About technology and men of mystery
Some items that caught my attention in the last couple of weeks:
The latest version of Windows, the new
Vista has been released with a lot of fanfare. Initial reviews suggest that it is a bit of a dampener. The large number of options (for want of a better expression) provided in this version are an overkill says
this report. There are 9 ways to shutdown your computer in the new version. A blogger who worked with Microsoft for 8 years before joining Google, recounts how
too many cooks spoilt the broth.
The former Russian spy,
Alexander Litvinenko, died under mysterious circumstances on November 23rd after a Plutonium 210 poisoning. He met up with an Italian academic and a football loving Russian spy turned businessman on the 1st of November. He was, as it emerged later, poisoned on the same day. Health authorities at first thought it was a harmless case if indigestion when the former KGB employee reported sick, inspite of his insistance that he had been poisoned. He lost hair and health and eventually on 19th of November, the poisoning theory was accepted. But then, it was too late, and Litvinenko died within a few days. In a letter written days before his death, he blamed Vladimir Putin, the Russian Prime Minister squarely for his murder. For a month preceding the poisoning, Litvinenko was investigating the murder of a staunch Putin critic, Anna Politkovskaya, on 8th October 2006. Read about it
here and
here.
Life and times
Black Out happened ten years and two weeks to date.
trekking+sports+movies=6th term
Last three weeks have been like no other consecutive three weeks of my life.
I reached the snowline twice in two weeks and have been playing sports the whole of last week.
After the BIDM paper got over on Sunday, the 11th of December, fun started. I set out for McLeodganj( in Himachal Pradesh) with Dilip, Anoop and MPK on tuesday evening for what turned out to be the best travel trip of my life.
Hey, hows life?
Hows life?
What are you doing these days?
Whats up?
Hows it going?
I come across this question very often these days. You go to a new place and old friends/acquaintances become old and when you meet them once in a while, both go 'Hows life?' 'Howre u?'. When I get these questions ( it could be in a conversation or a message/mail), I immidiately take a step back and try to look at my life in entirity and try to put it all in a few words and fail. Then I try to be a sport. I try to say something interesting. But, I often I end up shrugging and mumbling "aawww........nothing... so.... what's up with u?" and throwing the ball promptly into his/her court.
This question is probably meant as a conversation starter. When it is new acquaintances, there being no existing threads of conversation and both needing something to start talking about start " So, hows life...". That means I do not have a preference for a subject, you choose. Then it is left to the second guy to think of something. Generally one of the guys finds something to talk about and the conversation picks up. However, it is very painful when both parties are quiet people. Both parties go "Fine" then knit brows and nod heads trying to think of something.
Even good acquaintances/ friends are occassionally lost for things to talk about. Then too one goes "Whats up?" " Howre things?". Then take a deep breath, think of things interesting that would interest the other person too, and go on. Or say something and hope the other person finds something interesting about it.
After a certain amount of time in a new life, you stop noticing most of the things about it. So what would have struck you as intersting or wierd at first, dosnt do so anymore. For example, that MBA requires a degree of discipline that would seem stifling to a free spirited engineer is forgotten after a while when he asks u about ur life. Or that B-school has more girls who are also very approachable. And a hundred other things. And it requires the context to be laid out before one can talk about specifics like what you think about a particularly painful prof. So when you meet a friend from long ago or a brand new one with a different way of life, you face a virtual deadlock. It would take a long time to tell him/her about it ( bring him upto speed) since you have yourself lost the outsiders perspective and cannot identify things that he/she would find most striking, and explaining some interesting event would need laying out of some background about your life. Very awkward. One then settles for "umm......the usual stuff.... what's up with u?"
Now, "Hows life?" could in itself be a topic of conversation. I will start on it, the next time somebody asks the question.
Summer training report
The summer training at LPS Bossard has been a good experience. I came here and was allocated a guide, the SCM head. He defined the scope of the project flexibly. The target was to reduce the excess inventory the company is having(40% of the inventory) to zero (what was he thinking?). I did not realise how ambitious the target was then. I absorbed everything about the existing system talked to everybody on the scene( and behind it- unnecessary addition, this 'behind the scenes' part, but I couldnt help it) which took me close to a month.I had started out by thinking that it was purely a software problem. But over the period, I realised that it was as much about people as it was about technology.
Then came the time to do something about it. I realised that I had not thought about implementation at all! I had just looked at the project as one of those mental exercises to find out what went wrong where. But using what I found out to improve things had to be done by me too! I remember feeling stupid( all the memories of my past failures in getting things done, like the NTMIS survey in 2nd year engineering came back).
I started with a heavy heart, overcoming a strong repulsion( the kind you feel when you are next up on stage, or like before my kannada play in primary school). I decided to plan better for risk buys and stop sales order deletions( and left out the software improvements part out completely after getting abused by IT) . I opeartionalised my ideas and devised an excel tool for making work faster and easier for the purchase team( which was a deviation from my target of devising a planning tool :-( ). I could not push it through! As luck would have it, not a single sales order( the document that would trigger the operation my tool was designed to speed up) came in two weeks! I also could not follow up on the promising statistical tool( time series forecasting) either the one that would solve their planning woes. I plan to push them to adopt my automation tool though, before I leave, and thus make something out of the big waste of effort.
As all this was happening, I also did an analysis of the existing inventory along with Prateek( Mote)and singled out quantities of 65 items that could be disposed off( worth 85 lakhs). Again follow up with sales( follow up is everything!). It resulted in 8 lakhs worth of items getting sold. Hurray!
That is a Return On Investment of almost 16000% for the company.
( 2 Summer trainees cost the company 50k)
I have, over the two months, lost all interest in learning theory and models. Bah!!!
I had some fun on the side- caught up on my swimming, visited Delhi on weekends so much so that I now know Delhi better than I know Bangalore, read 2 autobiographies( my tastes have become progressively tame and boring over time), watched lots of movies on TV and generally goofed around with the bongs and the hyderabadi.
And my hair is just four inches long.
On project submissions
I did not sleep the whole of the night between sunday and monday. That was because of the marketing management assignment submission. It was a study of the distribution channels of the alcohol industry in Lucknow. I had bravely but naively assumed that I could do it myself. But it turned out to be much more time consuming than i had thought, and had to wake up the rest of the team in the middle of the night to do their bit. The submission ended on a dissatisfying note for me, as there was a misunderstanding, the editing of the report cut out the meaty part of my analysis. All in all, the whole thing left a bad taste in my mouth.
So, to shake off the fatigue, I had to sleep the afternoon and the evening off yesterday. I woke up for dinner, and the hyped Southern Spice dinner( Southern Spice is a eat out in Lucknow which specialises in South Indian food; the Mess arranges special dinners sponsored by willing restaurants once in a long while) turned out be worse than the usual fare. There was only roti and dal available when I reached the mess as the food brought by the organizers had gotten over. I chose not to wait for the second order to arrive( which would have taken half an hour) and instead had a masala dosa in the canteen.
After the marathon effort on the marketing project, I needed to unwind. I worked on my part of another project report for a couple of hours and then watched a movie, Enemy at the Gates which I liked immensely( why did I not watch it before?) except that the ending was missing. Then I watched another movie 'wild things' and another today, 'Raising Victor Veigas' which is very good.
Then I sat down to write this blog. By choosing to write now, my first ever, I am consuming valuable time that would be well spent on the project report on job hopping in the Indian Industry that has to be submitted tomorrow.
MBA education stresses a lot on projects, reports and presentations because that is one way to make people work in a group, which we would be doing so much of in our jobs. We also need to get enough experience making those presentations and reports( my friends in the software industry assure me that managers in their companies make a lot of those). Many of these projects are on topics and matters where one cannot come up with tangible recommendations because of the nature of the subjects( which are unstructured). In such cases, one cannot do anything valuable in the projects. Also, because of the cramped schedules and the sheer number of them, most of all the projects submitted are not of good quality thus defeating any other purpose that they might have served.
Whatever the reason for giving them so much importance in the curriculum, these projects make life miserable 4 weeks out of the 10 that constitute a term.
This is week is one of those. I would now be leaving to work on another 30 page project report.
