MOTHERFUCKERS!

They didn’t even wait for my JHA performance evals.

Fuck fuck fuck. Devastated.

Need to rethink my employment with Dufresne. If this means that I move to BCG or McKinsey & Co. so be it. No point in not being recognized for one’s worth.

29 November 2006

8.32 p.m.

Trying not to think of Vineet, Boris or the associate role. It’s all one big fraud. I know. There is just no point thinking about it. I should have just taken the McKinsey offer instead. Which I would have got if I’d applied off-campus. But I didn’t because I thought Dufresne would give me a chance to shine. Very pissed.

Breathe … breathe …

Anyway we had a funny team meeting today. The last one before the big presentation tomorrow to the JHA leadership committee.

After we analysed all our inputs and data the Dufresne team came to the conclusion that JHA is really not an ideal candidate for acquisition by the private equity fund. The company is reasonably profitable but it is very inefficient, overstaffed and too poorly managed to be able to scale up quickly in the years to come. I also pointed out that they have a poor inventory management system and the purchase department has no idea how to handle incoming goods, including ball bearings.

Finally, after listening to everyone, Prasad nodded and said he’d run the conclusions by Jerry before closing things for the day. While he spoke to Jerry on the phone outside we sat around chatting about the project and generally feeling thrilled to finally bid farewell to the hideous JHA guesthouse.

And then Prasad came back from his call with Jerry. With a bombshell.

He wanted us to redo the ENTIRE presentation! He said the discussion with Jerry had yielded some new strategic insights that we would now incorporate in the presentation. I was genuinely surprised, though as usual I did not show it on my face, but some of the other team members looked much less composed.

This new approach turned the whole project on its head and was simply revolutionary! We would use all the analysis we had that showed the problems with JHA and convert it into a section on the POTENTIAL optimization possible in JHA. We would then show how much more profitable JHA could be with a strategic and operational optimization programme and how it would be an excellent acquisition target for the private equity fund. We’d show that all JHA really needed to do was hire a management consulting firm on a six-month project to design and implement these improvements.

We added a new section detailing how, even if JHA paid up to three crore to a management consultant, the entire expense could be recouped by the private equity fund within six months of improved operation. We also mentioned that the management consultant should be chosen through an open bidding process UNLESS JHA had already worked with a consulting firm before (wink!) in which case that firm should be given top preference.