have taken off my defunct website .. will put up a revamped one soon .. for now www.yashovardhan.com points to my twitter account ... check it out .. www.yashovardhan.com

http://twitter.com/Nucliomaniac

sorry guys,

havent been updating this for a while now .. am fairly active on twitter also .. http://twitter.com/Nucliomaniac

now that I have more control over my time these days, hopefully, Ill get the opportunity to blog more.

cheers,

Yash

A letter to friends .. who are always asking .. Where have you been ?

My turn now :-)

Well I graduated from ISB this year and it was unbelievable experience. ISB is such a great business school and it surpassed all my expectations. I was extremely anxious upon choosing ISB as a business school, as I didnt know much about the school and was all set to go to the US for an MBA (was accepted at Cornell, Carnegie Mellon, Tuck (Dartmouth), Darden and Insead). But keeping my long term goals of being in India, and at least attempting to become an industrialist, ISB it was.

ISB got hold of me from the word go and didn't let me go .. the year just zipped by. I didn't sleep a lot, but neither did I study. In fact, I doubt if i learn anything about an MBA at all, its just a degree i got hold of while networking for a year ... and boy oh boy did I do so major networking.

I became extremely involved in ALL the extra curricular activities on campus. was elected as the Social events coordinator of the institute, which meant that anything non-academic fell under my control, things such as networking events, parties, speaker sessions, picnics, alumni interaction events, some more parties ... you get the drift.

Apart from this, I was also heavily involved in the Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital club, and was elected vice president of the same. This club is Big in ISB, and managed to get the business cards of scores of young entrepreneurs from India. The icing on the cake, was an event which we call the Tie-Isb connect, which is an event, attend by over 60 VCs from silicon valley and hundreds of delegate entrepreneurs.

anyway ... this went on for 9 months or so .. after which I ran away to HEC, Paris for an exchange. Paris was an unbelievable experience, and like Pramod, I not only used the opportunity to travel, but also develop some contacts in nuclear energy, which is big in france, fashion (was given a job by Moet henessy and Louis Vuitton) and European Private Equity. In my free time, I peeied on the Insead wall, pictures to follow ;-) Paris is a wonderful city and staying there for 4 months, I really learnt why people claim that travelling is the best way to learn.

I did pop back in India, during the middle of the my stint in Paris, to attend our placement week and having developed a distaste for consultants (sorry Pramod) and investment bankers, I chose to apply to really off beat companies, such as Aditya Birla Group, some other Indian companies and a few European ones. I was finally given an offer by Jindal steel and power Ltd., and it was such an awesome role, that I accepted it right away, rejecting one really high paying offer.

As of now, im cooling my heels in delhi, and understanding how Indian SME's transition from being an SME to much larger professional company and its wonderful. lots and lots of traveling, no time for a social life and a work schedule which would put an investment banker to shame, but I wouldn't have it any other way :-)

If any of you ever come to Delhi, do give a call ... would be awesome to meet up.

ohh btw: I majored in Finance as well as Entrepreneurship, mainly taking up courses, in real estate, private equity, capital raising strategies and hard core operations, things like logistics, supply chain and so on ... developed a distaste for soft courses pretty early into my programme, love Economics though.

take care and keep in touch,

With best regards,

Yash

movie lovers ahoy

found a really cool site, which gives you really really condensed versions of all the popular movies out there

Movie-a-minute

the one i liked the most was for stanley kubricks "A Clockwork Orange which is one of my favourite movies

"Malcolm McDowell

I was having a right horrorshow time of it, O my brothers, crasting and drasting with my droogies all the nochy, viddying the vino flow. Then, those glooby bratchny millicents loveted me and hurled me in the plenny like a common prestoopnik. That vonny plenny wasn't for me, so I let some doctor vecks filly with my mozg to fix me up right skorry. Then I ittied on home like a good malckickiwick, but I couldn't slooshy my lovely Ludwig anymore without getting bolnoy. It was oozhassny, so I jumped out the okno. I've had rather a change of heart, and thinking of getting a zheena like a proper chelloveck, and all that cal.

Audience

Eh?



THE END"

The Famous Ultimate Frisbee video at the ISB - to the soundtrack of Dhoom 2

Happy new year !!!!!

Wish you all a

Happy & Prosperous New Year

ISB Life at its very best - you simply have to check out this video !!!!

The Xpult Video ;-)

XPULTTTTTTTTTTTTTT ..... Yeahhhhhhh

As more and more of our mba is coming to an end, the cooler and better our classes are becoming.

quality management has been a pleasure!

Applications have also been an awesome pedagogy and and testifying that fact is the recent Xpult experiment and demonstration we were subjected to in class.

very briefly ... Xpult is a catapult and as students we needed to conduct experiments and create a model which maps a set of parameters to a result, which is the distant the ball travels. its an awesome way to teach about Design of Experiments and Taguchi Methods.

we had to present our findings in class which was succeeded by an in-class demonstration of the reliability of our model.

take a look at the setup of the experiment at our apartment ->

In the news

I have been misquoted again ....

these damn press folks .... Grrrrr

MBA in 3 words !!!

Process, Process, Process .....

Solstice 2006 !!!! - The Alumni reunion @ the ISB

Finally the real thing - Private Equity - Yeah !!!

It's almost as if these guys were saving the best for the last.

we have had some really awesome courses the last 6 terms, but the Investing in Private Equity takes the cake.

2 awesome professors, no examinations - what could be better

the first half of the course is taught by Prof Thomas Hellman who teaches at Stanford and University of British Columbia and the second half by Prof Vinay Nair who teaches at Wharton.

If thomas was good vinay almost blew us away.

This guy, came directly from a long haul flight, horribly jet lagged and delivered an exceptional class to 3 separate sections. he would be teaching 5 sessions to 3 sections within a week and covering material which he typically takes 3 months to cover in wharton in about 8 days at ISB. awesome guy

If ISB can continue to attract profs like this to come here, many indian students might not see the value add in going to the US.

Discussion Boards - a Wonderful way of keeping garbage, popularly known as "Class Participation" out of the class

Discussion Boards - a Wonderful way of keeping garbage, popularly known as "Class Participation" out of the class

We have a course titled Managerial Decision Making taught by Prof. Joseph Russo from the Johnson School of Business at Cornell and in that he has opted for a very succesful form of grading Class Participation.

We has instituted half the grade for class participation to a Discussion board on blackboard (an online student information medium)

this has been very popular with the students, here at ISB with almost 80 entries notched by the first week alone. which is all the more surprising as that the class consists of only 65 students.

Even yours truly managed to slide a couple of comments in ....

On the topic of Framing - which is nothing but viewing a problem differently or out of the box thinking, I wrote a couple of comments ...

Comment 1

Study groups or taking decision in teams is a wonderful method of counteracting the disadvantages on thinking through a specific frame. Diversified groups consist of people from a variety of backgrounds, each of whom apply a different frame to a problem and view it differently. The result is that learning teams/study groups achieve far superior results when compared to a individual effort.

To cite from an exercise we did in a Quality Management class taught by Prof Ram Ganeshan recently...

The objective of the exercise was to illustrate the different ways in which individuals as well as teams solve a problem.

The task consisted of ranking a list of 12 items in order of importance for survival, when stranded at a plane crash site in -20 degrees Celsius. the items were things like loaded .34 calibre pistol, can of shortening, axe, blanket, 12 sets of shirts and pants, a large canvas, a bottle of whiskey, a lighter without fluid, a map, a compass and newspapers.

This ranking was done by a team of 8 people and in parallel by 12 students, who did it individually.

This was compared with a ranking performed by experts, which afforded best chances of survival.

The results were not too surprising. The team's selection was better than the average decision of the individuals. Framing a problem in different frames, allows individuals to look at all aspects of a problem and reach at a far superior decision.

Comment 2

I have recently started reading a wonderful book called

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis

This book is a wonderful rendition of how Oakland A's General Manager Billy Beane used innovative practices and viewed baseball differently when compared to other teams such as the famous Yankees and consequently maximised his dollar to win games in an as cheap manner as possible.

The approach of most famous teams is to purchase the most successful hitter/pitcher at an insane price and win games by scoring home runs or pitching out the other team. This method is extremely expensive and yields a very low "No. of Wins/$ spent" ratio.

Billy Beane of Oakland A's decided to view the problem of maximising the "No. of Wins/$ spent" ratio through different frames and enjoyed phenomenal successes. Rather than focussing on stars, who were expensive, he focussed on aspects such as fielding and the importance of getting a guy on the first base. Viewing the act of winning a game by spending the least amount of money via a different frame than other managers, permitted Billy to implement very successful practices which have resulted in a wonderful performance by the Oakland A's

Maybe Chappel can apply the principles of framing a problem differently and other aspects of a Decision Process to improve the woeful performances of the Indian Cricket Team.

The Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh visits ISB

The Global Logistics Summit (GLS), hosted by the Centre for Global Logistics and Manufacturing Strategies at the Indian School of Business, was inaugurated by the Honourable Prime Minister of India, Dr Manmohan Singh on December 5, 2006.

read the full article here