IFMR Manifest'11

On 8th December 2011, the summit was inaugurated by Prof.Bobby.S.Srinivasan, President of IFMR. He set off the stage by providing information on major achievements of IFMR and lighting the lamp along with Mr.Kaushik Gopalan(Director, Senior HR Leader Symphony Service Corporation). Following this Kaushik Gopalan set the stage off by providing key insights on HR in a changing world and how to move over the change. He told about the different generations we can see in today’s organization, the role revolution, and transformation and berlin wall competencies.
Mr. V.Mohan (Director, AVITA HR Solutions) started his lecture on “Learning and Development” in organization. He gave his inputs on the learning triangle, the difference between education and training, types of training, employment gap and Job oriented education. He also told how the “Internet Age” has affected today’s training and development in organization and the evolution of Virtual corporation.
Next Mr.Ramkumar(Recruitment Head, TCS) delivered his speech on “Gen Z Perspectives”. He explained in detail about how today organizations have changed to be in line with Gen Z who comprises the major percentage of the employees in organization. He also told the various measures TCS has taken to fight the “different world”. Following this session there was a lunch break.
Post lunch session started off with an enthusiastic and inspiring talk by Mr. Madhu (Strategist, TVS) on “Role of young leader in changing world”. His session was filled with many short stories and analogies.
The next session for the day was delivered by Mr.G.D.Sharma  ( Principal, Beeline HR Advisory).  He delivered his speech on the topic “Emerging Trends in HR”. It was an informative as well as a fun filled session with lot of interactions from student’s side as well. He provided a 360 degree view of different trends speaking right from the “gazelle and lion” story of Africa and how to get an employee engaged to the organization.
This was followed by a panel discussion on the topic “First job- Dream vs. Reality, Young Leaders and Business HR ”. The panellists included Mr G.D.Sharma  ,Principal, Beeline HR Advisory , Mr Rajesh, Director, Entier Consultants Mr Madhu, Strategist, TVS Mr.Hari Hara mahadevan, Mind Quest Management Consultants and Professor Raghu Raman,IFMR. The  discussion was mainly focussed on attributes like commitment, responsibility and modesty.The panel discussion was moderated by Prof. Raghu Raman and was followed by a question session from the audience.
Prof  Balasubramanian , Dean of IFMR  rendered the vote of thanks. As a token of  our gratitude and appreciation the guests for the day were felicitated with mementos for presiding the summit.

A Misconception about IFMR

When I was contemplating on applying for IFMR last year & researching about the institute, I found that everyone was considering IFMR as all about Finance. Honestly, I felt the same way. When I had been to the GDPI, lot of candidates where keen to know if people interested in marketing, operations & HR can consider IFMR as an option at all. It was when our dean explained that IFMR was a complete b-school & all other disciplines offered were as good as finance if not better.

Having been here for 5 months, I would like to share my views on this misconception.

IFMR has been known for finance. I must agree that IFMR has a strong affinity towards finance and there is flavour of finance in every course you do here. For some strange reason, a majority of the students here opt for finance as their specialization in their second year.

But believe me, you have excellent faculty, course work & pedagogy for the other disciplines as well. In fact, IFMR is, probably, the only b-school in India to offer an elective in Blue Ocean Strategy. The placements for these disciplines have been excellent as well. We have companies like IMRB, JWT & a few FMCG firms offering good marketing roles. There are firms offering operations & IT roles as well. Manufacturing & IT firms also offer HR roles to students.

IFMR is making efforts to remove the misconception that IFMR is good only for finance. There have been a lot of guest lectures & seminars by people from the domains of marketing, IT & HR in the recent past. We organized MARKZ- Marketing Summit, MANIFEST- HR Summit & STRIDES- Entrepreneurship Summit this year. All of them were very successful in terms of projecting IFMR as a complete business school.

Bottomline: IFMR is known for finance but be assured it is a complete b-school. Your choice of specialization will not be an impediment to joining here.