Ahmedabad, 25th November, 2011.
Confluence 2011 kicked off to a grand start this year with the inauguration attended by Prof. Samir Barua the Director of IIMA, Mr. Satish Pradhan, the Executive Vice President of Tata Group and Mr. Koushik Chatterjee, the CFO of Tata Steel. Mr. Pradhan in an inspiring talk spoke about the different definitions of excellence and said that excellence is not a standardized definition but also involves questioning rhetoric in order to be something different. To illustrate this, he asked whether a person would choose an extremely brilliant person who is not aligned with the policies of the company or on the other hand, an average individual who is a great fit for the company and has a high level of integrity. This is one of characteristic situations where excellence has to be rethought. He also criticized the current system of placements followed by most B-Schools likening them to a cattle auction and called for a more refined approach. Confluence today saw 2 speaker sessions and a host of inter B-School events. There were footfalls of 700 students and the Management Students Program (MSP) saw 475 registrations. The following were/ are the events conducted/ in progress today:
Speaker Sessions:
The morning session dealt with ‘Business Leadership and Excellence’ and saw 4 industry stalwarts giving examples of leadership from their own experiences. Mr. Ravishankar, the MD of Sequoia Capital spoke about an incremental innovation strategy where a company targets 1% growth per day as an innovative method of facilitating growth. Mr. Renny Thomas, partner, McKinsey noted how sustainable excellence is elusive and even high growth companies are unable to sustain this over the decades. Mr. Thirumambalam, the MD of Heinz spoke about his company’s culture while Mr. Vishal Mehta, the MD of Infibeam citied his company’s initiative ‘Build a Bazaar’ which helps entrepreneurs to build up their own stock of goods for retail. The session thus focused on deriving leadership lessons from inspirational companies.
The afternoon session had Mr. Rajan Anand, the MD of Google India engage the audience with his characteristic energy on technology trends and their implications for companies in the internet space. He identified trends such mobile internet, social networking, e-commerce and internet video as being the most important trends for any technology/ internet company to take advantage of. He also spoke of growing importance of vernacular websites and cloud computing. The discussion was extremely interesting and provided an excellent amount of information for persons interesting in entering the technology sphere.
Game-On
IIM A organized a unique, first of its kind event ‘Game-On’ this year. The prelims was a challenging Facebook game testing the memory, visual cognitive abilities and logical skills of the 350 teams vying for a spot in the finals. The six teams who made it to the finals include two teams from Great Lakes Institute of Management and one each from IIM Lucknow, SP Jain, SIBM- Pune and IIFT Kolkata who were pitted against each other in a series of exciting strategy board games.
Sumeet Saurav from IIM Lucknow had words of praise about the uniqueness and competitiveness of the event and felt that the military strategy board game that he was playing was really addictive.
Faiz Raza from Great Lakes Institute of Management who was playing a game which put the participants in the shoes of Stone Age men looking for ways to develop civilization given limited resources felt that the games were new and innovative and there was a good variety of students with healthy sportsman spirit.
National Business Olympiad
National Business Olympiad is a business simulation competition the prelims of which was conducted in various cities conducted across the country including Delhi, Bangalore, Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Indore, Pune, Gurgaon and Chennai. The semi-finals which is to be conducted on the 25th and 26th of November has fifty 3 member teams participating across two days where the participants own their own company and take decisions covering all aspects of the company including Marketing, Human Resources and Strategy. Each day represents 4 years of the company and at the end of the first day the shareholder’s value is announced to the teams. At the end of the second day the 8 teams with the highest shareholder’ value are selected for the finals which will be conducted on 27th November. The event will be starting at 9pm today.
CricEx
CricEx, a popular Strategy sphere event, had participants fighting out the prelims rounds wherein they were grilled on their trading and cricketing fundamentals. A total of 20 teams have been shortlisted for the finals tomorrow where the finalists would trade cricket players based on their past performances and other statistics. Each player will have a certain price attached to him and participants will be required to judiciously invest in players, the future performances of whom will determine their market prices in the future. This dynamic event will see the finalists in action tomorrow evening battling it out for the prize money worth INR 35,000.
Kings of Advertisements
A highly specialised event in the domain of marketing, Kings of Advertisements provided an opportunity to management students all over India to display their creative prowess to Infibeam, India’s online shopping platform. Participating teams were required to submit a comprehensive communication campaign for Infibeam.com including a print ad and a social media campaign. Out of 128 campaigns which came in, 18 teams made the cut for the finals, out of which IIM Trichy eventually bagged the first place. Visibly ecstatic, the team from
IIM Trichy, The Invincibles, said that they were extremely happy to get an opportunity to display their prowess in front of such a distinguished panel of judges. The second place went to the team from IIM Kozhikode and the third place went to the team from NMIMS. The hotly contested event saw prize money worth of INR 90,000 going to the finalists and winners.
Masterplan
Masterplan, the Business Plan competition of Confluence, has the highest prize for among all events for the winning team: INR 1 Lakh. 9 teams ,representing colleges like IIMB, IIML, IIMK, ISB, FMS, IMT Ghaziabad, Jamnalal Bajaj and IIMA, have qualified for the finals after 2 rounds of evaluation among 170 registrations. The finals are being judged by Mr. Prajakt Raut from ‘The Hatch’, an incubator for startups and entrepreneurs Mr. Shrikant Gokhale, Mr. MS Rao and Mr. Sanjay Anandaram. A finalist from ISB Hyderabad mentioned that ‘The judges grilled us really well and the experience of presenting to the panel was in itself a great value-add for us’. The finals of the this event will take place tomorrow.
Campaign for a Cause
The flagship public policy video making event, Campaign for a Cause, final round has started today with 5 teams presenting fictional/non-fictional videos made to underscore policy gaps and their unintended impact on the society. The teams Cause for Effect from MICA and Group D9+ from IIM A have made their presentations, while those from IIFMights (IIFM), Mavericks (IIM A) and SENTImetre (NID) are yet to take place. While Cause for Effect’s presentation titled ‘Victims of birth’ featured kids from a foundation showing how child labour was impacting the society and taking the best years of life away from innocent kids, Group D9+’s presentation was a non-fiction one highlighting how the Ahmedabad BRTS project had rendered several people homeless and had hurt the livelihood of roadside vendors and further underlined the importance of incorporating public opinion in matters that may directly or indirectly impact the economically weaker sections of the society. The event bearing a prize money of Rs. 1 lakh is being judged by Mr. Pankuj Parashar, a well known film and TV director, Prof. Avanish Kumar, Chairperson of Public Policy and Management department in MDI, Gurgaon, Mr. Stalin, a documentary filmmaker, media trainer and human right activist and Mr. Bharathan Kandaswamy, an IIM A alumnus and professor of Contemporary Film Industry course at IIM A.
Corporate Combat
Corporate Combat, a strategy simulation competition, is a flagship event at Confluence 2011. Over 500 participants from India’s top B-Schools registered for the event and were asked to design a growth strategy for a deal-of-the-day website. Teams of 3 from IIFT, IIML , FMS, NITIE and IIMA will be vying for INR 1 Lakh of prize money in the finals over the next 3 days. The judges for the event are Prof. Jayanth Verma, IIMA and John Cherian, Founder of enParadigm Solutions.
Confluence 2011 kicked off to a grand start this year with the inauguration attended by Prof. Samir Barua the Director of IIMA, Mr. Satish Pradhan, the Executive Vice President of Tata Group and Mr. Koushik Chatterjee, the CFO of Tata Steel. Mr. Pradhan in an inspiring talk spoke about the different definitions of excellence and said that excellence is not a standardized definition but also involves questioning rhetoric in order to be something different. To illustrate this, he asked whether a person would choose an extremely brilliant person who is not aligned with the policies of the company or on the other hand, an average individual who is a great fit for the company and has a high level of integrity. This is one of characteristic situations where excellence has to be rethought. He also criticized the current system of placements followed by most B-Schools likening them to a cattle auction and called for a more refined approach. Confluence today saw 2 speaker sessions and a host of inter B-School events. There were footfalls of 700 students and the Management Students Program (MSP) saw 475 registrations. The following were/ are the events conducted/ in progress today:
Speaker Sessions:
The morning session dealt with ‘Business Leadership and Excellence’ and saw 4 industry stalwarts giving examples of leadership from their own experiences. Mr. Ravishankar, the MD of Sequoia Capital spoke about an incremental innovation strategy where a company targets 1% growth per day as an innovative method of facilitating growth. Mr. Renny Thomas, partner, McKinsey noted how sustainable excellence is elusive and even high growth companies are unable to sustain this over the decades. Mr. Thirumambalam, the MD of Heinz spoke about his company’s culture while Mr. Vishal Mehta, the MD of Infibeam citied his company’s initiative ‘Build a Bazaar’ which helps entrepreneurs to build up their own stock of goods for retail. The session thus focused on deriving leadership lessons from inspirational companies.
The afternoon session had Mr. Rajan Anand, the MD of Google India engage the audience with his characteristic energy on technology trends and their implications for companies in the internet space. He identified trends such mobile internet, social networking, e-commerce and internet video as being the most important trends for any technology/ internet company to take advantage of. He also spoke of growing importance of vernacular websites and cloud computing. The discussion was extremely interesting and provided an excellent amount of information for persons interesting in entering the technology sphere.
Game-On
IIM A organized a unique, first of its kind event ‘Game-On’ this year. The prelims was a challenging Facebook game testing the memory, visual cognitive abilities and logical skills of the 350 teams vying for a spot in the finals. The six teams who made it to the finals include two teams from Great Lakes Institute of Management and one each from IIM Lucknow, SP Jain, SIBM- Pune and IIFT Kolkata who were pitted against each other in a series of exciting strategy board games.
Sumeet Saurav from IIM Lucknow had words of praise about the uniqueness and competitiveness of the event and felt that the military strategy board game that he was playing was really addictive.
Faiz Raza from Great Lakes Institute of Management who was playing a game which put the participants in the shoes of Stone Age men looking for ways to develop civilization given limited resources felt that the games were new and innovative and there was a good variety of students with healthy sportsman spirit.
National Business Olympiad
National Business Olympiad is a business simulation competition the prelims of which was conducted in various cities conducted across the country including Delhi, Bangalore, Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Indore, Pune, Gurgaon and Chennai. The semi-finals which is to be conducted on the 25th and 26th of November has fifty 3 member teams participating across two days where the participants own their own company and take decisions covering all aspects of the company including Marketing, Human Resources and Strategy. Each day represents 4 years of the company and at the end of the first day the shareholder’s value is announced to the teams. At the end of the second day the 8 teams with the highest shareholder’ value are selected for the finals which will be conducted on 27th November. The event will be starting at 9pm today.
CricEx
CricEx, a popular Strategy sphere event, had participants fighting out the prelims rounds wherein they were grilled on their trading and cricketing fundamentals. A total of 20 teams have been shortlisted for the finals tomorrow where the finalists would trade cricket players based on their past performances and other statistics. Each player will have a certain price attached to him and participants will be required to judiciously invest in players, the future performances of whom will determine their market prices in the future. This dynamic event will see the finalists in action tomorrow evening battling it out for the prize money worth INR 35,000.
Kings of Advertisements
A highly specialised event in the domain of marketing, Kings of Advertisements provided an opportunity to management students all over India to display their creative prowess to Infibeam, India’s online shopping platform. Participating teams were required to submit a comprehensive communication campaign for Infibeam.com including a print ad and a social media campaign. Out of 128 campaigns which came in, 18 teams made the cut for the finals, out of which IIM Trichy eventually bagged the first place. Visibly ecstatic, the team from
IIM Trichy, The Invincibles, said that they were extremely happy to get an opportunity to display their prowess in front of such a distinguished panel of judges. The second place went to the team from IIM Kozhikode and the third place went to the team from NMIMS. The hotly contested event saw prize money worth of INR 90,000 going to the finalists and winners.
Masterplan
Masterplan, the Business Plan competition of Confluence, has the highest prize for among all events for the winning team: INR 1 Lakh. 9 teams ,representing colleges like IIMB, IIML, IIMK, ISB, FMS, IMT Ghaziabad, Jamnalal Bajaj and IIMA, have qualified for the finals after 2 rounds of evaluation among 170 registrations. The finals are being judged by Mr. Prajakt Raut from ‘The Hatch’, an incubator for startups and entrepreneurs Mr. Shrikant Gokhale, Mr. MS Rao and Mr. Sanjay Anandaram. A finalist from ISB Hyderabad mentioned that ‘The judges grilled us really well and the experience of presenting to the panel was in itself a great value-add for us’. The finals of the this event will take place tomorrow.
Campaign for a Cause
The flagship public policy video making event, Campaign for a Cause, final round has started today with 5 teams presenting fictional/non-fictional videos made to underscore policy gaps and their unintended impact on the society. The teams Cause for Effect from MICA and Group D9+ from IIM A have made their presentations, while those from IIFMights (IIFM), Mavericks (IIM A) and SENTImetre (NID) are yet to take place. While Cause for Effect’s presentation titled ‘Victims of birth’ featured kids from a foundation showing how child labour was impacting the society and taking the best years of life away from innocent kids, Group D9+’s presentation was a non-fiction one highlighting how the Ahmedabad BRTS project had rendered several people homeless and had hurt the livelihood of roadside vendors and further underlined the importance of incorporating public opinion in matters that may directly or indirectly impact the economically weaker sections of the society. The event bearing a prize money of Rs. 1 lakh is being judged by Mr. Pankuj Parashar, a well known film and TV director, Prof. Avanish Kumar, Chairperson of Public Policy and Management department in MDI, Gurgaon, Mr. Stalin, a documentary filmmaker, media trainer and human right activist and Mr. Bharathan Kandaswamy, an IIM A alumnus and professor of Contemporary Film Industry course at IIM A.
Corporate Combat
Corporate Combat, a strategy simulation competition, is a flagship event at Confluence 2011. Over 500 participants from India’s top B-Schools registered for the event and were asked to design a growth strategy for a deal-of-the-day website. Teams of 3 from IIFT, IIML , FMS, NITIE and IIMA will be vying for INR 1 Lakh of prize money in the finals over the next 3 days. The judges for the event are Prof. Jayanth Verma, IIMA and John Cherian, Founder of enParadigm Solutions.