The reality of international interaction really came through today
in the Mergers & MBOs class. Prof. Paulo Volpin commented that 'So,
eefectively, ve see Germany has a pooor accounting seestem." To which,
immediately, a German pounced up and said, "I don't go with this result,"
and proceeded on a defence of why the system was right for Germany. A
few other Germans joined in. Poor Prof. Volpin had to make a hasty
retreat. Later, when making a similar comment about Belgium, he first
clarified: "Are there any Belgians in the class?"
A while later, he gave an example in China. One of his friends,
a consultant, told him that the Chinese sometimes picked a well-running
company and forced it to go bankrupt, just to show the World Bank that
their bankruptcy system was working fine. A Chinese practically shouted
out that bankruptcy protection was needed, because otherwise 20,000
labourers would be in the streets, and this stupid consultant obviously
was not aware of what really happened, because the Government had lots
of bad companies to make bankrupt, so why would they pick a good one?
Today's case discussion was on a Japanese company called Koito.
A Japanese is in our team, and he was often asked to comment on what he
felt was the situation. He didn't speak much in class, really. During
the break, he came over to me and said, "You know, I would like to speak
much. But I cannot. My English is not very good." As with most Japanese,
his entire education was in Japanese, and while he did have some courses
in written English, there were almost none in Japanese.
One of the slides was a comparison of market capitalizations of
various countries. India was not found on the list. So the Japanese turned
to me, politely, and asked "Where is India?" Naturally, I didn't feel
like telling him that the Bombay Stock Exchange had a market capitalization
so small that it wouldn't have been possible to put it on the table.
Well, so much for globalization!
The standard of class participation is extraordinary, though. For
example, when we were discussing the EMI-Warner Music merger that was
called of recently, one person commented, "Last week I was talking with
a Director of EMI, and he said the reason was such-and-such." I mean, we
have people who've actually been involved in some of these deals in class!
I feel like a baby when I open my mouth.
But that proved not quite the case, actually. We were discussing
the Koito case and I did open my mouth on a couple of occasions. During
the break, Prof. Volpin comes up to my desk and says, "So, Anand, you seem
to know quite a bit about the Koito case. How come?" I mumbled something
about Internet searches. Guess there's something to be said for IIM-B
after all...