Management from a Homemaker’s Lens

The word Management as defined in the dictionary means the process of dealing and coordinating with people. Management is a never-ending loop that begins when one gets up in the morning and ends when one sets the alarm for the next day and goes to sleep.

 Management is always conceptualized as a fancy degree from a Business school and jargons like Presentations, Entrepreneurship, SWOT, ROI, etc. Management is inevitably present and significant in all these fields, but what we often forget is that management is applicable in all walks of life. It covers all facets of our lives. We ignore this fact because we have been so used to doing these roles that we have forgotten about the management nature. Even a trip to Goa with friends or relatives requires proper planning so to effectively manage one’s schedule for an enriching experience.

 If we deep dive into our daily life schedule, I see my mother implementing all my MBA lessons in some way and the best part is though those decisions or acts of her do not bring any life-changing decisions but are pivotal for the smooth functioning of the house.

 The duties of a homemaker are frequently looked down upon, but as we look closely, we can see that becoming a homemaker demands immense management skills. One of the most difficult examples of management is managing an entire family, taking care of everyone’s special needs, settling petty conflicts among children, maintaining the bonds intact, ensuring food is prepared on time. All this might sound so simple when we compare it to the life of an MBA graduate but it is equally challenging and complex.

 If we draw an analogy between the life of a manager and a homemaker, it is quite indistinguishable. The only difference is the nature of the work they both execute. Just like in an organization, A manager is the one responsible for streamlining the tasks, planning things ahead of time so that the needs of the clients are fulfilled on time, and addressing the grievances of its employees. In the same fashion, Homemakers must plan for the whole family, predict future challenges, multitask and make the most use of their resources, and be armed with plans for any last-minute hiccups.

 Let us take a few examples where we see homemakers implementing various concepts of MBA.

 Before buying any vegetable, she does a SWOT analysis for it and checks for if it is the best available product in the market.

She keeps a close record of all house expenses and makes sure every expense is recorded and gets tallied with the money she has in hand. In some or the other way, she exhibits great accounting skills.

She doesn’t have a degree but yes she is a perfect manager and a successful leader.

About the Author
Sakshi Poddar a Computer Science Engineer by qualification is now pursuing MBA(Analytics from IIM Kashipur. She is a part of various student bodies like the Media and Public Relations Committee and Admission Support Body. She is an IT professional with 2 years of experience in Hewlett Packard Enterprise. She loves traveling and dancing. You can connect with her on LinkedIn

Management is an Art!

There are many B-Schools to provide you with the Knowledge of Management but is that enough? Is knowing it all enough? I believe it’s not. To be a successful manager you need to possess the art of applying the right knowledge (the craft), at the right time (the vision) and most essentially, delivering efficiently to the right people (the communication). Books and professor’s knowledge can tell you what different tools and frameworks you can use but which to apply where needs an understanding so deep it will be a tragedy to not call it an art.

A good manager must also have imagination and the audacity to redesign their organisations or the way they work, just as an artist needs vision, and a strong commitment to realise them.

One may argue about the new and improving scientific methods being taught to and applied by the up-and-coming managers for better decision making, or about those skills to derive unexpected success by making probable failure surrender to competence and nerve. But Management has always been more than that. Not all great students have been great managers, and not all great managers have started strong. It takes more than just the technical skills and intuition to be a good manager.

To be a good business manager, one needs to perfect their skills in dealing with people and express themselves verbally, just as an artist needs to master his craft. 

Moreover, just like the art has no right or wrong similarly the managerial decisions can’t be labelled correct or incorrect. In fact, in management failures can lead to new opportunities. There is no perfect formula for success.

Therefore, I strongly believe that Management is an Art and the artist needs to keep on practicing the art to achieve the epitome of success in the career.

About the Author:
Dr. Ankita Gabhane, Dentist is pursuing MBA from IIM Kashipur. She is an active member of different student bodies like the Cultural Committee and Admissions support body. You can connect with her on LinkedIn.

Case Study Competitions – How to make the best of opportunities!

“The price of victory is high but so are the rewards.”

Corporate competitions have been an integral and consistent part of my MBA journey. Especially in the 2nd year, when the entire classroom program was shifted to online mode, there was hardly any day when I wasn’t involved in brainstorming ideas for any competition. Hearing about being the Top D2C Champion from IIM Kashipur and my Institute being ranked 4^th, particularly when I was finishing my MBA journey, was the best way I could have summed up the significance of all my efforts.

Participating and investing time in multiple corporate competitions is indeed a difficult decision, especially amidst the conventions of a B-School, where a student has various academic commitments, projects, case studies with sacrosanct deadlines. There have been times when we had overlapping deadlines-prioritizing became the key factor there. There have been times where my team had to discuss and devise strategies working remotely, or work on competitions during the end term examinations as well. However, the extent to which these competitions enhanced my managerial learning by providing a parallel exposure to real-time industry-wide business problems, and a platform to evaluate my approach to these problems, made me keep the spirit alive and kept me going at every point.

During this time, I explored various domains, ranging from proposing a new product line in Market research for Thoucentric Bottoms-Up to preparing a Business Development Plan for CarEasy Spark. While proposing Supply Chain strategy for Tier-2 cities in the Flipkart Wired helped me gain perspective of the logistics industry, building a healthcare ecosystem in Infosys Ingenious and Optum Stratethon provided the insights of the technological advancements of this sector. Participating in 3M-CII helped us build a tech enabled product with a social impact. AGS Horizon navigated us through the emerging domain of hyperlocal fintech. In addition to this, I also participated in multiple B-School level competitions and managed to win a few. With this, I ended up with 2 National Winners, 1 Runners Up, 3 National Finalist, and 5 National Semi-Finalists in my tally.

Some key aspects that MBA aspirants should keep in mind, though these are not exhaustive:

1. In the initial year, experiment with building your team for the first few competitions until you get the right dynamics. Try to build a core team that will have zilch or constructive friction and no free-riders. Find members who have expertise, say it be market research, designing or technical domain knowledge. Motivate them. Teach them. Learn from them. And improve each other.
2. Making the most of your network, connecting with industry professionals to gain relevant key insights is of paramount importance.
3. The execution should be kept in mind so the idea should be minimalistic. Be thorough with your ground research and workflow. Try incorporating frameworks/models learnt in class.
4. During the presentations you need to ensure that you cover all the important content in the stipulated time frame. Try to make it as crisp and concise as possible. Ideally you can follow the approach – Problem Statement, Research, Insights, Ideas, Feasibility, Financials and Timeline.

Consistency and meaningful participation in competitions can increase your MBA learning to a great extent. Instead of taking it as only participating, take these as learning curves. If you want to make the most of your MBA journey, competitions undoubtedly provide a platform for you to learn and unlearn. My suggestion to juniors will be to participate in maximum number of competitions, keep yourself updated about recent developments and innovations, and always keep the hunger alive.

About the Author:
Shubham is an Industrial Engineer by qualification. He has completed his MBA from IIM Kashipur (Batch 2019-21) and has been recognized as the Top Competitive Leader from the Institute featuring him in Forbes India. He is an IT professional with 2 years of experience in ZS Associates. In his past time, he likes sketching & playing video games. You can connect with him on LinkedIn.

Future of data visualization tools in business analytics

– Team MPRC, IIM Kashipur – 

We are in the age of data science. The ever-growing complexities of data science welcome a whole new scope to unlock the power of data. With big data rising at an exponential rate, it is becoming essential to organise, filter, analyse, and visualise data to gain a competitive edge in the business. Data visualization is gaining traction. According to Gartner, by 2025, data storytelling will emerge as an industry trend, with 75 percent of the stories automatically generated using augmented analytics techniques.These techniques are at the center of revolutionising the sense of looking at data differently and thereby enhance the experience of analysing data.

Prof. Vivek Anand talks to the Media and Public Relations Committee (MPRC), about the scope of data visualization for the managers of tomorrow, and more.  

Prof. Vivek Anand is currently associated with Wilson Consulting Private Limited as an operations director. He is a data visualization consultant with 17 years of experience and has done MBA from Monash University Melbourne Vic. with an area of specialization including Marketing & Econometrics. He has a background in Sales & Marketing with leading Indian hospitality brands across the country. His inclination to analytics made him switch roles 8 years ago to become a full-time consultant in analytics and spearhead corporate training for Wilson Consulting in India and the US. He is a qualified trainer of some leading tools in the industry such as Tableau & Power BI and has a passion for teaching. He is also an adjunct or visiting faculty at Great Lakes Institute of Management, Great learnings, SP Jain, IIT Madras, IIM Kashipur, IIM Calcutta, IIM Trichy, IIM Ranchi, IIM Kashipur.

[MPRC]– What is data visualization? How important is it today?   

[VA].- So to give it to you in a nutshell, Data Visualisation is trying to look at data or trying to see or perceive patterns in the most effective manner. That’s what it is. It’s not a tool if I may say, I would rather call it science and I think it forms a vital part when it comes to business operations because we are moving into a phase where data is becoming the key. One of the biggest challenges that organizations face is how to best organize data, how to best seek patterns and once you find a pattern, the next task is how to best present it as a story or a dashboard or something. So I would say it is extremely crucial when you want to kind of make any sense of the data.

[MPRC]– How is this science helping the managers to perceive a pattern?

[VA]–  When you are trying to perceive a pattern, the intent is to try and get the answers. The interpretation must happen as quickly as a reflex action. Say, for example, you are made to touch a 500 degrees Celsius hot iron ball, your spontaneous reaction would be to take a hand off the ball. Now, you need to have a similar kind of reaction when you see data. Without even thinking for a second, you must be able to get the answers as quickly as you can without having too much hand-holding or too much help. That’s when you know that you have actually got it right. And also the thing is no one has the time or bandwidth to really sit and ponder old things to see what it was all about. So if we don’t get things right, we won’t get that kind of reaction from your audience.

[MPRC]– From a managerial point of view, prior to 2010, there were not many tools for data visualization. As we remember when we were in school, we were still using PowerPoint and it was just the beginning. But right now a lot of software has come up. So which software is used in the market right now?

[VA]. – Okay so, I’ll give you an answer for a software. There are so many tools like Tableau to lead with today. There is Power Bi for rich visualization and multiple other tools like Qlikview etc. A lot of tools are there. There are tools which are user-friendly, like drag and drop feature. Some of them require a bit of coding. But, I would say that learning software is not going to give you science. Just to tell you something, whatever that can be done with all these cutting-edge tools, can also be done with Microsoft Excel. It is just that it needs a little extra bit of time and effort.

The tool is not again a bit of a challenge because a tool which is learnt at the drop of a hat today might completely transform tomorrow. So tools should never be a constraint for learning and that is something that I keep telling everyone, organizations and students especially. To students, I advise that don’t worry about the tool at all but rather learn science. Transfer science to whatever tool you have. If an organization has an XYZ tool and you do not have any other choice, you still have to make do with what you have. So that’s something that I always believe in.

[MPRC]–Has there been any instances where this data visualization science has helped you or your clients in figuring out problems that might not have been possible with traditional approaches to data handling?

[VA] – Actually yes. Quite some time back. In fact when I was working for one of the hotel chains. I had joined the company recently and I was looking at its past years’ data performances and all that. We realized that the hotel was dipping very largely in terms of occupancies. Now, there were a lot of reasons as to why the occupancies were dipping…so on and so forth. Oh! I still remember the charts very vividly in my mind. We had access to a lot of reports from hotel agents, something called a spy report and a lot of other reports, basically numbers. We realized that when we actually did a very effective visual technique, we were able to see how the market is trending. We saw that the market was still growing at a very rapid rate. Everybody was growing except for the company that I worked for. So that was where the problem came about and we realized that it was not the market that was not growing but we were the one not growing. So the next move was to find who is actually the one who has kind of taken away from us and who is doing better. There were multiple lines. We saw that the year that we started having dips in occupancy levels, a couple of chains were actually gaining momentum and there was a very inverse proportion. As ours was dipping down, we saw that they were growing better and better. So that was a very fantastic and early indicator that I saw, the way things are actually coming up pretty well. Another example that I can share is one of the companies that I had worked for. They worked in a manufacturing setup; safety is of utmost importance. It was a US-based company so all the more reason they were very paranoid about safety than a lot of other folks because of a fear of lawsuits or claims. We were able to foresee how accidents were likely to occur. So the kind of visual that we created came with an effective technique which captured a lot of factors indicating a potential accident. We had to take a lot of corrective actions. So that kind of really averted a potential crisis. I mean nothing happened in the end of it but there were a lot of indicators based on things. So that’s another fantastic example that I can think of. There are so many examples we stumble upon every day but these are two diverse examples where I can think of applications.

[MPRC]– What would you suggest for the managers who are interested in data science and visualization and how they can develop this knowledge?

[VA]– See again, there are two kinds of audiences that one can talk about: a person who creates an actual report and the other who consumes the report. So a report consumer needs to have a different set of skill sets and the one who is going to create the report must have slightly different skill sets. I am assuming if a person is a manager and he may have someone working for him or maybe he is a director or VP of a good company, I don’t expect him or her to learn technology. For example, suppose you got a platform which requires complex coding. All you need to do is know that you have to understand how to read the results and absorb it. That’s the kind of learning that I would recommend a manager to get himself or herself acquainted with. If you are a marching soldier and you are the one who is going to create the reports, then you need to have a couple of tools. First of all, you need to have the technological input. You need to also have the science of visualization. While you have the science, you also need to make sure that you do things right. You must be one step ahead of the manager. Therefore, the one who is developing should be twice as smart as a manager. That’s the irony but then that’s how things work.

So in terms of decision-making, you want to support the manager with the right quality of output so that they are able to absorb. And of course, with their experience in the business, they will make the right decisions.

[MPRC]– So in your opinion at this moment, what is happening in the industry? Do you think that the data visualization is not being given the importance as it should have been?

[VA] – The thing is…it’s the mindset of a lot of people. To give you a little insight into it, the particular clients that I have been dealing with, they had a very stereotypical mindset. They are the ones who have not been able to think beyond what they have been doing. So for them, it is a concept selling that you still have to do.  I think they are happy in their own space. They are happy with what they are doing and they don’t really wish to evolve into the next level. So there is nothing that you or I can do. But having said that there is also another whole bunch of cohorts where things are very different, where people are actually now adapting to this entire concept. They are embracing this whole idea. They want to really see how to make it fit into the reader or the business operations. They are getting very data-driven. But everyone does not have the skill set. Because that’s a different piece altogether that one has to know. But this is starting to grab people’s attention and the trend is changing. I can see it’s slowly changing.

[MPRC]–  When did you realize that you should pursue a career in data visualisation?

[VA] –  So I must admit I am not the brainchild behind this particular thing at least as far as I am concerned. I must owe this to my brother who is taking a leap more than I did to take it back to where we started. To give you a background, he used to work for a utilities firm back in the US. I think he was more on the supply chain side. Back then all that they were doing in his team was simply reporting. They were just getting reports and putting them in different forms. Nobody was really taking any sort of action with the data. So I think what he actually did from there in the early 2000s is to start to take some actions on data. It was a very rudimentary technique to really get going with how to generate some meaningful insights from the data. Back then I think they would not do it anywhere. There was not a lot of content. there was not a lot of technology also to support something in this space. Simultaneously, while my brother was working in the US. I had gone to do Master’s in Australia and I also picked up a sense for Analytics. So to be very honest that’s when I kept hearing things on a very similar note. We also had a lot of exchange students from the US. We interacted with some folks and we understood that there was a buzz. There is going to be some sort of explosive technologies. We could pre-empt. People are talking about it that this is going to be big. There was a lot of hype getting built in its own capacity. So that’s when I started to think about this as a thing. I said, maybe this could be a potential career path, but I guess for me what happened was I was basically inclined into analytics and I found that this was a very useful feature or a very useful skillset to have if you are going to get into the analytics profession. So as a career path, yes, that’s when the whole thing I can take it back.

[MPRC]–  So you have been in the industry for almost the past 10 years. Based on that, what is your opinion about the industry trends or the career option which anyone can have in this field?

[VA]. – A career path just on data visualization alone is something where I would not put all my eggs in one basket. This has to be in combination with all your other learnings.  So today, If you want to make a career path in this alone, it’s a very slim chance. Because right now, as a student if you try to set a career for the first time, you need to be a jack-of-all-trades, you can’t just be a master of none. It happens over a point in time, once you have your expertise. So right now, my recommendation is to learn everything. You don’t know when what will come in handy. Because you need to have your skill set in analytics, data mining, business analytics, forecasting etc. Put all your regressions, your modelling techniques and you should be able to combine visualization as a part of your data model as well. If that works well, I think it is a fantastic career path.

(Prof. Vivek Anand teaches data visualization at IIM Kashipur). 

How to fill the MBA(Analytics) registration form for IIM Kashipur?

Here is a step by step guide on how to fill the MBA(Analytics) registration form of IIM Kashipur

Step 1:

Go to the link: http://iimkashipur.ac.in/academics/mba-analytics

The official website of IIM Kashipur will open with the registration link for MBA Analytics

Step 2:

Before registering you need to pay the application fee as per your category. The details of the same can be found under the Application fee tab.

You can pay either through NEFT or SBI collect. In case you choose to pay via SBI Collect the following dialog box will appear

Click on the check box and proceed further.

In the ‘Select Payment Category’ option, choose the MBA ANALYTICS — Application Fees option and proceed further.

On the next page that appears,

Provide the necessary personal and account details. Pay the fees, download the receipt and note down your transaction ID

Step 3:

Go back to the link: http://iimkashipur.ac.in/academics/mba-analytics and click on the registration link 1 or 2.

The following dialog box will appear

Click on the ‘New User Sign-up Here’ option. It will direct you to the following page

Fill in your name, valid email ID, Mobile Number, and set a password. Click on REGISTER NOW.

Following this, you will receive an activation link on your registered email ID.

The next step is to click on the activation link which will direct you to the following page

Following this, you will get a message that your account is activated. Login with your credentials and move ahead with the registration. After logging in, the form asking for your personal details will open.

Step 4:

Fill in all the details in the next step. Ensure the desired file size limit when you upload your photograph and signature. Fill in your temporary and permanent address details.

Finally, fill in your transaction details, name of the bank along with other details, and click on NEXT.

Step 5:

In this step, you have to fill in your educational background and related details. Make sure you fill in the exact figures as mentioned in your original documents. Further, you need to fill in the details of your qualifying exam (CAT or GMAT)

Also, fill in your scholarships and professional work-experience details. Click on NEXT

Step 6:

The next step is to upload the mark sheet of your qualifying exam. Post that, you can preview the entire form and check for any errors. Sign the declaration and submit the form.