Sunday Posts

I resume the rest of my life today.  That sounds good. All it is, though, is a return to work, after a forced break of two weeks, as I had to go away to India to attend to my father. But, as forced breaks do, this was a break in all senses - a reordering of priorities and focusing of minds - and there is nothing better to restart on an unusually warm, sunny, mid-September morning in London. Timing is right otherwise too. It has been two years I had to step back from entrepreneurial life, primarily as money was running out. It was like going back on time, taking on a limited role, doing what I would have done several years ago in my career, and settle into the usual balancing acts characteristic of 'corporate' life. In my mind, it was always temporal, a compromise, a tactical retreat - two steps forward, one step back - meant to build up to the point that I am at today. The trick, though, was to keep remembering this. For all its faults, monthly paychecks can serio...

How to create a model of global Higher Education fit for post-recession world? This is not about private equity initiatives spanning the world, the kinds that the American majors such as Apollo and Laureate do: That is about global finance capital buying out assets in different geographies. Nor this should be about what the Academic community dubs as TNE, Trans-National Education, which is essentially about exporting degrees from metropolitan centres to the hungry nations in the periphery.  Indeed, global is, in common use, all about finance capital buying out assets in poorer countries, and extending the cultural influences of the metropolitan centres. But that model is coming under pressure lately: The 'Global' steamroller has perhaps gone too far. The richer nations are increasingly wary of the immigrants, and the poorer nations are facing existential crisis as its 'comprador bougeois', the ones that collaborate and benefit from global finance capital, has ...

The conversation about Education Innovation should go beyond Education Technology, and try to address fundamental questions: Do we need schools? What should the teachers' role be? How do we make people think critically? What makes students creative and innovative? What credentials should one have?  My favourite one among these is about Professional Education: How should a '21st Century Professional' train? There are several reasons why I want to ask the question. I have seen professions transforming both from inside - as a Professionally trained Marketer - and outside - as someone working closely in technology and technology training. But, more importantly, I ask this because this is not a fashionable question to ask. That professions, defined as a sort of social monopoly in some service areas, are supposed to be well-regulated and well-defined, which makes them less susceptible to change, and as a result, near-blind to the possibility of change. But this immunity...

In 2012, I set up a small company with a few other people. The essential idea behind this venture was to create an International Education proposition, a 'pathway' programme that could be delivered in-country and which allow the learners to earn credits that could be used to get an UK university degree with a shorter duration. We chose to deliver Pearson Business Qualifications, which meant the students completing these qualifications in their own country could come to UK and complete an Undergraduate degree with only one additional year of study.  This business did not work as we intended. There were several business reasons. We did not raise enough money, or, to put it the other way, our ambitions were not aligned with the kind of money we had in hand. This was the big reason, but there were other reasons too.  For example, our business plan rested upon another assumption: That countries like India have created a lot of educational infrastructure in the recent year...

Of the books I read recently, Herminia Ibarra's Working Identity made a lasting impression. Despite my deep aversion to the simplistic and formulaic style of business books, and this book is no different, it resonated for two reasons. Professionally, I am exploring solutions to the difficulty of education-to-employment transition, and my experience at the fault-line tells me that this arises, in the first place, because of the divergence of realities of commercial work and that of the college; the students arrive at work without resolving who they are and what they would like to, and struggle to fit in increasingly unforgiving workplaces pursuing the illusive idea of perfect candidates. Further, personally it has been appropriate too, as I am at the very point of questioning whether it is worth living my life the way I am doing now. I may already be in my second career - moving from one country to another and transitioning into Higher Education I have already done - but I do not...

I have done various things in my career, from selling to teaching, from developing products and campaigns to designing courses and raising money. But, then, all of it was really around one thing - helping people develop skills and get jobs! My exposure has been various - I have spent time in the world's largest independent IT skills training company as well as a big name English training provider, a company providing technology to Europe's largest e-learning project, an Irish recruitment company embarking on global expansion and now an American start-up looking to bridge the Education-to-Employment gap - but the point of my work was always the same.  This claim may seem odd to some, as we tend to box skills training into one skill or another, and indeed cut this adrift from Higher Education (which I have also indulged in, in a private Higher Ed institution in London) - there is nothing common between a business degree programme, IT training and English language for work, ...

The conversation started with a question: What would you do if you have to re-imagine Skills Training in India? It was prompted by, no doubt, my posts in the past regarding the trajectory of skills training sector in India, which, I argued, took the eye off the ball - the demands of real workplaces - because the Government was throwing so much money into it. The correspondent, a retired Senior Executive with portfolio interests in skills training businesses, had a clear idea of both sides - he knew the changing nature of work and he knew the demand for skills education and its challenges - and he and I found ourselves in perfect agreement that government-funded skills training almost always changes priorities, from the student-centric priorities to one of pleasing bureaucrats and winning grants. This is a persistent problem in all countries - the education providers in the UK are no exception - but the absence of other safeguards, consumer rights of students, health and safety standa...

The new Digital Economy demands new sets of competences and abilities, enterprise being the most critical. While one may think of Enterprise as critical for those who set up and run businesses, enterprise with the small ‘e’ is the everyday ability to find problems, optimise resources and think creatively, opening up possibilities of doing better even within the most process-orientated of the jobs. Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne of Oxford University estimate that more than half of the current occupational categories face significant risk of being automated within foreseeable future, and for many professions, this is real and the job roles are already changing. Even as we get used to the term ‘Knowledge Economy’, the process-orientated, middle skill jobs that were the mainstay of the Middle Class economy, are fast disappearing, taking the ‘Knowledge Worker’ with them. What is coming in its place are jobs that demand innovation, creativity and person-to-person contact, jobs th...

Lean has come to Education too, but it needs some special consideration. Education Start-Up is no longer an oxymoron, but a real thing. Venture Capitalists do invest in education, and some indeed treat this as the next big thing, a sector with abundant growth potential in an otherwise growth-less world. However, this is one sector in search of a business model: Most VCs would try to use models they use for technology or media businesses on education propositions - and they mostly do not work. I have tried and failed with an Education Start-up. Since then, my approach has been one of caution - quite antithetical to my usual excitable nature: Whenever I have been invited to join Founding Teams, I have shied away, and stated that the education start-ups need much more capital than one could possibly project using a technology or media investment model. This, because the Customer Discovery process, central in the Lean Start-up worldview, has special challenges when it comes to Ed...

When I ran out of money in 2014, I decided to take a two year break, to revisit my ideas and see if I still feel them after a while. Sure enough, some ideas died down as their immediate context changed. But others persisted, and as life comes a full circle and I think about what I must do, one particular idea that I flirted with not just during U-Aspire days, but even before, when I was working to rejig a London college. This is to set up an Enterprise School. An Enterprise School - and I may have to find a better term for it eventually - is not a school to make entrepreneurs, much less for handing out degrees or diplomas of entrepreneurship. One of the people I consider my mentor says that entrepreneurs do not go to school, and indeed, going to school to get a degree is somewhat anti-entrepreneurial. That entrepreneurship, at its core, is about a bias for action, can not be denied: It is about knowing, assessing and managing risks through action and commitment, rather than getti...

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 ...

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...

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 ...

Right now, the theme of my life is getting rid of legacy!  2015 has began positively for me, and I am able to focus on the tasks at hand and also starting to think about the future. There were some minor strokes of luck too, after I thought it had abandoned my path altogether. So, into the third week, as the expression goes, I am looking forward! Which should start with stopping to look rearward. I have been clearing my desks - and indeed my inbox - as quickly as I can, and have started to say no to many of the propositions that come my way. I am indeed tempted by academic life, something I want to live and some of the proposals I have will perhaps allow me that, but I have now resolved to be in business for a little while longer. In fact, after my experiments with living through 2014, I can not afford not to. So, here I am - intently focused on one problem, which, after Mckinsey, everyone seems to call the E2E gap. My day job concerns bringing the educators and emplo...

I am trying to build a new kind of classroom. This should look like a start-up company. In fact, I am trying to make it a start-up company. So, here is the idea: I build something where studying means working in a start-up.  I have been exploring competence-based education for a while, and one thing I learnt that there is a lot of difference between the rhetoric and the practice. The competence based courses become, all too often, about studying the marketing of the local deli or creating strategies for the cash-and-carry, the problem being that none of these businesses are interested in what the student is doing. They see no value, and for the student, it becomes an uninteresting paperwork to complete. In this form, it is worse than mass-manufactured degrees, because the student does not feel so bad. But, then, there is little point in mass-manufactured degrees. They are so disconnected from everything else that goes on in the world. They are hardly about anything re...

I have written on and off about the e-school concept. The idea was to break away from the model established by business schools, which is all about providing solutions to problems, and rather, focus on finding the problems, as entrepreneurs will do. It is still about studying business, but not through case studies, but doing one. In this conception, the e-School will look less like a school, with desks and all that, but rather like an ecosystem, with incubation, facilitation and education, all bounded together. This is a 'pivot' for U-Aspire and a necessary one. My initial efforts to persuade partners abroad to think about education differently were producing the familiar conversations about getting a British degree on the cheap, a goal I wanted to move away from. The idea was to start a new kind of conversation, about how education needs to change, but the easy one, selling British degrees, was triumphing over the difficult one, of innovating in education. Hence, the cha...

Education should be changing: The kind of education that helped us create the workforce during the industrial expansion may not, would not, work at a time of computerisation and globalisation. While this may appear kind of obvious, this is not what we are discussing though. Indeed, there is a lot of discussion about globalisation and computerisation, but the discussion is focused not on the educational challenge, but on the politics of it: For some, this is an elitist conspiracy which needs to be resisted at all costs; for others, all debate on the path to profit is utterly futile. In the middle of this charged debate lies the somewhat ignored issue: How can we create an education that helps people to adopt to this changing world of work? From this position, that change will happen is a given: One could clearly figure out that such changes have happened and those tried to resist it, rather than trying to benefit from it, usually ended up on the losing side. So, teaching people to...