Sunday Posts

I have been working on Internationalisation of Higher and Professional Education for over a decade now, mostly at the business ends of things and exploring strategic opportunities. Therefore, I find myself often in conversations about how to internationalise educational offerings, often involving developed country institutions trying to tap into demographic booms in emerging markets, and sometimes, emerging market institutions reaching out the other way.  Most of this conversation, as I see it, is opportunistic. The list of failed attempts is long, which, not incidentally, include my own two years of developing a business to deliver British qualifications online in partnership with colleges in India and China. So, my current wisdom is not just theoretical - it has all the practicalities of someone who burnt himself in the process!  This makes me reluctant, often to the surprise of willing collaborators or investors who would see me try again, to engage again in cross...

There is a conflict at the heart of management - the question of culture. Culture will eat strategy for breakfast, said Peter Drucker, and he, as always, was right on the money. And, yet, culture gets insufficient attention in management practise, although not in management theory. Many small companies, who collectively employ more people than ever, think of the question of culture really as a big company thing.  The underlying view is simple - you worry about culture when you are a big company! It is logical too, because big companies are large, somewhat inorganic entity, having to align diverse elements all the time in pursuit of certain objectives. In contrast, small companies are, well, small, organic entities often consisting of a man and his dog, where the business is defined by the opportunity of the day. The day-to-day reality of the small company makes the question of culture, which is often long term both as a concept and in impact, a luxury. But, the point ...

A few days ago, I was completely bleak about the possibility of introducing Higher Education innovation in India. ( See earlier post here ) However, my key points were perhaps already cliched, and with the benefit of little more perspective, it is worthwhile to review this topic with a different start point - what shape can Higher Ed innovation in India take? First, there is an enormous amount of corruption in Indian Higher Education sector, and it is growing with commercialisation. The students are justifiably sceptical about anything new or disruptive, and would rather put their faith on tried and tested, despite knowing that these public institutions are quaint and could not care less for them.  Second, while the students know that the choices they have are all poor, the default reaction to this realisation is not to try something new or innovative, but to ensure that one does not do anything foolish. So, while Indian education seems ripe for new and disruptive proposi...

Someone told me, new ideas in Higher Education do not work. He has a point - even Gerald Grant and David Riesman conclude along the same lines in their The Perpetual Dream: Reform and Experiment in the American College - and paradoxically, the worse the crisis of educational exclusion or irrelevance in a country, the more difficult it is to introduce new ideas. The reason perhaps is that though in theory Higher Education is an enabler of social mobility, in practise, in many places, it is only a system of perpetuating social privilege. And, hence, even those who seek to climb the social ladder approach Higher Education with a conforming attitude, trying to disrupt everything else but not change the way to the gate of disruption. The lack of venturesome consumption, as Amar Bhide will put it, makes new enterprise and innovation extremely difficult in education. It does not indeed mean that businesses do not make money in Higher Education. They do, and lots of it. But, paradoxica...

As Education-to-Employment gap becomes worse, the popularity of 'Employability' training grows. This is a worldwide phenomenon: The government usually pays, and many micro businesses are set up every year in the hope that the students will also pay for it themselves. The format is usually cheap and cheerful: Bring in the learner for a few days, tell them how to write CVs, present themselves in the interviews, how to dress, how to shake hands and how to look confident.  Since those people I know in this trade are not stupid, I would think that they are driven either by incredible optimism or sheer opportunism. How else can one believe that if someone was not employable before their kind intervention, they become one just by learning to do better handshakes? There is no denying that learning to write CVs, or doing better at interviews, are important skills; but these things can only work if the students know in the first place what they want to do, and have the right skills...

Talking global is easy. In fact, it is not easy NOT to talk global. In this age of Internet, Facebook, Venture Capital, WTO, scale is the mantra: And, global is the only scale that really matters.  When I started working in England in 2004, I worked for a couple of interesting E-Learning companies for the first few years. They had good products and good people. I was greatly impressed by what they did, and with the sophistication of their technology and approach. They had large projects covering their cash flows, and were strategically poised to expand. But when I brought up the question of going global, given that I had first hand experience globally and thought these services would be quite compelling, the answer I got was "No Thanks!" These companies did not want to go global but rather service the small e-learning market in the UK that they knew well. They did not see the benefit of taking on the extra complexity and was afraid of 'global'. At that time, new...

As I travel in India and meet with education providers, I come across this popular view that there is no business in educational content. So, the business models of private education providers are predicated on innovations in delivery, technology or financing, but content is by far the least popular. This is not surprising - this is indeed the view most financiers of education hold - but slightly puzzling particularly in the context of India, where most content is so poor.   It seems that the argument is when so much free content is available, what is the point of making more content? And, secondly, the business model for content seems very difficult to crack. These are apparently valid points, but the 'content gap' in education in a country like India remains apparent, and some business model innovation is needed. Indeed, there is some work happening already. There are companies adapting MOOC content for Engineering Education, in partnership with an Indian universit...

Vocational Education is designed to be a poor man's thing. It is for those kids who faltered through the school and didn't do okay in the things that matter. Those who couldn't get the right GPA or work out the system of examinations to get a good college. Those whose parents never went to university and didn't know what counts in the game to get to good college. Those who perhaps couldn't pay the tuition for the private school. You get it - those who are not smart enough, not connected enough, didn't know enough. I see this as an opportunity. Because the whole system of exams and colleges are so misdirected. They are almost always preparing people with wrong skills and abilities, for professions that may cease to exist soon. I could see a model of vocational education that could be constructed on the back of various government attempts, vain and pointless as they may be, and provide a disruptive force in the education sector of the developing countries.  ...

Six months into the new venture, it is time for stock taking. It has been exciting, but extremely demanding, journey, testing my assumptions and giving me a taste of street-level entrepreneurship. Despite the personal costs and sacrifices, this is intoxicating: The freedom, the ability to create new stuff and the sheer joy of watching something grow. Indeed, there were disappointments, many of them. Our idea was perhaps too ambitious, too complex for many investors, particularly in the UK, who has a limited view of the education business, and a particularly constricted one for the emerging market opportunities. What we wanted to do is disruptive, but not disruptive the way those who love status quo want: It was not about using technology to deliver standardised education, it was not about collecting learner data and create models of learning to create further standardised education. It remains quite the opposite: It is about opening the box of competence-based education and creating a...

I wrote about arriving at a break point a couple of weeks ago, and I intend to follow it up with more concrete plans now. I am fast arriving at a point of crisis, when I have started questioning the worth of my day-to-day activities, even if they are financially rewarding. The desire to do something meaningful gets me out of the bed every morning, and after spending twenty years in For-Profit education companies in various sizes and forms, I have started questioning whether I have always been barking up the wrong tree. I have a theory about commercial enterprises - that companies can only make money serving a socially useful purpose - and I shall claim that my early career spent in IT education proved that this was indeed the case. However, as I traveled, I have started discovering the other side of the coin, progressively, encountering in various opportunistic enterprises with business models founded on exploiting arbitrage and extracting the advantages of regulatory failure. I have...

In constructing a model for global education, the biggest challenge to negotiate is one that of local context. From the high ideal of global skills, it may not be visible that same words may mean different things for different people, and there is no universal agreement on how businesses should run and societies should function. This is where our business model of delivering British Education programmes worldwide comes up for a reality check. This is where we are having to think beyond the technology: In fact, technology plays only a minor part in the plans we are putting together. The consideration of context introduces a layer of complexity beyond just the online provision of teaching in our plans. We wouldn't be counting on the lazy assumption that if we put a set of good tutors and smart technologies, everything will fall in place. One of the things about Independent Education is that the success of students is everything: It is they who pay the bill, and it would be wrong t...