Each student tends to approach a case study in their own, unique way. There is no single perfect approach, but the steps mentioned below has served us well during our time at b-school.

1. Read the first four paragraphs and the last four paragraphs – Check how the tone has changed. Understand what thoughts the protagonist of the case started with and ends with.
2. Generate your own hypothesis on what might have transpired between the beginning and end of the case
3. Glance at the exhibits given – Is the case numbers driven or more qualitative in nature?
4. Read the entire case once – Does the case fit in with the hypothesis you came up with earlier? If, not why?
5. Finally, crunch the numbers

Remember there is no one right answer to most case studies. It is the variety of ideas and thoughts which come up during the case discussions that promotes learning. Do your best to contribute your thoughts on the matter and remember – follow the etiquettes.

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We assume you have no prior knowledge of accounting. However, we want to keep things fun and will quickly ramp up to ensure you have a steep learning curve. Please note that we do NOT intend this to be a course in book-keeping, but aim to create an understanding of accounting from a running-a-business perspective.

The biggest discussions we had over the days running up to Christmas were about what to charge for the course to cover our costs. After much googling, we found similar, but rather disconnected, courses on Accounting on the web  for USD 149 or more. This was more than what a large majority of our friends are able to spare just before heading to b-school or starting their own businesses. So, we have decided to price the course at USD 69 to keep it affordable for everyone. Stay tuned to our Facebook page  or sign up on our website for a special launch offer though!

So, without further ado, the topics we will be covering are:

SECTION 1: Accounting 101?

• Lecture 1: What is accounting? – A super-quick introduction

SECTION 2: Financial statements

• Lecture 2: Introduction to financial statements
• Lecture 3: Balance sheets
• Lecture 4: Income Statement
• Lecture 5: The Statement of Cash flows
• Lecture 6: Other financial statement information

SECTION 3: Who needs standards anyways?

• Lecture 7: Accounting standards
• Lecture 8: Accounting mechanics – Double entry system
• Lecture 9: Revenue recognition

SECTION 4: Did you cook your books?

• Lecture 10: Basic Financial statement analysis
• Lecture 11: Balance sheet analysis
• Lecture 12: Income statement analysis
• Lecture 13: Shareholder’s equity

SECTION 5: Is your company worth as much as Facebook?

• Lecture 14:Business Valuation – A bird’s eye view

SECTION 6: Pull your ‘Sox’ up!

• Lecture 15: Accounting Fraud
• Lecture 16: Madoff’s Ponzi scheme (Optional)
• Lecture 17: The Enron fiasco (Optional)
• Lecture 18: The Lehman Bro. failure (Optional)

Let us know what you think! Have we missed out on a topic you would like to see? Let us know in the comments, so we can get working on it.

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So, though it’s not a formal interview, you should always consider it as part of the formal interview process—suiting up and all. Follow these tips, and you’ll ensure you use your informational interview to its fullest potential. Plus, you’ll leave a great first impression.

1. Do Your Research: While the purpose of an informational interview is for you to get more information, you should still do your research on the company and industry before you get there. You certainly don’t have to be an expert, but the more you know ahead of time, the more intelligent questions you’ll be able to ask, and the more interested and capable you’ll look.

Check out the company’s website and online news room, as well as industry publications. Head over to vault.com. Also find out as much information about the person you’re meeting with as possible—check her profile on LinkedIn, and do a quick Google search to get the basics. Don’t waste time asking her what her role in the company is if this is clearly outlined in her company bio. Instead, save your in-person time to ask more in-depth questions.

2. Mind Your Manners: Real interview or not, coming in 15 minutes late is not going to impress anyone, so keep interview etiquette in mind for informational interviews as well. Arrive to your appointment 10-15 minutes early, dress in appropriate business attire, and turn your cell phone off! When you meet your interviewer, make eye contact, smile, introduce yourself, offer a firm handshake (both when you enter and exit), and do not sit until you are invited.

3. Be Prepared: Just like you would for a real interview, set aside plenty of time to prepare for the meeting. You should already have a list of all the questions you would like to ask about the person’s position, company, and background. Also be prepared for the interviewer to ask some things about you, too—namely, who you are, what you want to do, and why you want to work in her field or for her company. Before you get there, have an intelligent, well-thought-out elevator pitch, and be sure you are able to articulate your goals.

4. Bring Your Resume: Don’t be caught off guard if your informational interviewee asks you interview-like questions—you should always be prepared to share your skill set, capabilities, and accomplishments if you’re asked. Better yet, bring your resume. You never know when someone might ask for it, or, you can offer to leave it at the interview to be kept on file for future consideration.

5. Follow Up: Thank the person for taking time to meet with you—both verbally and with a thank you note 24 to 48 hours later. And if your interviewer asked you during the interview to apply for a job, send in your resume or provide any other information right away, while you are still fresh in her mind.

Assuming the interview went well, this person is now part of your network. Invite her to connect on LinkedIn, send her an article you think she might find interesting, and—most importantly—let her know once you’ve landed a position. Even if you don’t end up working for her company now, she may be a valuable resource down the line.

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This is the third of the “52 management concepts you should know” series that we will bring to you. Sign up for our newsletter to stay up to date via email.

The marketing mix is often crucial when determining a brand’s offering and is often synonymous with the four Ps: price, product, promotion and place.

Product - Every product, good or service, is subject to a life-cycle including a growth phase followed by a maturity phase and finally an eventual period of decline as sales falls. Marketers must do careful research on how long the life cycle of the product they are marketing is likely to be and focus their attention on different challenges that arise as the product moves through each stage. For example, in the growth phase, a company might struggle to fulfill the demand for its newly launch products. Case in point – The latest model of the iPhone

The marketer must also consider the product mix. Marketers can expand the current product mix by increasing the number of products in a line or by increasing the number of product lines. Marketers should consider how to position the product (luxury? utility?), how to exploit the brand, how to exploit the company’s resources and how to configure the product mix so that each product complements the other.

Price – The price is very important as it determines a company’s profit. Adjusting the price has a profound impact on the marketing strategy, and depending on the price elasticity of the product, it will affect the demand as well. When setting a price, the marketer must be aware of the customer perceived value for the product. For example, Pepsi Co. would not want to price Pepsi too high beyond the threshold of its customers.

Promotion – This represents all of the methods of communication that a marketer may use to provide information to different parties about the product. Promotion comprises elements such as advertising, public relations, personal selling and sales promotion.

Place – This refers to providing the product at a place which is convenient for consumers to access. Place is synonymous with distribution. Various strategies such as intensive distribution, selective distribution, exclusive distribution and franchising can be used by the marketer to complement the other aspects of the marketing mix.

As we mentioned earlier, this was extended by three more Ps to better model the service industry. The ‘seven Ps’ refers to the already mentioned four Ps, plus ‘physical evidence’, ‘people’, and ‘process’. ‘Physical evidence’ refers to elements within the store. In the offline world, that would be the store front, the uniforms employees wear, signboards, etc. In the online world, that would be the domain name itself, branding etc… ‘People’ refers to the employees of the organisation with whom customers come into contact with. ‘Process’ refers to the processes and systems within the organization that affects its marketing process.

A 4 Cs classification, which is a more consumer-oriented version of the four Ps, was proposed later that attempts to better fit the movement from mass marketing to niche marketing. We will cover that the next time!

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This is the second of the “52 management concepts you should know” series that we will bring to you. Sign up for our newsletter to stay up to date via email.

The Competitive Forces Model, developed by Prof. Michael E. Porter,a Harvard Business School professor, is a tool that determines the competition level and the attractiveness of any industry.

According to Prof. Porter, a good understanding of the industry’s competitive forces & their underlying causes is a crucial component of strategy formulation, which entails building defences against competitors, or finding a viable position in an industry where the forces are weak.

Without further ado, the 5 original forces originally proposed in 1979 are:

• Competition – This force is determined by the number of the competitors and their aggressiveness in the target industry. If you have many incumbents in your industry, your competitors might be drawn into price wars to compete with you. This will naturally cause the profit to drop towards a competitive level.

• Customers – This force focuses on the bargaining power of the customer. If your product is a luxury product, your customer might forgo the purchase if the price is too high! (assuming all your customers are rational) . If on the other hand, the product is a necessity, they might be willing to tolerate higher price variations. In other words, the force describes the ability of customers to put the firm under pressure and also the reaction of the customers to price changes.

• Suppliers – Every company needs raw materials (goods & services) in order to make new products. This implies that any changes to the supplier equation such as higher costs or reduced availability can change industry dynamics.

• Potential entrants – If your industry is highly profitable and does not have any barriers to entry, others are likely to enter your industry. This may cause the profit rate to drop towards a low, more competitive level (perfect competition). On the other hand, if your industry does have many entrance barriers such as high fixed costs or patents. your profit can possibly remain high, because you do not have downward pressure from competitors.

• Substitutes (Product or service) – The existence of similar products or services can substantially raise the bargaining power of the customers. The customer has the most power when two products are practically identical. In that case, the customers does not have any incentive to pay more for any one product and so the customers will buy the cheapest product available in the market. This can lead to high elasticity of demand.

A new 6th force was proposed recently.

• Complements – This force determines how the government, complementary products or the public perception can change the profit rate of your company. For example, sometimes corporations can grow too large (or create monopolies) and the government tries to limit the company control over the market through the use of competition law (aka antitrust law in the US).

If this idea has caught your fancy, then we highly recommend the book Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors by Michael E. Porter.

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This is the first of the “52 management concepts you should know” series that we will bring to you. Sign up for our newsletter to stay up to date via email.

The premise of Blue Ocean strategy is that an organization can generate high growth and profits by creating new demand in an uncontested market space, or a “Blue Ocean”, rather than by competing head-to-head with other suppliers for known customers in an existing industry, or a “Red Ocean”.

Red Oceans are all the industries in existence today – the known market space. In the red oceans, industry boundaries are defined and accepted, and the competitive rules of the game are known. Here companies try to outperform their rivals to grab a greater share of product or service demand. As the market space gets crowded, prospects for profits and growth are reduced. Products become commodities or niche, and cutthroat competition turns the ocean bloody. Hence, the term red oceans.

Blue oceans, in contrast, denote all the industries not in existence today – the unknown market space, untainted by competition. In blue oceans, demand is created rather than fought over. There is ample opportunity for growth that is both profitable and rapid. In blue oceans, competition is irrelevant because the rules of the game are waiting to be set. Blue ocean is an analogy to describe the wider, deeper potential of market space that is not yet explored.

The cornerstone of Blue Ocean Strategy is ‘Value Innovation’. A blue ocean is created when a company creates value simultaneously for both the buyer and the company. The innovation (in product, service, or delivery) must raise and create value for the market, while simultaneously reducing or eliminating features or services that are less valued by the current or future market.

Take the example of bookstores. Barnes & Noble and Borders superstores in the U.S. redefined the scope of the services they offer. Instead of focusing solely on the moment a customer purchases a book – as the hundreds of bookstores were doing – they asked, what do customers do before, during, and after purchasing a book? They found that often before purchasing books, buyers want to sit and browse through several selections before making a choice, yet traditional bookstores did not offer a place to do so – in fact they discouraged the practice. Then they observed that often after purchasing books or magazines, customers went to a coffee shop to spend some time alone reading.

With these insights they transformed the product they sell from the book itself into the pleasure of reading and intellectual exploration, adding lounges, knowledgeable staff, and coffee bars to create an environment that celebrates reading and learning. In less than six years, B&N and Borders emerged as the two largest bookstore chains in the United States, with more than one thousand three hundred superstores between them.

Then, amazon.com came along and questioned the concept of brick-and-mortar bookstores and carved out a blue ocean for itself. This goes to show that creating blue oceans is not a static achievement but a dynamic process. Once a company creates a blue ocean and its powerful performance consequences are known, sooner or later imitators appear on the horizon. While innovation has been seen as a random/experimental process where entrepreneurs and spin-offs are the primary drivers, Blue Ocean Strategy tries to offers systematic and reproducible methodologies and processes in pursuit of blue oceans by both new and existing firms. These frameworks and tools are designed to be visual in order to not only effectively build the collective wisdom of the company but also allow for effective strategy execution through easy communication.

If this management thinking has caught your interest, then we strongly recommend you grab a copy of Blue Ocean Strategy where the authors, W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne of INSEAD, explain the concepts and work through the framework with some fascinating examples.

Full Disclosure: Some of the MBA Basecamp team are INSEAD Alumni

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The interesting thing though is that most of us would already have pre-conceptions about the various nationalities, based on input from sources such as movies, books or the internet, even before we have met someone from that culture. These cultural lenses, or filters, are shaped by information we keep in our libraries of experience or simply hear-say. You don’t want to insult your classmate or embarrass yourself by sticking to such, many-a-times wrong, stereotypes that abound. In this infographic, we try to illustrate to the best of our abilities some advice on how best to work with your fellow students from China. Please do keep in mind that this is a very generic representation and does not apply to each and every person of the country. (Think about the normal curve – there are data points at the tails too!)

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Speaking from experience, one of our MBA Sherpas had an American Professor who had just joined a European business school. While the professor’s knowledge in his subject area was extensive and his delivery style great, all the examples he used to illustrate the concepts were of local American businesses and brands. This meant that almost 90% of the very international class including our Sherpa could not directly relate to what he was trying to explain. What does one do in such case? What if the professor’s delivery style had sucked too? What if being in his class began to feel like a waste of a good hour and a half? You might begin to feel that you could achieve more in that time reading on the subject in the library or online. Fortunately, there are a few things you could do to get around this problem.

Talk to the guy: There’s no approach as effective as the hard way. Try talking to the professor about changing his style. You may approach him personally during a break or during his free time, or talk to your section representative about getting the message across. Most professors are cool about constructive criticism, and doing this would be beneficial to both your batch and the ones that follow.

Rope in the TA: Approach the teaching assistant on the subject to re-explain the concept to you. Teaching assistants, many of whom are PhD students, aspire to become professors someday, and these are opportunities for them as well to hone their skills at teaching. It’s a win-win situation for both you and the TA.

Form Study Groups: Informal study groups are one of the best ways to learn a subject, especially so in a business school. Different students with their diverse backgrounds are usually well versed in subjects of their area. A well chosen group will have people from different backgrounds who can help each other understand concepts better in their areas of preference.

More effort: Despite employing smart tactics to maximize success at b-school, remember there is no substitute for hard work when it comes to learning something. If your professor sucks, use the points we’ve mentioned here and complement these methods with hard work from your end. Dealing with adversity in any form is pretty much essential to your corporate education!

It is quite possible that you will cross paths with professors with ungainly styles and low effectiveness. What approaches, besides the ones mentioned here, would you employe to deal with such an issue? Let us know in the comments below!

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 So, here goes!

Bloomberg for iPad (Free)

This is an app all MBA students should have at their fingertips. Get instant access to all your business and finance news, market data and portfolio tracking tools from the most trusted source financial professionals around the world rely upon.

Amazon Kindle (Free)

While there are people who profess their loyalty to paper, the convenience and cost-effectiveness of e-books have swayed many an MBA student in the past. However, before you commit to a big iBooks library, consider Amazon’s Kindle app, whose e-books will work on other mobile operating systems such as Android and Windows Phone, as well as those companies’ respective e-readers. You’ll want that flexibility if you stray from Apple’s ecosystem.

Dropbox (Free)

If you already are not using Dropbox, you should sign up right way! It is a free service that lets you bring all your photos, docs, and videos anywhere. Any file you save to your Dropbox is accessible from all your computers, iPhone, iPad and even the Dropbox website!

Take your work on the go and review docs when you’re out and about. Even if you accidentally leave your iPad in a taxi, your stuff is always safe in Dropbox.

1Password Pro ($14.99)

1Password will securely store your important information and can automatically log you into websites with a single tap. There’s no need to remember the username, password, or even the website address. This awesome app saves your web usernames and passwords, a variety of information that you might find in your wallet (licenses, social security numbers, credit cards, etc.), software serial numbers, non-web account information (like iTunes and e-mail) and freeform secure notes to store any data you’d like to keep safe from prying eyes.

Bamboo Paper (Free)

Bamboo Paper, a seriously fun new app from Wacom, provides you with the ability to create virtual notebooks for your iPad, letting you share your ideas visually with handwritten notes, sketches or doodles. Paired with the Bamboo Stylus, it turns your iPad into the ultimate paperless communications tool to communicate with charts and graphs, collaborate during brainstorming sessions, sketch a design while on the go

May we also suggest you invest in a good stylus? You can’t go wrong with a Bamboo stylus.

Flipboard (Free)

Beautifully designed for iPad and iPhone, Flipboard creates a personalized magazine out of everything being shared with you. Flip through your Facebook newsfeed and Google+ Circles, tweets from your Twitter timeline, photos from Instagram friends, videos from YouTube, and much more. This is the best way to catch up on your social media life during the hectic time at business school.

Evernote (Free)

Evernote is an easy-to-use, free app that helps you remember everything across all the devices you use. Stay organized, save your ideas and improve productivity. Evernote lets you take notes, capture photos, create to-do lists, record voice reminders – and makes these notes completely searchable, whether you are at home, at work, or on the go. Definitely a life-saver for busy MBA students!

Have we missed out any apps you think are a must-have? Do let us know in the comments.

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