I, The Absolute

I have reached the pinnacle of “busyness”. No one asked me to start a blog. Having started it, it was only reasonable to expect regular posts. From the site meter I realize that the readers have gotten tired, if not vexed, of visiting the site and finding the same old post for close to a week. While a long hiatus is unexplainable, i hope the readership will pardon this.

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Having subscribed to five courses during the term, I find myself entangled in a complex web of group formation exercise, reading scores of pages and then attempting an assignment a day. While both the courses and the professors are good, there is hardly any time for the mind to transition between subjects. The following are the subjects

• Corporate Risk Management – tries to cover various aspect of risk (credit, market, operations and business) and risk management tools.

• Corporate Control, Mergers & Acquisitions – covers the entire gamut of issues and models involved in M & A, and how governance is an important, yet oft-ingnored, factor in the business of M&A.

• Investing in Private Equity – this covers various concepts and models used in private equity industry. Though some of the concepts may overlap with the above course, the objectives of private equity investment are entirely different from the objectives of M & A. these two courses are, thus, fundamentally different.

There is some amount of math in all the above. This was the limit to my math-taking ability. Hence, took two soft courses. Remember, I also need to complete these soft courses to major in my pet Leadership & Change Management concentration.

• Managing in Global Environment – there is nothing new that one will learn except that the contexts will change. We had a very good multi-party, multi-member, multi-dimension negotiation exercise today. The lessons learnt in Negotiation course did help.

• Strategic Human Resource Management – I was wiling to give up M & A course to do this course. Luckily, I got allotted in both without clash of timing. Two good aspects of this course – first half, we have industry HR leaders coming and sharing their views and second half, we have David Balkin, the renowned HR guru, teaching us. Today we had HR leadership institute head of UBS, the global banking major, sharing his ideas. Must admit, MNCs differentiate themselves from other companies largely because of their people management skills. Some of the insights were quite brilliant.

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Today I had classes from 8.30 am to 7 pm, followed by a talk by Diamond Cluster, a management consulting firm. This is the longest I have ever sit in classrooms during a single day. Quite tiring yet edifying.

Added to the routine frustration of not being able to cope with the work load is the upset that my general reading is not happening as I would like it to. I finally managed to complete Freakonomics and The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid. Everyday, I keep looking at ‘the World is Flat’ that I borrowed from Library two weeks ago and which I will return unread in a couple of days. Freakonomics, by the way, is a phenomenal book, which gets as close to the truth as possible. The entire book revolves around explaining various examples to prove the author’s point that, every action is based on one or more of the three incentives – social, economic and moral. Some of the examples are the corruption amongst the Sumo wrestlers; why cocaine traders live with their mothers; how teachers cheat, et al. This book is a must read.