Lessons from the Trenches...

On a gloomy Saturday morning we assembled for a presentation by Mr. V. Vishwakiran, who is handling the module on "Sales and Large Account Management" for the students of Marketing and IT. A PGDM in marketing, Vishwakiran joined an Indian IT major in their Sales and marketing support function, after a brief stint in media and advertising agencies.

His presentation was mind blowing, amazing and colorful, with picturesque visuals from his Mac. His session titled "Lessons from the Trenches", kept us spell-bound throughout.

The objective of the session was to make us understand that as managers we must, in addition to managing the repetitive and regular issues, be dynamic, resilient and mature to handle crisis with the required clarity and not get overawed by the situation. In this context he narrated the lessons he learnt the hard way in his corporate career and the hits and misses he had in his life.

He delivered this in an innovative way. For example, the presentation's first slide had a World War-II trench picture with soldiers in bitter condition. The idea was to convey the lessons the world learnt under tough conditions during the brutal trench warfare of WW-I.

He had done his homework of going through our profiles from our college website and he called us by names and asked us to recall our experiences in the appropriate context, thus making the whole session a participative event. He was open and shared some of his personal experiences at a conceptual level and discussed his learnings.Some of the themes discussed during the session were:

- Creating your value systems
- Dealing with others
- Staying on top
- Art of communication
- Work ethics

Mr. Vishwakiran had his own unique way of conveying his messages that was loved by one and all in the class. This was through movies and quotes from famous personalities. A hollywood movie buff, he made effective use of movies to convey critical points. To suit each context, he quoted relevant movie dialogues from Hollywood movies and presented them in a picturesque way in his PPt's.

For example, he quoted a dialogue from the Tom Cruise movie, Jerry Maguire- "The Key to any Business is Personal relationships"
“If everyone is thinking the same thing, someone is not thinking”
- from the movie MacArthur
“Every battles is won before it is ever fought…”
-from the movie Wall Street
“If you don’t dream, you don’t have anything…”
-from the movie The Rookie

We had a good practical insight into management and work ethics. It was a Saturday that will linger in our minds for a long, long time.......

Contributed by Sarathy Guru Shankar. K, IT Varsity, CBS Batch 4 (2009-‘10)