Sunday Posts

Lenin allegedly said, "there are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen". Living through placid times just as we gave up on history, it came alive in 2020. But that's not the only comeback worth noticing. Prime Ministers, including those who regularly trashed experts or promoted health benefits of cow urine, came to hide behind 'science' to justify what they are doing. Scientists on television, even if only things they are permitted to do are to sheepishly nod or parrot platitudes, have become a regular spectacle. The pandemic seemed to have brought them back from oblivion. But is this the moment of experts or the twilight of expertise? The great hurrah for science may be misleading when its appreciation extends only upto speculative statistics, which, with its magic wand of models, can produce any result that one may want to see. In fact, as this great catastrophe came knocking, it was clear that we were looking the wrong way in t...

I watched a popular Indian mythologist expound on an Indian Business TV channel that Indian organisations are essentially different from Western ones. His reasoning is that the Western organisations are supposed to be separate, stand on its own, entities, Indian organisations are extensions of its owners, and hence, not just culturally different but organically distinct too.  I am sure this is an attractive opinion. In this season of celebration of Indian exceptionalism, what's better to think of a culturally exclusive form of business? Also, one that makes all the idiosyncrasies of Indian businesses look explicable and even desirable! I am sure a lot of this Business Sutra will be sold - I can see many presentations blooming around this central thesis. Except that, leaving out the soundbites and mythologies, it reflects a profound misunderstanding of both Western businesses and Indian business culture. In fact, the whole premise is based on a false dichotomy, or, to ...

It is possible to see the recent history as an interplay between Politics and Economics, and 2016 as some kind of inflection point that made politics interesting again. Allowing for a broad generalisation, my point is that the narrative of harmonised economic interest keeping the status quo, which effectively meant a professional political class indulging in risk-free politics, is no longer the only story in town after 2016. The broad consensus that kept emotions out and interests predominant in public affairs has taken a serious beating in Brexit, Trump and myriad other political changes around the world. This includes the failed bids too, as Marine Le Pen reaching second round or AfD entering Parliament make politics something that all intelligent people should be engaged into.  And, yet, if the 2016 was only the beginning, the events in Catalonia yesterday mark a political turn that all the preceding events pointed to. Whether or not this really leads to a Catalan sece...

Or, I could have said - why I can't read business books. At least, not anymore. This may seem inconsequential, but it is not for me. In fact, it is an existential problem that I face now: I can't read business books! It is very necessary for my career - being well-read is one of the advantages I brought to table as a professional - and indeed, crucial to maintain my professional credential as a Chartered Marketer, which I attained with great effort, once upon a time. And, yet, I can't bring myself to read Business Books. This isn't always there. I did read Business Books, quite extensively, until about three years ago. I did maintain a subscription of HBR, bought Strategy & Business and Sloan Management Review regularly at WH Smith, maintained a small collection of business books all the time with books on marketing and innovation prominently featuring on my shopping list. I even had my favourites: I read all of Clayton Christensen, Henry Chesbrough, Micha...

Lots of odd things happened in 2016, and I wrote about them, almost reluctantly, as they happened. And, yet, while I could not keep myself from commenting on Trump's victory, I refrained from commenting on India's 'demonetisation' move, in which the Government annulled 86% of India's currency by value, overnight. This event has more real and emotional significance to me than Trump's victory, and indeed I am in the middle of a very heated discussion, online and offline, on the issue. Yet, I chose not to comment, at least so far, because I was so divided on the issue. And, commenting now is not a pretencion of self-importance: I rather thought it was best to say how I really feel, rather than trying to project that I am indifferent (which I am not). To start with, I should be happy because the government has made people to make sacrifices. Instead of the promised better days, the Prime Minister has called upon the middle class to be the soldiers of the ATM, ...

I have an aversion to the word Great! This is one of the words in English language, employed to describe a little island, which has taken an altogether new level of superficiality in the usual American habit of splashing it onto anything: For example, "the Great Country of North Korea" - ok, except that! I was, therefore, naturally suspicious when I come across The Great Courses, the audio/video learning content aimed at Lifelong Learning (another meaningless expression, admittedly, except that it has a specific meaning in the European Union). I came across these through the regular advertisements in The New Yorker and The London Review of Books, and also, in a Bill Gates interview, where he mentioned that he uses The Great Courses to learn about different subjects. Gates' point was interesting: He was arguing that more than the MOOCs, The Great Courses, high quality recorded videos on a rage of subjects, designed for self-study, has great potential to change Educat...

Whatever Jefferson meant with Pursuit of Happiness, it has become a global mantra. We may like, hate or be indifferent to different aspects of American life and culture, but this essential American Dream now underpins the Chinese Dream, Turkish Dream, African Dream, Indian Dream - dreams everywhere! It has become a governing philosophy, and sometimes at the expense of the other two essential aspects of life Jefferson had in mind. True, happiness means different things to different people. An Indian may see it as a comfortable life alongside his parents, which would perhaps be unbearable for a Brit. A man would define happiness differently from a woman. But, despite all these differences, our society could be defined as one unified in pursuit of happiness. Why did this catch on? When Jefferson was writing, Life would have been the most important goal, given the number of autocrats then ruled the world, followed by Liberty, which was perhaps the point of his writing. Pursuit of Ha...

Reading history is one of my favourite pastimes. In fact, more correctly, reading history is my key professional development activity, if I take the view that writing this blog and talking about ideas are the most important things I do, and treat my day job as what really is - an instrument to pay my bills! Though my reading list may seem haphazard to some who only read on purpose, those lists - as I am becoming conscious of them recently - are around the big questions I labour with at the time, and most of these big questions, for me, have a historical nature. For example, consider the question that dominates my conversations, and readings, at this very moment. It is - how does a society fall under the spell of an autocrat? I know why this question troubles me. In India, my origin country, democracy is taken for granted - various television talk shows proclaim that democracy in India is irreversible because it is so chaotic - and various democratic institutions, both at the Unio...

Tony Blair says a Corbyn win would annihilate Labour. Failing to elect him as the leader would do so too. Blair misses the point that the sanitized, undifferentiated party that he helped create in 1990s is now irrelevant. This is one of the problems with change - that it does not stop. Today, after 9/11 and its wars, recession and Greece, the world is a difference place than it was in 1990. The politics must be different, too. The triumph of centrism, as witnessed in the decades since 1970s, was not the end of History. An opportunity was provided and missed, as the lack of working class activism was used by the powerful to advance their agenda of marginalisation, inequality and power-grab. The moment may be now, or in the future, but the push-backs have now started.  It comes just after the Tory win in the UK, but it should not surprise anyone. We should be able to see beyond Tory win and Labour loss. The Labour lost for two reasons. One, because the Lib-Dems got anni...

Geoff Colvin's Humans Are Underrated is set to come out in the UK in September and I would look forward to read the book. From the snippet published in Fortune magazine ( Read here ), Colvin seems to make an interesting argument. That it is time to rethink what it means to be human. In the race against the machine, it is futile to try to figure out what the machines can not do. Very smart people have tried and failed before, as the logic of Moores Law caught up with their prediction. With the Arrive-By date of Singularity set in 2029 ( by Ray Kurzweil ), even the tasks we think are beyond technologies, will soon not be. So, the point is not to try to outsmart technologies, but to figure out what really matters. The answers he provides are not dissimilar to the ones we already have had. His list of five big 21st century skills include empathising, collaborating, creating, leading and building relationships. These are similar to what we hear from other people trying to think ab...

If we accept there is a tipping point for any trend or fad, that is now for this conversation about man versus the machine, or, more specifically, what impact automation would have on jobs. This is an old conversation, dating back centuries (Luddites, Ricardo, Marx, Keynes and Leontieff - all made their point), and the fear that machines will take over our jobs is not new. And, indeed, the counter-argument, what the Economists call the Lump-of-Labour fallacy, or the mistaken notion that there is only a fixed amount of work to be done (and, therefore, a job for a machine means one less human job), is extremely well-known. So, one may ask - what is the fuss about? Indeed, it is quite a fuss if you call it so. As The Atlantic visualises a World without Work , the Foreign Affairs says Hi to Robots and wonders whether humans will go the way of horses. Harvard Business Review tries to look beyond automation and allows Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson, the High Priests of the Secon...

Higher Education has become a subject for Prime Time TV in India. This is not because there is a sudden awareness that the system is not working, but rather a string of other events - the closure of a high profile institution which operated without a license for many years (see my earlier post here ), a scandal that exposed Civil Services examinations in one state were rigged for a long time, a Nobel Laureate Economist writing about Government meddling and limitations of Academic Freedom - that brought the subject to the fore. The conversations, stoked by temporary concerns, would almost certainly fade away again, once these issues become old news. But, it is worthwhile to follow it while it lasts. [See one Indian-style talk show, where everyone talks, here ] One could claim that this is not new and the question of Higher Education has got political attention throughout the last decade. The Presidents and the Prime Ministers regularly talked about it. There was a huge expansion w...

TechCrunch reports a slowing of EdTech investments in the first five months of this year ( see here ). The period in question is perhaps too short to pick up a trend, but this may allow us to think through some of the issues on the table. For example, what kind of EdTech is really going to change things? The EdTech business is a slow one - someone told me that you will need 36 visits to an university to sell them a piece of technology, and make it 72 if it is a new idea - and indeed, most investors and entrepreneurs, believing the trade press perhaps a bit too much, are already feeling disappointed that the things do not change as fast. In fact, not just this piece of news about slowing deal flow, but also the big successes - like Lynda.com - tell us a story of continuity, rather than change.  The big investments in EdTech going to video perhaps tells us that while technology is being adapted in the classroom, and people are learning themselves, the ways of doing so are c...

Nisid Hajari makes such an obvious point in Foreign Policy ( see here ) that it surprises. Blaming India for the failure of Pakistan is so cliched! What do we not know of the arguments made? That Gandhi was too religious for secular leaders like Jinnah to put up with, and this is why he went on to set up a religious state? Pakistan faltered because it was not given Calcutta, and later Kashmir? That Indian leaders never wanted Pakistan to succeed? These arguments have been repeated since the 1940s, and promoted assiduously by two groups of participants in the drama, who may each have something not to talk about. First, the Pakistani elite. Nehru did indeed scare them off, but this was not about Hindu majority. If anything, ask the Hindu fundamentalists in India, Nehru and Gandhi would be accused of undermining Hindu majoritarianism. Nehru scared them off because he was dangerously socialist and the founders of Pakistan were mostly landowners. Most political leaders, and the Army t...

One does marvel at the technological progress that we have made over the last two centuries. It is all but natural to make this the new God - and expect technologies to appear to solve our problems. When we talk about an environmental apocalypse, it is common to refer to the first environmental conference in the world, which was convened at the end of Nineteenth century to deal with the seemingly intractable environmental problems of the cities - Horse Dung! The conference ended in a failure. Yet, in a few years, automobiles were everywhere and the problem completely disappeared. We believe that the technologies will indeed appear when the problems become urgent. Yet, technological development is not a value-neutral process. It is dependent on the social power, and the agenda of the powerful. This is why we can do advanced robotics but may not have a cure for Ebola. This is exactly why technology can kill - and we know it does - and it is naive to keep an unquestioning faith on t...

Since writing the post on The Great Indian University earlier, I received an email from Mandeep S Bakshi, a valued colleague and co-traveller, someone who is interested in Indian Education, both as a concerned citizen and a parent of someone taking career decisions. These views were put on an email because it was longer than the word limits allowable for comments on posts, for some reason which I don't understand. However, I thought it was appropriate to publish the email in full for public consumption, and make a separate post, as this email enhances my understanding and previous statements regarding the issues involved. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hi Supriyo With reference to your blog on A Great Indian University on August 5, I would like to pen my thoughts. These are based upon my understanding and appreciation of the issues involved. If you recollect, in one of our e...

We talk leadership all the time and everyone seems to know what it is, though everyone may have a slightly different idea. As a part of my teaching course, I do ask my students to define leadership, and get many definitions. In summary, the answer to my question is given in the lines of Justice Potter Stewart's "I know it when I see it", with a long list of names that stretch from Jesus Christ to Jose Mourinho. While this may sound intuitive, there are a few granular details in this definition we should be aware of. Indeed, Jesus Christ and Jose Mourinho are two very different kind of persons, but even the common strand that seemingly tie them together in my students' conception - the ability to move people - is actually two very different kind of things. Indeed, I exaggerate the difference by picking two extreme examples, and this would be much less emphatic if one picks another pair of names from the list, like Winston Churchill and Mahatma Gandhi (or Abraham ...

During my teaching sessions on Innovation, I show students a debate between Professor Bhaskar Chakravorti and Tyler Cowen, on the subject 'Is Innovation Over?', hosted by The Economist. It is interesting to see the reactions I get after the students have seen the video, as they remain overwhelmingly convinced that innovation isn't over, given the marvels of technology they enjoy in their lives and the coming marvels they continue to expect. While Tyler Cowen's arguments (and certainly his presentation) are cogent and provocative at the same time - where is the new Budhdha, Socrates and Jesus Christ - he fails to convince the twenty-somethings that the world is going to slow down, even as they sit in London. This is why I believe Professor Chakvorti's arguments in the debate, primarily focused on the emerging world, falls short. As Tyler Cowen rightly points out, celebrating innovation in India in the form of Mitticool is actually being unduly pessimistic abou...

There is massive arrogance in the technology circles, captured best perhaps by Marc Andreessen's WSJ article proclaiming the same. The rise of the 'information economy', though a bit of jargon in itself, has boosted such rhetoric: Today, technologists confidently sermonise others on how to do healthcare, education, construction, everything else, and even money. It did seem that this is the final frontier, a scientific thesis that is really un-falsifiable. Until Bitcoin. Bitcoin possibly shows what's wrong with this position. It is not about the technology or the economics of it, nor the failure of Mt Gox. It is about the underlying proposition that software can save/ change everything. It may appear arrogant, but the recent pronouncements of Jon Matonis that Bitcoin is a currency in beta and you should only invest if you can afford to lose ( see story here ), is really symptomatic that software may be living inside a bubble itself. And, bubble in this context is ...