Sunday Posts

A lot happening at my end, which impeded my blog writing for a while. As I restart, I thought I would do so by doing an update. This will, I hope, not only get the conversation started, but also return this blog to its intended purpose. It has been almost a year I left my job, and I spent the time doing various projects while I explored the idea of setting up connected global network of learning spaces for competency-based learning. Not necessarily I wanted to go back to doing another start-up: Having lived through successful and unsuccessful ones, I have learnt that start-ups can be boring and established organisations can be interesting. Also, after six years of trying to establish an alternative model of education, I have come around to the view that doing it by working with others is a better way than trying to go solo and try to reinvent every cog and wheel of an educational institution. In fact, I came to see that start-up ecosystem in Education to be what it is: A lot ...

Having worked in International Setting most of career, and having lived in four different countries and engaging in business in at least half a dozen others, one of most attractive conversation topic for me is - what makes an organisation effective globally? In my work, I come across educational institutions which want to recruit students from all over the world, or businesses which want to trade, and indeed do, globally. I hear conference speeches and business presentations proclaiming global ambitions. I meet people dreaming of scale, globally. Yet, at the same time, I see the track record of global engagement to be one full of failures and disappointments, over-expectations and under-achievements.  I believe the essential problem of constructing a really global organisation comes from the essential tension between trust versus difference. Any organisation wants to impose an uniform culture - and indeed, doing so is essential. Only by promoting an uniform culture can an...

A kind commentator dropped by and left a comment in one of the older posts, pointing out that the approach I wanted to promote - a practical education built around the humanities - is what he calls building of character. In the work he does, he focuses on Character and Competence, side by side, which makes abundant sense.  Indeed, character is a high sounding word with a lot of legacy, most of it going back to colonial times. So, talking about character in my work, which is mostly done in developing countries, is not going to be straightforward, without explaining what it is going to be about. But, such explanation is needed and timely, because one could perhaps claim with justification that the technocratic nature of education is the reason why we have the social problems we have. But even before we go into the discussion about character, it is important to state, perhaps re-state, the case why we need to look at humanities seriously. Those who believe that humanities ed...

I sometimes catch up with ideas and concepts long after they were needed. Call it slowness if you like, but this is not about slowness of wit but the lingering of love that I am talking here. This is not about missing out on something while I am at it, but rather indulging in an ongoing engagement even when the immediate need has been fulfilled. So, I really discovered the fascinating world of economic history - so much so that I may end up reading those books while on holiday - only after my formal education in economics was over. My obsession with John Dewey came only after I have completed my Masters in Adult Education, and I believe I understand him better now as I have completed the course earlier.  My current reading concerns leadership. I have got to it in a roundabout way. It all started with Vienna, where I am planning a short holiday around Easter, and Freud, upon whom I stumbled upon in course of my engagement with Modernity, itself a hangover from the Coursera cou...

I taught a course called Leadership Journey for a few years in a college in London. This was part of their post-graduate programme for practising managers. It was a great little course embedded in an MBA type programme, the difference being the emphasis on practice. The participants were to plan for their own development of leadership capabilities and compile a portfolio of reflections backed by evidence, which made it very different from most MBAs. This was part of a management course, and the rest of the programme dealt with the usual HR, Marketing, Finance, Strategy stuff. However, this one constituent course stood out, because this was more about the learners and less about any one subject, and everyone could choose their own paths to write their portfolio. I did indeed try to encourage a diversity of approaches, though not many of the learners eventually tried to be creative. Indeed, they saw this course without any fixed content as an invitation to do whatever, which means ...

While chronicling my experience of teaching leadership, I made the point that we explore three ideas of leadership: The first is that leadership is the behaviour that the leaders display; the second was that leadership is about a position and the activities that come with it; and finally, that leadership is a sort of personal ethic. I argued that I try to plod my students to explore all three ideas, and usually, once they discover the range, they settle for the third, as this is profoundly empowering. This is because leadership as a personal ethic could be achieved by anyone, at any point of their lives, as long as they could understand what that ethic is and are ready to commit to it.  This stands in contrast with the first idea, the leadership as a personal characteristic of a few people, because this grows out of the leaders-are-born-not-made view of the world. This theory indeed falls short against the argument whether all born leaders become recognised as leaders, which,...

We talk leadership all the time and everyone seems to know what it is, though everyone may have a slightly different idea. As a part of my teaching course, I do ask my students to define leadership, and get many definitions. In summary, the answer to my question is given in the lines of Justice Potter Stewart's "I know it when I see it", with a long list of names that stretch from Jesus Christ to Jose Mourinho. While this may sound intuitive, there are a few granular details in this definition we should be aware of. Indeed, Jesus Christ and Jose Mourinho are two very different kind of persons, but even the common strand that seemingly tie them together in my students' conception - the ability to move people - is actually two very different kind of things. Indeed, I exaggerate the difference by picking two extreme examples, and this would be much less emphatic if one picks another pair of names from the list, like Winston Churchill and Mahatma Gandhi (or Abraham ...

I teach leadership. I am not sure leadership can be taught. Semantics aside - I know all that facilitating stuff as opposed to teaching - the question I am really interested in if one can really 'make' leaders through a series of classroom conversations. Some of my colleagues will argue that it should be a series of projects or activities rather than classroom conversations. I am no big fan of the kind of unambitious projects that people usually set up in context of business courses: Review your company's mission statement! I would tend to think those are worse devices than classroom conversations. And, in any case, whatever the method, how does one teach leadership? I am not taking the position that leadership can't be learnt, though! There are born leaders, but the leaders are only born and not made is a fallacious theory: We all know one or two people who were born to be leaders, but were never made. Whether or not leaders are born that way, they have t...

If you are seen to be creative, an out-of-the-box thinker in your organization, you may actually be shut out of the Senior Management positions. This may be counter-intuitive, as the corporate jargon revolves around creative thinking. However, this is exactly what Jennifer Mueller of UPenn , Jack Goncalo of Cornell and Dishan Kamdar of Indian School of Business found, and presented in their paper in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. [For a summary, click here ] The key point is that a typical leader is expected to bring stability, promote a vision, achieve a consensus etc., not things that creative types would naturally do. The things they do instead - challenge status quo , start the debates - are not expected from the leaders. So, if you are showing your creativity, this may go against your prospects of rising higher up in your organization. Creativity is usually seen as a specialist activity: In many businesses, this is the preserve of 'creative' departments,...

For all the talk of leadership, spare a thought for the followers. Because they make the leaders. In a way. A leader may not be an identified individual that we would like to believe. Or that's what celebrity obsessed mass media wants us to believe. Rather, more often than not, a leader emerges - based on the context - and other people, followers, choose to follow them. Think of the first man on the dancing floor and you know what I am talking about. So, leadership is not a position or a title, but a relationship, that one enters with others from time to time. In a way, then, followers make the leaders. Without them, there will be no leaders. Imagine dancing alone on the floor. Writing a book that no one reads. Standing up on Speaker's Corner without onlookers. We think of people who do them as crazies, not as leaders. So, then, why, in business, we assume leadership comes with position, or gets embedded in title? Because, indeed, business tries to fashion itself more after the...

Management is over. Dead. Gone. Welcome to the age of Leadership. I don't believe in the Leader/Manager debates. It is fashionable indeed, to pour smart soundbites about the difference between the leader and the manager. Things like: Manage the process, lead the people. Or, the manager steers a team through the woods, but the leader gets atop a tree and find the way. And, most popularly, short versus the long term, tactical versus the strategic - each designed to tell us, with preciseness, at which point a manager should cross the leadership threshold. And, then, there is this whole argument that management is nothing without leadership, and leadership needs management. Mintzberg says this, primarily. He has a point: Management without leadership will be boring, and leadership without management will be chaos. All good leaders must manage, and all good managers must be able to lead. Indeed. But, increasingly, it is unclear what you can manage. The age of uncertainty is no longer a...

Henry Mintzberg says Management is not a science, but it is a practise, in his new book, Managing. Recently, Strategy+Business interviewed him on this and other issues, which can be accessed here . This is a significant departure from the current managerial wisdom, which seems to assume that we know exactly what makes people tick, and use extensive modelling to predict and manage human behaviour. Mintzberg's timing is excellent, this comes at the back of the biggest economic crisis in recent history, a crisis which exposed how little we know about people's behaviour and how models and theories are not exactly good guides to reality. Instead, if we follow Professor Mintzberg's prescription, we can make Managing a more involved, interesting business. However, before that, one possibly needs to answer a more fundamental question - why manage? It seems like a no- brainer , but people will actually have different answers to that question. Some manage because they have a job t...

I am trying to develop an understanding of leadership, in the context of today. I think many of our ideas are too industrial age - a concept I picked up from the New Constructs initiative - and also too Euro-centric , though this term is used to mean Europe and America together. I know this is not a new discussion: People like Charles Handy explored these concepts extensively in the 1990s. But, like other concepts, these need to be revisited often. So, to start with a metaphor. The industrial age leader was almost like the leading horse in the charge of the Light Brigade. First man out. The captain of Titanic. The one chosen to die. General Patton. Focused and Unforgiving. FDR. Unfearing . Dirty Harry. Dispassionate and Professional, though sometimes a social oddball. Warren Harding or Bill Clinton. Presidential from day one. On a more serious note, leadership so far has been about standing out, standing apart. It was about leading the pack. The leaders absolutely must be 'at the...

As we get ready to emerge from the recession this time, we should learn from this near-death experience. If this recovery should sustain, which means that we shall not have an inflationary run, absurd interest rates and countries going bankrupt in the near future, the way we conduct ourselves must change. So far, it seems that we have learnt little, and waiting, like little boys, to return to life as usual. The only way we can move forward is by accepting that there will be no return to life as usual. We must move forward, not back, and that includes not trying to replicate past templates. Bonus et al included, we should not wait around to banks get back to their old ways soon and start buying houses beyond our pay. We should save and not go back to our free-spending days. Businesses must focus on create value, and not just sustain themselves on easy credit or the naivety of investors. But, before anything else, we must acknowledge that we have this terrible habit not to learn, and m...