All About Honesty

I have been reading Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational. It is a superb insight into our sub-consciousness and how it drives lot of irrationality in our day to day decision making. All theories proposed in the book are well supported with experiments. What is interesting is most of these experiments were conducted on smart MIT kids and even they were found to be predisposed to highly irrational behavior. Dan Ariely then explains how irrational behavior at individual level translates into the way our society and business is structured. He goes further to offer suggestions on how this irrational behavior can be tamed, but most of the suggestions are around having a deep sense of self awareness that I guess is not so common.

Every chapter of the book is themed around a different aspect of human behavior ranging from buying behavior, honesty, expectations and many others. The book is a very meaningful insight into our own behavior, yet fun and light to read. I just finished a chapter on honesty and could not help reproducing some interesting take aways.

1. People will cheat if they have opportunity to do so. But they don't cheat as much as they can because they hit a threshold where their act comes into conflict with their value system. Dan Ariely put is more aptly. We care about honesty and want to be honest. The problem is that our internal honesty monitor is active only when we contemplate big transgressions, like grabbing entire box of pens from conference hall. For the little transgressions, like taking a single pen or two pens, we don't even consider how these actions would reflect on our honesty, and so our superego stays asleep.
2. If we can make people think about honesty just before the act of transgression, the incidence of dishonesty can be drastically reduced. That is why signing honor code before the tests tends to mitigate unscrupulous behavior among test takers.
3. Much of dishonesty that we see involves cheating that is one step removed from cash. Companies cheat with their accounting practices, executives cheat by using backdated stock options, lobbyists cheat by underwriting parties for politicians, drug companies cheat by sending doctors and their wives to posh vacations. To be sure, these people don't cheat with cold cash. Cheating is lot more easy when it is one step removed from money.

Dan Ariely brilliantly explains the last point through an experiment where students tend to pick up unlabled coke can from a community refrigerator but do not touch the cash that is lying next to it.

Highly recommended.

What Companies Can Learn From Swimming at Sub Zero

Lewis Pugh's mind-shifting Mt. Everest swim Video on TED.com

1. There is nothing more powerful than a made up mind

2. If something has worked in the past does not mean it will work in future

3. It is important to recognize whether you need a tactical calibration or a radical tactical shift

50% MBA

The second semester ended 3 weeks ago. It was an extremely enriching experience with the almost all the courses and overall Haas experience. The next few months will entail lot of travel to Europe, a destination that has been on the cards for few years now.

Continuing with the legacy here are my two favorite courses from the semester – Strategy and Corporate Finance.

Thanks to Professor Jonathan Leonard for giving a very pragmatic and broad view of strategy. There were specific takeaways along with learning to think about strategy in a broad way.

Favorite quotes and takeaways from the class:

Strategy is about making choices. If you decide to try everything you don’t have a strategy. You are merely experimenting.

If experimenting is cheap, do it.

An effective strategy is the one that pervades like a theme across the organization. It is not sustainable if it can be imitated by competitors or if it manifests only in one part of the organization.

Make sure you understand how much you bring to the table and how much are you capturing.

You compete not only with your competitors, but you also with your suppliers, customers, and complements to capture the value that you bring to the game.

It is ok to not sell to everyone. Everyone is not your customer.

Influence your competitor’s perception about you and make them make the moves that are in your interest.

Preempt competition even if it is not visible on the horizon. Because it is brewing somewhere.

Diversify vertically only if you have sustainable economic leverage in the areas you diversify into.

Many of these take away are vague without the context. I obviously had the privilege of learning them through series of cases.

Corporate Finance was another gem in the MBA experience. Learning valuations and corporate financial structuring was high on my ‘must understand’ list and I am glad I opted for this course. Professor Raghu was great, a very lively energetic person who kept the class light and focused. Some of his finance jokes will give you a sense of how good humored the class was. I am heavily swayed towards pursing a career in finance and hope to take a decision on it by end of the summer internship.

More on Europe in upcoming blogs…

Leadership and Strategy

The following words from Professor teaching Strategy course struck a cord with me.

An organization that decides to do everything has no strategy in place. Neither does it have any leadership. It requires leadership to give up your options and stand behind the ones that you consider most relevant.

The First Milestone

The first semester is over. I am officially 25% MBA.

The fact that I have not been able to post a single blog speaks for the intensity of the first semester at Business school. In words of one of my buddy at school, "So much has happened in past four months that it is not even funny. We have met so many different people, learned hard core business essentials like accounting and finance, met scores of companies, made many career preferences and changed them later, and attended some very high intensity social functions :)."

If I have to summarize three key takeaways from the semester, they would be the following:

Effective Networking - Networking is what we did for almost 50% of our time. Initially it was mentally exhausting but over time it became a way of life in the school. The heavy duty networking turned out to be a training ground for improving communication skills. I became much more effective in communicating value proposition in the shortest possible time with maximum effectiveness and subtlety. I have definitely become more recipient focused in my communication, an ability that I believe would serve me for life.

How to think about Strategy - 'No, this is tactic not a strategy, what is your strategy' is my favorite quote from the semester. Thanks to marketing Professor, Rashi Glazer, who elevated our thinking from tactical to strategic. I was amazed by the transformation that I was going through with every marketing case. Just when the last class concluded and I started wondering how much of all that I learned would be retained by the time I graduate, the professor asked us to write on a piece of paper three things we would do differently after we graduate. He then gave each one of us an envelope and asked us to fold our paper in it, seal the envelope and write our address over it. The professor took the envelopes and told us to expect them in our mail boxes in may 2011.

Importance of Perspectives - The diversity of opinion that can exist over a simple issue has overwhelmed me. Walking into the class with recommendations on a case and walking out convinced of a reverse strategy has taught one important lesson. It never hurts to bounce your opinion or ideas against someone who can make you see the alleys that you were initially blinded to. You can never see all the alleys by yourself. This underscores the importance of team work.

While there is no dearth experiences that I would like to write about, prudence beckons me to get back to work. Hopefully, the next blog would be posted before end of spring semester.

First Days at Haas

This post has been due for very long time.

I have formally joined Haas School of Business and have already been through one month of physical, mental and cultural churning. After 2 weeks long summer workshop and one week of fun filled orientation week, classes kicked off today. 

Needless to say that the school of quiet awesome especially the collaborative and student led culture of the campus. It has been an overwhelming experience to meet such a diverse class coming from all parts of the world.  

We had great orientation week, each day filled with motivational lectures, team activities, and informational lectures. A grand culmination was planned for every day of the O-Week which would have caused even the hardest of alcoholic to shy away from the bar.

Day 1 – Alumni sponsored dinner and drinks

Day 2 – Tuesday’s at Bear’s Liar (Bear’s Liar is a campus pub and it’s a Haas tradition that the entire class meets at Bear’s Liar on Tuesdays)

Day 3 – Cohorts Sports (some sports like Slosh Ball required you to drink to win – I must say very creatively conceived)

Day 4 – Consumption function (networking event that takes place in Haas campus once a month, dinner and drinks)

Day 5 – Grand Finale Party (Pub hopping with entire class. The entire class was divided into 5 buses and every bus had a theme such as pirates, MJ etc. students donned props relevant to their bus and went to pubs in the San Francisco)

A glimpse of cohort Olympics available here - cup cake eating contest, cohort skit (1,2,3,4).

Nevertheless, there was some serious work too. The entire class went for a 2 hours of community service, totaling to 500 hours of community service. I think it’s an excellent means to bond the students and in the process create social and economic value. It is definitely a concept worth adopting by colleges back in India. 

We also had the honor of hearing CEO of Intel, Paul Otellini during the orientation week. Here is the article in Haas News room summarizing the orientation week and listing the guest speaker.

A talk on the sensitization to American culture was one of my favorites. Led by an European coach, we had a laugh riot by cracking jokes on some typical American traits (such as how you are looked down upon if you anoint yourself with the title of 'Dr.' when you are PhD). On a serious note, the speaker emphasized on the fact that American culture is about optimism and postive attitude. People detest prolonged cynicism and criticism of any situation, system or people. I have so far found it to be largely true, though it may be a B-School specific thing. Whenever I have tried to (at time consciously) criticize or ridicule something (say a guest speaker), more often than not people have tried to show me the positive side of it.

It is also amazing to see how quickly and how well two strangers get along here. There was an instance when I was in a group and a new person joined us. She immediately started talking very enthusiastically with another person in the group. After about half an hour of avid conversation, they exchanged their names which is when I realized that it was their first rendezvous. I believe that from business perspective it is a very valuable cultural trait to posses as it fosters communication, knowledge sharing and networking. As an international student, developing such strong networking abilities would be very crucial to success.

The next month is replete with lectures, workshops, club events and of course pubbing (we have 'Bar of the Week' coming up tomorrow). The blog will definitely stay alive, though the postings will be terse.

The Sustainability Network: Marching Ahead

Sustainability Network started over a casual discussion four months ago. So far it has culminated into www.sustainabilitynetwork.in

It has been overwhelming experience. However this is just a beginning. We have just laid out a framework and proved that the concept has the potential to create a meaningful impact. We are now looking for people to come on board, take leadership roles, fine tune the strategy, take forward various initiatives, develop leadership in the students and volunteers and in the process, embrace and learn Sustainability. The list of roles and their description is available here.

During these 3 months, we launched two chapters – IIT Kanpur and IIT Madras. The decent success in these chapters has infused a fresh confidence about the potential of The Sustainability Network. We would like to express special gratitude to students who came forward in these initial days, professors who supported us, people at TERI who gave us the opportunity, individuals who helped us launch the website.

At Berkeley and MIT, we will continue work on Sustainability Agenda which a leadership team in India will push through the campuses through students and alumni network. There is a tremendous scope for sharing Sustainability related knowledge and solutions between communities in US and India. In the process, we will not only create an immediate impact on community resources but also help professionals of tomorrow develop sustainability consciousness.

If you are anywhere in the world and want to be a part of our vision, write to us. And if you have any suggestions, we could not be happier than to hear from you.