Peer Feedback

After the end of last quarter, I had asked my fellow class-mates for my 'Peer Feedback'. This is a fairly new system at Kellogg where students are encouraged to constructively critique each other on how they could improve on their leadership qualities. Unfortunately, it has not been taken as widely as it should. And I can see why. All our life we work on building our reputation. Now asking the world to find out what we lack goes against what we have been hardwired to do.

And I wish I could say that after getting the feedback, you feel much better. Far from it. You feel cheated! You wish your classmates had told you earlier that this is what bothered them. You feel you were misunderstood.... you feel humbled.

And yet, I feel this exercise is absolutely necessary. Better to know how you are perceived now rather than when you get out of school and in the workforce. If you are already in the workforce, better to know yourself now rather than after many years when you miss out on promotions because no one told you that you could have improved way back when you were up for promotions.

Another argument against getting feedback is that you are fine with getting feedback from only certain people. Getting feedback from just about everyone you work/study with will not be fair because these people don't really know the real you. If you ask me, it is the people who don't know you whose feedback you should be really getting. Even if you feel you are surrounded by morons, the fact is that these 'morons' are the ones you will be interacting with on a daily basis. Knowing how they perceive you is just as important as knowing that that perception is wrong.

So suck it up. Ask for that feedback. And once you get it, work on it. For if not now, then when?

Connecting the dots

Come mid-Fall quarter and you see 2 things at Kellogg. There’s the wonderful fall of the leaves as they go from green to red to yellow and eventually glide their way to the ground beneath. And you see another kind of Fall, the one that involves 1st year students! You see them move from the glowing color of triumph and a yearning to learn about every business case out there to one that is more sullen, unshaved, barely awake and just skimming through the headlines of only the most mandatory of cases. Having been there and done that, I often get asked what are the shortcuts to reading these cases. Are those supplementary readings worth it? If I’m going to have a career in Finance, does it make sense to spend my time pouring over books on Social graphs and Personality Types?

I hear you. You see, more often than not, these cases are about some business that perhaps was an interesting problem a few decades ago. And more often than not, its about an industry that is likely obsolete or has been shipped overseas. So at a cursory level, and definitely by only skimming through the summaries of these cases, I always felt that this was a waste of time.

But I think the 2nd year for an MBA is for a reason. Strangely enough, after a year of cases and an internship, one can, to paraphrase Steve Jobs, “see and connect the dots”. You begin to realize that the case on some Gillette razor that added another blade was never really about whether adding another blade made a better business case. Far from it! It really was about the lessons you can draw from it; timeless lessons that can be applied in very different settings. Marketing yourself on just a few lines (Facebook status message), creating a need in consumers for something they were doing without (iPad), the psychology of consumers towards deals (Groupon), etc have something to draw from this age-old case. And therein lies my point. It’s not about the cases. It’s about the dots that you can draw from there to issues that abound today.

This reminds me of Moksh. He’s 22 months now and in that phase where he’s still blabbering baby talk but does use some words every now and then that we understand. What’s surprising is that even he, in his own little way, connects words he picks up from different sources. Whenever Megha is having coffee, she reminds him that its is not for his consumption. In his own toddler-like way, he calls Megha as "Menga" and Coffee as "Koshi". We had some guests the other day and opened some beer. When we told Moksh that it was not for him, he pointed to the beer and exclaimed... "Menga Koshi!" :) . Through the little cases of his life, my little boy was also connecting the dots!

So, yes, my MBA 1st year friends, please read as many cases as you can. But don’t just stop there. Go ahead and connect the dots. For as any child who has done the puzzles on connecting the dots will know, the more dots you can have to draw from, the faster you can converge on the complete picture!

God Speed!

String Theory

Updating on my last triathlon. This one was called the Pacific Grove Triathlon (http://results.eternaltiming.com/event/PGT2008). Here's a link to the pictures that Megha's uploaded on her site 

http://picasaweb.google.com/mshenoy/PacificGroveTriathlon#. 

This was an Olympic Distance Triathlon (1 Mile swim, 25 Miles Bike and 7.5 Miles Run). It is considered one of the most scenic triathlons since it is along the famous 17 Mile Drive. 

I love taking part in such distance events... the ones that make you wonder what in the world were you were thinking. Waking up at 4:30 am, driving down to the sea, plunging into the frigid Pacific before the sun comes out, biking with feet that are too numb from the cold to feel the pain and then running without quite knowing whether it is the sea water or your sweat that's got you all drenched... Triathlon, Sir, is a cruel sport! 

And yet, perhaps that's why one does it. It makes the finish line that much sweeter. 

As for me, I like to think that I learn something new each time. This time it was Kelps.

Monterey Bay, where we had the swim part of the triathlon, is the Mecca of Kelps, the trees of the sea. Think of them as these gigantic spinaches with just their noses sticking out of the water. And boy, this was one Kelpy sea! So much so that it was less of swimming and more of wading and plowing my way past these leafy vegetables. 

Not used to so much 'greenery', I struggled at first to swim past these plants.  I was trying to cut my way past them.  And that' s when I saw a fellow swimmer zoom past me. I realised that instead of fighting these plants, he was actually embracing them! He was using them as a bunch of strings, clutching them and then pulling against them to propel himself forward. In a way, he wasn't quite swimming at all. He had adapted his swimming style to pull his way out of the situation! 

I followed suit. Very soon, thanks to these Kelps, I had managed to 'pull' myself to the finish line  and ready to start my bike stretch. 

You know, almost always, it's in deep waters that one learns new ways to stay afloat. I had prided myself in being good at swimming in open water. And yet here, it just took an innocuous leafy vegetable to make me unlearn what I had learnt over two decades! We all have our share of these unexpected randomly floating Kelps... the strings attached to our ocean of life. We can fight 'em. Or we can learn to use 'em...  for sometimes, pulling the right strings might just help you get home faster.