Tuesday, March 18, 2014

Corporate Governance, Coca-Cola and the ebrary :-)

Well, I had no class scheduled for today, so spent the day to have some nice Indian lunch with friends, did some experiments in photography [], and did the readings for corporate governance class of tomorrow as my own leisurely pace, today.

Having said that, the readings turned out to be really interesting. One of the readings for today was a chapter from one of the corporate governance related books. Up until now, whenever a professor has given us chapter readings, it has always been a PDF file with only that chapter extracted out of the book.

Prof. Nieves however introduced us to the ebrary. Well, not that I had not heard of ebrary - the online book library here at IE, and I have registered myself for this one, and downloaded a related app - but to tell you the truth, I had never used this one until today.
And I was amazed after using this tool - it gives an interface very similar to Google books page, where I can have a preview [with zoom-in, zoom-out, and other features] on the left hand, a chapter summary and index on the right, with a wide variety of other options to help me read, download, print, browse and interact with the book in a better way. I must say I am impressed with the interface.

This feeling of delight was soon topped by feeling of amazement. After doing a chapter reading, and a technical HBR note reading, it was time for me to read the Coca-cola case for tomorrow.

While I had the usual expectations that I have developed about the Harvard cases on major corporations, after I started the reading, I could not stop - this case is almost out of some fiction book - and the most memorable part - how most of the coca-cola management for almost 60 years was actually the decisions taken mainly by one person, a person who took up the leadership at Coca-cola at an age of 33 and retained it until an age of 95. I am not sure how corporate governance looks at this, but if you ask me, i would love to be that man :-)

No comments:

Post a Comment