Check out our new B-School Blog

http://owenbloggers.typepad.com/

This is the new blog that some of have put together at school.
If any of you are considering starting your MBA's this should give you a fairly good idea of what first semester looks/feels like!! Also, this also means one should seriously consider Owen School of Management at Vanderbilt.
Come on! Nashville is not what you may think...

Finally Here!

So I'm finally done moving to Nashville. A year of preparation, anticipation etc. is finally bearing some fruition, I'm ready to start B-school!!! More on my move later.
The past two days have been spent in orientation, another 10 days of it to go! Day two has been especially tedious and long, sitting through 5 hours of ethics lectures, and another hour of listening to the honor council and honor code here at Vanderbilt. The honor code sure as hell put the fear of god in almost all of us it seems. As I was listening to it, I got to start reminiscing about my undergrad days. If this was strictly enforced (I think it was, probably we just never got caught?), I'd have been thrown out of school like in my second year!!!! Anyways, this time it would seem everyone will pretty much adhere to the code, which I suppose is a good thing. Back to ethics lecture... in spite of the tedium, I am glad it was a long drawn out boring lecture on something I could actuallly understand vs. a long drawn out boring lecture on Electrical Engineering learning about NAND gates. Wow, I can't believe I still remember that word! But I promised myself after undergrad that I'd never touch another EE book again, eight and a half years later, I have adhered to that promise. Anyway, I'm finally starting out what I had set out to do for all these years. Lets hope it all works out!!!!

Thought

So earlier today, while driving down to my office, I put in a CD that I'd never really listened to before. It happened to be a compilations of old Bangla songs. The words of the song went something like this:

"Hoito kichui nahi pabo
Tobu o tomai ami duur hote bhalo beshe jabo
Hoito kichui nahi pabo"...

This literally means,
"Perhaps I will get nothing in return
But I will continue to love you from afar"

While I understand love is an ephemeral feeling, one that cannot be explained really. However, is unrequited love possible, forever? In the world we live in, especially here in the West, psychologists, friends and anyone else one might care to listen to when faced with such a situation would be to "get over it", heal and move on quickly. Opining and thinking about someone, and expressing those feelings, especially after the other party has decided to move on with their lives, would almost verge on psychotic behavior, from a societal stand-point. Yet, in the way our traditional South Asian culture works (or at least used to work), one would almost believe that it is possible to martyr one-self, and selflessly continue to want somebody even after they no longer would seem to care about you. Bollywood movies are filled with stories of people who continue to stymie themselves and their lives, just to be with the person they feel they love even though they may never get anything in return. Would this mean, that today we have just become more self-obsessed, more about instant gratification? Can one truly love somebody else even when doing so would be seemingly detrimental?

Frustration

Have you ever had one of those days when nothing seems to go right? Occassionally, I seem to have a day, like today, when it seemed from the moment I woke up, I was destined to have a "bad day", it was almost like a premonition. You wake up late, get out of bed, and boom - you realize you forgot to pick up your clothes from the cleaners the previous day, so now you have nothing to wear to work! So, as it is you're running late, so you have to go through your stash of new shirts (since everything else is at the cleaners), and then open it up, and have to iron it. You suddenly realize that you forgot to charge the electric razor, so now you can't shave and have to use that old razor you have for emergencies, but because you have gotten so used to relying on the electric one, you don't have any shaving cream. So you try to make do (necessity is the mother of invention), and use soap instead, but then you nick yourself in like five different places. In the meantime, since you're already running late for your meetings this morning, your phone starts ringing off the hook. Finally, after fighting your laptop to shut down so you can take it to work with that presentation you've worked all night on, you make it out to your parking lot, only to realize you can't find your car, because you couldn't get your designated parking spot, as you came in late the previous night, and due to the really narrow space you were designated, you couldn't get your car into the spot after your neighbor had already parked and no other regular spots were available. As you try to make your way out of the apartment complex, the friggin' remote for the gate is not working, so you have to step out of the car and punch in the codes, and then realize your gas tank is running on empty. The phone is still ringing away, you're not even bothering to pick up after all, and that annoying voicemail thingy's just beeping away. Now, you make a dash to the gas station, praying the car won't stall before you get there. Finally make it there, and then decide you should take the feeder roads instead of the freeways because its shorter. Well lo and behold, you get stopped at every single signal. You're blood pressure's just rising and road rage is slowly but surely creeping in, and right then, you see a call coming in from your boss, now you can't ignore the call. So you take it, and guess what? Priorities have changed, the meeting is postponed because one of the major client's systems are all down, go into disaster recovery mode, and co-ordinate all efforts to bring client systems back up. Every minute is precious, the CIO at the client site calls and of course in no uncertain words reminds you that systems are down, and patient lives (and doctor's livelihoods) depend on these systems. So in your agitated state of mind, you remind yourself to remain calm, and explain to the customer that we're doing all that we possibly can to bring things back up quickly, and in your mind you're thinking, I'm not even in the office! The traffic lights are all still f*****g with you, and you're just going ballistic. The phone's still ringing, how peaceful life must have been before cell phones were invented. Just then one of your friends' calls you up, to get over life crisis, that has to go the back burner for now, I got enough crises of my own to resolve. You finally make it in to the office, assess your situation, get things cranking, whip up all your people into action, all the while fielding half agitated customer calls asking for explanations and ETA's. How do you get them that answer if you dont know it yourself? Just when you think things could not get possibly worse, and you realize you're still helpless, you call up the support vendors, and are told oops, customer has not re-signed maintenance contract, so will not be supported. That's when all your pent up frustration and anger comes out, because now you have your own whipping boy, the support vendor who's customer we are. So after a 15 minute shout out with the poor support guy (who is of course just following his guidelines), you decide to go over his head, and call up the top dog at said vendor's company, after much cajoling, some promises to make sure that I will do whatever it takes to make customer resign contracts, some empty threats on my part to take our business elsewhere, vendor top dog gives in, and agrees to provide support this one time for the sake of on-going relationships and to try to get the few carrots which I probably won't be able to deliver on but dangle his way anyway. Things finally start working late afternoon, and you're feeling good now, things just might work out your way. So you sit down to eat a much deserved lunch at 330PM, and the sandwich that you have just had delivered to your office, fall out of your hands and lands on the carpet...
(No I don't believe in the 5 second rule)

Anyway, such was my day today.

Is Corruption embedded in our culture?

So, we all know that Bangladesh has perennially been designated as "the Most Corrupt" nation in the world. And every year that Transparency International (TI) comes up with this statistic, the government comes up with its own spin to counter this. Well atleast we're number one at something! Anyway, I came across what I thought was a very interesting article in last month's Forbes magazine. The article is titled "Reforming Tony Soprano's Morals". The article concluded that a certain amount of corruption is grounded in culture and immune to carrots and sticks. Since economists like to think that corrupt behavior can be changed through punishment and reward, and in that view there is no such thing as culture or corruption. Alter the legal incentives and, and law-abiding behavior will follow. An ideal test of this would be to bring people from all over the world to a place where they faced no legal constraints, then simply monitor their willingness to behave corruptly.
Accordingly, they studied the behavior of Diplomats at the United Nations who enjoyed diplomatic immunity from prosecution for parking violations until 2002, giving them an opportunity to observe which diplomats racked up the most parking tickets and which observed the law despite the lack of punishment. Unpaid parking violations by diplomats totaled 156,775 between 1998 and 2005. Forbes matched the data with the size of each UN mission, then pulled in data from the Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) developed by TI. The results?
Scandanavian countries, which perennially rank among the least corrupt in the CPI index, had the fewest unpaid tickets. There just 12 from the 66 diplomats from Finland,, Norway, Denmark and Sweden. Almost all these tickets went to one bad Finn.
Chad and Bangladesh (!!), at the bottom of the CPI, were among the worst offenders They got 1,243 and 1,319 tickets respectively, in spite of the fact that their UN missions were many times smaller than those of the Scandanavians!!! In fact, according to this article, there is a remarkable concordance between the number of unpaid violations and a country's corruption ranking. This would seemingly strongly suggest that one's background and experiences, what we might call culture, does indeed contribute to bad behavior? So the next question then becomes, whether these diplomats flouted the law immediately on arrival in New York and then perhaps absorbed local norms of obedience. Perhaps, they gradually converged with the local culture? Not so apparently! It was broadly true that these diplomats committed more violations the longer they stayed at the UN, and this increase was even faster for diplomats from corrupt countries. In 2002, after a Senate amendment went into effect, that gave New York city the right to tow the vehicles of delinquent diplomats and to recoup unpaid parking violations from U.S. foreign aid disbursements to offending nations, the rate of unpaid violations immediately dropped by 90%, however, postenforcement violations, were still highly correlated with national levels of corruption. So it would seem incentives matter, but so does culture.
Would this mean that local values would seem to undermine the efforts of reformers of economic and social institutions? Changing the law and enforcing it is helpful but by itself not sufficient to induce change in a corrupt country? So does all this point to the fact that corruption is now so embedded in our culture and thought processes, that eradicating it altogether will be a Herculean task indeed?

Karma Part II

On the subject of blind dates from my earlier blog, a couple of my friends mentioned that the way I structured the whole thing made me look "cheap". This is an interesting topic of discussion especially from a guy perspective. Now I am perfectly cognizant of the fact that we live in a world where men and women are considered equals in every facet of our lives, it is also a theory that I subscribe to and firmly believe in. However, this one aspect - dating, this particular notion of equality seemingly does not hold. In our efforts to be chivalrous, it would seem we men are at a slight disadvantage. We're expected to hold the doors, act gentlemanly and on top of that foot the bill in any dating circumstances. No self respecting man would even entertain the idea of letting his date pick up the tab at the end of the night, even if she were to insist on going dutch. Of course, most women on the other hand will offer to go dutch, but almost never can be expected to nor will offer to pay the whole bill. There is a little bit of dichotomy there, and for whatever reason most of us men have accepted this status quo fairly happily. Now mind you, I have heard women complain plenty of times about guys that they have gone out with, who they will refer to as "cheap" because they did not entertain them as, how shall we put it, as lavishly as they would have liked. Now in the case of my experience from last weekend, why is it that I was expected to pay for someone else's indulgences at my expense, especially someone I did not even like that much to begin with and did not know at all? In a world where we are supposed to be equal, I should have been able to stand up at the end of the meal, look at the bill, split it at least down the middle or more correctly, since I had maybe eaten and drank a tenth of the entire bill, paid for my part and been able to walk out with my head held high, right? hmmm... I guess we're not as "equal" as we like to think we are?

Karma's a b***h

So the other day, I went out had a "blind date". She seemed real nice when we talked, we even seemed to connect on some level. So we decided to meet Saturday afternoon, at this restaurant, one of these really ritzy places here in San Diego. Now I must admit, the place was awesome. But, before I get to the place... Anyway, I pick up my "date", mind you I had just wanted to have a nice, quiet, fun dinner. So immediately there... after picking her up, was the shocker. All my enthusiasm was sapped in a matter of seconds on meeting this person. However, me being the nice guy, decided to at least give it a shot, in spite of my shallowness, figured what the heck, since I had committed to going to this place, I'll just follow through, what's the worst that can possibly happen? So she orders herself a drink, and then we order some appetizers. Well, we start on the appetizers, she eats up more or less both the appetizers, of course my own appetite is slowly going down the drain, as I start contemplating the bill that is quickly hitting the stratosphere, now she's not only eating off her own plate, but finishes up the remainder of the food on mine! The drinks keep coming, I'm stuck on my first one still at this point. A little later, I finish up my drink, go to the restroom, to plan and strategize. I come back, she's ordered a bottle of wine, and another drink for me! Now to dinner. I'm thinking in my mind, how do I at least bring this to a feasible bill. Well, shocker, she orders a $55 entree!!!! And a salad on top of that... Hate to say this, but she scraped her salad so that even if you turned the salad bowl over, not a single crouton would have dropped out. By this time, of course she's pretty tipsy, so decides to get into a conversation about how I'm not being a good date, how I'm not appreciating her, and not being very complimentary. To top it off, she tells me how much she'd love to see me again, and how come I'm not telling her that I would like to do the same! Well, I have to come up with a diplomatic answer at this point. I send a text message to one of friends, asking advice on how I can get out of this self-created mess, my friend writes me back and I quote "just hang in there, be a gentleman and keep up the pretense and then leave on a good note". Dude, you suck for that advice... yeah you know who you are! Anyway, end result, I am left with a $320 bill... The redeeming factor? I have now found San Diego's premiere restaurant with the coolest view.