The Business Quiz Cognizance 2015

IIT Roorkee

Pointers

O It’s the quizmaster’s decision where he finds it fit to give points and where not to. The quizmaster feels that points don’t matter, except… in deciding the result, of course.

O Some questions are relatively long. Patience has its rewards.

O That’s all this slide is meant for. Guidelines, wherever necessary, will be provided.

1. Infinite Pounce 1 [CW]

O +10 on Direct

O +10 on Pass

O +10/-10 on Pounce

Q1. Who, Which Book ?

O Last year, this billionaire investor took to Reddit for an AMA as part of the

run-up to the release of his new book. Here three targets of his hyper-

articulate ire were b-school grads, the overly dressed, and the cult of Silicon

Valley.

O While he doesn't have an "absolute ban" on hiring MBAs, he thinks that they

tend to be "high extrovert/low conviction people.

O While he cautions that there are "no absolute and timeless sartorial rules,"

he says that "in Silicon Valley, wearing a suit in a pitch meeting makes you

look like someone who is bad at sales and worse at tech.“ Maybe that's why

he has a simple rule for investing: never bet on a CEO in a suit.

O And he is particularly less enthusiastic about Silicon Valley than most of his

peers. He says it is more affordable to start a business outside, in almost all

ways.

Peter Thiel, Zero to One

Q2

O Arunachalam Muruganantham is an inventor and social entrepreneur from Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu.

O He is the owner of Jayaashree industries whose signature product has been used in 23 of the 29 states in India and he currently plans to expand exports to 106 nations. In 2014, TIME placed him in its list of 100 Most Influential People in the World.

O What does his company make ?

Mini-machines to self-manufacture low-cost sanitary pads

Q3. Give me X and Y.

X – Housing.com Y - Sequoia

Q4. Who ?

O He (and his organization) is the winner of over 600 awards in his field from all over the world. An alumnus of St. Xavier’s school Jaipur and St. Stephen’s College, little is known about his versatility in that he has played in the Ranji Trophy, worked as a Tea-taster & also made a brief acting stint in a mainstream Bollywood film in 2013.

O Insiders say it was him who came up with the now famous ‘Achchhey din aane wale hain’ for the BJP campaign.

Piyush Pandey

Q5. (1/2)

O In 1981, Steven Spielberg was at work on another soon-to-be box office sensation, E.T.

the Extra Terrestrial. A key scene called for the film's main human character, 9-year-old

Elliott, to lure an alien out of the woods with ‘X’. Spielberg's people approached the

makers X, A, with a deal to use their product in the film. Notoriously frugal,

unpredictable, and tyrannical in their business dealings, chief executives John & Forrest

A flatly rejected Spielberg's offer.

O Looking for the best alternative, the movie's producers turned to B for its Y, a relatively

new addition to the B product line. Despite Spielberg's track record, Jack Dowd, B's Vice

President for took a substantial risk when he accepted Universal Studio's offer: he was

not permitted to read the script but was told the plot and, he knew that his rival had

curiously already turned down the opportunity. Nonetheless, Dowd made an agreement

with Universal, guaranteeing that B would spend $1 million over six weeks concurrent

with E.T.'s release, to promote the film in return for being allowed to use E.T. -- the movie

and its trademarked images -- to promote Y.

(2/2)

O Dowd had made an astute decision. Y had been introduced

nationally in only 1980, and by the time E.T. was released in June

1982, sales were sagging. However, within two weeks of the film's

release date, its sales had tripled; distributors of the product re-

ordered as many as ten times during that 14-day period.

O B paid $1 million for an amount of promotion that would have cost

an estimated $15-$20 million, according to Dowd. Articles at the

time pointed out that some viewers thought the product used in the

movie was X, and that A probably experienced some level of "free

ride" from the movie hype. A month after E.T.'s release, however, A

was clearly abashed by the company's missed opportunity, going so

far as to imply that they had never received an offer from Universal.

A – Mars, B – Hershey’s X – M&Ms, Y – Reese’s Pieces

Q6. Connect. (Specific Name)

Baby Bells

Q7. O A X (Korean: for "wealth or property" + "faction or clan") is a South

Korean form of business conglomerate. They are typically global multinationals owning numerous international enterprises, controlled by a chairman who has power over all the operations.

O The term is often used in a context similar to that of the English word "conglomerate” and was first used in 1984. There are several dozen large Korean family-controlled corporate groups which fall under this definition. Examples would be Hyundai, Samsung, LG, etc.

O The X has also played a significant role in South Korean politics. In 1988, a member of a X family, Chung Mong-jun, president of Hyundai Heavy Industries, successfully ran for the National Assembly of South Korea. Other business leaders also were chosen to be members of the National Assembly through proportional representation. Since 2000, Hyundai has played a role in the thawing of North Korean and South Korean relations

Chaebol

Q8. Who ?

O The family is said to have its roots in Araria, Bihar, but was settled in Gorakhpur. He stayed with his parents and siblings in a rented house in Turkmanpur area. The eldest son, he did a diploma course before being forced to take up work due to the death of his father Sudhir Chandra, who worked in a sugar mill. He tried his hand first at making salted snacks, apparently supplying them on the Lambretta under a venture called ‘Jaya’ Products.

O Nothing epitomises his preoccupation with his humble past more than the Lambretta scooter that stands enclosed in a cubicle in his home — a throwback to how it all started over three-and-a-decades ago in Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh’s hardscrabble east.

O Who ? And which group did he establish ?

Subrata Roy, Sahara

Q9. X ?

O X has reportedly become the country’s largest digital company. With eight lakh orders every day, it has surpassed the volume of Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC).

O It brings over 250 merchants with over 1,00,000 items for users with an interesting feature of allowing bargaining between the merchant and buyer through a messenger.

O Jack Ma’s Alibaba recently ventured into Indian markets by acquiring a 25% stake in this company’s parent body.

Paytm

Q10.

O While at college, company founder Marc Ewing was

given the Cornell lacrosse team cap by his

grandfather. People would turn to him to solve

their problems and he was referred to as that guy

in X. By the time he wrote the manual of X _____

he had lost the cap, so the manual included an

appeal to readers to return X if found. What is X ?

Red Hat

Q11.

O Due to its narrow focus and relatively small size, X has been potentially an attractive takeover target for its competitors, namely Nestle and Kraft Foods.

O In mid-July 2005, the share price of X rose 20% within two weeks on rumors of a bid approach by PepsiCo, although this intention was denied. Upon realizing that a takeover of a national treasure such as X by a foreign company was indeed possible in the capital markets, the "economically patriotic" French government stepped in by drafting a law to protect companies in "strategic industries" such as X from takeover. This has been dubbed the "X Law".

O X has recently made concerted efforts to ramp up its growth in Indian markets. X?

Danone

Q12. X ? O X was founded in 2010 by former Apple engineers Tony Fadell and Matt

Rogers. The idea came when Fadell took a couple of years off and built a vacation home. He was unimpressed with all of the certain available products and decided to design a new, better ones. X was acquired by Y in January 2014 for US $3.2 billion.

O On 7 May 2014, German activist group Peng Collective released a parody website named Y X, satirizing Y’s practices with fake products imitating Y’s art style, supposedly created as a result "of an intensive period of studying user behavior" in response to the "public debate around privacy and government surveillance" .

O The site described four purported new services lampooning Y’s data gathering tendencies made possible with X's technology: Y Trust, Y Hug, Y Bee and Y Bye, respectively a "data insurance" paid with personal data, a location service encouraging in-person emotional interactions, a "personal drone", and a memorial website created from automatically collected information.

Nest

2. Mega-Connect

O Written Round

O +5 For every Correct Answer

O Points for the connect are indicated on the

each slide

1. Connect. (+30,-20)

2. ID (+25,-15) O He is the former CEO and Chairman of infoGROUP

(previously known as infoUSA). Borrowing $100 from a bank to get started, it has grown from a one-man operation to a global employer of over 5,000 with revenues of $750 million. During this period he acquired over 45 companies. InfoGroup was sold in July 2010 for $680 million.

O More than that, he has been known for his close association with the Clintons.. He was recognized in Bill Clinton’s book Giving, describing the company as one that “has made a concerted effort to hire people who were on welfare, as well as people who are disabled or who have to support themselves after getting out of unsafe domestic situations.” He has also established a state of the art Science block at his old school at Rampur, which was inaugurated by former U.S. President Bill Clinton in 2003

O He was appointed by President Clinton to serve as a Trustee of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.

3. ID (+20,-10) O X in a remote village of Kutch. At the tender age of

eleven he came to ‘Mumbai’ was hardly literate even in Gujarati. By dint of hardwork and determination he learnt not only Gujarati, and Accounts, but also acquired functional command in English, Hindi and Marathi.

O He started his career as a hawker. At one time he became one of the leading share brokers in Bombay Stock Exchange. Having experienced fluctuations of fortune and a severe setback in the Stock Exchange he decided to set up an industry.

O He established Golden Tobacco in 1930 and nurtured it in very adverse and hostile environment of the British Monopoly in the cigarette industry. He showed the same determination and entrepreneurial skills when he established Golden Chemicals ten years later.

4. ID (+15,-5)

O X(4 November 1889 – 11 February 1942) was an Indian

industrialist, a philanthropist, and Indian independence fighter.

He was also a close associate and follower of Mahatma

Gandhi. Gandhi is known to have adopted him as his son.

O During the First World War, the British government appeased

and honoured native tradesmen, soliciting funds. They

appointed X an honorary magistrate. When he provided money

for the war fund, they conferred on him the title of Rai Bahadur,

a title he later surrendered during the non-co-operation

movement of 1921.

O In 1920, he was elected chairman of the reception committee

for the Nagpur session of the Indian National Congress. Later,

in 1923, he participated in the flag satyagraha, defying a ban

on flying the national flag in Nagpur, and was detained by

British forces. This earned him national admiration.

O X found one of India’s finest group of companies that continue

to do well even today.

5. ID (+10) O XY was a Basque Roman Catholic missionary

born in Y, Kingdom of Navarre (now part of Spain), and a co-founder of the Society of Jesus. He led an extensive mission into Asia, mainly in the Portuguese Empire of the time and was influential in evangelization work most notably in India.

O On his death, he was first buried on a beach at Shangchuan Island, Taishan, Guangdong. From there his body was taken to St. Paul's church in Portuguese Malacca on 22 March 1553. On 11 December 1553, his body was shipped to Goa.

O The body is now in the Basilica of Bom Jesus in Goa, where it was placed in a glass container encased in a silver casket on 2 December 1637. This casket, constructed by Goan silversmiths between 1636-1637, was an exemplary blend of Italian and Indian aesthetic sensibilities.

6. ID (+5)

O X, is a distinguished alumnus of IIT Bombay and a venture capitalist based in the US, was the chairman of the board and the CEO of Providian Financial Corporation, a former Fortune 500 company. He has served on the boards of MasterCard Inc., CIRRUS and many other organizations.

O He was appointed by the governor of California to the California State University Board of Trustees.

Exchange Sheets!

1. Connect.

Jain Family/ The Times Group

2. ID O He is the former CEO and Chairman of infoGROUP

(previously known as infoUSA). Borrowing $100 from a bank to get started, it has grown from a one-man operation to a global employer of over 5,000 with revenues of $750 million. During this period he acquired over 45 companies. InfoGroup was sold in July 2010 for $680 million.

O More than that, he has been known for his close association with the Clintons.. He was recognized in Bill Clinton’s book Giving, describing the company as one that “has made a concerted effort to hire people who were on welfare, as well as people who are disabled or who have to support themselves after getting out of unsafe domestic situations.” He has also established a state of the art Science block at his old school at Rampur, which was inaugurated by former U.S. President Bill Clinton in 2003

O He was appointed by President Clinton to serve as a Trustee of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.

Vinod Gupta

3. ID O X in a remote village of Kutch. At the tender age of

eleven he came to ‘Mumbai’ was hardly literate even in Gujarati. By dint of hard work and determination he learnt not only Gujarati, and Accounts, but also acquired functional command in English, Hindi and Marathi.

O He started his career as a hawker. At one time he became one of the leading share brokers in Bombay Stock Exchange. Having experienced fluctuations of fortune and a severe setback in the Stock Exchange he decided to set up an industry.

O He established Golden Tobacco in 1930 and nurtured it in very adverse and hostile environment of the British Monopoly in the cigarette industry. He showed the same determination and entrepreneurial skills when he established Golden Chemicals ten years later.

Shri Narsee Monjee

4. ID

O X(4 November 1889 – 11 February 1942) was an Indian

industrialist, a philanthropist, and Indian independence fighter.

He was also a close associate and follower of Mahatma

Gandhi. Gandhi is known to have adopted him as his son.

O During the First World War, the British government appeased

and honoured native tradesmen, soliciting funds. They

appointed X an honorary magistrate. When he provided money

for the war fund, they conferred on him the title of Rai Bahadur,

a title he later surrendered during the non-co-operation

movement of 1921.

O In 1920, he was elected chairman of the reception committee

for the Nagpur session of the Indian National Congress. Later,

in 1923, he participated in the flag satyagraha, defying a ban

on flying the national flag in Nagpur, and was detained by

British forces. This earned him national admiration.

O X found one of India’s finest group of companies that continue

to do well even today.

Jamnalal Bajaj

5. ID O XY was a Basque Roman Catholic missionary

born in Y, Kingdom of Navarre (now part of Spain), and a co-founder of the Society of Jesus. He led an extensive mission into Asia, mainly in the Portuguese Empire of the time and was influential in evangelization work most notably in India.

O On his death, He was first buried on a beach at Shangchuan Island, Taishan, Guangdong. From there his body was taken to St. Paul's church in Portuguese Malacca on 22 March 1553. On 11 December 1553, his body was shipped to Goa.

O The body is now in the Basilica of Bom Jesus in Goa, where it was placed in a glass container encased in a silver casket on 2 December 1637. This casket, constructed by Goan silversmiths between 1636-1637, was an exemplary blend of Italian and Indian aesthetic sensibilities.

St. Francis Xavier

6. ID

O X, is a distinguished alumnus of IIT Bombay and a venture capitalist based in the US, was the chairman of the board and the CEO of Providian Financial Corporation, a former Fortune 500 company. He has served on the boards of MasterCard Inc., CIRRUS and many other organizations.

O He was appointed by the governor of California to the California State University Board of Trustees.

Dr. Shailesh J. Mehta

Indian Business Schools

O Shreyansh Prasad Jain (S.P. Jain IMS)

O Vinod Gupta ( VGSOM, IIT Kharagpur)

O Shri Narsee Monjee (NMIMS)

O Jamnalal Bajaj (JBIMS)

O St. Francis Xavier

O Shailesh J Mehta (SJSOM, IIT Bombay)

3. Infinite Pounce 2 [ACW]

O +10 on Direct

O +10 on Pass

O +10/-10 on Pounce

1. Connect <specific term>

The Seven Sisters

Q2. O The X was a cartel of, among others, Osram, Philips, and General Electric from

December 23, 1924 until 1939 that existed to control the manufacture and sale of light bulbs.

O The cartel is an important step in the history of the global economy because it engaged in large-scale planned obsolescence. It reduced competition in the light bulb industry for almost twenty years, and has been accused of preventing technological advances that would have produced longer-lasting light bulbs.

O The cartel was a convenient way to lower costs and worked to standardise the life expectancy of light bulbs at 1000 hours, while at the same time raising prices without fear of competition. Members' bulbs were regularly tested and fines were levied for bulbs that lasted more than 1000 hours

O The X divided the world’s lamp markets into three categories:

O home territories, the home country of individual manufacturers

O British overseas territories, under control of Associated Electrical Industries, Osram, Philips, and Tungsram

O common territory, the rest of the world

Phoebus Cartel

Q3. O X is a British alternative investment management business. The company

manages about US$72.3 billion (30 September 2014) and employs over 1,200 people in 14 locations worldwide and is headquartered at Riverbank House in London.

O The company was founded in 1783, by James X, a barrel maker. The following year the company secured the contract to supply the Royal Navy with the rum for its daily “rum tot”, a tradition under which all sailors were allocated a daily ration of rum. The company moved into rum and sugar broking, and then later expanded into other commodities such as coffee and cocoa. Throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, it became a major market participant in commodity exchanges; and the firm’s twentieth century partners established the company as a broker to third parties..

O This venture prompted a move into financial services, which the company increasingly concentrated on. In 2000, the commodity trading companies went private with the result that X became exclusively a financial services company

Man Group (One that grants the Man Booker Prize)

Q4.

O She is the only child of the founder one of India’s largest enterprises and a trained classical musician.

O She graduated from Northwestern University majoring in Communication with a focus on Radio/TV/Film AND with a Masters in Business Administration having a focus on Social Enterprise Management and Strategy from the Kellogg School of Management.

O Within a year of joining her father’s company, she was elevated as executive director and CEO. Who and which organization is she associated with ?

Roshini Nadar, HCL

Q5.

O Below is an excerpt from the ‘About’ section of a company:

O “X is not for you. I repeat, X is not for the ‘Regular' you. X is only for that crazy traveller hidden inside you. It is an accommodation facility for your social self who wishes to meet new people and exchange travel stories. It is for your casual self who prefers a safe, hygienic, centrally located and affordable stay but at the same time want a relaxed and super friendly experience. It is for your playful self who feels that travel keeps them young at heart. It for your comradely self who believes that friends should have non stop fun while travelling in a group. It is for your dreamy self who dreams but never dared to step out for a solo trip before.”

O As on March 25,2015, X had its establishments in Jaipur, Jodhpur, Udaipur, Agra, Varanasi, Goa, Delhi and Vadodara. Which young start-up are we talking about ?

Zostel

Q6.

O Fortune’s investigation yields the first comprehensive picture of how one under-policed and far-flung generics company operated. It is not a tale of cutting corners or lax manufacturing practices but one of outright fraud, in which the company knowingly sold substandard drugs around the world — including in the U.S. — while working to deceive regulators. The impact on patients will likely never be known. But it is clear that millions of people worldwide got medicine of dubious quality from X.

O Excerpt on next slide.

O “In May 2004, Dr. Kathy Spreen joined X’s U.S. office as executive director of clinical

medicine and pharmacovigilance.

O At first, the company’s science seemed to exceed her expectations. She had been on the

job a few months and was preparing slides for a presentation about the company’s

launch of Riomet, a version of the diabetes drug Metformin, when she noticed something

remarkable. The data showing the concentration of X’s drug in the bloodstream appeared

to match that of the brand name perfectly. “Look how good this company is,” she

remembers thinking. “The bioequivalence data is superimposable on the drugs we are

modeling.”

O About a month later, she found another drug with similarly superimposable data. That’s

when she began to worry. “It’s too good to be true,” she recalls thinking. By definition,

data is tricky. Even two batches of the same drug made by the same company at the

same plant under the exact same conditions will have slight variations.

O With her suspicions aroused, Spreen began asking her Indian counterparts to send

underlying data that supported the test results. They repeatedly promised the

information was on the way. When it didn’t arrive, she got excuses: It was a “mess”;

they’d be “embarrassed.” She recalls begging, “I don’t care if it’s written on the back of

toilet paper. Just send me something.” But it never arrived.”

Ranbaxy

Q7. O The practice of X emerged in the same London coffeehouses that operated as the

unofficial stock exchange for the British Empire. In the late 1600s, shipping was just beginning between the New World and the old as colonies were being established and exotic goods were ferried back. A coffeehouse owned by Edward Lloyd, later of Lloyd's of London, was the primary meeting place for merchants, ship owners and others seeking ________.

O A basic system for funding voyages to the new world was established. In the first stage, merchants and companies would seek funding from venture capitalists. The venture capitalists would help find people who wanted to be colonists, usually those from the more desperate areas of London, and would purchase provisions for the voyage. In exchange, the venture capitalists would be guaranteed some of the returns from the goods the colonists would produce or find in the Americas.

O By 1654, Blaise Pascal, the Frenchman who gave us the first calculator, and his countryman Pierre de Fermat discovered a way to express probabilities . Pascal's triangle led to formalization the practice of X and made _________ more affordable.

Underwriting

Q8 O December of 2012, three young men were living in a claustrophobic apartment in San Francisco’s

Tenderloin district, working on a technology startup. Their project—a plan to make inexpensive cell-phone towers—had failed. Down to their last seventy thousand dollars, they resolved to keep trying out new software ideas until they ran out of money. Rent was a sunk cost. Since they were working frantically, they already had no social life. As they examined their budget, one big problem remained: food.

O Rhinehart, who is twenty-five, studied electrical engineering at Georgia Tech, and he began to consider food as an engineering problem. “You need amino acids and lipids, not milk itself,” he said. “You need carbohydrates, not bread.” Fruits and vegetables provide essential vitamins and minerals, but they’re “mostly water.” He began to think that food was an inefficient way of getting what he needed to survive. “It just seemed like a system that’s too complex and too expensive and too fragile,” he told me.

O What if he went straight to the raw chemical components? He took a break from experimenting with software and studied textbooks on nutritional biochemistry and the Web sites of the F.D.A., the U.S.D.A., and the Institute of Medicine. Eventually, Rhinehart compiled a list of thirty-five nutrients required for survival. Then, instead of heading to the grocery store, he ordered them off the Internet—mostly in powder or pill form—and poured everything into a blender, with some water. The result, a slurry of chemicals, looked like gooey lemonade. Then, he told me, “I started living on it.” Rhinehart called his potion X, which, for most people, evokes the 1973 science-fiction film “X Green,” starring Charlton Heston. The movie is set in a dystopian future where, because of overpopulation and pollution, people live on mysterious wafers called X Green. The film ends with the ghastly revelation that X Green is made from human flesh.

Soylent

Q9. FITB

The Grass Ceiling

Q10. Put funda.

Twitter’s April Fool’s Joke

O On 1st April 2013, Twitter announced that

it’d be shifting to a two-tiered service: a

basic free service, Twttr, but you only get

consonants and for five dollars a month, a

premium “Twitter” service which also

includes vowels.

Q11.

IRCTC (Indian Railway Catering And Tourism Corporation Limited) in joint partnership with SBI launched the IRCTC-SBI Railway Credit Card - India’s first co-branded credit card of its kind for railway passengers. It had many exclusive features such as -

• Up to 10% of the ticket fare back as Railway Points which can be redeemed for free travel

• Online railway ticket booking at a 0% transaction charge

• The SBI Railway Card also gives complimentary personal

accident insurance of up to Rs 10 lacs in the event of death in the case of a train accident

What was unique about it?

O India’s first ever credit card to have been designed by renowned

cartoonist, Shri R K Laxman. The face of the Card bears a

never-before published sketch created by Laxman exclusively for

the SBI Railway Card along with his autograph

Q12.

O The name X is the Chinese word for "millet".

O In 2011, its CEO suggested there are more meanings than just the "millet and rice." He linked the first part to the Buddhist concept that "a single grain of rice of a Buddhist is as great as a mountain," suggesting X wants to work from the little things, instead of starting by striving for perfection, while the second part is a reference to ______ _______ and also Mission Impossible, referring to the obstacles encountered in starting the company.

O He also stated that he thinks the name is cute. It is about revolution and being able to bring innovation into a new area. Several sources have linked the latter meaning to the Communist Party of China's "millet and rifle" revolutionary idiom during the Second Sino-Japanese War

Xiaomi

4. Long Visual Connect

Written Round

+5 for each print ad

Points for connect indicated on each slide

1. (+36/-20)

2. (+33/-18)

3. (+30/-16)

4. (+27/-14)

5. (+24/-12)

6. (Logo) (+21/-10)

7. (+18/-8)

8. (+15/-6)

9. (+12/-4)

10. (+9)

Exchange Sheets!

1. Hugo Boss

2. Standard Oil

3. Allianz

4. Ford

5. Kodak

6. Random House

7. Bayer

8. IBM

9. Volkswagen

10. Coca-Cola

Connect ?

Companies that explicitly collaborated with/aided the Nazis during WW2.

O Kodak (Used slave laborers from concentration camps)

O Hugo Boss (Uniform for German soldiers)

O Standard Oil (Supplied Tetraethyl Lead for German War Planes)

O Allianz (Insured all the facilities and employees at Auschwitz)

O Ford (Supplied vehicles, Henry Ford known anti-semite)

O Coke (Fanta was conceptualized)

O Bayer (Gas for Concentrations Camps)

O IBM (Made all sorts of tracking machines – Jews, soldiers,etc.)

O Volkswagen (Designed Beetle for the Nazis)

O Random House (Published Nazi Propaganda)