Mills and Goons.

The best few hours in a day in IIM-A are, quite counter-intuitively, the classes. The professors are extremely intelligent and immensely capable of forcing you to think the right way. This, they do through questions, interrogation, ragging, mockery and ridicule often bordering on the outrageous. Sometimes, you end up being the laughing stock of the class. But thats something the professors are especially fair about. Everyone gets his or her chance to be laughed at.

To give you a background of the case (its always a case) we were discussing today, there's this company whose mill in Indiana is old and overstaffed with people who arent exactly productivity gurus. This mill is running into heavy losses and is offsetting the profits the company makes in its other mills. The decision to be taken by the case actor is whether to spend a considerable sum of money to modernize the place or to shut it down, the dilemma in the latter option being the town's heavy dependence on the mill for its survival.

Of course, if there's some other innovative idea the class comes up with, it would be discussed and built upon.

Here's an excerpt from the discussion in the class. (I really really wish I could record the whole thing so that I can reproduce it all here. Now you will get to hear just a tiny fraction of it.)

Student A: Sir, the building at Indiana is five storeyed, whereas the mills at the other places are much smaller and hence more productive.

Sir: So, you are suggesting we chop off the top three floors.

(Scattered laughter)

Student A: No sir, we dont use all the floors for the operation. Maybe the other floors can be lent out and used to generate some other form of revenue.

Sir: Oh, you mean we open a restaurant on the fourth floor and a disco on the fourth floor so that all the people in the town come and dance ?

(Laughter)

Student B: But sir, we have to remember that the town is under economic depression. So it might not be possible to generate revenue like this.

Sir: Yeah, they are all depressed people. So how about this, lets get a psychiatrist there, and then all the depressed people can come in and seek counselling thereby generating revenue. We can also open a disco on the top floor and keep the depressed people happy. Indiana would be the only place in the United States where the depressed people are happy.

(A roar goes around the room. After the laughter's died down...)

Student C: Sir, the problem with this place is that the people are not productive. Every employee should be under vigil by their superiors and should be told that if they dont work they would be gone.

Sir: So, we should put a gun to the workers and say "Work, otherwise I will shoot you !" and the production will shoot up. (He points his forefinger at the temple of a student on the front row, and nearly startles him)

Student C: No, Sir..

Sir: Actually, it might work. If the labourer doesnt work, his supervisor will have to shoot him, and since the supervisor's boss would have a gun on the supervisor, he would have to shoot him as well, since there's no labourer to do the work. We might avoid the lay offs and get rid of the labour problem completely, without having to pay a dime by way of severance pay.

(Students take a while to recover.)

Student D: Sir, how about sending some of the people in this mill to the other mills which are doing well. They can get trained there and we would avoid the problem of lay offs too.

Sir: Hmm.. essentially you are proposing the parasite model. These are the people who have sucked the mill dry. And you want to send these people to the other healthy mills telling them, "Go to those healthy fat mills. They have a lot of blood. You can suck them to your hearts content". Ultimately, the bloodsuckers will suck the life out of every mill, drown the towns in depression and we can close down.

(This time, there's quite a gap before the student retorts. I am clutching my sides.)

Sir: You think, the other mills will accept such people ?

Student D: No Sir, those people can be given some time, in which they can be monitored and if they arent good, the management of those mills can fire them.

Sir: Oh, this is even better. Instead of killing the parasites ourselves, we export the parasites, export depression and then let those people kill them. Thereby we solve all the problems.

(Another uproar, and this time the noise culminates in a uniform thumping of desks. The point of the day, however, is yet to come.)

Student E: Sir, why dont we sell everything to a competitor ?