Midlife Vices 2 – 25 years after IIM Calcutta

Joka Notes, Dec 19

Walked down to the railway station with Pinky. Reached in 1 hour 10 minutes. Walked across the railway tracks and went on to platform number 1. Did some fruit purchasing before getting into the compartment. Had interesting company. Lady who works with Schlumberger, along with her 7 year old kid and 20 year old nephew. They were on their way to Rourkela. Her mother in law was going to be operated for a throat tumour in Bhubaneswar. There was another semi blonde guy. He had just quit his job in Accenture after working for 4 years. Got bored of it and was deciding what he wants to do in life next. There was also a gym type, who happened to be an engineer. He had quit engineering immediately after passing out. And now was working in multifit gym. There are some goras working in the gym, who he does not have very high opinions of. Took a lot of effort to finish the book on diary writing. It was extremely boring. Need to have faster decisions on when to skip and when not to. Thankfully, the train was late by an hour. Reached Howrah station at 05 30 hours. Walked down to the bus stop and got dropped off at the Joka gate by 7:30.

Day 1

Anju Seth, the IIM Calcutta director, was to address us on day 2, but this was preponed to slot 1 day 1, as she had to leave for Delhi to attend a wedding of her IIMC batchmate’s child. Was interesting to note that the compere, who was a first year student, was born in 1994, the year we passed out of IIM Calcutta. Drives home our antiquity!

The 2018-19 breakup of students at IIMC is:

• The MBA program, it ain’t called PGDM anymore, is 480. Will zoom up to 600 soon.
• The MBA Executive (PGPEX of earlier days) has a strength of 70.
• The business analytics program has 60 students.
• Across years, there are about 90 PhD candidates.
• PGPEX-VLM, a manufacturing leadership program, hosted across IIT K, IIT M and IIM C, which has 40 students.
• 2500 people participated in MDPs in the last year.
• The online programs have a registration of about 3000, across 24 programs.

Anju’s talk was primarily devoted to fund raising. For the last 20 years, there has been no support on operating expenditure for IIM Calcutta from the Government of India. And in the last 10 years support for capex has also dried out. There is a sarkaari scheme where a loan can be taken from a PSU bank at 0% interest, but it has to be paid back in 10 years time.

From 2019-20, a 10% reservation will be added for the Economically Weaker Sections. The EWS students will still pay full fee, as do the SC/ST/OBC candidates. Whenever the government adds a quota, it ensures that the old categories don’t see any reduction in absolute seats. So institutes have no choice, but to add capacity. Being a residential campus is a sine qua non at any IIM, hence any additional quota category implies additional hostel rooms.

What really rankled me was Anju informing us of the plan to demolish the hostel I stayed in for two years, NH. We visited NH later on in the evening. The loos have been done up recently. Talked to NH students, no major problems. Like Fazal said, a crore spent over here, is going to give you a hundred and seventy rooms, compared to spending tens of crores trying to rebuild the rooms again. Fortunately, WH and OH are in better shape. But there will be pressure to expand capacity. We are looking at a 2000 students campus. And we will have to go taller. Btw, Anju, who is PGP 13, was the second batch to stay in the Joka campus. OH in those times stood for the Only Hostel…

I think WH has stood the test of time the best. And there is a nice culture of camaraderie that you find in WH, that is missing in NH and OH. Possibly because all rooms face the central quadrangle. You can have a conversation with the resident of any of the rooms without leaving the corridor outside your room. Wonder why WH got underrepresented in our meet. Coming back to NH, one of the problems that the campus authorities have faced a blocked access when the lakes overflow flooding that happens during the monsoon. (There is a superstition amongst later batches that lakes overflowing means good placements:-)) There were some problems with the interconnection between lakes, which have been taken care of. The excess water from the lakes can now be drained out, so the access to NH is not underwater in the monsoons. The other issue with the NH is the size of the room. Compared to the luxurious rooms of the Lake View Hostel, NH rooms are like servant quarters. Yet, having spent two years of my life in those rooms, I have no complaints. Being the the first hostel stay in my life, I came in with low expectations. But then, our fee was much less compared to the current guys, At 3,000 bucks a day that the current lot pays, I guess I would also want to if not 5 Star, at least 3 Star treatment.

Annual revenue of the institute is about 150 crores, with an operating profit of only 4 crores. (Incidentally, the 2017-18 revenues were 200 crores, with a surplus of 40 cr. Wonder why there is a fall? For those who want to investigate further, here is where you can find the reports – https://www.iimcal.ac.in/annual-reports) We were foxed, since the fee is a healthy 23 lakh for the flagship MBA program. Even if students can’t pay upfront, there are enough providers for loans. Indeed, 95% of the student population takes loans. In the last 5 years, about 60 to 80 students have been given a tuition fee waiver, ranging from 25 to 100%. Prashant Mishra, dean of alumni relations, told me that the low profits for the last fiscal are primarily because the salary bill went up last year, as arrears had to be paid to staff members for the 7th pay commission. Otherwise, profits are usually in double digits.

Anju was grilled a lot about her views on the overheads that IIM Calcutta is saddled with. She confessed that IIMC accounting systems are bad. Although money does not come from the government, they still keep control in terms of reporting. Vineet Anurag made a suggestion that we could farm out some of the non core activities like running hostels to private partners aka Manipal. Haresh Chawla, in his brief appearance, suggested that the batch was ready to pay the 20 lacs that would be required to get an audit done of our financial systems. Unfortunately, Anju had her sights set on what the norm for previous batches was, which is basically to promise cash rather than kind. The 29th batch seemed to be  wanting to gift ideas and systems, rather than funds. Funds would follow, once implementation starts, that was the promise made by the batch.

Next on the agenda was remembering Waggles, aka Neelesh Wagle. Neelesh passed away just a week before the meet. Mama Joshi, X-ray, Neeraj Garg, Jaieep, Kedar Wagle, Sudhir Variyar and Singhal spoke. Neelesh was remembered as a genuinely helpful guy, who kept on the spirit of helping till the end. Only in his last two weeks did he confess to his friends that he did not have any strength left anymore. He was praised. For reaching out to his friends with insights into small cap stocks. For the beautiful office that he maintained along with his partner. He believed that you can become an investor, only if you have been an entrepreneur. The hope was that the batch will do something in his name to honour his memories. Rohan Singhal made us do an exercise which made us confront the Big D. The exercise was called What’s Up? The idea being that having conversations helps in grieving. There were a few rules to the conversation, the interesting one being that only people who held a prop could speak. Groups of three were made. Here is what our group ended up discussing. Death is something that can happen to any of us, especially from now on. Am quoting from a chat in our Joka@Pune Group.

Nandu Kulkarni (12th batch): We were 37 alums at our 40th  reunion out of a batch of around 100 minus 13 (who are no more)

Deepak Mohoni (13th batch): 13 out of 100 is roughly the same as our batch.

Avishek Sarkar: 13 within 40 yrs of MBA somehow still seems too young to pass away

Deepak Mohoni: It’s driven by statistics. The percentage is almost identical with classmates from school, IITK and IIMC. There also seems to be certain age bands which see spikes. There are even repeating patterns in cause of deaths, but that’s even more depressing, and easily guessable, so let’s not go there. All I can say is drink, but don’t smoke.

The regret was that as Waggle’s health deteriorated, we did not realise the degree. Possibly, the feeling we have is that death can happen only by heart attack or cancer. The question we asked ourselves, have we taken care of our family, is the insurance in place? Do our kids and survivors have access to our passwords? Is there a will in place? Kapil Khanduja had an interesting take on the will part. He made his will five years ago. He lives in the US, and if you don’t have a will in the US, the state takes over your estate. Another thing that got discussed was a living will. A course of action about your own health, in situations where you can’t take your own decisions.

We then had a panel discussion, moderated by Rajesh Jindal. And the topic of the discussion was transitioning careers at 50. In his introduction, Rajesh lamented the fact that we tend to be identified by our corporate titles. But what happens when we lose them? How can we still stay relevant? Some of our batchmates were invited to discuss their career transitions.

Nattu was the first, and the wittiest. In 1994, Nattu was sure he wanted a career in exports. He let all the placements happen to wait for Ashima Syntex, an Ahmedabad based textiles exporter, to come to campus. Did well and within two years he had the fantastic designation of a Deputy General Manager. He got scared of the designation and decided to quit to become an entrepreneur. Started with corrugated boxes and a few other things, which didn’t turn out too well. So then moved back to a corporate job, working long years with Triton and Tesco, in India and the UK. Then ver 2 of entrepreneurship happened. Nattu’s view is that the time to switch is when you feel that you are spent out in your job. He was chatting up with Venky about pivoting his newly founded business, https://www.leadwalnut.com/, to become a CMO on hire company. Venky mama immediately got him his first assignment from Venky’s own company, Maarga Systems. And there has been no looking back. Nattu has a team of about 10 people now. And although his earnings are still not at the same level as the corporate salary he used to get, the learning curve has started climbing up.

Deepak Malkani then had a short talk. Like Nattu, he and Shanu, his better half, run a specialist- on-hire company called www.IndusGuru.in. Typically that offers SMEs short term consulting assignments from experienced specialists, who are either freelancing or retired. The typical assignment lasts for 2 to 3 months, and the value of the contract ranges between 10 to 15 lacs.

Anshuman Tripathy, who teaches at IIM Bangalore, talked about his switch from the auto sector to education. Anshuman was specifically asked to talk about the likelihood of one of us becoming an adjunct faculty at a good B school. He felt that most of the people who want to become visiting faculty have nothing much to share, except experiences . Anshu feels that experience without theory is meaningless. So most of the resumes that come to him for visiting faculty get rejected. Incidentally, our friend, Haresh Chawla takes a course on digital transformation at SPJIMR. Anshu feels that if you are really interested in teaching you need to work on your PhD, because this is what gets your arm around theory. He believes that there can be no teaching without research.

X-ray was next. He was made to rethink his corporate career by Nokia, as the company fell from hero to zero in a span of 2 years. During those years, headcount shrunk from 120,000 to 23,000. Ramashish Ray (well that happens to be our friend’s real name) managed to leave Nokia and land a job in Samsung. He realised that there is nothing called certainty in the world of business. He became an entrepreneur immediately after Samsung, making mobile accessories and power banks, http://intartic.com/. All of us who attended the reunion have been gifted a powerbank by X Ray’s company. Thanks for the goodies, buddy. There were a lot of ups and downs in his entrepreneurship. He draws an analogy to trekking, where the way to finish is simply one step at a time. You got to plod on. (On the subject of trekking, he also runs a very interesting astronomy observatory – https://www.stargateindia.com/) And what is important for success in entrepreneurship is resilience. One of the things that he is proud of, is the responsibility for the wellbeing of the 40 families of his employees.

We then had VAK – V Arun Kumar. VAK has been through a slew of companies, changing jobs almost every two years. But all the time being very interested in blogging and writing. He started a creative blog on politics and mismanagement during his days at the Anil Ambani group. He talked of an interesting 3 C model – Core, Comfort and Challenge. Your core gives your salary, the comfort give you your sanity, and the challenges are what drive you. He has gone on to become an acclaimed lyricist in the Telugu film industry, parallelly managing to hold on to his job at Google Research in Singapore – for the last 8 years!

Chatted up with Professors Mishra and Balaram before dinner. Tried to convince them about why the high fee is killing entrepreneurship at IIM C. But like our friend Anshuman says, business schools are the heart of capitalism. And why would a B school not adopt a pricing policy of what the market can take. Some cartelisation happens in the fee setting of the top B schools. A, B and C play a match up game, as most times their fees move in consonance. And as long as students are getting good salaries, banks are willing to fund the institutes through student fee. We had a debate on the cost structure, Professor Mishra informed me that all the financial reports of IIM Calcutta are there on the website, (referred to in an earlier paragraph), because they have to be presented to the CAG committee in parliament. Wanted to chat with Balram, but he was very busy chatting up about professorial politics with Anshuman Tripathi. Like Anshu, Balaram is also in the operations area, he joined IIM Calcutta in 1996.

Briefed Vikramaditya about the plans for Peepal Tree. He and Rahul Chawla both left early morning on day 2. We ended day 1 on a ‘high’ note with a bonfire karaoke. Samaira, Chetan Pal’s young one, slept through the first half of day 2, thanks to the passive consumption of a lot of non-nicotine weed at the late night do.

Day 2

Venky and Kislay had organised a talk on giving back. The batch prioritised sharing skills over sharing wealth. One idea is that alumna can jointly fund an alumni office, with full time staff, and campus students contributing. Taking an example of executive MBA program – with no seniors and juniors, continuity has to be designed in to interaction across batches. The same approach has to also work for alumni across batches – having an active full time staff in the alumni office will ensure continuity in alumni efforts. Who will lead this effort? Coincidentally, on day 3 we met our up at the MDC with our junior, 33rd batcher Alok Dugar. He was spending a week at campus – donating his time to help the director with improving systems – a great sign of alumna institute co-operation. Have introduced Alok, who also happens to be from Pune, to Venky. The idea is to work together to create an alumni body that can coordinate across batches and across cities. And help come to a decision fast on a common set of priorities.

Sanjay Singh was of the opinion that enhancing revenue should be the priority for the institute. How we can help in this direction is important. If there is a clear vision, then the institute can communicate clearly to future batches about priorities. Haresh proposed that the institute can use 29th batch funds to take professional help to develop this vision and clean the systems. On the subject of priorities, our friend Tyson, aka Subro Ranjan Misra, advised Hunar Gandhi, the President of the current student council, that his first priority would be to establish faculty chairs. The Tatas, the Pauls, ITC – are all companies with a strong Calcutta connection. Why not start with them? Maybe, as the director hints, our batch could itself sponsor a faculty chair? Another idea was to sponsor construction of a hostel wing. Yet another one was to install aerators to improve the health of the lakes. And also a Sewage Treatment Plant. (That seems to have been adopted by the 14th batch, who met for a 40th reunion one week before we did.) But the most sensible suggestion seemed to be that the institute should identify specific capital expenditure projects and provide us their cost estimates. The batch can then establish priorities and decide which projects to fund.

We then moved on to fund raising. Vamsi and Sudhir Variyar were of the opinion that the current batches are shelling out 23 lakhs for fee vs the 30 K we paid. Even adjusting for inflation, we paid a heavily subsidised fee. So let’s treat our donations as a repaying of debt. The first idea related to fundraising was to match our alumni meet spends to create a funds corpus. Each of us spent a minimum of Rs. 50,000 rupees to come and spend 3 days at campus. So each one needs to put a similar amount in the corpus. We closed with the decision to get the money in first. Closure date is important. Then we will figure out what projects to fund. Each person wrote in a commitment of funds that he or she can give. All this data has been collected by Venky and Mops. They are looking to add the commitments of those of us who could not make it to Joka. We already have commitments of 2 cr +. The idea is to get the funds into the bank by 30th April. Hopefully, the trust that we are donating to will have Sec 80G status, so that people can get tax exemptions on the donated amount. We discussed with Alok Dugar, who is the Venky / Mops equivalent of the 33rd batch, the idea about putting in funds directly to the IIMC account. The IIMC Account already has 80G tax exemption. Alok advised us against it. Once the funds have been put in, there is no say that alumni will have in their utilisation.

Hunar Gandhi, the president of the student council, had a short talk where he came up with his own wish list. This had stuff like coffee machines, an app for night mess home delivery, a contribution for taking care of food for campus pets (we used to call them strays in our times). PVV, who heads Mars Petcare, has promised to look into it. Madhav Joshi, though he has shifted to a venture fund from Nestle, has promised that a Nestle coffee machine will be put in place soon. Madhu has already got an app developed for institutes, he has offered his pro bono services to the student body to help get the app fitted into the Joka ecosystem.

While Venky is working on a larger platform for contribution, Kislay, along with a few of our batchmates have come together to fund an Indian NGO called Jeevak Vata. (From the Sanskrti for the tree that gives life). Jeevak Vata has got Fazal and Makrand as trustees. There is also another trust based out of Amsterdam, which Kislay had initiated, to help raise funds from batchmates outside India. Kanchan, Vibhuti are others who are involved in the running of the international trust. The plan is for the trusts to give back to society. As a beginning, the trustees have identified education as a focus area. One of the projects that got discussed was Peepal Tree School, started by Atul Gopal in Pune. The help areas were identified as improving English skills and getting board affiliation. Fazal and Makrand have visited the school (So have Shobana, Sameer, Chetan, Ananth and VAK.) They gave their own perspective of the school’s status.

Next was a super interesting talk on moving from disease to ease, by the Deepak Chopra of our batch – Rohan Singhal. We have adopted lifestyles, where the focus is on thriving rather than surviving. We had a show of hands to find out how many people live in families where there is no medicine being taken. Only 5 hands went up out of 60. Singhal  talked about the 7 grades of toxicity in our body. The first grade is constipation, the 7th is cancer, with stuff like diabetes and tumours in between. When our liver and kidneys do not work well, this toxicity accumulates, sometimes into a tumor. The body is wiser than the surgeon, as it can dissolve the tumor.

Rohan talked about his experiences with THAC, where they try to reduce our ills without pills. Medicines leave a residue that continues sitting inside our kidneys. This magic pill in this case is –  food. In today’s age, the internal environment inside our body has a pH > 7, that means it’s acidic. This acidic environment is conducive to disease. Our body’s natural internal pH ought to be alkaline. Our body functions create these acids – exercise creates lactic acid, stress is associated with adrenaline. When you sleep, your brain blood requirement comes down, resulting in the liver getting a better supply of blood. So sleep time is when the liver does the job of cleaning up and restoring the body to its alkaline state. Rohan talked of the importance of sleep. We have a concept of day; we have a concept of night; what we have lost is the concept of evenings. Evenings are times which help the body transition from wakefulness to sleep. And with the artificial lights that we live with, this transition period has disappeared. No wonder, sleep deficiency is a problem that most of us face today. Sleeping late and waking up early in order to catch the gym, we seem to be worried about our commitment to our gym trainers more than our commitment to our sleep. What Rohan advises is to dim the light starting evenings. In fact Rohan mentioned that he has had 200 candle light dinners last year with his better half, Ruchi. According to him a good bath and some aromatherapy just before sleep time also helps.

One of the queries about alkalinity was can we improve levels by injecting alkalines into our body? Singhal believes that natural sources of alkalinity help more than artificial ones. A good cure for acidity is actually acid. Lemon and water together makes the body alkaline, once it gets into you. Singhal had a very interesting nutrition philosophy. Instead of reducing the bad, increase the good. Let us take the example of desserts Versus Fruits. Let’s not focus on cutting back on desserts, but let’s put our energies into eating more fruits. Let’s not worry about reducing our processed food, but worry about increasing consumption of raw foods. Worry about more Bajra, not less wheat.

Rohan feels that we should be having some raw food with every meal. And when we do deviate, remember that we are doing this strictly for pleasure. The idea is to have a full meal of nutrition before you start eating your pleasure stuff. Sometimes we eat bad, because there is no option of good. But all we have to do is ask. Singhal got his salads, even in breakfast, because he asked for them. I learnt my lessons from our Daman reunion. I consumed tens of bottles of mineral water, and was told while checking out that if I had asked for non packaged RO water, i would have got it. I applied that lesson at Joka, and ended up not touching a mineral water bottle during my 3 days stay. Though, was saddened to see the invasion of mineral water bottles into Joka classrooms.

Rohan talked of the Circadian Food cycle. From noon to 8:00 p.m. is the time for absorption. Ideally, all your meals should happen between these times. So the idea of breakfast like a king has to be now dust-binned. From 8:00 pm to morning 04:00 am is a time that the body repairs and regenerates itself. Ideally, there should be no food intake during this time. If at all you need to eat anything at this time, it should be nuts. Morning 4:00 am to afternoon 12:00 pm is the body’s time for clean up. During this time, it is best to have a diet of only raw or only fruit. Another interesting advice about fruit eating that he gave was that there should be a minimum of 30 minute gap between eating of the fruit and a meal. Rohan himself eats a whopping 1.5 kg of fruits per day. We were witness to this during the three days breakfast, lunch and dinner – Rohan munching on his salads, fruits and nuts. Takes a lot of willpower. I am not too sure I have enough of that. Attending the THAC program recommended by Rohan should be interesting.

We then moved on to an Interaction with the professors. Professor Leena Chatterjee talked about the research being done by her students. One of her students is doing a PhD on Courage at Work – everyday acts of courage. She has done two in depth field studies. One is with a self help group of tribal women in Bundelkhand. The NGO Pradhan had worked out a microfinance solution that has seen not just the financial independence of these women, but also a reworking of identities. Her other study was looking at the man animal conflict. About how forest officials are trying to change the narrative of the animal being more a victim than aggressor, as it falls prey to a loss of habitat.

Leena maam also talked about her online program for women who are being promoted in management. Her observation was that the current MBA female students at Joka are less assertive compared to the past students. She has a hypothesis that it could be because of the 30% quota for women that we have. Puja, who works with Time Warner in NYC, pitched in that her company had sent her to a similar program at Stanford. And in spite of her MBA and her extensive work in the media industry, she found the program to be beneficial. Puja’s request to Professor Chatterjee was that this assertiveness program should be a compulsory course for female students of the second year MBA program. Prof Chatterjee cited a study by Harvard Business School. They found that although women entered the class with similar GMAT scores, they passed out with GPAs which were less than their male counterparts. An assertiveness training session was started for female students by HBS. The guys in the class were not happy about the special attention to their female colleagues. Because of this peer pressure, women started dropping out of this assertiveness program, which then had to be discontinued. Men have a fear of failure; for women, it’s a fear of success.

Then Professor Rahul Mukherjee did an interesting math class for us. His first problem. A father has three sons. The product of their ages is 72. The sum of the ages is the serial number of his house. This information is not enough to answer the question. But when you get an additional information that the eldest son is mentally deranged, you can get the answer. Incidentally, the answer is 8. Figure out why?

His other math question is still an unsolved mystery. Let’s take a 3 by 3 matrix, with elements being 0, 1 or 2. We arrange them in a Sudoku way. Say

0 1 2

1 2 0

2 0 1

And

0 1 2

2 0 1

1 2 0

We superimpose these matrices and we get.

00 11 22

12 20 01

21 02 10

Interestingly, this gives us the entire range of combinatorial possibilities, without any repetition. A distinct orthogonal lattice. This mathematical method has a connection to something called as the Taguchi method, which has an important application in the field of quality assurance. The unanswered question is to find two 9 by 9 matrices, which when superimposed will lead to a distinct orthogonal lattice.

The faculty sessions were followed by an evening in the auditorium. There was a Catch 22 themed drama. Tried to cover a lot of philosophical points. My wife liked it, I am still trying to figure out. There were a lot of stand-up comedy acts, including one by our very own Anantha Annaswamy, who talked about his experience with pets. There was an interesting one by a fresher 1st year MBA student, who talked of his trouble identifying girlfriends of the appropriate age. Leading him to ask about work experience details from every first year female that he meets. We ended the day with lovely choreography. Hats off to this enthusiastic group who performed with amazing energy. The program ended with a bada khana.. where all the current batch students had been invited. Unfortunately not too much of mixing up happened there. There was a late night show of the 12C,  but taking Singhal’s advice, I decided to enjoy my sleep rather than the band. Ironically, I was told that Viji managed to get the entire batch do a rendition of our favourite so gaya yeh jahan. Looks like I got the message 🙂

On coming back to the room, my mind wandered back to 1993. I was in Mumbai doing field work for a term paper on Direct Marketing. What surprised me was a very warm reception to one of my cold calls. Ajay, the person who responded, was an executive in an ad agency. We met over chai at Oberoi. I realised that the reason for the warmth was the Joka connection. In the hour that I spent with him, I got more gyan than a term at IIMC. I still remember the takeaway – cash flows matter more than profits. Ajay had had a long stint with the hotel industry. Then he and his partner launched a hotel reservations startup. Those were the pre internet days, but yet it got traction. Sales happened, but payments didn’t! The receivables climbed up to a point where the startup had to shut down. 25+ years later, 50 + people spent 2+ days at the campus. I wonder why the current lot of students did not benefit from our life gyans. At a personal level, I must thank Apurva Verma and Jaideep Dada, you spent time with some of my old Bulls Eye students, giving them corporate finance and consulting gyan. Rohan Singhal did a great job by spending an hour with the MBA Ex students. But what about the rest? I think future designs of campus reunions can have more small group activity, where people from the same industry can team up and exchange experiences with a question and answer by the current students. Students shouldn’t be just from PGP, but across programs – maybe even the online ones. The good news is that some standardization in alumni affairs is happening. I was speaking to Mallu, Akila’s better half from the 28th batch, who mentioned that the 2018 reunion program for their 25th, was similar to the 2019 design for the 29th batch.

Day 3

Started by doing a 20 minutes single Surya namaskar. The trick is to do it for 20 deep breaths in every pose. Then went out for a campus walk along the boundary wall. This was followed by a three hour long breakfast. Starting 0830 hours and ending 1130 hours. Caught up with gossip. About Rono and Dabral’s experience with Tesla cars. (Would be interesting to hear about Dabba’s transition from banking to manufacturing.) About Kapil Khanduja’s learnings from his recently launched entrepreneurial career. Adi (Aditya Sehgal) had made his appearance only on Sunday. Had a brief chat with him over breakfast on Monday. Expressed my appreciation to his spouse for tagging our friend Adi on her Facebook posts. Keeps me updated about what’s happening in their life. Adi is COO for Reckitt Benkiser’s world wide health business, which includes Dettol and Durex. Chatted with him about how Reckitt Benkiser (RB) keeps green in mind while designing packaging. We started off with the Reduce of the Reduce-Reuse-Recycle triangle. Refills have been tried, but have not been popular. RB uses a green calculator to calculate the energy math in manufacturing of any new product. Another interesting thing is that any new version of a SKU at RB is mandated to use lesser plastic compared to the older version. Discussed the milk pouch problem with Aditya. About how every time you cut a small triangle from the pouch to get out the milk, one piece of plastic is taken away from the recycling universe. (One solution is to use a straight cut rather than a snip) Adi has promised to chat up with his design team to see if RB can help save the environment, one small pouch at a time. By the way, my COEP senior, Lakshman now heads RB worldwide. He was earlier with McKinsey and later on with Pepsi before joining RB.

Bumped into Professor Leena Chatterjee, and we asked her if we can attend a session with the current batch of students. She organised for us to attend a session on HR systems by Amit Dhiman, a PhD from IIM Ahmedabad. He has been faculty with IIM Calcutta for the last 12 years. As expected, was doing a Harvard case! Incidentally, students pay Rs. 95,000 a year for the use of course material from Harvard and the like. I remember Leena Chatterjee lamenting that Ahmedabad is becoming more like Calcutta and Calcutta more like Ahmedabad (In the process, Bangalore has zoomed past!) What I liked was the slow paced case, which was designed to be spread across three sessions. Attendance was an amazing 50 +. The 75% attendance norm seems to be helping. Only one person came in late, who was allowed to attend but was not given attendance. Amit was constantly moving around the classroom. Given the class dimensions, he had to use a mike. The case was an old one – ClubMed, but the choice of the case was good. Like a good detective story, it was full of twists and turns and clues, that you tend to ignore. Amit has great energy levels. I also liked Amit’s board work, where theory occupied the central space and the two side green boards were the buffer zones that were used to get points out during discussions to validate theory. Another interesting practice was the use of moodles. Supplementary reading material and videos are posted on a moodle. Got two interesting insights from the session.

• Attrition can be part of HR system designs, especially in entry level jobs in service organisations with flat hierarchies. This way we can make use of the raw energy of a fresher, and let the matured fresher go on to benefit other organisations.

• The equations governing outcomes in organisations can be either additive or multiplicative. For example selection can be based on written test + GD + PI scores. The final shortlisting is done by adding individual scores. A multiplicative model would be a formula for performance which could be seen as a number of hours worked X Productivity X Team working skills. In this case, if you have one of the factors as zero or negative, then irrespective of the scores on the other factors, you need to let this person go.

We had a chat with Amit after his lecture. He had grades for class participation in the last term, but not in this one. His concern area is about student homework. Only 30% of students read case material before they come. Having said that, a case across multiple sessions has an advantage. The first class become a trailer for the subsequent shows. Hopefully students will come more prepared when coming for the next class. An interesting idea. Have a trailer of the next class in your current class! I liked the concept of what he called the dipstick test. If different employees give different answers to a single question, then and the organisation does not pass the dipstick test. What it requires is not just a clear vision, but a communication of this vision to employees. Another interesting kaizen was to refer to a previous case in a current case. Attentiveness across cases becomes important.

If you want to get bored more, here are the details of the case and how it was handled. He made an interesting differentiation between recruitment and selection. Recruitment is the ability to attract enough candidates to apply. Selection is the normal process of doing group discussion et al to get some of these interested guys in. The critical problem in the ClubMed case was the high attrition levels for the Guest Officers – 25%. How was it going to affect business? In any service industry face to face has value. Also, production and consumption happen in real time. You have to deliver things first time right. Students talked about building relationships, but Amit pointed out that relationship building may not be so important, because vacation locations change every year. However, bad experiences can lead to bad of word of mouth. He quoted the example of an Indigo Airlines bus attendant, who beat up a passenger wanting to board a full bus, and the video going viral. (https://twitter.com/i/status/927915529163046912)

The case states the fact that first time employee ratings go down as soon as a six month rotation happens. This happens even with experienced Guest Officers. Then why is this being done? What constitutes customer value at ClubMed? Why does the ClubMed logo have a tag line – an antidote to civilization? He talked about employees, who regularly work 80 hour weeks, whose salary was a $5,000 a year, a measly amount even in those times. Is the ClubMed model difficult to replicate? The ClubMed hospitality like a family culture is embedded in the ecosystem. For the recruit, the attraction is to see the world, while earning some pocket money. Organisations like ClubMed do not have too much of hierarchy, they tend to be flat. Usually services sector companies have got flatter structures. The reason is that most decision making has to be made by the person on the ground. So escalation does not happen too much, requiring little supervisory inputs. The investment in training for clubmate is 0. People learn on the job. When a Guest Officer is transferred to another continent, she has to learn the local language and the local culture. At the same time, she is also improving on her people skills. The employee comes in with a psychological contract, something that fellows do for NGOs like Teach For India. Most have a tenure of between two to four seasons. The question he raised is should be really be worried about attrition at all? After all we need people with fresh energy, and we don’t have enough positions to promote these people. After a while, it’s best to let them go.

Ended my Joka stay with lunch with Singhal at MDC, after both of us had attended Amit’s lecture. Have given an invitation to Rohan to participate in the Bulls Eye annual meet on 21st 22nd March at Dehradun. I hope he will. I need to book him and his wife Ruchi. Probably they will start from Bombay on Saturday evening. And the plan is to put them on an overnight train to Dehradun. So they will be with us on Sunday. And possibly come with us on our vacation on Monday and Tuesday as well.

Walked down from MDC to the ESIS medical College, which is 2 km away in Thakurpukur. We drove down to Joya’s house for an early dinner. Shantanu is now working in a startup with an interesting backup product. The clients are government offices and others that have data privacy as an issue. These guys can’t take backups on the cloud. Their device, which is plugged into LAN ports, has 10 slots. Each slot can have between 1 to 12 TB hard disks or solid state drives connected. The other advantage of this device, apart from privacy, is that recovery is faster compared to cloud transfers. The startup is owned by a private equity investor. There were sales issue earlier, as the sales team had the DNA of software sales, with typical ticket sizes of $50 to $100. Sales used to close fast. The hardware devices being more expensive than the software, require a lot more patience in selling. Sales team seems to have adapted. One fun fact about the company. Except three people, the rest of the team works from home. This culture started as one of the founders was in New York and the other in San Francisco. The company was headquartered in the Bay area, but the New Yorker continue staying in New York. I wonder whether this is the future of our workplaces? The litmus test would be to check if this company breaks even, which I hope happens soon. I remember discussing the Work from Home culture with my friend Nilesh Nayak, who runs an IT company in Goa. He believes that Work from Home is more a talent retention tool. He has mothers, who can only work at home while bringing up young kids, And then there are employees who shift away from Goa after marriage, who can contribute to Goa, even while being in Ahmedabad, thanks to distance working.