Vineet told me that he was helping Abhijit with the overall presentation of which, he told me, I was working on a small part. Jenson looked considerably better when Vineet said this.

I think I am beginning to hate Vineet now.

Anyway, I excused myself and went back to work on my laptop.

Abhijit came over to check on me an hour or so later and asked if I was working on a war footing. He told me there was a ‘Green Team Review’ the next day. I didn’t know what a Green Team Review was, but from the way he said it I assumed it was something important. I told him I would boost my efforts immediately as I did not want to let him down in any review, much less that done by the ‘Green Team’. I told him that I was planning to tackle the problem by first completing the model and then comprehensively testing it for accuracy.

He said I had two hours. And then asked me if I wanted anything; he was going to Barista. While I was thinking about which coffee to order … Abhijit left.

As you know I thrive on challenge. Remember the time I had to read The Wealth of Nations overnight and write a summary for the ‘Literature in Management’ course? And I submitted an essay downloaded from the Internet and almost got expelled from business school?

I immediately began to think laterally and out of the box like that.

I decided to solve my spreadsheet challenge with a goal-oriented approach, keeping the stakeholders in mind. Who was the most important stakeholder in this case? The client of course! But more immediately the stakeholder was Abhijit. He wanted a spreadsheet that would throw up a good approximation of the price of the target company.

Did we know what this number was? Of course. Somewhere between 120 and 150 crore.

So what was the real challenge? Preparing a spreadsheet that would show a solution between 120 and 150 crore.

But HOW?!

Most MBAs would simply bend over the laptop and work like slaves at this massive spreadsheet—feeding formulae, crunching numbers, building scenarios and charting outputs.

Not Einstein, thank you very much!

So first of all I made the spreadsheet output a reasonable figure: 132.45 crore. Not only is that conveniently between 120 and 150 crore but also the two decimal places make the number seem authentic. Then I worked backwards—reverse financial engineering; is there such a concept?—step by step and see how each number affected the other and I filled in all those numbers. Finally, when I had a completely accurate model set up, where every number was correctly linked to the other, I began to actually write the visual basic code.

Personally, I think I should patent this idea. Varghese Basic!

Now, irrespective of what happened at the client meeting the spreadsheet would give the same results: Rs 132.45 crore. Technically you could say this was cheating. What is the point of all this calculation if the answer was hard-coded?