Markstrat - The essence of an MBA

Let me start this post by apologising for an inordinately long absence. The incessant partying and ... partying, which took place at the end of the first term caught me off guard.

However as all good things must come to an end, instead of partying I am now Blogging.

Term 2, arguably consists of the finest selection of subjects. One of the them is a subject called Marketing Decision Making, taken by 2 fantastic faculty - Pradeep Bharadwaj and Jagmohan Raju.

40% of the grade for this eminent subject is allocated to an activity called markstrat, which MBA students are aware of.

Blessed with a really kick-ass team, consisting of the Marketing club president and the batch topper till now, we were extremely bullish on our performance. Notice that I said WERE.

markstrat for the uninitiated is marketing simulation environment, where each team is given the reigns of a company and a starting position and over 8 rounds, the team has to earn as much money as humanly possible. the amount of moolah you acquire determines your grade.

Our first experience with markstrat lasted 7 hours. Starting at 2300 and going on till 0600. These 7 hours in my opinion captured the essence of an MBA. Optimistic about our chances, we delved deep into it and often discussed issues, such as firm A must be thinking this, hence we should be doing this.

After hours and hours of debates and naps and coffees and football breaks we thought that we had come up with an unbeatable solution. However when the results came out today ...... we were far from being numero uno ....... its obvious isn’t it, that we came last.

Confidence dented; today we shall aim to find the reason why we might have missed the top spot by so large a margin ;-) I would attribute it to over-confidence, excessive strategy planning, too much investment in the future, too many naps and variability of knowledge in the group. 2 are fantastic and 2 insipid.

The moral of the story in Prof Richard Waterman’s words is KISS - Keep It Simple Stupid