it , if you need to arrive in Life!”
Now I was excited that I got a tangible way to arrive in life…
So then I stumbled upon the MBA
program from the most premier institute in Bangalore…only issue is they don’t
offer an MBA …instead they called it a post-graduate diploma…I consoled by asking
myself “What’s is in a name?” A rose by
any name should smell as sweet…So, I went into one of their Open-house
sessions about the program to check if they were indeed selling a Rose… The marketing person was smart and
read my mind and said…”If you do this course,
you are bound to arrive”
I was floored, literally… not by
the marketing person’s words of wisdom…but by
the program fee…It was a part-time program and they were charging a bomb!
…As I asked for the price break-up…he just said …”We don’t discuss price here…because we deliver value” (you can tweet this quote)…that’s the first management gyan I got from the institute …I immediately took out my pocket
notebook and made a note of it. I was impressed by the quote even though the
fee amount was depressing…anyway this arrival
thing was bothering my mind so much that I decided to join the course!
So I joined in….And the first
thing that blew me away was …Quality of professors that the institute has!
…They teach yoga , philosophical discourse on life and if time permits …some
management models as well !
I group the professors of this
institute into 3 typologies…(permit me to use some MBA jargon here)
The first type of professor is whom
I call an Yogi…: These professors
observe that the students of this part-time course do not have time to sleep
and make up for it in the class hours…so they begin the class with meditation….and
by the way, ….the yoga fee is included
somewhere in the fine-print in the tuition fees.
The second group of Profs, are Philosophers…they really teach us the
nectar, the essence of life…the core message of all is “ All Management frameworks are useless”… I wonder, how come I did
not stumble upon any one of these Profs. during the open house sessions…
The third group of professors are
the Shakers, whose face reads as: “Folks , I am going to shake the hell out
of you ” …these are the ones that teach the management frameworks…and they
demand what is called class participation(CP) …CP used to scare me so much that
I used to prepare for class participation (CP) …until one day, in the MPPO
class as the professor asked a question on Robert Cialdini’s Influencing
techniques , I started reeling out the 4Ps of marketing management. That was
the end of my class participation…It was a profound realization to me that : Spontaneity was not my middle name.
Then one of professors shared the
technique of private CP…although I
consider it proprietary , I am sharing the art of private CP here for the
benefit of larger population .Private CP works like this : right after the professor’s class, you gently
hustle the professor to Prabhakar’s tea
stall and engage in a small talk with
the professor over a cup of chai and samosa …this is a kind of
reverse psychological ploy on the Prof,. I suggest you do it three to four
times over the Quarter…In the end, the Prof. cannot avoid handing over a decent grade for you on the
CP…. because , what you are using here is in fact ,Robert Cialdini’s key influencing
principle of Reciprocity …(Oh my goodness…finally, I managed to find one
management framework that works in real life!)
Now comes , the most dreaded part
of the PG diploma program….the Exams
; Even though the strategic stakes
are low, I was amazed by the Intense
Rivalry among the competition displayed by my classmates on the Exam day …(I stole the line right out of my competitive strategy class notes…).
For the uninitiated , an equivalent of this in High Jump world will be like
this : Judge draws a line in the sand and asks the competitors to cross over
the line…however the competitors (my esteemed classmates especially DML folks) use
Fosbury Flop to cross the line ,unnecessarily
raising the bar for the rest of the class..
Needless to say, Exams send
shiver down my spine! and the exam results made me look average….below average to be precise. How
precise ? …If I were to write a novel on my MBA course, my title would be “Two Point Someone”. The toppers in the
class get into what is called a Director’s Merit List …shortly known as DML…I belong to what is called a DDML…Disjoint set of Director’s merit
list…I have to admit that my ego
cleansing happened due to the exam results…
To set things straight and be
back in order, I approached the topper of the Class on how to score better in
exams. The Class topper, being a nice,soft-spoken and gentle person ,leaned on
to the whiteboard and started drawing three circles and called it “Augmented
Experiential Learning framework” (refer exhibit
1 below).
I will let you figure out
whatever the exhibit means for you..but for me…(I am at loss of words here and I have to admit that I am getting a bit
emotional here) … it was both tears of joy and sorrow. Tears of joy,
because, I realized what was missing in my exam papers…Tears of Sorrow,
because, it was too much to expect from myself to raise to such high standards
…So, I did my own 3-circles to describe my learning framework (exhibit
2) .
I have stuck to my learning
framework ever since and needless to say, so too have my grades,struggling to
take-off. Nevertheless, I have a blunt message to the SAC President…”You got to
reward and recognize the members of the DDML as well in the PEHEL event” …I
have a sound reason backed by Quant …It gets a bit technical here, but I guess
you will allow me to prove my point …(refer exhibit 3)…Without us, the DDML folks of the class, the mean score would
have shifted to the right and all of DML who are in the right-tail would end up
becoming “stuck-in-the-middle”.
After all this ordeal, and as I
am nearing the end of the course, my
wife asked me a pertinent question.. “what
is your ROI of doing this course?”…I was flabbergasted, to say the least….I
tried to show my bunch of pocket notebooks filled with corporate gyan and display my inner transformation (whatever that might mean!)….Her facial
expressions suggested that she is not impressed.. Since emotions did not work,
I tried to become analytical and convince her with my economics knowledge ….. “Honey, every infant born in India is welcomed
by Indian government with a $100 debt on
head! …similarly every MBA graduate of the institute is given a send-off
by the Banker (who looks like a Bouncer at the Biere Club), waving the education
loan bond vigorously and reminding the student of his debt …So nobody, and I reiterate…nobody ,not even
the HNIs of the Class, get out of here
with positive net-worth!”
Epilogue : I graduated on 20th March 2017…After that, I had an appointment with my father...I did not have the guts to ask him if I had arrived !
Comments