Sunday Posts

B-Schools had their day. There was a time when we thought we knew how to do it - capture the future in a web of models and processes - and created the big, successful institutions charging top dollars for educating business leaders.  Then, a few things happened. We overdid it. There were just too many B-Schools and too many business 'leaders'. We also lost faith in big businesses. According to a recent Pew survey, only 40% of Americans have a positive image of big businesses, down from 75% a couple of decades earlier. And, big businesses stopped creating jobs, as they continued to automate and spread their global supply chains. And, then, came the Great Recession, sweeping away the dreams of middle class life of the most, and what emerged is a completely different future. No wonder that only a small fraction of MBAs now find appropriate employment, and all but the top B-Schools are able to fill their seats today. The truth is, today, not the company men but those wi...

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...

There are many different types of entrepreneurs but the Enterprise Culture, the official celebration of enterprise that dominate the media and our talk, highlight just one of them. And, this, a culturally biased version of the enterprise, is not just counter-productive as it does not fit into the context of many societies, but also regressive, it prevents rather than promoting possibilities of enterprise and innovation. The dominant tale at the heart of enterprise culture is what I shall call the Pioneer Narrative. Think of the Wild West, the Gold Rush, the Unattached Man in search of jackpot, a sort of rough, manly version of creation. Played out in the United States, the primary exporter of enterprise culture narratives, this lies at the heart of our portrait of the entrepreneur as an young man, tough, unconstrained, stops at nothing, up against the nature but offered its bounty, its abundant land that lay there to be claimed.  Enterprise existed much longer than the Wil...

One of the projects I started, and then abandoned, is the creation of an e-School, an enterprise school. This was a concept defined in opposition to the B-School, a place where one is trained to solve problems and learn how to communicate: The e-School, as conceptualised, was about finding problems, connecting with people, discovering opportunities, creating and leading. This is not about being entrepreneurs, though: Enterprise is for everyone, though entrepreneurship may need particular financial, social and opportunity setting. Besides, entrepreneurship, as it is defined today, is quite a narrow concept related only to a way of making money. In my conception, the e-School was about seizing the initiative in one's own life, and defining the agenda, rather than leading one dependent on other people's agenda. I started and abandoned this project at some point in 2011. This was the direction I wanted to drive the college I was then involved in to go. However, the strategy w...

I have 'boot-strapped' for slightly over a year now, living without a salary or even steady income, to get the business off the ground. I did preach that everyone should do boot-strapping at least once in life, and I have done this to remain true to my word. It was challenging, indeed: I was not just boot-strapping to start a business, but was doing so while simultaneously paying for my education and still settling in a new country. That way, this bootstrap was a somewhat mad plunge, and therefore, as great a learning as I thought it would be.  This had the usual elements people learn in a bootstrap, like: That you can't buy everything you want to buy, and I am not talking about diamond rings. Many a times, I shall control the impulse to buy a book, or a toy for my son, because it was not urgent. That there are more efficient ways of doing things. I discovered the cheapest ways to get around in London during this period. I know now when to use my pre-paid Oyster ...

All my efforts over last few months have been directed towards setting up a global e-school. This is a term I picked up from one of the blogs on Forbes.com: E-School, as in Enterprise School, as opposed to Business School, is a place to learn the art of the enterprise, as opposed to the formulaic thinking that B-Schools usually represent. In short, it will be more art than science, greater focus on people than process, and emphasis on possibilities rather than the mechanics of accounting. If all this sounds wonderfully vague, it is meant to be. There isn't a formula that one can quickly follow in defining an E-School, because there isn't a precedence. What I talk about may sound more akin to a liberal arts college than a Business School. I see sessions on history, psychology and creative writing to be an integral part of what we may end up doing in the school. After all, the goal of the school will be to help shape entrepreneurial mindsets: It must start with a leap into u...

Kolkata, I would always point out, is unique among the major metropolises around the world as its population is FALLING. Even if this fall is only marginal, at this time of unparallelled urbanisation, that marginal fall in population indicates decay. Ghost cities aren't that unusual: A walk down the Piotrkowska Street in Łódź, the third largest city in Poland and one with declining population after its textile industry disappeared, is highly recommended if anyone doubted that this could happen in modern times. I know from my time in Łódź what happens when an inward-looking city meets globalisation: I imagine in my nightmare the side streets of Kolkata completely abandoned, an inescapable darkness and decline, where despair brings more despair and lead people to give up and abdicate to a self-interested, lumpen-bourgeois leadership.  However, even Łódź is turning around. The nightmare of Piotrkowska Street ends as one steps into Piłsudskiego and the all new steel-and-glass outs...

I have almost always been entrepreneurial, pursuing new ideas if not new businesses in my working life. As I reflect on a life of research and writing, I know it is important for me to be a change agent: This is something beyond mere observation and even beyond the grandness of discovery, this is about doing something to make life better generally. I have engaged with everything I do everyday with that spirit. My recent plans to develop a platform for global learning and teaching is indeed in line with my character. It is suitably grand, difficult to do, long term and, I shall claim, life-changing. It is not the easiest thing I could have picked, but I never pick the easy things. And, I am about to make it more difficult than it should be. Here is how: I now have a few choices about how to fund this business. However, I am trying to draw from life's lessons, and despite the fact that I don't have many alternatives, I am deciding to say no to the easiest offer that I have on...

After a long time, my life returned to normalcy yesterday. An after-office pub trawl lasted till 11pm, not because of the quality of the wine - I was merely on Guinness for a belated St Patrick's Day celebration - but because of the quality of the conversation. Indeed, it was mostly office stuff, to start with. It was about the urgency to construct a vision, something concrete and achievable, yet something that breaks the cycle of trivialities that seem to engulf our work. That way, we are at an interesting point. We are affiliated to a couple of universities, and we run their courses. The recent audits and examination boards went well, and everyone is jubilant that we seemed to have met our objectives. However, to me, this is just the starting point and not the end. To my colleagues who had a more public sector background, satisfying the very high standards of the regulators and the accrediting bodies is the goal, an end. To me and the colleagues coming from private sector trainin...

I am in the year-end mode, finally. It was almost difficult to let this year go: It has been one of those years of transition, from one thing to another, may be for good, but looked like a long tunnel. It was just not ending. However, as someone quite helpfully picked my pocket and stole my wallet on Wednesday - along with all the bits that made up my self and identity - it was easy for me now to call an end to this year. It is not about the fact it could not get any worse: The point is that it has ended itself. What an interesting contrast this end of year makes with its beginning. For me, 2010 began with an email, from an ex-colleague who I knew and respected, writing to me about his inability to join me in a project which we have been discussing for months. By then, I was all set to end my commitments with my the then employer and almost certainly knew that it would not be a painless parting. The project in question was the only thing I was looking forward to, and the colleague in q...

Most of my life, I worked for SMEs . For those entities which is below the radar of business press, but still employ most of the people [more than 80% of all workers in Britain] and generate most of the output. I know it is a broad range, which include self-employed accountants as well as mid-sized companies with 150 employees, but they are the real movers-and-shakers of an economy. Besides, it is also true that most large companies were SMEs when they started; those which were not, were usually public corporations which got sold out. The problem is that SMEs don't think much. That's so counter-intuitive; the SME mythology, as spun out in the Silicon Valley lore, SMEs should be full of ideas. They are the new world: The anti-thesis of big bad industrial companies. However, the truth is quite the opposite. Some SMEs are plain oppressive. They are more ' fordist ' than anyone else. The environment is often akin to boiler room than start-up utopia. The SMEs often see...

I have structured my career wrongly so far. I have worked hard, trying to learn skills and understand how businesses work, and wanted to save up a bit of capital in the process. All I wanted to become is an entrepreneur, independent, high-achiever. But, as I know now, my imagination of 'entrepreneur' was wrong. Or, it is, at the least, dated. In these boom-bust age of hypercapitalism , the entrepreneur needs to be a modern entrepreneur, one that runs with different rules than those in the book. Here is my take of the Modern Entrepreneur. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The 'modern entrepreneur' is usually young, energetic and high living. He is modern because most of his ideas and actions are determined by pop capitalism [aka Richard Branson] and he has, most probably, come of age in the new millennium. He is an economic agent, and he value-adds through opportunity-mining. He appreciates nothing but money, sees no si...