Football and Manchester

Olá everyone, hope all is well. I am done with the assignment and fingers crossed for the results. Summer is here and it came bit early this time around. It is such a welcome change after the winter and no more jackets, electric heaters and it is great to be soaked in the sun. It also marks the end of football season for the year and that reminds me we never talked about football. Football and Manchester has a long standing association. Manchester is famous for the game and Manchester United club is one of the richest and strong club all over the world. They play football all through the calendar year expect the summer break. I personally was a great fan of cricket till I came here but football fever is slowly catching up on me. It is like a religion and had great following with fans treating their star players as demi-gods. Manchester United stadium is a must visit and f you get tickets to Man Utd Vs Manchester City then you are lucky and you can talk to your kids about it too. Man City is another rival club to Man Utd and people give their tooth and eye to get a ticket to watch these teams play. I am privileged to work at the stadium on match days as a kiosk assistant as I get to sneak into the games now and then. The stadium is a beautiful piece of architecture built in 1910 with a capacity of around 68,000 and is second largest in England after Wembley. The buzz in the stadium especially during the matches against Man City is something which has to be felt by being present and can’t be described in blogs. Fans go berserk every time a goal is scored. Wayne Rooney is the highest paid and has superlative fan following. For all the football lovers staying in Manchester is a great blessing. For those working on match days like me, we can earn few bucks and at the same time enjoy the buzz. When I talk about it with my friends back home they all envy me and ask me for some pictures and souvenirs to bring for them. I will try to post couple of pics in this blog for you all. Football can also be a great topic to talk about while you try to socialize with people around here. So if you are in Manchester you better know about footballJ. Man Utd is leading the points table with couple of games left for the season and let’s hope they emerge winners against strong opponents like Arsenal and Chelsea. On this note, I leave you all to go and know more about football and Man Utd while we all here hope for a Man Utd win this season, love and hope to all :-)



Strategy - What about it ??

Ok guys, I am back now after a sumptuous meal and now working on my assignment. While I do that, thought I would share a bit about assignments, projects and my favourite module. As you all know MBA is a course for experienced professionals and hence it is more practical oriented than academics. We have plenty of case studies and project work which gets us familiar with the real business world out there. So all the modules are aimed to test the practicality of the academia and also relate it to the past experiences each student carries. The best of them all and my favourite is the strategy module. This module is divided into theory, case studies and simulation task. Theory tells you all the research that has been made and what different authors have to say. Case studies will give you the facts how different companies followed their strategy and what was the end result of it. The best part is the simulation where you are in a virtual business environment and you need to make decisions based on the data available. The class was divided into teams for the simulation task and we were given a project to run a car manufacturing company in a virtual environment and decide on the strategy about how many cars to be produced, how much to be invested on promotions, work force, R&D etc. The market environment and the demand for different type of cars is provided to all the teams and each team should formulate their strategy to be competent. Earlier I had a feeling that it is just a game and doesn’t reflect the real world. But as we progressed into later weeks of this simulation task, we all realized how it exactly works in the market out there. As a strategic manager none has access to all the information in the market and there is no proved formula that a business can follow to be successful. Had that been the case all the companies would have been successful and running into profits and there would have been no management school existent to teach. The reality is on a careful analysis of the data and speculation of the market you have to make important decisions. All the teams were asked to put in use the theories proposed on this subject into our simulation strategy and then critically analyse these theories based on the experiences we gain out of the simulation business. This gives an opportunity to the students to understand all the theories and how to apply them successfully in a business when they graduate out of the school. We have a group presentation and an assignment at the end to showcase our understanding of all the theory and also critically analyse them. This is a perfect example of the approach every academic student should be taking and I am very glad that the University is following this approach. So on that note, I leave you all to speculate about the theories and their implementation in real world while I get back to my assignment for some critical analysis. I will come back to you guys soon to share how my assignment went on. Love and more !!

Food & Spices

Hello everyone, I know I left you all after talking about accommodation in my last blog and been away for a while. It has been a busy schedule but no excuses. Now that I am here let’s talk about food which is the important thing after accommodation and especially when you move to a foreign land. Different cultures have different cuisines and I agree that it might be difficult to adjust to the cuisines of the other nation. I am not sure about the other countries but UK has to be an exception in this case. As UK is a business capital you have people from all over the world working or running their businesses here. As a result of that you get variety of cuisines that serve to almost all the nations. Since I come from a place where we eat lot of spices, I was wondering if am going to miss all that before coming here. But I was pleasantly surprised when I found so many restaurants that serve spicy mouth-watering recipes that make me never miss the home. Around city centre, there is Swadesh, Zaika and then there is curry mile in Rusholme which has got one of the biggest collection of curries in Europe from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal. This place is a must visit for all those spicy lovers to satisfy their taste buds. For Chinese food lovers there is china town in city centre which serves everything that you can name from a Chinese cuisine. For traditional English food there is English Lounge and City Café, for Italian there is The Olive Press and San Rocco, Sakura and Walrus serving authentic sushi meals and a lot others. There is Nandos which you can’t miss if you are a chicken lover as you get the best grilled chicken with lots of spices and is my favourite. Then there is McDonalds and KFC anyways for fast food to be grabbed when you are in a rush J.The best part of this blog is what I am going to tell you now. You also get student discounts in some of these restaurants and especially in Rusholme, so it is always advisable to carry your ID J. So there is a lot in Manchester to test your appetite when you come around. So let me go grab some food for myself, tata till I come back to see you guys ;-)