Sunday Posts

This was an old idea that I keep coming back to - that of a Global Enterprise School. Indeed, the shortening to E-School is deliberate to contrast it with B-School. A Forbes article in 2011 first used the term (see my earlier post ) and I have been exploring it ever since. This was the idea I pursued in the transformation, which remained incomplete, of London School of Accountancy and Management that I was running at the time, and afterwards, as I set up U-Aspire to offer pathway education globally. While I may have been doing something else for several months now, and U-Aspire, in its China-only format, became more focused on qualifications that lead to English degrees, I have never abandoned the idea. However, the intervening months of experience was valuable and helped me develop the concept further, and perhaps to a point when I am ready to give it a shape. The idea may have started as a contra-B-School, particularly attractive as the limitations of B-School teaching is all b...

There are three wars of civilization in play last week. First, let's call it the war of St Valentine. If we thought the debate was settled, on the eve of Valentine's Day, the discussion how romantic love undermines a society resurfaced. For example, Malaysian police monitored the hotels in provinces to ensure that nothing wrong is going on. In the extreme form, in India, a young boy of seventeen got killed because he was seen walking with a girl, his sister, on the the day. Young versus the old, it seems to be the theme. The conservatives of various hues usually portray their action as a fight against Western cultural imperialism, but increasingly, this has a local flavour. The women who sent out undergarments to the home of a Hindu fundamentalist leader after he instigated violence against couples seen in the parks etc, were not prompted by Western media of any sort, but their own sense of dignity and freedom. Second, let's call it the end of Caliphets of Mubarak and Ben ...

Changing organizations can be a thrilling, all consuming, life enhancing experience. It is not easy, and often it may look quite scary. But, if one's convinced about the pay-off, not just in money terms but the value one would create, every bit of the trouble seems worth it. But, then, there is nothing straightforward about it. As I told a colleague recently, everything is culturally grounded. This is something management gurus often don't get it, because they are not inside an organization. It is often easy for consultants to see and do things to change an organization, because they see and work from outside. If they have the mandate, they can follow the cold logic of management rationality. However, this de -personalizes the organization, as the logic employed can be only of money and shareholder returns: Such re-engineering can only end up with a narrow focus on stock value at the expense of everything else. Changing from inside, though difficult, can be more rewarding, in t...

As a part of my work on the Leadership Programme, I came to realize that one of the more important aspects that one needs to understand about leadership is what leadership is not. I have been reading Warren Bennis and his warnings about Pseudo -leadership is very real: I do think the world is full of pseudo -leaders and the big problems we face comes from the failure to call the wheat from chaff a lot of times. To start with, take the distinction, following Max Weber, between Power and Authority. Weber argued that POWER is about the ability to force people to obey, whereas the AUTHORITY is when one is obeyed without having to resort to force. In real life, however, this distinction gets blurred and too many people confuse the two. This happens on both sides of the table, incidentally; those who obey sometimes mistake the power - the senior person's ability to fire or punish the junior person - as some sort of automatic authority, and those who are in the driver's seat someti...

I had an interesting conversation on the scope of e-Learning and how much it will replace the traditional classroom training in the next five years. Obviously, there were many sceptics in the group, and they were pushing the opinion that e-Learning is not nearly as good or effective as someone standing up to teach. However, it was heartening to note that most people saw the argument for what it is - a passionate plea for horse-drawn cars when automobile has started coming to the market - and the fact that usually it is comparing some basic e-learning efforts with some very good teachers. The general opinion, therefore, was that e-learning will continue to expand in scope and possibly replace most of what is done in classrooms today. The panel touched upon various media comparison studies, which proved, over a number of years [starting 1947, when such a study was first carried out, a comparison between video, paper-based and classroom training] that the learning outcomes do not vary sig...

I am as optimistic as ever that we shall emerge out of this recession soon. Whoever I tell this reminds me that the party is not going to start anytime soon, though, they agree, that the worst may be behind us. But, as long as we look forward rather than back, new things will happen and new possibilities will emerge. And, besides, after all this pain of the Great Recession, who wants to return to partying as usual. This recession, however, will have two long term impacts. While this crisis undermined the moral force of the theory that the market gets it right all the time, it has also severely undermined the governments' ability to bail us out of any future crisis. The pendulum seems to have run its full course, over thirty years, where we have moved from public spending to fiscal responsibility back to public spending again. So, in the coming years, we may go back to the old days of fighting inflation and high taxes and interest rates, as capital will become scarce in general. ...

Talent Management was, and still is, the buzzword. As championed by numerous management gurus, including the uber -guru, Tom Peters, Talent Management is envisioning your company like a football team. He says, you must have the stars and the others. Like a football team, you must have the miracle man, who will pull up that miracle goal, which will make all the difference between winning and losing. In today's hyper-competitive economy, that's what makes a difference. Makes sense, indeed, just that the companies are not football teams. They are not even an orchestra, which is the next best parallel that Talent Management consultants draw. Well, they can seem to be, if you all you care for is 90 minute glory. But if one sees a business organization as the hard long term slog that it actually is, suddenly the poor knowledge workers seem to be as much valuable as anyone else. The point I am making is - yes, stars make a difference. But since building a great company usually is a lo...

While I am on the subject of Leadership Training, I had this interesting discussion about sales training in India with a friend. He was emphasizing the need of developing sales training modules specifically for India, and not rehashing the western modules available off the shelf. He also made the point that sales has a changing priority in India, because the new commercial frontiers are the villages and hitherto untouched customers for most industries. His point was - and he had been doing this for more than a decade - that the western models, if it ever worked in India, are losing their effectiveness in the context of this new marketplace. Indian trainers, indeed, covet the western practises. This is primarily based on, I believe, the faith on the superiority of Western business culture. After all, modern business culture in India is deeply influenced by Western business thinking, passed on through customer interfaces and expectations, or through consultants and executives trained in ...

It is fashionable to be a socialist these days. Even in America, that is. In Europe, various socialist parties have always existed, though past their prime after 1970s, but in America, being called a Socialist was an abuse. That remains unchanged indeed - last week we have seen various schemes being labelled socialism - but there is a new openness to the new socialism. The family tree of new socialism, as presented by Kevin Kelly in WIRED , traces its roots to Utopia and the high point in Paris Commune, but connect up Linux, Twitter and Blogger in the same family. Indeed, the biographies and a new film about Che Guevara has made a comeback in Europe even when we thought we have seen the last of Fidel Castro. And, the universal acceptance of capitalist way of life is suddenly looking challenged in the face of a global recession brought about by the wisdom of the markets. But, then, what about socialism's blemishes? The state socialism is dying. Theocracy and autocracy has taken over...

Nations, the modern currency of our identity, were not there forever. That's an obvious fact, but how often we forget this in our political discourse? Like many other things, governments, printed money, passports and visas, we take nations for granted too. As if they were always there, and by extension, always will be there. However, truth is - nations are a fairly modern invention, and there is absolutely no guarantee that they will even last our lifetime. The usual British apologists of imperial rule in India argue that there was no India prior to British rule. They reason the British rulers have conceptualized India as a nation, given it its modern geographic shape and unity. Indian nationalists, of course, take strong exception of this view and point towards the historical entity of Bharat , in its expansive geographic form. They cite the great Indian kings of Ashoka and Akbar who united the country and ruled it for a number of years. The argument goes on. Pointless argument, ...

I joined Linkedin several years ago. I sent out some invitations to a few people I knew, turning down the option of adding everyone on my address book. If they were on my address book, why add them here again - that was my thinking. This whole thing was about connecting with long lost friends, so I searched the names of past colleagues and contacts. I did not go far, and after about three years of using the service, I had about twenty odd contacts, all of whom I was in touch anyway through other means, and actually never bothered to check the site at all. In the meantime, there were other sites which competed for my attention. There were the chat rooms to start with. But then there was hi5, which was more for ladies I did not really know; Orkut, more for family; and Facebook , which I must admit was the most engaging. I did use [and still do] Facebook quite a bit and found many people I lost contact with, and there were quite a few friends who used the chat facility in Facebook , whi...

Paul Samuelson, in a weekly syndicated column, has written about the mistakes Harvard economists Joseph Schumpeter and Edward Chamberlin made during the time the stock market crash of 1929 spread its spectre on the wider economy and eventually became known as the Great Depression, a decade-long slump which affected the western societies significantly. Samuelson goes on to argue that a similar mistake is being made by Harvard economists today, and he names Greg Mankiw and Robert Barro , when they oppose President Obama's plans to increase government investment as stimulus, including putting money in bad banks. Dr. Samuelson argues that Keynesian multiplier really works and one can see a multiplier effect of 1.5 projects results close to reality [what I understand of it is that every dollar spent by the government generates demand worth $1.50 in the economy] and therefore, the stimulus package is the only meanigful way to get the economy back on track. He argues that politics sh...

For lots of people, capitalism has failed. Their mortgaged houses were repossessed, their savings melted out in the hands [and pockets] of Bernie Madoff and his kind, their stock market portfolios look puny and they are no longer sure where to keep the savings anymore. Banks and other infallible institutions, like General Motors, General Electric and Toyota, look clueless. The leaders of the government are not proving any more enlightened than Uncle Joe down the road, who gambles upon the idiocy of the lenders to climb out of trouble every time. The deep downturn, after years of peak prosperity, is hurting more - and many people blame the greed of the capitalist, embodied in Wall Street bankers, for their trouble. Media has caught on the mood and many respectable magazines have already announced 2009 to be the last year of Capitalism. The more conservative ones, like The Economist, which remains unrepentant about supporting George W. on Iraq to this day, have been thinking deeply wher...