Ripples on the brain

Ok, so we’ve had our first and second classes taken by Prof. Jagmohan S Raju. I’ve been hearing about him from the time I’ve heard about ISB. From the first ISB information session that I attended way back in October last year, he’s been the professor whose name has always been mentioned over and over again.
Just after the first class was over, Bharani was standing out and he asked me how the class was. My instant reaction was that the class was good, but I didn’t find it markedly different from the other good classes that we’ve had. (I just now read in one of the blogs that the Prof. was injured in an accident some weeks ago and was close to cancelling his trip here. Not having him here would’ve been a great loss for most of us, I mean you’ve heard about him so much that you’d have felt really bad if he wouldn’t have been here). But Shankar passed by and reminded me about the perspectives he gave to what we’d already learnt in Term1. There are some well known terms in marketing that we thought about only using the formulae. He made us see them intuitively so that we needn’t remember the terms by their formulae, but by what they meant to a firm. That was actually done in the first part of the class and I hadn’t thought about that when I responded to Bharani.
I liked that portion where he talked about the takeaways from the class. First he mentioned about the obvious questions that we should be able to answer after this term. Then he talked about the other things - the team skills, time management so on and so forth. “…If you think ISB has kept you busy so far, you haven’t seen anything”. “Your team skills will be tested. You have no option but to be with your team. That’s what mostly happens in life. You don’t choose your team, you only choose the way you want to interact with them”.
Markstrat would be that thing which will keep us busy throughout this term. It will test the limits of the time management and team skills. I only hope I learn a lot from this as I seem to be way behind as far as time management is concerned. Term 2 has been very unorganized when compared to Term1. We have classes at odd times and uneven workload. On Wednesday (June 21) we had 4 sessions each running for 2 hours whereas on thursday we’ll have just one. This week we have classes even on Saturdays. I look forward to this term with hope and excitement. Hope it transforms me!!!