Friday, October 3, 2008

"Picture this: Jigyasa teaching Retail Marketing at IIM Shillong"

"Picture this: Jigyasa teaching Retail Marketing at IIM Shillong "
Difficult na ... i also thought so .. untill recently ...

People say that a keen interest and willingness to learn takes you to places. Plus, persistence and eagerness to learn is the key to keep us keep going. Also the past activities bring the effect to them in future – sooner or later.

Well, I guess God considered all the above aspects and when he decided the above mentioned role for me. Yes, I was there for taking two sessions as a part of the corporate lecture series of their Accelerated Learning Program. I was so glad and wanted to give my best shot. It took me few days to believe that I am finally going and have lots to do in terms of the requisites of a proper corporate lecture. Since, my motto was to design a very interesting & interactive session with lots of examples.

Opportunity & a U-turn

Life doesn’t offer a second chance to everyone. I hope you agree to this and eventually I too had the same thing in my mind while preparing through the opportunity after the tiring day at work. Plus, I got a sprain K , God keeps checking his children on their tolerance & persistence. I somehow managed and by the time I was done with 75%of the subject provided to me, it got a U-turn. Ah! They changed the topic!! Incidentally, it was Retail, the one I am always ready to talk & learn for. But it was no pancake; I needed a proper flow, implementation tools etc. I remember I was quite panicky but slowly I collected my positive attitude & energy to go ahead.

Preparation

This was not so tough but demanding in terms of timelines, may be too tough with office and it’s ever increasing issues. I started slow and was trying to excel. I started with a blueprint of the plan, then did some data collection and in 3 days I realized, there is no stop to reading good stuff, so one fine day I decided to stick with the data I had till that day, my job was to get that in good shape & size – to make it more interesting, to bank it with more, relevant examples. I must say, it was too much of reading & observations in detail. I was excited and had to put that excitement onto my slides & hand-outs. By this time I had decided that I will be covering the “Emerging Trends” in retail industry, largely the
Retail Formats,
Visual Strategy & POP – as the face of retail,
Private Labels &
Mall Management in detail.

Now once I was on the job, slowly my concern was the time period allotted per session; I wanted to discuss too many things. That shows – I was gaining confidence. Well, I thought so!

About the entire experience at IIM, you will have to come back and read my next post…..but before I sign off….let me thank my Prof. who chose me for the reason, my friend Hemant for some critical inputs & timely help and my better half Rohit for helping me in domestic chores and then with the preparation. These two people actually made the whole thing like a project work for me. Of course a critical one ;-)

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

@ jigyasa,
its always thrilling to do things which we like and in the best of environs.
i can sense the exitement you have to teach in the IIM !
looking forward to ur other blogpost irt IIM experiances.
congrats and cheers !

Sarang said...

congrats , looking forward to read further on this.

viju said...

hi Jigyasa,

is always nice , confidence boosting & satisfactory 2 b able 2 do something like this.

it gives an opportunity & vent 2 our ability.
the excitement also is gr8.

well done

vs

Jigyasa said...

@ Vamsi

Thanks!!! Yeah, thrill was a part of it....and I am sure you would like to details of the subject on my marketing blog....

Jigyasa said...

@ Sarang

Its already there..... thanks n keep visiting :-)

@ VS

Thanks for the kind words n encouragement VS....