It's always beautiful...

...when it snows and you never realize that...and suddenly you peek through the window to find the whole world white :).
Indeed, Life is beautiful!

dunnhumby-the genius company...

"Customers today are very disloyal; it is so hard to make them stick to us. How much ever you try, creating a loyal customer is just impossible."
"Well, maybe finding a loyal customer is very difficult, but can you tell me how loyal YOU have been to your customer?"

Now that's a very real conversation a dunnhumby consultant usually has with the CEO of a potential client. And CEOs don't like to hear that answer most of the time. But that is exactly how dunnhumby, a small and fast-growing Cincinnati marketing research and consultancy firm, is making money-for itself and for its clients. There are two things about dunnhumby in my mind that make them one of the best small companies in the US right now.

Insight

The data never lies (as long as you understand them). Many market research firms have access to huge databases, but very few of them have succeeded in creating “magic” out of it. One very powerful example they showed us was that of a huge US retailer- dunnhumby managed to show them (for the first time after 30 years of their existence) that around 2% of their customers contributed to almost 30% of their revenues and also who this 2% were. Now all the retailer had to do was to focus majority of its marketing dollars on that 2% to get the greatest return on investment. The beauty of the dunnhumby philosophy is that they go against almost every commonly (and often stubbornly) held paradigm in brand management, the most important one being-"The best way to make more money is to get more customers". They have proved that there is a better way of doing it-especially in fairly mature markets- and that is to make more out of existing customers, by really being loyal to them, by creating value for them over and over. Backed by a super-smart data analytics team they are able to achieve this goal through intimate knowledge of who each customer is (think of the granularity in a database of 40 million customers) and what value proposition would make sense for that customer. End result? The customer is happy, the retailer is happy and dunnhumby gets paid-everyone wins in this game!

People

When I visited the dunnhumby office, I could literally feel the energy in the air, every person I talked to was completely pumped up. They are so passionate when they talk about the kind of work they do. They love the impact they (as a ~300 employee company) are able to create in giants like Kroger (to see a more detailed analysis check out the case studies section in their website). The culture of the company is so open and friendly. Every employee (from the senior-most managers to the entry level worker) sit out in the open and people interact very freely with each other. The structure of the office itself is very different from a common office building and lends itself to a collaborative atmosphere. It is rated as one of the best companies to work for (in 2007) by The Sunday Times and I am definitely not surprised!

Company Website: http://www.dunnhumby.com/

Networking-An Art and a Science

One of the first lessons they teach at a b-school is the power of networking. This is one skill that can make the biggest difference between striking it big and just landing up with whatever gets thrown at you.

Networking comes naturally to most of us, though we may not be aware of it-we all like to have good company right? Some people just wait for people to come to them and talk while others just can't stop talking:). Now some people have taken this simple natural instinct and made a whole science out of it.

I am a pretty sociable person, or so I thought until I had to meet these huge set of people from the corporate world in an alien culture. Now for the first time in my life, I am just tongue tied, extremely self-conscious, searching for the right words, struggling with finding common interests with the person in front of me! This is bizarre.

Though I am a strong advocate against using "influencing" techniques with people (they are just manipulative most of the time), there are some basic things that get us off the ground quickly...(these are things I keep telling myself every time I have to meet a new person and am going "ewww..not another one...")

1. Get out of your comfort zone. If you never wanted to meet people, you could have done that pretty easily back home (with a decent paycheck as well!!). You came here for a new experience and here it is...its not comfortable the first time, but nothing ever is. So just push yourself (literally many times:)) and go out and talk to new people.

2. Quickly find common ground. With Indians it is so easy-which state are you from gets the discussion along for half hour maybe, with people from other cultures, it might be difficult to start a discussion-asking them about their country/background/company might be a great way to start. I have been amazed at how candid people can suddenly get when they talk about things dear to them.

3. Do some research. Yesterday we had a meeting with representatives from about 10 companies and I didn't know about even one of them! I failed miserably in finding common ground:(. If I had known about their companies I could have asked more insightful questions about their work and probably learnt much more from the discussions.

4. Just go up and introduce yourself. Chances are that they won't pull out a gun and shoot you (you might want to be careful in Texas though:)). Many people want to be talked to-they are just as shy as you are-so if you don't get it off the ground the plane shall never take-off!

5. Practice, this might sound gross to some people, but I am going to say it. If you dont think you are good at it and it is a life-saving skill there is only one way to get better-Practice. There was a senior manager at one of the Big 4 consulting firms who impressed the hell out of us with his talk (he looked like he started talking right from the time he was born!!) and his final caveat? "I used to practice 15 hours a week in front of the mirror when I was in b-school!" You might want to think about that.

And some minor ones...
Never forget to exchange business cards.
Send out Thank you notes, they did take out time to meet you and you learnt a new perspective-thats a lot to be thankful about!
Keep in touch in a non-intrusive way (unscheduled phone calls/visits, too many emails etc are no-no).
STRICTLY NO PERSONAL QUESTIONS.
Use http://linkedin.com

Finally all these are just starting points, what stands out in any relationship is true character. I will close this with a wonderful quote from Emerson-"“What you are shouts so loudly in my ears I cannot hear what you say."

If any of you can add more items to that list, I would be delighted!

Integration...

I have discovered the simple truth-its just too hard to maintain two blogs-the ideation, content generation, marketing, comment tracking...just too much. So I have just integrated my other MBA blog into this as two BIG posts.

The First Quarter...

Life is interesting...

Am three weeks into the MBA program and a friend put this simple question that I always dread-"so how is life?" I mean how am I supposed to answer the question-at any point of time there are a hundred things not going so well and a few going fairly ok and maybe if I got lucky one or two going pretty darn well...so I stopped at "Life is..." and thought long and hard about it (well not too hard-I never can:)) and decided "..intereting".

IMhO, atleast on a personal level, this program brings out all your weaknesses and worst fears out in the open and you have to start dealing with them! I haven't fully dealt with them yet, but atleast I have started seeing them. There are no longer things I could easily get away with in my work life (getting up 10am EVERY day for eg.). Its tough to put it mildly, but it is also interesting, I can see bluntly where my priorities are, time comes at a premium and my tendencies from the past guide my decisions about what to do with it. And whatever I do with it, there is always an oppotunity cost, pretty heavy one most of the time-and I just have to trust my instincts to get it right (or atleast to avoid getting it wrong:)). I feel like a little child thrown into a maze where there are plenty of attractive dolls at every turn, but waiting to pick'em up closes more doors down the road. Whatever it is life is definitely LOT more interesting than it used to be.

Btw, just when I thought I will sit down and write something here finally...I am reminded, my midterm starts next Monday...so off I go for another week of roller-coasters ...

PhDs can be NOT boring!

There is something about PhDs and every prof in a b-school is expected to be one...first day in class I was expecting a dull monotone and boy was I surprised!! I will talk a bit about some amazing profs who handle classes for us (I will do this before my exams start, so that I can conveniently go back and bitch them after the grades are out:)).

We have this prof who has like a zillion years of experience, he has worked with SEC, consults for top-notch companies and is the head of Finance department (or something similar I dont remember which one), and he teaches accounting. Now accounting is probably THE most boring subject to teach for all you do is take a problem crunch the numbers and you have the answer, there are very few ways of going out of the box or engage the class creatively and what does our guy do to compensate for that? He uses humor-and trust me, its not just run off the mill stuff, he can get really really funny. I will leave it with one colorful example. The whole class was drowning in a lengthy monologue of the basic rules of accounting and he was about to start a problem (again lengthy-but very important to catch on to the basics). He takes one small pause and goes-"You know accounting is a bit like sex (heads are bouncing off the tables at this point), when you are doing it the first time, you really dont know what the heck is happening (people are shaking their heads in wierd ways to make sure their hearing is still right), you just fool around you are not sure which is the right way of doin' it, you are very uncomfortable and you dont have that much fun, but as you start practicing it you start getting better at it (some folks are nodding their heads off at this point, some international students can't control loud giggles), then the fun part starts (the whole class is in fits now and he picks on one student we will call Sam) and he goes "Sam, where is your mind man, I was talking about accounting!!" It took almost five minutes for the class to get back in order, but I can tell you every one of us were wide awake for the rest of the class!

Then we have two profs handling Organizational behavior, both have scores of years of experience in the Vice President level of management in large corporations, and it really shows! OB is a fairly dry subject with so much of theory, models etc etc. So the style that one of them adopts is to trust the class to read the material on their own and engage the whole class in pretty involved conversations and whats more-in these you really get an opportunity to see what amazing kinds of people you are sitting next to!! In one class we were discussing a case on the culture in IRS and most of us were making some generous assumptions on what they would want and how they would be structued, and one guy raised his hand and said, well I have worked for IRS and here is what it actually is!! It is a paradigm shifting experience. Many times to make his point he would bring in some movie clip or some other video related to the case and we would end up having a lot of fun. Finally the personality of this prof is mind-blowing, he would just walk in and take the class by storm, I would be sitting there wiith 3 hours sleep previous night heads down, trying to keep my eyelids from sticking to one another...he walks in and boom..two hours are gone! Its simply exciting!

I have to talk about at least three other amazing profs, but I will save that for later...

Simulations-they are real!!

We participated in two simlations in the last month, one was with the orientation program, where we were split into teams and each team gets a company in a market and we are asked to make decisions-production, sales and marketing, finance, sourcing, then negotiate deals with other teams, cooperate compete, think strategically and implement a winning strategy-sounds like a lot, and it really was. We were simply overwhelmed, two days we were having animated discussions on how the production couldn't scale up, the market share seem to be going down, how to improve quality, how the hell do we get the striking workers back to work, what patents do we bet on, how much money do we borrow, do we get out of/get into a market and how to kill the competitors! And all this without having the faintest idea of what a balance sheet looks like what profit indicators we needed to look for, which part impacts which function-zilch-absolutely nothing. It was exhausting, and we didn't do too well on it, but we learnt so much within those two days!

Then just two days back we had an OPEQ simulation, each team was an oil company producing a particular quantity of oil (that was the only number we had to decide) and if all teams cooperated there would be huge profits, if one team cheats they make a lot of money, or as more commonly happens if everyone cheats everyone loses money. The communication between teams was limited and spaced appropriately so that there were many blind spots where you just had to trust somone's word. Things got really ugly, my teammate was going, "I want to know who are all in that Team-I am never going to deal with them for the rest of the two years! How could they cheat like this!!!" It really got very personal. And finally there was an analysis in class of the results-all messages and decisions were put out in the open and we had a riot of laughter (someone says-"Guys lets be true to each other, we will stick to 35" and their output that year is 75 and then some people putting out friendly rejoinders like "You sons of bitches, go burn in hell" and so on...it was a fun way of learning oligopolistic competition and the prisoner's dilemma

Some thoughts on first quarter

Its official! I have successfully completed the drill of the first quarter, supposedly the hardest quarter of an MBA program. It has been a fulfilling experience. It has been a real roller coaster, but never ever short of fun. Every single day I have been doing new things, learning new ways of doing old things, admiring some amazing individuals and thoroughly enjoying every minute.

The most interesting experience has definitely been working with my team. You are part a team of five and each of them is chosen to have a very different background from the rest. For example in my team, I am the only engineer and international student, we have a girl who has worked in the media industry, an accountant, a former Englih teacher and a pharmacist who is also pursuing law. Things get really interesting with such a motley mix of people, working closely on very tight schedules and under enormous work pressures. I have seen us take on different roles at different times from the creative genius, to the timekeeper, to the conflict resolver, to the project manager, the silent listener, you name it! I personally find it very rewarding to understand each of these different individuals, learn from their strengths and play to achieve the team's best output. I have learnt to put the team before myself and everything else, I have learnt to trust people and make and keep commmitments.

Then there are the courses themselves, each one so unique and differnt from anything I have learnt before. The class runs completely on participation. The instructors encourage discussion and get the concepts out of the students themselves instead of rote lectures. Two profs in particular deserve special mention-Prof Wruck who handled economics completely using case studies, with a flair and confidence that lit up the class, enabled lively discussions and created a beautiful learning environment. Second is Prof. Rucci, my personal favorite in Fisher so far, he has had experience at very senior levels of some huge organizations for a number of years. He has an interesting story for every concept, every situation and he just loves the students, always with a genuine smile ready to help. I should say I have never seen someone own the stage as much as he does, every single time!

First quarter involves some serious hard work to meet deadlines, midterms, student organization etc. If I were to make a suggestion for a newbie, it would be to join as few student organizations as possible and do some significant work in them because time ALWAYS comes with a premium in an MBA.

Finally, the out of class fun activities, it is very important to de-stress yourself in the first quarter as things can get really overwhelming many times. I have a great set of friends who are always ready for a movie, a late night walk to mirror lake, hanging out on High street and so on...its been great help in wading through the quarter.

[Many of my classmates have a different opinion from what I have expressed here...so this is no way the "normal" experience, but that's what is special about an MBA, there IS no definition of how you are supposed to take it-each person experiences something totally different in the same program.]

The Beginnings...

The journey begins...

This week, I start my MBA at Fisher College of Business at The Ohio State University. I will blog my experiences as I go along (as frequently as my schedule would allow it:) ) . I should be adding a post every Sunday...so check back (if you really have nothing better to do) on Monday mornings!

And oh...by the way, mirror lake is the name of a beautiful lake at OSU campus. I pass by this every day as I walk to Fisher and this one is staying right with me as I wade through the next two years:).

Day 1...

The campus is beautiful and HUGE! I need to walk 20 minutes to reach campus-its on the same road as my house is. On the way is this beautiful lake called the Mirror lake-more on that later.

Btw, at Chicago, I almost had a heart attack when I checked my folder and did not find the I-20 and SEVIS documents inside...after almost ten minutes of frantic searching I remembered that I put them in the my big green purse for "safe-keeping" :)...that was the only tense moment in the whole journey. When we landed in Chicago, they said there is a message waiting for some people, when I saw my name on that message list I was so happy-I haven't even arrived and they already have a message for me!! When I opened it, it said your bag has not arrived! Some local friends who came to my house were just so surprised when I told them that only one of my check-in baggage has arrived. They asked "How on earth did you manage to get even one correctly from British Airways" seems that they almost never get it right!!
Going good...

Got my baggage finally!! All stuff intact!

Today, for the first time in my life I was in a suit...almost half the day (Nostalgia: Microsoft days when people would look puzzled if you wore full-sleeves and formal shoes) I was talking and socializing with so many people from so many different countries (10 and still counting...). I felt so comfortable in it that I feel I wouldn't mind working at a place where I wear suits to office everyday ;)...

Yesterday an American senior took us to a pub+restaurant since pizzas are just $3 there every Thursday. It was my first time inside an American bar, (or any pub for that matter:))...enjoyed it very much though I couldn't participate in the drinking...we met up with a great lady (wife of a student) from Chile who started talking to us about Indian culture-she wanted to know about India and Indian culture-particularly about how women are treated there-she is a strong career woman and was astounded at some of things we had to tell her:)...we talked almost for an hour...we got out early since sessions started at 8 today morning.

Networking, back in India might be a "nice" thing to do, out here though, it is considered your bread and butter, how far you go is directly related to how many people you know and how well you know them. The faculty, seniors, industry professionals, almost everyone talks about networking and ways of doing it.

After the day's sessions were over they left us in a room to meet people and socialise and I got to meet so many exciting people...a Chinese girl (who has started teaching me Mandarin;)), an American who was a pilot for several years (he's agreed to fly me on a plane and teach me how to fly;))... a former US Navy officer, a German, an Indonesian, two Taiwanese, a Vietnamese, a Jamaican and ofcourse so many Indians. Yesterday I got to meet an Ugandan doing PhD in Animal Sciences and we ended up talking for half hour on the similarities between the two countries...so many people..so many cultures..so much to explore!

Tomorrow is a football game here...this is not our usual football..this is American football (the one where they crash into each other throw a ball and run like crazy...people are just too crazy about it...you just can't beleive how crazy!!! A $25 ticket for the final game (Ohio Vs Michigan) sells for $500 here!!! The rivalry between these two teams is just unbelievable!!

Need to go home now...catch you tomorrow...same time same id...with more exciting news from Columbus Ohio!! Till then its goodbye from ...Aaarveend Shaarma (this is the way some Chinese friends pronounce my name here;).

Muthal Mazhai (First Rain)...

Today is the game day here at Ohio State. Arkons play the OSU team, this is a football crazy state! Early in the morning as I was walking up to school, I saw so many small airplanes (not joking...real airplanes...about ten of them) circling all over the sky, each tied with a big poster on the back depicting some advertisement for a brand or company that can be clearly seen from the ground so nobody can miss it up in the sky! Thats how creative marketing can get in this country!!

Here a game day (usually Saturday) is like one big festival...families go together to the stadium, just outside they have so many stalls, many people start cooking food outside the stadium (barbeque etc)-this is called tailgating. And inside of the stadium is just an unbeleivable sight! inside http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohio_Stadium Check all the photos in that link!!

The capacity is 1,10,000 and there must have been atleast 90000 people there. And they all shout in one voice...O.H.I.O...there is a small gap from which inside of the stadium is visible. Red is the color of Ohio State and the whole place is just flashing red. Wherever you go people are in Red, and most of them are talking about the game. If this is the scene of an pretty low-interest Arkon Vs OSU game, it is impossible to imagine what OSU Vs Michigan would look like! People take a dip at the Mirror lake before that game every year it seems. Last year the temperature was around -5 degrees and the lake had almost frozen over, still a lot of people stripped and took a dip before going to the game! Incredible!!

After this,I decided to check out the RPAC (Recreational and Physical Activity Center)-this is a HUGE sports-cum-gymnasium center-state of the art-full of gyms, squash courts, basketball courts, tennis courts etc etc etc! The best part though was the acquatic center. There is a mega swimming pool (used for Olympics they say!) and three smaller ones... I'm gonna go swimming as soon as possible!! then there is a spa (a jacuzzi kinda thing) and a sauna!

When I came out of RPAC, there was a lovely rain-my first at Ohio:)...not the heavy troublesome one..but a light flowery rain making the whole place much more beautiful than it already was! Came straight to the internet center in the rain and here I am...

That’s the story till now...