Future of education

The d.school at Stanford is a wonderful place for both dreamers and doers. They have been looking at  ways in which education will evolve, and have come up with a few versions of the future of a university at http://www.stanford2025.com . One of the options that they have created is to imagine your own version of education in the future. 

I spent one afternoon with my brother-in-law, Abhishek Singhal,  trying to design our version of this future. Abhishek spoke about "Always learning, Never learning" as a concept. I agree, given so much information availability around us, you do not need to have prolonged formal education as we had to, as you will always be able to learn the specifics needed to do a particular thing well through online forums. You have the ability to acquire any skill-set on an "as needed" basis.

But there is a merit to a formalized education. And I postulated that formal education should be divided up into a few core skills to be acquired in different buckets before one turns 21. These 5 buckets that we could come up with include:

1.5 years - Basic Mindset Development - basics of all subjects along with developing critical thinking ability - anything that builds up the basics allowing you to comprehend how various things work, and build a "growth" mindset

0.5 years - Grooming - critical to improve your social skills and ability to communicate with a larger audience as it is easy to reach out to a large audience

1.5 years - Physical Education - a fit mind needs to be housed in a strong body - dedicated effort to strengthen the various parts of the body and learn basic skills of teamwork and leadership requires active engagement in a sport

1.5 years - Mission Education - understand ways in which you can make the world a better place for people around you - developing empathy for others, and actively engaging in "servant leadership" style projects

1 year - Business Education - update yourself to understand the latest developments in the business world through an academic lens - academia tends to have the luxury of looking at an idealistic scenario, and their perspective is always a good way to look at your own self from an outside in perspective. You can also say that with 2 management degrees, I am biased towards the value of this type of education.

And this can be done interchangeably with breaks in-between to assimilate more real world experience.

Would love to hear your thoughts!

Safety Nets

There are two scenarios that people take risks:

1) When it is necessary and the only way to change the present status which is not pleasant

2) When it is planned such that you really want to take risks to change the world and your relation with it

I ran a survey in my MSx class (comprised of international students who represent two ends of a spectrum - ones looking for jobs, and the others who have been identified as high-performers and are sponsored by their organizations as fastrack to upper echelons of management), and this is the list that they came up with:

External

- Money (varying amounts and forms) - not a surprise really

- Education (incl. professional license) - I guess that is not surprising either, given that we are here at Stanford

- Family support

- Impeccable professional reputation

Internal

- Self-confidence

- Alternate plan to bounce-back

I have classified it into 2 parts, as I think that over time growth happens when you move from the External safety nets to Internal safety nets. However, I keep wondering if you can build the Internal safety nets early enough, and then you don't need the External safety nets at all. But somehow, it is difficult to communicate and such people become lone geniuses I guess.

Leadership and fear management

As part of a quite a few courses here at the GSB, I had a lot of time to hear great leaders come and share their thoughts which allowed me to reflect on leadership.

And my take is that a truly great leader is aware of his fears, acknowledges them, works to resolve them by changing both his physiology and his mental state, and then helps his fellow workers alleviate their fears by providing support and encouragement through effective communication. 

And once you are able to overcome fear, you learn to connect better with your fellow beings. One useful tool is to embrace an Improviser's Mindset as that helps in overcoming your fears by just showing up, and celebrating any failure as a means to learning new things. This approach will help in making your life uncomplicated while opening up new vistas for you to explore. So, strive to learn Improvisation early in your life as a means to becoming a great leader.

Execution vs Ideation

They say "the world beats down a path to the person's house who builds a better mousetrap". Essentially this means that world pays a premium for good execution.

On the other hand, nothing great would have happened in the world if someone would not have spent time in thinking up things. I always feel that our imagination is bound by the realm of possibility. It means that if we can think something, there has to be a way to execute it. Whatever feels and looks impossible is only because we are looking at it through an existing way of doing things. To me, such things demand us to look at them in a different way, maybe not easily visible to everyone.

An imaginative person who understands execution well, will be in a good position to find such different ways and build his fortune. The one person who seems to have mastered this art well is Steve Jobs. Creating companies like Apple and Pixar needs great imagination but more importantly, the leader has to have a grip on the execution aspect of the same as well. Without this, it will be difficult to communicate the vision to your employees/associates in a manner meaningful enough that it can be executed upon.

Would love to hear your thoughts!

I have been writing a series of letters to my son over the years. Am reproducing some of the thoughts that have evolved as I have grown as a person/husband/father/student over the years. I want to ensure that I am not superimposing my thoughts on him, and hence want to give him a choice of decisions that he should be making when he grows up. 

I am open to criticism that I did not tell him the right thing, but I know that I am not the best person to answer that given that I am not sure myself.

Principles of affordability and reciprocity

The principle of affordability means that you assign a value to anything that you do for others. And if that value is something you think you can afford (for instance, stress affects health and should be avoided by paying a monetary price that you can afford), you should do it.

On the other hand, the principle of reciprocity means that you do things for the others expecting/returning equivalent responses and actions from them.

Many discussions later, I have come to have another analogy to this argument. I think the principle of reciprocity is like building a long transaction history, with the parties to the transaction relying on previous behavior to determine creditability of the other party. This works well in cultures that have grown inorganically, because the only shared history and background between two parties is the transactions that they have had. I think the US society is the best example where this kind of a system works well.

The principle of affordability works better in cases where the two parties have more in common than just transactions - background, blood line, culture, shared history etc. which allows a certain amount of comfort and large-heartedness in relationships that extends beyond just the history of transactions. Hence, it will work better in societies that have grown organically, like the Asian societies for instance.

I have also come to realize that these are not mutually exclusive. When the transaction history becomes long and people remember it (new technology is surely helping that), people will need to become more virtuous, and this will lead to greater trust and bonding, which will lead to longer shared histories further leading to people following the principle of affordability eventually.

Which to follow is for one to decide and adopt? Would love to hear your comments on this.

I attended a beautiful Low Keynotes talk by a fellow classmate at Stanford GSB, Michal Wiczkowski  in which he called blogs being serendipity engines, and that comment has been the genesis of this blog. This is not the first time that I have thought about writing down all these random things that go on in my head. In the past, I have heard that you should share your ideas in the world, for that is a duty you have. You never know who might get inspired from what you say.

So here is a blog that I will use to share random thoughts as they keep appearing. Take what you want, leave the rest, as this is just a repository of all that keeps humming through me as I go about life collecting experiences and stories.