Sunday Posts

The venture-funded 'disruptive' higher education start-ups often claim that they can offer a better education than the universities, because, apart from other things, they have great instructional designers. Just like the claim that AI will provide better learning strategies, this is also an attempt to hide behind jargons to avoid hard questions.  Instructional design sounds serious enough to invoke deferential responses, particularly as it's not a common term in academic circles (except in schools of education) and indicates a certain affinity to workplace learning and invoke the holy grail of employability by association. But whether this is good enough to make better education remains to be asked. Instructional design is popular in workplace learning but it's more a method than magic. Besides, for all its advantages, the instructional - process - bit is at the heart of it, rather than what one would make of the term 'design' at this day and ag...

The big question for many college graduates is whether to work for a start-up or, wait and look for opportunities with more stable companies. In my straw poll, the opinions are split right in the middle.  About half the people think start-ups are cool and fun, and therefore, better to work for. The more practically minded make the point that they offer a range of opportunities, to grow and to learn, which an established corporation wouldn't allow.  The other half feels that working for start-ups are the worst of both the worlds. They offer no security - the point of a job - and rarely big rewards, as most of it is usually reserved for the Founders. Most start-ups also fail. There is little transparency with regard to the finances and working practices of a start-up, and therefore, very little to make a well-informed decision. And, finally, while the learning value is undeniable, the value of that learning is questionable. Even the start-ups themselves often pay a...

I am sure 'career indulgences' appears an oxymoron, there can't be such a thing! But in my quest to do things I love, and also to work with people I like, I have created, at least, the possibility. At this time, a penny-dropping moment of sorts, I am reflecting when I started indulging in dreams! And, indeed, there are many forkways to look back at, like these: 1. Walking out a secure job and an impending promotion, I jumped on the dotcom boat in 1998: Not many people around me were doing that at the time and I had no idea how to deal with investors and their contracts.  2. A couple of years later, when the enterprise became boring and investors became bosses, I pursued my dreams of adventure - going to a country in the middle of political turmoil and business decline - and lived through bomb threats, general strikes and all that.  3. When all that was sorted out and I had won, four years later, I gave up yet another promotion and promises of a predict...

Here is a conversation in preparation: What have I learnt about Product Development through my years of hustle in my quest to build Education-to-Employment and Education-to-Enterprise pathways? Three things, essentially. 1. Most Start-Ups fail because they over-engineer the product.  It is the quest of perfect product that kills most start-ups. Of course, this is what Steven Gary Blank and the conversation around Lean Start-up is all about.  However, I think this problem is not just about the cost, but about the culture it implicitly builds. One can argue that if the monies are available, costs of product development should not be a huge problem.  But, even if product development is well resourced, too much focus on it creates a number of other fatal problems:  First, it makes product introductions really slow, and makes the company fall behind in fast-moving markets.  Second, and more crucially, this creates an inward-looking cultu...

How to create a model of global Higher Education fit for post-recession world? This is not about private equity initiatives spanning the world, the kinds that the American majors such as Apollo and Laureate do: That is about global finance capital buying out assets in different geographies. Nor this should be about what the Academic community dubs as TNE, Trans-National Education, which is essentially about exporting degrees from metropolitan centres to the hungry nations in the periphery.  Indeed, global is, in common use, all about finance capital buying out assets in poorer countries, and extending the cultural influences of the metropolitan centres. But that model is coming under pressure lately: The 'Global' steamroller has perhaps gone too far. The richer nations are increasingly wary of the immigrants, and the poorer nations are facing existential crisis as its 'comprador bougeois', the ones that collaborate and benefit from global finance capital, has ...

I have been through quite a bit - big companies, small companies, failed start-ups and successful ones, big companies pretending to be start-ups and start-ups pretending to be big companies - and despite my sincere efforts, I am yet to discover how to market a start-up. One could indeed say that about Marketing itself: John Wanamaker's " Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half " has been embraced as the justification of the marketing practise. However, while this may sound playful or funny in a big company, such an approach is plain fatal. The company could easily die, and mostly die, before ever reaching the useful part of marketing. But, then, this is perhaps a starting point to talk about marketing a start-up. That there is no money to waste, and therefore, no money to spend on marketing without knowing what works. Which is basically to say that start-ups must market itself differently from the big companies...

Lean has come to Education too, but it needs some special consideration. Education Start-Up is no longer an oxymoron, but a real thing. Venture Capitalists do invest in education, and some indeed treat this as the next big thing, a sector with abundant growth potential in an otherwise growth-less world. However, this is one sector in search of a business model: Most VCs would try to use models they use for technology or media businesses on education propositions - and they mostly do not work. I have tried and failed with an Education Start-up. Since then, my approach has been one of caution - quite antithetical to my usual excitable nature: Whenever I have been invited to join Founding Teams, I have shied away, and stated that the education start-ups need much more capital than one could possibly project using a technology or media investment model. This, because the Customer Discovery process, central in the Lean Start-up worldview, has special challenges when it comes to Ed...

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. ...

I am trying to build a new kind of classroom. This should look like a start-up company. In fact, I am trying to make it a start-up company. So, here is the idea: I build something where studying means working in a start-up.  I have been exploring competence-based education for a while, and one thing I learnt that there is a lot of difference between the rhetoric and the practice. The competence based courses become, all too often, about studying the marketing of the local deli or creating strategies for the cash-and-carry, the problem being that none of these businesses are interested in what the student is doing. They see no value, and for the student, it becomes an uninteresting paperwork to complete. In this form, it is worse than mass-manufactured degrees, because the student does not feel so bad. But, then, there is little point in mass-manufactured degrees. They are so disconnected from everything else that goes on in the world. They are hardly about anything re...

I am getting into that time, after 18 months of bootstrapping, when people have started asking whether the personal sacrifice is worth it. My views are unchanged: I am soldiering through my otherwise miserable life of lecturing four days a week to earn the keeps, so that I can do one thing that I really really wanted to do in life. This is about building a truly great educational institution. I know it does not make any sense. Educational institutions are all about big money, big land and big buildings. It is about having grants and scholarships, playing to the tune of government policies. It is about rankings and prestige. You don't just get up and create an education institution, much less a great one. I disagree. My ideas may be less quixotic that it sounds, and here is my defense: That we are at a time of fundamental discontinuity. I am one of those who believes that the next twenty years isn't going to be like the last twenty years. This is not just about Interne...

These are lean times. Gone are those days when capital was plenty and start-up was glamorous: More so, when people believed in the ideas of an world constantly getting better. The start-up revolution has muddied the waters so that changing the world has become so commonplace that no one believes in it anymore. Besides, there is simply less to go around, with one funding cycle coming to an end and everyone has to do with a little bit less. So, lean is the buzzword: Getting started through bootstrapping is glamorous, even heroic. Getting paying customers from day one, rather than the fantastic business plans predicated on losing money for a decade, is more in vogue. Start-ups, therefore, are what they should be - a struggle for existence to prove that they fall in the fittest category. However, it is not as bad as it sounds. Because opportunities of disruption keep coming. Big incumbents keep getting sloppier and sloppier. Technologies change quickly, opening up opportunities that w...