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Energising The Employability Magic Of Professional Education

The private engineering colleges and b-schools are going through another bad phase. The overcapacity, because of which many colleges are reeling under significant financial stress, is intriguing when seen against the backdrop of a modest Gross Enrollment Ratio. The reasons are quite straight forward, students enroll into professional education for jobs.  Starting from the mid-1990s, riding on an economy growing at a fast clip with the promise of dollar jobs students thronged the higher education professional courses. When the global economies plateaued and the Indian growth rate isn’t much better, job creation is poor and so also is the demand to join professional courses. The professional education institutes, must know that the role they need to play is to create industry worthy professionals. That needs to be the focus.  For the past 20 years, institutes have focussed on two areas – infrastructure and admission network. This strategy worked, when large organized businesses h

Agile Communications

Organization communication encompasses both the pre-planned formal, arte-fact centric communication and micro-level need centric informal, impromptu interactions. The former includes vision, mission, goals, job descriptions, performance targets, standard-operating-procedures, client proposals, periodic customer feedbacks, sign-off criteria, SLAs, performance management, performance appraisals, workshops, seminars etc. While the latter comprises verbal client feedbacks, impromptu team meetings, informal discussions in the café, unscheduled dip stick checks and associated discussions. The fact that organization communication is something that needs to be given emphasis is obvious. But the reality is that generally, including in our organization, the arte-fact centric communication dominates the communication plan while the power of the micro-level communication is largely unrecognized.  Communication systems – and we are not talking of technology here – offer a huge opportunity to impr

Treat The Customer As A King Or As A Child?

What is common to dealing with a king and a child? Both need to be made to feel special. However, that’s where the similarity ends. The difference lies in the feelings we carry towards a king or a child. For the king, the reason for making them feel special could be anyone of reverence, deep respect, convenient political correctness, vested motives or plain fear. In the first two cases, the drivers are positive feelings while the in last two the drivers are negative feelings. Quite clearly, we do not always treat someone like a king for the right reasons. In contrast, the reason why we want to make a child feel special is sheer love, compassion and goodness. Pampering is essential to customer delight. But blind pampering is detrimental both to the parent and the child. The parent stretches without commensurate value creation, while the child gets spoilt. Therefore when parents deal with children the focus is the child and his/her best interest. When subjects deal with kings,

The Negative Vote

Decentralisation of power is a powerful concept and democracy does it take it to its ultimate logical end. By allowing the people to be governed to decide who will govern the community. Asking a person, what he wants and by whom we wants to be governed, is respecting the basic dignity of human being and respecting her/his innate intelligence. But, quite clearly even if we are voting intelligently individually, we are not voting intelligently collectively. The power that the voters were supposed to have wielded is practically non-existent.  The political parties have been able to use a combination of charisma, lineage, fear, ‘inducement’, caste, alliance arithmetic, poll management, information inefficiency, to get candidates with dubious credentials get elected. As a result sometimes ineffective governments have returned to power [Left Bloc in West Bengal for 20 years] or the relatively effective governments given way to a less effective dispensations [there are many examples in the

Watching a Movie vs. Writing a Blogpost

Gosh! Its past nine. Looks like I can give a shot at only one of the things I had wanted to do post dinner. The past one hour has just zipped in a moment. So, lets toss-up. Writing is the first want, but a well-made Hollywood thought provoking movie is an amazing way to get the inspiration to express with abandon. Like the other day I watched Midnight is Paris and relished my old hero Hemingway’s arrogant conversation akin to Viv’s swagger and Gertrude Stein’s incisive comments on a book draft. The infectious Parisian abundance of thoughts and time. As if, the characters had all the time in the world and hence could party 7 nights a week. If that was what 1920’s geniuses - – Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Picasso, Stein, T.S.Eliot and a host of other – did; then when did they work to produce their masterpieces. Did they just ooze genius! ? That, every word that escaped their pen and every stroke their brush produced meant something captivating. Not to mention, the alluring imageries a

Political Jumble (May 2013) II - Aam Admi Party: Mis-alignment between larger goals and means

Aam Admi Party: AAP has certainly done a fabulous job. It has forced mainstream parties to take cognizance that corruption is a dangerous, potentially counter-productive word. The voters need not accept it as an inevitable evil forever.  The media is more equipped [unfortunately more belligerent, rhetorical also] to expose slip-ups. The CEC will be more confident to flex its muscles when parties cross the Lakhsman Rekha of propriety. Fund raising, election spending, ticket distribution all will need to be more transparent. In future, the means to winning an election will be more important than ever before. Not very far in the future, means will become as important as the end in itself. All of this will happen, with or without AAP making a dent electorally in the next few elections. This will happen because of voter sensitization and awareness that they deserve and can vocally demand better public values from their representatives. All this is because of AAP – kudos Team AAP. How

Political Jumble (May 2013) I - BJP in Disarray

The election bugle has been set off. Karnataka has been to the polls today, almost half the states will be going to the polls in the next 12 month and the general election scheduled in 2014. Poll bytes are everywhere. Of the large numbers of plots and sub-plots in the political jumble, two observations intrigue me the most. BJP is in disarray: We cannot write BJP off now. If luck would have it, BJP may still get to the gaddi next year. And get even with the voters in the inexplicability quotient – i.e it relinquished power in 2004 when it shouldn’t have and if it wins in 2014, it will win when it will have done nothing to deserve it. The UPA is in shambles. It is getting the worst press ever for any Indian government, I strongly suspect they have the worst press in any democratically elected government currently. But even then there is just no certainty that the UPA will lose elections next time around. Why? The BJP has not managed to convert the dis-satisfaction into an anti-w

Destiny in Randomness

Thought deficit is a temporary state of self-perception. How long or short the state persists depends upon how large a role we let randomness to play. We may wait for a probabilistic stimulant to give us a transient boost or we may passively let the mental ruffles to dissipate at the their own pace and ready ourselves for another probabilistic state of exhilaration. Sometime we maybe a little more proactive we may programmatically search for a specific stimulant   to earn a temporary tryst with freedom. The outcomes of all of the above responses are inevitably inter-wined with ‘random’ events, which have their own set of ‘expected’ outcomes based on individual contexts. Stochastically speaking, that is aligning ourselves with our pre-ordianed ‘destiny’. Sometimes, I have a love for the abstruse! And nuanced mental games associated with it. That’s probably another program, an addiction. Shedding the maths or rather stats, in simpler words, whether creativity (or its conc

Beauty

Beauty is everything That touches the core The partner’s love, the parents’ care The workers joy, and the creators ahoy! Beauty pervades the sweaty sinews, Beatific smiles And complex mathematics When bestowed with an uncomplicated innocence     And the silence Of connected solitude. As it is decisive action When delivered with lively compassion Beauty, then, is in the transcendental clairvoyance, Which whispers into our ears When to embrace to our intuitive call And when to numb our indulgent instincts. And the joyous wisdom which Accepts life’s fallibilities And values the striving to soar   Both, in the same slice of time Well, beauty is all, that aids in our march To unearth the simple inner truth While, awaking and embracing inert cells and souls And resonating with our pristine cosmic twin Bhubaneswar April 16, 2013 / Revised Apr 23, 2013