Onam is around the corner (5th September, this year) – no I am not a Mallu or for that matter remotely close to any state in South India. But what i like most about the festival other than the usual rangoli, harvest pooja, traditional dance and all is the boat race. (Can’t pronounce or spell the way it is called). This post is not about Onam (there are many more learned people to talk about it), but about how I compare the traditional boat race with organizational behaviour of a big company.

How fast can a team of 100 rowers row a boat? Choices – as fast as the fastest rower, as slow as the slowest rower, or just the average. Don’t know eactly, but probably it would be as fast as the average rower. So if I pick a random 10 rowers from the ‘large boat’ and put them in a small boat (which would be around 1/10th the size of the larger boat) and ask these guys to race against the bigger boat – which boat will win?

Statistically these 10 rowers selected at random can row the boat at the same average speed as the larger boat. So the race should end in a draw.

But wait there lies a catch – there is very high likelyhood that a slow rower (or underperformer) can be noticed in a small boat than in a much larger boat – so just to avoid getting noticed, he is more likely to perform better. Further, a fast rower in a big boat knows that his efforts alone cannot drastically improve the speed of the boat, which is rowed by 99 other men. However, he can see a perceptible improvement in the speed of a smaller boat if he performs to his full potential. So my feeling is the smaller boat is likely to win the race.

Isn’t the same with big companies – how fast can big companies grow – around the same average rate as the industry at a broader level. So a smaller company formed with a group of people selected at random (not just the super-heroes of bigger companies) can grow at a much faster rate.

This thought has some even more deeper connotations – So if I have to start a company, shouldn’t I start with a team of average performers from bigger comapanies? But offlate, I observe, most of the startups try to recruit a few highly talented guys – the justification being, a startup can’t afford any mediocre performers, becasue of the high burn rate. (Race towards Event horizon as Jim Clarke founder of Netscape puts it). The startups are ready to pay exhorbitantly high salary to recruit the bright guys (you need to pay much more to compensate for ‘frills’, ‘brand name’ etc. that bigger firms can offer) – so isn’t the burn rate (or cash drain) higher? The only caveat being – a startup should probably go for ‘out-performers’ only if they are developing something ’state-of -the-art’ and requires people with high intellect, ready to slog for any length of time. Or if you are going to launch a new product, and time not money is your constraint.

I have no experience in working for a startup – so the thoughts are just my conjectures. I invite readers who started their firms or have experience working in startups to share their views and enlighten me.

Thinking of writting the GMAT soon. I dont know when i will write it, yet to finalise on the date. At this stage I am not even sure whether I am worthy of an MBA or not.
Academically the MBA program would not be a challenge for me, but i am more concerned about my prospects and my fit in the job profile typical of an MBA. Still browsing through websites of B-Schools around the world, unable to decide on which schools to apply to – one of them will be ISB, dont know about the rest. May be INSEAD, as even that is 1 year program.

But whereever I apply i must write GMAT. I was scanning through the Kaplan and some websites on net for GMAT preperations. The quant section seems easy, but my verbal being pathetic I am finding it difficult – especially the Sentence Correction Part. Hopefully there will some tricks of trade which i need to crack to get at elusive 700+ score.

Okey, dont get deceived by the title of the blog. Its not about my first thoughts about blogging, but about my first thoughts of doing MBA. Well, the seeds were probably sown during the college days at IT-BHU(Institute of Technology, Banaras Hindu University) way back in 1999, when some of the classmates were preparing to bell the CAT. I for some reason had no plans of mba in those days, but seeing others talking about it day-in day-out about ims test papers, mock cats and God knows what else, was somehow infatuated towards this.

But in those days ‘MBA for me – no way’. I was a techie, destined for core electrical engineering job, somehow landed in a software company. Clock kept on ticking, some janta still in the CAT euphoria, some in GRE looking for MS or rather $$ dreams, and some like me chilling out on Ganges Ghat. Post engineering, landed up in Pune for job, was amazed by computers & internet – an entirely different world for a person for whom computer means a typerwriter-tv combo on which you can play ‘Doom’, ‘Heretic’ and ‘Solitaire’.

I got engrossed in the myrid world of coding, but more frequently in ‘Age of Empires’ and ‘Yahoo Messanger’ But the MBA, dint leave itself behind. Few of the colleagues strated the CAT preperation again, and I for one, use to laugh at those poor souls, who were planning to leave a well paying job to go back to school…!! Anyway during the course of time few of them made it to IIMs, and one chap had the privilege to be the founding batch of ISB. So this was the first time i heard about ISB, and I developed a deep-rooted but dormant desire to be at ISB someday. But that someday was not to be seen till 3 years hence, when I finally decided to write GMAT.