Great Lakes organizes its annual B School Fest L’Attitude 130 05’

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Great Lakes Institute of Management organized its annual B school fest - L’Attitude 130 05’ on the 20th of December. The event started with the inaugural address from the Dean of Great Lakes, Dr. Bala Balachandran.

Dr. Bala Balachandran addressed the gathering and welcomed one and all. He went on throwing light on how Great Lakes has survived the odds so far and has moved up the ladder of academic excellence. The institute would be having a state of the art , eco friendly , platinum rated , green campus come next year . The ballpark date of inauguration is 7th of January. He sent a strong signal to the audience that Great Lakes is on its way to pursuing business excellence and academic elegance , He called for a 360 degree vision and leveraging hindsight while exploiting ones insights and not to loose sight of impending potential potholes. He ended his speech after a brief introduction of the former Chief Election Commissioner of India and now, a full time faculty at Great Lakes – Mr. TN Seshan.

Mr Gururaj Deshpande, Chairman, Sycamore Networks

He asked the graduates of today to be part of the resurrection process of the economic engine. Entrepreneurship, he said is the most challenging occupation that one can pursue but the rewards are incomparable. He hinted at this being the apt time for such ventures when the market conditions are apparently tough and demands a fully focused approach.
Mr. Gururaj believed that the last couple of decades saw a relatively stable scheme of things on the global stage, both in the financial and the social sector. However the time has come when the world is going to witness a paradigm shift in its structure. It is not going to be the same anymore. We need to strive relentlessly to create value and rest assured that reward is a natural outcome.
After leaving India in 1973, Mr. Deshpande set various firms in the US. He is closely working with MIT in the field of innovation in technology. His Indian initiative includes the ‘Akshay Patra’ scheme which ensures a mid day lunch system for the children in the Hooghly district in Karnataka. It started with providing food for 185000 children and has grown phenomenally to 1 million children per day. Every aspect of the project is worth attending to- the supply chain management, accounting systems,. In fact the model has become an example for the US for its 500 million dollar initiative for Africa.
He concluded by stressing on the fact that India is very different now than what it was compared to the very recent past. Under such circumstances it becomes very important to combine best practices of business with compassion and non profit.


Mr. GRK Reddy, MD, MARG and Chairman, CII, Chennai Zone

He very crisply emphasized on the potential of the youth of the nation. Amidst all the gloom that the world is passing through right now, its only a matter of time when the phase is going to ebb away. Affordability and scalability are expected to be the next buzzwords in the infrastructure.

Dr. M S Krishnan, Professor, Stephen and Ross School of Business, University of Michigan

He essentially threw deep insights about the field of innovation. The New Age of Innovation consists of Connectivity, Digitalization, Convergence of different parts of technology and Social networks. He took the audience through the new approaches of wealth creation and went on giving examples of companies like Google, Starbucks, Nike, Amazon etc. The firms do not think product, they think experience. He talked about the way to give a personalized expression to each and every product that the firms come up with. They take the global pool as their resource base for maximum mileage. Rethinking innovation and value creation by leveraging personalized experience and global talent network is the mantra. Eg i Pod. Mr Krishnan stressed upon co creativity, virtual integration and referred to Apple, Google, Nike and ICICI Prudential. Agility, responsiveness, integration of technology and logistics transparency should be the framework upon which organizations should base their growth on.

Power Talk

Mr. Ravi Kant, CEO and MD TATA Motors

Mr.Ravi Kant shared his thoughts on means of responding to the global financial recession. “Indian industry has to demonstrate adaptability to paradigm changes. Earlier model of cyclic market generated high profits during crests and huge losses during troughs of the cycle. The new economy model should be designed to defeat recession. This model calls for collaboration among industry players, innovation and designing the business model to minimize risk.”

Mr.R Seshasayee, MD, Ashok Leyland

Mr. Seshasayee pointed out that by sticking to the fundamentals the current financial crisis could have been avoided. Mr.Seshasayee emphasized on the importance of leaders being right on the spot to manage the crisis. He advocated “visibility and communication” to tide over the problem. He expressed confidence that eventually “We are going to come out of this problem”.

Mr.Sunil Rai, CEO, Mumbai Business School

Mr.Sunil Rai saw “Huge opportunity in the current down turn”. He said that leaders should cooperate with each other to tide over challenging times. Leaders should show the way by practicing what they want their followers to do. Focus is the key to turning tough times into blooming times”




Panel Discussion

Can India Grow while being a part of global economic system and overcome the current crisis or does it need insulation


Dr. Ajit Ranade, Chief Economist Aditya Birla Group, started off by acknowledging the fact that Great Lakes, though a 4 year old institute has already started making waves in the world of management Education. He appreciated the concept of Karma Yoga that is included in the curriculum at Great Lakes.
About the subprime crisis, he said that such terms are really puzzling for the common man because there are hardly any words were for such terms in common Indian languages, and that no body had heard of these terms till a few months ago. Now you hear every other person talking about them.
He said answers to contemporary issues may not be very obvious and may need a deep study of the problems facing us. He briefly explained the process of how the crisis affected the industry. He mentioned that because of the credit crunch, lending of all kinds stopped, which is why firms were short of Working Capital.
According to him, India cannot be insulated form the crisis, even though it may not be responsible for the crisis. “But,” he said, “Our system is generally known to be slow. Our policies are known to go through huge amount of deliberation. Such well thought of policies are going to be our saviors.”



Dr. YV Reddy, former Governor RBI, started off by referring to an article in yesterday’s New York Times about How India avoided the crisis.
He said that many concepts that the world so far thought were right need to be revisited. The financial institutions that the world looked up to for financial policies, financial frameworks, have collapsed.
He talked about how the top 20 financial institutions stopped trusting and lending money to each other. He said that the problem was not confined to banks only – banks, financial institutions, real states, EMEs etc all of them were affected

According to him there are 3 ways to look at the causes behind the economic crisis – the financial view, the economic view and the political economic view. The financial view, he said, looks at the incompetent regulation, financial intrusion and irresponsible lending. The Economic aspect, according to him, includes the macroeconomic imbalances and the loose monetary policies pumping in too much money into the market. Talking about the political economic view he referred to another newspaper article by Paul Krugman that mentioned how Wall Street has been corrupting politics in a bipartisan way.
He said that the central banks of the developed countries have, for the first time, used various instruments in reaction to the current crisis.

He commented that we are currently concentrating on managing and getting out of crisis. He believes that the rules of the game must change. The world must keep its eyes open, all options open. It is difficult to settle in such an unsettled situation. The world must look towards India and China.


MS Sundara Rajan, CMD, Indian Bank

Mr. Rajan began his talk by saying that India can grow. He said that he would give much of the credit to the Indian financial system which continues to be strong compared to china. India’s foundations are strong and the credit has to be given to the regulator YV Reddy, former RBI governor. He raised the CRR rates and thus helped the economy. He also said “India is in a global village and it cannot isolate itself. The great subprime effect of US, a developed economy where the credit risk is continued to be the best had impacted the world. If the crisis had originated in India, people would have written off India”. He said that although the bailout package was in place, it was important to analyze what went wrong. He called it the subprime crisis where loans were given to borrowers who are not eligible. He stressed the fact that “What is good for today may not be good for tomorrow; one cannot take things for granted. This financial crisis is an imported one”. He talked about ninja loans which he defined as the loans given to people with no income, no loans. A loan was originated only to be transferred to somebody else who had created the impact. He said that the banks had invested in these ninja loans and they hadn’t learnt anything at all. About 20 investment banks have crumbled and the question he posed was “Will it happen in India?”. He opined that it had affected the sentiments in India and the business confidence index had come down. The business confidence level was at a level of 119.9 as against 157.3 in Jan 2008.

He said that certain leading magazines had identified a couple of things which was the need of the hour namely restoring business confidence and ensuring liquidity. Speaking about the Indian economy and stock exchange, he said “The stock exchange had come down from a high of 20873 as of 8th Jan 2008 to a low of 10099 as of yesterday. There was a liquidity crunch in between but the government has come out with the fiscal stimulus measures”. Talking about the banking system he said “Public sector banks are totally insulated. We need to learn lessons from this crisis to become stronger. Banks have tried to kindle the demand in the housing sector. There are 17 related sectors which also get boosted by encouraging the housing sector”. He concluded his talk by saying that there was a temporary setback and that the Indian economy would be able to withstand this crisis.


Dr. Bala, founder and honorary dean, Great Lakes Institute of Management

Dr.Bala began his talk by saying that all of us are moved and act based on two forces, one is greed and the other is fear. Talking about the subprime crisis, he said “If the loan repayment is not done in the proper manner and instead debt obligations are collateralized, everything breaks down”. He opined that a bunch of mathematicians had engineered this model and the act of transferring risk was proposed to protect oneself from risk. Malpractices and lack of background checks had led to the current crisis. The real estate boom fueled the crisis. He said that the US was riding a boom and the other countries joined the bandwagon and invested. This according to him was greed. Many of the credit instruments that caused the subprime crisis were insurance products which came under the regulation of congress and they attempted to manipulate rules and convert these insurance products into non insurance ones and they succeeded. He drew a parallel between the credit crisis and the overbooking concept in the Airlines industry. He emphasized on the fact that we needed regulation. The directors of major banks sold loans to people and ignored the NPA on their balance sheets. Distributing liabilities was an example of illegally orchestrating greed. Speaking about the hope for a recovery, he said “We have hope in the shape of Barack Obama. Freedom is not free, there are responsibilities. He has to create 2.5 million jobs, put in regulations and create accountability and the govt will have to back the banks to give loans. It will take anywhere from 18 to 20 months to recover. I am confident that things will change but it won’t be easy. India is not insulated but we are resistant to the crisis. We have too many regulators in India and it is a good thing. There is a great opportunity to focus, to be nimble and sprint. In a way if India is growing slow, it has helped us given the current crisis. When the US recovers, India is going to march ahead with stability, security”. He concluded the talk by saying the architects of this crisis had to be brought to justice to deter such behavior in the future.

The fest also included a lot of other events for participants from other B-schools and the corporates. The events included a B-Plan contest KAALTEET, a Marketing Strategy game for re-launching a failed product DVIJA, an operations Strategy Game KUMBHAKA and the Business Quiz JIGYA.SA.

Prabhakaran SK from IIM K secured Rs.70000 as the first prize for the B-Plan contest, while Shuchi Verma and Ravikant from IMT Ghaziabad won the Marketing Game. The operations strategy game was won by the team from IIT Bombay.

The most awaited event of the day after the CEO Conclave, The Business Quiz, was hosted by Mr. Giri Balasubramaniam, who’s known to be one of the best B-Quiz masters in the country, and after an exhilarating written round 6 teams got through to the finals. The final round was fiercely contested by all the teams, and was finally won by the team from Sun/Sanmar which made the team richer by 30k.

All in all, the event was a grand success. It showcased some of the best talent in the country as well as engaging some of the most prominent business leaders to talk about the economic crisis.
 
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