Wednesday, December 13, 2006

Eastgate Harare

The Eastgate centre at Harare in Zimbabwe is a shopping and office complex. The speciality of this place is its natural ventilation concept. there are no big glasses and hence no huge investment to run air conditioners all day. you might imagine how this has been possible in a place like harare which has a tropical climate and is lying on the equatorial belt.

well, the architect Mick Pearce did not think so. Harare being in the tropics, still has an altitude advantage. hence, he made use of passive cooling to maintain air conditioning. obviously all of this has been lifted from wikipedia and you can read up more on the centre from the website.

the fact of the matter is frames again. if Mick had approached the problem of building the centre like any other architect, then he would not have had this idea. but when there was a constraint with the running costs, this made him think wild and his frame changed and this idea came up.

we are still talking frames in the managerial decision class and i come across many examples often and i will keep sharing the same here.

Mercer was here today - another consulting firm. it seems they indicated in their ppt today that they do not follow the McKinsey way of UP or OUT. this relieved a lot of people who were attending the talk. as usual applications for this would also cross the 200 barrier. its been a month since this started and still people are not sure where they want to go and what they want to do. in fact, i know people who have applied to every role from fixed income, marketing, pharma sales, research, IT and management consulting in the last one month.

this is one side and now i imagine how US schools are so successful without having spoon-fed placements. coming to think of that, i wonder why we have a placement week in indian schools and why is it such a big thing only here. 90% of schools abroad and even the best ones do not have 100% placements on the last day of school and they are not even bothered. they are still doing well. and here we have this thing in our mind about placements as the eternal. everybody on campus is talking about companies and jobs - nothing else. the courses have been forgotten. its now about new strategies - interview preparation strategies and strategic resume building. i cant imagine i managed to use the dirty cliched word.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Mama...Very true... Its all part of the Indian Psyche. People just wanna be fat cats... and money has been the only driving factor for ages now and it will remain that way for some more years, when the younger lot is exposed to a way of life where "things happen by choice and not by chance"... which is the case in West... except for a handful of people each one of us know, majority of people around us just sail with the wind... Its like people have these inbuilt antenna to scan for a options in life which makes them monetarily very sound... majority of the IT crowd get so much money that can't even spend... now having spent a fortune on ISB, everybody has another Bold, Underlined reason to aim for a big booty...

Mate... all said and done... I am betting big on you... go ahead and proove that even thinkers can strike gold... good luck...

Anonymous said...

thanks mate, i hope not be troubled by the typical indian mindset around me. im just going to make sure that i earn something rather than worrying about placements and learn nothing.