Sunday Posts

I spent a lot of time over the last few years at the fault line of education and employment. This is a sort of no man's land, a messy swamp of practice that many educators would ignore in their pursuit of an imaginary complete individual who need not care for a job! The employers, who built industrial-scale recruitment operations with the aim of commoditizing hiring, would not bother too much about this area, which fell outside their area of influence. Well-meaning executives, who privately wished for better education in their country and community, thought it best not to challenge educators in their own turf, recognizing the institutional nature of education and feeling rather powerless to change anything. However, almost everyone admitted there was indeed a big gap, and a range of initiatives were spawned in the recent years to solve the problem. In this, I had taken the usual journey. It started with seeking out better courses - could one design courses to meet the ever-ch...

I have faced this personally. When I tried to raise money for an Education Start-up in the UK, I would regularly get asked, during investor pitches, what our key markets would be. By default, everyone would assume that we would do India, specifically because of my heritage (UK Private education sector worked like that - minority ethnic founders enrolling students primarily from their ethnic groups), while I, cognisant of the complexities of the Indian market ( see my earlier post here ), would be far more circumspect.  Revisiting those discussions, and the experiences since (our sales efforts will go nowhere in India, but would eventually find traction in China), I still think that an innovative education start-up should have an India plan. The reason is obvious - India would simply be worlds largest market for Higher Education. China has more students right now, but India is at a different demographic point than China, and the growth in India would be far more dramatic. ...

Indian Education is a fascinating opportunity. It has scale and an extensive ecosystem of demand. It is badly regulated, but as such things mean in India, which helps the people who are already in and keep others out of it. As the Indian consumers get richer and demand more education, the opportunity in India gets more attractive. This is one of those multi-billion dollar market opportunities, which seem to lay untapped. And, as it is happening in other industries, one could reasonably expect a world-beating company being made by this market. Following the classic model of business growth, it should be possible for a visionary company to take advantage of this relatively protected domestic market and emerge as a player in the global stage. So far, it has failed to happen. There are some Indian organisations came close, NIIT and Aptech, the two computer training companies, among them. But in a fascinating saga worthy of strategy case studies, they both lost steam just when it seem...

It is time to talk about markets. Differently. One may think there may be nothing new to talk about markets. After all, we have been talking about this endlessly for thirty years now. Markets as the mantra for everything under the sun, the panacea for all our ills etc. Or, if you are negatively inclined, for all the problems we have. Including a new word, to be spoken every time with the same disdain Lady Thatcher used for the word 'socialist', 'marketisation'. What more can there possibly be to talk about the markets? For many, the last few years have shaken the unquestioning magic of the markets: It does not seem to solve all our problems after all. In fact, it can make things quite ugly. Many of the words, 'ethics' prominently among them, which were becoming antiquities have been brought back to use. On the other hand, there is little appetite to revive the old socialist past as we knew it: No one could yet come up with a satisfactory explanation wh...

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 ...

Education produces social good, goes the argument, and therefore, the society should pay for it, argues the advocates of public education. On the other side are the policy wonks who sees education as a tool to build private capabilities, leading to private wealth. Between these two positions, there are lots of people, who apparently hold contradictory positions. For example, the For-Profit entrepreneurs and the Private Equity that sees a great money-making opportunity in education believe that education should be for private wealth but the state should pay for it (so that the market remains big enough for them to invest), and those professors in different schools who would continue to think that the students should care for social good above all despite having to shoulder all their debts. One such position is to see education as a social good even if it creates individual capability and prosperity. We have now come to see that inclusive political and economic institutions as the ...