List of Books to read

Joel Spolsky runs a very good blog at http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FogCreekMBACurriculum.html and he recently published a 'best-business-books' post at http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FogCreekMBACurriculum.html

Comments to follow in a later blog.

Cross posted (link to post) on my blog (link to blog)

Stupid advertising?

There was a post on the Tom Peters blog (link to blog post) a while back on what is called 'Badvertising', or amateur and possibly stupid advertising (is there any other kind? ;)

Here is the post in its entirety:
The Ameritrade TV spot opens with a 15 year old girl coming into the room to ask her dad for money for some new jeans. Dad asks about the jeans, and as he hears about them, his investment antennae go up. "What kind of jeans?" She tells him the name of the brand. "Are they designer jeans?" "Yes," answers the daughter. "Are they popular?" "Everybody's got them." "Everybody's got them?" "Yep."
Dad's brow furrows. He sits down on the couch and opens his laptop. Asks his daughter the name of the jeans again. Buys 100 shares. Sits back looking satisfied. She then, predictably, has to remind him to give her the money to buy a pair of the jeans. Cute.
Isn't this just the problem with amatuer online investing, that by the time "everybody" has bought the jeans a ton of vigilant investors will have bought the stock, and the poor Ameritrade customer will have to buy high and sell low? Doesn't this look like it is advertising designed by an amateur investor?

The post evidently elicited diverse reactions - as you can gauge from the number of comments posted there.

Something for the current students to ask their marketing/advertising faculty? :-)

A similar example of idiotic advertising that came to my mind was:
- E*Trade - this was popular during the dot-com boom days in the US. This cubicle dweller sees his stock portfolio, consisting of a single stock, zoom by several hundred percent, possibly making him a millionaire. He rushes to his boss' office, calling him the choicest of names. He rushes back to his cube, only to find the stock has tanked as fast as it went up. Now, shouldn't the genius have FIRST sold the stock???

A particularly egregious example (or two) were the Aamir Khan ad where he claims the standard of Coca Cola is the same, all over the world. The subtext is that Coke in India does not have pesticides. Now this claim is false, as the testing done by the parliamentary committee found levels of pesticides far in excess of what were claimed. The other example is Rani Mukherjee who claims that people should stop breathing because the air is full of germs. The message here being that all the hullaballoo about Coke and Limca and other soft drinks being laced with pesticides and other pollutants is just hear-say and not based on fact.

Vignettes - 2

Sridhar had a post (link to post) a few days back about memorable and lasting images from PGSM. These are a few of my favourites:

• Vivek Moorthy stating in a Global Financial Markets (Q7) electives class, with a straight face, that "the GDP is nothing but an autoregressive sum of its lags".
• Janat Shah in an OM class (Q4) very sweetly taking Naren for coming late to classs. Don't quite remember the exact words.
• Das in a QMM class (Q3) asking one of the students to explain the difference between a mean and a statistic (or something to that effect; I have blanked out that entire course from my memory).
• Thiru in a marketing class (Q3) regaling us with his Calcutta anecdotes... "kabhi aap poochte hai, kabhi aap poochtach karte hai", or giving a short 10 minute lesson in negotiations, with Phani and Amit as the lambs to the slaughter
• Prof Srinivasan stating in a very serious manner in a Social Entrepreneurship (Q10) class, "I have a theory that I can set unanswerable papers, but I am not going to test it out"
  . Or advising students to go in for the project option and not the end term test because "the end term paper will be much tougher than anything you can imagine in your life".

Vignettes

Time to get psenti! After all, it is the done thing on pass out.

So, what are your lasting images of the 2.5 years at IIMB that defined the experience for you? (Abhinav, I meant mental images!)

Mine:

- Shyamal Roy bursting Dinesh's bubble by labelling his question "Incomprehensibly Intelligent"
- For some wierd question from Subabrato Das (trust me, you dont want to know) which had the class & our group stumped, Harish piped up and launched into a "one tail/ two tail" explanation. I still dont know what transpired but Das was very happy!
- Ramnath Narayanswamy setting expectations (Unacheivably high, IMO) by destroying Nishit in the inaugral lecture
- Actually preparing for cases before the JR's SM class (Oh, the innocence of youth!)
- Ramnath again: starting each class in Spirituality with "Harish, what did we learn in the last class" and Harish coming up with 10 different ways of saying "ego"

Go on, let us know what defined it for you.