Diary of a Rural Manager!

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...

59th Week@XIMB - 22nd July to 28th July, 2012 22nd July - Sunday was gone in studying for mid term exams. Raising an Olympian - MARY KOM : As the Proud Sponsor of Mom, P&G presents a series about the Mom behind each Olympic athlete. 23rd July - ESM exam is over.The big news was about Hindustan Unilever Ltd. HUL increased its net profit by 112 per cent for the first quarter of 2012-13 to Rs.1,331.2 crore, thanks largely to a one-time gain on sale of property amounting to Rs.607 crore. Hindustan Unilever Profit More than Doubles on Strong Sales and Speaking at company AGM , HUL Chairman Harish Manwani lays emphasis on role of corporate in financial inclusion. 24th July - Tuesday was a holiday. I came across an article: How Hindustan Unilever is making every employee a marketer . 25th July - Mid Term exam of MFM was more analytic than based on rote learning. With Q2 session results are coming, companies are coming up with reports. Here a positive news from ...

58th Week@XIMB - 15th July to 21st July, 2012 15th July - Sunday is always wasted in some entertainment and long sleep. Today there was Individual Profile verification for Brochure and work ex certificate submission by placecom. 16th July - In QRM lecture, there is lot of emphasis given on ethical behavior of the researcher. A researcher must not opt either for socially desirable or biased answers for personal economic benefits. Such type of researchers /journalist are hard to find these days. 17th July - Rural poverty can be attributed a lot to ecological poverty or in easy terms biomass scarcity available for commons. Hence, a rural development program must be quite eco-specific. Auxiliary benefit of NREGA includes eco-restoration & regeneration of natural resources.Once upon a time, World Bank sees NREGA as policy barrier hurting economic development and poverty alleviation. 18th July - One opportunity for XIMB is to track performance in state livelihood mission...

57th Week@XIMB - 8th July to 14th July, 2012 08th July - The rest-day must be utilized in watching good video from you-tube. So, here comes a video where with wisdom, eloquence and wit, Anupam Mishra talks about the amazing feats of engineering built centuries ago by the people of India's Golden Desert to harvest water. A simple as yet a very accurate presentation of the actual state of Rajasthan. Anupam Mishra: The ancient ingenuity of water harvesting 09th July - There was discussion on a case study :- ICICI Bank: Challenges in Rural Banking in SDM lecture. Abstract : ICICI Bank challenge is to set up and ran an effective sales and distribution system (that is primarily non branch based) for rural Banking lending business and to scale up and so profitably. 10th July - Our Ecological Footprint is growing larger. Ecological Footprint is a standardized measure of demand for natural capital that may be contrasted with the planet's ecological capacity to regenerate...

56th Week@XIMB - 1st July to 7th July, 2012 1st July - There was an interactive session with Mr. Paul Polak, Founder and Director of IDE ( International Development Enterprises )in the Auditorium. Paul Polak‘s latest adventure is Spring Health , which plans to provide access to clean water to 10 million people within four years. I am embedding TED talk delivered by the Paul. He wrote a book 'Out of Poverty' on his tryst with poverty. TEDxMileHigh - Paul Polak - The Future Corporation Quote: “Talk to the people who have the problem and listen to what they have to say.” 2nd July - I have still a lot to catch up in writing a priori reasoning and null hypothesis in AMDA. Yet, I am happy to learn in details about forecasting and estimation method. Mathematical model is helpful in making decision with a holistic view of economy. Thanks to IndiaStat for amass of data to experiment with. 3rd July - Learned about financial and social inter-mediation of Micro-finance Inst...

55th Week@XIMB - 24th June to 30th June, 2012 24th June - Sunday was spent with some business analysis news and listening to Mr. Prabhat Patnaik on the topic "The Perverse Transformation".. Reebok is revamping the branding strategy with an inspiration from the Dominno's Pizza. After all, what was the market for home-delivered pizzas before Domino's began operations? Zero. The most efficient, most productive, more useful aspect of branding is creating a new category. Start something totally new. Hence, the learnings were clear: " Ask not what percentage of an existing market your brand can achieve. Ask how large a market your brand can create by putting resources behind creating a category. " Aditya Birla Nuvo to invest Rs 1,600 crore in Kishore Biyani's Pantaloon Retail. That is a big story to be watched in the coming years. Launched in 1997, the Pantaloon format is spread in 35 cities with 65 stores and 21 factory outlets covering total retail...