Week Eight - After the lull...

... comes the storm... is there an "always" after that? I think there should be...

Week six - the comfort zone week - had barely graduated to week seven when things got windy... in order to leave enough time for the Accounting WAC on Friday, 24 November, my learning team decided to shift gears... good decision. We also had to submit our Strategic Marketing Success report on Thursday, 23 November. Meanwhile, we had to visit an Italian restaurant in London on Wednesday for our Operations Management study. And it was on Monday that we could tie it all up and decide on the team's schedule.

We also received our grades for the two reports we had submitted earlier... nothing too great or disastrous to write about, I would rather term it as a wake up call.

So, on Wednesday evening, Pietro, Seni, Sachin and yours truly made the trip to Chelsea to the Italian restaurant - Made in Italy - good place, great milieu, truly absolutely wonderful mozzarella, and the best pizza I have ever had. Take my word for it, you will want to go there, again and again. We spent some time understanding the operations, clicked some pictures and spent the rest of the evening having a great time.

Our Strategic Marketing Success report is on consumer goods giant Procter & Gamble. Background work had been done during the A T Kearney competition, the report was prepared, finetuned and submitted on Thursday. We get to present it to our teachers and fellow students next week.

On Friday morning, we got our Accounting WAC - 1500 words, assessed, due by 1400 hrs on Saturday. After the initial "its easy yaar," we soon found out that what appears at first glance is not necessarily the complete picture... so we hunkered down, got into team and stream dumps to get ourselves organised and by bed time (!) on Friday had cracked it. The only thing remaining was writing it... first, getting the report up to 1500 words, then adding everything else that you have not yet covered, then editing it down to 1500, and lastly, going through it to ensure you did not edit out something vital. Oh! Did I mention the Executive Summary? One page, A4. And you need to sell the report in the executive summary...

Easy? ya right! We were at it continuously for 26 hours before finally agreeing that any marginal increase in report quality would not be justified by the marginal time spent... if that is greek or latin or some other obscure language to you, management students call it the practical application of the law of diminishing returns... don't ask.

Then, time to hit the bed... rather, flop on it. Another marathon effort, this time 16 hours of maintaining a horizontal I-dont-care state. And then comes the interesting bit... LBS - London Business School - comes to Cranfield every year for a round of Rugby and Football on Burns night - named after the Scottish poet Robert Burns. I aim to wear the Cranfield rugby shirt and get covered with mud on that day, hopefully defeating LBS in the process. And as with everything else, practice makes perfect. So it was rugby practice Sunday afternoon, followed by cricket in the evening...

To end this post with some really great news - the Cranfield team for A T Kearney global prize won the European competition on Saturday and will now represent Europe against University of Chicago Graduate School of Business who are the North American winners. Its now within reach - the global prize... all the best guys!!!