Introduced to a New World

The final day in Pondicherry was an incessant flurry of activity for me. The packing and unpacking, the last-minute shopping, the good-byes over continuous telephone calls with relatives and close family friends... All occupied my time and mind, without leaving room for further thought. Not once did I worry about the one-year course I had taken up in Chennai Business School (CBS) without actually doing any detailed background study of the institution or calling up the alumni for further information. Therefore, on the first day, the 8^th of July, I went there with an open mind, ready to understand, accept and work to my best advantage, whatever it offered.

The induction program was two weeks long, introducing the various subjects we had to cover in this course, interspersed with guest lecturers from different industry. There were several aspects of the induction which impressed me, one of them being the gradual acclimatising to the long hours that we had to spend in CBS campus and also studying at home. There were a few assignments given to us in the first week itself with short deadlines of a day or two. So, working in groups, we learnt more about our classmates, while getting back into the academic mode of doing homework. The Governing Council members and the faculty warned us several times that we would not have a second to even blink an eyelid as the year progressed to an end. This was a great challenge and with the fear of being submerged under piles of books and notebooks, came the stubborn desire to find a way up to breath in the fresh air and enjoy the whole course.

The faculty at CBS was another surprise. They were all very well versed in their subjects as well as the current affairs. But the thing that really caught my attention, was their approachability, which was something I had experienced during my schooling and graduation. We felt very reassured that in case of any doubt or difficulty, we could just walk up to them and address the problem. I believe that this is one of the biggest plus points of the institution: the faculty being constantly so inspiring and motivating.

A third aspect of CBS’s system of education which attracted me, was the continuous appraisal through class participation, assignments, debates and quizzes. Again another similarity with my alma mater, and therefore something I was already used to. The major difference being that here we have to take exams and there, there weren’t any. The constant evaluation keeps us on our toes, wanting to do our best at all times. Thus it fairly avoids the age-old trap of studying just before the exams, which leads to mugging up loads of useless information and vomiting it out on the examination table. So, either we know a subject (through regular reading) or we do not, and that is absolutely left to the individual and his reasons for being in CBS.

This brings me to another unusual aspect of the induction program, the 40-page Rule Book, which was something I had never seen or heard of in any other institution. Of course there are other strict institutions, but I wonder if they ever issued the rule books to the students... And immediately our gamut of excuses crashes to the ground!!!

On a more serious note, the most significant asset for any student is the Lesson Plan, which I consider as the best gift we received during the induction program. It is a clear concise route map and a great asset to the time-management skills we have to develop for the course. During a friendly session with the Alumni, they told us, make the best of the time you’ve got here, it’s very short, and not enough to do all that you want to do. So keeping their advice in mind, and still wanting to accommodate my whims and desires, I realised that if we make the right use of the Lesson Plan, we can achieve at least 80-90% of them (including the freaking out!).

In the end, the take-aways from the two-week long induction program are numerous. Most of my friends had laughed and said, “Wow! Two weeks of induction! You guys must be just having a ball of a time!” We did, but more importantly we got an idea of where we wanted to be at the end of the year and how best to get there. It’s the “CBS Way of Learning”, and we are here to make it our own. Good Luck to all of us!

By Ishita Deshmukh, Marketing & Communications Varsity, CBS Batch-4 (2009-10)

CBS Induction 2009

A fine day in July, half past five, a typical Chennai dawn woke me up without my usual outlook invites, morning reports or any arbitration saga. In spite, there was a sense of urgency; an adrenaline rush which did demand attention though not comprehended by the partly awake brain. The momentary dyslexia settled, and finally the calendar spoke a language which triggered my stimuli. 8^th July 2009, first reporting day at the Chennai Business School!

The two weeks of Induction was an ideal preparation for the year’s program. It all started with address by the governing council. Mr. PK Mohapatra’s talk on “Parable of Sadhu” in specific caught the attention of listeners, enunciating the moral aspect of business. Faculty team introduced themselves, and it was a pleasant surprise to hear Prof. Palanivelu sharing his experience on time spent in Bharat Electronics Limited with late Sujatha (Rangarajan), the famous Tamil novelist . The afternoon witnessed students’ introduction along with ice breaker sessions. With neat schedule for subsequent weeks shared, learning for the real world kicked off in full throttle

The phobic accounting basics were touched upon with a feel good factor by Prof. Vijaya. IT for managers was diligently handled by the Dean with his vintage wit. Concepts of MS office basics were covered highlighting the effectiveness of its related tools in official reports generation. The IT session was indeed an eye opener in terms of its application scope. The fact that this indeed would have reduced multiple reporting at my earlier workplace was in itself a big take away for me. In addition, the Dean helped relate all this to resource forecasting, estimations and capacity planning, not to forget the figures generation on a single parent spreadsheet indicating over burn/under burn statistics. I felt myself sitting over a goldmine being greedy of carrying maximum pounds of all that was available.

The guest lectures at such an early stage of the academic year got us an idea on how CBS operates and bridges the gap between academics and industry requisites. We had renowned giants walking in from manufacturing, software and advertising arena, sharing their vast experiences with the students. A brief on the current recruitment scenarios and improving trends in economy, and the emphasis on focusing in academics rather than end results viz placements helped us refocus on curriculum in store. After all, the need of the hour is to make oneself employable by getting the basics right, leaving aside speculations on external market conditions

The group activities pre-conditioned us to take on the business world filled with numbers and dynamic changes. Along with introduction to analyze cases, we also had healthy discussions and debates on pros and cons with purview of the information shared. Assumptions were put to rest and factual justifications were encouraged, inculcating a language of Boolean and statistics based on concrete sources. Application of concepts being the motto, approach to learning was completely pragmatic and thought provoking

And we discovered our “Taj” too; well I meant the coffee shop just opposite to the CBS campus. 10:30 am caffeine along with the optional green chili “bajji’s” have recharacterized our appetite, bringing back all those long lost memories from our under graduation days. The unfinished business of putting things on cellulose resumes as we look forward confidently into the future let alone tuning oneself to changing “constants”.

By M.S.Balaji, HR Varsity, CBS Batch-4 (2009-10)

Experience of a Lifetime, in a few words

Sitting in my cubicle, looking into the calendar kept on my desk, a myriad of thoughts are running in my head. Life, just a year back, was so different.

Last year, this was our last academic month as far as CBS goes. We were in the process of wrapping up the last few final touches and the internship part of the course. The final trimester exams were just ended. As a part of the curriculum, we had to work for a month in any organization, pertaining to our specialization before completing the course. This would help us realize in the practical sense, all that we studied during the one year course at Chennai Business School, from close quarters.

Chennai Business School has played a significant part in our lives. Just imagine a melting pot of people from different backgrounds, professionally, coming together on a single platform to ‘learn for the real world’. That’s CBS in a nutshell for you.

The unique point about CBS and its teaching practice is the amount of emphasis given on learning from experience as opposed to just limiting oneself to the textbooks. The rail fanning trips, trip to a Santhai at Acharapakkam were such experiences that’ll remain etched in our memories for a lifetime. These were a part of our Dynamic curriculum for the Marketing Communications varsity. I would call it Dynamic as it ensured that we were made to implement our learning from the class room on to the field and take the experience back from the field to the class rooms to complete this art called Knowledge.

Management was not only a part of our curriculum, in fact the way we were made to manage time and effort between classes and case study presentations, brought us close to the real world’s organizational situations. Though I must say, we’ve had tremendous fun going through these sessions. It’s not every day that you get to meet key people from the advertising and brand management world taking classes for you. But the fact of the matter is, that here we did get to see this happening almost every day. Lectures can never get just theoretical when the people implementing these concepts on a day to day basis, explain them to you. This aspect of CBS is quite unique to the style of teaching that is undertaken here. Getting to hear concepts from the horse’s mouth is nothing short of an inspiration as it helps in relating to the subject matter in a better way.

At the Marketing and Marcom varsity, we’ve always toyed with this idea of coming up with new means of exchanging information. A part of our lunch time was used for this purpose, where we formed sets of two and presented the most interesting and intriguing news articles for the day. The subject of the news items stretched across industries, but the idea here was to search for a marketing concept in these and discuss the pros and cons involved with the article. This was our way of giving food for our thoughts, literallyJ.

One of the fundamental aspects of doing a post graduation in management for a year is that you need to be at the job almost every day. You have little time to react and you don’t get enough chances coming your way everytime. Such circumstances not only help you understand the pressures of a work environment but also help in developing a balanced temperament towards situations that are in store in future. This was one of the most important take aways for me from this institution.

With the kind of support and guidance that you get from the faculty and other members of the management, learning never looked this enjoyable. Though I must confess, at times we’ve really got on to their nerves. All said and done, this was our way of growing up here.

CBS , to us , will always remain one of those crucial phases of our life, where we rediscovered ourselves and moved ahead in the journey of our life. It’s this journey, which will never end and all the roads will keep leading us back to CBS , in one way or the other.

Looking forward to that road soon.. :)

By Pradeep, Batch-2, 2007-08, Marcom Varsity

Current Employment: Communication Executive , Health Care Services Dept , Apollo Hospitals, Chennai

Life is ‘Busy’-ful

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"The busy man is troubled with but one devil; the idle man by a thousand"

There were these few months before I joined this college, soon after I had quit work and had a few months to “cool off”, when I used to watch TV all day long and slept as I wished. No commitments, no deadlines, no targets, no reprimands to dent my day. Though I missed being busy, I bought the fact that I needed the well deserved break. Soon enough all this came to a stand still. I had heard that the marketing varsity was the highlight of this college from our predecessors. When I joined the college I had my hopes higher and my head even higher, floating on a presumption that my experience in sales would make me one among the elite. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

All that I had assumed in my mind about what marketing was came crashing down to earth. I was introduced to the world behind the products that we see on the shelves, TVs, newspapers and where not, and trust me when I say there’s more to them than meets the eye. I was amazed when I learnt that marketing was way beyond just selling the product but went much into the creation of the product itself. That was when I was introduced to the concepts of segmentation, targeting, positioning, branding, Advertising, B2B, B2C, Services marketing and so on.

Apart from the marketing curriculum, we were exposed to a few sessions in retailing, advertising, PR etc which widened our understanding about the world outside. The best thing about this college was that they deliberately exposed us less to theoretical knowledge and brought in industry speakers from renown companies like CavinKare, HCL, O&M, JWT etc. and CEOs of other business entities, from different industries, to give us a sneak peek into how the jungle outside was and how high their expectation levels were when it came to employability during this recession.

Projects, case studies and assignments were showered upon us during the course with tight deadlines but much to our delight they were interesting enough to set our pulses racing and in the process got over our laziness. Sleepless nights became a habit and presentations became the stimuli for further endeavours. What we didn’t or couldn’t learn from the text books, we learnt through the case studies; So many live cases from Indian companies and a heavy load of global cases from the top B-schools of the world. Each case study opened up our minds to new invaluable strategies and implemental business logic. This gave us a healthy edge over students from other colleges when it came to job hunting as we knew what the employers expected, while the other’s thought they knew, but, eventually didn’t.

Where there is a smoke there is a fire. Similarly, where we fledglings are eventually fluttering around, we have had our favourite award winning Professor and mentor, Prof.Sathyanarayanan, constantly spending long hours at work, improving our curriculum, roping in industry speakers, giving feedback about performance and not to mention a few lighter moments too. This battle hardened knight somehow manufactured time to attend to his chores and also patiently heard us out when we had issues to be addressed. I couldn’t help but observe that we had tons to learn from him apart from the course.

Thus in these last few days, I feel, over the period of the course I’ve transcended to a competitive level of understanding of the complex business world and with my career path lit up I am but at a loss of words for thanking this course, for having set the sails for me.

P.S.Suhas, Batch -3 (2008-09), Marketing Varsity

A year full of practical retail experience

“Retail Is all About Detail” … these words of Mr. P.K Mohapatra, Retail Varsity Chairman are still ringing in my head. And true to his words CBS was able to give us in-depth understanding about the Retail industry. I can proudly claim that our course curriculum is one of the best in the country. The reason being, it has a comprehensive gamut of courses on Retail like Shopper Behavior, Luxury Retail , retail branding, Mall Management, Retail Supply chain Management, merchandise and store management, fashion merchandising, e-tailing, Customer Relationship Management, Rural retail, etc. handled by the industry experts.

That’s not all. “Learning with fun” has been our mantra and we have followed it judiciously by having numerous in-class games, with one of the first being the simulation of a Wholesale market scenario, followed by the “Beer Game” ( though unfortunately there was no beer in it for anyone!!).We also had games to predict Consumer Behavior.

The real-world projects that we did gave us a strong foothold in understanding the nuances of Retail both organized and traditional, right from Kirana store analysis to Big Bazaar Sabse Sasta 3 Din , site location project for an Adidas store and consumer survey work for Spencer’s Daily. If that was not enough, we had the privilege of rubbing shoulders with the who’s who of Retail at various Retail Summits throughout the year. To top it all, we also had several international case studies which let us take a glimpse into the best practices followed all across the world.

All these were carefully woven by Prof.Sathya, our Varsity Head who also deserves a special applause for motivating us, raising the bar and pushing us to do our extra best all throughout the course. It was an amazing year for us in learning about retailing, hands-on.

By Khadeeja Bilquees, CBS, Batch-3 (2008-09), Retail varsity