IIT Kanpur MBA Blog

Everyone has an idea about the world of consulting but only few are aware of what it actually is. To allay our doubts and provide a glimpse into it we had Mr. Amit Singh (Director, PwC) and Ms. Shalina Bhaita (Associate Director, PwC), who visited our campus for a session on Consulting and consulting to government bodies in particular.  Initially Mr. Amit gave us a brief introduction about PwC, its working and about the Smart city Project of Government of India to which he is closely associated.  During his talk Mr. Singh emphasized on the skill set required for a consultant. The first among them was mentioned as the ability to learn and unlearn quickly. And for that one must read to stay relevant and contextual.  Further he mentioned how this must be complemented with peer to peer learning, with emphasis on learning not just from acquaintances but also from surroundings. Another prerequisite for a consultant was mentioned by Mr. Singh as building a good network of people with fo

The morning of 24th September started with a thought provoking session, when Mr. Siddhartha Roy, General Manager, Advanced Analytics & Cognitive Solutions at IBM, visited IME Department of IIT Kanpur for a session on Advanced Analytics, Big Data and recent trends. An alumnus of IIT Kanpur, Mr. Roy started  by defining consulting as a guiding force for thinking right  in order to bring out best solution for a set of defined problems. Talking about ‘data’, he said it has both quantitative and qualitative parts, and knowing how both of these match is the key to understanding it. Mr. Roy mentioned how every problem or case starts as a nebulous one. To  emphasis  his point and to impart an approach to students for tackling real life business problems, he carried out an interesting activity by dividing the students into groups and presenting them with a problem faced by a certain company having dipping market share of its products. With the required focus on the market metrics used

“How to become a ‘leader- across all levels’? How to generate confidence for providing solutions to a myriad of problems? And not only that, how does one proactively simulate problems, solving them even before they occur, and step ahead in the learning curve?” These are some of the intriguing questions that were raised and were very efficiently answered today, by a very young and dynamic persona; Mr. Himanshu Verma (Lead HR, IT Consulting Services, KPMG) when he delivered an enlightening seminar on ‘Corporate roles and career in consulting, a key perspective’ while addressing an audience of MBA students at IIT Kanpur. Mr. Verma began by defining the two terms: ‘consulting’ and ‘consultant’. He stated that consulting can be understood as a process of not only giving solutions but also creating (simulating) problems proactively, in order to get efficient solutions beforehand. According to sir, a ‘consultant’ is not just a job role; it’s a breed of people with relevant domain know

Mr. Manish Menon, Business Technology Manager at ZS Associates, visited IIT Kanpur campus on 11 th  September. The topic of the seminar was Business Intelligence and Analytics. The seminar began with how analytics affects every walk of our life: from taxi aggregating service  Ola , e-commerce giant  Amazon , superstores like  Walmart , to healthcare services such as  Apple Health Kit . Mr. Menon elaborated on the shifting focus of analytics over the years from “what to do with data and where to get the data from?” to “how impactful can we make it?” Mr. Menon talked about the evolution of analytics from centralised passive reporting, periodic monitoring and data warehouse to decentralization, active experimentation, advanced use cases and data lakes. He also emphasized on a pragmatic saying – “ fail fast  so as to recover quickly, learn the lesson, and move on to other projects”. Mr. Menon discussed how the growing trend of cloud computing and storage of huge quantities of d

The fundamental requirement in corporate is not only about survival but about thriving in chaos. Thriving in chaos and not letting oneself be unnerved leads to growth. Targeting the sunrise opportunities, learning continuously and evolving perpetually were some of the insightful learnings from Mr. Sanjay Sharma (Managing Director, Accenture; Data Science Lead – India), who was at IIT Kanpur, MBA for a seminar on “Big Data Analytics”. Mr. Sharma simplified the definition of Big Data and gave a generic definition for us to understand. According to him, Big Data is collection of unstructured data to derive useful information out of it for making decisions. According to him the huge amount of data available has generated the need for Big Data Architecture. For example Banks need to maintain a lot of data due to rules, regulations and requirement of customers. A lot of querying on this data is necessary to generate information out of it. This is where cloud computing and distri

Mr Vikash Kumar, Chief Digital Officer at Trident Group India Ltd, visited the IME department at IIT Kanpur along with his colleague Mr Mohit Goel, GM at Digital Trident, on the 3 rd of September, 2016. Talking about the changing scenario of digital marketing and the challenges and opportunities that it poses for today’s marketing managers, he shared his insights as the Chief Digital Officer of the textile giant Trident India Ltd, about the marketing and branding strategies being followed in the current scenario. Mr Kumar stressed upon keeping the session as informal and interactive as possible, making it into a dialogue rather than a one-way lecture. He started with defining digital marketing as a medium that provides two way flow of information or communication on world wide web. He emphasized on how the rapidly changing world of digital marketing has made textbook knowledge insufficient, and further emphasized the importance of learning on the job, staying unique, a

“A leader not just shows the way, he walks with you on that path”- Mr. Vikram Ahuja, C.T.O. of ‘Vlink’, shared these immortal words whilst his candid session with the students of MBA IIT Kanpur. Sir gave the perfect example of Elon musk to drive the point home. World famous personality, Musk with his futuristic and altruistic vision has raised the bar for innovation. The solar city venture by Musk, aims at scaling up the entire level of civilization of our planet! Mr. Ahuja led us through his journey after leaving the portals of IIT Kanpur, his experience at his family owned business from where he moved to Boston to work with companies in the domain of healthcare, retail and artificial intelligence to his post Harvard experiences in start-ups, as an angel investor and as a business strategist. He added in particular how the case study method deployed at the IME department was helpful to him at Harvard where the same methodology is applied, and how case studies bring students clos