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 ...

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 ...

It only seems natural to hire people who fit the organisation's culture. In fact, the most common excuse for executive failure is the inability to fit into the culture of an organisation. We all have our own stories about colleagues or bosses who were complete misfits and caused havoc. However, a recent post on Linkedin presented the downsides of hiring for culture and that is this: That it breeds conformity. Seen from this perspective, hiring for culture is another 'corporate creep' that at least the Start-ups must avoid, as the objective of a start-up as an organisational form is to confront the status quo. I have observed in my life with the start-ups that while many, most of them, want to change the world, they don't want to change themselves. While their motto is to upturn entrenched industries and introduce new ways of doing things, organisationally and structurally, many start-ups are derivatives of some defunct organisation of the past. This is human: We a...

The above title is a red herring: This is no how-to guide on building universities. Indeed, I am no expert, and not pretending to preach. Rather, as I could not possibly title something like "Wondering How To Build An University" without being considered crazy or pompous, most likely both, I settled for this less offencive title. However, the troubles with title offers some insight why the discussion is problematic. People do build things and organisations, but universities are not one of them, at least by common imagination. Despite being an empirical fact, hundreds of universities have been granted license in the last few decades, and an urgent demographic necessity, there is no other way to satisfy the growing middle classes, university building is seen to be something that takes hundreds of years, much beyond the imagination and scope of a single lifetime. Hence, while knowing 'How To Build A Company' is interesting and useful, claim to know 'How To Buil...

Could there possibly be a Global Solution for the Education-to-Employment problem? The question can be answered at two levels. First is to see the contrast between the national and the global. A solution shaped around the local labour markets, sensitive to cultural nuances and regulatory quirks, can be contrasted with the ideas of some kind of universal solution, something that works everywhere. This latter view of the world is, in many ways, increasingly common and incredibly arrogant. This is the view from the top, in which the world is just a poor version of the West, all waiting for some kind of redemption. This proselytising view has two incompatible assumptions at its heart. First, it works on the basis that the Western education models are broken, because they do not deliver the desired outcome, namely, employment (or more broadly, occupation) at the right level. Next, it makes a further assumption that some kind of universal model, based on what has been done in the W...

Someone told me, new ideas in Higher Education do not work. He has a point - even Gerald Grant and David Riesman conclude along the same lines in their The Perpetual Dream: Reform and Experiment in the American College - and paradoxically, the worse the crisis of educational exclusion or irrelevance in a country, the more difficult it is to introduce new ideas. The reason perhaps is that though in theory Higher Education is an enabler of social mobility, in practise, in many places, it is only a system of perpetuating social privilege. And, hence, even those who seek to climb the social ladder approach Higher Education with a conforming attitude, trying to disrupt everything else but not change the way to the gate of disruption. The lack of venturesome consumption, as Amar Bhide will put it, makes new enterprise and innovation extremely difficult in education. It does not indeed mean that businesses do not make money in Higher Education. They do, and lots of it. But, paradoxica...