There are those who could, at this point, quote with justifiable pride the words from the banner borne through Caesar's triumph. But, as a friend commented to me, "we conquered" can be, for some people, a rather inappropriate description of IIMA's first year. A better one - although he was politer about it - would be "we cowered on the sidelines until Vercingetorix had his hands full with Julius, and then snuck quietly past while his back was turned".
Good or bad though, it is over. And unless the glory days of Rome return, complete with the slaves on the rowing decks of the triremes, there is very little that could prove more stressful. The greatest "learning" you get from first year is the knowledge that your limits are a lot farther out than you thought they were; when you've sat up till half-past five in the morning to finish an assignment, run into your classroom at five seconds to nine, and stayed up till three the next night - all this two days before your end-of-term exams and in the certain knowledge that you weren't going to get a good grade on the assignment anyway - you're unlikely to be fazed by stress on the job.
All I can feel right now is relief. Forget placements and grades and social pressure, the biggest incentive to study in fachcha year is that if you don't, you'll have to go through it a second time. No more waiting with bated breath in front of the Quiz Notice Board, no more running through the underpass with the brown envelope on Saturday afternoons...
Congratulations to everyone who has slain, tamed or crept stealthily past the dragon. This will be a day to remember.
Wednesday, April 26, 2006
Monday, April 17, 2006
In the Year of Grace 1564
Maybe, a few months earlier, Mary Arden had seen the shadow of Venus on the snow. Maybe, on that April morning, the sun shone benevolently from a cloudless sky on the sparkling waters of the Avon. Maybe, just maybe, every lark in England alit by a country church in a small village and burst into joyous paean.
And maybe, as is far less poetic but far more likely, it was a muggy day with the rain pouring in sheets and turning Stratford's picturesque lanes into strips of unpleasantly squelchy mud, and those larks who were not going about their business in other parts of Elizabeth's realm were cowering beneath eaves and rafters waiting for the showers to stop.
Whether or not the birds and the sun and the clouds marked that day, the Muses did. The year was one of abundance for them; they had, exactly two months previously, stood over the cradle of the one person since Euripides who could, had he not been rudely interrupted by a rooming-house brawl at the age of 29, have equalled if not exceeded Shakespeare's mastery.
In the years since he lived, volumes have been written about the Bard and his work. He has been reviled, extolled, equated with God and Satan and a host of entities in between, accused of being Bacon/Marlowe/both, and had his work dissected with a 0.001-micrometer scalpel under a 200X microscope. That he manages, despite the weight of his reputation, to enthrall his audience today as surely as he did when that audience consisted of sixteenth-century Londoners, is testimony to his mastery.
By now I daresay I would have been, mentally at least, relegated to the ranks of those who should be marooned on a desert island in the Pacific with only a palm tree for company. Before some civic-minded citizens decide to suit the action to the word, let me only say that performances for the Elizabethan court and gravely intellectual pedagogues who had read more words than they had heard spoken were not the reason for Shakespeare's popularity in his day, and are not the reason for his enduring appeal.
Enough mystery still surrounds him to keep historians occupied for years. In 1612 he wrote Henry VIII, the disputed The Two Noble Kinsmen and the now-lost Cardenio; there, to the best of our knowledge at least, his writings end. It was, perhaps, natural for the playwright to choose to leave London and return to Stratford as his fiftieth year neared; why he chose also to stop writing remains open to speculation. Maybe it was a sudden distaste for the stage. Maybe he wanted a break from writing. Or maybe Shakespeare did write, and the greatest literary find of the century is waiting for some venturesome tourist to fall through a solid wall into a priest hole.
And maybe, as is far less poetic but far more likely, it was a muggy day with the rain pouring in sheets and turning Stratford's picturesque lanes into strips of unpleasantly squelchy mud, and those larks who were not going about their business in other parts of Elizabeth's realm were cowering beneath eaves and rafters waiting for the showers to stop.
Whether or not the birds and the sun and the clouds marked that day, the Muses did. The year was one of abundance for them; they had, exactly two months previously, stood over the cradle of the one person since Euripides who could, had he not been rudely interrupted by a rooming-house brawl at the age of 29, have equalled if not exceeded Shakespeare's mastery.
In the years since he lived, volumes have been written about the Bard and his work. He has been reviled, extolled, equated with God and Satan and a host of entities in between, accused of being Bacon/Marlowe/both, and had his work dissected with a 0.001-micrometer scalpel under a 200X microscope. That he manages, despite the weight of his reputation, to enthrall his audience today as surely as he did when that audience consisted of sixteenth-century Londoners, is testimony to his mastery.
By now I daresay I would have been, mentally at least, relegated to the ranks of those who should be marooned on a desert island in the Pacific with only a palm tree for company. Before some civic-minded citizens decide to suit the action to the word, let me only say that performances for the Elizabethan court and gravely intellectual pedagogues who had read more words than they had heard spoken were not the reason for Shakespeare's popularity in his day, and are not the reason for his enduring appeal.
Enough mystery still surrounds him to keep historians occupied for years. In 1612 he wrote Henry VIII, the disputed The Two Noble Kinsmen and the now-lost Cardenio; there, to the best of our knowledge at least, his writings end. It was, perhaps, natural for the playwright to choose to leave London and return to Stratford as his fiftieth year neared; why he chose also to stop writing remains open to speculation. Maybe it was a sudden distaste for the stage. Maybe he wanted a break from writing. Or maybe Shakespeare did write, and the greatest literary find of the century is waiting for some venturesome tourist to fall through a solid wall into a priest hole.
He was a man, take him for all in all,
I shall not look upon his like again.
Sunday, April 02, 2006
Oompa-Loompas in Large Numbers
I have my Strategy Formulation and Implementation exam tomorrow. I have Finance as well, but I’ve given up on getting a respectable grade for Fin, so it’s only SFI I’m going to worry about.
Due no doubt to a regrettable lack of application on my part, I have failed, in the past month and a half, to become a brilliant formulator of strategy for multibillion dollar international firms.
Take, for instance, a company called – to avoid copyright violation and keep myself from getting sued right, left and centre – XYZ. A couple of hundred billion worth of assets, retail outlets in 47 countries across four continents, fifty billion sales in the past quarter… OK, so I tacked on a few zeroes here and there. It makes it all sound so much more impressive.
I start by identifying the problem or potential for improvement or whatever it is. Step One is to go to the Google advanced search option and see if some philanthropic person has posted the solution to the case as an Adobe document on the Internet. If Step One results in success, the job is done there. If – as is more common – it fails, you curse a bit, close the browser, and define a problem.
So XYZ has massive profits, its CEO owns two yachts and an island in the Caribbean, and it had higher earnings last year than several countries. What could possibly be wrong? Nothing. Nope, it’s perfect, nothing to do, just be careful not to rock the boat.
Do not rock the boat, one types. And then one realizes that may be a little too short for a graded submission, and makes liberal use of the backspace key.
There isn’t a problem I can see, so let me assume a problem. An underground party of Oompa-Loompas is planning to take over XYZ because they don’t like the CEO’s twelve-storey island home. It spoils the view of the palm trees.
OK, now I have a problem. To repel the Oompa-Loompa takeover bid and emerge a better, stronger firm. But that is a very nebulous objective; to be scientific and disciplined and logical and deserving of a good grade, I should introduce some quantifiable aims. God demands Numbers.
I could just add another zero to the profit margin and advise the CEO to gun for that, so that earning enough money to buy XYZ would require the entire Oompa-Loompa population to engage in pillaging ancient treasures for the next six decades. But no, five hundred billion is an obscene figure, and I doubt it’s achievable in any case.
I haven’t any other numbers, so let’s find some quantifiable parameter and give it a Number. The state of the CEO’s relations with the Oompa-Loompa chief, that’s one. When all is peace and light and friendship, the Number is one, and when the Oompa-Loompa chief is busily handing out the Violet Beauregarde treatment, the Number is zero. The way things are at the moment, the Number is roughly 0.05.
Objective: The Number should be above 0.95. (An argument about whether daffodils are prettier than lilies is acceptable.) (A full description of how the Number is calculated is provided in footnote 4(a) to Exhibit 25.)
Strategy: Offer the Oompa-Loompa chief $25,000,000,000 to tell the people back home that the twelve-storey house is just a mirage. Back it up with the theory of relativity, and fund research on bending the space-time continuum to solve the problem. There may be some legal issues involved in the bribery though – no, wait, there is no group in the entire universe that has authority over human beings and Oompa-Loompas. No trouble there, then… Now we just fork another hundred million or so out to a mad scientist to come up with the physics of the explanation, and we’re all set.
Time Horizon: An hour to call the Oompa-Loompa chief and explain the proposition, another two hours to arrange for the money transfer, thirty seconds to make a trans-Atlantic call and three minutes to tell the Head of Research to stop playing with his toys and expound some reasoning. Totally, 183 minutes 30 seconds. Allowing some cushion for the telephone lines being busy, 184 minutes 14 seconds.
Positive Outcomes: The Oompa-Loompa chief keeps his sceptre, the CEO keeps his yachts and mansion, and XYZ will shortly be able to finance a submarine or so.
Negative Fallouts: Well, it just may happen that the Oompa-Loompas throw their chief in the chocolate river and go at the CEO’s mansion with a truckload of dynamite and a match, but then again it may not. And anyway it’s worth the risk.
As was writing this.
Due no doubt to a regrettable lack of application on my part, I have failed, in the past month and a half, to become a brilliant formulator of strategy for multibillion dollar international firms.
Take, for instance, a company called – to avoid copyright violation and keep myself from getting sued right, left and centre – XYZ. A couple of hundred billion worth of assets, retail outlets in 47 countries across four continents, fifty billion sales in the past quarter… OK, so I tacked on a few zeroes here and there. It makes it all sound so much more impressive.
I start by identifying the problem or potential for improvement or whatever it is. Step One is to go to the Google advanced search option and see if some philanthropic person has posted the solution to the case as an Adobe document on the Internet. If Step One results in success, the job is done there. If – as is more common – it fails, you curse a bit, close the browser, and define a problem.
So XYZ has massive profits, its CEO owns two yachts and an island in the Caribbean, and it had higher earnings last year than several countries. What could possibly be wrong? Nothing. Nope, it’s perfect, nothing to do, just be careful not to rock the boat.
Do not rock the boat, one types. And then one realizes that may be a little too short for a graded submission, and makes liberal use of the backspace key.
There isn’t a problem I can see, so let me assume a problem. An underground party of Oompa-Loompas is planning to take over XYZ because they don’t like the CEO’s twelve-storey island home. It spoils the view of the palm trees.
OK, now I have a problem. To repel the Oompa-Loompa takeover bid and emerge a better, stronger firm. But that is a very nebulous objective; to be scientific and disciplined and logical and deserving of a good grade, I should introduce some quantifiable aims. God demands Numbers.
I could just add another zero to the profit margin and advise the CEO to gun for that, so that earning enough money to buy XYZ would require the entire Oompa-Loompa population to engage in pillaging ancient treasures for the next six decades. But no, five hundred billion is an obscene figure, and I doubt it’s achievable in any case.
I haven’t any other numbers, so let’s find some quantifiable parameter and give it a Number. The state of the CEO’s relations with the Oompa-Loompa chief, that’s one. When all is peace and light and friendship, the Number is one, and when the Oompa-Loompa chief is busily handing out the Violet Beauregarde treatment, the Number is zero. The way things are at the moment, the Number is roughly 0.05.
Objective: The Number should be above 0.95. (An argument about whether daffodils are prettier than lilies is acceptable.) (A full description of how the Number is calculated is provided in footnote 4(a) to Exhibit 25.)
Strategy: Offer the Oompa-Loompa chief $25,000,000,000 to tell the people back home that the twelve-storey house is just a mirage. Back it up with the theory of relativity, and fund research on bending the space-time continuum to solve the problem. There may be some legal issues involved in the bribery though – no, wait, there is no group in the entire universe that has authority over human beings and Oompa-Loompas. No trouble there, then… Now we just fork another hundred million or so out to a mad scientist to come up with the physics of the explanation, and we’re all set.
Time Horizon: An hour to call the Oompa-Loompa chief and explain the proposition, another two hours to arrange for the money transfer, thirty seconds to make a trans-Atlantic call and three minutes to tell the Head of Research to stop playing with his toys and expound some reasoning. Totally, 183 minutes 30 seconds. Allowing some cushion for the telephone lines being busy, 184 minutes 14 seconds.
Positive Outcomes: The Oompa-Loompa chief keeps his sceptre, the CEO keeps his yachts and mansion, and XYZ will shortly be able to finance a submarine or so.
Negative Fallouts: Well, it just may happen that the Oompa-Loompas throw their chief in the chocolate river and go at the CEO’s mansion with a truckload of dynamite and a match, but then again it may not. And anyway it’s worth the risk.
As was writing this.
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