Sunday Posts

I have the wrong idea about what entrepreneurship is. I must blame my grandfather. An austere man, he built a business by working hard, paying his taxes and keeping his word. He created something. He made money, invested in blue chip stocks and lived within his means. He would turn down opportunities, much to my uncle's disappointment, if he thought he couldn't service the contract. The first English sentence I learnt - from him - is 'Cut your coat according to your cloth'. Growing up, I had plenty of disagreements with him. Most of it was political. He never voted, which enraged me. His reason was simple: In India, once one votes, a mark of indelible ink used to be put on one's index finger. He hated that and objected to the implicit lack of trust this implied. He also told me that Gandhi destroyed the country by teaching people to disobey the laws, which did not go down well with the revolutionary sympathies of a twenty-year old. However, I watched him ru...

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...

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...

B-Schools had their day. There was a time when we thought we knew how to do it - capture the future in a web of models and processes - and created the big, successful institutions charging top dollars for educating business leaders.  Then, a few things happened. We overdid it. There were just too many B-Schools and too many business 'leaders'. We also lost faith in big businesses. According to a recent Pew survey, only 40% of Americans have a positive image of big businesses, down from 75% a couple of decades earlier. And, big businesses stopped creating jobs, as they continued to automate and spread their global supply chains. And, then, came the Great Recession, sweeping away the dreams of middle class life of the most, and what emerged is a completely different future. No wonder that only a small fraction of MBAs now find appropriate employment, and all but the top B-Schools are able to fill their seats today. The truth is, today, not the company men but those wi...

Among various projects that I am considering doing is one that involves creating a global programme for Entrepreneurs.  As always, things that I do represent a coalition of interests. The current conversation involves someone I have known for a long time, and respect for his business savvy, backed by investors wanting to leverage UK qualifications in the global markets, and primarily in China. My role will be to craft a programme that works, and I am setting myself to the task as earnestly as I can. However, I have always harboured doubts about degrees that look to certify entrepreneurship. For one, I think it is a purely defensive move: I can not think of a person who would be a successful entrepreneur in the end trying to an MBA in entrepreneurship first. Besides, while I do not deny that there are things entrepreneurs need to learn, I would always see entrepreneurs as men (and women) of action, who needs to learn not from text books and lecturers but from the action it...

Start-ups are fashionable. They conjure up the image of brilliant teenage founders creating billion dollar businesses from scratch, magically finding the confluence of perfect technologies and hidden desires. The inconvenient fact that they mostly fail is also wrapped in a heroic feeling - fail, fail again and fail better is the battle cry - and its toxic consequences on the people's lives are overlooked as the investor cash goes on chasing the next big thing. This narrative is already familiar, being everywhere on the media, books and all those seminars promising to change lives. But, the fashion now invaded politics, with Start-up Policy gurus appearing on Government roasters, Start-up courses being listed on university catalogues and Start-up programmes being promoted as the latest governmental idea to promote its beleagured middle classes. The conversation usually focuses on tax breaks and lots of expensive real estate in the form of innovation zones, and everyone expects...

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...

Recent discussions with a couple of start-up entrepreneurs brought up a topic that used to be my favourite: Obsessive Branding Disorder (OBD). This was the title of 2008 book by Lucas Conley which made it to the Best Business Books list of Strategy&Business that year, with a simple and powerful idea that you can indeed brand too much! This was a difficult idea to grasp for anyone involved in marketing, because our worldview can be summed up as, Brands eating the World! Our job, we tend to think, is to claim every piece of estate, real or virtual for the brands that we are custodians of. In the rush to better competition, we intend to leave nothing, urinals to the sky, if we can afford, to imprint our brands. We want to claim words, how cool is when someone talks about Googling something, and even emotions - feeling very Apple, anyone? The idea that we can overshoot the mark is indeed quite unsettling. But, if we look to others, it becomes quite obvious. We suddenly start...

I have three data points about Kolkata, which I talk about often.  First, Kolkata was the first Indian city to reach a million population, and only the second city in Asia to do so (Tokyo is the other one). Second, it is the only city in the whole world, in this day and age of urban expansion, to have lost population in the last ten years. The loss was marginal, and it is still a very populous city, but this is not good. Third, it is the only Indian metropolis with abundant supply of drinkable water. Assuming that water is going to be a big issue in the next twenty years, Kolkata seems secure as a City. These three data points capture the usual narrative. We often talk about the city's illustrious past, as the Second Capital of the British Empire, Capital of India and as home to many leading modern Indian intellectuals, a place of learning and a hotbed of Indian nationalism. We also hope about its promising future, pointing to various geographic, demographic and e...

Mark Cuban has created an uproar by suggesting that we are in the middle of a Tech bubble, much bigger than one seen in 2000, and it may all end badly soon. Mr Cuban, who made his billions on the back of the bubbles, is someone to be listened to - and he is surely sounding apocalyptic. It is therefore worth looking at his argument closely and putting it in context. The apocalyptic part of this warning is based on common sense. He is pointing out that todays billion dollar valuations are driven primarily by private capital, private equity and all that, as opposed to the IPO-led bubble that we had last time around. And, indeed, in a privately funded bubble, if and when it bursts, there will be no exits for too many people. In this setting, it will not be about doing a fire sale, it will be about just closing doors and going home. This part of his argument makes sense. If the bubble pops, there is a real possibility of a quicker and nastier fall-out than what we saw in 2000. How...

Earlier this year, I decided to postpone my ambitions to pursue Doctoral studies, primarily for financial reasons, and drew up instead a plan for self development which does not cost much. The plan included working diligently on this blog, with a certain number of posts every month and more meaningful ones, and reading a certain number of books every month: Six months on, I failed on both counts, though this made blog postings more frequent (but more diverse) and I am indeed reading more books cover to cover now than I did last year. This commitment, however, is the reason why I ended up making the endeavour of reading Ben Franklin's biography, 500 pages and all. I love biographies, but haven't read one from cover to cover in a while, primarily owing to their usual lengths compared to a 200 page book otherwise. Franklin's biography was sitting on my bookshelf and my To-Read list for a while, and I am glad I finally made the effort and finished it within a reasonable t...

The MBA is passé and law school enrolments are plateauing out: The popular professional schools of the future may come in the shape of E-Schools.  E-School as in Enterprise School, on which I wrote earlier (see the posts, The E-School Approach , Global E-School, anyone? and Global E-School: What That Means ). The E-School is essentially built around creativity, enterprise and technology, training a new generation of professionals and entrepreneurs ready for opportunities of the future. This is about avoiding the pitfalls of the B-Schools, which has been built around industrial era big businesses and promoted a mechanistic view of life and work; the E-School, by definition, is less about models and more about invention, creating new possibilities rather than just seeking to exploit arbitrage.  The E-School model, which I started working on in my earlier abortive attempt in the business school in London, is one that fuses together close cooperation with employers ...

Six months into the new venture, it is time for stock taking. It has been exciting, but extremely demanding, journey, testing my assumptions and giving me a taste of street-level entrepreneurship. Despite the personal costs and sacrifices, this is intoxicating: The freedom, the ability to create new stuff and the sheer joy of watching something grow. Indeed, there were disappointments, many of them. Our idea was perhaps too ambitious, too complex for many investors, particularly in the UK, who has a limited view of the education business, and a particularly constricted one for the emerging market opportunities. What we wanted to do is disruptive, but not disruptive the way those who love status quo want: It was not about using technology to deliver standardised education, it was not about collecting learner data and create models of learning to create further standardised education. It remains quite the opposite: It is about opening the box of competence-based education and creating a...

We spent most of yesterday meeting Entrepreneurs in Bhubaneswar and then discussing Enterprise training in the top management institution in the City. It sure seemed that the 'Pensioners' Paradise', as Bhubaneswar was previously called, is suddenly abuzz with entrepreneurial activities. Some of the entrepreneurs we met yesterday came back to the city, after having spent years abroad or elsewhere in India, to set up their entrepreneurial ventures, which is indeed a good sign. There are successful medium scale enterprises growing at a fast clip, and plenty of evidence that, at least in among the companies we met, there is healthy collaboration and culture of sharing. These are not world-leading companies yet, and indeed, I observed that most of them are decidedly low-tech, but there may be lessons from Bhubaneswar other Indian cities need to learn, and quickly. India is unlikely to sustain economic growth, and indeed its GDP will need to grow at least by 8% per year, if ...