Sunday Posts

From this title, a lot of people will get there-we-go-again feeling. But I am not writing about the brilliance of Steve Jobs, his ability to put himself in the shoes of the consumer, or his commitment to beautiful design or usability. These things have been talked about before, and still gets talked about, as Apple continues to perform astonishingly well. This post is about just one rather mundane aspect of business strategy, where Apple outguns everyone else, and something the universities are really bad at, habitually. And, the point of this post is that perhaps time has come for the universities to look closely at Apple, because this one key strategic point is becoming ever more important. In his recent article in International New York Times about how Apple overtook Microsoft ( See the article here ), James Stewart emphasises the courage Apple has shown in cannibalising itself. They were unafraid to undermine their most successful products. Apple destroyed its own very succes...

I taught a course called Leadership Journey for a few years in a college in London. This was part of their post-graduate programme for practising managers. It was a great little course embedded in an MBA type programme, the difference being the emphasis on practice. The participants were to plan for their own development of leadership capabilities and compile a portfolio of reflections backed by evidence, which made it very different from most MBAs. This was part of a management course, and the rest of the programme dealt with the usual HR, Marketing, Finance, Strategy stuff. However, this one constituent course stood out, because this was more about the learners and less about any one subject, and everyone could choose their own paths to write their portfolio. I did indeed try to encourage a diversity of approaches, though not many of the learners eventually tried to be creative. Indeed, they saw this course without any fixed content as an invitation to do whatever, which means ...

The label - 21st Century Skills - is popular, but the definition behind it are questionable ( see the previous post ). However, this is not to deny that the skills we need - to live and to be successful - are evolving. One interesting and oft-used thought experiment to figure out what we may need is to compare the experiences of a time traveller traversing through the last century. Say, we could get someone from 1900 to come to the world of 1950, and another person from 1950 to come to year 2000 - who do we think would experience greater changes? It is perhaps the person from 1900, who would see automobiles, aeroplanes, widespread use of electric lighting, airconditioners and tall buildings, who might experience greater changes in the material environment. But it is the person from the later half of the twentieth century, traveling to the threshold of the twenty-first, comfortable at first seeing only incremental changes (faster automobiles, bigger planes, taller buildings and more a...

Some time back, on the eve of the 2014 General Elections in India, I wrote about the Indian Republic (see Resurrecting The Republic ) as perhaps the greatest achievement of India, and hoped that the Indian electorate would vote sensibly to protect it. I argued then that handing out the Hindu Nationalists a mandate may endanger whatever we have achieved so far. I feared that we might have taken the Republic and the democracy for granted and might, therefore, stand to lose it. A few months on, the Hindu Nationalist take-over has happened, with some predictable outcomes. The development talk continues to dominate the agenda, with the government making tall proclamations while back-pedaling on the old ones. The greatest achievement of the new government so far has been a slew of development friendly ordinances, ten in eight months in office, which they have adopted without reference to the Parliament. So far, there was not much of economic good news, except the Bombay Stock Exchange ...

We have come to accept that there are certain things called 21st Century Skills. That these are distinct from what used to be 20th century skills, and universal across national boundaries, are implicitly accepted. A common list is also emerging, which include things such as communication, problem solving, critical thinking, initiative, and collaboration, skills that underpin any kind of 21st century work, presumably.  The list appears in slightly different modified form at different places, but words, as always, hide more than they reveal. We have no commonly accepted definition of any of these things, except claiming, like pornography, we know it when we see it. But it pays to explore the assumptions that lie behind the idea of 21st century skills. The first assumption, as Philip Brown et al underlines in their insightful Skills Formation in the 21st Century, is that there is a global labour market. The idea that there could be some universal skills valued across nationa...

Right now, the theme of my life is getting rid of legacy!  2015 has began positively for me, and I am able to focus on the tasks at hand and also starting to think about the future. There were some minor strokes of luck too, after I thought it had abandoned my path altogether. So, into the third week, as the expression goes, I am looking forward! Which should start with stopping to look rearward. I have been clearing my desks - and indeed my inbox - as quickly as I can, and have started to say no to many of the propositions that come my way. I am indeed tempted by academic life, something I want to live and some of the proposals I have will perhaps allow me that, but I have now resolved to be in business for a little while longer. In fact, after my experiments with living through 2014, I can not afford not to. So, here I am - intently focused on one problem, which, after Mckinsey, everyone seems to call the E2E gap. My day job concerns bringing the educators and emplo...

Graduate Employability is a big problem. Depending on who you ask, we are looking at 30% - 40% of the graduates not being employed within a reasonable period of time after leaving college. The problem is so bad that we are inventing ways to hide it. Instead of bring it to the fore, we club graduates who get a job and who go to post-graduate education together, and ignore the cases of underemployment, so that we get some respectable data. The granular data that we may really need to address the problem, such as how many of our graduates are working in fast food shops, may present us with a bigger problem, that of busting the myth of the college altogether. We would instead focus our attention to other soothing pieces of data, such as the existence of a college premium. It is soothing but problematic because, people going to college earns more than those who dont, the gap is widening only because people who dont go to college have seen their incomes collapse, while the premium has been...