GMPian Ankit Arora's article on financial markets published by CoolAvenues

Good news friends !

One of our GMP colleagues- Ankit Arora has been published as an author on CoolAvenues.

Ankit has written an article focussed towards recent developments in Indian financial markets and how one can avail the business opportunities in this space.

Here is the excerpt from the article:

"The Indian financial markets are undergoing major transformation since the last 2 years. We are witnessing lot of new developments in Indian financial markets. This article attempts to cover some of the recent developments in Indian financial markets and the possible business opportunities that one can avail.

To begin with, recently [Apr 2011], NSE, National Stock Exchange of India introduced the Smart order routing [SOR] which would allow the orders to pass from NSE to various other stock exchanges. What SOR does is that it looks for the best possible price across various exchanges. So if Reliance is trading at 995 in NSE and at 1000 in BSE, this SOR system would execute your order on NSE and thus save you Rs 5 per share."

To read the complete article, please visit:

http://www.coolavenues.com/mba-journal/finance/recent-developments-and-business-opportunities-indian-financial-markets

Dr. Mine Cinar's (Director, Center for Global Management & Responsible Leadership, Loyola University, Chicago) testimonial on XLRI-GMP

Dr. Mine Cinar's (Director, Center for Global Management & Responsible Leadership, Loyola University, Chicago) testimonial on XLRI-GMP:

Elephant in the room

Article by Anurag Behar (92 BMD, XLRI Jamshedpur), Co-CEO, Ajim Premji Foundation

The policy of having a school near every habitation has built in a difficult challenge for our schools and teachers

I am writing this from Shorapur, a 10-hour drive from Bangalore, and I am admiring India’s achievement in the past couple of decades of having schools at accessible distances from habitations. In this truly remote block, every village that I have visited has a government school with a decent building.

This is not surprising, because by 2006, 98% of habitations in India had a primary (up to Class V) school within 1km, and 86% had an upper primary (up to Class VII) school within 3km. The numbers have grown since, with a clear focus on “being near every habitation”.

This means a staggering increase in the number of schools. At the time of independence, India had about 130,000 schools. Today we have about 1.4 million. About 7 million people work in our school education system. This is by far the largest education system in the world.

Factor in the cultural, linguistic, socio-economic and developmental diversity, and you also face the most complex education system in the world. This system has about 210 million students.

This massive expansion has not resulted in actual learning in those schools. We have lots of schools now, but precious little real education. The causes and challenges are many, this column is about a specific one.

The design of this expansion has inadvertently “in built” a difficult challenge for our schools and teachers. This is one of the hurdles in the path towards real learning and improvement in quality of education. As a result of this strategy of “being near every habitation”, the number of students in our schools (especially rural ones) is small. Each school has just about as many as can come from the nearby habitation. Within that small number, the students span all age groups. A school may have 115 children, but the children will span an age range across 6 to 13.

Now, even if this school were to have three teachers, which is more or less at the current national average of one teacher per 39 students, the teachers would need to handle multiple age groups simultaneously. This is called “multi-grade” teaching—in this case seven “classes” would have to be handled by three teachers.

If you talk to practitioners, they say this is much more difficult then handling a class of same age children. It requires special training, different methods and different skills.

And we have built this challenge of “multi grade teaching” into almost all village schools by the way we have handled the expansion. One of the most complex teaching challenges has become a part of the everyday job of most village teachers, who by general admission are inadequately equipped and ill supported to deal with academic challenges.

It’s not as though we did not have a choice of another model of expansion. China in comparison has about 700,000 schools, including vocational training ones, and spanning about 250 million children.

The Chinese system has about half the schools, and about 20% more students, compared with India. Roughly, the average student number per school in China is 2.25 times that in India. China has followed a route of consolidation; we have followed one of dispersion. The former leads to an exponential drop in the “multi-grade” load of teachers, as is the case in China.

Two factors played a dominant role in the choice we made.

The first was our policymakers’ single-minded focus on “literacy”, and keeping learning outcomes and quality of education on the backburner. The second was the pragmatic assessment that getting children to travel away from their habitations, with our kind of infrastructure, was not possible. There seems to have been an almost implicit assumption that “let’s do literacy first, and then we will see about quality”. The whole expansion got designed for that. I would speculate that things like “multi grade teaching” and its challenges were practically overlooked.

Those choices were made under certain circumstances. Sure, these could have been better, but they could also have been a lot worse. What matters is that there is now no way to unwind or reconfigure the system.

We can and must still deal with it. That requires significant teacher capacity development, improved classroom practices and appropriate curriculum. It’s these fundamentals that need to be worked on and invested in

In fact with a capable, well-trained teacher and appropriate curriculum, multi grade teaching can be a learning enhancer. In Machagondal Camp, 10km from Shorapur, I met Uma who, in her early twenties, is a government teacher in the local school. She has handled class 1 toV for the past two years, all on her own, and the children have learnt. She was the only teacher in this one room school till a couple of months ago.

I have seen this happen in other government schools in this block, alive with enthusiastic well-trained teachers, using the “nali kali” curriculum.

There is hope, but to truly address the problem, we have to first notice and acknowledge the elephant in the room, inadvertently let in by having schools in every habitation.

Anurag Behar is co-CEO of AzimPremji Foundation and also leadssustainability initiatives for Wipro Ltd. He writes every fortnight on issues of ecology and education. Comments are welcome at othersphere@livemint.com

To read Anurag Behar’s previouscolumns, go to www.livemint.com/othersphere

(source: http://www.livemint.com/)

Article by Anurag Behar (92BMD, Xlri Jamshedpur ), co-CEO, Ajim Premji Foundation

XLRI '85 batch Homecoming

Diwali @ XL

There are just some of those occasions when no matter where you are you miss your family. Diwali, the beautiful festival of lights and hope, is definitely one of these. The very thought of being away from home on this day would bring feelings of despair. But ask an XLer and you will surely be hit with a different viewpoint.

The B school rigor doesn’t permit you to be home for Diwali but the beautiful XL culture ensures you make it a grand day in your calendar. So let’s begin with how it all started. The day started with people waking up early in their hostels (and this does include boys hostel :P) and gearing up for the celebrations. People put in hours to make their own little efforts which included internal room decorations, beautiful rangoli designs, lightning. The hostels transcended from mere buildings, they shimmered and glittered in the spirit of the festival.

As the sun dawned the actual efforts being made since morning started taking shape. Lighting illuminated the entire campus - trees, bushes , buildings. There were diyas and candles on every road, every path. The regional association in charge of the arrangements (COWBAXI) did a fabulous job, the members ran the entire day to make sure everything was in place. Evening saw everyone volunteering and lighting innumerable candles and diyas across the entire campus :). Then the celebrations began; everyone gathered for the traditional puja and recited the prayers. After the puja ceremony we all moved to the lawns where special arrangements were made by the faculty members. On our way to the lawn we could see the splendid amount of effort put in to ensure every nook and corner of the campus was brightly lit up. We met our excellent faculty at the lawns and were overwhelmed by their hospitality. There were stalls for everything right from snacks to main course to desserts and everything was a pure delicacy. It was a blend of cultures in the most delicious manner; there were idlis, dhoklas, cholle puri, jalebi, rabri and other mouth watering items. There was a crackers bursting session which saw participation from several students and faculty members. The entire XL family was in one place filling the ambience with extreme warmth and togetherness.

This was followed by a small cultural night put together by the students in our favourite JLT arena. The setting was exquisitely traditional – khatiya, badam milk and an excellent show. There were numerous games and stunning performances by the students. There was a stupendous display of fireworks; the sky was brightly lit in red, blue, green, golden and other wonderful shades.

The day made us fall in love with XL all over again, with the spirit of XL culture, the invaluable bonding and togetherness. It was an experience that goes into the diary of each one of us amongst the most cherished times and like all such experiences you just have to be there to feel it.

"Strategic Brand Management for B2B Markets" - by Prof Sharad Sarin (XLRI Jamshedpur)

Strategic Brand Management for B2B Markets

by Prof Sharad Sarin (XLRI Jamshedpur)

Sage Publications (Response Books)
ISBN: 9788132105220

This book aims to uncover the hidden and unexploited power of leveraging from the concept of brand and brand building for B2B marketers. It focuses on the need of B2B marketing from the point of view of Indian markets and economic conditions at home.

With extensive discussions on the three most respected corporate brands in India—Tata, Larsen & Toubro and Infosys—the author demonstrates how these companies have created value through brands and how their branding initiatives are benchmarks in their journey to success. With three decades of experience as an academician and consultant in B2B Marketing, the author argues that a brand-driven business can accelerate the transformation of all the big and small B2B marketers to gain competitive advantages. He advocates the need is for a holistic brand management approach and illustrates his point through six case studies of leading brands

Prof Sharad Sarin (B.E. (Jodhpur), PGDBA (IIMA), Ph.D. (Pune)) has been with XLRI since 1976. Before joining XLRI, he worked in industry for four years. He is currently on the Boards of XLRI Jamshedpur, Mudra Institute of Communications, Ahmedabad and Tata Refractories Limited. Over the last 30+ years, he has been a corporate consultant to several large and well-known Indian companies. He has conducted more than 100 programmes and workshops on Strategic Marketing, Industrial Marketing, Relationship Marketing, Strategic Management and Customer Satisfaction, both in India and abroad. He has been Visiting Faculty to IIM-Ahmedabad, University of Colorado at Boulder and Rhode Island in the USA. His areas of interests are: General Marketing, Industrial Marketing, Competition and Globalization, Relationship Marketing and Marketing’s Role in Development.

Prof Trishit Bandyopadhyay's book: A Regional Energy-Economy Model - A Case Study Of Karnataka

A Regional Energy-Economy Model - A Case Study Of Karnataka: Incorporating penetration of new and renewable energy technologies in a multisectoral intertemporal optimizing framework

by Prof Trishit Bandyopadhyay, XLRI Jamshedpur

Publisher: LAP LAMBERT Academic Publishing (14 Oct 2010)
ISBN-10: 384335992X
ISBN-13: 978-3843359924


It is widely being acknowledged that renewable energies will become important in future and we are already getting a glimpse of that now.In order to study the impact of penetration of new and renewable energy technologies in a regional economy,under a planning and policy analysis context,-it is often desirable to have a unified framework which integrates all forms of energies,both conventional and renewable,that have reasonable potential of being harnessed.This integration has been achieved here by developing a multisectoral intertemporal optimizing model which allows the study of interactions between the energy sector and the regional economy and thus would be a valuable tool for energy planning and policy analysis.Equity related goals could also be introduced into the model,as shown in the book while assessing the impact of gap reduction in per capita household energy consumption as heat between rural and urban areas.The working of the model has been demonstrated by energising it with data from the state of Karnataka,India.The energy policy analysts,the regional planners,and students including practitioners interested in applications of optimizing models should find this book useful.

Prof. Trishit Bandyopadhyay, B.Tech(IIT Kharagpur), Fellow(IIM Bangalore] teaches Strategic Management of Technology, Innovation and Operations at XLRI Jamshedpur. He has earlier worked in public and private sector organisatons in areas such as Electronic Switching R&D, Project Implementation and Production Management.

Krish Shankar, ED-HR, Bharti Airtel @ XLRI

“The future of HR is all about strategy. Ten years down the line, the foremost concern of HR managers would be harmonious alignment of organizational goals and strategy, capability building and talent sustainability. And the biggest challenge then will be managing distinctive aspirations of a diverse set of people,” said Mr Krish Shankar, Executive Director, HR at Airtel. He was delivering a talk on ‘The past, present and future of HR’ to management students at XLRI Jamshedpur on Friday.

Shankar, an alumnus of the 1984 batch of the institute, joined Airtel in 2007 after 21 years at Hindustan Unilever Limited.

Describing the strategy of top Silicon Valley companies like Facebook and Apple, Shankar said, “They just do not let the best minds leave. If an employee is the cornerstone of your firm, there is a need to recognize that fact and do everything possible to retain him.”

Of all the changes taking place in businesses across India, he identified three major fields of opportunity. The first is technology, which is now “completely out of this world” and even the most incredulous of ideas cannot be discounted without due thought. This advance has resulted in an accelerated cycle of changes and transformed business dynamics, which form the second field of opportunity. “There are new winners, new losers every 5 years. Nokia, which was earlier the undisputed King of Mobiles, is still wondering what went wrong after the iPhones and RIM took away their share of the pie. The lesson is that you have to be on your toes to keep ahead of the market,” he explained.

Talking about the youth, whom he termed as Gen I owing to their impatient, indulged and individualistic attitude, Shankar said they would spur faster growth. “None will be content with waiting 25 years to be CEO. Also, talent is coming from Tier II cities and that is what corporates should look for,” he added.

Leaving students with a final nugget of advice, Shanker said: “We are about to embark on the age of entrepreneurship and widening choices. As managers, always understand the big picture.”

Alum ‘81 and COO of Accenture India visits GMP: Ms Rekha Menon on Success, Leadership, Core values and more

It is tough to be a CXO in today’s interconnected world. You have to be ultra careful in each decision you take and that makes the job much more difficult. The solution is to define your core values and be true to them whatever you do. This was only one of the personal insights shared by Ms Rekha Menon, COO of Accenture India and an XLRI alumnus, while she was talking to the current students of General Management Program(GMP) at XLRI, Jamshedpur.

Ms Rekha Menon, the gold medalist from 1981 batch of XLRI, graduated at the time when women were seldom seen outside their homes after 6 pm and the top recruiters of those times refused to hire women for business management functions. How she got successful by fighting such a discriminating system and still managing to retain her core values was an insightful learning for the current students, especially the numerous female students of XLRI.

The audience was particularly enriched by Ms Menon’s ideas on leadership qualities needed for a top leader in today’s corporate environment. She said – “Since the industry is changing at a phenomenal pace, ambidexterity and adaptive capacity of a leader is absolutely essential today.” She also cited “ability to learn from the crucible and challenging events in one’s life” as one of the differentiating factors between great leaders and the rest. However the most fundamental and defining quality of all is one’s integrity and a set of other core values which one needn’t “wear on the sleeve” but withhold supremely in all one’s actions.

This last quality is especially relevant in today’s context when in addition to imparting quality management education; it is increasingly becoming important for Bschools to teach about the value systems. And that’s exactly what got reinforced by Ms Menon today. “Look at the mirror hard”, “Think what you will be remembered for” were some of the expressions which threw the budding managers in introspection.

 

 

In the ensuing question and answer session, the students also sought Ms Menon’s insights increasingly relevant areas of corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, scarcity of successful entrepreneurial ventures in India and the threat to Indian IT industry from China and Latin American countries.

Ms Rekha Menon is an XLRI alumnus, and the gold medalist from 1981 batch. Starting her career on the shopfloor of Eicher Goodearth, and then moving to Ashok Leyland, she has also served as the General Manager (Human Resources) with Aditi Technologies. She co-founded of India's first CRM company, Talisma, in 2000, before joining Accenture in 2004. During her tenure, Accenture India has shown a multi-fold growth from a 3000-people company to now more than 57,000-strong company (and the largest Accenture operation globally).