Come on, think. I want you to reach back into those minds and tell me, tell us all, what it is you fantasize about. World peace? I thought so. Do you fantasize about international fame? Do you fantasize about winning a Pulitzer Prize? Or a Nobel Peace Prize? An MTV Music Award? Do you fantasize about meeting some genius hunk, ostensibly bad but secretly simmering with noble passion and willing to sleep on the wet spot? You get Lucans point. Fantasies have to be unrealistic because the moment, the second, that you get what you desire, you don't, you can't want it anymore. In order to continue to exist desire must have it's objects perpetually absent. Its not the it that you want, it's the fantasy of it. So desire supports crazy fantasies. This is what Pascal means when he says we are only truly happy when daydreaming about future happiness or why we say the hunt is sweeter than the kill. Or be careful what you wish for, not because you get it but because you're doomed not to want it once you do. So the lesson of Lucas is, living by wants will never make you happy. What it means to be fully human is to strive to live by ideals and ideals and not to measure your life by what you've attained in terms of your desires but those small moments of integrity, compassion, rationality, even self-sacrifice. Because in the end, the only way that we can measure the signifigance of our own lives is by valuing the lives of others.

Marketing wants product variety, clearly a need to survive in competitive environment. Manufacturing wants stable production schedule to gain on economies of scale and stability in production factors. The revenue interactions by offering wide variety of products is an extensively researched topic in the literature especially marketing literature. On manufacturing side offering variety is researched through modularity and commonality in product design. A new stream of research has come up in which researchers combined the issues from manufacturing and marketing in offering wide variety of products. Product variety can be offered through new products or creating variations and options in existing products. Later is typically referred as product line extension. Line extension strategy is followed by many firms including consume durables and non-durables, industrial products manufacturing firms, and services firms. From review of studies there exists no research, which attempted to evaluate product line extensions from manufacturing planning perspective. To do this one needs to inculcate demand dynamics caused by launching of product line extensions.

This study is an attempt to build a model for a firm that produces and offers multiple products. Each of these products belongs to a product line and /or manufacturing class. Now the firm is contemplating on offering more variety through product line extensions. Each of these line extensions belongs to a manufacturing class. A product line extension builds its demand from cannibalization, capturing unsatisfied demand, and capturing competitors' demand. Evaluation of trade-offs involved in selection of which line extensions to offer depends on demand dynamics caused by launching of product line extension. On the supply side this demand dynamics results into variations in mix and volume. Question for the firm is which line extensions to select and how to plan them.

The path towards an integrative negotiation depends crucially on knowing whether and how the negotiating parties differ either on risk perception or perceived risk attitudes [Weber and Hsee 1998]. An understanding of risk preferences of an individual could prove valuable in the negotiation process and outcome. It would also help the negotiators to better understand their opponents and their issues. Although knowledge of the dynamics of risk taking is still limited, several authors have shown that decision makers can be simultaneously risk seeking and risk averse in different domains and situations, implying that risk preferences are context specific [Slovic 1972; Hershey et al 1982; Payne et al 1980; MacCrimmon and Wehrung 1984; MacCrimmon and Wehrung 1990; Schoemaker 1990; Shapira 1997]. There is little correlation from one setting to another in a persons risk preferences [Slovic 1972]. Only those tasks highly similar in structure and involving the same sorts of payoffs have shown any generality and as similarity decreases these cross-task consistencies rapidly decline. Thus, an individual who takes risks by guessing often on a mathematical exam (under negative marking) is likely to be high-risk taker in other exams as well but that does not imply that he would prefer a high-risk occupation. The context specificity not only relates to the substantive domains (e.g. negotiation outcome versus health outcome), but also to measurement procedure (e.g. response modes or question framing) [Hershey et al 1882; MacCrimmon and Wehrung 1990; Pennings and Smidts 2000]. No single measure of risk preferences is adequate to capture the complexities of risk taking behavior and different types of measures reveal different risk preferences [MacCrimmon and Wehrung 1990]. The objective of the present study is to examine the individual risk preferences in online negotiations. Specifically, to examine whether risk preferences are related across payoff domains (gain situation, mixed outcome and loss situation) and for different measurement approaches and whether these risk preferences share a common variance that can be attributed to a global construct.

Hi,

The StartUp Club invites you to two interactions with entrepreneurs with entirely different perspectives.

On Tuesday, August 10th 2004, at 6:30 p.m. in the Auditorium, meet Joe Liemandt, founder and CEO, Trilogy. He brings together judgement, dedication and luck in an amazing combination. Winning his first contract at the age of 20 and becoming the youngest man on the Fortune 500, Joe will interact with us to share his insights on the business of creating a new business.

On Wednesday, August 11th, 2004 at 2:30 p.m. in the Auditorium, talking to students will be Bhaskar Menon, President, Mphasis. An ex-Citibanker heading Citigroup’s worldwide e-commerce arm, Bhaskar will talk about his experiences of creating Mphasis and converting it into an instant global corporation.

Warm regards,
The StartUp Club

Recent developments in many aspects of theory and business practices worldwide have accentuated the need to step back and have a fresh perspective of some of the compelling emergent imperatives. On the theoretical front, conventional models of organisation of economic activity are being complemented by including sociological variables (Sztompka, 1999) while, on the practice side, many firms, finding it difficult to cope with the complexities of handling multifaceted competition, are resorting to arms length arrangements with other firms. Rapid development in Information technology is driving down governance costs having implications on firm size, industry structure and competition (Bryanjolfsson et al., 1994; Nooteboom, 2002); value chain fragmentation is leading to disaggregation and isolation of efficiencies (Evans & Wurster, 1997) making it unviable for firms to be present in all parts of chain; increased rate of globalisation and higher complexity levels of input and output markets (Zuscovitch, 1994) is making it difficult to sustain differential position in those markets.

These related developments point to a perceptible movement towards specialisation - of assets and capabilities, standardization - of offerings within the specialised domains, and fewer constraints to manage relatively complex governance structures. The first two are triggered by the proximate product market conditions while the last one is a macro phenomenon catalyzing changes across market spaces. New organisational forms i.e. modes of organizing and managing transactions, are emerging the literature about which asserts that "hierarchies are becoming increasingly infused with the elements of the market" (Foss, 2002 B). These diverse yet related themes paint a backdrop in which firms have to depend more and more on their relationships with others in order to create and deliver value, and these relationships are becoming more manageable with advances in information and process technologies.

The present research engages itself with the role of trust in the governance of inter-firm dyadic relationship. The central thesis is that Trust moderates the impact of relation specific assets and uncertainty on costs of coordination. In doing so, it opens new avenues for interorganisational relationships by enabling more options in terms of governance structures and mechanisms. It is also part of the agenda to test "higher Trust is associated with closer relationships" hypothesis. An instrument to measure the involved constructs has been adopted from literature and has been developed after subjecting it to a pretest. Final sample would include software offshore development centers and respondents would be the delivery managers.