The Wac (k) week

This week many things happened, it is becoming difficult to remember one whole week and I think its necessary for me to create a post line every day and publish it on a weekly basis.

First up during this week, I was selected as the Leader for the Cranfield SOM Chapter of NetImpact Club, now I have a good reason to focus on activities, I think I will put in a lot of time in this Club during the next few months.

Next day we had a meeting with Mr. Steve Killelea (from www.visionofhumanity.org, a Priyadarshini award winner) who spoke to us on the need for peace and his attempt to measure peace objectively. I was keen on this topic and he spoke to me about a State-wise peace index in India. I think this would be a nice piece of work to do.

Later during the week I had discussions with multiple people about my budding business idea to run a career counselling service for teens. In India a large part of the population gets into engineering or other education that they really do not want to do, but are forced by the social system to do so. I think if an organisation can focus on this population and try to move them away from taking such an important career decision based on social pressure to making a career plan, it would do good business and good to the society. This model attracts me because it does not require a lot of capital, there are no or very few players in the market and this can easily be converted into a brand on which I can build other businesses like a school.

On the MBA part, we had a presentation by Stephen Carver, on Presentation Skills, and man... does he know how to present, he is the most energetic teacher I have ever met, he drives his point with such practical context that no one can miss a point. His key skill in presenting is to taking the attention span of the attendee into consideration and keeping the audience engaged.

We also had a career counselling on what careers would fit me (The idea above was formed before attending this :) ). It was very useful for many people because they were unclear of their goals, however since I was clear that Social Entrepreneurship is my focus, I was a bit closed to the meeting. The one clarity that emerged from the meeting was that I am a good idea generator, but a bad implementer, which is very true. Mr. Peter Bernard, who was my team's facilitator, turned out to be brilliant at coaching and he was very helpful in providing some key material that can be used in my business model.

Then came the biggest event of the week, the WAC (Written Analysis of a Case), this is a Cranfield special, a case given to students at say... 4 PM and then we need to analyse the case and present a written paper with analysis at about 3 PM on the next day, approximately 24 hours is provided. There is a team discussion (5-6 members in our own learning team), a stream discussion (our class) and then we work individually to create a 1500 word report. It was fun, and a good learning exercise because even those who did not understand what economics is about in the class would have understood the facts by now. I was surprised that people lost their sleep over it, given my focus on non-academics or so to say the personality side of it, I took it easy, I just hope to pass, which I am confident I will.

We have Deepavali celebration today, I think the next account will start with explaining that.