Heck, why dint I think it before? Aha-moments at XLRI..

June 20, 2010 — nikunjverma

It keeps happening every now and then in class. The profs keep coming with statements which make you wonder why we didn’t think it before. Here are a few I remember(the list will keep on getting updated):

Class Context Aha-moment Message
Marketing How stupid customers can be. When you buy “Mint with the hole”, you pay for the hole and get mint free! Marketing fooled you with giving less for more. And we all thought it was such a cool product!
Marketing How companies use the “emotional” appeal to goad you to buy their products. Prestige pressure cooker punch line: “Jo biwi se kare pyar, wo prestige se kaise kare inkaar”(English- one who loves his wife, cant say no to prestige pressure cooker). Marketing wants to target husbands to buy the product for their wives. So when a customer buys Prestige, he is not really buying cooker, he is buying love for his wife.
Marketing How the marketing effort goes beyond what we generally think. Parry’s punchline: “ Bathroom is a room too”. In 1980s, when Parry wanted to market their bathroom fitting products, they realized that Indian customers put bathroom at the last of their shopping list. The culprit was the low visibility of bathroom to house visitors. So, Parry marketing effort also focused on trying for greater significance to bathrooms in average customer’s mind.
Human Behavior Setting goals in life A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what the heaven’s for?  
Marketing Consumer behavior We value our  losses more than our gains While making buying decisions, consumers want to reap the benefits they have been reaping till now. You can offer something new, but they value it less than what they end up losing.
Financial Accounting Profits and Cash Topline is vanity, Bottomline is sanity, Cash is reality! Profit is an opinion, an idea. Cash is hard, bare  fact.
Posted in bizworld, bschool, mba. 6 Comments »

Was this really day 1 at XLRI?

June 13, 2010 — nikunjverma

It was 12th June and the first day for us GMPians in the school. Managed to take a snap in all the hum-drum of the campus life so far:

 

XLRI_first 004

XLRI Dhaba (canteen) near to my hostel.

 

XLRI_first 002

GMP lawns in front of our residential block.

Will try to upload some more detailed photos from the campus soon. Update : Here are a few more pics:

XL-GMP Lawns

View of Faculty block from GMP hostels. Photo courtesy- Narendran Santham, GMP-2011.

Learning_Center

Learning Center- This is where we attend our classes(and sometimes late night movies!)

The day had started at 8.30 am and right now its past midnight. We had introduction sessions as well as some non trivial sessions on “Financial Accounting” and "History of Indian Businesses”. The highlights, as I remember them at this ungodly hour, were:

1. The evolution of Indian businesses as well as the tryst of India with socialism, capitalism and a mixture of both were pretty interesting to learn. The professor Madhukar Shukla is an eminent figure in the bschool education and he not only covered the developments but also explained the logical reasoning and the prevalent conditions which gave rise to them. For instance, the cost of raising capital used to be at least 120% in 1960’s- quite unbelievable to modern day entrepreneurs(Bharti raised $8billion recently for acquisition of Zain at rate of interest of about 1.2%).

2. In 1980s, Karsan Bhai Patel was laughed at by HLL and other FMCG companies, when he was planning to make detergent powder for rural sector. He went ahead, created NIRMA and pulled of a marketing miracle by selling detergent on a bicycle himself in his neighboring areas.HLL’s Surf was the leading brand at that time and to conceive that a farmer from Gujarat beat the marketing stalwarts of a MNC like HLL is an inspiring experience in itself. Interested for more? Read here

3. Can you close your eyes here and tell me how much would be the annual outlay of a library at XLRI? Well, I don’t know about you, but it was mind boggling for us to note that it is Rs 4 crore(about a $1 Million).

4. If you don’t have any background in financial accounting, a caveat here- you might get slightly disoriented. In accounting profit of a business adds to its liability. And you guessed it right- loss adds to the asset. Think I mixed it up? Hell no, I was getting mad at our professor Sabyasachi Sengupta though. But you ought to sit in the class to appreciate that. :)

Finally to end the first post of my experience at XLRI, I would share what I realized today. I have seen a lot of ultra short term programs on investing in equities, communication skills, etc. And I know that they charge anywhere close to Rs 5000 to Rs 20000 for 20-30 hours. If that price is justified, then Rs 11.5L for the 1000 contact hours at a school like XLRI, where you learn so many new things, each potent enough to change a little bit of you inside, is definitely worth too.

Enough fun for the day. RIP me.. for the night that is.. :)

Posted in bschool, mba. 2 Comments »

Before you pack off to the bschool

May 11, 2010 — nikunjverma

If necessity is the mother of all invention, then this article is an invention indeed. This articles arises from the lack of a webpage which could help a person, who is about to join an MBA program soon, to prepare for the ensuing exciting but challenging journey. I intend to list down items as they cross my mind so that I can also keep track of my progress too.

Enough said, lets get cracking. First let’s tick off some basic obvious items in the list:

  • Finances: Get a comfortable buffer which can provide for your estimated montly expenses during the program + 3-4 months of expenses in case you don’t get a job in time. If you have some funds remaining in addition to your contingency funds, then make sure you invest them judiciously.
  • Life/Health/Education loan/Other insurance: Get a good term insurance cover for your life. Also cover your education loan and other loans. Don’t forget medical insurance- your corporate plan won’t work anymore!

Now, let’s have a look at some big picture stuff. If you are going to an exec MBA program, then this one is very important. You need to keep yourself focused and still find time to learn everything you want during the program. Here is what one can do:

  • Introspection/Reality check: First try to understand “the” you and your motivation to do MBA. Think what you want to do with your life and what short term goals would be good ones.
  • Talk, talk and talk to people: Now, with your dream goals in your mind, talk to current students and also to people who passed 2-3 years ago. You may be given same information again and again but still it helps as the thoughts get crystallized  increasingly.
  • Get back in touch: Before you begin the course and change linked-in status, try to expand your network as much as you can. Remember after you change your status, people might think you are getting back to them only to serve your petty selfish interests.

Now, since we are going to a competitive world out there, lets get equipped with some tools

  • Blog/Website: If you don’t have any online presence, get one yesterday! A website is better but a blog will just do fine. Think ahead what kind of content you would like to post there and learn the nitty-gritties specific to your blogging/hosting environment.
  • Resume:  There is no “official” time for resume’. Keep it updated and keep it polished. You don’t know what you don’t know!
  • Setup channels to tap: Information is going to be the key. There are tons of stuff lying around us. Look at this page – 100-useful-reference-tools

I particularly liked these lists on this page:

Open Education Links

Find loads of free, not-for-credit business classes, lecture notes, videos and other educational resources from these tools.

  1. MIT Sloan School of Management: MIT’s collection of business open courseware includes classes, lectures and answers for finance, economics and more.
  2. International Institute of Management: These open courses and projects cover quality management, executive management and more.
  3. Knowledge @ Wharton Podcasts: These podcasts cover topics from marketing to health economics to leadership and change to operations management.
  4. globalEDGE: This is a terrific resource for international business students who want industry profiles, country profiles and more resources.
  5. Chicago Booth Podcast Series: Chicago Booth’s podcast series features interviews, lectures and discussions about major business events and trends.
  6. BBC Learning: BBC’s online courses in business cover Internet business and more.
  7. KU School of Business: This b-school lists lots of business lectures online.
  8. biz/ed: This is another UK site designed for business studies and reference.
  9. Kaplan: Kaplan’s online business courses cover economics, marketing, accounting, technology and more.
  10. MIT World: This is another open education service provided by MIT, full of video lectures in all types of economics and business topics.

Calculators and Finance Tools

Use these calculators and tools for financial homework help.

  1. Business Calculator Center: Find a Break Even calculator, Investment Offering calculator and others.
  2. Dinkytown: Dinkytown has lots of financial calculators for figuring out cash flow, debt and more.
  3. Stock Market Yellow Pages: Find stocks by searching sector, company name, keyword or symbol.
  4. XE Universal Currency Converter: International business, economics and finance students may find this calculator useful.
  5. Business Calculators: Figure out starting costs, pay per click ROI, and more.
  6. NYSE: Here you’ll find a listings directory, symbol lookup and other market tools.
  7. SmartMoney.com: In addition to offering PF tools, SmartMoney has plenty of market watch tools.
  8. Kiplinger: Get tools for taxes, insurance, banking, bonds and more.
  9. Scientific Calculator: This large, clear scientific calculator can be easily used online.
  10. Market Data Center: The WSJ Market Data Center has plenty of tools for analyzing the stock exchange.

Finally, lets work on the spirit. Get to know the school and its culture. For instance following videos gave me the emotional connect with my school XLRI:

 

If you are hungry for more similar stuff, I am sure you would like the blog which gave me the inspiration to write this post: chunkypitbullmba

Have a suggestion/information source which you want to get added? Please comment!

 

Posted in bschools, mba, mumblings. 1 Comment »

Challenges of one year executive MBA

May 10, 2010 — nikunjverma

Going for an MBA program itself has many challenges.  But a challenge unique to one year MBA programs run by IIMs, XLRI, ISB, SPJain, etc is the alignment of 4 potentially conflicting things- long term goals, short term goals, your intellectual interests and you desired life style. For illustration, assume that:

a. you want to become a VC, entrepreneur or want to go into marketing strategy area in long term.

b. Since it is difficult to land a job in placements which can directly lead you to achieve above long term goals, you need to form differet short term goals. For instance, Product management or pre-sales.

c. You were always interested in understanding equity markets or foreign trade.

d. You want to have a decently active campus life, which means beers, parties, eat outs, sports etc.

Now think yourself. In a 11 month course, with same contact hours as a two year MBA program, how you can do all of the above efficiently? The key, of course, is to set the priorities straight and do good time management. But this is only as useful as saying to a layman- “just keep your body in balance, head straight, look at the ball and there will go your straight drive to boundary just like Sachin’s”. Isn’t it?

I like to read my readers with something more emphatic than the endings of my posts. So here goes today’s multimedia bite(from Steve Blank):

Posted in bizworld, bschools, mba. Leave a Comment »

Using Windows Live Editor for blogging now..

May 7, 2010 — nikunjverma

I recently and luckily came across this and thought its worth writing about. If you are not very proficient with blogging yet, you definitely want to know about this:

Windows Live Editor

Basically it is a client where you can create rich formatted text and publish it your blogs at wordpress, blogger, etc. You can edit and delete old posts too. In addition to this basic stuff, what makes this tool extraordinary is the plugins you can use to add functionality into your articles. Take a look at the gallery to find about the available plugins:

Windows Gallery

And the best part- its free and works like magic!

If you are wondering why you should bother, well it would serve you well to note that the difference between writing “into” your blog and using this client editing tool is like the difference between writing code in Java and Perl to read from a file:

Java:

 package MyProject

import java.io.BufferedInputStream;
import java.io.DataInputStream;
import java.io.File;
import java.io.FileInputStream;
import java.io.FileNotFoundException;
import java.io.IOException;

/**
 * This program reads a text file line by line and print to the console. It uses
 * FileOutputStream to read the file.
 *
 */
public class FileInput {

  public static void main(String[] args) {

    File file = new File("C:\\MyFile.txt");
    FileInputStream fis = null;
    BufferedInputStream bis = null;
    DataInputStream dis = null;

    try {
      fis = new FileInputStream(file);

      // Here BufferedInputStream is added for fast reading.
      bis = new BufferedInputStream(fis);
      dis = new DataInputStream(bis);

      // dis.available() returns 0 if the file does not have more lines.
      while (dis.available() != 0) {

      // this statement reads the line from the file and print it to
        // the console.
        System.out.println(dis.readLine());
      }

      // dispose all the resources after using them.
      fis.close();
      bis.close();
      dis.close();

    } catch (FileNotFoundException e) {
      e.printStackTrace();
    } catch (IOException e) {
      e.printStackTrace();
    }
  }
}

Perl:

my $contents = do { local $/; <HANDLE> };

Java fanboys – this was only an illustration, so don’t feel bad. Hope you got the drift. Explore this tool and I bet you won’t easily go back to writing your blog entry from editor built into your blogging service.

Posted in mumblings, personal. Leave a Comment »

Resume

May 5, 2010 — nikunjverma

My resume can be downloaded from here:

Resume

Posted in resume. Leave a Comment »

Contact me!

May 5, 2010 — nikunjverma

If you have any questions, comments, proposals or just want to be in touch, I can be contacted via

email on nikunj@gmail.com

linked-in: linked-in profile

Cellphone number: Please drop an email to the above email id to get my phone number.

Would love to hear from you!

Posted in contact. Tags: . Leave a Comment »

XLRI is where I belonged…

May 5, 2010 — nikunjverma

Just a quick update- after all these years of bschool applications, interviews, sleepless nights, pestering ex-bosses for recos, etc I feel happy to call it a day. I am joining 1 year executive MBA program(christened General Management Program or GMP) at XLRI, Jamshedpur.

In case you don’t know XLRI, it is the oldest Bschool in India, estd way back in 1949. The reputed Indian Institute of Managements(IIMs) were established in 1960s. You can perhaps skim through this wiki entry for more info on XLRI- XLRI@Wikipedia

On this historic day, I also feel compelled to list down my MBA journey in chronological order for posterity:

Year Interviewed with CAT score(percentile) Final result
2002 IIM-L, FMS, IIT-D, NMIMS 98.91 Not offered
2003 IIM-A and IIM-C 99.15 Not offered
2004 Nada 97ish;got busy working :) Nada
2005 Nada 97ish;still busy working :) Nada
2006   Skipped  
2007 ISB GMAT-710 Nada
2008 None interested, despite 5 year experience and 92%ile QA, 99.70 in VA, 98.5 in DI 99.70  
2009 SPJain PGPM, XLRI(GMP)   Offered by both

 

Believe me as I was putting together the above table, each year, each interview came in front of my eyes very vividly. It was a very rocky journey indeed and I feel anguished after having come so close to top schools but never making it.  But today, I am very happy to move over the hurdles and get into a school of the stature of XLRI.

Over to next hurdle- making the most out of the MBA experience and to achieve my ambitious goals in life. In the meantime, this song is what keeps humming in my mind every now and then:

Posted in bschools, personal. 7 Comments »

Education Loans- when and why?

May 5, 2010 — nikunjverma

Recently after securing admission into an MBA program, I was thinking about :

-whether to go for education loan
-to use it to what extent

For eg. if I have 4L of cash lying idle in my bank account, should I use some of this or should I go for loan of full amount. I searched around on the internet but couldn’t find something readily. So I thought of sharing my thoughts on this.

Before you begin your financial planning, keep in mind that most banks ask you to deposit "margin" money. What this means is that you won’t get the loan for full fees. A certain percentage(generally 5%) of overall expenses have to be borne by you. So in case of XLRI GMP(total fees 11.39), you will have to pay 5%= Rs 60K.

I realized that there were following considerations for evaluating education loans:

1. First go to this URL and try to get a sense of EMI you would pay after you pass out :
Calculator
Keep the ROI as 10.5%, tenure as 7(maximum possible) and play with other values. I realized that it doesn’t come cheap- Rs 10L loan for 7 years requires an EMI of Rs 16860.

2. Also, remember this EMI will be in addition to your EMIs for house and car if you are planning to buy them. These other EMIs can be in the range of Rs 30-40K for many of us.

3. But wait, before you get scared of the education loan, make sure you factor in the tax benefits. Here is the URL which describes them: Tax benefits
So, in short your interest payments(not the principal repayments) are fully exempted from tax calculation. Let’s calculate the tax savings:

Year Total interest payment Total tax saving(30% slab)
1 100,000 30000
2 90,000 27000
3 75000 22500
4 60000 18000
5 48000 14000
6 30000 9000
7 9600 3000
Total 4,16,000 1,25,000

So after reducing the tax benefit from the interest payments, the net “cost” of the loan is Rs 4,16,000 – Rs 1,25,000 = Rs 2,81,000. Or in other words, the effective ROI you pay for Rs 10L of principal is 7.5% which is 3% less than the rate of interest you borrowed the money at.

4. So a logical conclusion of our original question of whether to go for education loan becomes-

Can I make my extra money grow at a rate more than 7.5%?

The current FD rates are round about this same figure of 7.5%. But before you jump the gun, don’t forget that the interest earned on FDs(of less than 5 year duration) are taxable. So your effective rate takes a hit of about 1-2% points. So one should try to put the excess money in combination of following instruments:

  • a. FDs ( totally risk free)
  • b. Monthly Income Plans: Debt instruments + some equity component to take the ROI to about 12-15%. For further elucidation, I suggest this link: Deepak Shenoy on MIP vs FD
  • c. Equity diversifies MFs.

Conclusion: Penny-wise it does make sense to go for education loans given you are ready to invest your excess money judiciously. Simply putting the money in savings account or putting it on FDs is not a bright idea. In the end, it is a matter of personal risk appetite.

I suggest one to go for education loans to the maximum extent you can handle psychologically. But don’t forget to send your saved money for some hard work in the market.

Posted in bschools, finance. Leave a Comment »

Transformation on the way….

January 29, 2010 — nikunjverma

Its almost the end of the road to ISB. If I don’t receive interview invite in next 3 days, that dream to attend ISB will be over, well almost. Thanks to the XLRI GMP interview call which I received yesterday, I am not shattered yet. In the meantime, I have been thinking a lot about my future course of action. Will post about that in detail later. But just to give out some direction in the meantime, see this video:

Yes, breaking out on my own is one option. Moving to business consulting roles, without MBA is another. Going for the best possible MBA program in current year is one more. Hope I will have my path chalked out in next couple of months.

Posted in mba, personal. Tags: , , . Leave a Comment »
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