Random Thoughts

At last someone applies brains to management

2009-05-24T00:23:00.000-07:00

An author comes out with a book that suggests what works and what doesn't in management. Much of what we have discussed in the class. What I loved most was a quote from the article (link below)

"A lot of what managers are doing now doesn't work. It may make them feel better, but it's not helping their employees,"

What doesn't work?

Feedback doesn't work because we like to protect ourselves by blaming circumstances
Incentives don't work because they take away the pleasure of working for satisfaction
Goal setting doesn't work because it aint about the numbers baby..its about inspiration!

So what works?

Leverage employees universal desire for MEANINGFUL work
Allow employees to be partners and co-creators rather than just rule followers
Tell stories
Let each employee judge their own work.

http://www.sltrib.com/business/ci_12422516

LIFESTYLES OF THE RICH AND FAMOUS??

2009-05-21T01:58:00.000-07:00

Lights...camera...action

When the curtain goes down at the Oscars and you have just attended a ceremony where your movie was selected as the best in the world. What do the co-stars do at the end of it all? Go back on their chartered jets to their own mansions? Or..........

Find out that you are rendered homeless because your home has been raized to the ground?

http://entertainment.oneindia.in/bollywood/news/2009/rubina-azharuddin-homeless-210509.html

My family tree from geni.com

2009-05-05T12:11:00.000-07:00

View more of mathai's tree |
Get your own family tree at Geni.com

A letter from the Director of FBI

2009-05-03T19:01:00.000-07:00

Hi,

I always thought that at some day the FBI will catch up with me. Finally this morning I received an email from the director of FBI in Washington D.C. I am pasting it verbatim below. I had a good laugh, hope you do too. Perhaps he should contact Mr.Brown of Mind Your Language!

--------------------------------------

ANTI-TERRORIST AND MONITARY CRIMES DIVISION

FBI HEADQUARTERS IN WASHINGTON, D.C.

FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION

J. EDGAR HOOVER BUILDING

935 PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE, NW

WASHINGTON, D.C. 20535-0001

DATE: 05/03/2009,

Website: www.fbi.gov

FUND BENEFICIARY

We have received a security report from United Kingdom security unit to handle a case that is related to your winner’s fund which was abandon in the UK bank by you.

A report was lead that your abandon fund was claimed by on known person with the help of one of the bank workers, your winners fund was transferred to Africa by the imposters, which we send our delegate to go to Africa to apprehend them, with the information we receive from our delegate today, they have apprehended the people that Stoll your winners fund to Africa, they have been handed over to the EFCC OF NIGERIA. And we have ordered the EFCC OF NIGERIA to send them back to the UK, so that we will hand them over to the appropriate authority in UK to bring them to justice, and it also come to our notice that some group of fraudulent people are contacting you, we need your help to apprehend all of them. Because they are a pest to the world at large.

If you are not informed, your e-mail address was among the e-mails that won this year promo award of UK National Lottery, that is the fund that was transferred to Africa , and it has been recovered.

We need your urgent responds so that we will tell you the proper agency to contact for your winners fund that has been recovered.

Your's Sincerely

FBI Director

Robert S. Mueller, III

A story of disintermediation

2009-04-30T19:20:00.001-07:00

The word Disintermediation became part of my vocabulary during the dotcom era, when everyone was talking about how the Internet will cut out the middle man. Dr. Madhukar Shukla ran a yahoo group called the "dotcomworld" which seem to have fizzled out. Its a shame when a good idea becomes a fad. The annual rings of a sawed-off tree trunk can tell not just the age of a tree, but also about the seasons- the drought of 15 years ago, for example. Like wise if you ever cut me down you can learn about the cultural seasons by the thoughts and ideas that have entered my head. Disintermediation is one of those things.

In the first Talk Shop Case, I discuss a case of how the term Disintermediation takes on a new meaning, though not entirely disconnected with the old one. Read the case here.

Advertising that works

2009-04-19T21:21:00.001-07:00

How many times have we seen advertising on television that makes us wonder... how could anyone make such boring ads? Sometimes what seems odd at first later sticks in the mind. Take the clearsil ad that say "Agar hum yeh show mein ..." the voice over sounds like a child reciting a poem he hates in school. But it has turned into one of my favourite ads.

But the REALLY COOL advertising is one that others love so much that they forward it to others, put it on their blogs, etc. This kind of advertising spreads like wildfire and gets the right kind of attention.

Remember the Annoying Thing (aka crazy frog) by Erik Wernquist?

Making this kind of advertising requires us to think differently. Ok that is cliche...differently from what? Differently from the way our mind works when you are standing there facing a client desperately trying to convince him that advertising doesnt always have to be dull, boring, or even serious.

IT IS ALIVE!!

2009-04-14T07:05:00.000-07:00

When I was young cognitive science caught my fancy. I guess my interest came from an earlier question..what makes us human? What is the essence of human beings? And that in turn came from another question, what is the human soul? Does such a thing exist? And to the question before that...What, if anything, survives beyond death?. I guess it is Descartes' Cogito Ergo Sum that made me decide what makes us human is that we can THINK.

What is the nature of thinking/ thought? If intelligence is the capacity to think, what is intelligence? Do animals and insects think the way we do? What if we could break thinking down to some rules and it could be mimicked? What if, God forbid, we could get machines (not even living things) to think??? Would it be right to say Organizations can be intelligent? If so, would they have a soul?
Years have gone by and my quest for the soul continues.....

So how do we know if a machine can think? Can following a few simple rules be genuinely called "thinking"? Over years several possible definitions have come up. Some of them require the machine to make mistakes (not be right all the time) while others require the machine to be able to solve new puzzles where there are no pre-existing instructions.. through learning. In 1951 Alan Turing suggested a simple test. If you can get a machine to respond in ways that mimic human responses to an extent that we cannot distinguish if its a human or a machine then it constitutes of thinking for all practical purposes. How many times have you met up with a chat bot on yahoo and flirted with it before you realized it was a machine after all? In 1964, Joseph Wizenbaum said that this is a trivial program and wrote the program Eliza to prove it. Eliza is a simple computer program that can hold seemingly meaningful conversations with you via a keyboard. Soon enough, despite the good professor's intentions, people began to pour out their heart to Eliza. She was programmed to be a therapist along the lines of Carl Roger's Client Centred Counselling. (You can have a date with her here.)

One of the tasks that require thinking is translation from one language to another. So here is a question. If a person is able to translate a text from English to Chinese, would that mean he understood the meaning of the text and was able to translate based on this understanding? John Searle (1980) in his famous description of the chinese room does not think so. (Try out some chinese here.)

All of this leaves us pretty much stranded without a clue what it means to say a machine or a human being can think. Sure we have a set of possible criteria, but none of them enough by itself. Perhaps there is no one criteria, but a mix, neither of them the answer but together, they capture a good part of what it is. Wittgenstien called this language games.

But Artificial Intelligence or (AI) has made progress. Perhaps not in building robots that act and think like human beings, but in a number of small robots like the roomba that cleans homes, or AIBO the robotic dog. Robots have been used extensively in industrial production lines. Now there are microprocessors inside car engines, even refrigerators. And with the ability to talk to each other by WIFI or through wires, how much longer will it take for skynet to become self-aware?

If all this hasnt utterly bored you, you can always read Scientific American's version of the Rise of the Machines.

2009-04-11T12:16:00.001-07:00

theNamesnotimportant

View more presentations from Mathai Fenn.

A red pill to make you remember a blue one to make you forget

2009-04-10T20:56:00.000-07:00

Remember the red and blue pills in the matrix? Remember memory implants in Blade Runner? Science is not that far behind science fiction. Soon we may have pills that implant memories (of things that never happened to you- like the "jump program"?) and other pills that may erase specific memories.

Read about the exciting new developments in Pyscho-Pharmacology

http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/04/memoryedit.html

A time to hide

2009-04-09T22:05:00.000-07:00

From house by the river

I often have this urgent need to run away from everything and hide. Over the years I have come to believe that such a retreat from the world is a good thing from time to time, perhaps even necessary to keep your bearings in life. But to many people the thought of quietness is scary. If you are NOT one of those, please check out the links given below. If you know some place where people can go to be quiet (and not spend a ton of money). Let me know.

http://mathaifenn.googlepages.com/housebytheriver (don't forget to click on the other hideaway link)

Mathai

Does intelligence matter?

2009-03-30T15:40:00.000-07:00

11:00 PM last night, I was sitting on our terrace with a consultant from Accenture, having a drink and chatting, looking over the lights of the city. He told me that by nature, he was a theoretician and enjoyed an intellectual challenge, but his work has taught him that execution is the key. Our conversation turned to, why so many wonderful ideas never translate into singificant contributions to the real world. In short, what is the difference between imagining an elegant solution to a complex (business) problem and actually making it happen?

Intelligence is quite different from Knowledge. While knowledge represents the facts and skills that we have learnt, Intelligence claims to be a measure of our ABILITY to process information. Early theorists maintained that intelligence was the true measure of how well a person can learn and was largely inborn, hand hence could not be changed through training, etc. The dark days of intelligence testing was when it was used as a method for deciding that certain ethnic groups were better than others.

This is how the theory of intelligence works: Among various things we do, there are those that require us to understand shapes and patterns, other tasks require numerical ability, still others require verbal or language skills. Is there a correlation among these? If a person is good at some things, will that reflect in other tasks too? Hence was born the idea of a G factor, or a General Factor as a measure of some abstract "mental capacity". There are others who maintained that such a generalization is not possible and that there are indeed Multiple Intelligences, that help us achieve different things.

Measuring a single score, has all the problems of an AGGREGATE score in any examination. While a single composite or aggregate score makes it easier to make decisions, it gives us very little about the relative strengths and weaknesses of any particular candidate.

Much of this is passe, since Daniel Goleman, challenged the prevailing theory of a single intelligence by pointing out that this was not the only possible view. Since the publication of Emotional Quotient, there is talk about Spiritual Quotient, Relationship Quotient, etc.

All such tests are paper and pencil tests and measure the skill by giving the person, simulated situations and asking for responses. How well do these measures stand up in the real world? Most research suggests, that the correspondence between intelligence and performance in the real world is at best moderate. Goleman suggests adding Emotional Intelligence as another factor can help to improve the correlation between IQ and real world performance.

Around 2 am we finally came to the conclusion that there are indeed multiple intelligences. One could be the design intelligence, but it also needed relationship skills, emotional skills and something called BODY INTELLIGENCE. Body intelligence is the knowledge in our muscles, that cannot be put into words. The feel of the grain of wood or marble a sculptor needs to understand to work with it. I mentioned a friend of mine, a typist, whenever someone asked him for the spelling of a word, you could see his hands moving on an imaginary keyboard. The spelling was not in his head, but litterally on his finger tips. My son has developed a strong interest in Aero Engineering, but I tell him that he has to work with engines first hand, get the feel of how an Internal Combustion Engine works, get a feel for metals and meterials, know how they can be shaped. Imagining solutions is one thing, creating a workable prototype is another. Another friend of mine, an IIT Graduate, claims to have developed a working prototype for a revolutionary IC Engine, with much better energy conversion rates. His prototype remains on his work shelf, because he cannot trust anyone to take the invention to the next level, register patents, etc.

But then again, perhaps all this is not inborn or fixed. Perhaps there is a scope for improvement. Working with children with learning disability shows us how easier it is to help a child learn in the way that is most effective for that child. A small change in the way a child learns can make a big difference on his or her school scores. For example if a child cannot understand words by looking at them, encourage the child to read out loud and to learn from the spoken word rather than the written word.

The Talk Shop is devoted to helping people (both individuals and organizations) understand the relationship between knowledge, emotions, relationships and body intelligence. Then again, everything seems so much clearer at 2 am, sitting on the terrace with a friend, sipping a drink, watching the city lights, and discussing how ACCENTURE captures knowledge from new projects and solutions and makes it available to Accenture world wide. I wish it was as easy to build Talk Shop based on these thoughts. Then again, design intelligence is not enough... now where have I heard that before?

The Wet, Heavy, Blanket

2009-03-24T02:09:00.000-07:00

The silence is oppressive, and lies like a blanket over everything and it is deafening, to say the least. The Governor of Nagaland says that the only way to curb HIV is through prevention. This, of course doesnt mean quite the same as say POLIO prevention. There are no vaccines, so prevention means changing behaviour. The same article also says by far the majority of HIV today is sexually transmitted. So how do we change behaviour? Well the only way to be SURE to avoid sexually transmitted behaviour is NOT to have sex at all.

But what success do you think there would be if I put up an advertising sign board saying..."SAY NO TO HIV; SAY NO TO SEX". The next best thing is monogamy. Ofcourse that is meaningful only if BOTH sides practice monogamy. I know many of my friends whose wives swear that their husbands are monogamous and i KNOW they are not! So many "monogamous" wives have a surprise waiting for them! Anyway the "politically correct" message seems to appeal to either those who are already monogamous or those who are not but SAY they are.

It seems to me, there are things that are not correct to speak about and this blanket of silence smothers and kills many people under it. Yet it keeps the world above it, sane and moral.

Digital Security

2009-03-18T06:31:00.001-07:00

Lock
Originally uploaded by AMagill.

Digital security is all in the news. There is a lot of talk about how technologies like google earth prove a threat to our country. But here are two examples of digital security that make me wonder if we are barking up the wrong tree?

AT THE GROCERY STORE:

During the visit to the grocery store, I used my debit card. The sales man, after I swiped the card casually asked me "Whats your PIN"? The way he asked it made me think that it is how they operate routinely.

Speaking of cards, why does my credit card also have my signature on it? So that if someone does find it, he will have no problems faking my signature. And ofcourse online security is even greater, it asks for the three digit CVV number printed at the back of the card!!

DIGITAL SIGNATURE

I recently registered a company of which I am a partner. Current procedure requires that each partner takes a government approved digital signature. Of course this is a TRUSTED signature, that has been authenticated as mine. Now it happens my chartered accountant has applied for a signature in my name and used it to sign documents.

Now i trust my CA and I am sure he has only used it to make my work easier. But it raises some basic questions in my mind. Isnt it legally FORGERY to use another person's digital signature to sign documents?

So here is my question...what is the use of the worlds best lock, if we leave the key hanging nearby?

Democracy Alert - Complex Problems Simple Answers

2009-03-12T02:37:00.000-07:00

http://www.nocriminals.org/

The core idea of the 'No Criminals' campaign is to launch a nationwide effort to enable large numbers of citizens to appeal to political parties not to give tickets to people with criminal antecedents in the upcoming elections.

APPEAL

Sixty two years after winning independence, India waits to be free again. To be freed from criminals who have muscled their way into power. In 2004, about one in five MPs had criminal records, including some with charges of heinous crimes such as murder, rape, dacoity and kidnapping. This seriously tarnishes the image of honest and eminent leaders who are committed to building a greater India. It is time for every citizen of India to become a freedom fighter and unite to free India from the clutches of criminals. As citizens of a free nation, we appeal to all the political parties to refrain from giving tickets to persons with criminal backgrounds. And take an oath to free India from criminals forever.

MY COMMENT:

If this was applied when India's first parliament was being created, how many of our heroes could have been politicians? Anyone who has stood for fundamental social change has been called a criminal. Also the label of criminal has been used in so many ways to discriminate against people all over the world.

The ideal of democracy is that ANYONE can stand for election and the people can choose. ANYONE includes women, ethnic minorities, under-represented groups and those who have been thought of as criminals. It is this kind of EXCLUSIVENESS that gives rise to movements like TERRORISM where people who have no voice try to express themselves. In the Gaza strip, a party that was considered to be "TERRORIST" won by free and fair elections! Though their lot has not changed very much as far as the rest of the world is concerned.

I am proud of being a citizen with the largest and most vibrant democracy ever. I believe that this great ideal has to be defended against all attempts to CLOSE THE MIND

Evil in the Garden of Eden ( Kerala)

2009-03-10T10:17:00.000-07:00

"We decided to meet them and convey our concerns that liquor has been the single biggest evil which destroys families and people. We have a social commitment and we also decided to go ahead with our campaign against liquor all across the state," Latin Archbishop M. Susa Pakiam said.
Christian body launches anti-liquor campaign in Kerala

It looks like I will have to beg to disagree. In a recent meeting with young people in Kerala, I asked them what do you REALLY like to do? Of course we were discussing careers and stuff. But when I asked the question there was a silence among the otherwise talkative group. So I decided to probe a bit further. One young man said that he enjoys his weekends. I asked him what he did during the weekend. " I drink booze " he told me.

When the embarrassed laughter died down, I asked WHY? What does alcohol give you that you cant get otherwise?

He looked around the room and said "Somehow when I drink I can speak from the heart. When I dont drink there is something artificial about my life." I looked around the room to see several heads nodding in agreement.

Kerala is one of the most repressive societies I have known. Its a combination of unreasonably high morals along with the constant feeling of being watched. There is none of the anonymity that one gets from big metropolitan cities. In The PANOPTICON your every move is watched. Is it surprising that people want to break free?

Once upon a time in Malayalam Movies the villain were smuglers and underworld dons. Then they became corrupt politicians. In recent movies the villains are "MOBILE PHONES AND INTERNET" which are ruining our culture. Of course behind all this is the fear that WOMEN might escape from control. Here is an actual conversation I had with a gentleman over sixty while in Kerala.

"I just got back from a talk about how young college kids go to college but often never reach there. They go off on their own"

I said "Perhaps they are going places where they would not be allowed to go otherwise?"

Yes indeed, this is REALLY BAD. They often end up doing BAD things (read sex).

I said "I doubt that, but they are past 18, surely they can choose where they want to go and what they want to do?"

He turned to me and asked (and I quote as closely as I remember / can translate) "Lets be honest, if you were about to be married, would you accept second hand goods?"

When I said YES he said "You are just saying that for the argument"

I couldnt believe the words "SECOND HAND GOODS".

------------------------------------------------

In another incident, I was travelling by bus from Ernakulam to Kottayam. At the bus stand soon all the "Ladies Seats" were full. (I must say that often I have a hard time explaining to people why we have different seating for men and women in Kerala buses).

I was sitting alone on a seat meant for two people, when a woman came to me and asked me to get up! I looked at her and asked WHY? She said she had to go all the way to Kottayam and she wanted to sit down. I told her that (1) this was not a LADIES SEAT and (2) I have no objection to sharing the seat with her. I even promised her I would behave myself during the trip. She preferred to stand for the next 1.5 hours rather than sit next to me!
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In 1988, I married my wife. Since then when in Kottayam, she goes to our church. Having been raised a catholic she knew little of the rituals and order of service in our church. Not even when to stand up and when to sit. Yet in the church we could not sit together as a family. She had to sit among the women while I sat with the Men. I asked our parish priest several times for a solution, but the best solution we got was that we could sit together as long as we sat in the side-wing, and not in the main church. Since then you can understand why I have not been too enthusiastic about going to church!

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For one year we ran an educational program in Kerala. It was conceived to have two components, an offline component where students learnt about the world around them, as well as important skills. This included several field trips to different places to see and learn for themselves. But it was to have an online component where students were expected to surf the net, prepare assignments, chat with other club members etc. We soon learnt that many parents did not WANT their children to go online! Hence they were unwilling to invest in computers and internet. They considered this to be a "distraction" from their main thing....studies!

As a teacher and one who spends a lot of time thinking about education, I am convinced that the internet is as important to learning as PRINTING was once upon a time. The sheer availability of information and knowledge is changing the very way we process knowledge. While 100s of channels of TV beamed into our living rooms provided unprecedented information, its still passive. The internet is where children learn to SEEK OUT the information they need.

In the garden of Eden, eating from the tree of knowledge was forbidden. And when they did, Adam and Eve discovered they were naked! I wish we in kerala would focus not on restricting alcohol, but on the factors that make life unliveable without it!

Answer to my son

2009-03-09T21:50:00.001-07:00

A couple of days ago, my teenage son asked me "why do you need management at all? Why not just let people do their work?" In the next two or three days the answer magically arrived on my desktop as a forward. As if the cosmos was telling me the answer to give my son.

Ok its rather cliched. But how would our organizations be different if we truly believed that people (1) want to work and that they (2) will work sincerely if they can?

Ant and Corporation

View more presentations from Javed Alam. (tags: antcorporationmanagement...)

Mind of a Strategist - Musharraf

2009-03-09T06:30:00.000-07:00

Several years ago, I was impressed by an impressario par excellance, Bal Thackeray. This was a man who knew how to take credit for things he did not do. He pretended to unleash terror in Bombay when he had as much power over the process as I did.... well its a figure of speech..give it a rest! I was impressed when he said that the violence was caused by his henchmen and they would stop whenever he wanted them to.

"Exactly. One must require from each one the duty which each one can perform," the king went on. "Accepted authority rests first of all on reason. If you ordered your people to go and throw themselves into the sea, they would rise up in revolution. I have the right to require obedience because my orders are reasonable."

____The Little Prince

The guy who made me think of all this is Prez Musharraf. He found a nice opportunity in the India-Pak rhetoric and cleverly got himself a lot of press coverage. Now that is what image management is all about. The comeback for someone who was so unceremoniously dethroned. Remember, he was forced to hold an election and then he said he would step down if he WON!! Its like saying I will hold an election if the ONLY outcome is that I win!!

But he does have a trick or two up his sleeve and who knows he may yet to see another battle!!

Knowledge Engine that COMPUTES knowledge

2009-03-09T02:08:00.000-07:00

Stephen Wolfram claims he has found a way to scientifically computer knowledge! Read about it here. Now what does that mean and how is it different from "GOOGLING"? For one, the article seems to suggest that it uses Natural Language to understand the question and come up with answers. Remember the old ASKJEEVES.com that promised to provide answers to natural langauge queries??

Wolfram says that the program will answer only factual questions, questions that have only one possible correct answer and not ones that can have different opinions, perspectives. This would avoid "bias", it is claimed.

This brings me to the question of a hierarchy of knowledge. Once upon a time painters used to focus on trying to reproduce the real world through their skills. As photography developed it freed up the artist to focus on more abstract painting.

So what does this say for KNOWLEDGE? The easy availability of factual knowledge means that it is no longer something to brag about. Knowing a lot of facts doesn't make you wise. If so, what is the kind of knowledge that will be valued in the future?

A presentation I liked

2009-03-07T21:59:00.001-08:00

50 Youth Marketing Keywords You Need to Know PART ONE (Graham Brown mobileYouth.org)

View more presentations from Graham Brown. (tags: mobile advertising)

Beta Management

2009-03-06T01:29:00.001-08:00

Do we always have to be the number 1? How would management look like from someone who does not aspire to be number 1?

Beta Management

View more presentations from Mathai Fenn. (tags: relationships love)

A quick update

2009-02-14T22:10:00.000-08:00

Sorry! This post is not about management or psychology, but an update about me.

The picture of the handsome KNEE is mine. The other is something I found on the net!

On 29th January I was on my way from Muvattupuzha after visiting a friend to Kottayam, where my dad lives, in Kerala when I had a motorcycle accident. At 7:30 I took a curve on the road at around 50-60 Kmph when I slipped on some gravel and fell.

Actually the problem is not that I fell. The problem is that as the bike went into a skid, I put my right foot down to stabilize the bike. In the process I broke the upper surface of the tibia, the lower part of the knee joint. It actually, sort of caved in, crushed.

I realized that something was wrong the moment I got up off the ground and tried to put weight on my right leg. It gave way. Anyway I spent about a week in Kolenchery Hospital being looked after by my cousin who is an ortho guy there. After that I travelled to bangalore by train to have the surgery done at St. John's Hospital Bangalore where my family is. In Bangalore they can take better care of me, hence the choice to have surgery done here. They put in all kinds of nuts and bolts and a bone graft from my hip bone. Anyway I got home on fri day in time to celebrate valentines day with my family.

So for the next six months I will be stuck at home. I really do hope that this will help me to get some writing done. In more ways than one, I am REALLY looking forward to this working holiday.

Leadership Quest 2009 - A journey within

2009-01-23T00:07:00.001-08:00

The Kerala Leadership Quest 2009 is an educational program I am planning to do, based on my philosophy of taking learning outside classrooms. The objective is to help the next generation (Age 13 to 18) to build a "stronger connect" with Kerala's Culture and Traditions. I believe an important part of leadership is a deep understanding of how culture works and how we are all part of it. To those of Kerala origin, it would be a rediscovery of roots, to others its an indepth glimpse into a rich culture and history.

Please go through the page and click on the link at the bottom, to post your comments.

http://www.walkright.in

The Science of Management at IIMA

2009-01-10T18:30:00.000-08:00

I just read an article that said "Aspirants need to have brilliant academic records to get into IIM-A". This brings me to the question that I have often struggled with. What is the mission of a Business School? I know one aim is to provide the student with the best education in Business Administration. Even then, what kind of knowledge do we impart? Academic knowledge or more practical skills? Ideally both. But two things skew this delivery. One..as a culture, we have always placed a higher value on academic learning and second, most business schools work within the academic space. This recent piece of news goes well with the idea that it is academic skills that we impart.

But what if the objective of a business education is to help students perform better as practitioners - business managers? What if the larger mission of a good Business School is to the community.. by improving the institutions around it? What would be the criteria for admission if this is the case? I remember once I was on the interview board of XLRI when a candidate came in for an interview. He had good academic records and had done well at the entrance, so the final selection would be at the interview level. He performed ok at the interview, not too bad not too good. During the interview, I asked him about his background...typically to know what exposure he had to business. He told me his family ran a "family business". On persistent probing, it emerged he was a heir to one of the well known business empires in India.

During subsequent discussion, I presented to my colleagues that in the future this guy is going to have a significant impact on how business is conducted in India. I said we had a moral duty to admit him and mould him. After all he had done ok in the interview. However the team rejected him on the basis of his academic answers. Sure, it gives a good impression to the world. It tells the world that we are "objective". However, I would love to see a program that also takes into account the candidates background and potential for business. Has he shown signs of leadership in the community? What has he done for the community? Has he learnt what business is REALLY about... the art of management, not its science.

Are there any colleges that offer a program on the art of management and not its science?

Carrot or stick?

2009-01-09T20:47:00.001-08:00

Carrot or stick?
Originally uploaded by Intrepid wanderer.

As universities become increasingly difficult to manage, the Department of Science and Technology decided to use some extreme measures to keep this department on track!

Understandably some staff were angry when I took a picture of their department!

Obituary to strong women

2008-12-12T23:14:00.000-08:00

When I was a teenager I read an article by Parveen Babi called The Art of Flirtation. I think it was in the magazine that was the Playboy of our times, Debonair. In the article she said that flirtation is not a bad thing at all. It actually livened things up and both men and women felt GOOD that they are attractive to each other. Growing up in the highly restrictive environment of Kottayam in the 80's this was a refreshing view for me, one that went well with what I had already suspected, but no one acknowledged.

I was hooked for life and was a huge fan of hers. Wikipedia states: "

Parveen did not marry but shared intimate relationships with married men: director Mahesh Bhatt, actors Kabir Bedi, and Danny Denzongpa. Parveen was also rumoured to have a relationship with her co-star Amitabh Bachchan.

"

She seemed to live by her own rules. Yet reflect the secret dreams and aspirations of a generation of sexually repressed youth. When I heard that she had problems of psychosis, my heart went out to her. And reading about her death was heartbreaking. It was TWO days before anyone even realized she was dead!

Another Screen Goddess died today - Bettie Page I am sure its going to give a significant surge for the HBO screening of her biography. The woman who became the orginal pinup girl in leather, disappeared from public life. She too had a brush with insanity and her share of troubled men. So which of the following do you think is a reasonable hypothesis.

1. When you live by your own rules, you soon find you have lost your bearings and find yourself afloat with no moorings, drifting towards insanity.

1a. Society can't stand those who don't live by the rules and brands them insane.

2. Men are attracted to strong women, but later find they cannot keep them.

2a. Women who can't "Live the Lie" find it hard to fit in and become a normal family person?