I am writing a blog entry after a long time. I wanted to write earlier as well but somehow I managed to engage myself in all other activities except blogging. My last post was in May 2009 and was regarding preparation for CAT 2009. Well coincidently this one is also on the same lines. If you get an impression that I am obsessed with this whole process, then you won’t be completely wrong. The whole selection process is something on which I can talk for hours based on my experiences.
This time of the year all the aspirants have already experienced the first hurdle and some of the lucky ones start preparing themselves for the second stage. This article is directed towards those lucky ones. Through this article I want to help people to prepare themselves in slightly better manner. No it’s not going to be a gyan session on do’s and don’ts of GD/PI; I just want to show you the world waiting for you once you clear the second stage. When I was preparing for my GD/PI I always felt the need to know what happens behind the walls of a B-school. Many a times I criticized the written selection process, relevance of the different sections etc. but after experiencing the B-school life for around 7-8 months I can easily say that the whole process is pretty systematic/structured and logical. Each and every thing happens because of a reason.
To understand things let’s just do a fast forward and see what lies after two years of MBA education and then move backwards and hope that things would fall in place that way. MBA is often a stepping stone to reach a high responsibility position like CXO level. Of course typically some years of experience is required after MBA but there are many who assume such roles immediately after MBA(here I am talking of start-ups). So what does anyone needs to succeed or even operate at that CXO level? Let’s assume the start-up wishes to provide a new product. Here lies the need to decide upon what that product would be, who will buy that product, what all are the expectations of those buyers, how that product will satisfy those needs etc. answers to this set of questions can be obtained if we know what Marketing is all about. At that stage one can shortlist some ideas for products which would be further evaluated. For manufacturing any product we would require a location of manufacturing, equipments, material i.e. capital would be required. Now how to source that capital for each project, management of funds obtained, expected returns from any project all such things can be answered based on knowledge of Finance. The next step is to define the various processes like the assembling of product, its packaging, transportation from manufacturing plant to wholesalers, distributors etc. Efficiency of each and every process does impact the profit making capability of the firm so we just cannot ignore Operations.
Marketing, Finance and Operations are thus three core areas of business and they form the backbone of any MBA program. CXO level guy needs to have fair knowledge of all these areas because decision on anyone is highly interlinked with other two. These core areas can be divided into sections which are taught in MBA program as individual subjects over various terms of the course. For example I had three subjects of Finance over three terms; Financial Accounting, Cost Accounting and Corporate Finance. Financial accounting is where we are taught about the financial statements of a company. Financial statements give idea about financial health of a company and are good means of comparing different companies. Cost accounting teaches us how to keep track of the various costs which a firm incurs in making of product or providing a service. With complete understanding of costs involved one can find ways to reduce the same and hence increase the profits. Recession has made a term called “cost-cutting” highly popular; Cost accounting is precisely the direction where one needs to head in order to cut the cost. Lastly, Corporate Finance which is probably the most interesting of all finance courses, here we are taught to evaluate projects based on expected returns and budget constraints. There are many methods for such evaluation and vary in depths till which they go and their user friendliness. As far as I know it is this area where CFO level people work on, obviously the projects under their consideration would be of high importance. People at that level rarely do anything related to financial accounting however their decision are based on financial statements and their decision impact the status of financial statement. So knowledge of financial accounting is paramount and hence is the first financial course taught in b-schools. As anyone would expect finance require proficiency in maths. This proficiency is precisely what is tested in quant section of any written exam. Financial decisions involves interpreting information from various sources for example the three financial statements (FYI three financial statements are (a) Balance Sheet (b) Income Statement (c) Cash Flow statement). I think you would be able to guess the section which would test this ability; yes it is data interpretation section.
In the first year I had two Marketing courses (1) Marketing Management and (2) Marketing Research. The first course shows various facets of marketing like understanding the customers’ needs, knowing who your customers are, ways to reach the customer, creating your brand etc. Marketing Research focuses on the extracting the information which helps understand the customer and its requirement.
Operations was divided in two courses Operations Research and Operations Management. OR introduces to various mathematical and statistical techniques used to solve the problems of Operations Management which in turn includes things like task scheduling, inventory management, supply chain management etc.
To be continued…
I have not even made half of my point yet...
