arbit – Page 3 – Karthik Shashidhar

arbit, personal, work becoming a professor, becoming an entrepreneur, clue, confusion, conversations, existence, hippie, jobs, phenomenon, rocket scientist, socks, spices, strand, uncomfortable questions, wall street, whore, whoredom

I don’t know what to name this bias

August 19, 2011

So yet again I’m at that point in my life when I’m pondering about my career, pulling up my socks and asking myself uncomfortable questions. I’m asking myself what it is I really want to do, what it is that I really enjoy, what is the best way I can monetize my skills and the…

arbit, business, relationships, work algorithm, attrition, college students, courtship, going concern, handful, interns, married man, misfit, misfits, odd job, point of view, probability, recruitment strategy, risk aversion, romantic relationships, six years, taking a risk, typical day, uncertainty

Jobs and courtship

August 9, 2011

Jobs, unlike romantic relationships, don’t come with a courtship period. You basically go for a bunch of interviews and at the end of it both parties (you and the employer) have to decide whether it is going to be a good fit. Neither party has complete information – you don’t know what a typical day…

arbit, work geek, geeks, globe, masters of the universe, nbsp, pfaff, suits

Between Suits and Geeks

July 22, 2011

So you have suits and you have geeks. The problem with me is that I’m neither. I lie somewhere in between. So when I’m in the company of suits, I look like a geek, and in the company of geeks I look like a suit. Problem is that suits don’t understand geeky stuff, or tend…

arbit, business, general, work better chance, commitments, completeness, conclusions, consulting firms, consulting partners, downside, long time, new partners, partnership, sake

More on consulting partners

July 12, 2011

I’d written in an earlier post that consulting firms remain young nd dynamic by periodically promoting new people to partnership, and they in their quest to develop new markets and establish themselves, take on risks which can prove useful to underlings who now have a better chance to make a mark and establish themselves. However,…

arbit, business, work downward spiral, leading management consulting, leading management consulting firms, management consulting firms, money option, new business, new partner, partnership level, partnerships, payoffs, peers, pool, poor quality, promotions, relationships, reputation, stagnation, steady state

On Running a Consulting Firm

July 5, 2011

So most of the consulting firms are run as partnerships (as you might have already figured out). There was an experiment in the late 90s where a then leading firm was bought over by an IT company, and that saw stagnation for the next few years until the consultants did a “management buy out” in…

arbit, personal, relationships, work capital markets, couple of days, drift, financial markets, fractal, global pattern, intervals, love, mandelbrot, math, medical leave, quantum, scales, second time, self similarity, stress, time scale

Fractal life

June 20, 2011

Recently I finished reading Mandelbrot’s The (mis)Behaviour of Markets for the second time. Fantastic book. I think it is a must read for people who are interested in financial markets, and especially for those who work in capital markets. While it stays away from equations and “math”, and prefers to use pictures (or cartoons) to…

arbit, business, studs and fighters, work apology, blog, bonus, consulting firm, forthcoming book, important point, job, perspective, probability, stud, studs, target

Managing stud work

June 20, 2011

I begin this post with an apology. About two years back I’d promised that I won’t write any more on Studs and Fighters on this blog, and I’ll save all that for my forthcoming book. Unfortunately, since then I’ve managed not more than one page of my book, and that too has been in the…

arbit, business, economics, work 3 trees, catching fish, chopping trees, chopping wood, colleagues, competitive advantage, fishing, international trade, intuitive answer, job, law of comparative advantage, logs, opportunity cost, productive activities, productivity, robinson crusoe

Comparative advantage and competitive advantage

June 20, 2011

So there are two reasons why you could be employed. Comparative advantage and competitive advantage. Let me explain. In international trade, there is a concept called “law of comparative advantage“. Let me explain with the classical (and simple) example. Robinson Crusoe is marooned on an island with Friday. Now, let us assume there are two…

arbit, business, fundaes, work assumption, assumptions, attention deficit, bets, big picture, corporate ladder, corporations, digits, financial crisis, hyperactivity, hypothesis, initial reading, micromanage, middle management, mortgage market, orthogonal, promotion procedures, shortcoming, top management, zillion

Big Management and Big Picture

June 18, 2011

One common shortcoming that top management in a lot of companies is accused of is that they give too much attention to details (i.e. sometimes they micromanage), and they are unable to see the big picture. For example, if you think about the financial crisis of 2007-08, people kept making stupid bets about the mortgage…

arbit, personal, work blackberry, chats, colleagues, crap, face time, mobile phone, option value, teamwork, time at home, waste of time

Working Hours at Work

June 14, 2011

There are some people in my office (and in every other office that exists) who believe in “face-time”. That they need to be present for a certain number of hours every day at work irrespective of whether there is work to do or not. I find this wasteful, and distasteful. I don’t see why I…

arbit, personal, work

Career Development

April 14, 2011

I realize that in my close-to-five-years professional career, across four companies, the only time I’ve been really happy with my job has been when I’ve abandoned thoughts of “learning”, “career”, “career development” and stuff, and simply worked for the money. Given that I don’t expect to ever retire completely (though I do plan to “half-retire”…

arbit, work career development, consulting firm, hypothesis, managerial roles, managing people, nbsp, passion, point in time

On working in a consulting firm

April 13, 2011

Ok so my hypothesis is that a consulting firm is a good place to work at if and only if the partners are involved in day-t0-day business. Once the partners move on from doing day-to-day work into purely managerial roles – where they only manage their teams and interact with clients, they are no longer…

arbit, business, work assumptions, bureaucratic hassles, choices, class participation, fundamental difference, inertia, priors, scrutiny, switching costs, trivial change

Priors and posteriors

March 30, 2011

There is a fundamental difference between version 1.0 of any thing and any subsequent version. In the version 1.0, you usually don’t need to give any reasons for your choices. The focus in that case would be in getting the version ready, and you can get away with whatever assumptions you want to feel like.…

arbit, travel, work century 21 store, clothes, corporate expense, expense accounts, jock, jocks, long trip, strange ways, three dollars

Expense Troubles

February 17, 2011

Sometimes corporate expense accounts work in strange ways. For example, there is a clause in our policy that for a trip of over a week, you are permitted to get your clothes laundered at the hotel “within reasonable limits”. Given that this is a long trip and that I ran out of jocks, I got…

arbit, football, fundaes, sport, work analogies, failure, football world cup, game, jesus navas, little chance, misfit, opposition, plan b, spanish attack, spanish victory, taka, team mates, tiki, touchline, xavi

Handling Jesus

February 11, 2011

A few months back, perhaps during the football world cup, I had talked about the role of Jesus Navas in the Spanish attack. He would mostly be brought on as a “plan B”, mostly when the Spanish tiki-taka failed to break down the opposition defence. And by hogging the right touchline, he would single-handedly offer…

arbit, business, work business casual dress, business days, casual dress policy, different companies, dress code, dress codes, founders, gurgaon, hedge fund, inspirational quotes, investment banks, lehman brothers, necktie, neckties, normalization, paraphrase, physical books, rise and fall, roger lowenstein, ubs

The Necktie Index

January 11, 2011

I’m currently reading Roger Lowenstein’s When Genius Failed – about the rise and fall of the hedge fund LTCM. So when LTCM was in trouble, the employees there came up with a measure called the “necktie index”. I’m not able to find a good link to it, and unfortunately physical books don’t offer an efficient…

arbit, business, food, fundaes alcohol, conce, crowds, dirty glass, exorbitant price, fava, glorious tradition, hypothesis, india, intrigues, lifetime, liquor licenses, lounges, notion, novice, peak hour, pubs, segments, spectrum, wine shop

The City Lacks Bars

July 25, 2010

Yeah you might think I’m crazy to be cribbing like this about Bangalore, supposed to be India’s pub city and all that jazz. But I stick to my statements. Yeah we might have lots of good pubs and lounges but we don’t have lots of good bars. I was on my way to dinner at…

arbit, business, economics, fundaes apartment, b1, bedroom houses, bedrooms, combinations, landlord, neighbours, orientation, own a car, parking space, profitable trade, provision, seven cars, shape, slots, spoils

Valuation of Parking Space

July 23, 2010

There’s a unique problem in my apartment building – the building has been built with provision for only seven parking slots in the basement but each of the nine houses here has been allotted a slot, which means there are two obstructing slots. Unfortunately, my slot is at a location where I get blocked by…

arbit, business, fundaes apartments, bangalore, bda, cantonment, clue, drains, farmland, first fifty years, immigrants, india, localities, natives, observation, office buildings, private parties, slum, slums, tent

Immigrants

March 31, 2010

One thing I have noticed in Bangalore – and I’m not sure if it is true in other cities in India but I have a feeling that it is – is that immigrants inhabit parts of the city which natives wouldn’t really want to live in. I’m making this observation based primarily on one data…

arbit, business, retail amount of time, attention spans, big bazaar, bofi, cheap stuff, funda, insight, lookout, macy, marketer, rg, shoes and clothes, shopping in new york, stra, sunday evening, tim harford

Shopping in New York

January 13, 2010

When I went shopping in New York on Friday I was reminded of this article by Tim Harford that the bofi had posted as part of a comment on one of my earlier posts. The basic insight in the article (which draws upon some widely cited research – I’ve read about it in several other…

arbit, business, entertainment, fundaes, music aadi, aata, alaap, blends, classmate, constraints, contexts, creative thinking, degrees of freedom, domain knowledge, funda, improvisation, music competitions, raaga, scales, simplicity, strict rules, sundae, vanilla ice, vanilla ice cream

Simplicity and improvisation

December 28, 2009

While writing my previous post on the film game, I was thinking about simplicity and improvisation. About how if you seek to improvise, in order to improvise well, you would rather choose a simple base. Like how the simplicity of film aata allows you to improvise so much and create so much fun. I was…