Pointy Haired Dilbert - Chandoo.org

As usual my alma mater had a rocking placement year with 95 companies giving 367 offers to 173 odd students, salaries seemed to have peaked to new highs with lots of excellent offers and opportunities for the marketing / BFS and consulting candidates. IT companies offered some of the lowest salaries on the batch, indicating the looming recession and US market slowdown concerns. Perfectly inline with real world.

You can view the report here (pdf link) Indian institute of management final placement report 2008

Congratulations to the graduating class of 2008 @ IIM Indore. Cheers

If you are one of those lakh and half souls sleeplessly waiting for your score / percentiles over the last 6 or so weeks head straight to CAT IIM and findout your CAT 2007 Score. This time around IIMs have done few really impressive changes, you can get your score by IVRS / SMS

The scores can also be obtained telephonically through the IVRS or by sending an SMS to 57333. To access the results through SMS, the candidate should send an SMS to 57333 as follows: ‘CAT < space > registration number < space > date of birth (dd/mm/yy)’ or ‘CAT < space > registration number < space > application number”
Example: CAT 5370082 030482.

All these will be available from 3 PM on the 8th of January 2008 [Source: catiim.in]

They have even released the key [pdf file], I guess that should put an end to the bickering few people create over how / why they got such low/high scores.

If you want to read more about GD / PI process head straight to PagalGuy.com or read my old articles on the same.

• Group discussion / Personal Interview Tips for MBA aspirants
• All about cracking CAT and other MBA entrance exams

Wish you all the best for the rest of the process.

May their souls rest in peace.

Two IIM-Indore students drown
Two IIM students drown in MP river

Its been 3 years since this blog is launched. well, slightly more than that as the very first post was published on July 1st, 2004, my first day at IIM Indore. What started as chronicles of an engineer struggling in a b-school later transformed in to a full-time commentary on business, advertising, technology and life in general. I am happy to have maintained the blog this far. Hopefully this will last for few more years to come.

To celebrate the 3 years, I have modified the template, made it compatible with 1024*800px screens, added another column for ads, removed the yellow color theme and added a bold header image. Also, provided a google custom search engine to exclusively search PHD. Try it, its very easy to locate any of those 450+ posts meeting your search criteria. Hopefully more changes will happen in the next few weeks to make this place a little better for browser viewing. Suggest any widgets, features that you want to see here, I will try to add them. Happy Weekend!

Related: Read Welcome to PHD post

Imagine this:

You have an important client presentation day after tomorrow. You are going to demonstrate one of your company’s products and convince the client to use it in her upcoming project. Now suddenly you realized that the product has a feature that you cannot understand, like an excel import feature which is not working since you dont know what template to use. You get the point, right?

Now, the problem is the developers who worked on the product are out of reach, lets say they left the company or currently in Bolivia. Fortunately you have done computer engineering or worked on VB (or whatever technology) as part of your pre-MBA job.

Your choices are,

- You could use your forgotten programming skills to understand the code / tech-documents and findout why its not working. If its a small thing, you dont mind fixing it. You do this because you dont mind using your other skills even though its not your job profile or anything.

- Use your contacts inside the company and get sometime from a VB programmer and sit with him to understand the problem and see how to get a work around. You do this because you beleive that you are not the best person to do this job.

- Ignore the particular feature for this demo. You do this because using your pre-MBA skills belittle you.

What would you do?

The combination sounds as inseparable as ctrl+c and ctrl+v. But when it comes to making a career choice there is a fair bit of confusion as to what an MBA will do in an IT company, especially in the first few years. Marketing companies have it easy, in the first 18 months, you would be traveling in delivery truck along with an often drunk driver in rural India trying to understand branding, strategy or trying to believe that you are actually understanding. Even banks have it easy, they make you an assistant vice president - customer relations and you would be given a phone and list of customers to cold call. well, not really, but back in b-school, most of us seem to have known what we do in banks, marketing companies. Few lucky ones even knew what we do in consultancies. But no one, I repeat no one ever seem to have understood what we do in an IT company.

• Most of the MBAs join in one of the industry / service practices in IT companies. The practice is a place where a bunch of experts work together to develop business, create solutions, support delivery and maintenance activities, do research & marketing and perform various corporate functions like planning, recruitment, expansion etc.
• MBAs typically have a choice to become a domain consultant, who will have immense clarity on what the industry is all about and support few accounts in that area or to become a sales person doing BD or BRM activities. They also have a choice to become project managers, but as I see it, PM / Delivery support roles are not so famous with b-school grads.
• BD/BRM roles are glorified and most sought after by MBAs, but the path remains tricky and takes ample time to realise the dream.
• In the first 12 months time, the MBA would have done several proposals, one or two requirement gatherings, quite a lot of research and may have participated in business / account / relationship planning activities. This may involve fair bit of traveling.
• Doing actual sales or consulting, interfacing the fortune 500 clients in the first 2 years is not possible, at least thats what I have understood from several of my friends as well as my experience. Instead you get very close to that by developing the proposal, solution, analysis etc.
• After repeating the same process for 18-24 months, MBAs get to manage small/medium relationships, be a critical part of consulting engagements or support on-site business development. Often this might take an year longer, but thats where MBAs would end up after first few years.

Do comment in case you have specific questions about the what to expect.

Related: Why aren’t IT jobs glorified in B-Schools?

The problem with (B) Schools is that, they grade you. You are A-pos or A or A Neg or B Pos or so on. The grading starts right from the first day first presentation, quiz, assigment, case study, cp and goes on till you leave the campus with all your bags.

So much that RG (relative grading) is ingrained into every MBA who leaves the school. After a month or so of roaming around, we hit the corporate world, the ideas of RG vigorously flowing in our veins. And what do we see?

• The world outside is boolean. There are no 10 grades for every idea, word, slide, chart, suggestion or thing. There are only 2 stages for them, whether people like it or they dont. Its that simple.
• You often dont have much choice to say, “ok, if it sucks so much, I am ready to take a C or even D!” Well, All you get is a pass or fail.

I think, this is something B-schools need to impart to (or is it in) students.

Related: game theory and b-school placements B-school jargon