Sunday Posts

There was a time - not too long ago - when I used to be excited by venture talk. Spending hours on PowerPoint presentations or ever complicated Excel spreadsheets, I painted the future - and then 'pivoted'. I participated in the watercooler chat about valuations and name-dropped every VC I knew in town. The future - I believed like everyone else - had a valuation. Nowadays, though, I am scared. Through many failures and some successes, I have come to see what venture capital does to industries. While I spent my entire career looking for innovation opportunities, I have lately realised that disruptions can be literal and really destructive. Of course, my age explains my scepticism, but that also allows me to see things in context. Also, the reason I am scared is personal: I chose, early in my career, to be in education. That's what I have done for over twenty years now, not just working in it but also reading, thinking and talking about it. There was venture-talk in educatio...

There is a jobs crisis within the global supply chain. Squeezed between trade tensions and process automation, the global service economy that would have lifted all - or at least most - boats, hasn't been doing well lately. Even before the Corona Virus moment, China's factories were using two-thirds of the labour for like-for-like jobs compared to only a few years earlier. Ever-expanding back-offices in India had no net new hiring for some time now. And, yet, millions of people in these countries, as well as in Africa, South East Asia and the Americas, are reaching working age every month and looking for work. It seems that the great middle-class dream is about to go bust. But you always meet a particular kind of people who read book summaries and take the conference presentations too seriously. They were never out there and they usually find details boring. They keep their prophecies in the abstract, big picture level. For them, stories of the economic slide of the mid...

Before I make the case for hiring failed entrepreneurs, I must state that I have heard this - for the first time - from someone else. Sure, I can passionately argue about the failed entrepreneurs, having been an entrepreneur and having failed a few times. But that I heard this first from Jim Sphor, Global Head of IBM's University Partnership Programme makes it more than my own idle chatter. When Jim Spohr said that, in a workshop about Higher Education's future where I was present, there was a visible excitement in the room, hashtags rippling into Twitter with surprise and deja-vu feeling in equal measure. That very cold morning in Utah, Jim's main point was about T-Skills, how the ideal employee for IBM should possess one or two deep expertise and a lot of different abilities and interests at the same time. He would go on to arrange the annual T-Skills summit at Michigan State soon after. But it's really when he made the comment about failed entrepreneu...

That governments are so enthusiastically trying to promote start-up cultures, handing out investment grants and building fancy new hubs, would make Milton Friedman turn in his grave: One can anticipate his protest - it is not the business of government to do business!  But then, democracy in its 'for the middle class, by the middle class' incarnation expects the government to be a job creation machine, and when all else fails, the Ministers say 'let start-ups be'! In fact, they celebrate it: In this affair, failure, the hallmark of government programmes, is some sort of credit. It allows the governments to celebrate the doctrine of creative destruction - ever so cool - while destructively creating a self-blaming proletariat, whose revolutions are limited to ventures and whose idea of nirvana is an Exit. There was never a better mantra invented to justify a permanent bureaucracy. But, at this point, I must stop and make an important distinction. My post is abou...

As the crisis in jobs becomes apparent, many think that the way to maintain the Middle Class society is to be found in entrepreneurship. In their mind, it is a straightforward transition: People not finding jobs would start businesses. In some quarters, those look for jobs are already maligned - 'Job Takers' they are called - as opposed to those committing themselves to entrepreneurial journey, the 'Job Creators'. As always, the reality is harsher than the theory. But my point is not to challenge the idea that there should be more entrepreneurs. It is how to get there I have questions about. More specifically, my doubts are about the new trend of creating university-based incubators, US style, in the universities in developing countries. The incubators are taking the place of 'Placement Offices' or what was euphemistically called the 'Industry Collaboration Office', becoming the last mile of the students' life cycle in an university or a busine...

There are many different types of entrepreneurs but the Enterprise Culture, the official celebration of enterprise that dominate the media and our talk, highlight just one of them. And, this, a culturally biased version of the enterprise, is not just counter-productive as it does not fit into the context of many societies, but also regressive, it prevents rather than promoting possibilities of enterprise and innovation. The dominant tale at the heart of enterprise culture is what I shall call the Pioneer Narrative. Think of the Wild West, the Gold Rush, the Unattached Man in search of jackpot, a sort of rough, manly version of creation. Played out in the United States, the primary exporter of enterprise culture narratives, this lies at the heart of our portrait of the entrepreneur as an young man, tough, unconstrained, stops at nothing, up against the nature but offered its bounty, its abundant land that lay there to be claimed.  Enterprise existed much longer than the Wil...