Tuesday, May 02, 2006

Chronology of Good Times

Thankfully, through out my life I didnt had many bad times. So, since I promised to tell you only the good things, first let me start with something good happening to me.After working in corporate world for two and half years, I have joined Great Lakes institute of management. To know more about my college please go to
www.glakes.org

Let me tell you the events we had after joining this institution.First of all I am very happy to reiterate that I am studying in this awesome place which boasts of some stupendous names associated with it.

First day

"You have come here for educating yourself not to be taught by us"
This was the first clarification given to we all new MBA grads joining at Great Lakes institute of management,chennai.
However at first glance I thought there is not much difference in both the terms but now gradually I am picking the different nuances.
First day started with some verification of the certificates, then we had some fun with seniors. And to our surprise the very next day (20 April) we had guest lectures by 2 CEO's (one CEO of Grundfos, a multi billion dollar company manufacturing centrifugal pumps and systems for water applications , and other CEO from DEXTERITY an IT company).These great people discussed on organizational behaviour and corporate jungle.They were more than happy to answer our questions.


OUTBOUND

The next 3 days we had been taken on an outbound to a beach resort. This was a well needed ICE BREAKING Session. We had loads of fun and games. It was both mentally and physically draining. at the same time fun.During the second day, we had an interaction with CEO of Orchid chemicals, and Mr Lakshminarayanan , CEO of CTS. Everyone was awestruck with the way the Mr Lakshminarayanan discussed some of the key aspects like market evaluation of company. It was a great learning, since even after having worked in corporate world, market evaluation was something which not many were sure of.

Outbound went well and we were back to chennai.On Monday (24 April) we had a session on how to approach the Case studies by Prof Sriram. He explained the differences in approach to case studies by different B Schools, and made us tense when he told that we would be following the Harvardian way of approach. The same day evening we went to IIT madras where we had an interaction with CEO of Sanmar group(This initiative is called "MEET THE CEO").



25 April, Tuesday

Formal inauguration day of our batch. Dr Bala, the founder of great lakes was present. He was at his usual best.

We also had Mr Ravi Venkatesan , MD Microsoft India. He is a Harvard alumni and he while appreciating us also discussed about the importance of IT in indian development. The best part was the way he stressed the use of IT in rural development (geographically as well as demographically).


26 April,Wednesday


we had Uncle bala(thats the way he likes us to call him), discussing the objectives of the course and how he is going to lead us.

He also emphasized how the institute is run by students. Then came the seniors, who exemplified the above thing when they discussed about various committees like admissions, library, events, gravity (great lakes magazine), great lakes consulting, food, sports, Finance study groups, Operations study group,Branding and PR commitee etc. Each student has to be a part of atleast one commitee.

I am planning to be in 2, Great lakes consulting and Events.



27 April ,Thursday

The graduation day of the seniors. Adi godrej was the chief guest. The venue was Taj Ball room. Seniors were looking royal in their black gowns.Uncle bala was excited to see his nieces and nephews entering or re-entering the corporate world, with mush passion and knwoledge.



28 April,Friday

I think the most special day so far, we had an interaction with none other than RATAN TATA. I was impressed by his humility, his passion and his commitment towards excellence in various fields.Some great people say that, you can learn a lot from people, and there are lots of learnings one can have after meeting RATAN TATA.
Humble yet smart, shy yet straight forward, great listener at the sametime a great orator.



Meanwhile we had couple of philosphy lectures, where we had to understand Upanishads, Vivekananda's life. The professoe here was Mr Dr Venkat Krishnan (earlier he was with XLRi for 9 years). He told us , inorder to understand the culture of any country, it is very much necessary to understand the underlying philosophy, tradition.He believes that reading the books on asian management style do not really help to understand the underlying culture. He is very great admirer of Prof Robert J Bies from stanford who also states that understanding philoshphy is the best way to understand the culture of any society . The course objective is to educate us on Leadership and power. This can be achieved by doing a field work, where we have to work with powerless people and need to show positive results, since we are powerful than those set of people. This entire coursework has to be done in 45 days.



Also we have some interesting things lined up.Philip Kotler, father of marketing is going to visit us on July 18. Mr Jimi Carter, nobel laureate for peace, is going to take our help in a noble cause, where he is going to build 10000 houses for tsunami affected people. We have to lend our help to him for 2 days in October. But anyways would update my log very often.

I think by now you must be totally sure of my weblog name :))))

Let me know your comments


SACHIN

2 Comments:

Blogger Laks said...

yo!.. that was a good read... got a lil nostalgic thinkin abt the outbound though :P... am hopin we'll all have sometin just as fun soon enuf!

8:36 PM  
Blogger ponderingparanoid said...

Hey lakshana
Thanks for the comment.More to come now.Dont worry, we will have lots of fun , and will definitely repeat the outbounds during the "KARMAYOGA"

11:58 AM  

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