What's in a name? ... that too in a MBA - ISB?

Well for once this post is not about how ISB as a brand adds value to your resume yada yada yada (it does).

This post is not about how the name of the school or the institute from where you have done your education and / or MBA matters etc. That debate we can save for a later date.

This post my dear friends is about our name (at least mine) and what kind of impact it has. While on campus and even today when I go to the ISB campus I land up meeting the sexily named Chopras, Mittals, Goenkas, Shahs, Sharmas, Kalras, Kumars, Reddys, etc etc and I suddenly squirmed at the "Yadav" tag in my name.

Now before you start thinking I am not proud of my name etc etc, let me set the record straight. I am too narcissist to not like anything that I am associated with including my name. So I do say with "garv" that I am "Yadav, Amit Yadav" and then follow it up with a "How you doin?" (This is where I failed most of my job interviews).

But me and another of my dear friend from my batch "Nishant Pandey" had this conversation once on the campus during the placement season. We discussed what kind of a mental image will the recruiter conjure up in his / her mind when they read the name "Yadav" or a "Pandey" on the resume. Will they think of a suit clad smart looking professional or a village baboon sitting on a buffalo and talking about strategy. This was a discussion in jest and now thinking back I think this surely would have been when Nishant was trying to console me when I did not make one of the shortlists. We laughed about it and also ideated about whether it makes sense to actually add a picture of ours to the resume (I know it would have been more detrimental in hindsight)

But that discussion did linger on in my mind for quite some time and every time I now get a resume in front of me I consciously try to gauge if there is a bias that is creeping in because of the name. Another thing that we experienced during the "Gender and Leadership" sessions in ISB - You will always have biases and can never be unbiased. The trick is to be aware of your biases when you are making decisions.  The prof (I forget her name) also said that if you ever get rid of your biases you will lose your sixth sense.

....... coming back to the point....... I did eventually get a job and so did Nishant and both of us are doing pretty well in our industries and roles. We did not notice any bias against any name during the process but the thought of me being pictured by some recruiter as a "typical" Yadav (don't ask what that means) was pretty funny.

In conclusion, there is nothing in the name : you may be a Yadav, Pandey, Fernandes, Goenka, Mittal, etc, your employer will still make the mistake of hiring you :)

Does your Job have a Future?

Ever since I read the book "Who Moved My Cheese" I have always been wondering if my Job is actually the next cheese which may be moved? (Hope not)

Being in the outsourcing / offshoring industry (IT and now BPO) I have always thought that the biggest risk to my job and profile is the economic, political and military stability of India. If someday there is an eminent and real threat to any of these, then the whole offshoring industry in India can actually collapse leaving my job in jeopardy. I wonder what my back up plan would be? Where else can I contribute with whatever perceived skills I posses?

One of the key reasons for me to opt for an MBA was to actually minimize that risk a little more and make my skills "transferable" between industries. I had hoped to be part of the core industry post my MBA but for a variety of reasons did not (rather could not). However I wish to test the waters one day and confirm if my skills and my education actually help me traverse into some other industry. For this very same reason I had applied to multiple non offshoring jobs on the campus, got shortlisted and even got interviewed at a few places. This indeed boosted my confidence that what I bring to the table may be valued outside the offshoring and outsourcing world too. However being heavily risk averse at that time decided to land up back in the Offshoring MNC world.

One of the key parameters that I keep tracking these days is that how "real" is the future of the offshoring world?

While I maybe pondering on the future of my job, here are the 10 jobs which may actually be in jeopardy.

Disappearing Jobs: 10 High-Paying Careers with No Future

This one is even more interesting (Damn - one of them is my DREAM Role

 Top 5 Highly-Paid But Useless Corporate Jobs

NEGA - Negotiation Analysis -Did it help?

Scenario::Placement Season
Day 9 -
One of my friends has not yet found a company and a role that he is comfortable working with.

Then he finds a company and a role that he loves. He talks to the interview panel and they forward his profile to someone who they think he will work with if given an employment. They both connect have an amazing discussion on the possibilities and their interests. They share a lot in common professionally (Both from IIT, Both MBAs, Both analytically inclined, Both Data oriented). My friend is told that someone will get back to him on the next steps. My friend is very happy and so are we all. However there is no news after that. Complete silence. I finally call up the company HR and ask what the issue is and am informed that they are not making him an offer. On further enquiries I find out that the company feels he is asking for too much (is there something like asking for too much in ISB? :) ). I ask the company to forget the salary negotiations and give me a sense of what they feel about the candidate. They said he was an amazing fit for them, and explained to me the role they were offering him. This role was exaclty what my friend was looking for. So I asked them what they were ready to offer and they quoted figure "X" which was a just a little under what my friend was looking for. The company agreed to take the salary a few notches up and my friend was elated to take the offer.

Later I asked him what went wrong in the salary negotiations and he said that he remembered the Negotiation Analysis class and wanted to anchor high. But I think he slept through the part where Prof Kamdar said that while anchoring ensure that you are not driving away the other party.

My experience because of Negotiation Analysis has been very different and nice.

Negotiation Skills -they surely helped a lot during all the contract negotiations that we have had over the past 2 years. Whenever wehave reached an impasse, some of the skills acquired during the class has helped me a lot. There was this one time when the client was not ready to pay for additional capacity that was required to complete the work and we found it impossible to function without the additional. Capacity. We ended up breaking the discussion up into smaller components and making it a menu based pricing model.

Does an MBA help grow?

There has always been a debate on how helpful an MBA is.

Many successful CEOs and Business magnates have not been MBAs. This is an oft quoted arguement against linking MBA to becoming a CEO.

However now the authors of the Harvard Business Review article ranking the world’s top 100 CEOs recently wrote in BusinessWeek that their research has led them to conclude that MBAs make better CEOs than non-MBAs.

Some interesting finds from that article (entire article worth a read)

While analyzing the performances of 1,999 top CEOs, Herminia Ibarra, Morten T. Hansen, and Urs Peyer were able to obtain the educational records of 1,109 of them. Of this group, fewer than one-third were MBAs. But the MBA minority had some impressive stats on their side:

• CEOs holding an MBA ranked an average of 40 places higher in the list
• CEOs with MBAs had average shareholder returns of 93 percent, compared to 81 percent for non-MBAs
• 100 of the MBAs reached CEO by age 50, compared to only 40 in the non-MBA group
• Five out of the top 10 CEOs attended MBA programs (though only four graduated)

 

Why the MBA advantage?

The researchers offer a bit of speculation as to why the MBA can be a CEO’s “magic” ingredient. Here are a few ideas:

• MBAs have better skills, adding “right-brain creativity and warmth to left-brain logic and financial acumen. Or vice versa. It can even help get the hard and soft skills working together,” they write.
• MBAs’ networks “pay out” during their entire career
• MBAs are more willing to work on themselves and are open to new ideas
• MBAs develop broader perspectives

 

Post ISB Job ---- Money or Role or Location or Post or Brand or Boss?????

The pertinent and age old question is always "What to look for in a Job? - Money or Role or Location or Post or Brand or Boss?"

I had this question when I was preparing for my MBA and most prominently felt this same question staring at me while preparing for the Placements Season in ISB. There were the normal voices of sanity which spoke of a long term career and the choice of role. There were the "practical" voices of saying that you have to get a decent salary first because you have this large loan waiting to be repaid. Everyone finally spoke of the long term career but somewhere inside were still thinking of what would be the salary on offer.

I am still confused on what the right answer is. Of late when I have been looking for a change myself these questions came back to haunt me. It was nearly 2 years after my Placement anxiety but the feeling was the same. So basically this question I have decided is not meant to be answered at all. It finally just figures out by itself.

But one thought I will leave you all for sure, and that is from the Negotiation Analysis class which I think is critical. The anchoring that you have in a negotiation is very critical and for every job post ISB your current salary is that anchoring figure. Hence what you "get" out of ISB IS important. Money does matter. Other things matter as well but remember that do get a good salary out of ISB. It helps !!!!

More on how I made my decisions later (Fooled by Randomness)

How the MBA Helped - Peer Group Working

One thing which I have constantly noticed working with different people across the spectrum (within my organization or with that of the clients), that many of them know how to work with their superiors, most of them think they know how to work with the people who report into them, but very few people have the knack and the maturity of working with peers. And more often than not I have found people who have this ability are those who have had that experience in the past and have worked under pressure situations with people having differing skills.

This is where I also noticed that individuals who had done their MBA from top B Schools, had this opportunity during the course of their MBA. I also found that my experience at ISB helped me immensely in this aspect personally. Experience in ISB has been the most humbling experience for me ever. I went to the school thinking I was God's gift to humanity and surprisingly found out that there were more than 400 better gifts in the school. To top that I was paired with 4 individuals from differing backgrounds and an average experience of less 2 years in comparison to 8 years of mine. But when we all worked in a team for all of our assignments for 6 months (and then later in different groups as well), it was one of the most difficult times for each one of us. We all thought that our POV was the most logical and accurate. We all thought that there is just one correct answer. We took more pains to explain our POV and how that was accurate than listening to what the other person was saying. Our first case study on Splash Marketing took us more than 30 hours and 3 big fights to reach any conclusion. (By the time we were in our last days, a case study never took more than 30 minutes). The journey from that case study where we all were trying to prove ourselves to the time where we all understood that in business there is no one correct answer and that those differing voices of others not only ought to be heard but also ought to be accepted.

The experience of working in many diverse peer groups in ISB has surely helped me a lot and thus makes it easier for me to work in that kind of environment / projects / meetings where there is no hierarchy, where you cannot escalate to someone and look for a solution, where you cannot just muscle your way or throw the weight of your position around. ISB has been unique in that sense because of the diversity that the school ensures and the spread of experience that the class has.

One more thing that I learnt while doing my MBA with ISB...... seems abstract but is very tangible in experience.