CAPABILITY BUILDING SERVICES
So, what happened after I got selected into Mckinsey?
I think for a fraction of a second, I felt some sort of momentary joy after I got the news that I was selected. But the whole experience was super-overwhelming and the trauma I went through to reach to that point was very deep. I was just lucky to have been selected by Mckinsey. If it was another interviewer, I might not have been selected as well.
But what I want you to focus on is my mental state. The deep trauma I went through, the stress I was put through all of it together made me feel very empty and lost. I went back to the area where everyone was seated and I was given an applause since people heard what I did. I couldn’t feel happy at a very deep level. It was as if my senses became numb and slowly I started questioning “Why did I have to go through such a super stressful experience despite having a stellar profile?” I wanted an answer to this and I was sure I will not be able to rest without finding an answer to this question.
A lot of disturbing thoughts haunted me. It was afternoon on Day 0. I quickly went for a beer with a friend of mine just to take my mind off these thoughts. I came back to campus and placements were still going on. I decided that I will put in my maximum infinite effort to get myself back into my old state because I felt my sense of self was lost
My friends were struggling for shortlists. They were finding it hard to prepare for interviews. Somewhere I could see myself in them, subjected to a wrong system which no one whomsoever seemed to care about correcting. So, I sat with a few friends and helped them prepare. I was able to motivate them and create positive energy in them and seeing that, my empty feeling started reducing. I started to feel sparks of happiness. That was the start of a long road ahead.
The more I helped my friends, it seemed like the positive energy I was creating in them was feeding back into me and making me happy. And the depths to which my happiness got destroyed was too much that I decided that I’ll help all my batchmates together so that my happiness levels increases.
That night, I spent a few hours writing down my approach to crack interviews and tried to motivate my friends through my words. I sent the blog to my section mates and from there, I understood that it reached the entire batch. If you want to truly deeply understand my thinking at that time, you should read that blog post. It has some elements of my core theory written in it. I would strongly recommend reading it.
Blog post to Motivate my batchmates
It’ll take you an extra 15 minutes to read it, but you’ll appreciate a lot more. In case you’re not planning to go through this blog post, I’m just posting some comments that have come on that blog post over the years. I’ve also put pasted the screenshot of a testimonial from a friend of mine who read the blog. This testimonial was collected as part of analysis for a psychology related course in my 4th trimester.
So, I sent the blogpost to everyone. Next day, placements continued and a lot of my batchmates came to me and hugged me for writing that blog. They said it helped them find that internal motivation to crack their interviews. I was obviously happy. Their positive energy had fed back into me, creating positive energy in me and making me happy. And this was done at a full batch level. So I felt happier as compared to just individually helping out a few friends.
I thought I could go back to relaxing. I was walking around the campus listening to music. Placements were still happening. I thought the blog would help me find peace of mind. But the momentary spike in happiness again dipped and I started feeling empty and super disturbed again. I started feeling like I’m losing myself. I can’t explain what I was going through. Imagine you have your child close to you and some external force is pushing your child far away from you and you don’t seem to be able to do anything about it. The child equivalent here is myself. I seemed to be losing myself and couldn’t seem to do anything about it.
At some point, I decided that “Enough is enough. I’m going to do something about it” and looked at the immediate problem that I was facing. For some reason, I could feel the stress of all the previous IIM B batches who went through the same messed up placements process. I also could deeply feel the pain of the future batches of IIM B students who would be subjected to the same corrupt process.
Long story short, I thought I’ll try to solve the problems of students in terms of placements at IIMB by myself. No body seemed to care to solve it. Someone has to solve. It. I felt I was intelligent enough to attack this problem. And finally, I formulated the problem like a business case. I assumed that after putting all this effort and reaching the Mckinsey interview, if the interviewer asks the question “Your client is IIM Bangalore. Client wants you to revamp their placement process. There is massive student dissatisfaction. This is leading to IIM B students not referring the campus to other students who end up going for better options like B Schools abroad. You need to figure out a strategic solution for the client”
When I framed it this way, I didn’t see any reason why I couldn’t solve this. My approach to solve this was simple – “Put in infinite effort. Until I figure out a solution, I will keep on thinking about it”. This led to me not sleeping for the next couple of days. I wouldn’t take you through the different solutions I thought of. The final solution is suggested is the following and has 2 parts
- Dream Job – Every student coming into IIMB needs to have 1 guaranteed interview with 1 company of their choice no matter what. This will make sure that people coming into campus, even if they’re from a Tier 3 college background have atleast one shot. Now, what is happening is although both the Tier 1 and Tier 3 student has passed the same admission bar criteria, the Tier 1 college student is again getting preference. A friend of mine who had a super fancy job offer from the US (He was a tier 3 college computer science graduate) decided to come to IIMB for his MBA. But he got trashed during placements. So as a minimum requirement I felt that the dream job option guarantees students of 1 shot atleast. There are practical considerations here. For a batch of 400 students, that would mean that the campus needs to arrange for a maximum of 400 more interviews which is not very practical. And if this is done in one campus, it will have to be done across campuses which makes it even less practical. But I felt that these interviewers are also people. Assume the child of an interviewer falls sick during an admission exam and doesn’t get into a Tier 1 college. Doesn’t that person deserve a second chance? And the current system doesn’t account for that. I felt that this is doable but when I discussed with a lot of my friends, they debated and I agree that there could be different points of view on this. Hence, you can drop this part of the solution. But the second part of the solution is the important part
- Setting up of Capability Building Service: The idea of my blogpost was very simple but had deep impact. I felt that as a system, IIMB does not provide a holistic motivational platform to energize students. When we come to campus, we’re told that you’re all adults, you need to have figured out what you want to do with your career – whether it be marketing, finance etc. The whole point of coming to campus was to figure this out. But there is no dedicated platform that enables discovery of careers. There is of course the academic part which is heavily grades focused. But before our summer placements, we would have done just 1 course in each field and that is simply not enough information to decide on a career. You’ll need to talk to professionals across multiple sectors and make an informed choice. There is no form of motivation provided by the campus SYSTEMICALLY just like what my blog did. So, I recommended setting up of a department which I call Capability Building Services (CBS). This needs to be added to the org chart of IIMB. The function of this department would be to be a motivational powerhouse and super-charging students to face life. There obviously be a cost to setup this department. IIMB would have to pay salaries for the employees in this department, the preparatory material etc. will have to be designed. But think of the long term benefits! Parents sending their children to IIMB would know for a fact that their kids will be molded to face life. Hence, I assumed that parents will be willing to bear this extra cost of a few lakhs where they’re already paying a substantial fee. So, the incremental cost on parents would be less is what I thought.
So in summary, I felt that this is an organizational design management problem and it can be solved if IIMB management is ready to put in the effort.
Now, I wanted feedback on my solution. So I went to a few of my friends. Almost all of them agreed for the need of a CBS department. But there was huge debate on the dream job front. People also said that how can the mindset of people who do the shortlisting be changed? They would still prefer students from Tier 1 colleges in their companies. This was a live case where the rich were getting richer and the poor were getting poorer. In between summer placements, I got into heated debate with my friends who got placed. Long story short, I realized there was a larger societal problem at play. The reality of rich gets richer, poor gets poorer so far never bothered me. I thought it was somebody else’s problem. I felt bad for the poor and did help people out. But beyond that, I never felt that it was my problem to solve.
But now, to convince my friends that my theory will work out practically, I had to convince them that it is possible to change the fundamental mindsets of people who shortlist candidates. It became a real problem for me. You probably don’t relate to this because you cannot imagine the stress I went through because of IIMB’s corrupt placement process. And I didn’t want to lose myself in the process. So, I decided that if I ever were to get my old self back, I now need to solve the problem of changing everyone’s mindset. And that’s a larger societal problem. If I could change the mindset of interviewers and people who shortlist candidates so that they give a fair shot to all candidates, then I might as well try to solve the larger problem in society of inequality. One thing led to another – I was no where ready to give up. Finally, I landed on a new larger much more complicated problem statement of solving for world peace/happiness. That sounds abstract and impossible. Yes, I know that. But if I had to come out of my deep trauma, I just had to atleast attempt solving this problem. Instead of thinking of this as an abstract problem, I gave it a structure. I imagined myself in front of my Mckinsey interviewer and he asking me a live unsolved case “Your client is the entire world – The present and future generations. The client does not know whether they’re operating efficiently. There is a lot of productivity loss in the economy because of all the stress that exists. You need to figure out a solution to this problem. Take as much time as you want”. My attitude to solve this problem was to put in infinite effort. I wouldn’t give up until this is solved. Some of you might think of me as being mentally unstable for even thinking of this seriously. But it was as real as it gets for me.
I hadn’t slept for 2 days after I got placed in Mckinsey. Again, long story short – I spent another 2 days thinking about this case making math models, not knowing where to even start. Should I start with poverty or unemployment or something drastically out of the box which I couldn’t think of. After 4 days of sleeplessness after getting selected in Mckinsey, I had what I thought was a decent solution. Let me explain the solution in simple words.
My objective is that 6-7 billion people need to be happy NO MATTER WHAT. This means that I have to be happy NO MATTER what. For that I looked at my past and looked at data points where I was absolutely sure I was happy. Happiness is a feeling. So I defined a function called Happiness index function which is unique to each individual. There’s no absolute value to happiness. You cannot say you’re 20% happy or 30% happy. You can say that you’re more happy now compared to some other time. It’s relative. Happiness index function is a function of time and the unique experience and preferences of each individual.
Happiness index function is the output function. So, there had to be an input function. I looked at it and understood that there is a pattern to decision making. It comes from the gut for every future point at which I’m happy. I defined a conditional binary function called Gutmeter which either gives you a clear decision instantly at any point in time or stays still in the center where either no decision can be made (might as well toss a coin and make the decision) or you might want to go hunting for more information. (I have described this with more practical examples in the post titled “The Gutmeter Framework”)
Gutmeter is part of me but is like a separate person guiding me on decisions. All these data points I analyzed were discrete data points. What I wanted for continuous happiness. Mathematically, I had to compress time to such a small entity and follow my gutmeter every micro-nano second. Happiness is a natural output. This thought dt>0 (which means time is incredibly small) was the most insanely powerful thought I thought anyone could have. For life, I have outsourced my decision making to my gutmeter. I don’t know whether you’ll get the depth of this thought if you read it from a blog post. It meant that I don’t have to take anymore of my future decisions. That was insanely liberating. The thought seemed simple enough. It hadn’t taken control of my mind program yet. But I started stumbling on this thought.
Additionally, I also kept thinking that if you look at the org structure of the world, it’s missing a CBS equivalent department starting from primary schools to high schools to universities to work places to corrective units like jails. This thought also started looming in my mind. 4 days I hadn’t slept and I couldn’t get these 2 above thoughts out of my head. I discussed with a friend. He found it interesting as well.
I thought just following gutmeter is sufficient and that will help all of us be happy always. I started smoking excessively because my gutmeter was asking me to. There were discrete sparks of the gutmeter making me happy moment by moment and I could start to feel it better. It had not become continuous happiness yet. So, I thought the solution of world happiness was just to follow the gutmeter and install CBS in every sphere of life.
Then, I decided to take more feedback. Summer placements were over and classes were starting the next day. After 4 sleepless days, I loaded myself with redbulls, After my Quant class, I went to the class and said I have something interesting. In a class of 60, 12 were interested to listen and I gave a lecture for 4.5 hours. They agreed with my theory and gave me positive feedback. Then I went to a senior, he also said the thought is overwhelming. I started getting excited. The gutmeter model was taking control of my mental program. I got super excited and started posting on facebook. Those facebook posts convey my then thinking very clearly. I have taken screenshots of all those facebook posts. You can find them here in the next post
Blog post to Motivate my batchmates
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