A few days back I did a story on what they do not teach at an MBA school…here is one more story. Happened to a CA friend – let us call him RJ. He was considered to be the ‘finance head’ of the business – but he was still a rookie and needless to say his father / elder brother etc. were the people running the business.

One of their clients had given them a cheque for Rs. 60,000 (in 1984 that must have been a nice round sum of 60K)..and the cheque bounced. Well our friend said, let us sue him!

His brother said, let us try something else.

His brother went to the bank branch where the client had an account. He became friendly with the branch manager, and opened an account in the same branch for the business. Deposited cheques thick and fast…and took the balance to Rs. 10 lakhs. Made a FD for 3 years for Rs. 5 lakhs …vow and then asked the bank manager ‘please tell me what is the balance in Mr. X (the client’s) account. Manager obliged told him..”balance is Rs. 58,000″.

So our friend deposited Rs. 2000 in the clients account….and presented the cheque again…cheque was passed – and credited to my friend’s business account.

Better solution than what all of us put together could have ever thought of….surely the CA institute and the MBAs are not taught all this in school.

The world of experience teaches us all this….LOL……

  1. What if after doing all this (a/c opening, FD booking etc..), one discovers that client had only few hundred rupees in the account.

  2. Krish, then don’t present the cheque again and do something else to get that money from the client.

    What if the manager is not ready to tell him the balance in Mr.X’s account..after all these effort..?

    Is there any possibility to get hold of some accountant or a clerk in the bank to get the balance details of Mr.X’s account without all these new accounts, FD…etc…?

    Ultimately this is not a mathematical problem to give a standard solution. Just understand that Subra has give this information to help us understand how thinking beyond our usual/normal ways could sometime lead to a better and easy solution.

    In NLP we say “If you are not getting the result you want, do something different”. So, it all depends on people, situation, your ability and so on..!

  3. If I have understood this correctly,
    Institutions do not teach things, not because they forget or miss this bit in their syllabus. These things simply can not be taught. The message is that not every thing can be taught in life.

    We are so used to being handed out a script to follow or to hand out a script for others to follow, that we have stopped believing that there exists something outside the scripts. That’s simple original thinking which we have labelled ‘Out of the box’.

    I was in a role of system analyst about 12 years ago. I wanted to meet a process expert in a mfg. co. The message he gave me in the first meeting was that; to be accurate and successful, you need discipline and thinking. Do not need sophisticated computerized processes and systems. That was the time he introduced me to now famous ‘Daba-walas’ of Mumbai and how they operate.

    I did not like his rude behaviour (especially when I had gone there to design a computer system :)). But much later, I managed to appreciate the message.

  4. Ha ha ha.. Yes, you are right, it’s really out of box thinking! But what this can also do is, put the other person(banker) inside a different kind of Box namely the ‘kathghara’. I had heard this story long long time back during my Bank P.O induction training in a premier nationalized bank and how it landed the concerned Banker under litigation 🙂 Was never sure if the story was true then (neither am i now) but what i surely agree is there are different ways to do the same thing.

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