The Annual International Business Summit held at IIM Ahmedabad - Confluence Day 3
The closing day of Confluence 2014 saw a number of interesting sessions carrying forward the theme of developing a blueprint for Indian renaissance. The speaker sessions and competitive events saw enthusiastic participation from the students and some interesting discussions about various topics in marketing, policy, strategy and operations.
The first speaker was Mr. Mark Pierce, the Australian Consulate-General, who spoke about partnership opportunities between India and Australia. He spoke about the strengths of Australia and its potential to become an energy superpower. He elucidated opportunities for Indian students in Australia and urged students to think well about their career choices and invest in their future. He also assuaged fears about discrimination against Indian students in Australia, highlighting the student associations created to support Indian students, awareness campaigns and the strict law enforcement measures to punish offenders involved in racist activities.
The second speaker of the day was Lt General Shekatkar, who has served in the Indian Army for four decades and co-authored twelve books on security and terrorism. In his talk on entering the geo-political, geo-strategic and geo-economic world of the 21st century, Mr. Shekatkar highlighted the 21st century trends in information explosion and media dominance which has led to the creation of knowledgeable soldiers with a gamut of technological and informational tools at their disposal. He also spoke about global strategic mega-trends such as the movement in the centre of gravity of the world towards the Asia-Pacific, and the shift from geo-political considerations to geo-economic ones dictating current geo-strategy, and the need for India to be updated and in step with the trends to be competitive in the changing global security landscape. He ended with a call to the students to have faith in themselves, their organization, their cause and their nation, to ensure that India achieves its goals with respect to combating the new-age security challenges that it faces.
The third speaker was Mr Aarif Aziz, GM- Human Resources at GE India Technology Centre. Mr Aziz talked about the themes driving GE and the factors which made it competitive. He spoke about the importance of technology being a differentiator for companies and the necessity for having a vision and a purpose for all technological advancements. He solicited opinions from the audience about the roles of a leader in the face of changing customer behaviours and the influence of communities on individual customers' decisions. He also spoke of the problems of inertia toward change that large organizations face, and the need of the hour to be competitive by using big data and reaching out to customers. He concluded by urging students to show humility and consideration for others in their dealings in the business sphere.
The final session was a panel discussion on sports management, moderated by Professor Sanjeev Tripathi, who teaches a course on sports marketing at IIMA. The first speaker was the renowned sports journalist Mr. Ayaz Memon, who has written for periodicals such as The Times of India and Sportsweek. Mr Memon explored the attributes of sports, such as valor and integrity, which lure people into following sports, and the tendency of sportspersons to live life on the edge. He talked about the importance of sports as a way to develop the soft power of the nation and the need to dissolve barriers to encourage greater participation of women in sports. He also took the audience through the finances and operations of the global sports management industry, and highlighted the numerous opportunities for building a career in the changing sports landscape, through talent development, marketing and public-private partnerships with the government.
The second speaker in the panel discussion was Mr. Varun Mathur of Nimbus Sports, India's largest sports management company. Mr Mathur spoke about his passion for sports driving his career choices and about the basic human instincts that drive people towards sports. He highlighted the importance of sports towards developing an active, healthy lifestyle, and emphasised on the sports industry being a sunrise sector in India, with enormous growth potential over the next decade. He concluded with examples of companies such as the Emirates and Samsung, which have used sports to enable them to enter and develop a following in new markets such as UK and USA.
Other events through the day included AdQuotient, where participants had to develop an ad campaign, Talk the Sale which tested the participants' pitching skills and the case study challenge GE Genius. The day ended with Confluence's flagship open quiz, BizQuizzitive, with prize money of 1 lakh, organized by Mr. Kunal Savarkar, who was content editor for popular quizzing shows like Kaun Banega Crorepati and Croma Tech Grandmasters.
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