The programme will consist of frameworks, conceptual understanding from case-studies discussion, and presentations. Participants will be encouraged to present a difficult situation -- from marketing perspective -- faced in their organisation, and then to develop a suitable marketing strategy.

The programme fee is Rs 12,500 for residential participants. The fee includes teaching material, and on-campus boarding and lodging.

Non-residential participants will payRs 10,000 which will also cover the cost of teaching material, lunch and tea.

For further details, contact: Sr. Admn. Officer (Aca.Ser.), Indian Institute of Management, Prabandh Nagar, Off Sitapur Road, Lucknow - 226013; Ph: (0522) 361891-97; Fax: (0522) 361840/361843; E-mail: mdp@iiml.ac.in

Watch your back
All that back stabbing in the office keeping you from getting comfortable in your ergonomically correct chair? Welcome to the world of work. You might not expect vicious cliques to still exist in a place where you're all, putatively, on the same team. Yet, at times -- many folks say most times -- they're unavoidable. When you work at a place where politicking is frequent and frequently ugly, steer clear of joining in, says Chris Jones, owner of PoliTemps, a staffing company that specialises in finding folks political jobs, especially on the Hill. ``Avoid if at all possible engaging in office gossip.

There's a tendency for staff members to sit during lunch-time at the water cooler and talkabout other staff members,'' he said. Washington Post quotes Jones:``Resist temptation. They will use that later to talk about you.''

Even seemingly harmless gossip can become a weapon that your co-workers use against you if they hear you are going to get a promotion or raise, for instance. Remember, anything can and will be held against you in a court of work-place. Be careful. And if the local politics get out of hand, know when it's time to start looking elsewhere, or your work experience isn't going to be very fulfilling.

The cold shoulder: Ganged up on. That's how one employee felt after just a month of working at a staffing company in Bethesda. This 27-year-old was hired to be the office's only recruiter, bringing in potential employees to place in other firms for the first round of interviews before sending them off to more specific account managers within the company.

The recruiter pulled in 10-12 appointments per week for his first month. Then the top managers of the company called ameeting and said they needed to get more people in the door. Other employees at the meeting spoke up, suggesting that the recruiter set up seven meetings each day. They would all help out with the vast increase in traffic, they promised.

``So I held everybody to that, and that wasn't a very popular thing to do,'' he said. ``I started bringing in seven people a day and the place was swamped. Phones were ringing off the hook. It just became pandemonium.'' What sounded like a great team effort in the meeting in front of the top managers turned into an empty promise, he said, and almost immediately, ``I started getting the cold shoulder at work.''

Soon, he found it was just too hard to get done what he needed to accomplish when everyone seemed to be talking about him behind his back and making his life difficult. ``I did my job, and if I wanted to hang around in that environment, I could have spent 12 hours a day dealing with it. It gets to the point where if you don't have a good team in place, and don'tfunction as a large engine, you can really feel the pain.''

He left after the second month.