Presentation week

The DWO presentation and its run-up was a hopeless one. We hadn’t got the report ready by the time we had our presentation, we over shot the time by whopping 20 mins (twice the stipulated time- at least, everyone overshot by similar margin).

The presentation itself wasn’t bad. We had used rhetoric language (what else do you use in a HR course?) in some of the slides, and the professor asked, ‘these are all well, tell me the mechanics?’ Everyone tried explaining, and he wasn’t happy. I tried this- ‘Sir, we’ll design systems which will elicit the desired response from our employees’, which in effect means saying nothing. But the professor seemed to be quite satisfied with the reply. Whoosh goes the logic.

There were minor quibbles after the presentation and I stayed away from it.

Economics presentation was much better. We had put in our presentation this bullet- the change of the base year is one of the reasons why our fiscal deficit shows a smaller figure than it actually is’. Prof asks how. Ramanan said something which the professor dismissed summarily. After the presentation, I asked him how it really happens. Professor says ‘It’s really hazy. Why don’t you mail me the source so that I can figure it out?’ Ah, the self-righteous souls.

Marketing presentation, well Sounak thought Shakti was in our group (he generally is) and prepared his slides. But alas we realized it only the last moment. I was given the task of saying the part impromptu. I managed it anyway.

Its Operations management course again. Well, the senile old man at least gave a Quantitative, application oriented paper last time. This time it was qualitative (lacks quality though).

We knew it was qualitative this time; we tried to mug Deming’s 14 points, 5S principles, 7 tools of TQM, few models etc. etc... I generally make all course notes in the same book. On some days, I hadn’t written the subject name on top of the notes, and yesterday, I had a tough time figuring out if the notes belong to OM or DWO (HR subject).

Questions? Features of TQM, TPM, well, the professor must be bored himself when he sat down to set the paper. So are we.