Dirty MBAs; Clean Managers

Almost all my students are business school MBA types; so I may be talking about one specific species. I have one crib against them.   Most look sloppy.  The occasional ones are positively dirty.  

All of them look sleep deprived.  Fifty percent of the men are unshaven.  You walk in to a class of sloppily dressed students and it can be quite depressing. Many T shirts have seen better days.  Trousers are hanging down.  Some wear smelly jackets. The last shower date is possibly lost in the annals of history.  A few wear slippers which even the friendly neighbourhood beggar would refuse to wear.  You get the picture.  The higher the rating of the school,  the sloppier the look.

Look at their pictures when they are in the undergraduate colleges and they seem to look and dress all right.  Look at them after they graduate, they are very well dressed.  I sometimes see pictures of some of my former students on Facebook and I had difficulty reconciling the people in those pictures with my mental map of them when they used to haunt the schools where I teach/taught.

Somewhere after the first term, something seems to happen to the MBA student.  Some sort of metamorphosis happens and the clean undergrad disappears and the sloppy MBA student emerges! Till placement time comes, that is.  If I was a biologist I would almost draw the ubiquitous lifecycle circle. 

I have tried to reason out why this happens.  Could it be time pressure? – but they are under greater time pressure when they are managers. Yet they seem to have no problems getting shaved and putting on nice cloths and reaching on time for the meeting.  Maybe it is shortage of money? – heck, I am not talking about designer wear but a visit to the cleaners two or three times in a term.

The only explanation I have is that they are getting back at us, their professors. The idea being to make themselves as much of an eyesore as they can and so make us suffer. Every assignment, exam, and quizz is met with slightly more sloppiness.  An eye for an eye.....

I have even half a mind to moot an eye sore allowance for professors who have to suffer this. :)

Bala@Jaipur

Long Live the Landline !

This is fantastic news.  Our productivity will go up tremendously.  I do hope, at the same time, that the mobile charges go up a bit and mobile to land line charges come down drastically.  The highest charges should be for mobile to mobile.  People around me are going to curse me for this twentieth century attitude and call me retrograde. 

Some of my younger friends are going to snigger and say “ he is regressing to his child hood”. No; this is not nostalgia for the heavy black telephone nor for the good old times when you had rotary dials.  This is a more practical take on the whole thing.

Managers are going to order more landlines to be installed. Orders are going to go down to the line for people to use landlines for business calling.   People are going to bring down (if not stop) the concept of mobile phone allowances and start expecting people to use the land phones to call other land phones. Earlier it was cheaper to give someone a mobile phone rather than apply for a landline. It is cheaper for you to let the smallest of small minions to call up on mobile phones.   You had funny situation of people calling each other on the mobile phone within the same office.  There is nothing to prevent one guy who is in the canteen calling someone and the other guy ends up being in the loo.  Neither have the relevant papers on hand.  One has toilet paper in hand and the other has the canteen napkin and they are trying to discuss business!! Fall in landline to landline cost would basically mean the nuisance of the mobile phone ringing at all odd hours would stop.

Meetings would be less likely to be interrupted by some inane call from the relationship manager of your bank or someone’s wife wanting to know if he has genuinely forgotten his dabba or he just got tired of her cooking; whatever. Earlier when you went out of your office to a conference room, you left the phone behind.  Now everyone brings in their berrys (black, not goose) and each guy is happily contacting someone or the other.  The meeting takes that much longer.  I am yet to attend a meeting in the recent past when everyone is NOT waiting for someone to finish a call.

We Indians think of nothing to call up our subordinates at an odd time to ask for some information which is not critical.  I can understand if someone is calling late to find where you have left the fire extinguisher or some such thing.  But to start discussing the ways to reduce costs of some painting work to be done; well I suppose such stiff can wait till one reaches the office. Middle of the evening when you are out with a few friends does not exactly permit you to focus on the quality of paint.  People in the Western world do not do this.  They clearly demark the personal and work time. Usually they call on landline first and do not immediately try you on the mobile if they know you are in a meeting.

Hopefully, price of the calls would do the trick which commonsense and consideration has not been doing in our country. We would probably start using the mobile phones more judiciously.

Bala@Jaipur