This section is for Guest Speakers

This post is written for those speakers who have already been invited by Ms Shilpa Apte from the program office to deliver guest lectures. 

In this post you will find the following.

• About the Institute and how to reach there
• Audience Profile
• Role of Guest Lectures in our pedagogy and how to prepare
• Process
• Honorarium

All correspondence should be addressed to Ms Shilpa Apte ( shilpa@spjimr.org ) by speakers. 

About the Institute and how to reach there

S P Jain Institute of Management & Research, is located on a green 45 acre campus at Andheri West - a suburb of Mumbai. You can enter it from the East side (if you come from S V Road or from Western Railway Local Station ANDHERI) or you can also enter it from the West side (if you come from Juhu side or from Link Road). The institute is a maximum of 10 minutes walk from Andheri Railway station and also from the Link Road. 

Almost all the lectures are held at the Executive Education Center (EMBA Center) which is situated on the top floor of "IT Tower" - the 4 story building behind (but connected to) the main building where the reception of the Institute is situated.  

Audience Profile 

You will typically find 40 executives in our class and their profile will be as follows

1. A functional degree and 7 years experience.
2. Graduates but no formal and in-depth exposure to management learning. However, due to their having worked for large ( Rs 10000 Crore ) companies, they have been exposed to short duration programs many times. All are likely to have undergone many internal or external training programs where they have heard basic management terminology. For example you can safely assume that they are familiar with words like Management By Objective, Annual Budgeting, Project Proposal, Profit & Loss statement, Sales Forecast, Cash flow, Key Result Areas, etc. However they are unlikely to know these terms in depth : the application and the limitations. 
3. The employers of these executives are sending them to the institute as a "preparation" for their acquiring "general management skills". You may therefore safely assume that none of them will be required to practice in-depth the subject you are likely to be teaching to them. Our objective is that these executives should understand the language, concepts, roles and approach of each function so that they can converse and interact with everybody inside and outside the company. We do not intend to make them subject matter expert in any field. 
4. All executives have been identified by their employers as being "high potential" performers. Additionally we ourselves conduct 4 tests on them. Hence you can expect a high level of intelligence and a good practicality from them. Many of them are not necessarily impressed only by purely conceptual lectures. 
5. They are from our “Partner Companies” like L&T, L&T Finance, Gammon, M&M, Tata Chemicals, HPCL, Cummins, Eureka Forbes, eClerx, India Medtronic, Tata Motors, Tata Power, Tata Chemicals, Indian Hotels, State Bank of India, Bharat Petroleum and Hindustan Petroleum. 

Role of Guest Lectures in our pedagogy and how to prepare

90% of the sessions are "regular"

1. Taken by professors according to the curriculum
2. Text books are prescribed for further reading
3. Learning is evaluated through tests, assignments and projects.

The rest 10% sessions are of a different type

1. Taken by industry practitioners and need not adhere to specified curriculum
2. They need not be linked to any specific textbook
3. There need not be any evaluation plan associated with them.

We expect that every guest session, ideally, should have following characteristics

1. The speaker should classify his / her session as belonging to any one of the following six disciplines : Operations, Marketing, Finance, Strategy, HR and Business Environment. 
2. The speaker should bring to the class actual practice / case / method which will help the participants learn a new idea, a new angle, a new debate, a new tool etc. 
3. In particular we have observed that our participants are interested in listening to case studies and learn of how you faced challenges, solved problems, exploited opportunities, developed and implemented solutions etc.
4. Each guest session should "enable" the audience to "take home" something which they can "use". You should ideally weave your session around a simple and practical framework or checklist  This will be a good takeout for them.

Example : A speaker spoke of some interesting HR practices of a sales organization as a case study. More importantly he became a "hit" because he left behind a handout of a check list "how to make plans which people would be happy to implement". We have discovered that this method adds a visible value to the participants.

Example : Daman plant was the oldest plant of my company but the stability itself had created a problem. Because there was not much attrition, the organization of the whole plant was aging and had become resistant to change and new ideas. Then I, the new plant manager, came along and was asked to raise productivity by 20% in a year. I not only did it but the plant even won the “Best Qaulity” award in 2 years in spite of introduction of many new products and processes. This is my story ...

Example : How the HR department became a business partner of a new CEO and helped him re-orient the organization to face new realities and challenges. We will talk about what was specifically done in the area of designing KPIs, designing incentive structure and review processes to facilitate the transformation.

Process 

Kindly prepare 1 page description of your topic and send to shilpa@spjimr.org. She will arrange to show it to the academic committee and will revert to you within 3-4 days with their constructive suggestions and shall wait for you to send a final version to her. She will then post this version and also your brief profile. 

This always helps to manage the class expectations and enables the speaker to get a satisfactory experience and feedback and makes the participants keen to learn.

Shilpa will simultaneously deal with you and find a speaking slot which is mutually convenient. 

After this she will inform you the name, e mail id and phone number of a participant from the class who is a COCO ( Course Coordinator). You may thereafter deal with the COCO on the day when you arrive here. He will introduce you to the class and also manage other interactions.

MORE EXAMPLES OF TOPICS

• How does your company carry out essentially a local, branch level operation in a continent-sized country like India of 2000 branches ? The sales people and the service people needed are drawn from the same community,  the customers are from the same community, problems are local, the model taken to market differs from community to community. In this context you can speak about how you are harnessing the advances in IT to invent new forms of coordination and speed. 
• Another theme could be that in the Indian population of 220 Mn Households, but your Target Audience is only about 10 Mn at any point of time. How does the company focus the effort on finding these 5% and not waste time and money in reaching the 95%.
• How you have empowered the branches and Regional Offices to reduce dependence on a "template of operations" coming from HO. 
• How you overcome the issue of adjusting products and services to local needs on the one hand and to have  standardized business models on the other hand.
• How you make the most of the "people assets" - how to you tap vast reserves of skills, knowledge, and experience within the sales force. 
• As you become bigger and more diverse, complexity costs inevitably rise. Efforts to standardize the common elements of essential functions can clash with local needs.