Baseball Philippines

Hey All,

I'm gonna deviate a bit from bhavisha generated content to publishing something that I'm very inspired by. An alumnus from AIM worked on a thesis report to establish an MLB (Major League Baseball)-esque format in the Philippines called Baseball Philippines.

I actually think very few people in the world are fortunate to find something they are passionate about and Leslie Suntay the proponent in the Baseball Philippines MRR is one such person... he has the guts to follow through with taking his passion and turning it into something that has the potential to bind the whole country... SPORT! it takes a lot of courage to establish a circuit like the one he's set up... especially in an age where people are looking to secure themselves only through monetary means... by no means am I saying that Baseball Philippines is not capable of generating huge returns... quite the contrary... sports is a big market.. in India it's almost a 1900 crore market!

So here's how Leslie ventured into Baseball Philippines:

"With a bit of divine luck and perseverance, matched with a desire to pursue what excites you will more often result into something special; my story is only one of the many in Baseball Philippines that helped pursue a common dream for baseball that led to the creation of the only existing premier baseball league in the capital today. In 2003, my road began by helping organize an open amateur league for “weekend warriors” called the Titans baseball club, where from four teams it grew to eight all due to the clamor for more tournaments. The next challenge was to cater to a good number of players to want a Class “A” league. This prompted me to seek the help of sports gurus with a common passion that led to Baseball Philippines Pilot Series last May 2007. The work has never stopped then and what was once a simple dream has brought the game to our live radio coverage and select games shown in our very own television sets. I’m glad to be a part of something that makes me and many others happy, as the saying from the classic movie goes…”if you build it…they will come.’"

Travelogues - Day 0

I forgot to mention in my earlier post that the 4 of us were travelling to Vietnam and Cambodia (originally Laos too, altho' I've boycotted Laos now) after completing our Term 3 at the Asian Institute of Management. After our trip we were all headed back home (India) for our internships... so obviously we had a lotta luggage to take back.. now this is the crappiest thing for budget travellers... so we had to pay a lil extra for more allowance on Tiger Airways and it wasn't so bad... but instead of going straight to Ho Chi Minh City, we had to goto Singapore to drop off our luggage at our friend's cousin's place! Phew!

One crazy trip!

GOMCHA - Google Online Mktng Challenge!

I took up a really interesting elective this sem - Online Marketing. Its an AdWords based contest being run by Google worldwide and thru this elective, students are participating in it. So obviously it becomes a live project I can show that I've been working on and more than that, its in a really hot field - digitial marketing!

So what is this whole adwords concept?

Almost every company has a website today. To market the website they can bid for certain keywords which when typed in google show a landing page of that website in the search. Depending on the number of people who visit the website through the keyword search, the company's adword account gets debited by the bid amount*no of individual users.

I think its a great marketing platform and since its in the nascent stage today, expertise acquired to a marketeer would be a humongous boost.

My interest in sports made me choose a sports site for this project - Philippines Baseball. What excites and frightens me is that even though it's online marketing, my team has to study the business model and the market for target customers Philippines Baseball subject to parameters of internet usage! That's like a whole business strategy definition, analysis and recomendation! Very overwhelming at this point of time... but I'm also looking forward to it.

Money flows

Wow! It's been almost 3 months since my last post... I guess the DE project that my team and me had in mind about blogging made easy didn't let me post so regularly... anyway.. details about that in another post...

2 days back I had a case study on (RED) - the organization co-founded by Bono to fight AIDS in Africa. It's such a fantastic concept.. brilliant business model and strategy to make social development a profitable exercise! I don't agree that fighting disease, poverty etc have to be done on a purely philantropic basis...If there's profit to be made and not just charity to be doled out, it becomes easier for more people to get involved... and stay involved!

While discussing the case, we spoke about how helping out in social causes allows an individual to differentiate himself from the rest by adding / showing an additional personality dimension! As Prof. Cruz (our marketing prof) said... if money no longer is the differentiating status symbol, sensitivity, social development can do that for you!

What he says is so true because the true nature of charity is to just donate your money without creating a media buzz about it right... it's great that there's money being set aside by corporate greats such as Bill Gates & Warren Buffet but if we were to take the above mentioned argument forward, that philantrophy is a status symbol - then it amuses me to think.... that corporates who have been accused of exploting resources in the past to make billions are now being exploited to give back to society through things like CSR, status differentiation! I guess karmic theory is at work here ... money is but a form of energy exchange which needs to keep flowing!

Chai Biskut - a steaming success

I've been MIA for a week coz of the walkabout... it was cccraaazzzzyyyyy........ my partners and me were running a full fledged business... almost a restaurant! but it was fantastic... stretched me to the limit with all the college work and moreso the running of the tea stall..

Pre-event publicity consisted of:

• Print media
• Web 2.0 usage - emails, social networking sites like facebook, youtube, videos
• Word of mouth publicity...

Since we'd generated alot of hype, personally I was really anxious about how we'd manage the crowd on the first day... I'd never made tea in such large batches before... a part of me was actually hoping not too many people turn up... but even before we opened shop there was a throng of samosa hungry and tea thirsty people...

what was awesome was that so many people turned up to sample our products and support us in our walkabout....

there were alotta people who didn't know it was our walkabout and since we were doing it for the first time ever and had very limited resources our service was a bit slow... a student from the MDM batch actually thought we were running this as a vocation a la Jessica (the Indian food caterer) and told us off for taking time to serve him his tea...

our classmates helped out quite a bit.. I cannot even begin to explain how crazy the first one and a half hours were... I think I mustve made about 70-80 cups of tea and we sold about 120 samosas... all fried right there....

after that when we took a break and people complimented us on the food, tea and the ambience it felt so great!!!! and that's when I realized something... in an earlier post 'dignity of labour' I'd mentioned 'chottu' chai wala who serves 'cutting chai' by the roadside always with a smile on his face...I could kinda identify with his level of flow coz it feels great to be able to make something, even as mundane as tea, and have people appreciate it... not through words but through their expressions!

This walkabout (although it was more a business venture) has been such a fantastic learning experience... we actually used demand forecasting, accounts maintaing, marketing strategies (of course), experience creation through the ambience. Moreso, we even experiemented with our menu and came to an emperical understanding of what the best business model for the stall... the primary purpose was to conduct a feasibility study to demonstrate the profitability of the venture and I'm happy to say that we reached the best product mix and strategy to make the Indian Tea Stall a profitable venture on campus.

The walkabout got over yesterday and throughout the latter half of last week we kept getting requests to extend the dates... even today people haven't stopped requesting us to serve chai and samosas... in fact some of the seniors jokingly said that they'd take this up as a career option...

I've always maintained that I want to run a restaurant sometime in the future and our venture actually exposed me first hand to what situations I will face when I do so, albeit on a much larger scale... for starters.. I've really learnt to appreciate the good sense in clearly... and by clearly I mean explicitly... defining the firm strategy and more importantly sticking to it...

Conflicts are inevitable and there were a few times all of us (partners) didn't agree on things... I can happily report that we managed to resolve all differences amicably and had a good time doing the same...

Sourcing the raw materials was a great experience... I always thought that when it came to all those nitty-gritties I would buckle and wouldn't be able to go through with such boring activities but it was a plesant surprise looking for deals... looking for places to source the cheapest but best quality items...

Sustainance was another facet I uncovered... I was apprehensive about being able to sustain my enthusiasm and commitment beyond the first couple of days especially because we had limited capital and had lots of variable costs everyday... (fresh raw materials) which had to be taken care of...

Beyond all the visible aspects, maintainence was another area we had to take care of... start the shop before time... have stuff ready, clean up after the shop shut... all of these were extremely taxing coz after standing - whether facing a mob of customers, behind a stove making batches of tea or frying samosas which never seemed to satisfy the demands - for hours we had to clean up the place, wash the utensils and keep things ready for the next day....

My god... what a rush... I loved it... it tired every muscle and more in my body... but it's been a great experience... somehow my self-confidence too has gotten a boost!

Chai Biskut Promo

Have a lookie...

Chai Biskut and more

I feel like we're passing through a weird time-space warp... sometimes time speeds up and sometimes it just stands still... last week was quite hectic moreso coz we had to work out the nitty-gritties of our walkabout - the indian tea stall - christened 'Chai Biskut'.

I was super excited when we thought up the concept, totally oblivious to the fact that what we wanted to undertake was going to be super tough....

Why tough...

well for starters... we, at least me, are broke...

on top of that... milk, the second chief ingredient of our product - chai - is frickin expensive...

third... we're running the stall, very happily, for seven days... I have this nagging worry about the sustainability of our stall...

Due to the budget constraint, we've had to scrap some of our marketing ideas and make do with what resources we have at our disposal....

Well, we managed to figure out where to get what from and have gotten some pretty good deals... more importantly, we've managed to create a buzz on campus about our stall to the extent that everyday, everywhere we go people have started asking us for chai... I've gotten sick of telling them over and over again that it starts on Monday and not before that....

We did a trial run today... initially I was very excited and volunteered to make the first batch... Amit Mathur, our senior at college and a dear friend, agreed to be our tea taster... So I wen ahead and made the chai .... AND IT WAS DISGUSTING!!!

the sugar was whimsical... not matter how much I added the other stuff the sugar kept overpowering every other ingredient !!!

We threw away the batch and Rachna made the next one... it turned out great! In Amit's words, we found our gourmet tea brewer... so we decided to go ahead with Rachna's recepie and Shibani made the next batch... it turned out really good... I went next... petrified what my nemesis, the sugar, would do to my rendition of a good recepie... suprisingly the tea turned out good...

Now you'd think that all of this would've taken about 45 mins to an hour tops.... but we were at this for 2 and a half hours!!! That's when I realized how difficult our next 7 days are going to be.... To be serving an institute full of expectant people tea till 2 AM when we take about 30 minutes to brew a batch is a very daunting proposition!!! Although, in our defense its not the brewing that takes time but the washing coz currently there is no facility next to our stall.. tomorrow we're going to have to work that out....

I'm also worried about standing next to an open stove in the heat (AIM's spoilt us by providing us with round-the-clock AC facilities) for 7 hours!

God help me!

Chai Stall taking shape

This evening, after our third consecutive day of shopping for our chai stall, we started work on the buzz creating aspect.

But before I move onto that.... I'm amazed at how I've been working on handling this tea stall. I'm usually the kind of person who gets excited about an idea and then moves onto another idea or squanders away my energy. This process has always been on auto-pilot.

But with the tea stall ... I want to take it step by step and work on chunks of it or as MBA jargon would call it ... on functional areas (ahem).

I've been making lists (which I never make.. my mom would be so proud of me... she cried herself hoarse telling me to make lists)... I've been categorizing ... inventory, raw materials, assets, supplies!!!

The funny part is when I did that, I did it as a joke, but realized that categorizing it in that fashion actually made things easier and also made it recallable.

There's a sort of discipline thats gotten into my system (I just hope I haven't spoken too soon)

Anyway... coming back to the stall taking shape... we made our promo material... (will put it up by tomorrow or day after latest). The promo was suppossed to be made in secrecy but with the number of people all over AIM, you can imagine how difficult that was... add to that the attention grabing super kallan! I walked down with it and everybody started asking us if we were going to make chai! Then we needed a power outlet which wasn't available at our venue i.e. behind the SA store (Parasol garden I think it's called) and we ended up creating quite an unwanted 'buzz' with carrying the power points available in the dorm lobby to the cafe area... (it looked like I was taking a weird creature on a walk and with the cord wrapped all around me it looked more like the creature was taking me for a walk).

Finally we managed to diffuse the attention we'd generated and got our work done... it was so much of fun...

It felt best when people started telling us why don't you start you tea stall earlier... now itself!

Did I mention that the super kallan makes the tea stall sound like an authentic Indian tea stall ... I was supremely happy when we lit it today!

The countdown begins!

In exactly five days we run our week long walkabout - the Indian tea stall. (I'm writing as though I haven't mentioned it before in case there are readers who haven't gone thru' my prior posts... shame on you!)

Anyway, altho' I usually hate planning and making lists... doing all of that for this project has been alot of fun... I think it helps that the huge green-board in our dorm is my paper substitute. However, I have switched to more portable list-worthy apparatus. :)

Usually we're pretty bogged down by work and don't really get out of the campus much... but thanks to sourcing stuff for our walkabout - right from raw materials to (capital) assets (read Super Kallan ... our much-in-demand stove) we've been around Luzon quite a bit... first we went to Libertad - Pasay, then Baktikan Street and tomorrow we'll probably have to make a trip to UN Avenue and in the middle of all of this we gotta find slates and hay!

We've managed to get some decorative objects to Indianify our stall FOR FREE from our supplier...

So right now our room has a Super Kallan, an electric frier and raw materials... come tomorrow, it'll be filled with hay, fairy lights, et al... thankfully we have really supportive roomies...

I'll keep you posted! Watch this space for breaking news featuring exclusively our tea stall!

Walkabout Update

It's one thing to decide on the walkabout topic but its another thing altogether executing it...it's been alot of fun brainstorming about how we'll decorate our tea stall - but we realized that we couldnt really go bezerk with our costs and big picture people that we are... you can imagine how restricted we felt. And then came the arguments... could we include blah blah... lets also have yada yada... what should we call our tea stall?

The interesting part is.. I usually avoid conflicts at all costs... don't really like them too much... but while figuring out all this stuff with my fellow walkaboutees, I realized that conflicts are over-rated in the sense... people avoid them coz they (I) feel relations could sour or nothing of value will come out of it. Maybe its what I read in our HBO 'Conflict Management' class - "Polite conversations lead to polite solutions" that has changed the anti-conflictness in me. It's actually fun to see things from somebody else's perspective and when I say see things I mean understand where they're coming from, once you've gotten past the defensive stage...

So to cut the long story short...we've successfully managed to reach consensus on what we're going to have at our very own tea-stall here at AIM and also managed to agree on a name!

Now comes the execution... as long as its not our execution, it's all good...!

Uncertainty displaced

The world is pretty arbitrary... Quite often I find myself feeling disconnected with what I've learnt and what I see... most things, when you study about them in theory, seem pretty grandiose and oh so simple... but it's the Murphiness in life that disconnects reality from theory...

However, personally for me, the qualitative subjects here at AIM have exposed me to a more realistic perspective of things... not just postulates that ought to work...

Today especially I feel that there are absolutely no certainties with anything and its probably foolish to expect them to ever be there... I don't think it's possible to learn enough to know anything for certain... and I think it's a huge thing for me to digest and come to terms with...

Strangely, it feels good to realize this.

AIM Diwali 2008 Celebrations

Last friday we celebrated Diwali at the Asian Institute of Management... Shailaja, Rachna, whom I fondly call Rakhans La, Lambi and lotsa variations of those words, and me stayed up till 3 AM friday morning making chottu (small) diyas to stick on all the dorm doors. At 3:15 - esque we decided to stick diyas on the professors cabins... was awesome fun... the place is so huge we actually got lost a couple of times... and all of this while the Diwali Taash (cards) session was going on in college (which we obviously missed)

Come AIM Diwali day and our entire dorm, 311, was performing 'Bollywood through the ages'... I'm not usually the dance on stage kinda person but it was a dorm-mate's walkabout and so lots of us from class performed....

Hats off to Shailaja who made sure we came for practice, casework or no casework, decoration or no decoration work. She's a fabulous dancer but she'd never choreographed before and made the Diwali performances her walkabout... After going through what she did, I realized had I been in her place, I'd have probably given up and picked another walkabout topic... getting everybody, including the exchange students, to come for practice was quite a task... the best part was that inspite of everybody's nakhras (tantrums) she kept plodding on....

I was pretty worried about performing coz the songs she was making me dance to arn't normally the kind of songs I'd dance to and so I had a drink or two before I went on... it was so much of fun... the show went off pretty well and of course Shailaja won everybody's hearts.