Monday, July 9, 2007

Drinking water from a hosepipe

An one year MBA programme is really like drinking water from a hosepipe. That too doing the programme from a school of the stature of ISB brings with it a lot of challenges..

We get the best of the professors and are exposed to the latest in management thinking. To get the best out of this requires lot of effort, commitment, intellectual curiosity and guts. Some people get overwhelmed by this information overload and stop learning. Some others are so much caught up in the details that they just forget the big picture and miss the woods for the trees.

In my view i think a balanced approach to this would do a lot of good. Everything that is taught need not be in our area of interest. But it is important to know that such things do exist. Even a mere knowledge that something exists will help us become better managers than not knowing at all. Moreover as future leaders of organizations we can always hire specific talent for a functional role, but we may not be in a position to get the best out of others if we are ourselves unaware of the possibilities.

My two cents for all the future MBA aspirants, think a few hundred times why you need to do an MBA? Don't do it unless you get a clear and a compelling reason. Because its this clarity that will help you cruise through this course. It is this clarity which will give you the special power to drink water from a hosepipe and enjoy it too..

Contact lens for Chickens

Weird... you may think. But its true. We recently learnt about a company which makes contact lens for chicken. But of course this lens is not for bettering the vision, its actually for partially blinding a chicken. Apparently this increases the lifespan of a chicken and gives a host of other benefits.

We learnt a lot of management stuff by doing this case.. but apart from all these, i was amazed by the sheer ingenuity of human thinking. Who could have ever thought of making a contact lens for a chicken and trying to make money out of it too..

It reinforces my belief that there is no dream too large, no innovation unimaginable and no frontiers beyond our reach..

P.S: If you think i was fooling around check out www.opticaldistortion.com