Diary of a Rural Manager!

64th Week@XIMB - 26th August to 1st September, 2012 26th August Past performance are not an accurate predictor of future outcomes. Yet they can give a reference line about the academic career of the person. So much can be said in reference to the academics grades. Are we the student more than the CV and grades? There was also a lot of thinking gone over the news item - Placement reportage: How the DMS, IIT Delhi 2012 placement report is designed to mislead you? . This shoddy practices of fudging placement report without having a real-world experience of running a values-driven company possess a serious ethical challenge. It is actually a less known but well performed malpractice in most of the B-School! While army officers go beyond the call of duty sacrificing life for the country, investment bankers do exactly opposite. I can understand root cause of such problems in our education system only that never punishes plagiarism and other such activities. This makes me deeply cr...

63rd Week@XIMB - 19th August to 25th August, 2012 20th August - Since 1997 Dr Debal Deb has been conserving 700 varieties of native rice that seed companies are trying to drive out. He works for biodiversity conservation, knowledge transfer and non-commercial seed exchange within and beyond India's indigenous communities. Folk Rice Dr Debal Deb 21st August -  Today is my birthday. I will only quote Benjamin Franklin on life : "Content to live, content to die unknown, Lord of myself, accountable to none." 21st August I participated in Kurukshetra and Spardha Launch. There was a good Harvard Business review article uploaded by SDM faculty : Ending the War Between Sales and Marketing by Philip Kotler, Neil Rackham, Suj Krishnaswamy ( Complete Reading ) 22nd August -  There was presentation on OSCARD by our group in CM. We cam ro know about: Narasimham Committee on Banking Sector Reforms (1998) . There was discussion on MFI Andhra Crisis in MFM class. What...

62nd Week@XIMB - 12th August to 19th August, 2012 12th August - There is a policy paralysis in India. There are concerns over contraction in industrial output and drought need to be addressed soon. India's economic growth could fall below 5 per cent in the the first quarter of current fiscal. 13th August - Mr. K. Ramkumar, Executive Director on the Board of ICICI Bank is responsible for Human Resources, Customer Service & Operations. Are top business schools losing sight of what hirers want? is a probing article by him with a countering answer from N. Ravichandran, Director IIM Indore - Institutions need time to mature made by day. RBI had released long ago Malegam Committee Report on micro-finance. Report of the RBI Sub-Committee of its Central Board of Directors to study Issues and concerns in the micro finance institutions (MFI) Sector . 14th August - I had taken an interesting question for the research while doing later assignment of QRM. How students of PDGM-...

61st Week@XIMB - 5th August to 11th August, 2012 5th August - Professor Dilip Soman from the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, speaks at a conference about behavioral economics and mental accounting. Fear of Finance: Financial Literacy and Planning for Post secondary Education 6th August - One of our faculty is an IRMA alumnus. She shared a valuable insight about rural management course. IRMA has no case studies as reading material in its early years. Faculty, students and visiting fellow of the institute thrived hard to develop their own case research material. Today, we all are benefiting from their ground work. As long as basic principles of reliability, rigour, precision and validity are followed, the research quality will always be good. There is a great and valuable resource of Working Papers (228) on IRMA website useful for rural managers. These working Papers provide an opportunity for IRMA faculty, visiting fellows and students to sound out their...

60th Week@XIMB - 29th July to 4th August, 2012 29th July - Sunday is celebrated through a video on rural marketing sharing experiences of Airtel, M&M, and Hero Honda in rural India Eyeing on the monsoon reality, farmers in northern India always use the  proverbs of Ghagh aur Bhaddari for weather forecasting. There has been a research paper - Farming proverbs: analysis of Their Dynamics and Farmers' Knowledge by Ranjay K Singh and A Dorjey. The linkage of good monsoons and the Indian market is too close still we keep ignoring the reality of the rural market. With inadequate monsoons rural consumption falls and so do the overall sales of agri-input companies. There are many more companies whose sales are indirectly dependent on the agricultural cycle but with the poor monsoon that will also go down. Farmers try to maximize their returns in times of drought through the use of local, non-hybrid seed varieties and cheaper micro-irrigation. 30th July - A two-day worksh...