Exams are out and over. I felt comfortable while taking the examinations, with little confusion in concepts[Global Economics and DMO]. That feeling for me was a moral victory and I am not even bothering about what marks I will get, after 2-3 months of uncertain feeling in ISB. It’s amazing what a change in attitude does to one’s confidence. I normally tend to worry lot about the kind of image I create on others, and that invariably leads me into lot of inward consciousness and shortage of confidence at times. I just shifted that attitude and am trying to not worry about what others think about me. My quadie A is a big inspiration to me in that front. He looks very relaxed always and just don’t worry about things…A happy-go-lucky person!

2 Terms in ISB has passed. When I look back now, I am wondering what are the learnings which are of practical use.

Economics:
I hated those supply and demand curve when I had basic economics in my undergraduate days. But I realized now that anything and everything in the world can be represented in this supply and demand format. Somebody was saying “Economics is all about graphs”. I was wondering what that means. But Professor Krishna Kumar, who taught us Global Economics, also taught us how to apply the concepts in real world situations and more importantly to visualize economic situations in terms of graphs! When you learn a new language, you tend to have a lag between hearing the words and interpreting the meaning. But once you have ‘internalized’ it well, there is no middle level translation required. In the same way he almost took us to that stage by making us to intuitively interpret those graphs…Nice. A proper direction has been shown to us. It’s up to us to build the knowledge in economics, by consciously relating to day-to-day happenings. I am not sure how much of economics we will use in Professional front though. Anybody who has better idea can throw some light.

Buzz terms: ‘Consumption Smoothing’ [lifeblood of many classical graphs], ‘Keynesian and Classical approach’, ‘It depends…”, ‘Comparative Advantage’

Marketing:
The take-away has been the Markstrat experience. A wonderful simulation game. We were able to see the pathetic results of ‘hunch’ approaches and realized the importance of number crunching in marketing. But many people might wonder how number crunching and marketing are related. We also got few gyaan on marketing strategies, marketing research, marketing plan etc., Again I am wondering how much of this I will apply POST-MBA. (Most probably I will end up in IT services).

Buzz Terms: Many to mention…

Strategy:
It was nothing but case analysis. 10 cases related to various successful strategies pursued by companies across the world were discussed in the class. The companies were Coke, Intel, Jollibee Foods, J&J, McKinsey, Otis, CISCO, Nucor Steel, Dell Computers and Walmart. Each company had some competitive advantage and we analyzed those and summarized them as take-aways. Corporate Culture, Knowledge management, Diversification, Alliance Strategies, Managing high velocity industries, Managing High Asset industries, First mover advantage, Globalization were some of the areas that these companies excelled on. I would have appreciated if some India-centric cases were included. There are many great examples of successful Indian companies. Hmm…

Buzz Terms: ‘Sustainable Competitive Advantage’, ‘Value chain’,

Statistics and Decision models:
Hopefully this is the last of Statistics that we will see in ISB. We have seen enough of Confidence Intervals, Standard error, Normal distribution, Central limit theorom, hypothesis testing. If first term taught us the skills of Regression [Multiple and simple],this term taught us how to harness the power of computer for dealing with uncertain conditions [Decision making under uncertainity]. We dealt equally with Linear programming [Simple, Integer, Binary] and Monte-carlo simulation. These concepts will be of practical use. We will be constantly applying these skills throughout the course I believe. I will revisit these concepts sometime during this week…

Buzz Terms: ‘Shadow-price’,'Sub-optimal’,'I.I.D - Independant and Identically distributed’,'Correlation & Collinearity’.

Accounting:
We learned to interpret and prepare financial statements. That’s it. A more important subject for managers - “Managerial Accounting” is coming up next Term..

Only 9 more months in ISB remains…I have developed a bonding to this place. I will really miss this place when I leave ISB. May be that’s the reason why I am not going home even in Term breaks