Seeding the UK Business Schools network

On Saturday (16th) a few of us from Judge Business School, Said Business School, London Business School, Warwick Business School and Manchester Business School met in Oxford to explore avenues of better interaction and networking among the various UK business schools.

As an outcome of this meeting, we plan to increase the interaction between the schools and have a lot of inter-school competition.

Daniel from SBS hosted this event at his school. He was a wonderful host and took us around to some of the wonderful places (pubs, monuments, colleges et al.,) in Oxford. It is really an impressive place (just as Cambridge is); with a lot of history and tradition.

Leadership seminar with Sunil Mittal

Today we had a leadership seminar with Sunil Mittal. He talked about how India has developed over the years from a socialistic economy to a more liberalized economy. In 1992 the country had only 7 days worth of foreign-exchange reserves and had to mortgage its gold with the Bank of England to borrow $500 million. India was even thinking of selling its prime-property around the world to raise money (e.g., the Prime real-estate where the Indian embassy in Tokyo is located). This is really what drove India into liberalization along with a lot of pressure from the World Bank and IMF.

It was in this liberalized economy starting in 1992 that Sunil Mittal build Bharati Enterprise to become one of India's premier business houses. Bharati's flagship company Airtel now has a market capitalization of over $35 billion. His story resonates like the story of many of the Indian businesses that were started by entrepreneurs in the 1990's.

His view is that India is at a cross-road with a lot of potential and is growing rapidly. The next two decades will make or break India. He feels that the areas that needs the most development and support in India are education, agriculture and research in pure-sciences.

I liked the way he explained complex things in very simple terms. What I liked even more was that he used numbers to make his point across rather than using casual rhetoric.

Chinese New Year

We welcomed the Chinese New Year (The Year of the Rat) with a big-bang party on the 9th. Our Chinese friends made every-effort to dish out some real nice cuisine and festivities. We sang and danced through the night. The 'God of Fortune' came around and gave us gifts. The person dressed as the God was none other than the great Tao from my previous study-group. Here are a few pictures from that eventful night.

How do we learn?

This term has been a killer one with too many assignment and so much ready. However, I like it as we are learning newer things every day and learning to manage our time in a better way. The learning methodology is also quite different. For each of the case study we do in clasee, we get industry experts come in and give us their view points.

Example : We had a case on strategy case on Google and we had someone from Google to talk more about the case. So was the case with cases about Patents, Innovation and People Management. I'm really enjoying the learning part of it and tired of the incessant reading.

Looking forward for the results of the Technology Enabled Enterprise Transformation contest we had today.