Neophyte Braniacs, Amateur Strategists, Clandestine Traders, Flamboyant Bombay Pundits (desi version of the "Boston Brahmins" :)), and Stuck-in-the-middle muddled, brain-addled dilettantes like yours truly. Part of this elite, "( )"-ist (Is there a word for those who discriminate against the academically challenged like yours truly?!) menagerie but never fully at ease, my great Indian b-school dream elicits nothing but a yawn every time I put my thought at it. Two more lunar cycles, and im off to my hallowed institution to collect my degree with a couple of luminaries for speakers and some snooty professors for company, yippeeee....im burning with anticipation!!!
On a more sober tone, in retrospect I can’t help but wonder about my MBA. The "Mind.Blowing.Attitudes", the 1347 and still counting abbreviations to only accentuate the snobbery, Has this degree really equipped me with the realities I have to face out there? Apart from the rollicking whale of a time I had, and the reference number of parties attended (Well, that should tilt the scales a wee bit! :D), mine turned out to be more of a pedantic experience. Attribute as many reasons, as I may to offset the negative connotations I really think being a fresher wasn't the only cause for the experience.
Let me start, studying Kotler is all good. Making up gobbledygook out of the testing ain't. Studying business strategy was fine, the discussions weren’t. Learnin about "Challenges to HR" was good, being taught by a Dinanath-Chauhan-Headmaster look-alike was not. Getting exciting projects to work on was cool, copying from google was, well (not that bad).
Well, you are as good as you are think, and a bad workman blames his tools (Man, that’s about the maximum clichés I can handle in a day!).Not my bad grades withstanding, my current field of specialization is testimony to the fact that there was a lot left unread! Having taken up a field which hardly matched the subjects I read.
Not to sound ungrateful, I managed to squeeze out a pretty decent job that the brand affords, and my peers are doing great in their chosen fields. One goes to Egypt to decide which companies to be acquired, Other decides supply chain strategies for a product line at a top FMCG, Somebody else is slogging it out designing exotic products (in a bank, relax), Somebody else is touring out Singapore, Yet another decides the production for one half of India. We all got good jobs-Bottom line (??) ; no complaints....I mean isn’t that what we were there for??......were'nt we???
The fact is, Is customer satisfaction really that relevant, when you are working in a regulated environment and internal issues gain more precedence? Is selling bandwidth as a value-add product that important, when the fact is no-one looks at it as beyond a commodity. Is there a measure of brand awareness on direct sales? How do we justify discounted cash flow when the product life cycle doesn’t fulfill even a year for some products? Dealing with these concepts on a real-time basis is scary.
It was hard to imagine the profundity of these issues while listening to a grubby marketing "professor" teach us this stuff out of MS PowerPoint, with all the slides made out straight from the book. It was atrocious enough when my insight on the revolutionary promise of e-CRM ran into five lines, but when you have to appreciate the splendor of Supply Chain over the droning voice of a gentleman (luminary in his own right) you scarcely think that all this jargon can be anything more than just that - Jargon. Looking back, there are a lot of gaps in the style of teaching and the faculty could(should) have been better. Still it was an investment which paid off.
Am I thinking about another chance at this course someday? Maybe, when I have the urge to learn more about augmenting my experience with other functional areas of management. Naah, when I want to augment my pay packet is more likely!!!!!
Talk about pseudo-intellect.
