PagalGuy Rankings

It’s not often that one comes across a B School Ranking without any bias or without any B School being dropped from its list for various reasons. If not for anything else, then for this reason alone PagalGuy needs to be complimented for its first B School Ranking Guide. Although the crowdsourcing methodology used is not new and perception rankings have been done before by various publishing house, it must be the very first time that such a ranking can be said to be above board. The fact that most publishing houses have heavy income flows from some of the very B Schools they are judging, will always lead to the more than sneaking suspicion that the rankings have been manipulated. PG on the other hand doesn’t have an income stream from B Schools and the fact that most of its moderators and administrators have always been above board, gives it a high credibility in terms of the fairness of the rankings. Also as more and more people participate in the coming year, the rankings will certainly prove to be immune to the effects of a few shady manipulators outside the system.
The matter of perception rankings being a fair judge for evaluating a B School is another thing though. There is no consideration for the faculty, facilities, placements or any of the tradition parameters in B School rankings-well atleast not directly. The only thing that matters is what the Junta thinks about the college. So if a college has a heavy ad budget, not too controversial, and administrators who themselves could teach a few things about Branding and Marketing, then there’s a good chance of coming good in the rankings. And that’s where niche colleges and those with specialized courses lose out. Not because they are any the less better, but because they are not marketed enough. The audiences which do matter, like the Corporate Junta, HR, faculty, etc and who do know about these colleges are however unlikely to form a large percentage of voters (which is another thing PG missed out on- The complete demographics of the voters, rather than just their location). Which leads us back to the question- How relevant are perception rankings for selecting a particular B School over another. Well if you are not an ardent follower of the Indian herd mentality then these rankings (like any other) can only form a base for your research before selecting a B School. Ultimately you have to choose a B School for your reasons and not somebody else’s.

P.S.- Meanwhile the latest rankings by Financial Times have ranked ISB at no.20.Probably the first time that any Indian B School has come up so high. What’s surprising is that it has not only upstaged its partner NorthWestern University’s Kellog B School (at No.24) but also that it has the highest Weighted Salary among all B Schools ($169,355)! Now that’s something. The Weighted Salary definition as per ET is that “The average alumni salary today with adjustment for salary variations between industry sectors. This figure includes data for the current year and the one or two preceding years where available”.

It stands slightly lower at No. 5 in Salary Today which is defined as “The average alumni salary three years after graduation. (The 2008 ranking surveyed the MBA class that graduated in 2004). This figure includes alumni salary data for the current year and the one or two preceding years, where available. The figure is NOT used in the ranking.”

There’s no hint about PPP or any other adjustment factor but I guess something of that sort should be there, otherwise its too good to be true, even considering its cost vis a vis other global B School Programmes.

Edit- Apparently it seems PPP adjustment was there, Atleast thats what Rashmi Bansal says in here. Although she hasnt mentioned where she got the info from.

Red Letter Day

The recent stock market crash has been likened to the Black Swan theory by some market analyst. The black swan theory as propogated by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book, Black Swan is a large-impact, hard-to-predict, and rare event beyond the realms of normal expectation. However the last two days events have been anything but a Black Swan event. Large-impact; yes, Hard-to-predict; perhaps not- After all there have been enough warnings in the past two weeks. First there was a large amount of FII withdrawl in the last week. In fact 133 billion USD was withdrawn in the week preceeding the Reliance IPO. Couple that with the US Recession (the decoupling theory is a laugh now) and the fact that worldwide markets were going down. Any astute investor who has greyed his hairs in the ups and downs of the stock market would have known that the huge liquidity shortfall that would happen for a few days post the Reliance and Future Capital IPOs, would certainly catalyse even minor fluctuations in the market. Unfortunately it seems most investors are as clueless as a newbie like myself (which probably is a good thing for me). Anyway it was a golden opportunity to invest- if only the bank balance had been a little better.

Meanwhile there's a conspiracy theory going around that the brokerages were not allowing people to buy by closing down their sites or other means, ostensibly to drive the prices down further. Stupid theory I would say, if you stop people from trading you stop the buying as well as the selling. besides most of the brokerages would be so overleveraged that they would be looking for buyers rather than anything. The carshing of sites or the slow speed had probably to do with the huge traffic than anything else. The Banks and MFs seem to have made a good picking with the extra cash they. Guess that would atleast make the NAVs go up. Like they say what you lose on the swings, you make up on the roundbouts!

The 1 lakh Home

First it was air travel for the masses, then it became a car for the masses, now I am waiting for the home for the masses. A decent 2bhk not too far from the city for 4-5 lakhs. Is that too difficult? Is anyone listening?

Connecting the dots

From trulyparanoid to from the Heart and now connecting the dots, this is where I got the latest title of my blog from- a must ad to any podcast collection

This is the text of the Commencement address @ Stanford by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?
It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.
And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.
I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.
I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.
I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.
My third story is about death.
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.
This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Pass the Buck...out

The latest one in chain mails being fwded these days:

NEW ENGLISH WORDS COINED:

Bucknor: (n) (adj) 1. Temporary blindness leading to missing out on the obvious. 2. To be at the wrong place at the wrong time. 3. Situations leading to grave judgemental errors.
Usage: I feel bucknored by my boss; Life often throws a bucknor at you.

Benson: (n) (adj) 1. Something that legitimises a severe bucknor.
Usage: First they bucknored me and then they bensoned it! I am toast. Also see bucknor

Ponting: (n) (adj) 1. A substance or entity or even a person of unquestionable integrity 2. An act of uncivilised behaviour. [Also, pontingness (n)]

One Indian who must thank his stars for all the drama that took place in the last two weeks must be the Wall. Nobody has time to analyse his last performance now, no way sir, we have graver issues like the nations honor at stake. But as the next tests place under unbiased umpires and intensified scrutiny, the moot question will still remain the same. Will we be able to win even a single match this series. Even in the last test, it was only a draw we could have hoped for. A win in Australia against Australia, remains as elusive as ever….But then the boys are charged, Aussies are on a backfoot for once and we remain as optimistic as ever, who knows, a miracle might just happen.