Sunday Posts

Everyone loves a good theory. In this difficult job market, the idea that one can conceive an education closely aligned with what the employers need sounds like a good idea. It works for the employers too, who are having to look harder and harder for the right talent and frequently blame the education process for this problem.  All too often, this does not work. McKinsey believes that this is because the employers and educators have different priorities. For many educators, getting the students to successfully complete the courses and earn the requisite credentials are good enough. For many employers, the requirements are very very specific and they want to do as little educating as possible themselves. Besides, the employers' requirements are always evolving whereas education remains a long process: Even if a perfect solution could be found to bridge the gap of understanding - through, for example, building corporate universities - the time lag still remains a significant ch...

In the discussions about Global Higher Education, one country is often forgotten: Bangladesh. Somehow, it will never feature as a target country for institutions trying to recruit students from abroad, or more surprisingly, for 'Transnational Education'.  This omission is more surprising when one considers the facts on the ground. Bangladesh has a population (154 million) which is bigger than Russia (143 million) and Mexico (120 million), with 61% of its population within the 15 - 64 year bracket. The country has a huge problem with Higher Education access, with 13% Gross Enrollment Ratio (reports UNESCO/ World Bank). Indeed, the Global Higher Ed market in Bangladesh seems trivial. OECD reported that it sent 30,000 students abroad in 2011 (dwarfed by China's 729,000, India's 223,000 and even Korea's 139,000). However, this is more a paradigm problem as Global Higher Ed is predominantly seen as students from Global South coming to study in OECD. Students from...

I am in the process of advising a friend who is keen to invest in Education space in India, and this made me look closely into the dynamic of the businesses in the Vocational Training sector. The overall, macro, factors look promising indeed. A huge population base - India will have 10 million young people entering the workforce every year from 2015 - and a changing social dynamic, when organised employment expands rapidly, are hugely important drivers. The government has been handing out huge orders for training the rural youth, and the companies we are talking to have large mandates at hand, for 'employability' training. There is a capacity building fund set up through National Skills Development Corporation (NSDC), a sort of a special purpose bank extending funding for companies in the space: Again, the companies we looked into had large NSDC allocations, which they have left unused. Indian government has promoted 'skills' training opportunity with great gu...

With India's new government in power, the outlook for foreign investment is optimistic. Whatever effect this new government has on India's domestic polity, economic revival is their key agenda, and foreign investment has been the incumbent Prime Minister's favourite talking point in his previous stint as the Chief Minister of the Indian state of Gujrat. It is, therefore, logical to expect a foreign investor-friendly investment. This is more so because the economic nationalists in the Administration believes China is past its prime and India's moment has truly arrived: They would be looking to take advantage of the clear mandate the government has got and open doors everywhere. Accordingly, there is nothing to be surprised about the government's proposal to open up Railways and Defence industries to Foreign Investment. These announcements show that the government is unafraid of controversy and taking full advantage of its mandate: Railways is indeed India's...

While chronicling my experience of teaching leadership, I made the point that we explore three ideas of leadership: The first is that leadership is the behaviour that the leaders display; the second was that leadership is about a position and the activities that come with it; and finally, that leadership is a sort of personal ethic. I argued that I try to plod my students to explore all three ideas, and usually, once they discover the range, they settle for the third, as this is profoundly empowering. This is because leadership as a personal ethic could be achieved by anyone, at any point of their lives, as long as they could understand what that ethic is and are ready to commit to it.  This stands in contrast with the first idea, the leadership as a personal characteristic of a few people, because this grows out of the leaders-are-born-not-made view of the world. This theory indeed falls short against the argument whether all born leaders become recognised as leaders, which,...

We talk leadership all the time and everyone seems to know what it is, though everyone may have a slightly different idea. As a part of my teaching course, I do ask my students to define leadership, and get many definitions. In summary, the answer to my question is given in the lines of Justice Potter Stewart's "I know it when I see it", with a long list of names that stretch from Jesus Christ to Jose Mourinho. While this may sound intuitive, there are a few granular details in this definition we should be aware of. Indeed, Jesus Christ and Jose Mourinho are two very different kind of persons, but even the common strand that seemingly tie them together in my students' conception - the ability to move people - is actually two very different kind of things. Indeed, I exaggerate the difference by picking two extreme examples, and this would be much less emphatic if one picks another pair of names from the list, like Winston Churchill and Mahatma Gandhi (or Abraham ...

I teach leadership. I am not sure leadership can be taught. Semantics aside - I know all that facilitating stuff as opposed to teaching - the question I am really interested in if one can really 'make' leaders through a series of classroom conversations. Some of my colleagues will argue that it should be a series of projects or activities rather than classroom conversations. I am no big fan of the kind of unambitious projects that people usually set up in context of business courses: Review your company's mission statement! I would tend to think those are worse devices than classroom conversations. And, in any case, whatever the method, how does one teach leadership? I am not taking the position that leadership can't be learnt, though! There are born leaders, but the leaders are only born and not made is a fallacious theory: We all know one or two people who were born to be leaders, but were never made. Whether or not leaders are born that way, they have t...