Intoxicated by possibility

I’ll see your natural disasters and raise you a price on carbon

Watching $50B+ wiped out because of a storm, reading Mike Bloomberg’s endorsement of Obama, and looking at a study that show that the number of natural disasters costing $1B+ doubled in the last 15 years - reminds me of a poignant story in recent American politics:

Three senators (a maverick Republican, a soul-searching Democrat and an independent seeking redemption from a failed VP bid), coming together to push a non-partisan climate legislation in 2010. Politics, negotiations and deal-making at its best, only to be beaten down by three forces from all sides of the political spectrum: (a) the chaotic White House of Obama (b) the radical Tea Party movement pushing the GOP towards the extreme right and (c) an uneducated public. 

“Would this kind of storm happen without climate change? Yes. Fueled by many factors. Is storm stronger because of climate change? Yes.”

“We can’t say that steroids caused any one home run by Barry Bonds, but steroids sure helped him hit more and hit them farther. Now we have weather on steroids.”

Students always

That is one of the defining principles here at Berkeley-Haas. 

Most schools or organizations have values or mission statements which look great engraved in stone or hanging in plaques. But, it takes great schools/organizations to live and breathe them everyday. 

By no means, do I intend to brag here. But, I was truly touched by what happened today. As part of a leadership communication class, the Haas Dean Rich Lyons came in front of a class of 120 and rehearsed a speech he is due to give in 2 months at an esteemed national conference. At the end of it, he opened up the floor to take in feedback on how he can improve his speech and his delivery of the speech. 

For someone who I deem an excellent public speaker, and for someone of his status to listen to what freshmen MBA students have to say about his public speaking skills, and vow to learn from that - that is mind-blowing stuff. 

Students Always. I just found a whole new meaning to that phrase. 

Why can’t we build yet another Nalanda or Takshashila?

ARWU released its latest 2010 Academic Rankings of World Universities recently (Hat tip: Jitin). I am not a big fan of such rankings, but nevertheless was happy to see #2. I am digressing. 

As always, I clicked to see how many Indian universities made the Top 500 list. And as any Gen X/Y Indian would do, I also checked out how many Chinese universities made it. The answer troubled me.

To spare you the effort of clicking those links, here is the answer. India - 2. China - 22. I’ll also spare you a moment to weep. 

My question(s) to you is(are): Why can’t we build bastions of higher education, like the erstwhile Nalanda or Takshashila? When we blow our trumpets claiming that we churn out the highest number of English-speaking graduates/engineers every year, do we, for once, pause and look at what these graduates/engineers are contributing towards? 

Is IISc the only saving grace of Indian universities? Did we force the IITs to be too elitist for a long time (read: half a century) that we curbed their potential to become some of Asia’s best Universities?

In 1950-1970, when China invested heavily in primary schools and later in the 80s focused on its Universities, India was busy boasting about its IITs and spent a considerable amount of tax-payer money on higher education, largely neglecting primary education. We all know that we are paying a price for that now (look at our literacy rates), but what happened to the RoI on all that tax-payer money spent on Universities? Did we just build brick-and-mortar buildings and play cricket in its corridors?

How do we change this? Is the new breed of private universities or opening up Higher Education to FDI the answer? What will it take for the Institutes of National Importance (read: new IITs, IIMs, IISERs) to leapfrog into world-class universities? The answers are fairly straight-forward: better faculty, better remuneration for professors, better industry-university linkage, better infrastructure and so on. But, do we have the will? 

[I know some of you might point it out to me that AWRU is aka Shanghai ranking, is carried out by a Chinese University and probably is biased. To you, my answer is look at the Top 200 university ranking by two other sources QS (India-2, China-7) and THE (India-0, China-6)]

Engineers vs MBAs

[Full disclosure: I am one already, and in two years, I’ll be both]

I am always a fan of someone who says an MBA is a waste of time. Largely because, I believe that a large chunk of MBAs get the degree for the heck of it. In the process, a small fraction of MBAs who really benefit from the degree and create lasting impact are lost in oblivion.

I did come across this article quoting Robert Lutz, an alumnus of the school I’m headed to: 

Lutz ultimately believes that the U.S. needs more engineering talent. There are just too few engineers and too many MBAs, he says. “We need more nerds! And we need to stop thinking of our nerds as nerds. We need to think of them instead as an endangered population—like gazelles, maybe…More of our universities need to offer programs in manufacturing and industrial management,” he maintains. “We need to put engineers on a pedestal. And your young people need to be taught that there’s something noble about engaging in value-creating activity. Twenty or thirty years from now, when their grandchildren ask them, ‘what did you do in the great economic war?’ they shouldn’t have to answer, ‘I was a bond trader.’”

I agree. The same holds true in India too. I have personally seen a few of my friends who were exceptionally gifted in engineering, abandon it to pursue a management degree while short-selling themselves. What one really needs to understand is that a good engineer is as accomplished as (or better than) an I-Banker. At the same time, there are many folks, like me, who have an engineer’s approach/mindset, but do not have raw engineering talent and begin to explore an alternative career in business and commerce. As a society, we need to create incentives to equate these two and not put one above the other.