Monday, March 28, 2016

Best Business Movies Picked by One of the Top MBA Colleges in Delhi NCR

The top MBA colleges in Delhi NCR use a unique teaching methodology combined with an academic curriculum that is updated regularly and enables aspiring mangers to engage in river rafting. This involves learning to be exhaustive and exclusive. This exclusivity stems from absorbing business knowledge from all possible sources like a sponge not just from books only. At Ishan Institute of Management & Technology, one of the top MBA colleges in Delhi NCR we tread a path that mixes cautious discipline with sparks of unorthodox innovation that gives the curriculum a much needed elbow room. Business movies are not just about entertainment. Business movies are sources of information on how people react and respond to situations and how these responses differ over business geographies. In this piece we put together a list of business movies which we have screened to students pursuing MBA and PGDM for different papers and yes the outcomes have been very positive. Take a look.

Swades
There are people who may raise an eyebrow or two and ask the rationale behind including this movie in a list of business movies here. The answer is simple. Across papers of total quality management, strategic management and also rural management, we have felt the utmost necessity to enable a rendezvous between students who hail from India with the true face of Bharat. It has been more than a decade that this Shahrukh Khan starrer directed by Ashutosh Gowarikar made it to the Oscars and then got eliminated. The underlying themes make for a fabulous study of tracks and themes like Gandhian innovation, jugaad innovation, bottom of the pyramid market, digital divide, gender diversity, reverse innovation and rural governance. In fact it has something for business environment as well. Probably the enterprises that have the best rural market penetration are the Post & Telegraph Department and utilities like electricity boards. Even today FMCG companies have a lot to learn from these institutions. Yet again the context pits Gandhian economics against the modernization and scientifically advanced Nehruvian thoughts. The end result probably is that the protagonist brings Nehru’s India to Gandhi’s Bharat.

Boiler Room
Set in the big bad world of financial brokers who take full advantage of greed this is a movie for finance students as also for marketing people. The power of influence that is evident in the movie is a strong weapon for business development. The weird ways of the financial market are hard to get for the common man and by the time realization sinks in, it is already too late. The same goes for the protagonist of the movie who discovers that he is in a soup even after achieving so much working for his enterprise with all his skill and intelligence. The movie has some great takeaways for marketing students with regard to closing business deals, mounting pressure on clients to squeeze out every penny in their pockets and sell dreams even in the face of reality checks that may be knocking at the door step. Finance students may not be able to get into the technical aspects of their trade watching this movie but as most finance people realize in the middle stages of their careers, success is more about attitude than skill.

Pirates of Silicon Valley
Despite Michael Fasbender getting an Oscar nomination this year for Steve Jobs, we would rather include this one on the list of movies that enable learning. The Pirate of Silicon Valley has many great lessons to teach. The best thing about the movie is that it is set in the campus life of United States and shows the typical David versus Goliath competition that sprung with Steve acknowledging IBM as “big brother.” There are string lessons to be learnt on entrepreneurship and moon lighting which assume so much importance in an age when many Indian youth have goals of setting up junkyard start up firms, right from their student days. The Bill Gates manual of management is also on full display. The innovation of Steve Wozniak, the guile of Steve Jobs and the persuasion of Bill Gates are probably character building lessons for boys who want to make it big on their own.

Inside Job
In the aftermath of the sub-prime crisis of 2008, investment banks, financial brokers, credit rating agencies and even the Fed came into spotlight. This movie covers literally all the aspects of the chain of characters who were involved in the sub- prime crisis. It is a documentary that features the interviews of many top economists, business leaders, bankers, financial brokers and members of global policy institutions like the IMF. The entire movie is a collection of primary data collected through the direct interview method. It is a must watch movie for aspiring finance professionals. The concepts on securities market, reverse mortgage, amortization and liberalization of the banking regime are lessons worth learning indeed and the way these topics have been dealt with is supremely lucid and easy to understand.

Pinball
Not many would associate Brad Pit with a business movie. Pinball is a movie based on true events that occurred with a famous baseball franchise in the United States. The script of the movie revolves around the upheavals and sudden flight of top talent that the team goes through resulting in a downward sojourn. This movie has at its core the usage of data analytics in sports management and an inventory based approach to human resource management in teams and organizations. It is very interesting to note that several years after the movie was released Andy flower the then coach of the England cricket team used analytics to lead them into an overwhelming victory against Australia in the Ashes series. The following year though Australia made a strong statement by staging a comeback and taking the Ashes. In the end while data analytics is being used in sports management and also in so many other disciplines and functions of business like customer relationship management, production and operations, it remains to be seen if data can be a perfect substitute for the human element in management.