Sunday Posts

I have been intimately involved in a 'project' to change an organisation - a complex one in a highly regulated space - and I speak of the mechanics of change usually referring back to this experience. While it lasts, this has been the most demanding, frustrating yet exhilarating work I have done so far: Progress as in one step forward, two steps back was all very common, and often, we seemed to have taken forever to resolve even the most straightforward issues. Indeed, by writing about it, I am not trying to claim any breakthrough success or mastery of the art of change management. On the contrary, this is more like the dispatches from the fault lines of an organisation in transition. I learnt to hate organisational politics for no particular reason other than because people said so. In today's cynical democracies, people in politics are typically sleazy ones, those who try to be everything to everyone, with the sole objective of making themselves rich. Statesmen are a...

So, first step in the World College project, a middle-of-the-way, somewhat safe, step - the initiation of a Business School. No big deal, indeed. This is the most crowded field of education, particularly private education. In fact, a touch risky, given that there are league tables and campus recruitment salary benchmarks, the struggle for good professors and good students, both of which are in remarkably short supply. The business of business school, because of its dependence on performance parameters, is more about creating a club for already intelligent, already ambitious students. The success mantra is not to try anything exceptional, not to go out of the way. The business education is indeed out of sync, at least a bit. We have a major crisis in the world economy because of the way we educate. Because, as some commentators put it, the focus is so much on creating clever rogues than thinking professionals. The whole business around MBA, the ubiquitous three-letter symbol of manageme...

Science is the new dogma of our age. Of the industrial age. We have done brilliantly with science. We have battled nature and pushed the boundaries forward. We have changed the possibilities of human life, and also greatly extended it. All because of science, and the hundreds of thousands of people who have engaged in research and came up with answers hitherto unknown. We owe our existence, almost every minute of our life, to various scientific discoveries that led to this point. And, therefore, not reasonably, we believe in science. This faith is boundless, a dogma. Our world is based on simple principles: scientific is good, everything else is bad. In this setting, we must substitute our faith with science, because faith itself is non-scientific. So, we have Scientific Management, a set of processes and methods which can clock and chain human work. And, it is not just the bankers and businessmen who caught on the fad. We have Scientific Socialism, which dates back to the days of the ...