Tag: business school

Business school all over again

This morning, I felt like I was in business school all over again.

So the Montessori school that my daughter goes to is exploring the possibility of introducing an adolescent (12-18 age group) program that follows the Montessori philosophy. Towards this end, they are having a series of “seminars” with parents to explain the methodology and collect feedback.

Before the first such “seminar” two months ago, they had sent us all a paper written by Dr. Maria Montessori and asked us to read it in preparation. When we walked in to school, we were all given copies of the same paper and asked to read it before the discussions started. The teachers walked in after having given all of us to read through the paper once again.  “This sounds like Amazon”, I had thought.

To give parents full flavour of the proposed program, we were told that these sessions mirror what the adolescent version of the school is supposed to be like. Each session involves discussion of a piece of written text. All participants are supposed to have read it beforehand. And discussions have to be on point to the reading – like every note of participation has to refer to a particular page and paragraph. I had come away from the first session thinking “these guys seem to be trying to recreate business school in high school”.

And then, this morning, at the second such session, I got a taste of this medicine as well. I’ve had two insanely productive days at work last two days, which has meant that evenings I’ve been rather tired and unable to really read the paper (once again it was a paper by Dr. Montessori). This morning, I woke up late and by the time I got to school for the session (that began at 8am), I’d barely managed to glance through the paper.

I furiously tried to read it before the teachers came in, and barely managed a fourth. The teachers reminded us of the rules – all discussing points had to refer to specific parts of the paper, and we couldn’t talk “generally” (ruling out any “arbit class participation”). Also, the teachers would not “lead” the discussion – the format of the class was such that it was peer discussion.

I’m speculating here, but it is possible that many other parents this morning were also in my state – having turned up to class having not read the prescribed reading. Initially the CP was slow and deliberate. That we had to reply to each other (and keep referring to the text as we did so) made it slower. There were a few awkward pauses which I tried to use to hurriedly read the rest of the paper. I was also getting distracted, planning this blogpost in my head. I was also simultaneously feeling horrible about not having come to the session prepared, and was thinking I’m a horrible parent.

The format of the discussion helped, though, as different people kept referring to different sections of the paper, and I sort of read through it in a non-linear fashion. In about ten minutes, in the course of the discussion I had probably read through the entire text. And then I started unleashing.

All those business school skills came of good use – despite the constrained format, I somehow winged through today’s session (not that that was the intended consequence). By the end of the session I had comfortably spoken the most in the group. Old habits die hard, I guess.

It weirdly felt like I was business school once again. And as it happened, I noticed that the person next to me was wearing an IIMB T-shirt (though he didn’t put too much CP)!

On a more serious note, maybe this kind of a schooling format in high school might mean that the children may not really need to go to college!

Size, diversity and social capital

Starting off with a “global” statement, life is full of tradeoffs.

When we listen to stories as kids, we think of “battles between good and evil”. When we watch sport, there is “our side and their side”. From stories, we are usually conditioned to “battles” where one side is superior to the other, and there is a clear “favourite” to root for.

Real life is not so simple. A lot of times, you have battles between two sides that are both bad (a lot of elections, for example). And frequently you come across situations where there are two “good” things of which you can only have one (and so the tradeoffs). One of the more famous of these is the “impossible trinity” of international economics.

In a completely different context (which I’m writing about today), two desirable things that are a tradeoff are diversity and social capital. The general theory is that the more diverse a society gets, the lower is the social capital (google is impossible in providing good links on this, so maybe ask ChatGPT).

The theory here goes that you fundamentally trust people like you and mistrust people who are not like you. The more homogeneous a society is, the more there are “people like you”, and so the more you trust. And if everyone trusts one another much more, there is more social capital.

A recent conversation and observations makes me wonder if social capital is also related to size. More specifically I’m thinking of size as in number of people in an institution.

One observation we had when we went for our reunion last week is that the campus is a lot quieter than in our time, and that a lot more rules are followed in letter rather than just in spirit (no, not that kind, but I’m talking about rules about that also).

For example, the basketball hoop in L^2 has been removed. While we pitched up a net and played tsepak in BEFG Square (where we always played it), current students informed us that they can’t play there because playing there is now banned. Students mostly hung out in their wings rather than in the common areas. After our first evening there we assumed all the students were out on holiday, while it turned out only the first years had a term break then.

I still remember my first night in IIMB (in 2004). I stayed in G Block, on one side of the aforementioned BEFG square. A bunch of people were playing Tsepak until late in the night, which meant I didn’t get good sleep (and for the rest of the week we had our “orientation” which meant I couldn’t sleep well then either). A few days later I just joined these people in playing Tsepak and making noise. “If you can’t stop them, join them”, was a perfect way to go about things back in the day.

What I remember is that, with a batch size of ~200, our social capital was pretty good. While there were some students who occasionally displayed elevated levels of conscience, we largely stuck by one another and tolerated one another (and, of course, massively trolled one another). Disagreements and fights always happened, but were largely resolved among us by dialogue, rather than inviting external parties.

With a much bigger batch size now, though, from what we were told, it appears it is not so simple to resolve things using dialogue and mediation. And people frequently take to inviting external parties. And the expected result (crane-mongoose effect) happens.

That some people want to study when others want to play now means that the former complain against the latter, with playing within the hostel being banned. Some people want to enforce the rules on spirits, and they bring in external parties, and the law is invoked in letter rather than spirit.

When social capital dwindles, in some ways, the minority rule comes into play – when there is a small but vocal minority that wants things a certain way, that becomes the way for everyone else as well. (With high social capital, the majority might be able to convince the minority that they need to be more tolerant)

Yet again, this is not a one way street. You can also argue that when social capital is too high, the minorities can tend to get oppressed (since their views don’t count any more), and so a high social capital society cannot be inclusive.

And so yeah, the Baazigar principle is there everywhere. To get something, you need to give up something. To get a more inclusive class, you need to be less majoritarian, and that means less fun on the average. When you have lots of intolerant minorities (a consequence of diversity), those “intolerant rules” get applied on everyone, and the overall payoff reduces.

A few random thoughts to end:

  1. It’s not just the class size, it’s also the fees. We paid ~ ?300,000 over 2 years as tuition fees. Many of us (who sat for campus placements) made almost twice that (post taxes) in our first year of graduation.

    Students nowadays pay ~ ?2,500,000 , so they are a lot more conscious about getting their money’s worth. And being able to study.

  2. In general, cultures change over time, so coming back after 15 years and complaining that “things aren’t the way they used to be” isn’t very nice. So yeah, this blogpost can get classified in the “not so nice” category I guess (not like I’ve ever been known for niceness)
  3. I wonder how much changed during the pandemic, when students were off campus for nearly a year, and had severely curtailed interactions even once they were back. With a 2 year course, it only takes 1 batch to “break culture”, making the culture far more malleable. So again I’m wrong to complain.
  4. All that said, it’s my duty to pontificate and so I’ll continue to write like this

Girard and reunions

Thanks to my subscription to Jim O’Shaughnessy’s Infinite Loops podcast, I have been exposed to some of the philosophy of Rene Girard. A few times, he has got philosopher Johnathan Bi on the show, to talk about Girard’s philosophy.

 

Bi has also done a series of YouTube lectures on Girard’s philosophy, though I haven’t watched any of them.

In any case, Girard’s basic thesis (based on my basic understanding so far) is that we are all driven by “mimetic desire”, or a desire to mime. This means we want to do things that others want to do.

So you see an instagram post by a friend who has gone to Sri Lanka, and you want to go to Sri Lanka as well. Your cousin has invested in Crypto, so you want to invest in crypto as well. Everyone in your class wants to do investment banking, and so you want to do that as well.

(actually now that I think of it, I was first exposed to mimetic desire by a podcast episode sent by my school friend Hareesh. In a way, Bi’s appearance on Infinite Loops only enhanced my liking for this philosophy).

 

This is yet another of those theories that “once you see you cannot unsee”. You see mimetic desire everywhere. Sometimes you copy the actions of people who you want to impress (well, that’s how I discovered Heavy Metal, and that has now turned out to be my most-listened-to genre of music, because it turned out I like it so much).

The theory of the “mirror neuron” is unclear (at least I’m yet to be convinced by it), but either by gene or by meme, we are conditioned to mime. We mime people’s actions. We mime their desires. We do things because others do them.

As the more perceptive of you might know from my previous post, we had our 16th year IIMB reunion this year. Not many turned up – about 30 from my class (2006) and 45 from the class of 2005 (thanks to covid both our 15th year reunions had been postponed, so we ended up having our 16th and 17th year reunions respectively).

It was an amazing experience. I don’t know what it was, but I liked it far more than the 10th year reunion.  One major thing was the schedule – the 10th year reunion lacked a focal point on the main day (I’ve written about it) because of which we were rather scattered around campus. The 10th year reunion also had a much more formal structure, with “sessions” which meant we had less time to chat.

This time round, the Saturday schedule was very good – an interaction with the current director RTK from 10 to 11, and then NOTHING. That interaction was enough of a focal point to get us in one place, so everyone was accessible.

Then, fewer people having turned up meant we ended up having deeper conversations. We spoke about life, philosophies, kids, spouses, divorces, other people’s divorces, random gossip and all such. Absolutely no small talk, and infinitesimal work talk, and that made it more satisfying.

This morning, Bi tweeted again about Girard and mimetic desire.

One of the corollaries of Girard’s theory is that people get into conflict not when they are different but when they are similar. And mimetic desire means that people will try to become more similar to each other, and that increases conflict.

If not anywhere else, that is true in a business school, especially one where the class is rather homogeneous. Mimetic desire means everyone wants the same jobs, the same grades. And so they compete. And get into conflict.

16 years post graduation, we have drifted apart, and not in a bad way. Over this period, a lot of us have figured out what we really want to do and what we really want, and understood that what we want is very different from what others around us want. Not really being around our former peers, we have no desire to mime them any more, and that has freed us up to do what we really want to do, rather than just signalling.

And so, when we meet at a reunion like this, we are all so independent that we just never talk about work. There is no sense of competition, and we just focus on having fun with people we went to school with. The time apart has helped us get out of our desires to mime, and so when we get together, we compete less.

Maybe I should read / understand more philosophy. Or is this desire just mimetic?

 

 

Luxury and frugal managers

You remember very random things from business school, nearly two decades on. Usually none of this is academic – the lessons are only “internalised”, not “learnt”. A lot of it is from outside the classroom, silly things someone said or did or posted on the internal bulletin board. Most of the stuff you remember are rather arbitrary things that professors said, and made it seem like something profound.

“Management is like making music”, one professor lectured to us in the first week of classes at IIMB, back in 2004. “First you make music with what you have, and when you don’t have that, you make music with what you have left”. It was rather random, but random enough to stick in my head 18 years on.

It has been another disappointing season beginning for Liverpool. I didn’t watch the Crystal Palace game last night, but I clearly remember feeling at multiple points during the draw at Fulham that this was “like 2020-21 all over again”. The sort of mistakes that Virgil Van Dijk made. The length of the injury list. More players (Thiago) going off injured midway through the game. Nat Phillips starting. And add some new issues – like having your shiny new striker getting himself sent off and suspended for 3 games for a stupid show of anger.

I see the list of substitutes.

  • 2
    Joe Gomez (s 63′)
  • 8
    Naby Keita
  • 13
    del Castillo Adrian
  • 14
    Jordan Henderson (s 63′)
  • 21
    Konstantinos Tsimikas (s 63′)
  • 28
    Fabio Carvalho (s 79′)
  • 43
    Stefan Bajcetic
  • 72
    Sepp van den Berg
  • 42
    Bobby Clark

Yes, there are youngsters (unlike 2021-22) but that is fully understandable. What I don’t understand is seeing youngsters I’ve never heard of. Two games in, I’m already getting the feeling that this will be a really hard league campaign.

I wonder if Klopp is more of a “luxury manager” than a “frugal manager”. These are two very different management styles, requiring very different skillsets. The names are fairly descriptive.

Luxury managers need luxury. They need resources for “option value”. In the corporate context, they need large budgets and space and little control over how they operate. And given all of this, a lot of the time, they deliver big. Yes – there are cases where they spectacularly fail (in which case they don’t stay on in their management jobs), but when they do deliver they deliver big.

Frugal managers don’t need any of this luxury. They are experts at making the most of whatever they have been given. In Ramnath’s words, they are adept at “making music with what they have left”. Any kind of luxury, any kind of optionality, seems like a waste to them. Why pay the option premium when you can get the same payoff through a complicated basket of one deltas?

And just like any other dichotomies (think of studs vs fighters, for example), luxury and frugal managers struggle in the opposite settings. Without the luxury, luxury managers are simply out of their depth. They are necessarily wasteful (a bit like Salah) and cannot produce if they are not able to waste some. However, they win big when they do.

Frugal managers are good at eking out solutions in terms of adversity, but abundant resources can overwhelm them. They won’t know what to do with it. More importantly, they are unable to deal with the expectations of delivering big (which come with the luxury) – they have been experts at delivering small against nonexistent expectations.

What about teams though? If you’ve been used to working for a luxury manager, what happens when you get a frugal manager? And the other way round? I don’t have immediate answers for this but I suppose you will struggle as well?

Management Gurus

A few years back, one of the professors from my wife’s business school had come to London, and had given a talk to the alumni of the school. He was a professor of Operations Management (IIRC), and had given a talk about the Toyota Production System or some such.

At the time, my wife was working for Amazon and was completely unimpressed by the lecture. “This guy is 20 years behind”, she claimed, as she gave me a review of the lecture the same evening. The processes the professor had described were apparently extremely primitive compared to what Amazon was following at that time (I believe that).

So this got me thinking about management academia as a profession, and what value they add apart from teaching and preparing MBAs. I’ve sort of worked as one, though my position as Adjunct Professor at IIMB meant that I only taught and didn’t do any research. I did talk to some of the professors there during that time and tried to figure out what they were working on in terms of research.

Putting all this together with material I’ve gathered from Clayton Christensen’s obituaries, I think I’ve recognised a pattern that connects management research – it’s all about looking back at business over the last few years, deciphering patterns about them and then theorising about them.

In a sense it reminds me of second and third order levers. Scientific academic research is usually (though not always) cutting edge, with new science being created in the academic laboratories and then engineered in industries which then go on to commercialise this research.

Management research, on the other hand, is flipped. The true cutting edge in management happens at businesses, where the experimentation is relatively easier than experimenting with scientific stuff. Once some experimentation has happened at the business level and successes and failures have been observed, the academics get into action.

They look at the experiments that the industries did, meticulously collect data that documents the success or failure of these experiments (along with the external factors that might have affected the success or lack of it), and then theorise about the costs and benefits of these experiments, and the situations where they work (or not).

Sometimes the academics supplement their data gathering of the experiments and situations with experiments of their own, and some interviews, and then apply their deep academic and theoretical knowledge on top of it to create theories about them. And once the academic theoretical peer review process has taken place, the idea can get better traction in parts of the industry that have not already figured it out.

The competitive advantage that management academics have is that they sit an arm’s length away from the industries that they study, and they are able to gather data from large numbers of companies in order to build their theories. They may not be the originators of the ideas but their value addition in terms of synthesising ideas generated elsewhere is significant.

Analytics for general managers

While good managers have always been required to be analytical, the level of analytical ability being asked of managers has been going up over the years, with the increase in availability of data.

Now, this post is once again based on that one single and familiar data point – my wife. In fact, if you want me to include more data in my posts, you should talk to me more.

Leaving that aside, my wife works as a mid-level manager for an extremely large global firm. She was recruited straight out of business school for a “MBA track” program. And from our discussions about her work in the first few months, one thing she did lots of was writing SQL queries. And she still spends a lot of her time writing queries and building Excel models.

This isn’t something she was trained for, or was tested on while being recruited. She did her MBA in a famously diverse global business school, the diversity of its student bodies implying the level of maths and quantitative methods being kept rather low. She was recruited as a “general manager”. Yet, in a famously data-driven company, she spends a considerable amount of time on quantitative stuff.

It wasn’t always like this. While analytical ability has what (in my opinion) set apart graduates of elite MBA programs from those of middling MBA programs, the level of quantitative ability expected out of MBAs (apart from maybe those in finance) wasn’t too high. You were expected to know to use spreadsheets. You were expected to know some rudimentary statistics- means and standard deviations and some basic hypothesis testing, maybe. And you were expected to be able to make managerial decisions based on numbers. That’s about it.

Over the years, though, as the corpus of data within (and outside) organisations has grown, and making decisions based on data has become fashionable (a brilliant thing as far as I’m concerned), the requirement from managers has grown as well. Now they are expected to do more with data, and aren’t always trained for that.

Some organisations have responded to this problem by supplying “data analysts” who are attached to mid level managers, so that the latter can outsource the analytical work to the former and spend most of their time on “managerial” stuff. The problem with this is twofold – it is hard to guarantee a good career path to this data analyst (which makes recruitment hard), and this introduces “friction” – the manager needs to tell the analyst what precise data and analysis she needs, and iterating on this can lead to a lot of time lost.

Moreover, as the size of the data has grown, the complexity of the analysis that can be done and the insights that can be produced has become greater as well. And in that sense, managers who have been able to adapt to the volume and complexity of data have a significant competitive advantage over their peers who are less comfortable with data.

So what does all this mean for general managers and their education? First, I would expect the smarter managers to know that data analysis ability is a competitive advantage, and so invest time in building that skill. Second, I know of some business schools that are making their MBA programs less quantitative, as their student body becomes more diverse and the recruitment body becomes less diverse (banks are recruiting far less nowadays). This is a bad move. In fact, business schools need to realise that a quantitative MBA program is more of a competitive advantage nowadays, and tune their programs accordingly, while not compromising on the diversity of the student intake.

Then, there is a generation of managers that got along quite well without getting its hands dirty with data. These managers will now get challenged by younger managers who are more conversant with data. It will be interesting to see how organisations deal with this dynamic.

Finally, organisations need to invest in training programs, to make sure that their general managers are comfortable with data, and analysis, and making use of internal and external data science resources. Interestingly enough (I promise I hadn’t thought of this when I started writing this post), my company offers precisely one such workshop. Get in touch if you’re interested!

A One Year MBA Doesn’t Make Any Sense

Around this time last year, when the wife was applying for B-school, I was clear in my advice to her on one thing – that a one year MBA just doesn’t make sense. From what I recall I wasn’t really clear back then regarding that piece of advice – it was rather intuitive, and based on a few “data points” I know, but as I see her go through her (two year) MBA, I realise why my advice makes sense.

There are two important functions that a business school performs. The first – which is debatable since a lot of people I’ve spoken to, including my classmates from IIMB – is that it changes the fundamental way you think. Exposure to different paradigms of management and case studies and frameworks completely changes the way, in my opinion based on my tenure at IIMB, you think about a lot of things in the world. If I were to summarise my MBA in one sentence, I will say that it taught me, and reinforced in me, the issue of tradeoffs.

In corporate strategy we learnt that any strategy you adopt will have its pros and cons, and if a strategy helps you “cover one flank”, it will expose you to the other. In HR, we learnt that life, and all our decisions, are all about making tradeoffs. In finance, we learnt that the very concept of the interest rate reflects the tradeoff between consumption today and consumption tomorrow. And so forth.

This, and a few other concepts that I learnt in my two years at B-school, completely changed the way i look at a lot of things in the world, and that helped broaden my perspective and that alone makes me believe that the time I spent at B-school was time well spent (I managed to get a scholarship so I didn’t spend much money for my education there).

Coming back, the second function that a business school performs is that of an employment exchange. By having a highly selective admission process it signals its students’ quality to prospective employers, and helps people move ahead in their careers by getting jobs they would have otherwise not got, without the MBA. For a lot of people, this is the primary reason to go to B-school (let me confess that this was the case for me, too, 10 years back), and the learning or changing the way they think is a bonus. But having had ones way of thinking changed, one will realise that this change is the more sustainable impact that the B-school has on you.

So what does this have to do with one year MBAs? Ever since my wife started her classes two months ago, she has had to start preparing for summer internships. She worked on her CV, wrote cover letters, attended tonnes of PPTs and networking sessions, even did a short trip to network with some companies and so forth (it was a similar case for me 10 years back). In sum, she has spent a disproportionate amount of her time and energy in dealing with the placements, leaving little time and energy and mind space for her academics.

Now, the point is that this is only for a summer internship, which allows you to make a mistake since you are not permanently committing to a company. If you don’t like your internship, or if the company where you intern doesn’t like you, you always have a second chance during the so-called (in IIMB) “final placements” to make a better choice. Yet, despite knowing that the summer internship is not “final” and gives you a second chance, first year students of two-year MBAs everywhere end up getting quite stressed over it, with the stress not lifting until they know where they are going (which, for some curious reason both in India and abroad happens rather early – in the second “trimester”).

It is only when the summer placements are done are you actually able to concentrate and do justice to your academics, and do some learning, to try and imbibe the first function that a B-school offers. Then you can relax and concentrate on your studies till late in the second year when (if you haven’t “converted” your internship) you will need to find a full-time job. In IIMs, thankfully, this happens towards the very end of the course which gives you sufficient time to actually learn, change the way you think, or do whatever the hell you want.

Now think of what happens in a one-year MBA. Firstly, typically there is no internship, meaning you have only one chance to get your post-MBA “remodelled” career right. Secondly, since “final placements” are less than a year away, you will have to spend a considerable amount of your time and energy and mindspace in Business School to that end – worrying about it, wearing suits, attending PPTs, attending career fairs, networking and all such.

There is very little time that you spend in a one year MBA when you are actually relaxed and know where you are going next, which is a necessary condition for you to learn, and for the business school to “affect” you. And to change the way you think, which is the only lasting impression (apart from the brand) that the business school can have on you!

So unless you want an MBA just for the brand, and just for the change in career, a one year MBA makes absolutely no sense. It is cheaper, for sure (both in terms of time and money), but so much inferior in value, since the main function of a B-school has very little time to actually function!

Business School WAG series – day out with baby bulls

Ten years ago, I was studying in a business school. A few weeks before I joined IIM Bangalore, a friend told me about the concept of a blog. I was told about the existence of blospot and livejournal, and the concept of blogging seemed exciting (I’d just started writing earlier that year and quite enjoyed it). I signed up on blogspot and wrote a post perhaps in June or July 2004 (I’ve deleted the blog, and so have forgotten when). Then I found that most of my IIMB friends were on LiveJournal and I moved my blog to skthewimp.livejournal.com .

My blogging ramped up slowly during my two years at business school – the first increase in momentum was during my summer internship in an investment bank, when my readership improved. A series of fairly controversial posts in the next one year further improved readership. And then the blog did me a lot of good.

I’ve found a client and a couple of other business leads thanks to my blogging. It was also my blogging through which I got to know of the existence of <lj user=”favrito”> eight years ago. Four years ago, I married her, and earlier this year, she decided to go to business school. And I thus became a business school WAG.

My status as a business school WAG was first established two months or so ago when I got an email from “Club – IESE Partners and Families”. These business schools try to take themselves too seriously and sound too politically correct – they could have simply called it the IESE WAG Club (there is merit in the usage of the term WAG (with its origins as “Wives and girlfriends”) as a unisex term). But anyway, I’ve continued to get emails from this club about its various activities. So far none of them have impressed me, but some have freaked me out, such as “day out with kids at the beach”.

My status as IESE WAG was further enhanced earlier this week when I made it to Barcelona, albeit for a short period of time. I visited the school yesterday, where <lj user=”favrito”> introduced me to one and all and sundry, and they eschewed the “three way cheek peck” which is supposedly popular in these parts of Catalunya in favour of the humble handshake. I spent the day in the cafeteria sipping Coke Zero and Dark Hot Chocolate and watching students crib about their performance in placement tests, talk about “arbit CP” that others put in class, and indulge in the kind of nonsense that all business school students indulge in (I surely did ten years ago) which recruiters (mostly business school alumni themselves) pretend doesn’t exist. It was interesting to say the least, but not interesting enough to deserve a blogpost for itself.

I further embellished my credentials as a WAG today, though, as I accompanied <lj user=”favrito”> and some of her classmates on a sort of picnic today. There was a fair number of WAGs at the picnic today, though I suspect I was the only male WAG. And I got introduced to a new “sport” in the course of the picnic today – amateur bullfighting, or as <lj user=”favrito”> described it, “Rajnikanth bullfighting”.

So there is a bullring. And they let a bull into the ring (it was a young bull that was in the arena today). And people can get into the ring by way of a ladder. There are these hiding posts all around the ring, behind which people can stand and be safe from the bull. And more than one human being can be in the ring at that point in time.

And they taunt and tease the bull, inviting him to attack and gore them. The bull is young and his horns aren’t sharp, so it is unlikely that it will cause much damage. But the bull is easily ruffled, and he gives short chases to the humans, who having provoked the bull in the first place try to dodge and evade the bull. Some wusses run to the shelter of one of the hiding posts when the bull is about ten metres away from them. Other wusses (including Yours Truly) don’t even bother entering the bullring, preferring to guzzle on the beer and sangria available and make pertinent observations.

And so it was an unequal battle, with several humans and one bull, though in true Rajnikanth tradition only one human would physically interact with the bull at one point in time (though others would hoot and clap and jeer). I was about to use the word “grapple” in the previous sentence but there was no grappling here – the bull would charge you and try and knock you down, and you would try and evade it. Some people even fell while trying to evade the bull and got hit by it, yet seemed unhurt.

This went on for a short period, and soon there were so many people in the bullring that there was no merit in entering it – the bull would surely get confused. And then we retired to this resort somewhere else in rural Catalunya for lunch and more drinks.

Later in the evening, at this resort, I visited the urinal. It was fairly busy at that point in time, with all stalls occupied. The guy to the left of me and the guy to my right had both brought a beer bottle along – they held the beer bottle in one hand and their penises with the other as they input and output liquids simultaneously.

I had half a mind to indicate to them that they could just eliminate the middleman, but then I thought it wasn’t appropriate for a business school WAG to give such advice, and moved on!

I plan to make a series on life as a business school WAG. Not sure how regular this will be though since I don’t plan to spend too much time in Barcelona. 

Religion and Probability

If only people were better at mathematics in general and probability in particular, we may not have had religion

Last month I was showing my mother-in-law the video of the meteor that fell in Russia causing much havoc, and soon the conversation drifted to why the meteor fell where it did. “It is simple mathematics that the meteor fell in Russia”, I declared, trying to show off my knowledge of geography and probability, arguing that Russia’s large landmass made it the most probable country for the meteor to fall in. My mother-in-law, however, wasn’t convinced. “It’s all god’s choice”, she said.

Recently I realized the fallacy in my argument. While it was probabilistically most likely that the meteor would fall in Russia than in any other country, there was no good scientific reason to explain why it fell at the exact place it did. It could have just as likely fallen in any other place. It was just a matter of chance that it fell where it did.

Falling meteors are not the only events in life that happen with a certain degree of randomness. There are way too many things that are beyond our control which happen when they happen and the way they happen for no good reason. And the kicker is that it all just doesn’t average out. Think about the meteor itself for example. A meteor falling is such a rare event that it is unlikely to happen (at least with this kind of impact) again in most people’s lifetimes. This can be quite confounding for most people.

Every time I’ve studied probability (be it in school or engineering college or business school), I’ve noticed that most people have much trouble understanding it. I might be generalizing based on my cohort but I don’t think it would be too much of a stretch to say that probability is not the easiest of subjects to grasp for most people. Which is a real tragedy given the amount of randomness that is a fixture in everyone’s lives.

Because of the randomness inherent in everyone’s lives, and because most of these random events don’t really average out in people’s lifetimes, people find the need to call upon an external entity to explain these events. And once the existence of one such entity is established, it is only natural to attribute every random event to the actions of this entity.

And then there is the oldest mistake in statistics – assuming that if two events happen simultaneously or one after another, one of the events is the cause for the other. (I’m writing this post while watching football) Back in 2008-09, the last time Liverpool FC presented a good challenge for the English Premier League, I noticed a pattern over a month where Liverpool won all the games that I happened to watch live (on TV) and either drew or lost the others. Being rather superstitious, I immediately came to the conclusion that my watching a game actually led to a Liverpool victory. And every time that didn’t happen (that 2-2 draw at Hull comes to mind) I would try to rationalize that by attributing it to a factor I had hitherto left out of “my model” (like I was seated on the wrong chair or that my phone was ringing when a goal went in or something).

So you have a number of events which happen the way they happen randomly, and for no particular reason. Then, you have pairs of events that for random reasons happen in conjunction with one another, and the human mind that doesn’t like un-explainable events quickly draws a conclusion that one led to the other. And then when the pattern breaks, the model gets extended in random directions.

Randomness leads you to believe in an external entity who is possibly choreographing the world. When enough of you believe in one such entity, you come up with a name for the entity, for example “God”. Then people come up with their own ways of appeasing this “God”, in the hope that it will lead to “God” choreographing events in their favour. Certain ways of appeasement happen simultaneously with events favourable to the people who appeased. These ways of appeasement are then recognized as legitimate methods to appease “God”. And everyone starts following them.

Of course, the experiment is not repeatable – for the results were purely random. So people carry out activities to appease “God” and yet experience events that are unfavourable to them. This is where model extension kicks in. Over time, certain ways of model extension have proved to be more convincing than others, the most common one (at least in India) being ‘”God” is doing this to me because he/she wants to test me”. Sometimes these model extensions also fail to convince. However, the person has so much faith in the model (it has after all been handed over to him/her by his/her ancestors, and a wrong model could definitely not have propagated?) that he/she is not willing to question the model, and tries instead to further extend it in another random direction.

In different parts of the world, different methods of appeasement to “God” happened in conjunction with events favourable to the appeasers, and so this led to different religions. Some people whose appeasements were correlated with favourable events had greater political power (or negotiation skills) than others, so the methods of appeasement favoured by the former grew dominant in that particular society. Over time, mostly due to political and military superiority, some of these methods of appeasement grew disproportionately, and others lost their way. And we had what are now known as “major religions”. I don’t need to continue this story.

So going back, it all once again boils down to the median man’s poor understanding of concepts of probability and randomness, and the desire to explain all possible events. Had human understanding of probability and randomness been superior, it is possible that religion didn’t exist at all!