Week 6: More parties than assignments

This week had more number of activities planned that were beyond the boundaries of class and the business school. After the flurry of assignments we had last week, this week was bit relaxing with just two assignments in line to be submitted.

Week began with the Restructuring class where we discussed about the companies in bankruptcy, status of financial & economic distress. Eurofood and United Airlines were the two extreme cases discussed with respect to the Chapter 11 filing.


Branding class had discussion mainly concentrated around the branding myths associated with Harley and how the mass culture interpretations of the outlaw biker world built Harley’s identity value. The second part of the class discussed about the "FUSE" music channel and its brand promotion by mocking MTV’s bourgeois tastes and making use of provocative point-of-view commenting on contemporary American Society. Fuses Beach House campaign and the Fuse Uncensored got the ball rolling for the channel with increase in viewer ratings and more and more national advertisers pooling in. Towards the end came in the shocker in terms of the assignment that we had to submit today. In a country, within a category pick 3 brands. For those 3 brands, pick two commercials of each that reflect brand building and not promotion, and then do a critique analysis contrasting against what we have learned in last three classes. Ten pages to be written for ten percent of the grades.


Project Portfolio class had less of my interest that day especially because we discussed a case about a technology company based on our last weeks understanding about categorizing projects under different segments and prioritizing them.


The best for the day was saved till the end with the movie show planned for the night with 4 of my friends. The number grew to 15 by the time we reached the theater for the "Pirates of the Caribbean". In a nutshell I enjoyed the break from studies but the movie did not live up to the expectations I had from it. Ok, lets' put it in simple words, it was horrible.


Tuesday, my Corporate Valuation group sat down to finish the assignment on Royal Mail due Thursday. Puneet, Vijoy, Chad and I dig deeper to find what all could be deducted from their enterprise value of £10 billion to get their equity value. Saptarshi later joined us in finding the market beta for Royal Mail. It was a tough assignment and required due dilligence rather than calculations to justify our answers.


Wednesday, was the day for Supply Chain and Store management in Retailing class. Ben Gordon, the CEO of "Mothercare" talked about the operational aspects and the problems he had to take care of when he joined Mothercare. Thereafter, it was a dinner at the "Hertford College" where along with some 20 other guests I was invited to by Andrew, Simon and Swapan. It was a fun filled night starting at Kings Arms, moving on to Hertford for dinner and then the Hertford Bar to the Turf Tavern before ending at the Merton Bar late night.


Thursday wass a quite day with me procrastinating most of the day and finding the two commercials for my B&C assignment. Later that night we celebrated Andrew Bergbaum's birthday.


Friday was the day for the Great Gatsby Ball at Templeton College. Most of the MBA guys joined the summer party organized at Templeton to which I paid my first visit ever. After the initial drinks and dinner, focus shifted to the after-party for loads of dancing and more drinking that lasted probably till early in the morning. All the photos from the event are here.


Saturday, I finally found a couple of interesting ads for Cadillac to write about in the paper. The two ads I used were for Cadillac CTS 2008 and Cadillac V-series.


Sunday went into updating my resume, doing research for some jobs and talking to old buddies over phone. A partial rest day watching some TV-shows online and enjoying the warm sunny afternoon in Oxford.


Good Night and Good Luck!!!