In “real-life” problems, it is not necessary to use all the given data. My mind goes back eleven years, to the first exam in the Quantitative Methods course at IIMB. The exam contained a monster probability problem. It was so monstrous that only some two or three out of my batch of 180 could solve…
Genetic Algorithms
I first learnt about Genetic Algorithms almost exactly thirteen years ago, when it was taught to me by Prof. Deepak Khemani as part of a course on “artificial intelligence”. I remember liking the course a fair bit, and took a liking to the heuristics and “approximate solutions” after the mathematically intensive algorithms course of the…
Axes of diversity
Companies and educational institutions, especially those that have a global footprint and a reputation to protect, make a big deal about diversity policies. It is almost impossible to sit through a recruitment or admissions talk by one such entity without a mention to their diversity policies, which they are proud of. And they have good…
Brainstorming
I was never a big fan of “brainstorming”. I’m referring to those meetings where everyone gets together and thinks aloud, in order to converge to a solution. In the past, when I’ve been involved in such exercises, they’ve mostly come to nothing, and mostly ended with a list of to-dos which got never done (this…
The Ramayana and the Mahabharata principles
An army of monkeys can’t win you a complex war like the Mahabharata. For that you need a clever charioteer. A business development meeting didn’t go well. The potential client indicated his preference for a different kind of organisation to solve his problem. I was about to say “why would you go for an army of…
Weak ties and job hunting
As the more perceptive of you would have figured out by now, the wife is in her first year of business school, and looking for an internship. I’m at a life stage where I have friends in most companies she is interested in who are in roles that are at a level where it is…
Startup salary survey
I think I’ve come up with what I think is a really cool metric to value the tradeoff between your salary at a startup and the equity stake that you are given. For lack of a better name, I call this “multiple of foregone income”: Let’s say that your “market salary” is $ 100,000 (pulling…
Batch Parity
From several sources I’ve heard of this bizarre concept called “batch parity”, where you assume that everyone who joined a particular school or company in a particular year is identical. This leads to people passing up on opportunities because they are not given such parity. I’ve been hearing of this from way too many sources…
Meeting types
There are essentially three kinds of meetings – those that are entirely “in person”, those that are entirely “on call” and hybrids. I argue that the quality of conversation in the third kind of meeting is significantly inferior to that of the first two types. In person meetings are those where all participants are in…
Planning and drawing
Fifteen years ago I had a chemistry teacher called Jayanthi Swaminathan. By all accounts, she was an excellent teachers, and easily one of the best teachers in the school where she taught me. Unfortunately I don’t remember much of what she taught me, the only thing I remember being her constant refrain to “plan and…
The Risk of Overspecialization
A couple of months back i got an upgrade to my LinkedIn account that allows me to write essays there, which I occasionally use to spout management level gyaan. While it leads to fragmentation of my writing (there are already three blogs, including this one, and Mint), it helps create conversations on LinkedIn and in…
Marketing
I’m in a conversation with a friend on marketing my consulting services and he gave me a most genius piece of advice You can say you do supervised learning instead of saying regressions. Last month I was at this big data conference. Everyone I met said they were into big data or analytics or some…
Law of conservation of talent
For starters. there is no such law. However, there exists a belief in most people’s minds that everyone is equally talented, and it is only that talent in different people is spread across different dimensions. It starts when you are in school. If you are not good at maths, people tell you that you must…
Back to bachelorhood
Starting tonight I’ll be a bachelor once again. For the next nineteen months or so. No it’s not that I’m returning my post graduate diploma and hence getting this downgrade (it’s been a while since I cracked a bad joke here so I’m entitled). It’s that the wife is going away. To get herself an…
Switching Off
Since last night I’ve been terribly sick. I slept fitfully, if at all, all of last night, and I’ve been totally out of action all day today. It’s nothing particularly serious – just a bad attack of the common cold, and I expect it to take its normal course. Yet, through the day, as I’ve…
Long mails
As you might have noticed from my blog posts over the years, I like writing long essays. By long, I mean blog post long. Somewhere of the length of 800-1000 words. I can’t write longer than that, because of which my attempts to write a book have come to nought. Now, thanks to regular blogging…
Networking eatings
Given that I’m a freelancer and do several things to earn my money, and that there is no consistency in my income flow, I need to do a lot of “networking”. Essentially, this is about generally catching up with someone over an informal chat, discussing what we do, and exploring if there were any synergies…
Perfect and imperfect interviews
The movies give this impression of what is a “perfect” job interview. This usually happens during the stage of the movie when the protagonist has started turning things around, things are looking up for him/her. The “perfect” job interview barely lasts minutes, and the protagonist returns with the offer letter. As good as it can…
Should you have an analytics team?
In an earlier post a couple of weeks back, I had talked about the importance of business people knowing numbers and numbers people knowing business, and had put in a small advertisement for my consulting services by mentioning that I know both business and numbers and work at their cusp. In this post, I take…
Duckworth Lewis and Sprinting a Marathon
How would you like it if you were running a marathon and someone were to set you targets for every 100 meters? “Run the first 100m in 25 seconds. The second in 24 seconds” and so on? It is very likely that you would hate the idea. You would argue that the idea of the…
Numbers and management
I learnt Opeations Research thrice. The first was when I had just finished school and was about to go to IIT. My father had just started on a part-time MBA, and his method of making sure he had learnt something properly was to try and teach it to me. And so, using some old textbook…