mbawithme

#wharton #rollercoasterride

[mbawithme-blog]

In the class on managerial decision making this semester, I have read a lot of chapters from this book and it's amazing to learn about so many little things which can improve our lives and help us be better managers and leaders. I highly recommend the book. The chapter on the power of context is particularly interesting. 

[mbawithme-blog]

A good framework to think about mobile app marketing. Here's the full article.

[lecloud]

Scalability for Dummies - Part 1: Clones

Just recently I was asked what it would take to make a web service massively scalable. My answer was lengthy and maybe it is also for other people interesting. So I share it with you here in my blog and split it into parts to make it easier to read. New parts are released on a regular basis. Have fun and your comments are always welcomed!

The other parts of the series “Scalability for Dummies" you can (soon) find here.

Part 1 - Clones

Public servers of a scalable web service are hidden behind a load balancer.  This load balancer evenly distributes load (requests from your users) onto your group/cluster of  application servers. That means that if, for example, user Steve interacts with your service, he may be served at his first request by server 2, then with his second request by server 9 and then maybe again by server 2 on his third request. 

Read More

[mbawithme-blog]

Are you an Extrovert!

The first class you take as a full-time MBA student at Wharton is a course on Teamwork and Leadership. You learn what makes leaders and teams effective AND you work in a team to run an electric car company via a simulation. Being thrown in an environment where you are forced to look at data and make decisions is a fun way to learn quickly!

Since I missed this class last year, I took it this time with the incoming class of 2016. We were taught by a charismatic and young professor Samir Nurmohamed who unraveled interesting research data on leadership and team skills. What I found most interesting are the five personality traits that make successful leaders. Rating yourself on these scales could be a good exercise in self awareness:

Extraversion

Conscientiousness

Agreeableness

Emotional Reactivity

Openness

You can find them here too more details.

[mbawithme-blog]

Willkommen bei Amazon!

[mbawithme-blog]

SEATAC Bound

I haven't been writing for a few months now and there's so much that has happened that I do not know where to begin! In a nutshell, the second semester at Wharton was dance studio, 70s parties and a good project on Tesla.

On May 17th, I landed in Seattle - a gorgeous little town (not so little actually) with lakes, mountains, gluten-free food, naked bike-rides and hipster bars. It's been over 10 weeks now and I have enjoyed every bit of the kayaking, trekking and the weekend festivals.

Amazon's been a very unique experience compared to any of my work projects in the past. Leadership principles, do-it-yourself projects and data queries have been pretty much governed my internship. The most exciting parts - learning about the company culture, witnessing the launch of the Fire Phone, meeting really cool people from other schools and all the drone jokes. I work in Supply Chain as a Product Manager and have been studying same-day delivery - that's the future, watch out!

Will write more soon.

[mbawithme-blog]

[mbawithme-blog]

Global Immersion Programs

I spent two weeks this winter break showing my 35+ classmates a glimpse of India. As a cordinator of a study program called the India Global Immersion Program (GIP), we visited Mumbai, Bangalore, Delhi and Agra, met corporations, govt. bodies and non-profits, did a lot of sight-seeing and learnt and talked about the Indian economy, business and culture. I have never traveled so much with a large group of people and this experience was intense and exciting!

Every year, Wharton organizes GIP treks to four regions - India, China, Middle East and South America and I hope to do another one as a participant.

[mbawithme-blog]

5S - It's been fun playing with the new iPhone. I am trying to move my entire digital life to the phone and push myself to do everything on the phone be it reading, studying, emails, videos, lectures, small tests and assignments, storage, document collaboration, video chatting, hang outs and more. Let's see how that goes!

[mbawithme-blog]

eBay Now

A one hour delivery service for a variety of products available in five cities in the US - that's what eBay Now is! In a marketing course this semester called "Customer Behavior", we had to choose a problem eBay Now is facing (user acquisition, experience on the website, ordering, delivery, pricing, etc.), conduct a study and come up with recommendations. We had several conversations with the eBay Now team over the course of this semester to understand the service better and it was super exciting to learn how mobile and fast delivery is changing the online retail industry. Just to give you a sense of it, eBay did $20bn worth of sales on mobile this year (50% year on year growth) and this number is growing rapidly!

eBay started Now to compete with Amazon Prime, Google Shopping Express and the likes. With their recent purchase of Shutl, eBay Now will be expanding to 24 cities early next year and with Amazon talking about drones, this market is surely getting super heated up.

[mbawithme-blog]

Snow storm in Philadelphia - winter's here!

[mbawithme-blog]

Waking up to snow was on my bucket list and I checked it today. We finish the last day of classes on Tuesday and the exam week begins this coming Friday. I fly back to India for the winter break which includes visiting home and leading a trek of Wharton students to Mumbai, Bangalore and Delhi. We will visit companies, learn about their businesses, meet alumni and recent admits and do local sight seeing through the trip! This program called the GIP organizes four treks every year  to different parts of the world (India, Middle East, China and South America) and it’s quite an experience. I am so looking forward to it.

[mbawithme-blog]

Innovation Matrix

This is an exercise I did in the Innovation course this semester where we worked on an idea in a team and used the ‘Innovation Matrix’ framework to think of complimentary innovations that can fuel an entire ecosystem around a product or a service. It’s super powerful and very useful for early stage entrepreneurs or anyone thinking of launching a new product! Here’s the link.

[mbawithme-blog]

Poor quality is generally not the result of inefficient workers but poor process design! #operations101 #toyota #Heijunka

[mbawithme-blog]

Locust Walk at UPenn is lit up with beautiful tree lights during winter. It gets dark around 5 pm local time and walking through this street is an evening pleasure.

[mbawithme-blog]

One degree and freezing

It's getting cold. I woke up to a mild snow fall yesterday! How does that change my life? Coffee gets cold as soon as you walk out of the cafe! It's super windy and walking to campus is no longer a fun ride! We need new winter clothes and soon shoes to walk on snow! All seating across restaurants and bars is mostly indoors now! Less number of people on the streets - can be scary sometimes! It gets dark around 5! 

This will only get worse as temperatures fall over the next few weeks. As an international student, this is a "stretch experience" for me as a lot of other things like dressing up for Halloween! That reminds me of pumpkin. It's in everything here! Pumpkin beer, Pumpkin spice latte, Pumpkin pie and so on. Pumpkin is native to North America and widely grown for commercial use. 

[mbawithme-blog]

Give and Take - Adam Grant