Communication stream and exam

Here is our schedule for this week:
Monday - Tech Briefing - Present a technical topic from one of the six streams (Data Analysis, Accounting, Economics, Marketing, Strategy or Law) and present in front of a group of 14 + a speech consultant who provides feedback on how you present.
Catch: You need to speak to an imaginary audience, assuming assuming the audience to be unaware of the topics.
You want to know what I presented? Read on.

Tuesday - final accounting class. I am going to miss this class. I never expected this class to be this interesting.

Wednesday - Send a second draft of writing assignment. Topic: You are the CEO of Whirlpool writing to the employees of the newly acquired company, MayTag, informing bad news - a plan to cut jobs during the integration process.

Thursday - Accounting Exam. Receive group exam question for Law/Strategy

Friday - Submit the exam paper

Here is the topic I presented in the tech breifing. P-Value, its meaning and uses. Audience: high school graduates planning to take some surveys for a company.

Events: Rocket Pitch Competition - Review

Babson organizes rocket pitch competition every year. This year, there were about 108 participants: current graduate/undergraduate students, alumni and some faculty as well. It was very well organized, presentation in four rooms were even synced to facilitate easy movement from one topic to another.

It was a very interesting event. One would think 3 minutes allotted time is too short. However, good presenters communicated enough to enthuse the audience and create an interest. As you can expect there were a few very good presentations and a few very good products. But, due to time limits there were not enough details to evaluate their feasibility.

I presented one too. It was about a niche product in emerging market. I thought it would take lot of efforts to convey the context. It did not. Though the investors did not flock to my table after the presentation, I got good feedback from a fellow students.

Overall a very good experience.

Law Stream: Microsoft Antitrust and NAP

Our law professor makes the classes very interesting though the stream may sound boring. He brings a theme each class and wears a tie according to the theme. The theme of Antitrust discussion class was Monopoly.

Here is the interesting part. One of the bullet items was the 2004 antitrust case raised by Japanese fair trade commission alleging that Non-Assertion Provision in Microsoft's contracts with Japanese OEMs . The case in point is: Microsoft signed contracts with a provision to not sue MS for any future infringement.

(You can google and get more details. Anyway here is my analysis of this issue)
If MS get some supplies from a Sony subsidiary, they can not sue MS for infringing, say PlayStation related patents. Oh!

Prof's theme was very apt, right??

Law stream is one of my favorite. I am learning a lot of new things which I have never paid attention to.

Career Path: Product Marketing in HiTech

Before starting my MBA, my plan was to serve in product marketing role post MBA and in a few years, look for opportunities to start my own.

Still it is a plan. But I wonder if it is the best way for me. Let me explain why I started rethinking about my plan.

I have an alumnus mentor (through Babson Alumni Mentor Program, AMP) who is product manager in a medium sized software company. He was very helpful. He came to our Olin hall one evening to discuss about our plans. It is his first year participating in this program. He mentioned that even after ten years working in this field, he still finds to describe his role clearly. Product marketing, product manager roles are often mixed. While he said product marketing is a great place to be in because of the interaction with pretty much every other team in an organization: sales, marketing, engineering and often finance, he mentioned growth is very limited. A few people remain in product marketing for ever(10 - 20 years). Plus, the pay seems to be comparable to engineers (and not greater).

My plan now is to do some research on how many people have successfully moved from product marketing position to become CEOs. If you have any thoughts, comment or/drop an email.

(PS: Here is the link to learn more about product marketing: http://www.pragmaticmarketing.com/productmarketing/topics/index.asp)

Text book or manual?

We have a data analysis stream in this module and our text book is "Data Analysis and Decision Making" and in smaller prints "with Microsoft excel".

I get it. Excel is good and authors may have wanted to make this book sell to non students? Nice try.. Wont work easily.

We also need "StatTools", excel plugin to do the analysis.

The book has instructions on how to use StatTools all over. It makes me think whether it is a text book or a software manual.

Letting go is a difficult job. How can I accept the software without understanding the concepts and its implementation? Hmm.. I am in the minority if I opt to create my own algorithms to figure out p-value etc. Well. I just have to believe in whatever the software does and go along with the rest. Or, I will lag behind.

My interest in MBA is to get into product management with a hope that I will be a better judge of a product/market and in a few years I can start something on my own. I am rethinking that strategy. Stay tuned for my next post for details.

Why are we after grades?

Is this a common phenomenon to go after grades in the first year/first semester? Or is it specific to Babson? Babson has an interesting way of assigning grades (EXC, ESP, MSP..) and later converting to GPA.

Too much of grade focus affects the outside class participation in Babson. I hope this trend changes soon.

We have monday holiday and next friday we have a day off to attend Entrepreneurship conference. (babsonfei.com) I am looking forward to attending.

By the way, one fellow babson first year is wondering who I am. I am surprised some from our school have started checking the blogs. That is a good sign. I will remain unanimous atleast for some time.

Second day in Second Module

Today is just the second day in module 2 (Assessing market opportunities). But it seems like, our work load has increased tremendously. In Babson we have "Streams" and there are integrated stream classes. For example: Strategy may share a class with accounting once and may share with marketing some other time. Interesting. But, we are still trying to figure out how to prepare for the classes. There are some informal reading groups. I am yet to join/form one.

Some of the other streams in this module are: microeconomics, marketing intro, law and ethics: