Shawshank Redemption

http://www.generationterrorists.com/quotes/shawshank_redemption.html

This is a link to the quotes from the movie that has inspired generations of people. It still amazes me - every time I watch it. It kind of flows, like a river as time passes along. There are a few movies/novels, that have so inspired me like this movie.

How many of us have felt this while watching any movie or novel, which flows along with time ? Please leave names of such movies/novels as your comments in the comments section.

The rat race - Part Deux

This Part Deux is in continuation of the Part Un, that I had posted earlier. Yesterday, after attending an advertising workshop being conducted by Mr. Prahlad Kakar , I had a discussion with some friends. The main crux of the discussion was about certain issues raised by Mr. Kakar, regarding our choices of careers and what would be the source of satisfaction and success in life. I am sure, many of you would have read about this oft repeated topic in a zillion places already. This post is just an attempt by me, to present my thought process on the above topic.

The thing, that touched me yesterday in his speech was about Mr. Kakar's passion for advertising. He said that we should always follow our hearts and pursue whatever it says as our careers. But, in this competitive world of today, how many of us are able to do that in reality ? Is it really possible to follow your heart ? Can we really let go of all those future cash inflows in our lives ? How do we manage the expectations of all the stakeholders associated with our lives ? I have tried to do a sort of stakeholder analysis in my previous post. This post tries to answer the other questions, apart from the stakeholder analysis.

If we follow Mr. Kakar's advice, then how do we earn money so as to manage the expectations of all the stake holders in our lives ? Is there any possible way to solve both of the above problems ? Whatever I might say, might be true or not, but these are my personal observations in the past few months. I have attended a lot of CEO forums in the past 8 months of my life. The common thought, that was echoed by all of them was that they were passionate about their jobs and loved their jobs. This made me wonder, whether there is a link between they being successful in becoming a CEO and being passionate about your job ? What are the qualities that you need to become a CEO ? Some of them are mentioned in this post by me earlier. And, what should be our goal in life - to become a CEO or to imbibe the qualities required to become a CEO ? (Incidently, this was one of the advices given to us by Mr. Muthuraman, the CEO of Tata Steel. ) I think, that as he rightly pointed out, it is more important to acquire all the qualities to become a CEO in the long run. The post of CEO will automatically follow suit.

Is there any link between passion and being successful in your career ? I think, that it is one of the most pertinent questions that we should be asking ourselves, before our final placements to choose a career in life. Without being successful in your career, is there any point in choosing a career ? I think no. But, a lot of us might be willing to go along with a career option, which might be paying them very high initially in their careers. But, will that option give us satisfaction and success in the long run ? Perhaps, a certain amount of experimentation is quite usual in the initial years of our career, but beyond that, most of us rather than following our passions go blindly wiht the flow and just stick to something which we might be quite comfortable with (and offcourse, which gives you enough dough). But how many of us move out of our shells to follow our passions ? Only a handful - others simply go with the flow, refusing to budge. One of the managers in my earlier company, who had more than 12 years of experience in the industry had once made this comment - "Always choose a company, where your professional life is aligned with your personal life and not the other way round." This would always guarantee satisfaction in life. Now, if you add passion also to your job, as pointed out by Mr. Kakar and others before him, we should be farely certain to be successful in our careers. So, combining these two points, can we generate the perfect recipe for success and satisfaction in life -

1) Choose a job, where your "professional life is aligned with your personal life."
2) At the same time, you should have passion for the job that you are currently doing.

But, where is the connection between the questions raised by me in Part Un and Part Deux ? The connection lies in the one single term called "personal life" - which defines expectations that our stake holders have from us and vice versa. So, unless the expectations part is very clearly defined, we would not be able to limit the question of personal life within a certain boundary. Once the personal life is defined, we are in a position to allocate resources and time to our professional life and set certain boundaries for it. And, offcourse, then mixing it with passion and filtering jobs on the above criteria, we should be able to achieve our goals.

Voila!! We have our recipe for success and satisfaction in life. But, is there any guarantee that it would work in all situations ? Who knows, perhaps yes, perhaps not. But, I would certainly like to revisit the topic some years down the line when I would be in a position to enrich the above discussion with certain experiences from me and my batchmates lives. Hopefully, by then my search for the magic potion for happiness - success and satisfaction in life should come to an end.
The final equation stands as

happiness = success + satisfaction , where both success and satisfaction have certain values, with no individual cut off values. But, happiness has a certain cut off value. So, that explains why people who are successful, might not be satisfied with life but would be happy in their current condition. Similarly, people who might not be successful, might be satisfied and can be happy in life. With the values of the constraints success and satisfaction always being positive. Now, success can further be disssected, as it also depends on a number of factors. Ditto with satisfaction. But, that has to be some other post, some other time.

The rat race - Part Un

The eternal question about the balance between career and personal life has surely plagued most of us. A huge part of our personal life is devoted to fulfilling the expectations from the various stake-holders associated with our lives, which might be a big hindrance to us in following the career of our choice. In the Part Un of the series, I would try to answer the questions regarding the expectations from us. In the Part Deux, I would try to examine the eternal question, as I have mentioned above in the starting line of this article. Looking at these pertinent questions, I tried to analyze them from the point of view of the stake-holders. What are the various stake-holders involved in our current lives/near future ? I could list down the following few -

1) Parents, kins, immediate family members etc.
2) Your future spouse, children
3) Friends and acquaintances - this includes the people from our offices also, who form the part of our lives known as "Society"
4) The most important one - you yourself

1) Parents, kins, immediate family members - These are the people, who are the closest to you. They have brought us up from our childhood, showered us with unconditional love, taken care of all our demands without any expectations in return. In the current Indian social setup, the family members are very closely integrated, unlike in the Western value system. The current trend, which is fast picking up in the Indian society of today is, that the children work either in USA/other Indian metros, send regular money deposits to their parents, whereas the parents stay in the smaller villages/towns/cities.

Some background information about this - A son would usually follow in the shoe steps of his father, pursuing either business/service in the same line as him. The parents, in turn relied on their sons as their care takers/financial planners in the old age (and hence the distinct love for the son, vis a vis the daughter - in the end, "woh to parayee ho jayengi" as my grandfather says.) The daughter were usually married off at an early age. This system would have been still intact, but due to the booming services sector and globalization, the average middle class/lower class Indian has been uprooted from the city of their birth. This has entailed a steady migration of youth from the run down villages/towns/cities to the metros. Now the problem - the children are working in metros with big fat pay cheques, whereas the parents still live in the old village/town/city. This is in part, due to the inability of parents, to shift to the bigger metros, having spent a majority of their life in the small towns/cities - it is not very easy, to manage the change in culture/environment for them at this old age. And, another aspect is the inability of the children to relocate to the smaller towns/cities again, after the sort of education/lifestyle that we are exposed to. Hence, because of these reasons, the traditional value system has broken. The support, that was provided to the parents and the support that we would have got from them (had we lived with them) is gone or is reduced to a great extent. But, the expectations of our parents from us remain the same (or probably might have increased overtime, due to the rapid strides made in communications). Hence, the delicate equilibrium has been distorted, distinctly shifted by the forces of current global/Indian economy. How do we support the parents, in this old age, if we don't earn enough money ? Especially, since we don't have any support from the joint extended family (uncles/aunts etc.) in any financial aspect, as it was possible earlier ?

2) Your future spouse/children - If we don't earn enough money, then who takes care of our own immediate family (our spouse, children etc.) It is still easier for the educated females of today, to pursue their hearts and adopt a career of their choice. But, still the males in the Indian society are expected to be the bread winners of their family. (Inspite of all the talk about feminism, female liberation etc.!!!) Earlier, it was still possible as in a big joint family, there were enough people to take care of their financial problems/needs. But what happens in the current scenario ? Who takes care of them ? Nobody. This is a major dampener for the average Indian male and this might perhaps be one reason for the delay in marriage by the Indian males of today. Delaying marriage has it's advantages - you live carefree life, without any responsibilities till the time you are married (you atleast have one less person to take care of. ), following your heart, pursuing the career that you like and once you reach a steady state, marry after that.

3) Friends/acquaintances - Due to the lack of support system/reduced support system of parents in our lives, as I had mentioned in the point 1) above, the support provided by friends and acquaintances increases to a large extent. After all, usually they are local to the metro that we would be living in (assuming that a lot of the people mentioned below stay in the same metro as us) and it is they, whom we would be seeking help in times of our crisis. Hence, we get to know them much better - and thanks to the advances made in communication/information technology, we have a whole lot of our acquaintances - school, undergrad, office, post-grad, activity groups/clubs, your new acquaintances from the current swanky apartment complex etc. Their expectations from us vastly increase due to the increased competition, increased interaction with them, as compared to the olden days. And, I am not sure about all - but a majority of us want to shine in their eyes and we benchmark ourselves against them as to what they have achieved and what we have achieved in our lives. Is it right ? A lot of you might agree with that, a lot would not. Rather than delving more into whether it is correct/wrong (this is a wholly different debate altogether), the idea here is that definitely, we feel a lot more accountable in their eyes as compared to the earlier generation. Our earlier expectations of ourselves used to be derived from the acquaintances of our parents and their society. Since, we no longer live in that society, so our new acquaintances as I have defined above have replaced the older ones, as our society system. Also, they have sort of replaced/filled the gap left void by the traditional support system of parents/joint family, that used to exist in the olden days. And, hence their importance in our lives has definitely increased a lot, adding to the already existing load of expectations from us.

4) Our own self - As we all would agree, due to the eugenic growth of human race, we all have become much more competitive, more efficient, more knowledgeable than our parents were probably at our ages. What does this all translate into - our own expectations from ourselves increase, as compared to the older generation.

So, all the above four factors contribute their part in increasing our expectations from the various stake-holders involved in our lives. This means, that in order to fulfill the load of all these increased expectations, we need to definitely earn more and more, as our lives grow - and this is definitely more than the eugenic growth in salary/money earned as compared to our parents.

On the other hand, this conflicts with what our heart says and what career we want to follow in our lives ahead. Due to changes induced by globalization, we now realize that we were so much ill-informed about the outside world during the old days. As a nation, we are growing more and more competitive driving out the jobs of the Americans and other people across the world. We are a part of the global rat race now, competing with the whole world - thanks in part to the relatively young population that we have at our hand today, we Indians have the josh and right skills to take on the world of today. But, where do we draw the line between the constant juggling act between our career and managing our expectations (or put in other words, our personal life) ? I will explore more on these topics, in the Part Deux of the series, to be penned down shortly. Part Deux was prompted by the talk given by a certain ad-guru in our institute yesterday.

Vagaries of Indian B-School admissions

There are a lot of vagaries associated with the Indian B-School admissions. I had posted a post on one of the online Indian MBA forums, which I am reproducing here.

CAT, XAT, FMS etc. and all the other Indian MBA entrance examinations are designed more as an elimination exam than as a selection exam. With a country of 1 billion+, it is bound to happen. There are two kinds of MBA institutes catering to the Indian masses -

1) Those, who provide high quality education education, at an affordable cost to the masses

2) Those, who provide high quality education at real cost to the corporates

Now, as you can see very clearly, these are two very very different segments of India. And, the PGP programs of IIMs, XLRI, FMS etc. cater to the 1st category of students. Similarly, ISB, 1 year PGPX courses at IIMs A&C, 1 year GMP course at XLRI, most of the 2 year MBA courses at the US universities etc. cater to the 2nd category of students. Since, these are inherently two different categories, so the entrance exam format, the costs, the duration, the course/syllabus, the outlook of the institutes etc. varies in between the two categories.

For the 1st cateogory, all the exams are designed as an elimination exam, as it is designed to provide quality education to the masses(though, off-late, what we see in India is the propensity of most of the 1st category institutes going towards people with work-experience - but, that is more due to the pressures of globalization. In their quest to become world class institutes, they need to achieve parity with the institutes in USA, Europe and other developed countries, where work-experience is the di rigeur and India is probably the only country in the world, where freshers form a considerable part of a MBA class.) Hence, the need of the institutes to design tough papers(which may sometimes border on the verge of ambiguity, as seen in the past few years.) Can you blame the MBA institutes for doing this - after all, they are trying to do an honest job, what with they having to process almost 1,80,000 applications(for CAT), almost 70000+ applications(for XAT) etc. They need to design papers, which can bring about a wide range of differences in scores of students, to be able to eliminate students and maintain the applicants:call ratio, which is fixed every year. In doing this, often, the papers turn out to be a little ambigious and probably, this is what causes a lot of heart burn amongst the student community. But, with the increased competition in India, the renewed focus of all the MNC's favouring India as a preferred destination - India is where all the action lies in terms of the future jobs. Most of the Indian middle class wants to jump the MBA bandwagon to board the rags to riches stories published by the India media about multi-mullion dollar Indian salaries. But, the question that arises here is, do we see the other side of the story - which can be read at this link here.

For the 2nd category, all the exams/application procedures are designed as a selection procedure(so you see that most of the institutes in 2nd category accept GMAT scores for qualification exam.) These institutes/courses have a different focus altogether, catering to a different class of people - those with considerable amount of work-experience, who already have shown managerial traits in their job and who can add a lot of value to their programs also. Now, if you check out the average work-experience of students in these programs, for ISB, it is 5 years, whereas for IIM A - 9 years, C - 5 years(min. work-ex), XLRI - 5 years(min. work-ex) etc. After all this work-experience, these students gain not only a lot of industry exposure, knowledge and managerial traits, but also, their outlook is also changed considerably towards a global one - which as much as the IIMs, XLRI and FMS etc. would like to emphasize is sorely lacking in their PGP candidates during the time of admission. Though, one can argue, that not all the students gaining admission to the 1 year program possess these traits, as a lot of them come from public sector backgrounds which used to be protected till a few years ago. The admission procedure is predominantly of selection, which should logically be the case, as after all these years of work-experience one is expected to show certain managerial traits in their attitude, career etc. And, only those, who exhibit them ought to be selected. Whereas, in the former case, the B-Schools test students on a certain aptitude, general awareness and their communication skills, which are the necessary skills to be a manager. In the latter case(i.e. this case), the expectations are much more and much higher as compared to the former. Besides the above traits - like aptitude etc. they also expect students to have a fit with a certain function/domain in their area of interest and to have an idea about what their career would be like in the years to come, which is quite logical enough.

Now, one question that can obviously arise is, that why inspite of the superiority of the 1 year programs(atleast, in terms of the value addition, knowledge sharing and developing a global outlook) do the Indian B-Schools continue offering 2 year programs, and they are more famous as compared to the 1 year programs. The reason has it's roots in the Indian social setup, where in you are expected to complete your studies completely by the age of 26-27 and go for marriage. Most of the Indian men(which form a pre-dominant part of the applicants to these MBA institutes) get married by the age of 28(which I guess is a notch higher than the average age of marriage in India - 24 years for men and 19 years for women : Source) For the women, it was still a harder ball game, as they were usually expected to marry much earlier. With the advent of globalization, winds of change have blown over India and so, we gradually see the popularity of 1 year programs, where it is not considered taboo to go for higher studies, even after marriage. Hence, most of the students in the 2nd category are married and but for these winds of change, would'nt have even dared in the earlier days to go for a MBA after marriage.

So, rather than blaming the Indian MBA entrance exams, understand that it is you, who chose to compete in that type of system - if you don't like the system, you have full choice to opt for the second type of system - which did'nt exist a few years ago. A lot has been written and said about the crappiness of the Indian MBA entrance exams, but understanding the circumstances in which they are operating, I guess that they are doing a wonderful job.

A new perspective

After going through the entire hullabo of the summers process, there were some thoughts, that plagued my mind. The entire process is tilted more towards the satisfaction of the B-Schools, and the corporates. The third most important stakeholder in this process- the students usually don't get exactly what they want. (More so during the summers process and to a lesser extent in the finals.) Is'nt it ironic, that the entire process is conducted for the students and finally it's they, who don't get exactly what they wanted. Probably, we can start a precedent from next year, by reporting how many students got the profiles, that they wanted(A dream offer kind of thing). Though, the placements report that the no. of offers per student, they don't report whether the students themselves were satisfied with the offers or not. They should report the % of students, who are satisfied from the offers that they got.

This should help in two things -

1) Bring more transparency in reporting of final campus recruitment results, to the satisfaction of the students, for whom the placements are conducted

2) Start a new practice amongst B-Schools, which gives more information to the aspirants and gives a clearer picture about the placements, from the point of view of the students.

I am in favour of reporting it for final placements and not for summers, as it would be really premature to report them for the summers process. A lot of people are still not clear, about the field they want to go to - most of them go with the flow and hence the logic. But this can be implemented for the next campus recruitment process annually - it should add a fresh new perspective to the reporting of results and should be one of the parameters, on judging a B-School's rank/quality of students. The assumption that I make here is that within a time span of two years, all the students know exactly what kind of profile they want - it might not be true for all, but atleast for an overwhelming majority this assumption holds. A little bit of OB gyaan - rather than focussing more on the basic needs of money(which the top B-Schools like IIMs/XLRI already satisfy), it would be good to see these top B-Schools moving more towards satisfying the self-actualisation needs of the students. This should take the process one step further and rather than the usual rant of 100% placements, % of students placed on Day 0, highest salary offered to students, no. of foreign offers etc., it would offer an interesting perspective from the students side. Some food for thought!!!

MBA's and the education system in India

This is one of my posts, that I wrote for the new NITC forum. Hope, this helps somebody. This post reflects the true experiences of the author, while preparing for a MBA degree in India.

The problem at hand, for pursuing an MBA from India can be broadly divided into two categories -

1) The ground reality
2) The ideal situation, according to Indian circumstance

1) The ground reality : Most of us get well paying jobs, after passing out from college. Generally, now a days, the average salary has shot up to 3+ lakhs, in our college. When fresh at college, we generally follow, what our seniors did - and sadly, in our college, most of them opted for well settled, cushy jobs in the IT sector, which does pay very well. But, after working for sometime in these so called IT jobs, people get frustrated, as they find, that their creativity, their interests do not match with their job profile. This is a very real scenario.

Looking back, most of us pursued engineering, without knowing our interest - whether we liked Arts, Commerce, Literature, Law, Business, Entrepreneurship, Technical domain(Engg. incidently) etc.etc. Generally, our choice of career/higher studies is influenced by these considerations - we are good in Maths/like Maths, so we take engg. If somebody is good at Biology/likes Biology, he/she takes up MBBS as afield of study. Frankly, this is the herd mentality, which is more driven by what is practically available in India, and which pays you more, than what you like in reality. In this process, our natural instincts, of what we like to do, gets curbed. Now, once outside your engineering, we again take up jobs - without even thinking once, whether we like our job or not. This again creates frustration amongst people, and invariably after 1-2 years at your job, you start looking out of theways of moving out of the IT industry, if you're frustrated, or the second variety of people are, who live with that frustration, and again are guided by practical considerations. They continue with our job, without any liking for it. They go to Onsite, earn money, get married and continue living happily ever after, without ever questioning our interests - what did we like doing. And, frankly, after some 5-6 years, they start liking your job, as at this juncture, they don't have any outlets, in terms of their career.

Now, coming to the first variety of people - who get frustrated in the IT sector and start looking for outlets - again, there are a very few outlets, either you do a MBA(like what I did) or you jump careers to something totally new, with a lower salary than earlier one(which many of us rarely dare to do) - though, many from my batch have done so, and I highly admire them for that. Another option at this stage is joining some startup, in the domain you like and earn bucks there. Nothing like that - you get paid for doing something you like. There are also a third variety of people - who are hardcore techies and who love their job. It makes the most sense only for them, to be in an IT job, as that is what, they like and their expectations and their job, both match, resulting in job satisfaction.

2) The ideal situation, according to Indian circumstance : The easiest outlet at this stage is MBA, for the 1st category people - with the catch, that you can switch domains after your MBA. This is what most of us doing MBA aspire for, post MBA. Offcourse, money is always a criteria, but then, more than money, job satisfaction becomes a more important criteria than money, after 2-3 years of work experience. Now at this juncture, you get stuck in a Catch-22 situation.

Offcourse, having a certain amount of work-experience is always better for MBA, as you'll learn things better, you'll be able to relate a lot to your work-experience, while you're pursuing your studies, you'll be able to contribute a lot more to your batch, in terms of experience than a fresher. And, seeing the trend worldwide, MBA's with work-experience are preferred over freshers everywhere. It is only in India, that you can pursue a MBA, being a fresher also. In my opinion, I've matured a lot since my college days, till now, to pursue an MBA. I've learned a lot about life, about people, about the corporate culture etc.etc. blah, blah!!! If I had done a MBA, being a fresher, then I would'nt have gained that much, from my MBA, than what I'll gain now. Also, all the highest salaries, at most of the B-Schools go to the work-experience people - except for those finance, investment banking jobs - where the companies themselves need freshers, to work for 18-20 hour days each day. This suits the companies and the freshers - they don't know, what they're being led to. The reasons for companies preferring freshers are: 1) Freshers dont' carry any baggage - they can work for any number of hours per day, without complaining, since they don't have any work-experience. 2) They are not fixated with any domain and have'nt yet decided, what they like to do in life and what not to do. So, they can be moulded to do anything and this is what the companies cash upon.

Now, some sentences earlier, I had mentioned about a Catch-22 situation. The Catch-22 situation arises here - if you want to gain the maximum out of your MBA, work-experience is necessary in my opinion, but in the process of getting that work-experience, you might end up, not doing your MBA itself. But, according to me, it makes a lot of sense, joining a MBA course, immediately after your college finishes. That ways, you'll be able to get a good job, it would be easy preparing for MBA(this is the most important criteria) and also, you'll be able to enjoy studies for two more years of your life in continuation. The way, MBA's are made in India, freshers stand a clear cut chance over the work-experience people and this is where, you folks should go for the kill. In the enthusiasm to gain work-experience, you might end up getting only work-experience and no MBA. So, again, it depends on your priorities in life, at where you want to be, post your engineering and post MBA. Though, I have mentioned MBA everywhere in my post, but, this is quite generic and can be applied to any post graduate course, per se. It is not limited to only MBA. I have only used the word MBA everywhere, as this is what I could relate to. My $0.02 on the matter.

My first post

My first post on this new blog. Hopefully, I'll be more regular here, from now onwards.