Sunday Posts

It has been repeated so many times, it is now a cliché: Our next thirty years will not look like the last three decades! If anything, ever since the end of the Cold War, it was mostly peaceful, mostly prosperous for most of the world. However, One can clearly see that some of the building blocks of that world are shifting now and a new ideas environment is emerging. We don't have to be pessimists to know that the lives of our students would be very different from ours. If we are to design a higher education system today, many things must change. Particularly, there are five foundational assumptions behind how we think about Higher Education, which need rethinking. First, the idea of SMART - a version of the idea of general intelligence ('g')! We may talk about diversity and inclusion, but fundamentally, higher education and the idea of merit are closely linked. This comes from how we organise the school system, which attempts to separate students into academic and vocationa...

There was a time when countries and cities rushed out to build their silicon something. After many failures and dead-end real estate, this tendency has now sobered. Silicon valley has remained where it was, and its ecosystem proved impossible to replicate. So, where does the thinking about innovation as redemption go from here? Despite the spectacular failure of some of the fêted projects, there should not be doom-and-gloom in the innovationland. There are some notable successes too, and useful lessons. As governments look to rebuild after the pandemic - and before a new urge to replicate takes hold - it's worth reflecting on what separates success from failure. It's useful to start at first principles: Innovation cluster is a zero-sum game! Silicon valley is difficult to replicate because it exists, because it vacuums out money and talent from all other places. It's not enough to ask whether one can replicate Silicon Valley, but whether one can compete with it. Without ans...

Civilisation is a race between education and catastrophe: If H. G. Wells meant education only in a broad sense, in this third decade of the third millennium in the common era, the same can be said about specific 'formal' types of education that have pervaded all aspects of our lives and cultures. In the intervening hundred years (almost, as Wells said that in 1922), 'education' has increasingly come to mean formal instruction and recognition, and despite occasional half-hearted attempts by the government and academic dissertations with zero impact, 'informal' education has gotten nowhere. If anything, the thriving ecosystems of 'adult education' that Wells would have seen around him have all but dwindled into a caricature, as mass schooling and formal education reached everyone and degrees came to mean enlightenment. However, even if education has changed, catastrophe remained somewhat steadfast. The social arrangements that emerged in the nine...

I wrote about my career pivot, moving away from start-up kind of work and focusing more on introducing innovation within educational institutions. This means I am spending more time thinking about introducing new tools, formats and relationships within existing institutional structures and less time trying to woo investors who speak about disruption but behave like herds, responding to verbal cues (the magic word, this year, being 'blockchain'). Accordingly, I have started shunning those conferences which parade entrepreneurs based on valuation, and going to ones that deal with less exulted topics like educational design, funding and student services. Yes, sometimes, these are infuriatingly boring; but at least, delegates at these conferences do not think that all you need for better student experience is to give them an App! The world I am trying to get into is an in-between zone - between the entirely false claim of the timelessness of educational enterprise and the ent...

Kishore Mahbubani calls India an 'Open Society with a Closed Mind' - in contrast with China's 'Closed Society with an Open Mind' - and he is certainly right. The apparent diversity of India, its vibrant democracy, quarrelsome TV programming and English speaking middle classes hide more than they tell: The first impression of 'everything goes' is deceptive and India presents one of the toughest environments for new ideas. This may sound counter-intuitive to those who are always afraid of the Chinese stealing their intellectual property. I am not necessarily arguing that the Chinese don't, but rather that they do because they are in the same race of creating new stuff. India is a comparatively safer environment not because Indians are more honest or they have greater regards for intellectual property in the Western sense, but because they care less about new ideas.  The other contra angle is certainly that of the great inventors and thought leadi...

We have come to love Innovation as the engine of growth and progress. Being innovative is no longer a pejorative, but a compliment; even totalitarian Governments set up innovation ecosystems and Analysts put innovation premium on company stocks. The Corporations want to reinvent themselves as colourful innovation hubs, the universities justify drawing public money for they bring about innovation, and it is not unusual for entrepreneurs in India to pray in front of an idol so that they can be more innovative. In short, innovation is eating the world - and, everyone, with power and money, wants to bring about innovation. As we celebrate innovation in conferences, it is easy to forget innovation is usually a complex affair. We love to speak about magical discoveries: A naked Archimedes running through the streets as he discovered his law, Galileo figuring out the secrets of the pendulum in one night after observing the Cathedral's chandelier swinging about, Darwin's great ...

Earlier, I claimed Ed-Tech is over-rated: It promises too much and delivers too little. Worse, the noise of EdTech obscures Education Innovation, which encompasses lot more than gadgets and apps. My point was that the Education Innovation happening away from the limelight of twenty-somethings, venture capital and conference circuits deserve attention. ( See here ) The question is what innovation is really there in Education. Raphael's School of Athens makes a popular slide in Conferences, as the speakers often claim that the classrooms today look exactly as they were in Ancient Greece. That statement is symptomatic: It is instructive to pause at School of Athens and reflect on the claim - what counts and does not count as Innovation in the Conference Circuit. Surely the classrooms do not look anything like Raphael had painted them. Raphael's school is an Open Portal, and don't have rows of chairs and tables, people seating in neat rows. There were no black, white ...

I hope some people will agree with me if I say EdTech is over-rated. It's a nifty term, much broader than the older, nerdy, E-Learning; it is also a conscious claim to affinity with its famous and richer cousin, FinTech. What one gets to hear in the EdTech conference circuit is boasts about how many millions companies are raising, which is really meaningless in a world of loose monetary policy and inflated private valuations. The other most common refrain is how Educators don't get EdTech, which really means that this may be a set of characters in search of a play. Most of its boldest claims - Clouds of Schools, Self-directed Learners, Universal Access - remain forever in future, and only companies dealing with boring stuff - compliance training, video content, Learning Management System etc - make any money.  However, the overselling of EdTech creates bigger problems than sub-prime investment and pointless conferences. It crowds out the conversation about Education Innov...

Last week, voice recording of an HR executive firing an employee at Tech Mahindra, a big Indian IT company, went viral (as above). The employee was told that he is being fired not because of any performance issues, but because of 'cost optimisation'. He was told to resign by the end of the day, failing which he would be terminated the next day, and lose all his exit benefits and wouldn't even get a reference. When the employee pleaded it was too short a notice, he was told that the company can fire him summarily. When he sought an option to appeal, he told there was none. After this went viral, many weighed in, converging on the consensus that while the company might have the rights to fire the employee, it was all too harsh. As for me, I thought it was coercive, and therefore, illegal: I can't see how a company can fire an employee on disciplinary grounds because he failed to resign as told. In America, this, aggregating the claims of all employees fired in th...

Two things trigger this thought. First, the conversation I have been recently engaged into, and particularly the question, why is Indian IT Industry is not more innovative. And, second, this is about the Not-For-Profit projects which I dabble with, which concern themselves with the task of creating innovation ecosystems in India and Africa. My point is - despite all the fuss about Innovation - developing countries are doing quite poorly in innovation. Overall, the world is living in a bubble that Fredrik Erixon and Björn Wiegel will call an Innovation Illusion. There is a lot of talk and lots of people claiming that they have made a truly new thing - and media fawning over this and that - but apart from 'digitization' of some of the tasks, we are moving forward little. And, this is particularly acute in the developing world, which is doing some 'Copy and Catch-up' innovation (Tyler Cowen's term) but failing to solve their most basic problems. In more ways than...

Calcutta needs a new start. The city which I call home has earned a bad name, but its reputational problems have more to do with the politics of India than economic fundamentals. The city, the second most populous in India after Mumbai, is the third largest city economy in India, presiding over a mostly prosperous agricultural economy and a strategic state. Yet, people don't tend to see it that way: India's geopolitical obsession with Pakistan and Kashmir keeps minds focused on its Western frontiers, and a succession of opposition party governments in West Bengal (the last time Congress ruled the state was in 1977) ensured that the state did not feature in the Central Government's list of priorities. But this is changing - there is increasing realisation of the geopolitical challenges and opportunities of the Indian East - and one would hope that this would bring about a change, if only gradual change, in Indian policy. But any conversation about change must b...

I have followed the conversation about T-Skills, that a modern professional needs at least one 'deep' skill and several other interests and abilities to complement this - for several years (see my earlier post here ). Over the last several years, the idea has gained considerable traction and now has its own 'Summit' (check the last year's videos and details here ), as well as gained academic acceptance and popular support. Whether one uses the T metaphor or not, many people are advocating a similar approach. For example, Professor Howard Gardner, in his Five Minds For The Future , argue that the professionals of the future will require a 'Discipline', a native way of thinking and making sense of the world (the deep end of the T), as well as Synthesis, the ability to assimilate information and ideas from various branches of knowledge (the top of the T) - along with Creativity, Diversity and Ethics. There are several reasons why we are having this conver...

I came across a deeply insightful article by Vivek Wadhwa pointing out that the most successful companies in Silicon Valley are not focused on selling products. They are instead creating enabling ecosystems for others to create value, and they are capturing a portion of that value. They know that the value comes from communities and conversations, and not from selling close-ended blackboxes, at least not anymore.  In a different context, this is a message that companies claiming to 'disrupt' global education should take to heart. All they want to do is to sell those products - 'degrees' in most cases - structured as close-ended black-boxes. And, as the marketplace for such education offerings are becoming global, primarily with the growth of middle classes in Asia and Africa, the limits of this model are more and more visible. Education as an activity is deeply shaped by local cultures and preferences, and most attractive markets, such as India or China, already ...

We have two Jobs: One, the magical creator of iPhone, and even more, of the whole iGeneration, whose life story is one of a visionary, one that stayed steadfast through various failures and ultimately prevailed. The other is, of course, much more human, with all the failings, tempers and tantrums, who refused to accept parenthood of his own daughter and made life miserable for his colleagues at Apple so much that he managed to get fired from his own company. This latter story makes him no less visionary, but just a bit less perfect! The perfect millennium man, the first story eventually overshadowed the second story at the turn of the century, as the second coming of Jobs - his very successful return to Apple and making it the most valuable company in the world - played out, helped no less by his Cancer survival and finally, death. One can say I was watching Steve Jobs, a very good movie with Michael Fassbender as the lead. I am slightly weary of hero worship, and therefore, woul...

What enables Creativity? This has somewhat become the central question of my work. In a way, it was always there. I always sought opportunities where the boundaries between work and play fades - in other words, sought out work that I love - though this often meant a circuitous route to what other people may call Happiness. In fact, with time, happiness became something I do not seek, just the right opportunity to be creative! Happiness became, to me, a bottle, and the outside it, in the ephemerality of work and play, joy is to be found!  However, as Freud would have said in a different context, the economic life suppresses, rather than enables, such opportunities. The modern men (and women) is expected to play its part in the vast, global arrangement we have come to call civilisation, trading their very opportunities to be themselves, in return of happiness - or, what everyone calls happiness. In this sense, pursuit of happiness is the antithesis of a creative life, and y...

While everyone agrees that Higher Education needs new thinking, there is one sacred cow: Degrees! All the private capital flooding into the field with the battle cry to change the world meekly surrender themselves to the alter of the Degrees. To follow the rhetoric, the search is for a better way, not a better credential. The degrees, an early modern invention, look safe and sound, despite the world being claimed to be turned upside down. Or, is it? The recent Udacity Nanodegree Plus, which is an employer-backed credential that comes with a job guarantee (which, in effect, is a guarantee of full refund of fees if the learner does not get a job after graduating), opens up an interesting possibility. After a somewhat faltering start, Udacity, among the various MOOC providers, is now finding its mojo through nanodegrees, which, despite the allusion, are not degrees. In a plain vanilla world, this would be called a Certificate. But this, and other similar credentials like Micro-d...