Of Money and a Muddled Memory

...and hello to you!

What have you been up to all this while? How are things?

Me, I've had a very eventful two weeks here. Here I am, two papers away from a postgraduation degree...and tentatively about to begin another trip, a new one entirely. And this evening, with the latest Mani Ratnam-Gulzar-Rahman masterpiece in the background, I am going to write about a few things.

Here's a revelation: I can actually understand Finance!

(If you're wondering why that is a revelation, well...Hi, I'm Crossworder. Nice meeting you!)

Getting back to the point, I discovered yesterday, to my utter astonishment, delight and alarm, that I am actually capable of making sense of all those concepts and calculations. Nothing very fancy or complicated, you understand, just basic Finance. But it stunned me to find myself following all of it last evening. Of course, one has to take into account the fact that I had a paper this afternoon, and I am one of those oddballs who perform best under pressure. Maybe it wasn't me, just the exam looming large. But, for a change, it made sense.

Does that mean I had a good Finance paper, then?

Nope.

I went a little mad during the paper. The first five minutes, I thought I could answer all the questions pat. Then, euphoria gave way to reason, and I picked my five questions and began the paper.

Ten minutes later, everything began to slip away.

Formulae rearranged themselves in my head. Capital structure blended itself inexorably into cash management. Theories and their assumptions and propositions melted into an unidentifiable mass.

No problem, I thought confidently, ignoring the ominous cackle somewhere in my head. Can't do these questions, will do the others. I know all of this.

No, I didn't. Not any more.

So I took a deep breath and sprinted out for a glass of water, the whole classroom's eyes following me. If they had all chorused, "What's with you?", I couldn't have heard it any clearer. Nobody voluntarily leaves the room during a paper like this. But I was suddenly thirsty, and it wasn't helping my convoluted thought processes any.

To cut a long story short, I did finish the paper. Was it good? No. Was it bad? I'll have to say, not very. Where the formulae and my memory were being uncooperative, I simply applied some homespun logic and doggedly got to the answer somehow. Not bad. Only, I'm not sure it was the right answer.

What next, do I hear you ask?

Why, Marketing, of course! I can't wait to get started. :)

Over a Late Breakfast

You've got to be really well-prepared for your exam, or else really sure that you're beyond damage control, when you sit and ponder management theories a day before your Compensation & Benefits paper instead of dutifully revising Dessler and labour laws. And when you're cooking Maggi and writing this at the same time, you are beyond any help whatsoever, which is why you also grin like I am, and check your saucepan to ensure the seasoning is right.

But when I was boiling water for my coffee ten minutes ago, I hit upon some cardinal truths that I thought I must share. At this point, I must request all management purists and aficionados to exit the blog. I can feel irreverence bubbling over in me, and you are not going to be pleased. At the very outset, I remind you that I am a half-baked management graduate with very little knowledge to call my own. That probably explains the irreverence.

- More than once in the last eighteen months, I have found that most management theories are essentially common sense packaged in a fancy framework. Not to take away at all from all the contributors to the field, these are facts that have always, well, existed. That said, I do recognise the importance of realising that these facts exist, gleaning them from the everyday and the ordinary through intensive - and extensive - research, and presenting them to the world in a format that makes sense and is applicable, by and large, to most scenarios. As someone who intends to get into research herself eventually, I'd be the last to say that research in the field is irrelevant (why would I want to devote my life to something I don't believe in, now?), but there is also something to be said for the number of times I have heard people say (and felt myself), "Eh, this is what they're talking about? Of course there will be dissatisfaction if I pay one guy less than his counterpart doing the same work." Or "If you occupy a chunk of someone's mindspace for a reasonable while, he will, more likely than not, buy whatever it is that you're selling him". I could probably be charged with over-simplification. I'll cheerfully concede to the charges. :)

- Ever notice how most revolutionary concepts come from the same set of countries? Japan, the U.S. and the U.K., among others. Japan has practically cornered the market on contemporary management practices. I'd give anything for a peek into the average Japanese brain. Those people astound me. I haven't heard of too many theories coming from, say, Italy or Spain or Russia. I wonder why. Of course, there are studies carried out by researchers from scores of countries. What makes it to most standard textbooks (not that that alone means that the research was any good), though, comes from the same handful of countries. I seriously wonder why.

- We in India have an inexplicable affinity for books and theories that originated abroad. There's nothing wrong with that. Management is about people, and people are - cultural and organisational and economic differences aside - essentially the same everywhere. So whether we use Blum & Naylor or T. Rao to aid our understanding of how they can be "managed" (I've never been very comfortable with the connotation) is not - or shouldn't be - so important. But the problem lies somewhere else. The problem lies in assuming that your education is incomplete if you studied only out of Indian authors' works. Sure, it is...but isn't it equally incomplete if you study only out of McGraw Hill and Prentice Hall versions of foreign authors' books? Why can't we study theories from wherever they are explained best, and allow ourselves the privilege of reading what people from our country have to say about people from our country? And I mean this not just individually, but also from our universities' point of view.


My coffee mug is empty, my Maggi cold, and I am beginning to panic slightly about Comp & Ben. Cheerio, then. And I wish Blogger would behave better on my computer. I can't italicize words, the spacing is awry, and my paragraphs refuse to be disciplined into justification.

P.S.: As on November 30, I've had a decent C&B paper, have also spun yarns on Organisational Psychology...and am really kicked because Blogger is back on its best behaviour. As you can see, my friend, my posts are all justified in alignment...again! :)

Wondering why...

Transactional Analysis and the Johari Window have been recurrent themes of discussion and study in second semester, chiefly because we have entire papers in Organisational Behaviour and Organisation Development. I find these interesting, but, more than that, they're extremely challenging.

I know the technical details of TA alright, but it still intrigues me how people interact. If I have got TA right, I was in Child mode when I chose to jump out of bed and head straight to the computer when I should actually have picked up my books instead. Now that I am here, I'm likely in Adult state, writing objectively (or trying to) about something that interests me. But this is only about me in relation to myself...I haven't quite interacted with anyone yet all this morning.

Why TA is so challenging is that people constantly switch modes - and they do so without knowing it. It was awesome, discovering for myself the contrasts in biological and ego states - I was stunned the first time I heard that a toddler could also, technically, at least, be an Adult.

I won't go into the details of TA. If you'd like to, you can read about it here (Go Wiki!). I won't even go so far as to say that it explains all the intricacies of human interaction...but it does make a fairly decent beginning. Enough, anyway, for a student of OB and OD to consider Psychology the greatest contributor to these fields (though economics and sociology would come a close second).

The Johari Window is another fascinating idea, albeit a little nebulous. I'm still struggling with the concept of the Unknown, or the third quadrant. I'm still a little uncertain about how completely unexplored, uncharted territory can help in cognition. My friend suggested, as a rather funny example, the case of someone who is a good athlete and doesn't know it. Because he doesn't know it, he has never attempted an event, so the world doesn't know either. Then, one day, he sprints across the sports field and suddenly everyone gets to know!

While the example did afford me a laugh, I had to tell him it didn't do much for my understanding. I'm still in the process of reading this up. If anyone has any suggestions, please do let me know. If you'd like very basic reading on the Johari Window, here it is.

Before I go, one last, rather hilarious thing: Just for the heck of it, I googled "Free MBTI Profiling", and got at least four hits. MBTI, apparently, is big on the OB and HR scene - it costs about $150 to get one person profiled by the Myers-Briggs Institute. Which goes to explain the five different questionnaires I found online. Admittedly, they all seemed to test the same attributes...but the way they did it varied vastly...to the extent that I was classified as INFJ and ESTJ - each a personality type completely at variance with the other - on the same day, by two different tests that purported to measure exactly the same attributes.

Which is a lesson to me: leave the testing to the experts.

Second sem blues

Second semester includes some awesome papers. Each time I look at my bookshelf, I can't help but feel excited about what I will be studying for the next three months - there's OB, OD and Macro. Then there's HRD, Labour Laws and Economic & Accounting Aspects of Human Capital (quite a mouthful, that last name...and the paper lives up to it alright). There's CA II, which is, well, CA II. Why am I blue, then?

Because I know I love the first three, but that the devil must be given his DUe.

Because HRD is important (or so they say), but also vapid...so insipid that it can bore the most dedicated budding HR manager to tears! :(

Because Labour Laws are interesting, and important...but need memorising, which takes away from the pleasure.

Because we're all still trying to figure out exactly what comes under the Economic and Accounting Aspects of Human Capital (what sort of paper calls itself that, anyway??).

There's a lot I'm looking forward to learning. I have a feeling OB and OD - not to mention Macro, an old love - will make up for any not-so-great aspect of this semester. Let's see what the next twelve weeks turn out like, though. Sigh.