Formal Education?

strait·jack·et also straight·jack·et n.

2. Something that restricts, hinders, or confines: the straitjacket of bureaucratic paperwork.

[http://www.thefreedictionary.com/straitjacket]

The year was 2000, I was participating in high school debate (with my favorite debate partner) speaking against the motion that formal education was not a necessary perquisite to success. I remember arguing quite convincingly that every successful person has had some element of formal education in his life at some point of time or the other, and like it or not this has had a positive impact on the person's life and is a necessary perquisite to success in one's life. I guess I was able to convincingly argue my side of the case because it resonated with my own view of life and formal education. Right upto my graduate course in business administration course, I have believed that any success that has come my way has been largely due to my formal education and my single minded focus in excelling at the same.

I had a family friend visiting today whose daughter is in the twelfth standard, at the cusp of making the crucial decision on the form of formal education to pursue after high school. Couple this with the fact that I have just completed reading the first chapter of "Rich Daddy Poor Daddy" I took some time off to analyze and think of i see in myself today and root cause it to any facet of my formal education.

One aspect that struck me immediately is the emphasis that was laid on and linearity and certainty in the teaching of science. Everything in nature could be explained in a model in which results that were certain in nature were obtained from well defined fomulae. That kind of skewed up my thinking for the rest of my life i guess ... right from high school and through college i believed in the absolute nature of things, about how things would happen with certainty given the model that you superpose on the situation and process at hand, the modeling was always right. I read a lot of scholastic writings that debunked this theory, but the only action I would take is to feel intellectually stimulated with these thoughts and then get back to the safety net of my fixed and linear model that worked well for me.

This linear and certain way of thinking worked well for me until a few years back, i knew the model for a given situation, and i knew the result that would come out as a consequence of my action, because i was trained to believe that the model was always right. The formal system for science education never gave me a chance to appreciate the randomness and non linearity that is the characteristic of everything in life. The real problem lies in the fact that i continue to place this "straitjacket of linearity and certainty" in my thought processes. It has been tough for me to make the transition and freeing my mind from these shackles, from this stifling "straitjacket" . All my life things have fit so perfectly into my view of the world that I never gave a thought to the possibility of things working outside of "my way" which to me was the right way.

I am not discounting the usefulness of a formal education, but what I certainly feel very strongly about the shackles that this has placed on my thought processes. Thinking out of the box does not come as easily as i wish it would come ...

The important thing is that i have been able to identify this drawback, and I am working on it. It is not easy and very often painful! I am reminded of a quote that was oft repeated in the Services Marketing class in college :

"Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one's self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily; and why older persons, especially if vain or important, cannot learn at all"

Thomas Szasz, author, professor of psychiatry (1920- )

Its time I got out of the straitjacket of "certainty and linearity" once and for all, it is going to be a painful process, but a necessary right of initiation into the other endeavors that beckon me in life.

Thoughts on corruption

"Corruption is the market mechanism for privileged access" - C K Prahalad.

I came across this quote/definition while reading a chapter extract from C K Prahalad's "Fortune At the Bottom of the Pyramid". It has been a long time since i have given corruption some serious thought and this statement made me think quite a bit. At the end of an intense thinking session I had number of perspectives and insights into the economic and ethical implications of corruption as we deal with it in our day to day lives.

While thinking of the economic implications of corruption I got the following insights into the nature of corruption:

• As long as there is a consumer surplus in a price regulated environment (most government services are price regulated so as to make them affordable to all strata of the society), there is always a scope for corruption. Those consumers that hold a higher surplus are more likely to seek a more privileged access (be it in the form of reduced processing time or a higher evaluation in a dispute like situation) and are more likely to encourage the practice of corruption. Even people who enjoy the slightest of a surplus may give in to corrupt practices. Any form of governmental price fixing or supply restrictions on privately provided goods and services can also lead to a market for "privileged access" (read corruption) in the private sector.
• According to C K Prahalad, the most important factor that aids corruption is the lack of transparency in government processes, which in turn makes the completion of a transaction with the government a highly time consuming experience. This in turn causes the people at the "bottom of the pyramid" to consider the time value of money and therefore forces them to add to their costs in two more dimensions, one the price paid to the broker or intermediary who is getting the work done, and two the bribe needed for the government official to perform his duty. I couldn't agree more with his analysis on this subject.
• As much as private enterprises could raise the the cost of essential goods and services, given the flexibility that they hold in differential pricing, they may turn out to be a better alternative than fixed price government services. Public perception is very forgiving towards the private enterprise in providing a differentiated service/good at differential prices. Effectively private enterprise in a slightly regulated market could possibly reduce the need for corruption in a society where there is a high differential between the haves and the have not s.

These are not observations that have no technical basis, these can be proven using various economic models of demand and supply and i am quite convinced of the truth in these arguments.

On a more philosophical note, i found quite a few ethical applications of the term corruption as taken in the context of "privileged access".

When we tip the security guard so that he sorts our mail more carefully than that of our neighbors, or we tip the waiter a little more so that we get the most prized "romantic" seats at the restaurant, or when we pay that extra tip to the gas delivery boy expecting a more prompt delivery of the gas cylinder, aren't we all giving in to our perceived need of a "privileged access"? In effect are we all being corrupt in these simple actions that we perform day to day without giving it a second thought!

There are a lot more personal and professional scenarios in which i could try to apply this definition of corruption, focusing mainly on the words "privileged access" and i find it fascinating that so many routine actions of mine fall into the bucket of "corruption".

Perhaps there is a different definition of corruption when it comes to ethical and moral actions that I need to seek out ... but for today my quest stops here ... more perhaps sometime later in the year ...

10 years of the internet

I got my first computer in May 1999. It was a smart looking Compaq Presario with a 333Mhz Celeron processor, 32 MB RAM, 4 MB VRAM, 128KB L2 Cache, 4GB Hard Disk, a state of the art machine which cost my father a fortune and most importantly came with an inbuilt 56Kbps modem!

The new machine came bundled with a Satyam internet starter pack that gave me a total of 25 hours access to the internet.

It was any 15 year olds dream come true, a gadget for games, music, movies and fun along with a chance to get online and have my own e-mail account!!!

As we entered 2010 i remembered the most crazy thing i did at the fag end of 1999 (or atleast i thought it was quite a crazy thing to do). It was the year of the Y2K bug, doomsday was predicted and i was expecting the worst ... It was the last day of the year, being in between my pre-final exams the only celebration was with the family and at precicely 11:00 p.m. everybody retired to bed to prepare for a long new years day. I remember my first real encounter with the internet was around 11:45 p.m. December 31st, 1999. Inspite of all warnings from my parents to stay away from the computer, i thought "wtf", what could go wrong? After all billions of dollars were spent on fixing the Y2K bug right? A thought struck me, i should be celebrating my entry into 2000 by getting into a chat room and seeing what could go wrong ... would planes really come crashing down all over the US, would Russian ICBMs be triggered off due to a faulty code patch or would the internet fall apart at the precise moment of 00:00:00 hours!

Those were the days when chat rooms were really chat rooms, untouched by bots, real people discussed real issues in a common window. I think i logged in to Rediff Chat and entered one of those general rooms. The mood was quite light and everybody was talking of what was happening ... there were folks from Japan, Singapore, HongKong where dawn had broken in the new year and things were going just fine ... and slowly as the clock inched to 00:00:00 IST there were wild jubilations around and there was nothing that seemed out of the ordinary!

I went to sleep at 12:45 a.m. after getting a confirmation that Pakistan too has survived the entry into Y2K ...

It has been 10 years of using the internet since then, from being a tool to keep in touch with friends, to a source of all those adolecent porn, to being a source of all my music and movies, and culiminating in being my indispensible companion in all my college projects, it has been a faithful comapnion and perhaps the most useful tool i have used in my life ...

Here's a toast to the greatest technological invention of all times that has served me well for the past 10 years!

Experienced Trade-offs !!!

Experience is the biggest asset a manager has on his side. As much as I learn the nuances of "business" and "management" at my MBA course (the PGSEM) at IIMB, nothing will ever be able to take the place and role that time learned experience would play in shaping the characteristics i would like to develop as a good manager (and leader).

I believe that making the right decisions in the face of available trade-offs will always be an art that will be the most visible source of differentiation between managers!

Simply put, trade-offs are choices that need to made between available alternatives in scenarios where the consequences of the choice that is made is not fully known. Decision trees have been used extensively in many of my classes to define evaluation of alternatives at decision points in a business flow. It all looks hunky-dory in a classroom scenario where the consequences at each decision point are well defined and the end result neatly mapped out by the professor on the whiteboard!In the real world, there is absolutely no way of knowing the consequences of each decision! Not only are the consequences not well defined, it is also impossible to really know the full breadth of alternatives that can be taken at a decision point.

As we move deeper into the information world, it is not the owner of the cache information who has the ultimate edge as a manager, rather the one who knows how best to derive results from that huge cache of information that holds to key to future managerial success.

My management education provides me the tools and frameworks that help in gathering the required knowledge and information along with the partial ability to derive some form of results from the information that is gathered. However it has to be experience that will enable me to take the right choice more often.

Given that experience is time bound, i am reminded of the classic dilemma that a fresh graduate faces. Every employer wants to recruit someone with a minimum threshold of experience for exciting roles that involves certain amount of responsibility. A fresh graduate wants an exciting job of responsibility, and is possibly capable of it, but has no way to satisfy the "experience" requirement of the potential employer.

If I were to draw parallels, as a manager, the ability to make the right decision choice (in a world of imperfect information) would rest largely on experience gained while having made a large number of decisions in the past. Failure is but a small price I will have to pay in order to gain the "experiential wisdom" that I require for the long run. I will have to take risky choices knowing that the consequences may or may not be favorable, and not be afraid while facing the consequence.