Blog – Page 11 – Karthik Shashidhar

arbit, business, economics, finance, fundaes, randomness, relationships accounting statements, aggregate, amp, balance sheet, bryan caplan, corporates, domination, headache, incremental change, interpersonal relationships, intervals, judgment, loser, major components, occasions, randomness, taleb, time period, volatility

A Balance Sheet View of Life

October 31, 2009

The basic idea of this post is that interpersonal relationships (not necessarily romantic) need to be treated as balance sheets and not as P&L statements, i.e. one should always judge based on the overall all-time aggregate rather than the last incremental change in situation. Just to give you a quick overview of accounting, the annual…

business, finance, fundaes, investment banking, personal confidence limits, counterparties, diagnosis, diversification, doctors, hypotheses, last friday, measurement, medical case, medical negligence, medical profession, mind space, point of view, proportion, relatives, schrodinger, spent three, success rate, three months, two and a half years

Collateralized Death Obligations

October 26, 2009

When my mother died last Friday, the doctors at the hospital where she had been for three weeks didn’t have a diagnosis. When my father died two and a half years back, the hospital where he’d spent three months didn’t have a diagnosis. In both cases, there were several hypotheses, but none of them were…

arbit, technology, work age, ctc, cv, due diligence, entertainment, evenings, expectation, face value, formal india, formalities, formality, formals, generality, headhunter, hometown, liking, linkedin, market, marketers, neting, orkut, peers, periods, profiles, rhetorical question, testimonials, work, writing

LinkedIn recos

September 16, 2009

LinkedIn in general is a useful site. It’s a good place to maintain an “online CV” and also track the careers of your peers and ex-peers and people you are interested in and people you are jealous of. If you are a headhunter, it is a good place to find heads to hunt, so that…

business, fundaes, studs and fighters, work cracking, fighter interviews, fighters, four months, google, high quality, insight, interviewer, interviewing, personal experience, perspective, quality interviews, regard, seth godin, stud, studs and fighters, telephonic, thought process, twelve hours

Interview length

September 15, 2009

When I interviewed for my current job four months back, I was put through over twelve hours of high-quality interviews. This includes both telephonic and face-to-face processes (on one day, I was called to the office and grilled from 1030am to 630pm) and by “high quality”, I’m referring to the standard of questions that I…

books, business, descriptive, fundaes, general, personal, retail binge, book shopping, casual browsers, checkout counters, crowd, footfalls, grand mall, high streets, impulse, landmark, madras, malls, passerby, seven years, spencer, store staff

The Loot

September 13, 2009

So I executed the book binge yesterday. In two phases – first at the “main” Landmark at the Forum and then at the “other” Landmark at Swagath Garuda Mall. Technically the binge is incomplete since I still have another Rs.600 to spend but it’s unlikely I’ll be spending that off soon, so for all practical…

arbit, work coffee breaks, conversations, expense accounts, free riders, salary, studs, trousers, water cooler, whoredom

Return to corporate whoredom

August 16, 2009

Waking up early in the morning Formal shirt and trousers, neatly pressed An hour’s commute each way Conversations by the water cooler Team lunches; Expense accounts Hourly coffee breaks Meetings. Conference calls. Presentations Studs. Fighters. Free-riders. Reviews. Deadlines. Status reports. Salary credit!

arbit, business, cricket, fundaes, sport, studs and fighters, work backburner, corporate affairs, crap, enthu, google, handful, inclusion, inspiration, last job, mitchell johnson, moments of brilliance, nightmare, occasional moments, office politics, stud, test match, third test, wickets

Studs and Fighters and Form

August 2, 2009

It’s been a long time since I wrote about the Studs and Fighters framework. I had overdosed on it a few months back, when I’d put some 3 posts in 4 days or something, but that was when I was hajaar enthu about corporate affairs. It’s been almost two months since I quit my last…

business, general, technology conscious decision, exclamations, few days, good guys, imagination, initial network, initial stage, nicknames, orkut, periods, random names, scraps, seekers

The Trouble with Orkut

July 9, 2009

Some of you might have noticed that I haven’t been replying to your messages on orkut any more. I still exist there, but am not “active” by any stretch of imagination. I check my account once in a long while, when I’m feeling really bored. And make a conscious decision not to reply to scraps…

business, fundaes, personal, studs and fighters, work aggregation, ambition, continuous job, cv, discrete points, frenzy, good game, good job, ledley king, match, musician, performing artist, period of time, points in time, short period, sleep, spectacular performance, sportsman, train, weak knees

Discrete and continuous jobs

June 16, 2009

Earlier today, while contributing to a spectacular discussion about ambition on a mailing list that I’m part of, I realized that my CV basically translates to spectacular performance in entrance exams and certain other competitive exams, and not much otherwise. This made me think of the concept of a “discrete job” – where you are…

business, cricket, finance, sport 3 matches, bangladesh, broadcast rights, consortium, early exit, espnstar, grand total, indian governments, last time, legal solution, proud moment, ray of hope, rest of the world, second stage, semis, super8, t20 world cup, tata sky, tourism departments

Betting as a hedge

June 16, 2009

Today’s Business Standard reports that ESPNStar and their advertisers stand to lose significantly following India’s early exit from the T20 World Cup. However, the situation now is significantly better off than in the 2007 World Cup where India didn’t even enter the super8. Back then, India had played a grand total of 3 matches out…

arbit, education, finance, fundaes, IIT, work academic life, assignment submission, axis, concave curve, downside, eighty twenty, law of diminishing returns, paragraph, perfectionist, philosophy, rewards, straight line, wokr

The Eighty-Twenty Rule

June 3, 2009

I first got this idea during some assignment submission at IIT. One guy in our class, known to be a perfectionist is supposed to have put in 250 hours of effort into a certain course project. He is known to have got 20 out of 20 in this project. I put in about 25 hours…

arbit, business, descriptive, personal blade, flings, forward direction, gillette sensor, hindu customs, lenin stalin, long vacation, mach 3, mao, marx lenin, maximum time, o clock, one piece, portraits, safety razor, safety razors, sideburns, time in my life, two minutes, wilderness

Hajaam

May 31, 2009

This Monday, for the first time in my life, I got myself shaved by a hajaam (barber). Yes, for the ten-odd years that I’ve been shaving, I’d so far never let anyone put a blade on my face. However, a long vacation in Bangalore, absence of my usual Mach-3 and constant jibes by my mom…

arbit, fundaes, work blog, career development, cash flow, comfort zone, expectation, job, jobs, minded folks, monetary terms, money, opponents, rest of your life, sake, salary, several times

Compensation Etc.

May 19, 2009

For a change I’m keeping up a promise that I’ve made on my blog – I’m actually writing a follow-up post that I’d promised. In the past, I’ve guilty several times of promising to continue something in a follow-up post and then conveniently forgetting about it. So I had mentioned in my last post that…

arbit, personal, work Add new tag, carcopious quantities, cool things, corporate ladder, dahi, financial services, formulae, increments, karnataka, last time, left index finger, mileage, new guitar, pickle, rat race, roadtrip, sacks, sake, stage of life, vague sense

Work Etc.

May 17, 2009

There are these days when you wake up and start wondering what the fuck you are upto. You start asking yourself why you are where you are, doing what you are doing. You ask yourself why you are not on that monthlong roadtrip of rural Karnataka, with the hope of maybe producing a shelf of…

business, economics, fundaes aim, buzzwords, cdos, competitor, dirt, good business, good times, lipstick, loaf of bread, luxuries, market share, marketers, necessities, pespective, rigorous proof, rupees, segment, share of wallet, tranche, tranches

Tranche of wallet

May 7, 2009

One of the buzzwords in marketing in the last few years has been “share of wallet”. “We don’t aim for market share in any particular segment”, they say. “What we are aiming for is a larger portion of the customer’s share of wallet”. Basically what marketers try to do is to design their products such…

business, cricket, ipl, sport

Needed: An Indian Plate League

April 26, 2009

The problem with the IPL is that there is little disincentive for doing badly. There are a total of eight teams. Each of them has a reasonable number of saleable cricketers. These cricketers’ salaries are orthogonal to their skills, and their expected contribution to the game. Irrespective of how badly a team does, the one-team-per-city…

arbit, business, economics, work bowling, chutiya, colleagues, double edged sword, international trade, intuitive sense, kaam, productivity, stud, theory of comparative advantage

Theory of comparative advantage and chutiya kaam

April 26, 2009

Suppose you and me together have to do two tasks A and B. We need to decide who does what (let’s assume that we need to pick one task each). Now I’m a stud and you are a chutiya so I’m better than you at both A and B. So how do we split? It…

business, entertainment, fundaes, general, media, randomness advertisements, advertiser, bad idea, commercial break, crap, cricket, cup of tea, exact length, fag, modi, slots, soap, tata sky, tv channel, two minutes

Randomizing advertisements

April 20, 2009

This 7.5 minute break in the middle of an IPL innings is a bad idea. The biggest problem is that everyone knows the exact length of the break, and can use it to do stuff – like cook, or clean, or crap, or fag, or maybe watch the Everton-Man U shootout. 7.5 minutes is a…

business, economics, food, fundaes bangalore, caste, decades, economies of scale, expert instructions, four meals, fresh food, households, indians, kilo, meal preparation, onion, pressure cooker, professional cooks, rasam, refrigerator, sambar, three times, two ways, vegetables

Cooking

April 11, 2009

I’m in the process of my weekly cooking. I’m making onion and potato sambar which should last me for about four meals – one tonight, and for three meals during the course of this week. I have been on and off the phone to my mother, as she has been giving out expert instructions from…

arbit, fundaes, studs and fighters, work blog, blogging, blogs, boss, crib, fighters, four quadrants, headless chicken, inefficiencies, insight, insights, job, jobs, match, maybes, mismatch, possibilities, process, productivity, scalable, scope, structuring, stud, studs, two kinds, work

Don’t use stud processes for fighter jobs and fighter processes for stud jobs

April 11, 2009

When people crib to other people that their job is not too exciting and that it’s too process-oriented and that there’s not muc scope for independend thinking, the usual response is that no job is inherently process-oriented or thinking-oriented, and that what matters is the way in which one perceives his job. People usually say…

banking, business, economics, finance, fundaes, investment banking, randomness arbitrage, arnold kling, black, black swan, capitalism, conceivable problem, felix, financial times, global financial system, implementation, karthik, latter book, model, nassim nicholas, randomness, salmon, satyajit das, several times, structuring, studs, swan, swans, worshipper

Taleb’s Recipe

April 9, 2009

No, unlike the previous post, this has nothing to do about food. It is about Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s recent op-ed in the Financial Times where he gives his “recipe” for saving the global financial system. Two of my favourite bloggers Arnold Kling and Felix Salmon have responded to it, but I didn’t like either so…