Author: SK

The Trouble with Management Consulting

While I was pumping iron (I know, I know!!) at the gym on Wednesday evening, I got a call from a client seeking to confirm our meeting yesterday afternoon. “Why don’t you put together a presentation with all the insights you’ve gathered so far?”, he suggested, adding that he was planning to call a few more stakeholders to the meeting and it would be good to give them an insight into what is happening.

Most of my morning yesterday was spent putting together the presentation, and I’m not usually one who bothers that much about the finer details in a presentation. As long as the insights are in place I’m good, I think. I had also worked late into the night on Wednesday trying to refine some algorithms, the result of which were to go into the presentation. In short, the client’s request for the presentation had turned the 18 hours between the phone call and the meeting topsy-turvy.

It is amazing how many people expect you to have a powerpoint (or Keynote) presentation every time you walk into a meeting with them. For someone like me, who doesn’t like to prepare power points unless there are specific things to show, it can get rather irritating. Some presentations are necessary, of course, like the one to the CEO of another client that I made last Thursday. What gets my goat is when people start expecting powerpoints from you even at status update meetings.

Preparing presentations is a rather time-consuming process. You need to be careful about what you present and how you present it. You need to make sure that your visualizations are labeled well and intuitive. You need to sometimes find words to fill slides that would otherwise appear empty. And if you are not me, you will need to spend time with precise and consistent formatting and dotting the is and crossing the Ts (I usually don’t bother about this bit, even in presentation to the CEO. As long as content is there and is presentable I go ahead).

So when you have to make presentations to your clients regularly, and at every status update meeting, you can only imagine how much of your time goes into just preparing the presentations rather than doing real work!

The other resource drain in the consulting business is working from client site. While it is true that you get massive amount of work done when you are actually there and have a much shorter turn around time for your requests, spending all your time there can lead to extreme inefficiency and lack of thought.

When you spend all your time at the client site, it invariably leads to more frequent status updates, and hence more presentations and thus more time spent making presentations rather than doing real work. The real damage, though, is significantly more. When you spend all your time at your client’s site, it is easy to get drawn into what can be called as “client servicing mode”. Since you meet the client often, you will have to update him often, and you are always looking for something to update him every time you need to meet him.

Consequently, you end up putting on yourself a number of short deadlines, and each day, each hour, you strive to simply meet the next short deadline you’ve set for yourself. While this might discipline you in terms of keeping your work going and make sure you deliver the entire package on time, it also results in lack of real thinking time.

Often when you are working on a large project, you need to take a step back and look at the big picture and look at where it is all going. There will be times when you realize that some time invested in simply thinking about a problem and coming up with a “global” solution  is going to pay off in the long run. You will want to take some time away from the day-to-day running so that you can work on your “global” solution.

Unfortunately a client servicing environment doesn’t afford you this time. Due to your constant short deadlines, you will always end up on a “greedy” path of chasing the nearest local optimum. There is little chance of any kind of pathbreaking work that can be done in this scenario.

In my work I have taken a conscious decision to not visit my client’s office unless it is absolutely necessary. Of course, there are times when I need to expedite something and think being there will increase my own efficiency also and spend time there. But at other times, when I”m away, here in Bangalore, the fact that there are times when there are no immediate deadlines also means that I get the time to invest on “global” thought and on developing ideas that are long-term optimal.

The long-term productivity that emerges from spending time working off-site never ceases to amaze me!

Hundred Percentile

Ok so what is this 100 percentile business? How can IIMs with an entire department dedicated to Quantitative Methods declare a score that sounds so absurd?

My thoughts were just that when I had first heard from a friend that another had got “100 percentile”. It sounded plain absurd. It continued to sound absurd even after I found out (a few hours later) that I had also got “100 percentile”.

After some thought, though, I figured out what it is. Basically CAT gives out “percentile” up to two places of decimal (I know that sounds so wrong. Percentile is the wrong word there. It should be whatever 1/10000th is called).

So what they do is this. In good scientific fashion, to declare your percentile up to two digits of decimal, it is calculated up to three digits of decimal and then the last digit is rounded off. Great scientific practice. Except that if you’ve got a score in CAT that is more than what 99.995% of all CAT-takers have got, your “percentile” gets rounded off to 100.00 !

So if 10 people get “100 percentile” in CAT, it means that 10 people got more than what the rest of the 99.995% of the people who took the exam got. It could as well be a CAT question to calculate the number of people who took the exam given the number of people who got “100 percentile”!

Job Descriptions

“The best part of my job”, declared the wife this morning, “is that everyone knows what Toyota makes”. This, she said, she realized after she had tried explaining to several people (mostly in vain) about my job (past and present). Here are some sample responses she told me about:

  • “Oh, Golden Socks! Even my neighbour works there. Software, right?” (this was back when I worked for Goldman Sachs. To put this in context, about half of Goldman’s employees in Bangalore are in IT)
  • “Oh, he works for a bank? What is he? Is he a manager there?”
  • “Investment bank? What interest rate do they offer for deposits?”
  • “Oh he is a financial consultant now? Can you ask him to recommend to me a few stocks?” (on being told that I’m a freelance consultant now, after having worked at a bank)

I realize that given what I’m doing (and what I’ve done, and what I intend to do, which is the same as what I’m doing), I’ll never be in a position where the man on the street will be able to understand what I do. For the rest of my lifetime most people will never really “get” what I’m doing. I wonder if that’s a problem.

Personally I don’t think that’s going to be so much of a problem as long as there are enough people who understand what I do for me to get adequate work and adequately paid. But this refusal of the man on the street to even try and understand what I do is a bit irritating, I guess.

I’m going to make up a list of obscure stocks and obscure reasons to buy or short them. The next time someone asks me to recommend stocks, I think I’m going to actually give them some. And given that they mostly tend to be people I won’t care much about, I don’t think I’ll care about the quality of my predictions, either.

 

CEO Presentations and Rocky Movies

As part of my consulting assignment, yesterday I had to make a presentation to the CEO of my client. The process of preparing the presentation reminded me of Rocky (or any other Martial Arts movie). In these movies, before the protagonist can challenge the antagonist, he has to go through a series of underlings. Only after the protagonists has defeated all the underlings does the antagonist accept his challenge to a fight.

The work itself was done in consultation with a mid-level manager who heads the division that follows the process that I was going to recommend. While we had had a few rounds of discussions which led to the recommendations, I had prepared the presentation all by myself, and most of Wednesday was spent with him fixing the presentation.

Next we went to his boss, and repeated the process. Then to the boss’s boss. Then to someone else in the top management who would not be available for the main presentation! The hour before the main presentation was spent with the head of the division in whose realm the processes I was recommending fell. And then I got to the CEO.

Two hours before the meeting with the CEO, a couple of client team members and I were discussing the finer points of seppuku and hara-kiri. An hour before the presentation, the division head and I were discussing the Mahabharata!

The entire hierarchy was present for the meeting with the CEO (the mid-manager I had worked with, his boss, his underling, his boss’s boss and a couple of other people). Still typing away on his iPhone, without looking up, the CEO asked, “are all of you in agreement with what is in this presentation or are these Karthik’s recommendations alone?”

The Rocky Process was worth it, after all!

PS: I’m writing this sitting at the client’s office, in between meetings.

Pinda

I had written this as a note on facebook a long time back, in an introduction to another of my blogposts. It went largely unnoticed – I claim it is because it made way too many people uncomfortable. For posterity’s sake, I thought it needs to go somewhere more permanent – like this blog, so reprising it here. 

One of the several post-death rituals in the Sanatana Dharma is called “sapinDikaraNa” – in which the “pinda” (departed soul) of the deceased is “tied” to the pindas of their ancestors. This is apparently done to make sure that the pinda doesn’t end up as a free radical and come back to haunt its descendants.

I don’t know why I’m thinking about this today, but the way they “connect” the pindas is quite funny. They just tell the gotra and given name of the deceased, and then the given names of the deceased’s father, father’s father and father’s father’s father (for women it is mother-in-law, mother-in-law’s mother-in-law and mother-in-law’s mother-in-law’s mother-in-law).

I think this is a rather poor addressing system, and not one designed for today’s populations. Maybe back in the days when this was invented, not more than one person belonging to a particular gotra had the same name. So this system of addressing worked (like in villages and small towns, houses don’t have door numbers – the postman knows everyone by name). Why is it that the system hasn’t been changed even though there are possibly thousands of people with the same given names and gotras?

If religion truly ever worked, its working would have broken down through the ages when its addressing system became obsolete. Why then, do so many people still “religiously” believe in it?

It’s all pinda wonly, I must say.

Industry and agriculture’s contribution to GDP of Indian States

So you think India is an agricultural country? Maybe you are right in terms of the number of people employed in the sector. But that is not really the case in terms of output – the contribution to GDP to agriculture is a paltry 30% in most states and dropping sharply. The chart here (hope it works) shows how the contribution of agriculture and manufacturing to SGDP of various states in India.

[cf]indiagdp[/cf]

Rememberance of birthdays past

I was about to start writing this when I realized that I’d written a similar post four years ago. So I guess I’ll talk about what I had left out in that post.

I’m a “Monday’s child”. Thirty years back to the day, I was born around 2 pm in a largish “Maternity Nursing Home” in Basavanagudi, South Bangalore. My mother had been admitted to the hospital the previous night, and it had been decided that it would be a Caesarian operation. For breakfast that morning, my father’s mother had sent “avarekaayi uppit”. My mother’s mother had sent sweet pongal. My mother had told me that she had taken only one spoon of the former and wolfed down the latter. Maybe that’s why I have a sweet tooth. Oh, and I like uppit also!

My grand-uncle (mother’s father’s brother) was concerned that the surgery was scheduled for 1:30 pm. “The stars aren’t good at that time”, he had mentioned. “If it is going to be a girl, it would be extremely difficult to get her married”. His request to the surgeon to postpone the surgery by half an hour were summarily dismissed. As it happened though, by the time I made my way out (shortly after 2 pm), the position of the stars had changed.

Number twenty eight was a week after my wedding. I had messed up in planning the flights and we figured we had to wake up at 3:30 am to catch our 7 am flight back to Bangalore. My (then new) wife had ordered for a Tiramisu to be delivered to our room at midnight and the nice folks at the Taj Samudra (Colombo) had decided to make it complimentary. A whole posse of stewards came over and sang for me.

The duty free liquor I’d picked up at the airport came with a complimentary shot of Glenlivet which I gulped down. The day was only going to go downhill from then on. I had a bad cold, and it got worse as the day went on. Lunch was at my aunt’s house and dinner at my in-laws’. We opened our wedding gifts that day and it turned out that most gifts we’d got were quite useless – they were stowed away in one corner to play “passing the parcel”.

Twenty seven involved an “illegal” visit from my then (not yet “legal”) girlfriend (now wife). That was the first occasion I brought liquor to my house. I made nice vodka cocktails for both of us and we’d ordered lunch from Ragoo’s. Early in the evening, I mentioned to her “so how do we proceed?” and she brought up an elaborate plan about when she might be ready for marriage and how we should inform our respective relatives (her parents were already in the know). We ate corn at the 17th cross park (now closed for renovation) and she showed me around Subramanyanagar.

Later that evening, my cousin told my other relatives about my girlfriend. I had decided to use the goodwill of my birthday to make sure it wasn’t taken too badly (as it turned out, all of them ended up liking her immensely, so it was perhaps unnecessary caution). That was also the first time when I hadn’t mentioned my birthday on any social network. Got a maximum of of five phone calls that day (including a “guess who” call early in the morning by my current in-laws).

Twenty nine was special. The wife made sure it was, as she bombarded me with surprises through the course of the day. Video wishes from friends, a bunch of them turning up for dinner, five new kurtas (!!), a leather laptop bag and numerous other tiny gifts (there were a total of twenty nine of them). A massive breakfast with Nitin at Maiyya’s. And the formalization of my Project Thirty. It was an all-round brilliant day.

Numbers twenty and twenty five were particularly sad. The former was spent doing assignments in IIT. Few friends remembered it was my birthday. It was around the time when I got disillusioned with birthdays and stopped expecting much out of them. The latter was supposed to be spent with a lavish lunch at aunt’s house. As it happened several other guests turned up there unannounced just as I was going there, and I got pissed off and went for a long walk. My disillusionment with birthdays only turned deeper, and was resurrected at number twenty nine (described above).

My wife plans to celebrate my thirtieth birthday by getting herself a Thai massage (she’s in Bangkok as I write this). Before she left, however, she got me to cut a cake last evening, and I found more this morning. Mother-in-law woke me up with brilliant coffee and gave me (brilliant) uppit for breakfast. She’s also given me lunch. For dinner I’ll be meeting some of my oldest friends. And there’s lots of work to do. Massive series of meetings at client’s next week. And a conference from tomorrow, and I’ve to prepare for my talk. But I’m having fun!

Project Thirty – Closure

Today is the last day of my twenties. Which means Project Thirty has come to an end. I had a long list of things to do, and as the more perceptive of you would have expected from me, most of them are undone. Nevertheless, it has been a mostly positive year, and I’m glad I gave myself the year off in an attempt to find what I want to do.

The biggest positive of the last one year was that my mental illnesses (anxiety, depression, ADHD) got diagnosed and started getting treated. Yes I’m on drugs, and face severe withdrawal symptoms if I don’t take my antidepressant for a few days, but the difference these drugs have made to my life is astounding. I feel young again. I feel intelligent again. I have more purpose in life, and am back at the cocky confidence levels I last saw in 2005. I suddenly feel there’s so much for me to do, and for the first time ever, have started enjoying what I’m doing for money.

Which brings me to professional life. I decided to give myself a year to become a freelancer. I must admit I got one lucky break (one long-term reader of this blog was looking for a data science consultant for his company and I grabbed the opportunity), but I grabbed it. My improved mental state meant that I was motivated enough to do a good job of the pilot project I did for that company, and I have managed to extract what I think is a reasonable compensation for my consulting services.

There are other exciting opportunities on the horizon on the professional front, too. I’ve started teaching at Takshashila and am quite liking it (I hope my students are, too). There is so much opportunity staring at me right now that the biggest problem for me is one of prioritization rather than looking for opportunity.

There has been both progression and regression on the “extra curricular activities” front. Thanks to demands of my consulting assignment, I haven’t been getting time to practice the violin and abruptly discontinued classes two months ago. I did one awesome and rejuvenating bike trip across Rajasthan back in February but wasn’t able to follow that up even with weekend trips. I wanted to start on adventure sports but that remained a non-starter. I started preparing for a half-marathon and gave up in a month. I took a sports club membership, tried to teach myself swimming again, but have been irregular.

Personal life again has been mixed. Increasing excitement about work means less time for the family, and have been finding it hard to balance the time requirements. I seem to be putting on weight again, and now look closer to the monstrosity I was four years ago rather than the fit guy I was two years ago at the time of my wedding. I blame my expanding waistline and neckline on my travel, but that is not an excuse and I need to find an exciting way to get fit soon.

For perhaps the first time in several years my car didn’t take a knock that year, but I had two motorcycling accidents (one major and one minor) this year. The former led to the first ever broken bone in my body (the fifth metacarpal) thanks to which I don’t have a prominent fourth knuckle on my right hand. The latter led to major damages to my laptop.

My “studs and fighters” book still remains unwritten, and not a word has been added to its manuscript in the last one year. I was hoping to capstone my Project Thirty by organizing the first ever “NED Talks” but I seem to have bitten off much more than I can chew in terms of work, so that has again been postponed.

So let me take this opportunity to define my Project Thirty One. I want at least two published books by the end of the year. I want to do at least one major motorcycling trip. I need to find partners/employees and expand my consulting business. I want to travel a lot more – at least five weekend trips over the next 12 months. I want to become fit, to the size I was at the time of my wedding. Hopefully I can get weaned off anti-depressants. And I hope to resume music lessons, and start jamming. Ok let me not promise myself too much.

And I have a five-year plan too. By the time I’m thirty five, I want to have written a book on the economic history of India. Ambitious, I know. Especially for an NED Fellow like me.

More on religion

According to the Hindu calendar today is three years since my mother passed away. If I were religious, or if I were to bow to pressures from religious relatives, I would have performed a “shraadhha/tithi” today. Instead, I’m home, leading a rather normal life. In spite of it being a Sunday today, I’m actually working (I coordinate schedules with my wife, and for some reason she chose to take off this Friday and go to work on Sunday, so I followed). I’ve eaten breakfast and a very normal lunch.

Every year, twice a year (it’s remarkable that my parents’ death anniversaries have a phase difference of about six months), I begin to get requests from relatives – mostly uncles and aunts but also from the wife – that I need to “do my religious duties” and perform the shraadhhas. The last few occasions, I complied. However, as I’ve explained in this post, I’ve gotten disgusted with the general quality of priests around and decided that it’s not worth my while to enrich that community just because someone tells me it might help my parents attain salvation in their afterlives.

Since I flatly refused to do the shraadhha this time, the last few weeks have had more than their fair share of religious discussions compared to earlier. I’ve been asked how I know that priests mis-pronounce. When I say that my limited knowledge of Sanskrit is enough to identify the mispronunciations, they suggest that I try different priests. I then talk about the number of different priests I’ve encountered over various Shraadhhas over the last few years, and about how not one has really said the mantras well (except for the family priest who conducts weddings, etc. but shraadhhas are too small-time for him).

Then comes the clinching argument from my relatives – that even otherwise irreligious people like my father did their ancestors’ shraaddhas without fail. And it is at that time that I start questioning the whole purpose of the Shraadhha and trying to ascribe a believable reason for it. I argue that if the intention is to remember the deceased, I don’t need one day a year to do that since my parents come in my dreams practically every other day. The intention might have been to get all the descendants of the deceased together, but then I’m the only descendant of my parents and I’m “together with myself” all the time.

Then they try and convince me to perform what I can classify as “lesser evils” – such as giving raw rice and vegetables to a priest. I’ve done that once before and considered it to be such an unpleasant experience that I don’t want to do it again. And then I question how it will help. And the argument goes on.

So for today, finally I submitted that I’ll put food out for the crows before I eat, since in the Sanatana Dharma crows are supposed to represent your ancestors. After much haggling, this seemed like an acceptable compromise.

Later in the evening yesterday, my wife and I had a long conversation about what it is to be a Brahmin and why Brahmins are traditionally vegetarian.

Sometimes, when I don’t think enough I think it is ok to admit to the whims and fancies of other people just so that I don’t piss them off. But then when I do think about it, I find it ridiculous that saying a certain set of songs with certain pronunciation and intonation will have some bearing on my life. I find it incredible that feeding some random so-called Brahmins will help provide peace to my deceased parents.

Growing up with an ultra-religious mother and an atheist father, I never really “got” religion, I must say. In fact, the first time when I thought about religion was when I read about parts of America not believing in evolution (this was some 4 years back) – it was incredible that some people were so deluded that they didn’t accept something so fundamental. It was around the same time that I read The God Delusion (not a great book I must say – could’ve been written in < 20 pages), and the beliefs of the devout, as it described, shocked me.

It was around this time that I realized that some (nay, most) people actually take it seriously that if you pray for something it increases your chances of getting it. It shocked me to believe that some people believe that chanting a certain set of songs (mantras are just that, in Vedic language) will improve your life without any other effort on your part. It shocked me that people actually believe in afterlife and rebirth. By this time, my father had passed away, and this wasn’t a topic about which I could have a rational discussion with my mother, so I let it be.

Some temples (of various religions) make me feel calm and peaceful, and I love visiting them. There are temples which look so good I think they need to be preserved, and I make reasonably generous offerings there. There are festivals that I consider fun, and I celebrate them enthusiastically. We had a fairly large doll display at home this Navaratri. We burst fireworks and ate lots of sweets this Diwali. Last year we hosted a Christmas party. With some friends, I raided the kebap stalls in Fraser Town during Ramzan. We set up a little mandap at home for Ganesh Chaturthi, and displayed my collection of Ganesh idols.

But the concept of before-lives and after-lives and rebirth? That of prayers sans effort making a difference? That you need to feed some so-called Brahmins who can’t recite mantras for nuts just so that your parents attain peace in the afterlife? I find it all absolutely ridiculous.

I didn’t put food out for crows – I find no reason to believe that my mother has transformed into one of them, and that that particular crow will come looking for food today. I haven’t worn back my sacred thread as promised yesterday. I think my cook had put onion and garlic in my lunch today. And life goes on..

On Schooling

Usually I’m quick to defend the school where I studied between 1986 and 1998. I made lots of good friends there and generally had a good time. Of late, however, in discussions on schooling, I find myself mention teachers from that school who I considered particularly horrible, mostly for their method of teaching.

Yesterday I was chatting with a classmate from this school who now works in the education sector, and she happened to mention that she considered her schooling to be mostly “a waste” and that she didn’t learn too much there. And I quickly concurred with her, saying all that I had learnt was at home, and school didn’t teach me much. So what explains my love for the school even though they might not have done a great teaching job?

From 1998 to 2000, I went to another school, where again they didn’t teach much, and instead assumed all of us went to JEE factories which would teach us anyway. What made things bad there, though, was that they didn’t treat us well. That school had a strict disciplinary code which was enforced more in letter than in spirit. Teachers there had a habit of loading us with homework, calling us for Saturday classes and having surprise tests. The problem with School 2 was that not only did they not teach well, but they also made life miserable in several other ways. The only redeeming factor for that school was the truckload of interesting people I got to meet during my two years there.

So what explains my love for School 1 despite the fact that they didn’t do a great job of teaching? The fact that they treated us well, and left us alone. The uniform wasn’t very strictly enforced, as long as you wore blue and grey. The school had an explicit “no homework” policy. Exams happened only according to schedule and there were few assignments. Even in class 10, we had three “periods” a week dedicated to “games” where we played volleyball or basketball rather than wasting our time in “PT”. Teachers were mostly very friendly and the atmosphere on the whole was collaborative and not so competitive.

My friend might think she “wasted” her 10 years in the school because she didn’t learn much there, but I argue that it was better than her going to another school where she wouldn’t be treated as well and where her life wouldn’t have been as peaceful.