Competition and Strategy for EPGDM .. AI, Positivity and optimism in action ...

It was with a little trepidation that I undertook the challenge when our Area Chair Sukanya asked me whether I could engage the subject of Competition and Strategy for EPGDM term 3 students, core subject, in the city campus. I had to prepare the syllabus, was given the choice to choose the text books and had to finish the course in 5 sessions of 4 hrs each spread over 5 weekends, had to give 2 assignments and assess it and prepare objective quiz questions for each week, about 40 questions each, total 5 quizzes.

It was a minor interesting challenge. I have been teaching the subject of Operations Strategy for Operations students for the past 5 or more years and have been reading on core Operations strategy related topics from HBR and other quality reading material for many years. With all optimism and positive thinking, I took up the challenge. I knew Artificial Intelligence was by my side too.

I started hunting around for general strategy text books and somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew Michael Porter from Harvard Business school is the big daddy or dada in strategy. So from Amazon I ordered all the three Strategy books by Porter, Competitive Strategy (1980), Competitive Advantage (1985) and Competitive Advantage for Nations (1990). Started reading them. All the three were classic ones, 500 pages+ each with in-depth content. 

Reading and understanding Porter's content in detail was taking too much time. I understood no text book considered strategy in the depth to which Porter handled it in his books. So I understood I need not go in such depth to deliver the subject to EPGDM students. I am anyhow reading the three strategy books penned by Porter during free time. 

To ensure that I give the best strategy classroom sessions in the world, I even went to the extent of going through some of the basic books that have helped the field of strategy over the past three thousand years. Plato's Republic (4th century BC) and Homer's Illiad (8th century BC) gave me good insight into how the field of strategy has developed and blossomed over the recent modern times. Homer's Iliad, in fact, laid the foundation for the growth and development of western civilization and culture over the past three thousand years, while we know Egyptian, Middle East, Arab, Indian and Chinese civilizations are more older than the western one.

I started reading Porter's Competitive Strategy anyway. When on a Saturday afternoon for LOM class I met Praveen, EPGDM in the F1 campus, he gave me a text book which i found interesting - Strategic Management, by Hill, Schilling and Jones, 12 edition, Cengage Publishing. After each session I also had to prepare quiz of min 40 - 50 questions to be given to the Assistant, Bhogaan who would with Hussain, the IT person, put up a Moodle (Free and Open Source software) quiz for the students to take over a  aweek. 

It was here Google Artificial Intelligence became a great help. I used Google AI to convert speech to text for transcribing  the quiz questions, Google AI helped me with the spelling and grammatical mistakes. Google AI additionally helped me to give more than a 360 degree view of the topic and prepare relevant and appropriate questions for the quiz. 

Every weekend with some basic text editing to put the question in the Aiken format, within 2 hrs of an average, I could set up the quiz questions for each week. All the while I was using the Google cloud and Google was my best friend during this 2 month period of preparations and delivery of the subject of Competition and Strategy for the EPGDM term 3 students.

The classes started by the last week of November, Saturday 3 to 7.30 PM. I engaged classes for 4 consecutive weeks as one weekend we were in Tiruvalla, Kerala for my cousin Joy's (Kerala Chief Secretary) daughter's marriage.  I have to wait for the feedback from the students to get to know how effective I was and whether I need to improve, read more and deliver more quality content if I am given the subject again next term.

I heaved a sigh of relief when I completed it two days back. It was a challenge that I executed with great precision and preparation and i feel content that the experience besides helping me take the subject, has made me more informed about crucial strategy issues when I handle Operations subjects in the coming days. It was a great blessing in disguise. I am bustling with enthusiasm and energy now, radiating lot of self confidence and positive energy.

Looking forward to more such challenges that will enrich my knowledge and require me to do lot of reading.

George.