Sunday Posts

I didn't write for almost three weeks as I was in India. The essence of my work there is to deal with employment creation. Part of my work is pro-bono - a city initiative focused on Industry 4.0 - and the other part is commercial, advising a large Indian corporation on the development of next-generation Skills training programmes. But the sense of crisis regarding unemployment cuts across scale and scope of my work and is a recurrent theme that pops up everywhere. India has a really big challenge. About 2 million people reach working age every month in India, and even if only half of them are actively seeking employment, the few thousand jobs that the organised sector creates are woefully inadequate. India may be the fastest growing large economy in the world, but demonetisation of 2016 and poorly implemented General Sales Tax (GST) have hit businesses hard and froze up recruitment in many sectors. The widely promoted 'Make in India' initiative - the government...

In earlier posts, I wrote about my current exploration of possibilities of a Liberal Education for the 21st Century (See A Liberal Education For The 21st Century and A Liberal Education for India ). For last several years, I have been looking closely at the Education-to-Employment (as well as Education-to-Enterprise) transitions, a territory far removed from Liberal Education ethos and conversations, but the main lesson I took away from this work is that what we offer now is too narrow an education, and the solution of the talent problem - the challenge employers are facing in finding the right talent as technologies disrupt industrial business models - lies in broadening the scope of education. The other part of my life, study of the history of the education systems, emphasised the point further: A narrow education at a time of great technological change can turn a 'demographic dividend' into an unmitigated disaster (See An Education for Decline ). This is the background ...

I have come back where I started. I decided to write this blog in a diary mode yet again. This is how I started anyway, but abandoned the banter as I got more people reading the blog. But I just feel too constrained to fit myself into a crusty professional self - this has been the bane of my career, I would suspect - and I found out that churning out wisdom on the blog is not my kind of thing. I tried and stopped, stopped and tried, and like now, and I am at another moment of fresh start. A part of how I approach this blog is about my professional responsibility as well. When I am in employment, rather than being my own boss (I alternated between the two modes several times), these constraints matter more. I never wanted to write what I had for breakfast on this blog (I am not famous yet) but about ideas and situations that stimulate and make me think. And, some of these are disappointments: In fact, I figured out, disappointments stimulate more than a happy night out. Or, for th...

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 ...

I am sure 'career indulgences' appears an oxymoron, there can't be such a thing! But in my quest to do things I love, and also to work with people I like, I have created, at least, the possibility. At this time, a penny-dropping moment of sorts, I am reflecting when I started indulging in dreams! And, indeed, there are many forkways to look back at, like these: 1. Walking out a secure job and an impending promotion, I jumped on the dotcom boat in 1998: Not many people around me were doing that at the time and I had no idea how to deal with investors and their contracts.  2. A couple of years later, when the enterprise became boring and investors became bosses, I pursued my dreams of adventure - going to a country in the middle of political turmoil and business decline - and lived through bomb threats, general strikes and all that.  3. When all that was sorted out and I had won, four years later, I gave up yet another promotion and promises of a predict...

The last week - or slightly longer may be - was a period of great reset for me.  I have been thinking closely what I am going to do moving forward. Indeed, there is plenty for me to do right now - an exciting project in development with a professional qualification body, an impending launch of a new education programme in China, an educational software project which seems to be gathering momentum, not to mention my own studies which just commenced - but this is still a point where a road has to be chosen. Partly, this is because I said yes to too many things in the last couple of months, as I was trying to resettle into a domesticated life in Britain. I have allowed myself plenty of distractions, first the life of a bootstrapping entrepreneur and then being on the move all the time, and it was indeed a point when boring becomes desirable. I did want to have a predictable life, not because I am tired of experiments, but because I realised that I must do something significa...

I have spent the last four years working exclusively on the faultline of education and employment, and it is time to take stock.  I could perhaps claim that I have been doing this for much longer, indeed, my entire working life of 23 years, except for a couple of years when I was exclusively focused on learning in employment, or corporate training, as it is called. All my work in IT Education in India and then South and South-East Asia, to build English Training Centres globally and even the quest for a new kind of Business School in London, the point of all that was an employment for the learners. The starting point of this reflection is to recognise the distinction between what I did then, and the work afterwards, as I stepped outside employment and tried to set up U-Aspire and then took on a project to establish Knod in Asia: This was about looking to solve the problem, exclusively and with singular focus, rather than theorizing about it. This distinction is important ...

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...

July and I complete a year of travel. I spent most of the year on the road, travelling mainly to India and sometimes to the Philippines. This was some kind of reset, just as my project in global education seemed to have stalled, which, at the least, allowed me to regain the confidence that ebbed in the midst of a failure. When I launched the previous project - where the cardinal sin was optimism and we set out despite knowing we were underfunded - I told my business partner that i felt confident that I could rebound from a failure, if it might come. This last year was just that, my effort to rebound from a failure, and I feel reasonably satisfied with where I am now. Satisfied but not content, which is a curious feeling, as I know how much is still to be done. So, I am not counting the chickens yet. However, I needed to test some assumptions, restore faith in my own abilities, and clarify some of my own objectives, all of which I have done now. This meant three weeks of travel ev...

To paraphrase Dickens, this is the best and the worst of the times for Higher Education. On one hand, Higher Education was never more popular. A preserve of the rich and the privileged, it has now become the mantra for everyone aspiring to move up in life. The success of the Western Middle Class in the Post-war years of industrial expansion created a template that everyone around the world to follow, a life of suburban bliss (or an urban apartment), a family, a car, a good school for kids, all inextricably tied to going to college and getting a job afterwards. On another, Higher Education is also in serious trouble, because the equation does not work in practice. The middle class jobs are vanishing, the middle class incomes are stagnating, families are breaking down and state provisions of education and health (where it existed) are being whittled down to meaninglessness. And, most apparently, the Education-to-Employment linkage is breaking down. More than half the graduates, on aver...

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...

Whoever said it: The maxim of corporate dysfunction is when someone discusses their airmiles on the dinner table. While I scrupulously avoid it, making some of my friends what I really do when I frequently disappear for business trips, I can't avoid another frequent flyer syndrome: Having my moments of existential crisis at Airline lounges! So, here I am, in the quiet poshness of the Gatwick Lounge, and devoid of any conversations; the assorted Golf and Lifestyle magazines rather useless, staying off food in consideration of my soaring weight, with a touch of Internet fatigue (this post is being done retrospectively, or should I say, posthumously, after the thoughts have died). It was one of those moments when I don't want to start reading the books I am carrying in my bag, because I have to read them anyway for the next 7 hours, as I have seen all the movies that are there on Inflight entertainment (one less spoken about downside of Carrier loyalty) - and therefore, plunged in...

If you are coming out of college, how do you start thinking about your career? Or, if you came out of college a few years ago, and have dawdled through various things you don't like, how do you re-think about your career all over again? Indeed there could be numerous variations of this scenario, each person having an individual one, and the key question to ask is whether there are any general rules to think about careers at all. And, if you want to get really deep, you may start musing what's a career anyway. Let's start with the philosophical one. My favourite story about this is the story of the young man who was fishing in a pond middle of the day when he got accosted by a busy type, may be some distant uncle. Horrified with this young man's laziness, the older man advised him to abandon leisurely pursuits and get some productive engagement - education, employment or training whatever. The younger man asked him what would happen if he did that: The older man to...

In an interesting TED talk (see below), Rainer Strack underscores the urgency of thinking about global workforce crisis. The numbers, as projected in the work of BCG (to which he was a contributor), are indeed telling: The workforce crisis may cost $10 trillion worth of GDP between 2020 and 2030 ( see the BCG work here ). This is not any doomsday talk urging people into action, because the facts are in plain sight anyway: The population in developed nations are aging and there are not enough new births to take the place of retirees. The solutions are common sense but politically impossible: Import workers from countries which may have surplus labour or worse working conditions. Indeed, Messers Strack and others see the limitations in this formula and suggest a mix of measures, not just geographical migration but also non-geographical ones (such as offshoring) and bringing more women and retirees into workforce (Child labour is indeed a taboo subject). This conversation is im...