Sunday Posts

Adam Grant, in his excellent 'Give and Take', shows how Givers, those who seek to create value for others first, win at the modern workplace. His key point, that Giving, seeking to create value first, is a better professional strategy than Taking, seeking value for oneself, or even Matching, giving after norms of reciprocity have been clearly established.  He cites three reasons for the enhanced effectiveness of Giving. First, the essential difference between Giving and Taking may have been the focus on Long Term. Givers thought longer term, and they knew creating value always paid back over time. With accelarated pace of our lives, this long term has become shorter, thereby creating a more immediate payback for giving and making it a better professional approach. Second, the increased prevalence of collaborative work, and relative decline of independent working, has shone the spotlight on the Givers, making them more desired as colleagues. As a member of the team who foc...

The discussion about 21st Century skills is a bit confusing, because they sound a lot like 20th Century skills.  Consider the talk about collaboration, critical thinking and communication. We have been talking about them for a while. Did we not know the value of critical thinking after the horrors of the Nazi takeover of Europe? Did we not need communication skills in the golden age of advertising? And, in fact, most twentieth century innovations, and one could claim the middle years of the century as some sort of golden age of innovation, came through great collaboration. If we were not talking so much about these then, it was only because our thinking about skills and abilities are always retroactive. The rote memorisation of knowledge, which seems, by common consent, the point of what we now think twentieth century skills really were, had been dead in the water long time since, not just at the point of conception of the Internet. We somewhat forget that the Newspapers and ...

Character is back in conversation. It was one of those Victorian ideals we came to discard. It reeked of elitism, somewhat, and of an irrelevant valour from a time past. The IQ, which came to replace it somewhat, was far more democratic, at least in theory. We loved those stories of smart people coming from unlikely places, and they became our new heroes. But, as it seems, character is back in conversation, with a vengeance. As IQ peaked, and observing all the craze about tests and test preps, one would tend to think this can't get any crazier, cognitive psychologists, economists and educators started talking about the value of the non-cognitive skills, such as work ethic, self control, integrity, grit etc. We now have masses of data and all sorts of interesting research proving that these things do indeed matter, and character building is now back at the centre of educational discussions. Which should be good news, I should think. I am on to a little project to go bey...

As we speak to employers about what skills they value, they often talk about Critical Thinking. When we talk to colleges and universities, at least in the UK, Critical Thinking comes right at the top of the list of the things they want their students to be able to do. Someone I know, who has been working on the Educator-Employer interface for more than a decade now, tells me that even if they are using similar language, they mean different things by Critical Thinking. According to him, this creates the disconnect, and this is why while 70% educators may think the students are ready for the workplace, less than half the employers think so. With this in mind, I was engaging with educators and employers to figure out what the different definitions of Critical Thinking may be. It seems that both employers and educators mean the same thing - the ability to test and validate the assumptions that underlie a decision - when they talk about critical thinking. They are both talking about n...

Democracy is not just a political arrangement. It is a huge mistake to think about democracy purely in terms of political process, because then we miss the requirement of embedding this socially. Fareed Zakaria made the point that the failure of exported democracies in Afghanistan and Iraq was because it did not precede with constitutionalism and rule of law, as it did in the mature democracies in the West. But, I shall argue, that constitutionalism and rule of law did not come from nowhere. It was a result of long struggles or violent revolutions, and sometimes, it came from concessions made in the fear of impending revolution. And, indeed, the dynamic that produced the revolutionary stirrings, and the liberal instincts for constitutionalism, were firmly embedded in the social dynamics of education and economic participation. Now, as we look to make democracy as a deliberate rather than an emergent phenomena, we must look beyond the mere mechanics to these aspects of social dyna...

'Value Education' is claimed to be the next big thing in Indian Education. As the expansion of Engineering and Management Education has somewhat stalled - these have failed to improve employment prospects and demand for these has declined - the buzzword is now Values.  At the outset, one would assume that the need may have arisen because of the overt technical concentration in the Indian education system which leaves its graduates wanting in terms of moral commitments and social engagement. Also, Value Education, as it is practised and promoted in India, is also in line with the general revivalist tendencies as witnessed in the country today. It isn't about ethical and moral exploration, but about tradition and heritage; in most cases, this means pop-Hinduvta, extracts from traditional texts presented in PowerPoint, someone chanting out Sanskrit sound bites parsed with pie charts. At the surface, the trend very much reflects the conversations inside Indian compani...