Kavitha Sivasailam, MBA ’11

Another milestone!

Cannot believe that the H1 part of my last semester at MIT is completed. For those of you who are not familiar with the MIT Sloan semester, it is divided into 2 halves, H1 and H2. Some of our courses run for just half a semester, either in H1 or H2.

The last week of H1 was a crazy one. It is always a mad scramble to finish up assignments and project reports. I finished up one course in H1 - System Dynamics ( the rest of my courses are full term courses).  The last home work in System Dynamics ended up to be almost a mini-thesis analyzing the rise and fall of an airline called People Express that existed in the 80s. Some of my classmates will continue the next part of System Dynamics in H2, which will get into more detailed system dynamic modeling.

We have a week of SIP (Sloan Innovation Period) after the end of H1 classes, which is a break from regular classes. SIP week is for attending short classes on a range of topics taught by faculty and guest speakers. An interesting SIP class I attended was "Ethnic Diaspora Networks" by Elena Obukhova. Prof Obukhova's research looks at the effect of returning Chinese migrants on the emergence of a semiconductor design industry in Shanghai. This is a topic of great interest for me , being part of the Indian diaspora in the US. We discussed about ethnic Diasporas and how they have contributed to the growth of high‐technology firms in India and China. The interesting takeaway from this class for me was to see how managers and entrepreneurs could take advantage of an ethnic diaspora to take their businesses global.

We are all on vacation this week for Spring Break. Most of my classmates are away on exciting treks and trips all over the world. Exactly one year back for Spring Break I was in Japan for the MIT Sloan Japan Trek, enjoying the sights and sounds of Japan and the incredible Japanese hospitality. The March 11th earthquake and subsequent tsumani and nuclear crisis have indeed been heart wrenching. I pray for the people of Japan, and for a quick recovery for this amazing country.

I look forward to a few more days of rest and relaxation , before I start H2. I will be taking Global Strategy with Prof. Obukhova in H2 and also attend to attend several conferences before I leave Sloan. More on that later!

 

Dinner with a CEO

Last week as part of the CEO perspectives class , I had the opportunity to have dinner with the CEO of a biotech company. Every week, a group of students from the class are invited to have dinner with the CEO before heading to the class discussion. This is indeed the highlight of the class as I discovered. The dinner is a great opportunity to ask the CEO questions about his company, career etc in a small, intimate gathering.

As this was my first introduction to the bio-tech industry , I did a lot of reading to prepare for my dinner. Before the dinner we have to submit a memo addressed to the CEO on how we think we can turn his company around! This was indeed a tall order for someone who knew pretty much nothing about bio-tech and its business model! Not sure how my memo turned out in the end, but the dinner was certainly very enjoyable. It was an evening filled with interesting questions from the students to the CEO, and I sure savored every bit of it, included having the CEO answer my question!

It  was indeed a C-suite week at Sloan as in another class I had the opportunity to hear from the CIO of large technology company. Mid-week we also had the former president of Fidelity give a talk to the Sloan community as part of the Dean Innovative Leadership series. I am going to miss all these amazing talks and speakers once I graduate!

This week I switch gears from attending talks to giving exams for my classes :-). I have a business law exam coming up on Friday which I trying to prepare for soon...

 

Connecting the dots...

I was listening to the radio yesterday  as they were reporting on the Sanofi buyout of Genzyme. What was very interesting to me was when they said Sanofi and Genzyme had sealed this deal through some creative ideas.

 A little history behind this news story - Genzyme wanted a price premium for their pipeline of block buster drugs, however Sanofi did not want to pay a premium as they were not sure of the potential success for these drugs. So the two companies argued for months on a price. Instead of spliting the difference, the 2 CEOs of these companies took a rather creative approach to discuss options. They left their teams of lawyers and bankers and instead took a hike together in the Swiss Alps.

The hike and the conversations that followed lead to a creative solution. Genzyme would be entitled to a payout over time if the Genzyme drugs succeed. This way both companies come out better. Sanofi is not paying a premium for something that might not work, and Genzyme still gets the opportunity to reap the rewards if their drugs are successful.

What does have to do with MIT Sloan? This type of creative value creation technique is exactly what I learnt in my Power&Negotiations class last semester. Negotiations are not only about capturing value from other but more importantly about value creation ; look for creative solutions so that both parties end up walking away better after the deal!

I look forward to connecting many such dots as I enter the corporate world soon. Meanwhile I am happy to be at place like MIT Sloan that takes so much effort and pride in preparing their MBAs for their foray into the workplace.

 

Nearing the end (:-

I have been guilty of not posting on my blog for a loooooong time..and I today I realized that I am almost nearing the end of my MIT Sloan journey. Better late than never, I want to update this blog regularly as I go through my last semester and also add some of the wonderful memories of the past 1.5 years.

It has been barely three weeks since the final spring semester started, and it has already turned so busy in true MIT Sloan style. I am taking several interesting courses this semester. One of them is System Dynamics - an MIT Sloan hallmark.  System dynamics helps to understand physical phenomena using modeling and simulation techniques. The begining of the course seemed very quantitative focussed but after a few classes I can understand why that rigor is uncessary. Yesterday we drew a system dynamics model to explain the gas shortage that happened in the 70's due to the Iran crisis and for our homework we had to model the housing bubble!

The other class I am enjoying a lot this semester is a class called CEO perspectives.  Every session of this class we have a CEO discussing about the challenges facing his company and the students have to turn in a memo outlining how the CEO can turn his company around. We have had several interesting speakers for this class . Last week we hear the CEO of GM and before that was the CEO of Genzyme. I highly recommend this class to incoming students as well as soon to be second years. But remember to bid high during course bidding. This is an extremely popular class.

I have to run now to prepare for my CEO perspectives class, but will be back to share some more of my MIT Sloan experiences

An exciting conference : EmTech

One of the perks of being a student again is to get free passes to conferences which usually cost a ton of money to attend. I recently attended EmTech (http://www.technologyreview.com/emtech/09/index.aspx), a conference about the emerging technologies in fields ranging from energy to software. Since this conference was held in our own backyard at MIT, I was able to get a pass to the conference by volunteering for a few hours. Being the good student that I am , I attended all my classes before I got here.. Well okay I missed a recitation to be here :-)

One of the panels I attended was titled "Always Connected", and discussed advances in communications and information technology. Pranav Mistry from the Media Lab at MIT was one of the panelists. Remember the cool interface through which Tom Cruise sifts through information and files by moving his fingers in a orchestrating fashion. The research Pranav Mistry is working on is reminiscent of the movie and is very appropriately titled "sixth sense". Check out http://www.pranavmistry.com/projects/sixthsense/if you are interested in learning more. Pranav Mistry talked about his research that is focused in trying to find ways that we can access information through everyday objects versus having to turn to a computer to find that information. For example a regular newspaper that would show live video instead of just delivering static news.

The other cool thing about the EmTech conference was the "Digital Bag". Each of the conference attendees had a small RFID tag in his/her conference badge. When we wanted to exchange business card information from another attendee, we just walked over to one of the touch screens stations available at the conference and waved both our badges at the same time to exchange information. Similarly if I wanted to learn more about one of the sponsors who had a booth at the conference and did not necessarily want to carry brochures around, I quickly swiped by badge at the RFID reader available at the table, and all the information was transferred to my "Digital Bag" that I could access over the internet at any time.

Attending EmTech was a great way to get a peek at what is happening elsewhere at MIT and also see how industry trends are shaping up. Looking forward to attending EmTech again next year!

The first post!

Almost a month has passed since I joined MIT Sloan and there is so much to blog about. Where do I start ?!! The past few weeks have been an action-packed, intense but amazingly fun time. I started my MBA-experience with a week long immersion into the core MBA classes or simply what MIT calls pre-term. I highly encourage students joining next year to attend pre-term. Not only you get to refresh concepts that are a little rusty but also get to know your classmates in a relaxed environment before the grind begins :-)

The orientation week was the best one of them all. MIT Sloan had designed a very interesting orientation experience for us first year MBAs. As part of orientation week, we spent a day at an outdoor conference center with our team mates learning valuable skills to navigate the MBA core semester. One of the activities had us building a raft out of barrels, ropes and boards, and this raft had to be sea-worthy! The activity I enjoyed the most was the Giant's Ladder which is a ropes course. Even though I have a fear of heights, I climbed the ladder with encouragement from my team mates, the Caribbean Cranes. Go Cranes! The climber's life is in the smooth execution of the team below holding the ropes. The climber learns to trust his team and the team pulls through for the climber.

After an exciting orientation week, it was time for some serious stuff. Our classes started in full swing two weeks back. I am taking Finance, Accounting, Economics, Data Models and Decisions, Communications and Organizational Processses. All the courses expect for Finance make up the MBA core.The nice thing about classes at MIT Sloan is that the core classes build up on each other. For example this week what we learnt in our DMD (statistics) class had a direct application in our Finance class.

Our lives are not just about classes and assignments though. There is so much fun stuff happening here at MIT Sloan and at MIT in general every day. The hours in the day are just not enough to enjoy the opportunites around us. When I started at MIT, I took a sailing class through the MIT Sailing Pavillion. MIT offers free sailing classes for all its students and also free use of its sailing pavillion once you complete the sailing class.

Well, I stop here now with my post and look forward to report back with more exciting news from MIT Sloan very soon!