A week in IIMB

Hi friends, its me again. This time reporting as a student of IIM Bangalore. Its been a week since our classes started, after a few days of inauguration and orientation. A few facts emerged from this interaction: we have 11 yrs of mean experience, over hundred years of international experience between us, and have representation from more industries than even I thought!

Factor in the salaries we have had to give up to reach here, and its no surprise that the energy levels are super-high. The 90 minutes classes seemed daunting before we started, but the interaction is so vibrant that there's usually surprise that the time is up. We all wrote and anticipated that classroom learning will be an important part pf the education, but we never bargained on so much interaction.

These last few days have been a blur. Picking up a calculator after almost two decades, I wondered how I will cope with the quant jocks that are bound to be there. And they are there, make no mistake, but the teaching is so great that whether its probability, accounts, economics or organization design..... the profs make sure teaching is accessible as well as challenging. When our program chair said the faculty are world class, he wasn't kidding.

Ohh and by the way,. we already had our first sets of quizzes yesterday. When i said the profs were great, I didn't mean they were willing to give us any time to dawdle.... and its going to get tougher. I don't know how I'll find time, but will try to keep you guys posted.

The Insights of a Columbia Professor

I am a regular Listener of Econtalk, where an Economics scholar (Russell Roberts) talks with luminaries of the field about various aspects of political economy. This week I listened with interest to Prof Amar Bhide of Columbia business school talk about outsourcing and venturesome economy. I was hooked early on when he talked about the fears of Americans regarding innovation in other countries, and the supposed lack of basic science research at home (link to the episode page).

He said that there are multiple levels of innovation, but they may be divided into three basic ones. Taking the example of shipping, the Archimedes' Principle regarding buoyancy is critical, but not sufficient to build a ship. You need technical expertise of various kinds for that. And then you need to run the shipyard, and that requires a different set of skills altogether. His point was that basic research is all well and good, but the knowledge, once created, is there for all to use. What is much more critical for prosperity is the application of that knowledge, and that requires skills that are much more local. Leading a team of workers to either build, or manage requires much more local knowledge, and contributes much more to the profits than basic research. We may agree or not with him, (I do, with the caveat of health care) but the idea leads to interesting paths.

I think its obvious from his exposition that the three basic tiers of wealth creation are basic sciences, technical sciences (like medicine and engineering), and management sciences. And it is interesting to see that almost all of my classmates are moving from technical sciences to management, implicitly agreeing with his theory that this will lead to them contributing more than they do now (and presumably receiving more too :-) )

And now, look at this EPGP course. One of the major explicit differentiators for the course is the focus on India and emerging economies. This ties in well with Prof Bhide's thoughts that the management needs to be much more focused on the local factors that any other branch. There is going to be a local focus throughout the course while teaching us general principles. Sure, there are differences between different emerging economies, and that's why we will have full-time immersion into these counties for several weeks, giving us a first hand experience of how business is done there. This fantastic aproach is one of the reasons I'm excited to pursue this course.