SBenegaL

Category: Skills

  • The Writing Workshop by Anoop Madhok

    As part of the doctoral training, we today had a “writing workshop” today at IIMB conducted by Prof Anoop Madhok. He had come down to Bangalore for the AIB conference and it was pretty entrepreneurial of Prof Suresh and Prof K Kumar to have leveraged the chance to organize the workshop for us doctoral students.

    Writing is a key skill for us strategy researchers and it is a tough skill to master. Any amount of writing and rewriting without clear learning so as to improve in the subsequent iterations of the draft is extremely essential. Clearly a conscious pursuit of this is important so as to improve the skills through the deliberate practice.

    As a pre-reading, we had to read three papers which would be discussed in the workshop. The workshop presumed that we already had a good research design and the problem was primarily on the writing front.

    Anoop took us through the three reading and analyzed the structure in the introduction and discussion section to show how we can be extremely precise and effective in our argument.

    The Producer-Consumer mindset was extremely interesting and helped understand why the introduction and the discussion section was extremely essential for one to improve the chance of presenting the research to the world at large.

    Here are some key take-away from the session:

    1. Understand the Life-cycle of the field you are in.
    2. Identify the conversation you are getting into
    3. Focus on how you are going to extend the existing understanding in the area you are researching on.
    4. Link back the discussion to the introduction – work iteratively on this aspect.

  • Develop the necessary skills for your Career

    In the last byte, we looked at the shift from  the top-down firms of the old career paradigm to organizational empowerment to new career paradigm. In today’s byte, we looked at a means of developing the necessary skills for career progression.

    If an individual thinks of oneself as being in the business for oneself, even if the individual works for someone else, then there would be an enormous positive impact on the career. Knowing the skills one has to package for other employers, helps acquire the necessary skills. Organizations too need employees who have acquired multiple skills and are adept at more than one job – note that there is the skills that would help dealing with change. The self-reliance necessary to deal with the change is a key skill. 

    The flexible and team-oriented people, those energized by change, those who are tolerant to ambiguity are all found to easily adjust in the scenarios of a new career paradigm. The people who have rigid in their thinking, learning styles, and have a high need for control are those who become frustrated in the new career. 

    As a famous researcher says – “a commitment to continuous, lifelong learning will prevent your from becoming a professional dinosaur!”