Induction, Social Entrepreneurship and Impending Deluge of Work!

After some sobering messages by the Careers team over the two bootcamps, yesterday the MBA class relished some encouraging words by Dr. Stephan Chambers, the Director of MBA. Oxford, with its rich history, is a complicated and interesting place, to say the least. It feels good to be a part of its rich heritage.

Today, I attended a talk on Social Entrepreneurship. I understand that it takes passion and commitment to be an entrepreneur with a social cause, and that can come only from inspiration within. Business inspires me, and I would conduct it ethically and responsibly. Beyond that, there is nothing much of interest for me in Social Entrepreneurship. Nevertheless, I am impressed by an alumnus from Canada who is running a flourishing business in Zambia. Hats off to his passion and commitment, and several other similar champions. Even within my own class, several people aspire to use business skills to make a sustainable difference to this planet. I wish them all the best, but this nut is not for me to crack, I think.

Meanwhile, our study groups, sections and timetables are out. Excluding lunch breaks, comfort breaks, travelling et al, I think I will be doing at least 50 hours of lectures per week for next 8 weeks. Add to this the group work, assignments, exams and some extra-curricular activities. Of course some sleeping, eating, socializing/networking, job-hunting and family time. This will be fun... In the following weeks if you notice me by the virtue of my absence, please don't be surprised!

Finance Bootcamp

Two days of Finance Bootcamp, and my biggest take home is that it is not the field that I would aim for. Besides the unsocialable working hours and extra-ordinarily high stress levels, in the current climate finance is simply off-limit for experienced MBAs with a non-finance background. It is as simple as that. So, why bother and waste your time and energy.

Even then, there were many new things to learn as I listened to the sector consultants. My key take away:

• Investment banking constitutes of only 10% of finance jobs. Finance is much more than M&A and trading
• the execution time of financial deals can vary from micro-seconds (trading) to decades (project finance)
• even after 6 years of work-experience, there is much to learn about the black art of writing CVs and cover letters
• a well researched opinion can make all the difference
• networking rules
• in the current scenario, forget about finance if you do not have a finance background

Oxford Pursuit

It is amazing that even though I enjoy writing about philosophy, policy, poetry and learning experiences, I find it amazingly hard to write about events and people. For me, this is a brand new discovery that has come up while thinking about what to write about "Oxford Pursuit", an activity this Sunday that helped most of the MBAs to know a few more of their classmates, explore Oxford and have some fun. I will give it a try.

"Oxford Pursuit" is a game akin to treasure hunt and was played around the main landmarks and pubs of Oxford. I enjoyed the chase around the city, and had some really good discussions with my team-mates during and after the hunt. In a group of five, we had a US soldier who had served in Afghanistan, a successful New York trader, a German marketer, a professional with roots in Hungary and an Indian techie (yours faithfully). I had some amazing discussions on topics including entrepreneurship, capitalism, communism, politics in India, politics in Hungary and leadership, to name a few. The time spent made me realize that even though we are different from each other, there is a subtle ambition and attitude that we share at some level. In a certain unexplainable way, it makes me feel at home.

It is good to be in Oxford.

A Disappointing Career Fair by Top-Consultant

Management Consultancy Fair organised by Top-Consultant was a big disappointment, to say the least. Barely ten companies (IBM, Accenture, Ernst & Young, Pcubed, Newton, Thoughworks, BT) and ten recruitment firms! Not of much value there, and nothing worthwhile to write about it either. Anyway, moved to Oxford finally. Now next in line are "Oxford Pursuit" on Sunday and Finance Bootcamp on Monday. I think the next two weeks will go into settling in and getting into the grove. Will keep you posted!

Management Consultancy Bootcamp: Day Two & OBA Event

End of the second rigorous day of the Management Consultancy Bootcamp (MCB) with SBS in Oxford followed by a brilliant evening talk organized by the Oxford Business Alumni (OBA) in London. I am dead tired, but will summarize my take home for the day.

For MCB:

• got a perspective about hiring from the people who actually do the recruiting (from LEK, Bain, IBM, Ernst & Young and PRTM)
• got a taster of written tests, fit interviews and case interviews. Received some pointers about handling case-based questions
• listened to the experience of the students from 2009-10 batch who got an offer from top consulting firms

All the specifics, including the full video recording and presentation slides, will be made available to all students online via the careers portal. One thing is sure; the decision to pursue consulting is not to be taken lightly. Not only the process is hard, high travel times can potentially place very high demands on your personal life and health. Nevertheless, the bootcamp will enable the students to make a more sensible and well-informed choice. In fact, some students will be starting case interview practice (yes!) right from the coming Monday. Amazing speed.

For OBA event, I enjoyed the talk by an erstwhile Oxford alumnus. During drinks, I connected with four brilliant people, and not even one of them had done the MBA. And that is where I realized the reach of the University of Oxford. Anybody from Oxford with interest in business can be in your network, and I think that would really broaden the scope of networking and help all of us to leverage the Oxford brand more effectively.

Time to hit the bed. Tomorrow I am going for a Management Consultancy Career Fair in London, after which I shall finally shift to Oxford. Ciao!

Management Consultancy Bootcamp: Day One

SBS has organised a two-day Management Consultancy Bootcamp for its incoming students in order to give them a better idea about the consultancy landscape and give them a head-start for preparing for the rigorous interviews. Today was day one. This is my take from it:

• Got to meet quite a few of my future classmates, and had fun talking to a friendly, diverse group of bright people from all around the globe
• Got an idea about the consulting landscape and what it is like to be a consultant
• Got a much better idea about the application process, the things that consultants may be looking for in an ideal candidate and the pitfalls to avoid while writing a CV or a covering letter

One can read zillion books, spend hours on networking and make a herculean efforts to analyze markets; even then it may not be possible to gain such insight as was packed in this one day. At end of day one, I can simply say that it was a very useful and informative session. A productive, tiring day. Will hit the bed for another long day tomorrow at Oxford followed by an Alumni event in London. I guess it is preview of the busy days ahoy!

CloudForce 2010

Some time back I had attended an event by SalesForce.com in London, CloudForce 2010. In the CRM world, SalesForce is an awesome company that has given companies like Siebel and SAP a real run for their money. Not content to occupy the CRM space only, SalesForce is now targeting cloud computing with a difference: it is trying to marry cloud computing with content management systems and rich-internet application (RIA) development to develop and popularize an alternative application development and deployment model. A very ambitious and daring venture, I must say. In the world of IT changes can be either pretty fast or they can simply linger on (if not, we wouldn't find a single mainframe on the face of earth). Since many organizations would be haevily invested int the present status quo, it is a complex proposition at its best.

On the up side, SalesForce has built a brilliant RIA and is trying to leverage its knowledge to both help and tie in its clients. It is doing a brilliant effort to make partnerships and sell the idea on the force of its network. The marketing strategy seems to be brilliantly thought out, and the execution is marvellous. The deployed applications are said to take lesser time, are on the cloud and readily deployable to browsers, iPad, iPhone, Android and BlackBerry. With lower costs, it can potentially be tempting for an entrepreneur to use the set up to launch an internet application. With "Chatter", they are also trying to present themselves as the secure facebook of the corporate world. With tools to analyse Twitter feeds and integrate it with SalesForce products AND the applications developed, the possibilities indeed seem mouth-watering. Having a functioning CRM RIA is a big plus here.

On the down side, I feel they are trying to do too many things and trying to be all things to all people. I am not sure how this hopscotch of ideas (When Azure Meets Joomla, Facebook and Twitter?) would work out without some seriously tough strategy planning and implementation: something that may turn out to be quite a mouthful even for the SalesForce marketing juggernaut. There have been systems that have promised develop once and run anywhere in different ways, but have failed when they have not given enough flexibility to developers and designers. Successful content management and application development systems like Joomla or Drupal come in handy on a typical LAMP (Lucene, Apache, MySQL and PHP) set-up with a nice net based UI to develop a simple,reasonably powerful and secure application that can run on any Windows or Linux based cloud. At any time a company can switch the cloud-operator or host themselves. With SalesForce, you are pretty much tied to them if you want the app. Another worry I have is that they have tied-up with Adobe to deliver their application development IDE. In many of my earlier blogs on RIAs, I have often complained about the lack of end-user focus in Adobe RIA applications like the erstwhile Flex. I sincerely hope SalesForce does not depend on them only for this IDE.

In conclusion, the product idea definitely has an immense potential to succeed, but the path is far from easy and there are some problems that I can already envision. It will be interesting to see how the application develops eventually, as other cloud providers are sure to counter this massive marketing blitz with moves of their own.

The Rise of PaaS

After Software as a Service (SaaS) we are now slowly entering the domain of Platform as a Service (PaaS). As the Internet speeds pickup and our hardware increasingly becomes more powerful, there is little to stop this transition. With enough competition in the domain it would possibly present benefits to a lot of people from a business point of view as it would further democratize application development.

I feel that the three key factors that need to be taken into consideration before either adopting or selling PaaS:

1. Security: Keeping proprietary code on alien servers may be hard to stomach for many businesses if they fear data-theft or data-loss. This is always going to be top-priority and reputation is everything. It would make sense only for the big and established brands to enter the arena immediately, so to say.
2. Speed: Technically proficient companies may feel that they are ceding control of the speed of application as they would no longer control many things in the server, database and application development. For many small and medium business owners, though, this may not be as big a consideration. Nevertheless, the companies attempting to enter PaaS will perhaps counter this by giving more configuration options and partnering with network accelerators.
3. Portability: This would be another major issue. With their experience with computing over the last so many years, business owners in general would hate to tie down themselves with any specific PaaS provider. This means PaaS provider would have to either leverage some existing and popular framework (aka Red Hat) or invent and popularize an entirely new one (aka SalesForce). Both challenges are not for the faint-hearted!

With respect to development of Rich Internet Applications, this would only further complicate the equation in this nascent field. Tie-ups, support, marketing and smart technical development is the way ahead, I guess, as reach somehow always wins over technology (especially when the product can be potentially commoditized). The big horses to watch include Red Hat, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Google, HP and SalesForce. I am sure many others would try as well. Lets see how this story unfolds.

Seminar With Jane Silber

I attended my first seminar at SBS today which was organized by the "Women in Business" special interest group. More specifically, Jane Silber, the CEO of Canonical Ltd and an alumna, addressed a select group of SBS students, alumni and faculty. The event was organized by two students from the 2009-2010 batch, Annika Dubrall and Emily Chew.

Overall, the seminar was well organized but the attendance was a bit muted as perhaps many students were preparing for the end of their course, arranging possible logistics of moving out of the country or otherwise. Nevertheless, the cause of women in business, I would think, could have done with a little more support. Anyway, I found Jane Silber to be humble, sharp, unpretentious, dedicated and technology focussed. Being a techie, I know that Canonical's product Ubuntu is a great operating system(OS) for PCs. It is one of the most popular and easy to install versions of the Linux, and its focus on ease of use has won it several laurels. Even though for server based system Red Hat Linux rules, as Jane Silber herself said,Ubuntu is the undisputed king of PCs running Linux. I feel that the next few years will really test her leadership and vision as Ubuntu faces intense competition from Google's new Linux based OS, increasing dominance of web (which will favour Red Hat) and a resurgent Microsoft, to name a few. Yet, with its excellent brand, a strong user community, ties with OEMs and increasing popularity, Ubuntu and Canonical will remain a force to contend with, and I wish Jane Silber all the best steering this ship.

The Human Story

Though each one is blessed by Him
Why the light in hearts is dim?
Like a poisonous serpent black
Like a deadly locust attack
Like a hunter's closing net
Like a heavy loosing bet
A darkness creeping on a name
Like winds closing on a flame
Hearts trapped in greed and hate
Humans oblivious to their fate
As far as our story goes
Goodness dies and evil grows
Are we stupid or are we naive
When we dig our own grave...

Thinking Networking

Managing an MBA application and then implementing the transition is a big project in itself. I think it is the first training that one gets at multi-tasking, prioritizing and answering some difficult questions.

The more I think, the more I feel that the most powerful thing about the MBA is the network it puts you in. To progress in this world with lesser hurdles is not only about talent and drive. The personality and initiative do matter, and so does your network: a group of intelligent, helpful and successful peers and mentors. Compared to other educational setups, I think that an MBA provides for the strongest possible settings to build a strong, worldwide, quality network for the simple reason that quite a few people come to the MBA with this motive. Your MBA group, the alumni network and your school can potentially be your biggest power base. Of course a lot will depend on your willingness to contribute back, how much you interact with people and your conviction in this belief.

I have met a few people from my senior and current batch, and my experience has been good. Perhaps I will have revised this opinion after the course, for better or for worse. But for now, I go in with a realistic understanding that even though not everybody may think alike about networking, it is highly probable that the MBA group would be a cohesive one overall. Fingers crossed!