ankur Warikoo

94%…yes you heard it right…94%…! Thats just 6% lower than a situation wherein a stressed-out parent enters the campus, approaches the reception and asks, “Madam (or sir…I dont mean to be sexist here!), I want to enroll my son for the engineering course.”

Figure this:

Out of 391 students in the IIMA Class of 2009-11:

# 369 are engineers

# 12 have a science background (which itself sounds so derogatory, as if engineering is some intellectual science and there is another field called science!)

# 9 have a commerce background

# 1 is from Arts background!!!

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This basically means that in the 2 years that will follow, these 391 students will have diversity examples as follows

Professor: “Students, what is a code?”

Student 1 (Or rather Engineer 1): “Sir…code is what I wrote when I couldnt get girls, but a guy named Mark Zuckerberg offered free beer and I gave it to him”

Student 2 (Engineer 2): “Sir, code is what humans are made up of..the DNA code”

Student 3 (Engineer 3): “Sir, code is what I hate mode about software design”

Student 4 (Engineer 4): “Sir, code is a form of modulated wave whose amplitude is directly proportional to the wavelength when travelling at the speed of light”

Student 5 (Engineer 5): “Sir, code is a mathematical complexity that is so hard to comprehend that one can only hope of making a movie out of it and winning the oscar”

Student 6 (Commerce Student 1): “Sir, I am surely going to flunk this class”

Student 7 (Arts Student 1): “Sir, I think the commerce student and me are surely going to flunk the class”

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This also means that irrespective of what students do in these 2 years, the one getting the most press coverage (and rest assured there WILL be a LOT of press coverage) will be the Arts student!

Oh..but there is more

Number of female candidates has dropped from 19% last year to 11% this year

WHATT??? Did the students know this, when they accepted the offer?

So let me get this straight, not only does the new IIMA Class of 2009-11 have more “super stud red underwear over pants” engineers, it has lesser of the “dumb good for nothing only know how to bitch and giggle” females!

AhA…now THAT is a perfect MBA CLASS! Undivided attention, no hormonal excitement at the age of 21, no world perspective from a lawyer or a doctor…but pure divine engineering based business education. Such joy!

But high WTFness emerges when you read such statements made by the Admissions Chairpersons

“We had a limited pool of candidates from arts and commerce backgrounds making it to the first round. On our part, we tried to include several combinations during the interview, but engineers scored well,”IIM-A admissions chairperson Diptesh Ghosh told ET

Aaah…that explains it. Its not their fault. We have just dumb Arts and Commerce students in this country! Engineers scored well!

Because hey, when we asked students what is the probability that you will take out a red ball from a box when you have thrown in 7 red balls in Box1 and 8 Black balls in Box2 and transferred 3 balls from Box1 to Box2 and then re-transfered 5 balls from Box2 to Box1, WE HONESTLY THOUGHT ARTS STUDENTS WILL GET IT!

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Its a pity! Because the institute is one of the finest the country has. And yet, it remains blindly attached to fundamentals that fail to modify themselves as per the times. Students from IIMA perform well in life (statistically atleast) not because of the education they have received or the work-experience they come in with, rather the ability to work like crazy. They are fantastic when it comes to slogging and working hard and cracking the exams and the CATs of the world…but that doesn’t necessarily make them good business managers!

An MBA in India has been reduced to a “degree that will get you a job”, rather than a degree that will teach you business fundamentals. And admission processes that are skewed towards a certain section of society, especially in terms of numerical capability, defeat any attempt to change this attitude. You get number crunchers in your batch and give them sexy I-Bank/consulting roles at dollar figures…and the MBA dream just keeps getting bigger and bigger! Its another thing that the MBA itself did not do anything to that student, apart from making him/her marketable!

Tragic!

DNA: Engineer’s dominate IIMA’s new Post-graduate programme batch

Economic Times: It’s engineers galore at IIMA

Got a call this morning from ISB that the FT Rankings for 2010 have been released and ISB has moved up the ranks to close at Global Rank 12! Fantastic

The top 15 schools according to the rankings are:

1. London Business School
2. Wharton
3. Harvard
4. Stanford
5. INSEAD
6. Columbia Business School
7. IE Business School
8. MIT Sloan
9. Chicago Booth
10. HongKong UST
11. IESE Business School
12. Indian School of Business
13. NYU Stern
14. Dartmouth Tuck
15. IMD

You can view all the ranking here

And here is an evaluation on the top schools from a placements perspective

Comparison from a career progression point of view

And from a value for money perspective

Its fantastic that in less than 10 years ISB has reached the levels it has. Ofcourse, the ranking do tend to hide a lot of qualitative aspects that ISB might suffer from, but then I am sure other schools also have their own deficiencies! Keeping all these aspects in mind, I love the fact that ISB has done so much in such a short period of time…and needless to say…I AM PROUD TO BE AN ISB’ian!

Top 10 rankings next year! :)

Very Interesting Delivery model that ISB has introduced today…the PGPMAX (Post Graduate Programme in Management for Senior Executives)

Basically the program is designed on a schedule that minimises disruption of work and personal pursuits. Participants will typically be on campus for a 6 day schedule of classroom learning once every 6th week. The 6-day schedule will include full days of teaching and evenings will be used for guest lectures, projects, and group work. Participants will be required to stay on campus during those 6 days.

I dont know if such a program happens anywhere else, but this is fairly innovative (and at Rs 25 Lacs/USD 53,800 fairly expensive too). Wonder how many takers will it have…!

Putting myself in the shoes of a senior (read busy) executive, honestly, I have my doubts. Spending 6 days away from work, every 6 weeks is maybe a little too much to ask for. No wonder the concept of executive education is so successful, because its short term and meaningful impact.

But yah…ISB has impressed people even with its innovative (atleast for India) 1-year MBA program….so I would love to be proven wrong!

All the best…

In yet another instance of financial fraud that have emerged like Akshay Kumar’s Films in the last year, Galleon Group’s billionaire founder, Raj Rajaratnam, was charged Friday in a sweeping, $17 million insider-trading case (btw notice how amazingly fast a concept like wikipedia updates on even biographies!)

I have never heard of this dude, but apparently he is a billionaire! So strange that he would do this for 17 mil…! So either its a false case or the hole is deeper than visible!

Also arrested in the case is Anil Kumar, Director at Mckinsey. Now a director at Mckinsey is pretty big…its a senior partner level…something that is achieved only by nomination and election. So this could be a big dent to the company (woohoo!!)…imagien clients resting seriously confidential data in consultants hands, only to realize that the same information is being used for personal gain! Well, honestly, this shit happens all the time, but being caught is not cool. Especially when you are Director Mckinsey

Unfortunately, Anil also happens to the Board Director at ISB. Which SUCKS, because this dude’s working will impact the rather fragile branding perception that ISB is going through this year. Its rapid rise in the first 6 years brought with it a lot of critics…people who love to lap onto the fact that ISB has been now involved in 2 financial scams…starting with Dean Rao and Satyam and now this!

ISB has started its band-aid solution by asking Anil to step down, but the damage might have been done! Especially when it comes to people commenting on whether “this is what ISB teaches its students!”

It hurts! But such is the price you pay for being in the limelight!