Sunday Posts

I am back in International Education again. I had a three-year break from international education. Part of the reason was my own work preference: In 2016, fatigued from years of constant travel, erratic habits and living out of a suitcase, I requested a change of role into a more home-bound one. I always enjoyed travelling but perhaps I did too much of it. After years of boasting about Airline tiers and the quality of food at airport lounges, I was, at that point, keen on a new life of office work and daily routines. But that was only part of the reason. The other part was that I became all too aware of the limitations of 'global education'. I wholeheartedly believed in what I did: That project-based education would represent a great step-change in education. I engaged with all my heart to bring employers ever closer to the learning process. But, as I did that, I saw that any universal formula really doesn't work - the tension between the specificity of the empl...

Once upon a time, I was a believer. I believed that the wonderful possibility of online higher education will make available affordable, high quality higher education for the aspiring middle-class students everywhere. Of all the vistas opened up by the Internet, this was the most transformative. This would have made a truly flat world; this would have resulted in a convergence of values and ideas, desires and languages.  That was then, the late nineties. Before the dot-com bust, before 9/11, before Facebook conquered the world. Most importantly, before I did a day's work for the online universities and met the first students who enrolled in them. Before the wonderful rhetoric met the real world and billions of dollars of venture capital was poured into online universities! And, before various failed schemes to improve higher education in the 'third world' came full-circle. In between, I was in the frontline. I have this odd enthusiasm about what I do. Though I...

Education will be transformed by technology, but not until the technologists have fully appreciated the Culture question. This is EdTech's blind spot. Culture is 'soft' - it is hard to capture in a spreadsheet - and yet Education is a 'cultural activity', deeply embedded in the society that surrounds the learner and constantly informed by its history. Tech, on the other hand, at least in its modern, global, incarnation, wants to be culture agnostic: Its quest for scale is intricately linked to its ability to operate culture blind. The EdTech businesses fail to account for culture for more reasons than just its inherent claim for scale. They also assume technology is used in an uniform way, despite all evidence on the contrary. The users almost always adapt technology to their own purpose, rather than changing their habits to suit what the technologists originally intended, but such ideas are not welcome in technology circles addicted to the idea of 'ha...

Wrong question, perhaps! Some of the times I asked the question, I got awkward pauses in return. This is a dinosaur question, so dated, reactions indicated: Going global means being on the Cloud, countries are totally irrelevant in this conversation. As I wrote in an earlier post, Global or Multinational , I think this is one of the big mistakes companies make. Their assumption of flat world is totally off the mark. One has to touch the ground as long as they involve people from different nations as customers. This idea of 'global market', borrowed mostly from the playbook of hedge funds who seem to move money from one place to another seamlessly, does not apply to most businesses dealing with customers. One has to be 'national', multi-national if you like, because markets are national. And, that claim of being on the cloud is based on complete innocence of how marketing and product development work in real life. Once I get past the mistaken assumption of ...

I come up a lot against the issue of culture, given that I mostly do what one would call International Business, and do so in Education, an area which is so culturally specific that most people banish both International and Business from vocabulary when dealing with it. So, in my day-to-day interactions, I both come across the Not-invented-here syndrome, that anything from a different culture should be rejected out of hand, and its inverted form, that culture does not matter. Indeed, I have a view, and I shall claim to be qualified to have one in this case. This, not just because I migrated mid-life and settled in another country, but because I escaped the entrapment of my native culture by deliberately trying to see it from outside. This, I believe, worked better for me than just reading about culture, which I had to do for professional reasons, and indeed, doing so made me think about the limitations of engaging with culture as a technical thing, a system of acting in a certain wa...

How much should one pay heed to cultural issues when planning to deliver education globally? This question has assumed renewed significance as global education is now a reality. Technology has made it possible, financial liberalisation made it desirable. Now, even the last barriers, which were there for mostly political and cultural reasons, are also coming down. Even a country like Bangladesh, which is forever at war with Western influence at home, has now allowed overseas universities to set up shop ( see story ). With a broad global consensus slowly emerging about a regulatory easing of Higher Education, the global online providers never had it better. The technology of delivery has reached a tipping point, the access to computing, through cheap tablets and smartphones, have reached even the remotest parts of the world, and the groundswell of middle class aspirations have far outstripped the traditional modes of supply.  Indeed, there are big hurdles to cross. Chin...

The issue my work primarily concerns with is how to develop the 'global expertise' of the people that learns with us. Often, this is a bit too woolly, what is global expertise indeed, as expertise is seen as an ability to do something specific. And, in that is our first challenge - working out a definition and explaining why it is important. 'Global Expertise' grows out of the common sense dealings with globalisation around us. It is about being able to work together with people from all over the world, who come to work in and with our businesses. It is about taking opportunities that may be available to develop our expertise, and to derive best value for them. This is about adjusting with transient communities - communities that change all the time around us - rather than clinging to nostalgia and some fixed ideas about how life should be. And, yet, within this melee, global expertise is about developing a sense of self, a set of values, a professional identity a...

Culture, while it is increasingly an issue to be reckoned with in business circles, does not get the same prominence in the discussion about International Education. The reason why business pays heed to culture is perhaps because increasingly the Chinese, Indian and other consumers are 'emerging', and it is no longer the same monolithic world where all purchasing powers were concentrated in the hands of a certain type, Western, consumers. For the same reason, surely, western educators may pay heed to the issue of culture, as the Chinese, Korean and Indian students flock to Western universities.  However, such cultural sensitivities are less likely to take hold in the academia, simply because the demand for an Western education is simply taken as an acceptance of its superiority. Besides, educators usually resist the idea of education being a consumer commodity and see the need to adjust to the needs of different students as a compromise of the standards. And, finally, pra...

I live on the front lines of global culture wars. Literally, as it is my job to reconcile an English Supplier with Irish colleagues, East Asian Business partners, Indian and Arab clients, and lately Polish prospects. I am forced to see where things get lost in translation. Yes, I am the translator in most cases, and I am trying to do better. I don't want to conjure up the image that I am living at the tower of Babel. No, it seems the God's scheme of diving the mankind with languages have finally been defeated. By who else other than the masters of Pax Britannica, or Pax Americana as it should be called now. I speak mostly in English, even in the continent. Most business meetings in Poland was also conducted in English, and many people I have come in contact with have lived at least a part of their life in the Anglo-Saxon realm. So, language is less of a problem. But fundamental concepts are. Fundamental concepts like Time and Space, as Edward Hall pointed out. Coming from India...

I am at it again, after a gap of almost five years, when I am actively searching for a job. This means all the things that come in the package, preparing a CV, posting it on job sites, keeping a watch on job alerts, firing off applications to those positions which remotely match my area of expertise and smarting off after reading through various rejection mails every morning. Despite the disappointments, it is an interesting exercise to do, to get a feel what I am really good at, to study the patterns of rejection letters and infer which one was written with some sympathy and which one was auto-generated, feeling the sense of hope and despair while waiting for some employers who did not say no, overall feeling young again. Also, the interesting thing here is that my heart is not in it, not yet. I am not sure whether I can get back the zeal of sending out 750 applications as I did in the first few weeks after landing in Britain, which earned me 743 straight rejections, 7 interviews and ...

I am fascinated by the studies I am doing on cultural variations among the countries and peoples, and how this affects business, people management and marketing. I am current reading Marieke de Mooij's Consumer Behaviour and Culture: Consequences for Global Advertising and Marketing , a very insightful book which, in my opinion, should be an essential read for everyone trying to sell to international consumers. Which is to say pretty much everyone, including my neighbourhood pub, as the pubowner told me, in a friendly non-racist way, that he has more Indian patrons these days than the Brits and planning to add some Indian dishes on the menu. The key debate in this field is whether the world, integrated by internet, facebook, google, instant and mobile messaging and above all, twitter, with the common footballer heros and Daniel Craig, is becoming a more uniform place. That's the conventional wisdom - enthusiastically proclaimed various anglo-saxon writers who variably want to p...

I am still fascinated by how cultural differences taint communication and continued studying the ways they affect us all the time. I have already been through Geert Hofstede and found his work illuminating. However, while I found his studies fairly straightforward and helpful, I had two problems with how he, and his numerous followers who lead the way how Western businessmen think about other cultures, treat the national cultures. I must admit that both these problems are actually acknowledged in the literature. The first is the etic method of looking at national cultures - the fact that the cultures are classified against an external, largely western, framework. I am conscious that there is an alternative, emic , method to see cultures against their own structure, and some work has happened on the Chinese culture using a predominantly Asian perspective. The obvious outcome is the fifth dimension of the Hofstede model, the short-term versus long-term orientation - something plain w...

The last two years have been extremely useful to me in studying and understanding how cultural differences come in the way of business and working relationships . Elsewhere in this blog, I have referred to the phenomena of Anglo - Saxon arrogance, something which I experienced on a day to day life in business. But, in a broader sense, and when I reflect with neutrality and perspective, I realize that this odd arrogance - the assumption that the Asian business culture is essentially backward and wants to emulate the West - comes from the pervasive eurocentric concept of civilization . Therefore, it is harder indeed to explain and teach a western business executive ways of the East, though I must not apply a stereotype and there are many exceptions of conscious efforts made by western executives to be truly global citizens. The problem of this eurocentricism , apart from the brazen disregard of other people's sensibilities [which are usually toned down by good manners], is tha...

I am reading Nirmalya Kumar's India's Global Powerhouses , a story about Indian businesses expanding abroad and rewriting the norms of global business. It is indeed an interesting read - particularly in the context of my stated belief that India will assume a pre -eminent position in the world commerce post-recession - and to read about various Indian companies going through the process of 'breaking out' is indeed exciting. At the same time, I also came across Professor Kumar's article on How Emerging Giants Are Rewriting the Rules of M&A in Harvard Business Review and thought it fit to put the two in context. Professor Kumar's HBR article seeks to answer one important question. As most M&A activities fail [the article states that over half the mergers fail to deliver their expected business value], why then do Indian, and other important emerging nation, companies are pursuing global M&A with a vengence ? Obviously, there were several high pro...