HT Week 0

Hello back,
HT in the subject line means Hilary Term....

There were couple of seminars this week. Heard some cool quotes during that time. Like below...

Don’t give me that MBA bullshit

Mr. Tim Berry, 60 years old guy, founder of Palo Alto software Inc gave a very pleasant and out of the way from regular MBA talks.
This guy graduated from Harvard when I was not even born and joined a company every MBA in the world aspires from. McKinsey. He worked for McKinsey Mexico city for about 4 or so odd months. He didn’t like the way of working there and the sophisticated system of the company to make the employees forget the family and consider work and the company as a policy. He left and started writing computer books. Not a really charming work to do. Fortunately he knew some guy at Apple who asked him to work on a Business Plan for Apple. And from then Tim worked for many years specially from Apple in the areas of Business Planning and development before starting his own company Palo Alto.

The above mentioned quote came from the CEO of Borland (Remember Borland C++???). At the starting phase of Borland Tim was one of the three directors of the company. The CEO of Borland was a guy of instinct and he took every wrong decision in the book. Every time the CEO used to present his revolutionary and theoretically wrong ideas to the directors, Tim used to feel that he is risking the whole company. When he tried to explain the same to the CEO (whose name I don’t remember right now) the CEO simply said to Tim: “Don’t give me that MBA bullshit”. Against all odd the CEOs ideas came out largely successful for about a decade. And he took Borland to a new height which theoretically was not possible.
But in defence of MBAs, eventually his risks inverted back at him which made him loose his job and put the company in large debt. Tim had left long before that.

I liked the way this little guy engaged the class in non-MBA way. Very nice and pleasant way to start the term.

Artists bend the rules, even greater artist break the rules, but fools just don’t know the rules

The quote by MBA program director Stephen Chambers during the EP presentations. Out EP in healthcare kiosk is facing multiple regulatory and other issues. I am working at the business side of it and Harsh is working at technical and patient side of it. Letz see how it comes.

Trinity Electives.
For the next term we have all six subjects as electives. There are about 25 odd subjects to choose from. So on Wednesday and Thursday the professors of each subjects pitched about what is there in his subject and why should we take it. We all are given total 120 points and we need to bid this points against the subject. Each subjects have upper cap and the highest bidders gets the subject. So we have to work a lot in first choosing the subjects and then bidding for it. I found that very good professors are teaching boring subjects on the other hand very interesting subjects are taught by not-interesting professors. Looks like I have a lot work to do here.

Job recruitment Fair.
Well....WIT did a LOT better job than this fair. Some 20 companies cam for the fair. Most of them were middle sized firms looking for recruiting couple of people. Also some big shots like Amazon and KPMG opted out at the last minute saying they have stopped recruitment. Due to credit crunch and subprime in US and UK the financial companies are in deep trouble. To spare you all from MBA Bullshit the gist is this is just about a start of a recession here which may end up having very bad recruitment year for MBAs.

Week end.
Went to Manchester to visit my uncle there. Typical relative visit. And to make it worse it was raining all the time. So nothing happening there.