TechTalk blog

Some of our fellow TechTalk group members have started a blog. I hope we continue to be in touch through this blog.

Fun of reading

My course load this semester is not bad. Plus, I am enjoying the work as I have to read a lot for two of my courses, MTIE - Seminar and Capstone. I like the former more because of its quality of content. This week, we read about search, cloud computing, thinking machines and brain computer interface. You may wonder what the connection among these topics. Well, the theme is how a technology came into existence. Did someone "push", or did society "pull", or did some other entity enable. I wont get into the details of the class.

The fun part for me was in learning about Richard Feynman's role in thinking machines. I have read his books before and did not know about his role in computing. It is indeed a great quality to synthesize complex problems in to smaller pieces that you can work with.

For Capstone course, we have to read a lot of articles and the theme for the upcoming session is "Nations and Societies in Flux". To me, most of the materials covered were known.

PS: attention first years and soon to be Babson students: If you want to take this blog over after I graduate this May, contact me.

What got you here wont get you there

I came across a review of the book, "What got you here wont get you there" in Knowledge@Wharton. I got hold of an executive summary of this book through books 24x7 service. I downloaded as audio and listened while I was driving. I liked it a lot though I am not sure where I want to go.

It is hard to believe that I am going to graduate this semester. Speaking of second year, I liked my electives last semester. I enjoyed evening classes where we had students from all programs (2 year, 1 year, evening/part time). Many students came prepared way more than what full time students did (contradictory to commonly held that they do not contribute much)

In Spring semester there are lot of intensive electives (1.5 credits) which gives us more options. Well, technically. The new requirement of Capstone course (3 credits) takes away this freedom.

We had our first session of Capstone course on last Friday. It was really good to see all my batch mates at the same time. Our dining services came up with a brilliant idea of $5 lunch buffet on Fridays for MBA students. So, most of our first year cohorts ended up there socializing.

Here is something interesting that I observed in India on a local (not a long distance) bus - "MP4 Hard disk stereo coach".

Thankful to...

I just read a case/article for tomorrow's marketing class. It is about the story of radio. Actual HBS case title is "The introduction of FM radio". The story starts with Marconi and gives an account of De Forest. Builds on the contribution of Howard Armstrong and business acumen of David Sanroff. I am looking forward to our class discussion tomorrow.

It is unusual of me to write down what I am thankful for. One great thing about doing an MBA is about how much we learn over this period through these cases and articles, complimented by class discussions. I wonder if I ever would have paid attention to so much material in my entire life if I had not opted to pursue my MBA. So, my thanks to all those who had influenced me to do so.

I had taken GRE prior to my Master's and did not think GRE mattered much towards what I learned in graduate school. However, MBA is very different. What I prepared for GMAT is very helpful and am appreciating every piece on my preparation for GMAT. Thank you GMAT planners!

I had mentioned in my prior post about BCAP. It was indeed very well structured and our deliverables were very well planned that helped us to think about a plan and stick to it. Thanks to my fellow BCAP team and the program office for their support.

There was a great event today, a talk by John Dragoon, Novell CMO, on "Embracing competitors for the benefit of customers". We, Babson Tech Venture Group, along with Marketing club organized this talk. It was very well received and we ran out of pizzas!.

Capstone controversy:

At Babson, there is a requirement that 2nd years (and 1 yr students) take a capstone course to graduate. It is meant to prepare us, students on what is happening in the world. The less I say here, the better. Because there has been lot of confusion already as some the description (supposedly outdated) in the course catalog had "ethics", "social" and such words that tipped many students off. It is a 3 credit hour course and hence we will have one less course (or two 1.5 credit courses) option. There are quite a few good courses which are in high demand and people want to take as many good courses as possible. Given that, this capstone puts us in a difficult position.

The school's argument is that this requirement was published a while back but somehow many of us did not catch it. Further, this course offered last year had very poor students' feedback making my batch mates even more apprehensive.

I sincerely hope this course is good this year. Professors seem to be sincere to make a difference this year. On a side note, I am looking forward to this course because it would be good to go back to "cohort" setting as in first year.

After many people voiced their concerns, our dean arranged a town hall meeting to discuss college strategies but the capstone discussions took the entire meeting time. Clearly, this "required" course impact plans for many. All shared very legitimate arguments putting forth their ideas. We have to wait and see the results from sharing our concerns.

[updated on Oct 27th]
the town hall meeting. The My biggest disappointment is that the GSC (graduate student council) kept mum leading up to GSC even has a representative to voice concerns in the graduate decision making board. I wonder why some choose to run for GSC? Is it just to organize pub nights and social gatherings? Or is it for networking? Or just to improve their resume? It is very discomforting to see supposedly matured business professionals who might one day lead a company shy away from responsibility to represent students and choose to ignore this sensitive, important matter altogether.

A self serving individual representing GSC could change the rules for future students as long as he/she does not get affected. Last year there was a change to Honors policy (Read this post for details) to be effective after the then 2nd years graduate. GSC representative, a second year, had no problem in voting for it without ever consulting the first years.

I hope we, students, take more responsibility for the way college is run.

[Appended on Oct 27th]
Last week, I got to know a bit more information on what went on last year with respect to this capstone course. It is very interesting and comforting to hear that they had raised similar concerns and suggested very similar options to what we did this year. So, while my comment on GSC could be construed as accusation, it is not to question the intentions but the actions and the lack of communication with the students.

At least, last year the course was made optional. I wonder what is going to happen this year.

Preparing for classes

Preparing for case based classes can be very tricky. If you analyzed a lot, you may be completely blind folded by strategic discussions in class. Sometimes, while reading a (HBS) case, you would be lost in the volume of information provided.

However, one thing I have figured out is this: If you have a case to read and an article as well, spend more time reading the article as it usually is more important than the case itself. Pay special attention to time line while reading a case. It is easy to be lost and focus on unimportant details about a company. Very often, I skim through the introduction and later find that critical pieces buried in there. I recently came to know that our course pack (set of cases) can be accessible online. It is very useful especially when you forget to take cases to class.

I liked Harvard Business Review articles on Strategy: What is strategy, Core competency of the Corporation. Interestingly my courses this year on technology and strategy are well aligned to my continuing internship on corporate strategic planning.

Back to School: Exciting year ahead

Doing the same thrice in a row is no coincidence. Somehow, I seem to get the interest to write a post just a day before the school starts. I did the same in Mod III, Mod IV and now. I have a lot of things to look forward to in this year.

First and foremost I do not need to get up early as I have two classes in the afternoon and the rest with the evening students at 6:30 PM!

Options to choose courses excites me the most. I am taking Corporate Restructuring, Managing technology intensive enterprises (intensive track), global strategic management and M&A for Entrepreneurs. First and last courses are very sought after and the corp restructuring professor sent us a warning note about the work load involved. I know for sure that I am unlikely to end up in finance career. However, I chose it just for the fun of it. Interestingly M&A course complements corporate restructuring as it tends to focus on the soft/qualitative side of transactions.

My internship opened up new areas for me to look at in a tech firm: corporate strategy and corporate development. One alum I met in my internship firm gave a pretty good overview of the roles and how former VC firm analysts and investment banking professionals end up in corporate development.

In addition, a few friends and I are going to lead Babson Tech Venture Club and we have big plans for this year.

There are some challenges too. Our classes will include students from 2 year, 1 year and evening/part time students and scheduling group meeting would be difficult. We will have no room for ourselves, unlike in first year, and have to roam around to find a place to sit.

Course registration: Why do we need intensive tracks?

At Babson, we have phased and tiered registration process. Full time students get first preference and in phase I, we get to choose 6 credit hours (2 courses) and then in phase II we get to choose the rest. For people like me who have opted for intensive track like Managing the Technology-Intensive Enterprise (MTIE), required courses in these tracks would be registered at the end of phase I. So, it made my life easier as I had to compete only for one course. However, registration is not so bad as we have options to choose a course in day time or evening time and mostly we can get into the courses we desire.

Specialization seems to be out of favor at Babson. Many people who wanted to take EIT (Entrepreneurship intensive track) or MTIE have opted out to take a good mix of interesting courses. Hope school administration makes note of this trend.

After working on strategic planning in my internship at a leading tech firm, my course selection in second year have changed considerably. I find corporate development to be an interesting career option as well. Taking good finance courses could be very handy in the future.

I could not stop appreciating the curriculum after I started my internship. Our industry analysis in BCAP comes very handy in going through tons of research articles from Forrester, IDC, etc.

Why pay cash?

In finance classes, professors convince you that best way to acquire a company is pay by cash for several reasons. I will not dwell into those reasons. Let us see some of Google's acquisitions, DoubleClick offer 3.2B, mostly by cash, Postini for $625 M by cash. When the stock is doing so well and Google want to hire more, why pay by cash?

On a different note, I happened to browse GoogleFinanceBlog and came across this post. It is amazing! Ability to pull real time finance data from Google Finance is extremely powerful. If I had known earlier, I would have done all my finance class work in Google. Combine this feature with ability to discuss, share with a group and access to earlier revisions. Awesome, isn't it?

(updated on 11/2/2007) Here is a spreadsheet for you to take a look at.


Note: Make sure to check out both tabs. Both are retrieved in real time. To import income statement, all I had to do was to use this formula:

ImportHtml(concatenate("http://finance.google.com/finance?q=",A3), "table",24)


My internship is going great. I am working in a strategic planning organization in a tech firm. Could not have gotten any better. It is no coincidence that our research and consultancy work we did in BCAP comes very handy.

Oh yeah, our registration started this week. Babson is entrepreneurial in every way. Courses were (are?) still being created as we were about to register. There is a new one based with a focus on second life. Sounds interesting but I am not bought into 2nd life yet. I will wait and watch till Spring.

Filler: Year end update

I tried to blog periodically and still I got sucked into worldly matters and could not finish a post I started. I changed my mind and decided to just list the items I wanted to talk about.

Our mod IV was short, just 4 weeks, but was very interesting. I especially liked our final group exam evaluating which country should MTN enter, Kenya or Ukraine? Thats all the question and we had to figure out everything about MTN, Kenya and Ukraine and present our recommendations. Very interesting stuff.

I got this email about change of "Honors" policy in Babson. It seems we are moving away from Honors into three categories of "Cum Laude"s. It was touted as a move to make students worry less about grades. I do not believe that. The process through which the committee came up with this decision was appalling. One GSC representative participated without consulting the student body at large. I wonder how students in other schools get involved in such a high impact decision making.

Recently I attended a networking reception at Highland Capital. They had an interesting internship/incubator program and there were lots of people who applied to this program. There seems to be lot of activity in video advertisement space.

I recently went on a trip to Niagara falls. I am glad I went on a weekday. Less crowded and it was not such a painful 8 hour drive. Here is a photo we took.

Buffoonery '07 clips

Babson buffoonery'07 was awesome. It was so good I stayed for the entire program!

One great thing about buffoonery is everyone participates, first years/second years, 1 year students and faculty. There were pretty good cheer leading skits by faculty. My favorite was Top Gun.



You can search for Babson buffoonery to view the rest of the clips

By the way, just read the news involving Fuqua students. It is shocking to hear that so many people could be involved in this cheating.

Final week, Babson Buffoonery

This is our final week of classes in our first year. In a way I am going to miss the class because we will no longer be attending the same class as a group of 55!. Quite a few will choose evening classes.

In this final module, we really had to read a lot. We spent most of our time reading macro economics. Our textbook is written by our professor Prof. Marthinsen. Lot of material to cover but this book has good flow and makes it easy to understand difficult concepts. On the flip side, volume of content to be covered in class gives little room for discussion/questions in classes.

By the way, Asian Business forum elections are getting hotter than our Grad council. One person has created a blog and even registered a domain for campaign. Very interesting!

Babson has a tradition of organizing "Buffoonery" twice a year. 2nd years organize the fall event and we, first years, have ours tomorrow. I am looking forward to the poker tournament prior to the event. There are quite a few clips from previous events in youtube. Here is one for you.

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.

Election time - Running for GSC President

The Graduate Student Council (GSC) elections are coming up this week. It has created a buzz and a lot of people have stepped forward to be elected as council members. I am contesting for a key post, president, as well.

Here is my plan

• Transparency in the functioning of the GSC.
  The least a student organization can do, is to be open to all the students and communicate clearly what the council's priorities are.
• Play a bigger role by
  
• reviewing curriculum
  
• working with the office of program management on class scheduling
  
• working with the career development center to bring in services such as interview preparation, resume review, etc.
• having a representative on the campus student council boards to voice our concerns on issues such as the changing of BofA ATMs to Citizens bank ATMs in the middle of the academic year (this was pain to a lot of students living on campus and without a car to access other BofA ATMs) !!!
• proposing an increase in international business cases, so as to reflect the growing importance of global economy, and more importantly the Babson student body, 50% of which is comprised of international students
• introducing a bidding system for the Babson Consulting Alliance Program (BCAP) so that the selection of company/project is left to the students.
• Continue to organize fun activities but with an additional thematic "food & beverage" pub nights.

Apart from the above, I also intend initiating a dialog to offer electives in the first year itself.

We have been asked to submit a position statement and we also get to deliver two pitches.

Power of informal groups

I am part of an informal group formed to discuss technology topics. Slowly the group has got its critical mass and evolved into a casual entrepreneurial opportunities discussion forum. We meet once a week during weekdays at lunch and a lengthy session during Saturdays. These groups are great not just because of the topics discussed but for understanding the other side of the class mates. Many silent spectators in class pitch in a lot in these forums.

I can not give too much detail in to what has been discussed. In addition to our ideas discussion, we help each other in business plan, preparing for competitions and now applying together for internships. It is a very good group and I enjoy being part of it.

This raises a question for business schools consider - how to increase the effectiveness of clubs and bring in such casual conversations into the main forum. There are many schools that publish a list of clubs, their website which have not been updated for ages. For example a club I am very much interested in is yet to organize a noteworthy event this academic year. My recommendation would be to encourage a period get together in clubs to facilitate a few focussed groups. If a club i s not active for a few months, stop the funding and eventual dissolution.

What Yahoo has got up its sleeves

Not a long time back, people loved Yahoo for its a wide range of services. I still love Yahoo for its fantasy games, finance, games etc. I have been wondering why it has taken a long time to respond to Google threat. Yahoo Pipes could be one response.

While everyone loves to talk about "Web 2.0" as if it is a version of some software, here is a revolutionary technology letting users to create application out of thin air, almost. Attach any number of "pipe"s in series. Here is an example: Create pipe #1 to get results from Google Base, Filter the results in pipe #2, get a price of an item in Amazon, Ebay in pipe #3, and provide the Reviews from CNet in Pipe #4. Now you have all the data you need as a result of one Yahoo Pipe application.

Pipe has huge potential provided there are willing content providers. A new channel to sell data, a new way to create and host applications. One can create an interesting pipe to be sold to others too!

The catch is availability of content. I checked Yahoo Pipes recently and number of supported sources have not increased a lot.

What has happened in the last two months.

We are into the fourth and final module which lasts just for a little more than a month. Time really flies and could not believe we are closer to end of our first year in this program.

As I stated earlier, curriculum is pretty interesting as it is well thought through and structured and integrated.

I really liked a joint session between organizational design and cost systems. I was skeptical about the connection before the class. The topic was how an organization divide up their costs among various functional units and the importance of a well established control system to correctly measure the effectiveness of various teams and in evaluating their performance.

In the fourth module, we have gone global. The central theme is in this module is : Managing business in changing global environment.

We had an interesting class on Nations Bank CEO Hugh McColl. We also talked about how to evaluate a company's worth. I wonder how to apply strategic worth such as key employees/engineers/Intellectual Properties.

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.

Much ado about nothing

It is funny how we have assimilated as a section with 40 new faces in less than a week is amazing. I guess, we knew lot of folks from other sections in the previous semester itself.

We get one BCAP day a week, Wednesday, to work on our consulting projects. So, once a week I can afford to wake up late.

This module is all about operations! Its about managing IT, executing marketing plans, making decisions, etc. I have a mixed feeling about this module. We have to read lengthy cases and even prepare an outline of cases to hand in for professor's evaluation. I think it is a good idea to prepare in a systematic way before the class. However, I disagree with the over emphasis of such preparation for evaluating a student. Why? Any evaluation that explicitly mandates student participation is bound to make a few people uncomfortable and make some to talk without adding much value.

We discussed about "soul of a new machine" as part of our organization design class. I shall dedicate a separate post for that topic.

Fall review

Following the tradition of year end reviews, I wanted to summarize how things have gone in a semester.

The good stuff:
Babson has been a very good atmosphere with nice classmates willing to help each other. Camaraderie is good.

Integrated curriculum seems to make sense and the modules (Mod I - Creative management in dynamic organization, Mod II - assessing business opportunities) lived up to the general theme.

Creativity stream was really creative and generated lot of enthusiasm among students and interaction among students increased tremendously.

Writing and speech consultants offered valuable feedback to improve respective skills.

Accessibility to faculty is very good and lot of professors are more than willing to discuss with students about anything.

Consulting project was well structured and helped in teamwork. It seemed like a research project similar to that of Forrester's or Gartner's.

There are lot of opportunities to start a venture while at school.

Weather has been great this year. Does not seem like winter at all!

Not good stuff:
Too much emphasis on grades. It was one of the main topics discussed on the orientation day itself! I though fellow students would come out of this consciousness in a semester but even second years continue to give too much importance to grades.

To certain extent, people seem to prefer spoon feeding and hence there is limited interest in exploration.

Very little interaction among students to the benefit of the program as a whole. Graduate student council is busy organizing pub nights and similar events but not collecting students input in developing the program.

Some where in between:
Some clubs are active but not much. I would like to see periodic activities to discuss topics such as business trends, technology, globalization etc. On the positive side, HBS, MIT, Boston Univ etc welcome Babson students to attend their events.

Admission and grad school staff are very co-operative and helpful.

There were quite a few companies conducting info session. But, many of them seem to be region specific. For example, I wish Google or Yahoo coming to campus.

PS: I waited till the last day of my vacation to post this review. It is not complete but stay tuned for updates to this post.