Sunday Posts

Automation is Capitalism's great new prize and its most potent challenge. At once, it breaks the back of organised labour but puts into disarray the carefully constructed social system that we call Capitalism. It is Capital - that's what machines, robots and know-how are - becoming supremely productive and utterly meaningless at the same time. It is the realisation of an utopia, but also a moment of reality. It would potentially expand supply infinitely, as finite Human time will no longer be required, at the same time as perversely limiting demand, as nothing that is produced could be bought. The last bit is indeed the classic Marxist argument, but from the vantage point of 21st century, we see something that Marx did not. First, though Marx made some very insightful predictions, the empire was still only taking shape and at the time of Marx's death, the integration of global economy was still in its infancy. Also, for Marx, the nineteenth century capitalism was a ...

Despite the success of the universities around the world - there are more students going to them than ever - time has come to think about a new model. The universities work wonderfully well for a few, as they have always done. More precisely, few universities work well for few people, but they are unable to become the drivers of social mobility and the magic potion for the middle class dream, as they were slated to become. Part of this is of course about the change in the nature of work, that we have technologies that limit the number of middle class jobs, but the model has failed to adapt to these changes, or, in another way, to influence the changes to have more broad-based benefits. These changes, globalisation and automation being two prime-movers but there are others too, must be taken into account in thinking what kind of education we would want now. Sending more people just to get degrees, as politicians keep talking about from time to time, is not a solution. Thinking abo...

I have been working in International Education for the last fifteen years. This has been an interesting journey as I have done various roles, right from teaching classes to establishing operations in different countries, selling courses as well as managing university partnerships. And, indeed, I was writing about this as I went along, using this blog as a scratchpad of ideas and records of interactions with people from different backgrounds and interests. I am not sure I thought of this as a career path in any sort of meaningful way, but it somewhat became one. Some of the things I did was deliberate, others less so. In fact, if anything, I discovered that a career in International Education is quite different from what I perceived it to be. Or, that there is no career in International Education if one remained Indian, by appearance and at heart. International Education, in more ways than one, is about promoting courses from Developed countries in the Developing, and this require...

If my work is about creating an education offering ready for the 21st century, two forces count the most - Globalisation and Automation. The question how automation alters the educational requirements of a common citizen and average worker keeps popping up in my engagements, conversations and work. I spend a great deal of time traveling and talking to people how education must change, how we must look for a different set of skills than the ones we hitherto talked about, and how we must get ready for a tipping point globally when the economic and social structures change drastically under the weight of these two forces. In this context, it is important to think how this change may look like. For this post, I intend to focus on automation, the ubiquity of intelligent machines and how that may alter the nature of skills, and leave globalisation for another day. I have indeed made several blog posts about this in the past - it is indeed central to what I have been doing for several y...

I need a meta-theory to explain whatever happened in my professional life, as I reach another decision point, where, yet again, I have to do some explaining for what happened so far. When I narrate the story of my career, which is a sequence of several mini-careers, it appears like a dance than a journey, the usual metaphor most people would be comfortable with. I moved vertically, did things which seemed like going back on time, took risks commonly deemed unacceptable, and mostly lived on the brink. I may have achieved too little, reached the right place often too early, and preached, to those who cared, a view too antiquated. Someone, who was my Line Manager for several years, told me that I was the most intelligent person she ever worked with, but I should be mindful that intelligence is a double-edged sword: The wisdom of her words is beginning to dawn on me only now. There is one easy explanation of my relationship with work: That I sought meaning. I was motivated by the stor...

A friend complained, I don't know how to be happy. Point taken: If happiness is about being content, I surely show symptoms of being unhappy. To be fair, she wanted to make the point that I possibly had everything that one could reasonably want, and therefore, I should drop the anchor and try to achieve steady state. I tried to counter and justify myself, which is quite usual in such friendly arguments. In the end, it became almost a religious argument, without invoking God. I should be happy with what I was given, and make the best of it, she contended. On the defencive as if I am accused of being too greedy or ambitious (growing up in suburban India before the liberalisation, I am not used to treating those emotions as virtuous), I was laying out an argument that I saw life as an one-off opportunity to change the world, and since I have not achieved this yet, I couldn't rest. Though it may sound a bit crazy and overtly quixotic, it is exactly what I believe. In the end, s...

I left India on 2 nd July 2004, and traveled through Singapore to Britain. It was a rather strange day, not just because the day lasted almost 30 hours due to my traveling route and English summer; I was embarking on a journey completely unprepared and in a way, unnecessary. In a way, I was okay: Had a decent job in a decent company, just moved back to Calcutta with my parents after a stint overseas, and been rigorously advised, by my parents and friends, to start a family. I was 35 then - so my chances of playing with life were written off - and had no particularly transferable skill, as my computer skills were largely forgotten after years of working in a General Management role. I ignored all the advice on the contrary and came to Britain. It was a wrong decision, I knew instantly. I knew no one in London, except an old friend from my Bangladesh days who migrated earlier and who tried to find me an accommodation in one of her boyfriend's flats (which did not materialize). I had...

Physical work is liberating. We have spent the last 200 years, that is the period since industrial revolution, demeaning physical work. Before the industrial revolution, physical work was seen as the source of all value mankind could produce. The wonders of farming, celebrated by the French Physiocrats , were there for all to see: Man's physical labour making nature yield life sustaining produce. But, since the Industrial revolution, this changed. First, people were seen as mere resources, eligible for only a meagre subsistence pay and less than amenable living conditions, who must 'man' the machines and just that. The magic of physical work was gone. The workers became mere cogs, as celebrated in Charlie Chaplin's The Modern Times. Then, started the man-machine competition: For the same work. Machines were taking away not just the glory of physical work, but physical work itself. The heroes of this age were men who could beat the machines, people like John Henry or St...

There seems to be a problem with such a straight-forward question. It is political. There are two sides on it. Battles are being fought over it. This simple innocuous question denotes the battle for the soul of the organization, though its methods are certainly less grand. The side that says NO has a simple reason: People should be working in office. Not socializing. Not playing. Facebook is playful, even immoral. Let us call this group High Priests of Scientific Management. These gurus are usually the Command-and-Control guys who believe that office work is about putting a bunch of kids in a cage and giving them some simple menial tasks to perform. This is where they get it wrong. They forget that office work is no longer like that. May be, they don't get because they are mostly managers: They don't work anymore. They sit in their cabins snooping around on other people, forgetting that it is social connections and free energies of the educated adults that determine the fate...

One part of my work is exciting: Developing a new Global MBA programme. The college I am working for have been offering an MBA for a while, a general one validated by an UK university. It is a quite well structured programme, highly successful among international students. However, over last six months, I taught in the programme and was involved in managing it along with my colleagues, and this experience has given me some insights which I want to utilize now. So, I am currently working on a change agenda, with the objective that we would want to develop a truly differentiated, global programme, in step with the post-recession world. I have set myself a period of six more months, by when we should implement a new programme design and ensure greater manageability of how the programme is delivered. While I go along this route, however, I wanted to keep a narrative of the journey, so that I can look back at this process and reflect upon. Hence, this post. At this time, my plans are quite ...

Viktor Frankl defends idealism, why we must believe in others to be what they should be, rather than what they are. Deeply moving and inspiring, this comes as a gift in the middle of my despair. I am struggling with my innate idealism, something I inherited and grown up to believe, in the face of the usual mid-life crisis, a point where I start thinking where I am going and how much I have lost being a dreamer and not a realist. However, here is a man who has seen it all, who has seen the moral bankruptcy of incomparable magnitude, and yet kept his faith and believed in the ultimate goodness of mankind and the meaning of life.

I have talked about doing meaningful work before, but have not substantiated what I meant by that. But before that, a note on context. My point about wishing to spend 2010 doing meaningful work implied that what I have done before, or doing now, is meaningless. While it is possible to clarify and elaborate such a statement, this goes against one of my core beliefs: No work is absolutely futile. While I may be deeply frustrated by what I am doing, primarily on account of my inability to move forward on any front, this work also presents me an enormous opportunity to learn, and explore various aspects of international business. That can't be meaningless; work rarely is. I must admit that the current job that I do taught me a lot about work. One of the key lessons have been that you can not be a quitter. I have faced enormous difficulties while at work, not least because of the recession. I thought the project I was involved in was not important, had to deal with colleagues who took ...