Travelling Soldier

Moving from blogsome to blogspot.Fasten your seat belts as the move can be overwhelming.

Update your feeds and bookmarks with http://mahendrakar.blogspot.com/

You will be automatically redirected to new site in 2 seconds

Last friday, neethi from marketing club managed to bring in Mr.Mehmood Khan,Global leader innovation process at Unilever to deliver a talk at MBS. Typically, most speakers do not engage audience and try to avert sensitive topics during the lectures ( atleast thats what I observed here..at MBS). But Khan was from a different league who literally hits the nail’s head and mostly on sensitive topics and some controversial ones too…!!!

After the lecture talk, we had some interesting conversations on emerging retail sector within India or other emerging countries. And if allowed, I can say we had some sort of tough questions bowled to him and he did answer them very well. His forte of answering questions revolved around "Value Chain","democracy" and "Economic reforms in India"

A quick summary of topics we covered in the post-official talk -

Microfinance, MicroRetailing, Kirana store, Rytu bazaar, Rural development, Young population, literacy, Unilever in India, HLL, and ofcourse Manchester MBA’s

tIn the end, he offered us to meet him in London..

About Mr.Khan

Mehmood Khan is Global Leader of Innovation Process Development at Unilever. For Mehmood, what has become prevalent in innovation is the issue of sustainable value creation. Unilever’s award-winning approach to this has seen Mehmood take all stakeholders into account in the product lifecycle. No longer are Unilever solely thinking about the internal players within the product lifecycle. Rather, Mehmood now considers all stakeholders who were previously not involved, such as suppliers, customers and universities in driving Unilever’s innovation process. This presentation will see Mehmood showcase the specifics behind this approach, and how it is enabling Unilever to grow as a business. Kudos to marketing club, who are way ahead of other clubs and have done second most memorable event..!! (earlier they were able to bring in TESCO’ Chief for a talk).

Yes, while Ivy’s league schools are making attempts to understand how there can be only one mistake out of 16 million deliveries of lunch boxes some of the schools do not know about this concept. While the dabbawalla(delivery guy) education is eighth grade, and many are illiterate, the dabbawallas have been given a Six Sigma performance rating of 99.999999 by consultants and a quality management system standard ISO 9001:2000 certificate.

Quotes from a chief of Dabbawalla’s

“Only the educated people have all sorts of questions about this and that. For a dabbawala, all he cares about is doing his job right and keeping the customer happy.”

“People recognize us by our Gandhi topi [hat] and our white kurta pyjama, which is our biggest brand,”

“We don’t use technology, we rely on manpower,”

“Big multinationals come to learn from us,”

Dabbawalla on Wiki

Indian Railways - Case Study of Corporate Turnaround and Recovery

State owned Railway industry, world’s largest employer, has seen profitability after long time.Couple of years ago, it was on the verge of bankruptcy. But thanks to Mr.Laloo prasad yadav, Railway minister for his turnaround strategies and to booming economy. Mr.Yadav was invited to Indian Institute of Management,Ahmedabad and other US premier league schools to share his understanding and strategies in making the railways into a healthy industry from deep perils. Recently, MBA grads from UT Austin visited him and indeed the charming minister did offer opportunities in Indian Railways with lucrative salaries.

As if the amount of attention which Mr.Yadav was not sufficient, successor of Jack welch and GE chairman Mr.Immelt said

"This is music to my ears that Rail Bhawan is now talking about unit costs, volume increment and competition. We did the same thing in 1980s to save the US Railways,"   

Financial Times Special Report

This week McKinsey has released a report on India’s Consumer market and there are very interesting forecasts and findings.

Complete report:

Audio Version :

Thought the report is quite optimistic - rising incomes, poverty reduction, middle-class growth, and greater opportunities, for individuals and businesses. But the good news is largely dependent on GDP growth in the rang of 6% - 8%. Some of the hurdles which can slow down the machine are

-Slowdown or backlash against the reform agenda -Poor macroeconomic management -Poor fiscal discipline -Lack of investment in infrastructure -Lack of investment in education

Download the complete report here

Financial Times:

Today FT published a special report on India’s Infrastructure and its relevance for the economic growth. The report is quite substantial but with few flaws in the way conclusions were drawn from the facts. FT’s conclusions might look very convincing to a novice reader but if one is careful it is quite easy to identify some of the flawed conclusions. Read the complete report here

Google has emerged as the undisputed number one employer this year, outdoing its previous record of no. 129 in 2005 to no. 2 in 2006.

The Universum IDEAL Employer(TM) Survey says Google is now the most popular place to work for MBA students, ending McKinsey & Company’s 12-year reign. Not just for management, Google also appears in the top 10 rankings across industry surveys including investment banking and healthcare.

• 5,451 MBA students participated in the MBA Edition the Survey, making it the largest survey of its kind.
• Students ranked their choice of ideal employers and answered questions about their career expectations, including their choice of office locations, salary expectations, best internships and communications preferences.
• Goldman Sachs – at number 3 on the list – managed to retain its position while Bain & Co. (4), BCG (5), Apple (6), Microsoft (7), GE (8), Nike (9) and Bank of America (10) were the other big names.
• Goldman Sachs also remained number 1 among students choosing a career in investment banking. It was followed by Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers, JPMorgan IB and Merrill Lynch. Bank of America replaced Citigroup as the number 1 IDEAL employer among MBA students interested in commercial banking.
• IT companies went up overall. Google maintained its number 1 position. Apple (6) moved up from seventh position in 2006, while Microsoft (7) jumped from the 16th position.
• Procter & Gamble, Google, PepsiCo, Nike and BCG make the top 5 for students interested in consumer goods. Starbucks pushed 8 positions from 15th to 7th.
• GE is still the number 1 among students who selected engineering/manufacturing followed by Toyota, Apple, J&J and BCG. Intel, number 2 in 2006, fell 15 positions while companies like Honeywell and Boeing pushed up in the top 10.

One of the best sequels ever made, can be the expression for the new movie spiderman 3. I saw the movie on friday along with my friend and the movie was made with a best commercial formula.

But the most interesting aspect was that the character of Peter Benjamin Parker — alias Spider-Man — had aged nearly 40 years from the time he first appeared in the pages of Amazing Fantasy #15 in 1962, to when he exploded on the Hollywood screen in 2001’s first blockbuster Spider-Man movie. And he certainly seemed to have aged well. But perhaps even more impressive is how he rescued the firm that created him. For Marvel Entertainment’s financial fate — and with it, that of Spider-Man and his Marvel superhero brethren — had been hanging by a thread.

In 1996, Marvel was in bankruptcy, its vast assemblage of 5,000 comic-book characters in a kind of hibernation. But new CEO Isaac Perlmutter understood the power of nostalgia among baby boomers and, under his direction, old characters were revived and reborn on the big screen through licensing deals. Thanks, to “Spidey,” as well as Wolverine and the Incredible Hulk, by 2004 Marvel’s revenues from movie licenses and merchandise accounted for more than half its $513 million in revenues and much of its $125 million in profits.

 Stock Performance in the last 10 yrs

Marvel’s resurrection from oblivion shows that superheroes are not the only entities with hidden powers. Businesses have them, too, in the form of underutilized or underappreciated assets — assets that can reinvigorate their core businesses.

Spidey into Musical :

Spiderman 3 was released in five languages(Telugu,Tamil,Hindi,English and BHOJPURI) throughout india. Nowadays, its very interesting to see that almost all new hollywood movies are being released in local languages throughout India. Its one way of improving the customer base by customising the global products with local tastes. And most of audience do feel the local version of the movies more funnier than usual.

And I was thinking to really entertain the global audiences, these dubbed versions can have the background scores of regional movies. In the context of spidey3, think of

• Tanhaaiye song from Dil Chahta hai for the scene when MJ leaves P.Parker
• Salman’s ‘garam chai ki’ song for the scenes when the ‘black’ spidey flirts around.
• Ofcourse, a title song during the titles and intro scenes.

Looks like Microsoft is making real moves to compete with Google. After google’s double click acquisition, microsoft and yahoo had to make new strategies to guard their forte and to get a share within online advertising. Though Yahoo acquired Right media advertising to boost its online advt. presence, it might not be sufficient to beat google.

Microsoft has asked Yahoo to enter formal negotiations for an acquisition that could be worth $50 billion. After this news, yahoo shares were up 18% and market cap is about $45 bn.

However,any Microsoft/Yahoo merger would probably attract the attention of anti-trust regulators.

The merger speculation comes shortly after the exit of Christopher Payne, who led Microsoft’s efforts to compete with Google and Yahoo in internet search.

The most challenging term of MBS MBA ended in March, and what a way to start a new term. The first week of april was a break (not really). It was a week where we had to form teams and plan our pitch for Project 2 projects. This is the first instance where we actually start feeling the difference between a MBS MBA and other mbas. Client with real issues offer project under various categories(interdisciplinary, marketing etc.,) and we have to bid to win the projects against our own classmates.

First term, was all about primary stuff required to be known and second term was all about managerial stuff ,international perspective, searching internships, working with more than 5 teams on different parts of the course. This (third) term is mostly applying the basics and principles learnt in the first two terms in successfully completing the project 2 , MIBS (PMOPMO  - its true PMO exponetial PMO) and about learning different models involved in business research.

Dr. Laszlo Czaban is teaching us MIBS for this term and everyone in the class enjoys his lectures because he speaks about various organisational aspects at length. Whether it is about SME’s in russia or different business systems in south east asia.

This term we have incoming exchange students from different schools and also a new stream of MBS MBA students who are bred in korea for the first two terms (with similar courses) have joined us.

After talking to incoming exchange students,  it is quite sure that PMO and MIBS are two courses which stand out in the diploma stage. The cases in these cases were handpicked by faculty and cases are quite resourceful to gain knowledge about different industries, sectors and economies.

One more thing, MBS has a legacy of conducting vital topics lectures every year. This is not particularly targetted to MBA students but to the whole school,  in general. Some of the very eminent business personalities share their ideas and opinions during these lectures. This month British Airways Chief executive,  Willie Walsh spoke at length on The Future of Flying. This lecture was quite a fascinating one coz he started off by addressing the imminent doubts within audience i.e., low price trans-atlantic airlines. He shared industry insights, personal experiences and his conversation with Michael O’Leary, CEO of Ryanair (rival airlines).