Sunday Posts

There was a time when countries and cities rushed out to build their silicon something. After many failures and dead-end real estate, this tendency has now sobered. Silicon valley has remained where it was, and its ecosystem proved impossible to replicate. So, where does the thinking about innovation as redemption go from here? Despite the spectacular failure of some of the fêted projects, there should not be doom-and-gloom in the innovationland. There are some notable successes too, and useful lessons. As governments look to rebuild after the pandemic - and before a new urge to replicate takes hold - it's worth reflecting on what separates success from failure. It's useful to start at first principles: Innovation cluster is a zero-sum game! Silicon valley is difficult to replicate because it exists, because it vacuums out money and talent from all other places. It's not enough to ask whether one can replicate Silicon Valley, but whether one can compete with it. Without ans...

The new year 2022 will be like no other. The shock of 2020 and the grappling of hope-and-despair of 2021 will be behind us. The pandemic, which seemed to threaten civilisation earlier, will become a mere logistics problem.  At the year-end party, we would celebrate modern science, for putting the shape-shifting killer genie back into the bottle. As the seconds are counted down, we would shed our fears and look at the future in its eye. At that hooray moment, we will know that there will be no going back to 2019. Our lives, societies and businesses, may have just been reinvented in the shadow of the pandemic. The memory of the 'pandemic years' will linger on: Therefore, in all our hope, there will be sobriety; our fetting of the new heroes will embrace the mourning for the dead; in our new exuberance, there will be the anticipation of payback time.  More than the outward changes, the changing ideas will matter more. The economic principles that we lived by - sound money and sma...

As an idealist who rather naïvely believed in shared purpose, I have been confounded by the pervasiveness and silly pettiness of the silos all through my working life. Initially, I approached it with the high-mindedness of youth: We must be able to find common ground! Gradually, that gave away to the cynicism of mid-life: People never change and bureaucracies are inherently corrupting! Eventually, I needed a full therapy - start-up life - to cure me of cynicism and gain some perspective on why silos happen. I now think that the silos are usually a response to a certain leadership style. Most leaders seem to assume that work-life needs to be built around competition. Office, in this version, is some kind of Darwinian playground where the fittest should survive. Obviously, that misses the point: The most crucial insight of Darwin is the understanding, one that he drew from the breakthroughs in geology, that evolution is a slow process that plays out over millions of years. Compressing th...

There are moments when choices have to be made. This is perhaps one of those, for me. Ever since 2020, I kept my life in a holding pattern. Not thinking about the future, living a day at a time! It worked well - it was the right mode for the pandemic. But now I am getting tired of not dreaming. I must concede that the year has been extremely productive for me in a variety of ways. It's not just about overcoming my earlier entrepreneurial failure - which I have been brooding over for seven years and still dealing with its consequences - but also about learning a few things about entrepreneurship itself. As a result, I live a very different life now: I have gone back to being a company man I once was. Along the way, I became conscious of my baggage. I now have a clear idea what success looks like - how singularly focused, totally unconcerned about nuances one needs to be - and how my fundamental assumptions about business life were always too idealistic. I grew up in an entrepreneuri...

Through our scientific and technological genius, we have made of this world a neighbourhood and yet we have not had the commitment to make of it a brotherhood. But somehow, and in some ways, we have got to do this..We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. - Dr Martin Luther King, March 31, 1968 1 It is time to make Digital work for people. It's time to think about a Digital Commonwealth. Commonwealth used to be a community for common good. It was so in Renaissance and then for the founders of the American colonies, facing off the wilderness with the strength of working together.  Today the term lost some of that meaning, and got associated with the imperial legacy. It's time to reclaim it back. 2 Digital commonwealth is about enabling human communities to co-create digital possibilities. Today's narrative, that the sociopathic technologists and sociopathic investors would control the tools and the rest of the hu...

As we learn to live through the pandemic, during which work and professions have been transformed through the use of information technology, the question of what effect technology will have on post-pandemic jobs has been raised again and again. Books that explore AI and humanity have come thick and fast; how we educate a new generation of workers has received a lot of attention too. There is much speculation whether this time, it will be different - and if there is anything to be found in our past experience with technological change.  I work in the faultline of this change and the object of my work has been to enable workers take advantage of technology. In a way, this is the less attractive end of education: This is not about groundbreaking research or completely novel ideas, but rather equipping the middling workers with skills to take advantage of technologies. I shall claim that this no less crucial in economic growth and progress - as without the skilled workers, the benefits...

In 1921, just after the Influenza pandemic, H G Wells was writing "Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe." As we strive to look beyond the pandemic, it's a useful place to start. Of course, we are still counting the bodies and the public health challenge must be met first. But it will be a mistake not to think about what comes after, as otherwise, the after-effects will linger on and may eventually break the society as we know it. In the influenza pandemic, India lost approximately 5% of its population. This time around, even with the near-collapse of the healthcare system in some cities, the toll is likely to be lower. But the economic and social impact of the Pandemic would be far more severe, with the global supply chain reaching a breaking point and the dislocation of the health and education systems due to the pandemic.  However, my objective here is to try to look beyond the pandemic and what needs to happen to contain the afte...