Padma Shri Dr. Vijay Bhatkar visits SIOM, Nashik
Symbiosis Institute of Operations Management (SIOM), Nashik, students got an opportunity to meet and interact with Dr. Vijay Bhatkar, best known as an architect of the PARAM series of Supercomputers, GIST multilingual technology and Education-to-Home mission. He is also credited with the creation of several national institutions like the CDAC, ER&DC; Trivandrum, ETH Research Laboratory, Pune and IIIT, Pune. For his contributions to IT in India, he was conferred with the Padma Shri award in 2000, one of the highest civilian recognitions by the Government of India, the Maharashtra Bhushan Award 1999-2000, the highest recognition of Government of Maharashtra.
Dr. Vandana Sonwaney, Director SIOM, thanked Bhatkar for sparing his to share his experience with the SIOM students. Bhatkar enlightened the students on their further career path. He said that today’s engineers equipped with operations management knowledge can work effectively in given set of constraints in any industry. He appealed to the students to play an active part in shaping tomorrow’s India. He concluded the session with his inspiring words by mentioning that no one can deter us from becoming the superpower if we all take the oath for a corruption free India.
IIT Kanpur ‘s Prabandhan 09: Phoenix Rising from the ashes of the global economic turmoil
Prabandhan 2009, the annual flagship management conclave of IIT Kanpur started off on September 18 and concluded successfully on September 20. The event was centered around the theme Phoenix “Rising from the ashes of the global economic turmoil” which focused on how prospective managers can work towards making their organizations immune to such crisis and beat it by using recessions as an opportunity rather than a threat. It also emphasized the need to understand the mechanism that govern the current economic and financial systems which led to the crisis so that they can be countered. Several industrial bigwigs, academicians and government officials came over to IIT Kanpur to conduct lectures and interact over these three days that also included several inter-school events and panel discussions.
Day1: 18th September
Friday started with a session from Rajan Kumar who is the Director of India Operations at Rocsearch, a UK based Research Analytics and Knowledge services firm supporting a variety of fortune 500 companies and market leaders throughout the globe.
Rajan’s session on the Global Financial and Economic Crisis gave a clear understanding of the financial crisis. He argued that the financial institutions and world governments have not learnt their lesson and there is still no fundamental change in the way these organizations are run. Greed and bonus incentives still drive the reckless risk taking which is the Prima facie of modern financial institutions. His advice to the common man was, “Conserve cash and do not indulge in reckless spending. Secondly, make sure you have savings enough to ensure your survival for another six to nine months were you to lose or give up your job”.
Based on his experience in consulting and knowledge services industry, he gave valuable insights on how corporate managers can work towards beating the crisis and take competitors by a surprise during such a time. According to him, recession is the best opportunity for visionary organizations to acquire strategic resources, woo customers and develop distinct competitive advantages. He laid emphasis on the need to improve operational efficiencies, enhancing the capabilities to create future opportunities, need for innovation and the positive disruptions in organization’s leadership.
Day 2: 19th September
The second day of Prabandhan 09 was marked with a gamut of events with participation of students from colleges such as IIM’s, IIT’s, XLRI, MDI, SIBM battling it out in a host of presentations and case studies. From formulating Marketing strategies for launching a new product to designing employee engagement programs in times of a recession, insightful discussions and arguments on all of the above were the order of the day. The Ad making competition offered the students a challenging task of designing an Ad on the spot to market the product – Low cost affordable Housing. These everyday events received entries from all the top management colleges of India.
This was followed by an informal session with McKinsey representatives with the students attended by students eager to learn more about the consulting industry and its work culture.
DAY 3: 20th September
L Venkateswaralu, commissioner,Kanpur city, graced the occasion as he walked in along Prof. Sanjay Dhande, Director IITK, deputy director RK Thareja and Ashok Bhagat – Vice President at Societe Generale, a French Corporate and investment Bank. Bhagat is also an associate member of the Executive Committee-International Chamber Of Commerce, ICC India nominee for ICC Banking Commission Paris.
Prof Dhande expressed his thoughts on true management education which views production of goods and services as a tool to develop human welfare rather than the rush for quarterly profits and bonuses. Venkateswaralu emphasized the requirement for a long term sustainable strategy for use in business corporations and government bodies. He argued that Managerial capabilities are as crucial for educating people about using hygienic sanitation, as they are to attract them towards a particular brand of soap. The Commissioner expressed his desire to interact on such forums and thus initiated an exchange of ideas between administrators of society, administrators of private corporations and academicians.
Bhagat then conducted an interactive session on “Risk Management in International Business”, explaining the various types of risk, namely Credit, Performance, Country, Currency, Transportation, Transaction structure, Fraud risk and educated the audience about the methods available to evade them. He gave real life examples using several real life cases to depict how various forms of cheating and fraud have occurred in businesses and what steps could have been taken to mitigate such kind of risks. He also talked about the necessities of regulations and strong institutions to minimize such risks in an economy.
FMS hosts Annual Banker’s summit
The Finance Society of Faculty of Management Studies, FMS, Delhi, conducted its Annual Bankers’ Summit at the Habitat Center on 20th September, 2009. The event saw a variety of eminent speakers from across the industry.
The Summit was divided into two sessions. The topic of the first session being ‘Banking after the Bubble’, which aimed to highlight the changing dynamics of the Banking industry in response to the financial crisis. The distinguished speakers for the session included S.C. Sinha, ED, Oriental Bank of Commerce,T.M Bhasin, ED, United Bank of India, Anirbam Lahiri, CEO, Deutsche GMC,Sanjeev Bhasin, Managing Director, DBS Bank, Hugh Sandeman, MD, Langham Capital and Paranjoy Guha Thakurta.
The session started with an address from Dr Madhu Vij, Professor of Finance at FMS. She began with describing the present crisis as one of over-lending and over-leveraging. Thakurta emphasized on the importance of living within one’s own mean by bringing about the differentiation of the present crisis from other crises.
Bhasin added to the discussion by looking at the hallmarks of success of banking, namely trust, technology, knowledge and growth. He was of the opinion that the Indian banking system was strong as well as backed by a sound regulatory system and spoke of the way the RBI handled the sub-prime crisis by infusing liquidity into the system. Sinha talked of the collapse of Lehman Brothers and claimed greed to be the reason for the downfall. He further focused on the need for innovation and for young minds to take care of the government and society.
Sanjiv Bhasin spoke of the crisis being a result of absence of commitment towards corporate governance, citing the example of the Enron debacle. In the olden days, the monetary policies used to be simple as money simply depended on interest rates. However, with the expansion of economies, interest rate manipulation alone cannot help. He also spoke of the futility of growth strategies based on historical data and emphasized on a move towards risk management.
The second session was on the ‘Evolution of the Private Equity Ecosystem’. The panel consisted of Ajay Garg, MD, Equirius Capital, Munish Dayal, MD, Barings Private Equity Partners, Udai Dhawan, CEO, Standard Chartered PE, Jayasankar, CEO, Kotak Mahindra Capital Company, Muneesh Chawla, MD, Blue River Capital and Paresh Thakkar, MD, Religare Advisory Services with Avinash Gupta, Head, Transaction Advisory Services, Deloitte who was the moderator for the session. The discussion revolved around the current state and challenges faced by Private Equity. Sector attractiveness, reputed management team or promoters, return ratio and exit opportunity were claimed to be the factors that PE investors look for while making an investment. Chawla spoke of the period between 2001 and 2008 as the golden period of private equity (PE). This period saw the creation of large size firms as well as the PE industry becoming an organized industry. Garg however claimed 2011-12 to 2014-15 to be the next big phase for PE With the consolidation in the industry and number of players going up.
PGDM Autumn Placements conclude successfully at SPJMIR
The Autumn placement process at SP Jain Institute of Management and Research (SPJMIR), Mumbai, concluded on August 27 with 175 students being placed in over 60 companies in sectors like Consultancy, Banking, IT, Investment Banking, FMCG, Private Equity, Manufacturing, Health care & Pharmaceuticals, Telecom and Media.
In contrast to other business schools sending the management students for Summer Internships, the students at SPJIMR go for an internship process called as ‘Autumns’ wherein the two year full time PGDM participants go for their compulsory corporate internship during the months of September and October in the second year of the program. The summers at SPJIMR are marked with social projects with NGOs.
The companies that visited the campus for the ‘Autumns’ Placement process included organizations such as Tata Administrative Services (TAS), Microsoft, Citibank GSK, ING, Tata Capital, Reckitt Benckiser, P&G;, HUL, L’Oreal , Marico, Nestle, Intel, J&J; Consumer, Wipro, SAP, GE, Edelweiss, SBI Capital, Axis Bank, HT Media, Dabur, Bank of Bahrain and Kuwait, , Barclays, HSBC, Development Bank of Singapore, Frost & Sullivan.