Election Update and preparation for second year

No surprises. I did not win. Well, I did not think I could win in the beginning. Still I joined the fray to communicate my points across. However after my successful pitches, position statement and promotion of this blog to convey my views gave me some hope. There were quite a few friends who supported my bid to contest as well.

Good learning for me from this campaign was that two minute pitches can be quite valuable to communicate one's passion. Many people came to me later and extended their support. I wanted to raise the issue of increased role of GSC. I think I succeeded in my goal.

We have several intensive tracks such as management, high tech, entrepreneurship, etc. There are information sessions run by different departments to promote their tracks. I have not attended any yet. Most likely I would take Technology Intensive Track. One does not need to participate in any such program and can always take courses from different areas.

GSC and second year students have been helpful in collecting student feedback across all courses and about professors and send us a nice spreadsheet by the end of their term. It is very useful information. Otherwise I may have to rely on quantitative/survey analysis run by the graduate school and also it is a very tedious process as I have to search one by one.

Operations and organizational structure

In Babson we have eight streams covering various aspects of operations in this module. It is a mixed bag. Some classes you love the discussions and in some, you do not. In organization structure and design, we were presenting our restructure recommendation for two different companies, a small auto parts manufacturing company and another a software startup. The first one was the toughest as it was evident from the weaknesses exposed in every one's proposal. Well, how do you lead an age old company, say a mine, where you do not need special skills and every one is hourly paid?

I wonder what if business schools integrate people without any formal education, but with experience, to attend such leadership and management classes. We may have more practical discussion than those 30000 feet hands-off view and impractical recommendations.

I thought I might be contributing very less in class room discussions this module compared to quantitative module II, last semester. To prospective students with engineering background, you have a lot to offer in classes. Instead of apologizing for your background you can really differentiate by explaining how you can contribute your experience to class room learning.

exams, ethics and BCAP

Exam fever started a week before the exams began. I enjoyed the CSCA-strategy exam analyzing Robert Mondavi case written in 2001. It was a group exam and we had one day to work on. It was one of the rare occasions our study team sat together to answer. I like my study group a lot because we did not need to have face-to-face meeting a lot. We have gotten better and better at doing group assignments over email. I was satisfied with the results we submitted for CSCA.

We have ethics stream for the past two modules. Do not get me wrong. I am very interested in the subject. However, the classes were so boring and made me wonder why we have this subject at all. I think it is there just to please the potential employers: "look we teach ethics too". I wonder how students at other schools think about their coursework.

Now, we are busy with our BCAP (a year long consulting project with real companies). We are studying the enterprise software industry. Babson has access to very good online resources. I am getting familiar with a bunch of them. In Fall we do the industry analysis and in spring we focus on the sponsoring company and they problem they ask us to look at. We will know the sponsoring company next monday.

I will be attending Cyberposium organized by HBS this Saturday. We at Babson get more and more invitations from HBS and MIT events. More on that cyberposium next week.

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.