Sunday Posts

In the conference circuit, the most common complaint against Higher Education institutions is that they do not understand employer requirements. Thereafter comes the slide that cites either the World Bank or the World Economic Forum, or some neoliberal think-tank, and maintains that employers are, most crucially, looking for 'soft skills': Ability to communicate, collaborate, think critically and empathise with others.  Languages hide as much as they reveal. In another day and age, one would call those very attributes human skills and recognised the problem as one of narrow education. And, this alternative perspective is exactly what we need: The problem is not that the education is not specific enough, but it is too specific. The Higher Education institutions, since everyone, students, their parents, regulators and governments have become outcome obsessed, are endlessly chasing 'employer requirements', in a world where the recruiters are always focu...

As I mentioned in the last post, a recent conversation about a deal threw me into a mini existential crisis. A mid-life crisis was indeed due, but I perhaps postponed it with my refusal to grow up and settle down for the boring bits, so far. It burst into the scene, somewhat unexpectedly, as I got an offer that I apparently sought, but did not want, at least not anymore. However, before I try doing something with my life, there was one bigger question that needed answering: Why do I work in Education? I could say that I defaulted into education, which is partly true as I moved between technology and education jobs in the early part of my career, but I had so many inflection points and at each one of those, I chose education. Indeed, the latest escape route, if I needed one, was my work in recruitment in 2007 onwards - I could have made the shift and indeed, it would have better careerwise if I did. But I did not even see that as a possibility then, and have no regrets for not doi...

My whole project of 100 days, which, by the way, I am doing well with, is about changing my life. However, changing my life to what is still perhaps unresolved. The overall goal, to go beyond the compromises I had to do after my last experiment at a breakout, remains: But what the next breakout is about needs more thinking. As I noted in an earlier post, my enthusiasm about the world of education ventures have now somewhat dampened. The reason for this is a realisation, which comes with the exposure I have had over the last several years, that all the talk about education innovation is really neither about education nor about innovation. It is, mostly, about some desperate excess money following concepts and ideas past their sale-by date. And, this does not excite me enough: Or, let's say, it does not make me feel that any hardship is worthwhile to build another of those education apps that no one wants to pay for, or, for that matter, that For-Profit school that would peddle...

I did stop writing personal notes on this blog. I wanted to make it more professional. But that made me, as I realised on reflection, write long, rambling posts on ideas that are personal, which may not have much consequence as I am not living them. In that sense, personal is more professional on this blog - at least that reflects my lived experience - and I intend to get back to doing it again.  So, here am I, at a seemingly interminable red light at a crossroad. Stopping so was an admission of failure: That my ambition to create an world-changing education outfit failed. I desired a recovery, after a fairly intense few years of bootstrapping when I flirted with bankruptcy and lived precariously doing contract teaching and occasional writing, and all those 'bourgeois' comforts and ambitions that I so heartily disliked when I had a comfortable life, became so much desirable by their absence again. So, as I hung my hat - in fact, ate my hat would be a more appropriate desc...

I wrote about a fresh start in 2016, but unlike all the grand plans of new beginnings I usually make around the year-end, this fresh start was not really that fresh. Rather, I am seeking to be boring, conventional, going back to a professional life etc. Was this about a burn-out, am I giving up, I was asked, and my answer that I am trying to be realistic did not have much weight. After all the years of attempting not to conform, this idea of settling in can only be seen as giving up, rather than a bidding time strategy. The point, of course, is that I am not giving up on my ambition, but seeking a different one. There are certain assumptions I made about my abilities and what I wanted to do, and to be sure, I tried them out. It did not work, or at least did not work the way I expected it. Like a good entrepreneur, I have learned and now, I am trying to pivot. Stepping back and getting back to professional life is not giving up entrepreneurship, but rather seeing my life as a con...

The time to change Professional Training has come. Despite its prominence, Professional Training hardly features on the agenda of Education Innovators. This is because of its legacy - clearly defined professional bodies, enabled by charters, defining the standards and assessing the competence - and its clear linkages to jobs. In many ways, this is the least broken part of the modern, industrial age, education system. But this is perhaps not the picture one gets to see from inside. The professions, and the national monopolies that they implicitly draw upon, are indeed challenged by the same two forces that are transforming education - globalization and automation! Some professions are more exposed than others, and in some countries more than others, but there is an unmissable case for transformation.  To understand why it is so, one needs to look at the changing nature of professional knowledge. That there is self-service (or should we call it DIY?) in many areas from ...

I wish to write about two mistakes. First, I thought I would not have a mid-life crisis. Wrong. Second, after everyone else, I think it is impossible to change course of my career as late as this in my life. Wrong again. It is harder, surely, but not impossible. First, the interesting news - that I have a mid-life crisis. I know I am creating trouble for myself here by baring it. One cardinal rule for career building is perhaps to present oneself in a neat format, best things upwards, vulnerabilities folded away. Talking about the crisis I am facing is like turning up in the interview shirtless. But, I would like to believe I am among friends in this blog - no matter who you are, if you turn up to read my banter, you are a friend - and talking about vulnerabilities is fine, therefore. I wanted to live a creative life. This is the motivation behind my journeys, my forays into different interesting things, my refusal to be grounded by affections or mortgages, my obsession with ...

I have been involved in the ugly end of the Higher Education - For-profits - for too long to not to detect the puzzle that lies at the heart of Higher Education as a business. Good Higher Education, if we overcome the cynicism to believe that there is such a thing (and overcome the claim that Higher Education is a mechanism to perpetuate privilege, and nothing else), needs elements such as a community, a gift culture, a long term vision and high levels of trust, which are not common in the business world. The investment world, which gets involved in owning and running Higher Education institutions, is really at the far end of the spectrum of values from what makes good education, and while they claim to reward innovative companies, they like regimented Higher Education, and while they want Google to be more college-like, they want college to be more like a factory. Recently, Professor Malcolm Gillies, the recently retired Vice Chancellor of London Metropolitan University, argued that...

August was somewhat the crucial month, with a both a week-long walking tour of Paris and a work trip to India, allowing me to the perspective that I desperately needed. It has been a year that I chose to take up a job after a few years of bootstrapping, and it was most appropriate for me to reflect on what happened since. Besides, I wanted to figure out what I really want to do, and travelling and engaging with different things in different countries was one of the best ways to figure this out. This allowed me to test the assumptions I had, about work and about myself, and while there are no definite answers in these kinds of things, I am much better informed now than I was only a year ago. For a start, I know adult education is something I enjoy being involved in, and I would rather stick to this, despite some tempting offers to work for the technology sector. Even an education technology company is not an education company, I keep reminding myself, and nor an investment bank pu...

Having failed a few times, I claim I know what it means.  Knowing failure means a few things.  First, it means that I know that there are degrees of failure. There is indeed that complete, catastrophic failure - the end - that most people think about when they think of failing. But the actual experience of failure teaches you that it can be far more gentle, and indeed reversible. Having failed, therefore, means many bad things but one redeeming one - overcoming the fear of failing. Second, the experience of failure also teaches one to plan for failure. This is a departure both from the failure-as-catastrophe view of the world (in which case, no plan is really enough) and also the bravado of not thinking about failure. Indeed, this is not planning to fail, but planning for failure, so that if and when it comes, one has a Plan B in hand. Third, failing leads to an optimistic view. This does not mean failure is nice - it is never so when you tried something that...

If last half-year of travelling changed anything for me, it is that my desire for an immediate return to India has somewhat dimmed. The personal reasons remain as valid as ever, but the prospect of engaging into Indian Higher Education is perhaps too daunting. While my work has primarily been about innovation in education, no talk of innovation  is welcome in Indian Higher Education. It is a sector focused essentially on carrying forward the colonial division of society, so rooted in the past, corrupted by political interference and black money, and regulated ineptly. There are indeed exceptions, world-class institutions such as the IITs and IIScs, committed research establishments, and genuinely philanthropic entities doing good, but my focus - Mass Higher Education - is afflicted by practises that one would not want to get involved in. This indeed means rethinking my plans for the next few years, and perhaps reviving one of the plans I almost abandoned in my quest to find a...

No particular reasons, but I am feeling confident and happy: As they say, a good summer may have lifted my mood.  Or, may be this is something more substantial. It would perhaps be right to admit that I drifted along a bit, particularly through the last few months of the last year, when I was hard put to see how I can move my life forward. I staked it all to get the business going, but the progress was, as with most start-ups with limited capital, slow and often dependent on other people. I had this feeling of powerlessness, not being able to do anything myself - not a nice place to be! Something has changed since then. Actually, several things! I took on more training work, primarily because of economic necessity, though I hated it and wanted to get out of the routine commitments as soon as I can. But this, counting the flights of stairs every day as I climbed them, promising to myself that I won't be doing it indefinitely (truth be told, I wanted to do this till June, a...

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 ...

About a year ago, I set out to do what I always wanted to do: To create a technology-led network of global colleges, offering competence based education abroad. I was fully aware that this is a challenging project, having spent more than four years thinking and planning for it. However, doing it was always going to be different, and it was - full of new insights, unexpected turns and opportunities, and learning, which no amount of planning could have prepared us for. I am coming to the end of the bootstrap phase that we had to live through to get things going. It is, therefore, time to reinvent myself. One of the great rewards of doing something like this is that I come to know how much I wanted to do this. There should have been no doubt, given the time I spent thinking and talking about how this could work. I took on a rather unappetising job of working in a chaotic private college environment for a period to build my network and ideas: Those two-and-half-years of my life was no...

A migrant is defined both by the journey he makes, of leaving, and the journey he never ends up making, of return. In that sense, I am a true migrant: I have left, and I am forever returning. Unlike the others with a stable life and steady aim, I have not fully assumed the identities of my host and not given up that of my home; nor did I do the opposite, like some others, and clung to my home identity and rejected what came my way. I have, consciously, let the journey change me, but preserved my deep desire to make the opposite journey some day. But this is not just a transmutation between the home and the host, but the desire to renew myself that makes me a migrant. It is not about search of my roots, which I know full well where they are, nor a denial of my self-chosen circumstances, but rather the pursuit of an identity, an emotional construct of a 'universal' identity that defines my being and becoming. So, this is not about giving up or taking in, but absorbing, obser...

Start-up life is exciting: Disappointments and rejections come thick and fast. Just when one thinks that there is light at the end of tunnel, another endless tunnel starts. In what could be the reverse of bungee-jumping, indeed one would imagine the sky having gravity after talking to any aspiring entrepreneur, one lives the life in spurts of joy and endless despair thereafter; indeed, it is this experience that is thrilling, indeed only after all of it is over, and would be material for heroic stories for telling one's grandchildren, minus the silly bits.  There are lots of silly bits, unavoidably perhaps. At this time, slightly sulking from the latest disappointments, I am onto this what's-going-wrong quandary, and the thinking whether the whole project is quixotic, only to realize quickly that the main problem Quixote had was of not accepting the world as it was. The mantra of what I am doing now is to be able to pivot, to change and to adapt; and my solace should come ...

Two years into a career in Higher Education, it is time for me to take stock. I have been working in education for last twenty years, starting with computer education in India, but also spending time in e-learning, management training, vocational education and finally, English language learning. It is in the course of my previous job, which involved setting up English Training and Vocational Education outfits in different countries in Asia and Eastern Europe, I became convinced that Higher Education is the next 'killer app', the 'thing' that can improve lives of people and create prosperity and progress. It was simple demography plus productivity kind of realisation, and travelling around Asia is the best way to see the scale of the opportunity and the scale of the challenge: That's exactly what I did. It was a no-brainer that I left my job to take the circuitous way into Higher Education. Britain, with its predominantly publicly funded higher education and...