Quarter 8 - Week 1

The last quarter for the year, and it feels like I'm on the cusp of something huge. I would have completed two years by May this year. That's.... some... accomplishment! I've taken a lighter load this quarter, two subjects and one project. So it feels a lot more aaraam-se compared to the other quarters. Traditionally, Q4 has always been the "soft quarter", the courses are more the pondering-types rather than the hard-theoritical types. My choices reflect the type of courses offered this time around...

Ethics in Business Management

I've always been told that Ethics can't be taught, it is imbibed, mostly in your formative years. I look at it a little differently. A person would take a course on ethics under two circumstances. 1. He wants to understand ethics more deeply, so he can be a better person morally. 2. He wants to break the rules, and is looking for practical loopholes. I like to think that I fall under the former category! :D

We've already done one case study on Ethics, it was based on slavery in the Chocolate industry. Apparently, 50% of the world's production of cocoa beans happen in Ghana and on the Ivory Coast. And the labour is mostly children, who have been enslaved after being kidnapped at a young age. Their living conditions are atrocious, and their plights miserable. So, after a lot of hullabaloo, people covered the event in major newspapers and television broadcast, and the case ends with a statement of the current status. Apparently people still buy chocolate.

We followed it up with an analysis using a framework that was taught. And we found, that except for the poor kids who were enslaved, everyone else, including the chocolate farmers, traders, bigtime US chocolate manufacturers, retail and distribution and the regular global consumer were ALL morally responsible for the unfortunate events. So the prof concludes saying that everyone has a choice to buy stuff, and you could choose not to buy, but even then many times, people continue to buy shirking off their moral responsibility. Additionally, what seems unethical to us, might seem all right to people in that condition. So it's not fair to look at ethics through a single lens, you need to apply it to the region and its customs, and then decide what actions should be taken.

Managing Off-Shored Software and IT services

A slightly more soporific course that seems to cover how we're doing currently in the off-shored space and what we can do to better manage it. We started with a simple understanding of which countries are known better for what type of outsourced/offshored activity. Our second session while focussing around this topic, ended with an understanding of India's competitive advantage, and if it is possible for us to sustain it. You'd be surprised at the result we arrived at! ;)

Here's to looking forward to a chilled-out quarter, with chilled-out activity. All assignments are individual, for the first time ever! Looks like this can be a nice fun quarter after all! Who says you can't relax at the IIMB?