Rural marketing:

Learnt stats and hard facts about Rural India. Read the book “Everyone loves a good drought”. Listened to well-prepared presentations of my colleagues on various aspects like Credit card for Rural India, Media for Rural India, Rural Entrepreneurship, Healthcare in Rural India, Summary of a Rural Visit [Day-to-day real facts]. Prepared [still preparing] aVulnerability Analysis on Agriculture industry. Listened to practical gyaan from Prof. Harish Bijoor. He has spent quality time marketing to Rural India. He knows thoroughly what Rural is, How much potential lie within Rural India.

But one disappointment to me is that there were not many case studies on successful Rural marketing. There were moments of brilliant insights in the class. He is a great speaker. Excellent communicator. Has the ability to keep the audience engaged even for a vague topic. Unfortunately he didn’t have much of content to offer us. We had few cases like Dabur, Himalaya Drug Company, Jhunjunwala.com. But nothing much was discussed about those cases. It was just a reading. If there is one thing that happened in the class, it’s the enrichment of ‘Social responsibility’ in us. This course brought us closer to some hard-to-believe realities. I have this sense of urge to do constructive work to Rural India, somewhere down the line.

Knowledge Management:

The course began with two key questions in mind. How to encourage employees to share knowledge? How to encourage employees to reuse existing knowledge? There were peripheral questions like, How to foster knowledge creation and knowledge sharing in the same environment? How to replicate knowledge at mass-level (Copy-cat)?.

Learnt about few frameworks on knowledge management [Boisot’s I-space model, Framework for Organizational integration, Nonaka’s knowledge spiral]. Read dozen HBR articles on Knowledge management, Stories about knowledge management in firms, some ways to overcome the challenges in managing knowledge. Listened to presentations on experiences of my colleagues in managing knowledge in their firms. Listened to CKO, Mr. Raghunath of Wipro, about KM in Wipro.

Prof. Mani Subramani taught us this subject (He is teaching for the first time in ISB). He also took the ‘Managing IT’ for us. He is a very knowledgeable person. One will appreciate his knowledge and subject expertise when he/she interacts with him one on one…His expectations from the students are quite different from what students are expecting from him. He wants each of us to reflect the readings/concepts on our past experience. It took quite a while for many of us to understand the importance of that. But inclusion of more cases in the course will help the learning. Due to the vagueness and still-evolving nature of the subject, it’s very difficult to benchmark this course with other courses.

But at the end of the course, the questions that we began the course with, still remains unanswered. The reason: There is no prescriptive solutions available. There are only descriptive solutions available. Finally it boils down to our JUDGEMENT.

Managing IT:

The course exposed to us key technologies available in today’s world, which the firms can harness effectively to maximize the value. We dealt briefly about ERP, CRM, DataWarehousing, RFID, EAI etc., and about IT governance, Knowledge management, IT infrastructure management and IT-enabled Business transformation.

Again, listened to the presentations of my colleagues on their experiences with various technologies and how they applied the technology to create value for firms.

Loads of HBR readings were suggested. I haven’t read few articles yet. Planning to complete the reading soon. Couple of case-studies were also involved [one about Enterprise integration in Cisco and other about CRM in RBC Bank].

One take-away that I can think of about this course is that it gave us an opportunity to think about technology solutions from client’s perspective and not from IT services perspective. Looking the technology from other person’s shoes changes our perspective big time.

Negotiation Analysis:

Undoubtedly, the STAR subject of the TERM. This course was entertaining and of high practical value. Prof. Dishan Kamdar is a highly energetic person. His passion, distinctive accent, chubby personality, approach to the subject won the respect of the students.

The coursepack had excellent articles on “Negotiation”. The interesting part about this course is the role-play. Every session was filled with some form of role-play [Individual negotiations, dispute management, Multi-party negotiation, Inter-group negotiation, Ethics in Negotiation etc.,]. Also showed us video on ‘12-angry men’ and ‘American Dream -union negotiation’. At the end of the course, he gave us another coursepack with 12-15 ‘all-time best HBR & MIT articles’. According to him, It’s a memorabilia to students.