London Business School Art Exhibition and a white paper on educational reform…..

I've been MIA for a while. Speaking on MIA, if you like her music, check out Santogold. I've been flying under the radar, having spent a fantastic weekend in Boston, organized the London Business School Crossroads Art Exhibition, taken a macroeconomics exams and finished my organizational behavior audit with MyBnk (a non-profit). BTW If you are into pro-bono for non-profits, I highly recommend these articles:

• The new landscape for nonprofits. By: Ryan, William P.. Harvard Business Review, Jan/Feb99, Vol. 77 Issue 1, p127-136
  
• Organizational lessons for nonprofits. By: Hauser, Jerry. McKinsey Quarterly, 2003 Special Edition Issue 4, p60-69

The art exhibition (sponsored by my summer sugar-daddy, Nomura) was well-attended and the open-air concerts (violin, viola, harp, flute) performed by students from the Royal Academy of Music were simply mind-blowing. We had rented a grand piano, and it was great to hear the quad fill with notes from Rachmaninoff, quite different from the usual corporate buzz-buzz. Dean Andrew Likierman inaugurated the exhibition. This was the best two months that I've spent organizing an extracurricular event. My role was Veep of Sponsorship, and Senior Veep of Jack-of-all-Tradery and Event-managery. Incidentally, I'm doing the same role for the London Business School Healthcare Club, in preparation for the 2009 Healthcare Conference. GSK chief, Andrew Witty will deliver the keynote.

So you may wonder if I ever study, given all my travels and extracurricular involvement. The simple answer is "No". And does that mean that there is a mad scramble and all-nighters before exams? The answer is "Yes". The truth is that, this is what works best for me. And no matter what your study style in B-school, it is relatively easy to get an A, curve notwithstanding. And then again, with grade non-disclosure, often people don't care enough. I just don't agree with most of what is being taught in my Operations and Strategy classes anyways – it is outdated and impractical in the real world. As for Macroeconomics – spend 2 days quality time with a good text book, read the Economist and read whatever Goldman Sachs and McKinsey's chief economists put out, and you're golden.

McKinsey Managing Director Ian Davis on "What society expects from business"

The B-school experience, coupled with the Macroeconomics class, and McKinsey chief Ian Davis's talk, and a question I was asked in a consulting interview "What reform is needed in the educational system, globally?" (I had to spin tales for 45 minutes) prompted some deep thought which I intend to convert to a white paper at some point. But here are the salient points (below). I'd love to hear your opinion on it (email me at sbuxespresso@gmail.com)

1) Professional degrees must be shortened in order to return high-GDP producing individuals to the workforce ASAP. Case in point, doctors, lawyers, MBAs and PhDs. The advanced professional degree educational system is outdated and programs are too long. A combination of self-study, online courses and modular/block weeks, with a greater emphasis on internship time is what's required. Think of your own MBA experience. Wouldn't you rather be out making the big bucks, ahem!, increasing GDP earlier. And, especially for PhDs and doctors, with the internet, data-mining, rapid technology upgrades and better predictive/computational/hypothesis defining/problem-solving tools, it should be easier to get done in 3 years, no more. People entering these degrees are arguably smarter and better informed today than their peers 20-30 years ago, and we aren't futzing around with Bunsen burners and conceptual quarks and anti-quarks as in years gone by. Besides, not only is there an opportunity cost associated with keeping people out of the workforce, there is actual value-destruction, as people lose motivation towards the latter stage of their advanced degrees. Ask any fifth year Theoretical Physics PhD or third year medical resident about regressing motivation. And, think of this point and the next one, especially in the light of women, child-bearing years and glass ceilings. Wouldn't this actually make things easier, or at least give them the option? Would it? I'm asking.

2) Ditto for four-year colleges. Split the four years into modular elements so that students can intersperse longer internship spells in between to really understand what they want to do vocationally. Imagine a four year program, where freshman year is when you are 18 and senior year ends when you turn 25! I started off as an engineer, then biotech startup researcher/product developer, only to find that I wanted to be a strategy consultant, and now I'm going into investment banking. And I'm not atypical. More than 75% of my MBA classmates are career changers, onto career number three. How many of us started wanting to study choral music only to find that we really wanted to do few years later was law or underwater basket-weaving? In the meanwhile we futzed around in school or meandered from job-to-job. In other words don't put the horse before the cart.

3) Instead of useless subjects, teach people the following early on in their educational experience

1. How to leverage their brains fully? How to deal with failure? How to find happiness? How to deal with metal pressures? There is a huge body of recent research that suggests that we as humans do not fully understand how and why we think a certain way (nature + nurture). Hence books like 'Stumbling on Happiness' and 'The Paradox of Choice'! After all isn't it about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? Our mental and emotional map is still very primitive, and lags behind the pressures and pace of post-post-modern lifestyle. The solutions this new research suggests are not your grandma's Freudian lying-on-your-shrinks-couch bullshit, but solutions grounded real facts based on fool-proof experiments, double-blinds, cross-referenced with MRI/CT scan data. Don't we want everyone to live richer, fuller lives? And bonus - from a capitalistic perspective this understanding helps sell stuff and from a welfare perspective it helps solve problems (Read 'The Tipping Point', 'Freakonomics', 'Supercrunchers', 'Fooled by Randomness' for evidence).
2. How to interact with people, empathize, connect and collaborate. Friction between humans and the inability to snap together like LEGOs and work cohesively are will be the most significant value-destroyers in upcoming years within any organization. See Ian Davis's view on this. How many times do you wish you had insight into a difficult co-worker's mind? Why should good interpersonal skills only be the forte of salespeople and schmoozers? How much does this affect the potential of people who are unable to overcome their social awkwardness? What, are we living in the stone-age, where lousy interpersonal skills impact both individuals and corporate/citizenry well-being? (Read 'Extraordinary Relationships', 'Fierce Conversations').
3. How to find the right mate? Even as it is, one could argue that divorce is a welfare value-destroyer. It is as welcome as a root-canal. And it is definitely an economic value destroyer. Think of alimony or child-support as transfer payments (most feminists and child-advocates would love to scourge me for this). And, not being able to understand what a potential partner would want, defers the mating process (not sex, but confluence), potentially reducing individual happiness (not the happiness associated with a stable partnership, but not being able to fully focus on what makes the individual happy regardless of the relationship). And, ask any joint-tax-return-filing married couple. Less tax equals more savings or consumption which equals more growth of national capital stock which equals more GDP and welfare growth.
4. Teach people how to learn, think and evolve vocationally. This is especially important for developed countries with offshoring and outsourcing. Case in point, Adam Smith vs. theory of comparative advantage. Help people learn to evolve and develop new vocational skills. I have been lucky to have "learned to learn" and to evolve from engineer to researcher to consultant to banker. But this should not be the privilege of a few. Teach the masses to fish…..
5. Teach people to learn to become efficient and drive local Leaness. Everyone on this planet simply needs to learn to live Lean. Lean is not just for making cars, but as the population grows and people in emerging countries learn to consume more, we need to understand how to eliminate waste and conserve resources. Plus, one of the biggest reasons that jobs flow out rapidly from one country to another is loss of productivity. And the reasons why companies like GM go bankrupt is because people aren't thinking daily "How can I make my environment more efficient and less wasteful?" (Read 'Lean Thinking' by Womack and Jones). Also training is passé. Its important for both managers and leaders to be able to coach their reports. (Read 'The Coaching Revolution').
6. Similarly teach people fiscal and personal finance concepts much earlier in life. The reasons are self-evident.
7. Obviously, none of this can be forced down the citizenry's collective throat, given the personal nature of issues at hand, the issue of free will, and given that no government or educational system should be as totalitarian. I suggest a gentler kinder approach where the people are made aware of what they are missing out on and why this is important. Most rational human beings will see the value in this.
   

Well, that's enough pontificating for now. I need to get cracking on my Corporate Markets and Finance final. And then on to reading, 'Damodaran on Valuation' in preparation for my Nomura summer internship. More later!

Excerpt from McKinsey's Ian Davis: Maximizing Shareholder Value Doesn't Cut It Anymore Published : November 01, 2006 in Knowledge@Wharton

……..Fourth on executives' minds is organizational capability. Talent is only one component of capability. "If talent is not trained or relevant to the task at hand," it won't have an impact, he said. Capability comes in many forms: emotional, psychological and intellectual. Sometimes even physical capability is important in business. "Intellectual can be dominant, but often human capability, like the emotional stability to deal with stress, can, in certain circumstances, be crucial."

In most companies, talent is misdirected close to 70% of the time, according to Davis. Often the mismatch between an employee's capabilities and his or her assignment is most obvious from the CEO's vantage point. One CEO told Davis that his main job -- his definition of strategy -- is matching managers' capabilities to the work that needs to be done.

Davis was asked how companies should balance matching individual capabilities with specific tasks, and still be able to develop management talent when new challenges arise that might be beyond an employee's capabilities. He said it is possible to do if top executives have a clear strategic view of what they need and a sense of the people who could ultimately fill senior leadership roles. Then top management should be prepared to invest in those people and tolerate some mistakes.

Business today, he said, is unwilling to accept any degree of failure, even small mistakes that might help future leaders avoid catastrophes in the long run. "We're in a culture that says, 'If you fail, you're gone.'" He argued that most people learn more from their mistakes than their successes. Often CEOs are fired for a mistake, just as they are becoming strong and wise executives. "It's tragic," said Davis. "My general experience is that if you have highly capable, motivated people in the right place, most other problems go away."

The "Usual Suspects"

How do these themes bear on leadership?

Davis said one word captures what is necessary: diplomacy. He defined diplomacy in the business context as "the ability to influence events through the force of personal and moral character.... I think business, NGOs (non-government organizations) and public sector leaders are all going to have to learn the useful skills of diplomacy to explain in a positive way what they do and why they do it."

……..Davis stressed that the issues he focused on in his speech go beyond the "usual suspects" of CEO concerns -- such as costs, corporate structure, customer relationships and strategy. "These subjects matter a lot, but they're starters. You've got to get them right." Even companies that do get the "usual suspects" right don't necessarily thrive, he said. To differentiate themselves in the future, companies will need to build strategies taking into account the larger themes of society and government.

NY Times on God.....

May 3, 2009, 10:00 pm

God Talk

In the opening sentence of the last chapter of his new book, “Reason, Faith and Revolution,” the British critic Terry Eagleton asks, “Why are the most unlikely people, including myself, suddenly talking about God?” His answer, elaborated in prose that is alternately witty, scabrous and angry, is that the other candidates for guidance — science, reason, liberalism, capitalism — just don’t deliver what is ultimately needed. “What other symbolic form,” he queries, “has managed to forge such direct links between the most universal and absolute of truths and the everyday practices of countless millions of men and women?”

Eagleton acknowledges that the links forged are not always benign — many terrible things have been done in religion’s name — but at least religion is trying for something more than local satisfactions, for its “subject is nothing less than the nature and destiny of humanity itself, in relation to what it takes to be its transcendent source of life.” And it is only that great subject, and the aspirations it generates, that can lead, Eagleton insists, to “a radical transformation of what we say and do.”

The other projects, he concedes, provide various comforts and pleasures, but they are finally superficial and tend to the perpetuation of the status quo rather than to meaningful change: “A society of packaged fulfillment, administered desire, managerialized politics and consumerist economics is unlikely to cut to the depth where theological questions can ever be properly raised.”

By theological questions, Eagleton means questions like, “Why is there anything in the first place?”, “Why what we do have is actually intelligible to us?” and “Where do our notions of explanation, regularity and intelligibility come from?”

The fact that science, liberal rationalism and economic calculation can not ask — never mind answer — such questions should not be held against them, for that is not what they do.

And, conversely, the fact that religion and theology cannot provide a technology for explaining how the material world works should not be held against them, either, for that is not what they do. When Christopher Hitchens declares that given the emergence of “the telescope and the microscope” religion “no longer offers an explanation of anything important,” Eagleton replies, “But Christianity was never meant to be an explanation of anything in the first place. It’s rather like saying that thanks to the electric toaster we can forget about Chekhov.”

Eagleton likes this turn of speech, and he has recourse to it often when making the same point: “[B]elieving that religion is a botched attempt to explain the world . . . is like seeing ballet as a botched attempt to run for a bus.” Running for a bus is a focused empirical act and the steps you take are instrumental to its end. The positions one assumes in ballet have no such end; they are after something else, and that something doesn’t yield to the usual forms of measurement. Religion, Eagleton is saying, is like ballet (and Chekhov); it’s after something else.

After what? Eagleton, of course, does not tell us, except in the most general terms: “The coming kingdom of God, a condition of justice, fellowship, and self-fulfillment far beyond anything that might normally be considered possible or even desirable in the more well-heeled quarters of Oxford and Washington.” Such a condition would not be desirable in Oxford and Washington because, according to Eagleton, the inhabitants of those places are complacently in bondage to the false idols of wealth, power and progress. That is, they feel little of the tragedy and pain of the human condition, but instead “adopt some bright-eyed superstition such as the dream of untrammeled human progress” and put their baseless “trust in the efficacy of a spot of social engineering here and a dose of liberal enlightenment there.”

Progress, liberalism and enlightenment — these are the watchwords of those, like Hitchens, who believe that in a modern world, religion has nothing to offer us. Don’t we discover cures for diseases every day? Doesn’t technology continually extend our powers and offer the promise of mastering nature? Who needs an outmoded, left-over medieval superstition?

Eagleton punctures the complacency of these questions when he turns the tables and applies the label of “superstition” to the idea of progress. It is a superstition — an idol or “a belief not logically related to a course of events” (American Heritage Dictionary) — because it is blind to what is now done in its name: “The language of enlightenment has been hijacked in the name of corporate greed, the police state, a politically compromised science, and a permanent war economy,” all in the service, Eagleton contends, of an empty suburbanism that produces ever more things without any care as to whether or not the things produced have true value.

And as for the vaunted triumph of liberalism, what about “the misery wreaked by racism and sexism, the sordid history of colonialism and imperialism, the generation of poverty and famine”? Only by ignoring all this and much more can the claim of human progress at the end of history be maintained: “If ever there was a pious myth and a piece of credulous superstition, it is the liberal-rationalist belief that, a few hiccups apart, we are all steadily en route to a finer world.”

That kind of belief will have little use for a creed that has at its center “one who spoke up for love and justice and was done to death for his pains.” No wonder “Ditchkins” — Eagleton’s contemptuous amalgam of Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, perhaps with a sidelong glance at Luke 6:39, “Can the blind lead the blind? Shall they not both fall into the ditch?” — seems incapable of responding to “the kind of commitment made manifest by a human being at the end of his tether, foundering in darkness, pain, and bewilderment, who nevertheless remains faithful to the promise of a transformative love.”

You won’t be interested in any such promise, you won’t see the point of clinging to it, if you think that “apart from the odd, stubbornly lingering spot of barbarism here and there, history on the whole is still steadily on the up,” if you think that “not only is the salvation of the human species possible but that contrary to all we read in the newspapers, it has in principle already taken place.” How, Eagleton asks, can a civilization “which regards itself as pretty well self-sufficient” see any point in or need of “faith or hope”?

“Self-sufficient” gets to the heart of what Eagleton sees as wrong with the “brittle triumphalism” of liberal rationalism and its ideology of science. From the perspective of a theistic religion, the cardinal error is the claim of the creature to be “self-originating”: “Self-authorship,” Eagleton proclaims, “is the bourgeois fantasy par excellence,” and he could have cited in support the words of that great bourgeois villain, Milton’s Satan, who, upon being reminded that he was created by another, retorts , “[W]ho saw/ When this creation was…?/ We know no time when we were not as now/Know none before us, self-begot, self-raised” (Paradise Lost, V, 856-860).That is, we created ourselves (although how there can be agency before there is being and therefore an agent is not explained), and if we are able to do that, why can’t we just keep on going and pull progress and eventual perfection out of our own entrails?

That is where science and reason come in. Science, says Eagleton, “does not start far back enough”; it can run its operations, but it can’t tell you what they ultimately mean or provide a corrective to its own excesses. Likewise, reason is “too skin deep a creed to tackle what is at stake”; its laws — the laws of entailment and evidence — cannot get going without some substantive proposition from which they proceed but which they cannot contain; reason is a non-starter in the absence of an a prior specification of what is real and important, and where is that going to come from? Only from some kind of faith.

“Ditchkins,” Eagleton observes, cannot ground his belief “in the value of individual freedom” in scientific observation. It is for him an article of faith, and once in place, it generates facts and reasons and judgments of right and wrong. “Faith and knowledge,” Eagleton concludes, are not antithetical but “interwoven.” You can’t have one without the other, despite the Satanic claim that you can go it alone by applying your own independent intellect to an unmediated reality: “All reasoning is conducted within the ambit of some sort of faith, attraction, inclination, orientation, predisposition, or prior commitment.” Meaning, value and truth are not “reducible to the facts themselves, in the sense of being ineluctably motivated by a bare account of them.” Which is to say that there is no such thing as a bare account of them. (Here, as many have noted, is where religion and postmodernism meet.)

If this is so, the basis for what Eagleton calls “the rejection of religion on the cheap” by contrasting its unsupported (except by faith) assertions with the scientifically grounded assertions of atheism collapses; and we are where we always were, confronted with a choice between a flawed but aspiring religious faith or a spectacularly hubristic faith in the power of unaided reason and a progress that has no content but, like the capitalism it reflects and extends, just makes its valueless way into every nook and cranny.

For Eagleton the choice is obvious, although he does not have complete faith in the faith he prefers. “There are no guarantees,” he concedes that a “transfigured future will ever be born.” But we can be sure that it will never be born, he says in his last sentence, “if liberal dogmatists, doctrinaire flag-wavers for Progress, and Islamophobic intellectuals . . . continue to stand in its way.”

One more point. The book starts out witty and then gets angrier and angrier. (There is the possibility, of course, that the later chapters were written first; I’m just talking about the temporal experience of reading it.) I spent some time trying to figure out why the anger was there and I came up with two explanations.

One is given by Eagleton, and it is personal. Christianity may or may not be the faith he holds to (he doesn’t tell us), but he speaks, he says, “partly in defense of my own forbearers, against the charge that the creed to which they dedicated their lives is worthless and void.”

The other source of his anger is implied but never quite made explicit. He is angry, I think, at having to expend so much mental and emotional energy refuting the shallow arguments of school-yard atheists like Hitchens and Dawkins. I know just how he feels.

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I’m dying for a good movie about junkies in Edinburgh….

Ugh! I've said it before here but I'll say it again, "Danny Boyle, you should stick to making movies about junkies in Edinburgh! Look mofo, your exploiting India's poverty for titillation to accompany popcorn chomping is not cool. Your connection with India is zilch! In fact the first time you visited the country was to shoot the film. And, did you even watch City of Joy and Cidade de Deus before decided to go slumming?"

I quote from the Financial Times February 23 2009: The film (Slumdog Millionaire) has been sharply criticised as "poverty porn". Well-respected local filmmakers have described the film as titillating western audiences with its portrayal of slum life. Priyadarshan Nair, an India film-maker, complained strongly that the film makes a mockery of India. "It's nothing but a mediocre Bollywood film, which has used references from several Hindi films very smartly," he wrote in the newspaper India Today at the weekend. "India is not Somalia. We are one of the foremost nuclear powers in the world, our satellites are roaming the universe. Our police commissioners' offices don't look like shacks and there are no blind children begging in the streets of Mumbai." Even some who like the movie are unhappy with its title. "Dog is really offensive for us Indians," says Krishna Pujari, a former street child who now organises ethical tours of the slum.

Yeah, no shit Boyle! Your calling an Indian street-child "Slumdog" is like a white person using the N-word. This is not the f**king Raj and we're not your f**king coolies.

indieWIRE flays it as a "A noisy, sub-Dickens update on the romantic tramp's tale. Poverty can be so much fun with M.I.A.'s ubiquitous "Paper Planes" pop-pop and ching-ching throughout. Jamal's success on the TV show makes him a hero to slumdogs everywhere, but he doesn't care about being rich. He just wants to be with Latika. Quite instructive to the billions of poor people in the world foolishly aspiring to subsistence, let alone wealth! Love is all Jamal needs. Love and a lobotomy." Another disection of the structural flaws of this sub-par film is on this blog.

On other fronts, we had a kick-ass Winter Masquerade Ball last weekend and the organization of London Business School Crossroads Art Exhibition is going smoothly. I'm debating whether I should accept a second internship with Accenture's ADP program. Its 7 weeks and ultra-cool! ADP provides strategic advice to nonprofit organizations, foundations and donor organizations operating in the development sector, helping these organizations achieve social and economic development goals. Sample engagements include building supply chain capabilities for a humanitarian aid organization in South Africa and developing an IT industry growth strategy for the government of Guyana. But after 10 weeks of an I-banking internship will this be overkill and am I better off working pro-bono for a local non-profit? Plus I'm planning on moving to Portobello Road before fall trimester starts in October. But I'm so tempted to do this …. plus its for a good cause! Decisions, decisions!!!