Sunday Posts

Coffee shop chains are cool, but are they? That Starbucks, Costa and Pret are everywhere in the neighbourhood, offering us a standard experience - of space, coffee and everything - is signalling more than just coffee: This is about what we use public spaces for and how we use them. They are an instrument to create our identities. Imagine the morning coffee, not just its smell but also standing in the long queues at or by the station. The act of standing there is being part of a civilisation, which, despite its currency, seems to have been going on forever. This is being part of the office crowd, being busy, being hard-working, being on the path of, if one is not already, successful. The carefully crafted and branded paper-cup, with the cap and the holder, all parts of being modern, a fragment of our daily, and perennial, experience. But, more so, it is the sitting down experience, laptops everywhere, each table a small universe of start-ups and ideas, napkins specially ...

Creativity was perhaps never been more glorified. We have appreciated art, music and literature, enjoyed the fruits of scientific research and technical invention, indeed, but never before we have considered Creativity as the sole source of progress as well as redemption. Governments never wilfully proclaimed the goals of building creative economies, city planners never before had an explicit mandate for creative cities, and here is the clinchers, accountants never concerned themselves with creative output. Creativity, seen in context, is a modern religion, a source of collective well-being when all other prospects have failed. Accordingly, there is a stampede for making creative places. Start-ups have taken the place once Public Corporations had in public imagination - the mainstay of a middle class economy! Governments now divest in public sector, they are so last century, and proclaim policies to encourage start-up making. Economists write about idea economy and collective IQ....

This post is not about an idea that just popped up in my head, but about something that I saw. And, that, though uncharacteristic, is most appropriate. I just came across, while reading a book about 'Genius Clusters', a 'Hindu' theory of creativity! I am reading Eric Weiner's Geography of Genius , a concoction of travelogue and psychological theories, representing a tour through spots of great creative flourishing in human history. I am about half-way through, and have already travelled through Athens, Hangzhou, Florence and Edinburgh - and currently in Calcutta! It is a chatty read, serious ideas and wackiness bound together, and oftentimes, as a book of this nature would invariably be, too simplistic. But, every now and then, there is an idea worth all my effort, and my current pulse-rusher is this notion that Hindus have a different notion of creativity. Here is the argument in brief: That, in Judeo-Christian, currently Western tradition, the idea of cr...

We have two Jobs: One, the magical creator of iPhone, and even more, of the whole iGeneration, whose life story is one of a visionary, one that stayed steadfast through various failures and ultimately prevailed. The other is, of course, much more human, with all the failings, tempers and tantrums, who refused to accept parenthood of his own daughter and made life miserable for his colleagues at Apple so much that he managed to get fired from his own company. This latter story makes him no less visionary, but just a bit less perfect! The perfect millennium man, the first story eventually overshadowed the second story at the turn of the century, as the second coming of Jobs - his very successful return to Apple and making it the most valuable company in the world - played out, helped no less by his Cancer survival and finally, death. One can say I was watching Steve Jobs, a very good movie with Michael Fassbender as the lead. I am slightly weary of hero worship, and therefore, woul...

What enables Creativity? This has somewhat become the central question of my work. In a way, it was always there. I always sought opportunities where the boundaries between work and play fades - in other words, sought out work that I love - though this often meant a circuitous route to what other people may call Happiness. In fact, with time, happiness became something I do not seek, just the right opportunity to be creative! Happiness became, to me, a bottle, and the outside it, in the ephemerality of work and play, joy is to be found!  However, as Freud would have said in a different context, the economic life suppresses, rather than enables, such opportunities. The modern men (and women) is expected to play its part in the vast, global arrangement we have come to call civilisation, trading their very opportunities to be themselves, in return of happiness - or, what everyone calls happiness. In this sense, pursuit of happiness is the antithesis of a creative life, and y...

Again, a Sunday and a Sunday post.  After taking on this travelling life, Sundays are travel days for me. Sundays often mean a late morning flight out of Gatwick, with the goal to reach somewhere by Monday morning. Often, my mind is closed on Sunday morning, in anticipation of the sleepless night that would follow. And, indeed, there are other Sundays to play the same chore in reverse, to get into Gatwick early morning and then spending rest of the day catching up on all the sleep missed during the two week sojourns and indeed, the red-eye! This is one rare Sunday without any of that, and that makes me so protective of it. This is my time to think and read, I would like to believe, though the usual life soon catches on - it usually reaches its full crescendo around mid-Morning, usually with the clarion call of Milk (or something else, most inevitably) running out. So, I stop my indulgent reverie and return to Planet Earth, usually manifested as a Shop Aisle, at around 10a...

I finished reading Kevin Ashton's super-smart How To Fly A Horse , a very readable book on creativity. This is the kind of book I love reading, about new ideas, and what makes people come up with them. While I would not put this one at the top of my favourites list on the category, that will be Steven Johnson's  Where Good Ideas Come From , this is still very good. At this very point of my life, when I am searching for a potential topic that I could do further studies on, this is a feast, a birds-eye view of one of the things I keep reading about - about creation and creators. However, more than just being a good start for me on my project to make my reading more thematic, the book is full of great insights and ideas that will hopefully help me in my work. One of these ideas comes from an inspired passage in the book, which distinguishes Confidence and Certainty. In Mr Ashton's view, Confidence is the belief in yourself whereas Certainty is the belief in your belief. ...

Global Workforce Crisis is real, going by plain demographic numbers. The solutions available, immigration, offshoring and extending the retirement age, are politically difficult. The only available option is improving mass education, but there are entrenched interests, of power and privileges, that seeks to undermine the case for a good public education. If this does not make the problem look bad enough, there is more: It is not more of the same education that would solve the problem and we may need to think about the educational model as well. This new educational model, I shall argue, needs to put creative and cultural education at the heart of the educational process, at all levels. Our current model of education assumes that culture is a rich man's thing, leaving out all the museum visits and piano lessons as expensive add-ons to schooling. Mass education, as we see it, is a rough-and-ready thing about literacy and numeracy, which will allow the pupils a shot at all the v...

The creative space is the ultimate retreat of a humanity under siege. Technology is already turning upon us. Those who celebrate technological progress, have already made it antonymous to human progress, by dislocating the concern for greater good from the pursuit of technological sophistry. To make billions, one needs to think up an Uber: To think about what happens to poor taxi drivers who want to play by the rules isn't one for the entrepreneurial playbook. With the return on capital as the overriding concern, and when more and more capital is pooled into the pursuit of ever better technologies that may replace all but those brilliant, favoured and lucky few, technology is more like that celebrity lover that we may all desire, but whose celebrity does indeed render our own plainness irredeemable, our lives meaningless. Creativity, counterintuitively, is our opportunity to reclaim our lives. This is counterintuitive because we have gotten used to a certain concept of cr...

As we search for a formula to make our students ready for a productive engagement in the economy, we are thinking of an 'economy' as a static thing. It is an industrial age construct of production and consumption, a system of hierarchical roles and proportionate rewards, with a somewhat predictable future. However, this is not the economy we live in: The economy, as we know now, is like a conversation rather than a structure, and it is those who change the conversation, rather than follow the structure, win. The main thrust of our attempts to make our students employable today is on the unity of rhetoric, on making sure that our students talk the language of the workplace. The formula we are seeking is based on an ever-closer integration with workplace: However, the poverty of such formula may be quite obvious once seen in the perspective of the squeezing of the middle class and rise of the superstar economies. The elevator of the middle class life is jammed, in the West ...

The Global Innovation Index, produced by INSEAD and others, is built around seven factors - Institutions, Human capital and research, Infrastructure, Market sophistication, Business sophistication, Knowledge and technology outputs and Creative outputs - and measures an economy's ability to innovate. India has continually slipped in the rankings, from 62nd in 2011 to 64th in 2012, to 66th in 2013 and now at 76th in 2014. Indeed, it is useful to contrast India with China, acknowledging the coveted hyphenation that many Indians desire: China has remained on the 29th position during this time, losing and recovering the lost ground during the in-between years (though China includes the territory of Hong Kong, which is treated separately and is a top 10 territory in these rankings). Not that rankings matter much, but they are useful reminders of where one is going. India's decline tells a story in the context of the rest of the world. In the past rankings, India was ranked 2nd...

Seven works of Street Art by Banksy are to be auctioned at a London Hotel today. ( See the story ) If you are not into art, or not into street art, should you care?  I think the 'Banksy Problem' is not about art, but about all forms of creativity. It is about 'market' and 'non-market' debate, and the ideas of how to live. Today's story brings out the issues involved in sharp relief. So here is a celebrated, but unknown artist, who would sneak in the middle of the night and create a graffiti. No one really knows what he, or indeed she, thinks about this latest auction. The hypocrisy of the auctioneer is evident: He is not doing it for money, he says, but to save the building owners who are fearful that with a Banksy on their wall, their buildings will be listed Grade 2 (a building of special interest where every effort should be made to preserve them). He further adds that he does not approve of street art, and considers it illegal.  I am wo...

India is building new universities, at least at a rate of one a week. Same is true for many emerging countries. Building universities is seen as the panacea for lack of modernity. The route looks ever so simple: More universities will mean more people in Higher Education, which will mean better skilled workforce and higher productivity, and hence Higher GDP - and everything else will follow. India is also a great example of what could go wrong with this formula. The universities are being legislated into, but most become weaklings at birth, most with only a few students, limited number of disciplines, almost no research activities and no industry linkages: The prospect for future GDPs don't look that bright. If anything, they hardly herald a promising future and rather stand as monuments of wasted opportunity.  However, anyone will be impressed if they visit these new institutions. Some aberrations aside, they are mostly shiny new institutions with adequate infrastructure...

I try again to start. Life moves in circles as usual, and these are moments when I say - stop! These are strange moments when the past comes back to me, and as with a circular life, I see future at the same time.  I am not off the mark if I say I feel like standing in a hall of mirrors, where I feel like being in an endless passage, a passage to the future, built entirely of stories of the past. Once I start believing it, indeed, I feel weightless. All the baggage that I accumulated over the time, all the fears, all the emotions, fall away. I feel like staring firmly, solely, solemnly into possibilities. Just that, and nothing else - I feel creative. I am too restless to be anything. I am too much of a dreamer to make money. Or even stay. Or love or be loved. In this life of mirrors, illusions, dreams and words, my emotions are that of a constant journey, of movement and not of anchoring. And, this may reflexive, as people I loved and those who were my anchors, left. Since...

I just read a piece by August Turak on the Forbes blog ( read it here ). My takeaway is the six lessons on teaching creativity that Turak claims his mentor, Louis Mobley, embedded in the IBM Executive School. It affected me deeply and made me think; hence, I am trying to reproduce these six lessons here: One, the linear methods of teaching - books, workshops etc - do not work in teaching creativity. This is not about giving answers and formula, but about encouraging a person to ask questions. Radically different questions! And these need to be generated in a non-linear way. Two, teaching creativity is more about 'unlearning' than 'learning'. So, the whole experience was designed to be a humbling experience, even in a frustrating, infuriating way. The end objective was to make people feel - wow, I never thought that way before! Three, one does not learn to be creative; one must BECOME creative people. So, the learning experience was designed so that no answer is ever ade...

If you are seen to be creative, an out-of-the-box thinker in your organization, you may actually be shut out of the Senior Management positions. This may be counter-intuitive, as the corporate jargon revolves around creative thinking. However, this is exactly what Jennifer Mueller of UPenn , Jack Goncalo of Cornell and Dishan Kamdar of Indian School of Business found, and presented in their paper in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. [For a summary, click here ] The key point is that a typical leader is expected to bring stability, promote a vision, achieve a consensus etc., not things that creative types would naturally do. The things they do instead - challenge status quo , start the debates - are not expected from the leaders. So, if you are showing your creativity, this may go against your prospects of rising higher up in your organization. Creativity is usually seen as a specialist activity: In many businesses, this is the preserve of 'creative' departments,...

Amit Sood talks about Google's Online Museum, and I am indeed excited to see the service. For me, this is about art being given back to people, as well as a neat way to prepare for Museum visits. Indeed, I love the museums, the experience of being in the presence of great creative works, and I am sure this will help me prepare for my visits better and make the visits more enjoyable.

The Creativity Imperative Businesses today consider creativity of their staff as a critical, possibly the most critical, factor for their ongoing survival. This is because the environment, political, social and commercial, has become so fluid; as Yogi Berra put it, “the future isn’t what it used to be”. Constant change, demanding and more aware customers and citizens, rapid information dissemination through new technologies of information and communication, and intense competitive and regulatory pressures, are pushing companies and people who work for them to innovate and adapt continuously. Set in this context, employee creativity has a whole new meaning. It is traditionally understood as people thinking about products and services, which did not exist before, or tweaking and improving the existing ones. Competitive pressures add to this creativity imperative. Information is fast and cheap, and communication technology is driving the costs of production and distribution ...