Management

Importance of Brands in Education

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Bombay became Mumbai in 1995, Madras became Chennai in 1996, Calcutta became Kolkata in 2001 and Bangalore became Bengaluru in 2014; but IIT Bombay, IIT Madras, IIM Calcutta and IIM Bangalore have still not changed their names. In each of the institutions mentioned above, the place name was initially an identifier, but now, it has…

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Coercion as Policy

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One of the first things that B School students in India learn is about the importance of the CAS – Career Advisory Services, or the Placement Committee as it is otherwise known. This is the student committee that takes up the responsibility of getting summer internships for the first year students and the final placements…

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Understanding the New Economy

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One of the items that has been hogging business headlines the past few days has been the Zomato IPO. And it should, in terms of what it implies, not just for those who invest in the stock markets but for all of us. The estimated market capitalization of Zomato is Rs.60,000 crores while it could…

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Government in Business? A Contrarian View

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One of the most frequently asked questions that startup founders face from investors is – “What would you do if Google decided to do what you are planning to do?”. This is a trick question, for the purpose of the question is actually to see how the founder/s react when faced with insurmountable odds. Nowadays…

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Educating India – Challenges to Prepare For

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Over the last couple of weeks, I noticed a number of friends on Facebook applying a frame to their profile photograph saying they were proud to have studied in a government school. I do not know how this trend started, but it is a welcome one, for hopefully it will bring about a change, both…

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The Dark Side of Technology

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There’s a popular web series that’s playing currently on Netflix called Startup. It’s about three very different individuals – a corporate honcho, a Haitian thug and a brilliant Stanford dropout who are thrown together and create a new cryptocurrency. When they are cheated out of their company, they create a new darknet that is more…

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Treating India – Using Technology to Augment Healthcare

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One of the happiest memories of my younger days was watching M*A*S*H on TV. The show was based on the experiences of the doctors and nurses of a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital during the American military involvement in Korea. While it was mainly a humorous show focussed on a rebellious young doctor who hated the…

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Leveraging the Crowd – When Strangers Step up

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It was a WhatsApp message from another young alumnus of my alma mater XIMB that brought Nikita’s request to my attention. Nikita and her husband Manoj were both recent alumni, and I was not connected directly with them. Manoj, a young professional working in the development sector is directly involved in the upliftment of vulnerable…

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The Value of Wisdom

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It was on Mother’s Day that Prasad lost his mother to Covid. And this was but one of the tsunami of tragedies that hit our nation as the pandemic reared its head again after a lull. All talk of waves, peaks, plateaus and variants become meaningless when a loved one becomes a statistic, and most…

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Criticism – Accept, Stifle or Ignore?

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As a child, I remember feeling puzzled when reading about people being referred to as critics. I wondered why anyone would want to criticize something, and more importantly, why others not only allowed the critic to make unpleasant remarks, but actually paid him for doing so. As I grew older, I understood that the critics…

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