Growing up happens in a heartbeat.
One day you're in diapers, the next day you're gone.
But the memories of childhood stay with you for the long haul.
I remember a place ... a town ... a house
like a lot of houses ...
A yard like a lot of other yards ...
On a street like a lot of other streets.
And the thing is ...
After all these years,
I still look back ... with wonder.
Saturday, September 25, 2004
Monday, September 20, 2004
MM Hypothesis - Dying to study, or studying to die?
STUDENT commits suicide, says the newspaper yet again. Unhappy with marks in the exam, it continues predictably. The picture shows parents in mourning, with that look in their eyes that says it wasn't supposed to end this way.
This is the seventh such death I count in two weeks - I'm sure there are more - but we're inured to the shock. Like the rains and SSC results, it's the season for suicides, when our kids senselessly take their lives because they couldn't live up to our expectations.
The last page of the paper shows some coaching class bleating about the success of its students in entrance tests. I bet if you take all these 'exam topper' cases over the last 20 years and look into them, you'll universally find careers of mediocrity that follow.
One girl, I read, takes her life because she couldn't get into the college she'd set her heart on. Another girl, a daughter of a dear friend, says she's feeling suicidal for the same reason. We counsel her - that there are a lot of things far, far more important than having the right college on your resume. Perhaps we succeed.
A parent tells me she has to leave a party early to wake up at 5 and tutor her kid, an eight-year-old. This time one counsels the parent, but not too successfully either. I wonder if this is the lot of the educated Indian parent, who feel their success will not come directly, but by turning their little ones into Einsteins.
And it's not even Einstein who's the right role model. He dropped out of school, and was a dull student. And I really don't think Indian parents push their kids because of a sadistic streak: we do so ostensibly in the best interests of our wards. But are we more than just a little misguided? Does excelling in studies really mean excelling in life?
I cannot recall a single study that establishes that school- and college-toppers turn out to be outstanding in life. But there are numerous cases to illustrate the opposite. I have a theory why. Given the regimen of sitting with textbooks and tutors when the rest of the world is living a normal life, these kids grow up unsuited to deal with the reality out there. Most end up in some employee-type career in some hole in some large organisation's wall. Toppers, as they say, come croppers. It's the people who learn to cope with the real world early who excel.
Forbes magazine said that over one-third in their list of the 400 richest people in the world last year - Bill Gates, Mukesh Ambani, Richard Branson and Michael Dell among them - did not even have a degree, leave alone top their class. And on an average, these people were worth more than the degree-holders. Certainly, if success in business is what you'd like from your child, getting a degree has no correlation.
What about non-business pursuits then? There are Nobel-winning scientists and authors who didn't finish formal education. The world of entertainment is full of the supposedly-uneducated: Marlon Brando, Humphrey Bogart, Charlie Chaplin and Sean Connery didn't need a degree to win hearts and Oscars. Neither did Bob Dylan, Louis Armstrong, Kurt Cobain and other artistes. Contrast here our own violin virtuosos L. Subramanian and L. Shankar, whose folks insisted they get an MBBS, so just in case they needed to put down their bows they could pick up the stethoscopes.
'Just in case' - this risk-averse thinking is what holds us back. What is the risk if your child doesn't get into the 'right' college or school? Think about it. You'll see the answer: nothing. There is no greater chance of success if your kid gets into an IIT or IIM, compared to if she doesn't. In fact, the IIMs, if anything, have a record of damping the probability of success by producing lifelong employees - and almost no entrepreneurs - compared to no-name degree colleges. Where's the chance of greatness here?
Yes, there will always be some kids - the few who are dying to study - cut out for academic and research excellence. For the vast majority though, the risk is greater - that they'll end up doing the opposite.
This is the seventh such death I count in two weeks - I'm sure there are more - but we're inured to the shock. Like the rains and SSC results, it's the season for suicides, when our kids senselessly take their lives because they couldn't live up to our expectations.
The last page of the paper shows some coaching class bleating about the success of its students in entrance tests. I bet if you take all these 'exam topper' cases over the last 20 years and look into them, you'll universally find careers of mediocrity that follow.
One girl, I read, takes her life because she couldn't get into the college she'd set her heart on. Another girl, a daughter of a dear friend, says she's feeling suicidal for the same reason. We counsel her - that there are a lot of things far, far more important than having the right college on your resume. Perhaps we succeed.
A parent tells me she has to leave a party early to wake up at 5 and tutor her kid, an eight-year-old. This time one counsels the parent, but not too successfully either. I wonder if this is the lot of the educated Indian parent, who feel their success will not come directly, but by turning their little ones into Einsteins.
And it's not even Einstein who's the right role model. He dropped out of school, and was a dull student. And I really don't think Indian parents push their kids because of a sadistic streak: we do so ostensibly in the best interests of our wards. But are we more than just a little misguided? Does excelling in studies really mean excelling in life?
I cannot recall a single study that establishes that school- and college-toppers turn out to be outstanding in life. But there are numerous cases to illustrate the opposite. I have a theory why. Given the regimen of sitting with textbooks and tutors when the rest of the world is living a normal life, these kids grow up unsuited to deal with the reality out there. Most end up in some employee-type career in some hole in some large organisation's wall. Toppers, as they say, come croppers. It's the people who learn to cope with the real world early who excel.
Forbes magazine said that over one-third in their list of the 400 richest people in the world last year - Bill Gates, Mukesh Ambani, Richard Branson and Michael Dell among them - did not even have a degree, leave alone top their class. And on an average, these people were worth more than the degree-holders. Certainly, if success in business is what you'd like from your child, getting a degree has no correlation.
What about non-business pursuits then? There are Nobel-winning scientists and authors who didn't finish formal education. The world of entertainment is full of the supposedly-uneducated: Marlon Brando, Humphrey Bogart, Charlie Chaplin and Sean Connery didn't need a degree to win hearts and Oscars. Neither did Bob Dylan, Louis Armstrong, Kurt Cobain and other artistes. Contrast here our own violin virtuosos L. Subramanian and L. Shankar, whose folks insisted they get an MBBS, so just in case they needed to put down their bows they could pick up the stethoscopes.
'Just in case' - this risk-averse thinking is what holds us back. What is the risk if your child doesn't get into the 'right' college or school? Think about it. You'll see the answer: nothing. There is no greater chance of success if your kid gets into an IIT or IIM, compared to if she doesn't. In fact, the IIMs, if anything, have a record of damping the probability of success by producing lifelong employees - and almost no entrepreneurs - compared to no-name degree colleges. Where's the chance of greatness here?
Yes, there will always be some kids - the few who are dying to study - cut out for academic and research excellence. For the vast majority though, the risk is greater - that they'll end up doing the opposite.
MM Hypothesis - Brain paralysing outfits
It was a strange call. A friend of mine phoned up in a bit of a tizzy the other day and asked if I could deliver one of what she called 'those motivational speeches' at the company where she worked. Not being from the Dale Carnegie or Mamata Banerjee schools of vacuous verbalisation, I first asked her what it was all about.
The lady - in human resources, by the way, at her firm - described her worries using nice MBA-type phrases like 'attrition' and 'dissatisfaction levels'. Simply put, people were leaving as they didn't like the work. The 'people' being fresh graduates. And she wondered if I could speak with them to convince them to hang on as, supposedly, things would get better.
I asked if money was a problem. She didn't think so. They started these fresh grads at Rs 40,000 to Rs 60,000 a month, amounts I personally consider obscene. And people were leaving not for better-paying jobs, but to work for less, and some even to not work at all. Soon realisation dawned on what the issue was: they were paying India's best salaries to our supposed crème de la crème from the IITs and IIMs, and placing them as patent clerks - to write patents for large, faceless US corporations. It was a 'saste-mein-patent-likhenge ' BPO operation.
Coincidentally, on that day, I met a few ex-IIT boys struggling with their startup - and two of them had worked at the very same BPO outfit. Why, I asked them, did you leave? Sir, said one, I was good at writing patents but after writing half-a dozen I figured this isn't what I maxed JEE and went to IIT for. He confessed, though, that he missed the money.
I did get back to my friend, and told her she was hiring wrong. I felt they should find people who were actually turned on by writing patent applications, and didn't have any ambitions beyond that - retired scientists, or highly-qualified but otherwise unemployed housewives who were free to use their time and brains. The BPO firm might not get to show off to their US clients that their low-end work was being done by IIT grads, but it would have a team of people who loved the work. It was likely their wage bills would significantly decline too.
In all this excitement about BPO creating jobs in India, we haven't really looked at what kinds of jobs they're creating. I'll tell you. They're all, without exception, low-end, sub-100-IQ type jobs, and - as the current attrition rate shows - we're consistently staffing them wrong. I'm amazed we're so proud of our call centres hiring fresh MBAs, when they're replacing lowly-paid customer service staff in the US who can barely speak a sentence correctly, let alone write one. Where's the pride in it? More importantly, how can we cry about attrition when we hire tigers to do pussycat jobs?
And the trend continues. I understand, virtually the entire batch of last year's grads from the Indian School of Business was hired away by these Brain Paralysing Outfits. If name-brand school is what you want, IIM-A typically produces risk-averse seekers of highly paid desk jobs, so they could be a better target for BPOs than the IITs.
And it's not just Indian firms seeking to use our talent at far below their intellectual capacity. A management grad working at one of my investee firms got an offer to work with Bloomberg in Singapore — in customer support, and at a salary no Singaporean graduate would accept even for a secretarial job. McKinsey is hiring at IITs for back-office analysts doing US-grade work at desi prices.
If you're going through the hiring process, what do you do? Well, it's hard to resist the lure of high salaries. But think about it — will you be using your brains? Is there any career growth?
Two signs of being the best in the world are that you're using your brain to the fullest — and that you get paid the most in the world to do it. Anything less is a compromise. Take the job if you want the money and have a loan to pay off — but get out of there soon. If you don't need the money, let the job pass you by.
You're not that desperate. Or are you?
The lady - in human resources, by the way, at her firm - described her worries using nice MBA-type phrases like 'attrition' and 'dissatisfaction levels'. Simply put, people were leaving as they didn't like the work. The 'people' being fresh graduates. And she wondered if I could speak with them to convince them to hang on as, supposedly, things would get better.
I asked if money was a problem. She didn't think so. They started these fresh grads at Rs 40,000 to Rs 60,000 a month, amounts I personally consider obscene. And people were leaving not for better-paying jobs, but to work for less, and some even to not work at all. Soon realisation dawned on what the issue was: they were paying India's best salaries to our supposed crème de la crème from the IITs and IIMs, and placing them as patent clerks - to write patents for large, faceless US corporations. It was a 'saste-mein-patent-likhenge ' BPO operation.
Coincidentally, on that day, I met a few ex-IIT boys struggling with their startup - and two of them had worked at the very same BPO outfit. Why, I asked them, did you leave? Sir, said one, I was good at writing patents but after writing half-a dozen I figured this isn't what I maxed JEE and went to IIT for. He confessed, though, that he missed the money.
I did get back to my friend, and told her she was hiring wrong. I felt they should find people who were actually turned on by writing patent applications, and didn't have any ambitions beyond that - retired scientists, or highly-qualified but otherwise unemployed housewives who were free to use their time and brains. The BPO firm might not get to show off to their US clients that their low-end work was being done by IIT grads, but it would have a team of people who loved the work. It was likely their wage bills would significantly decline too.
In all this excitement about BPO creating jobs in India, we haven't really looked at what kinds of jobs they're creating. I'll tell you. They're all, without exception, low-end, sub-100-IQ type jobs, and - as the current attrition rate shows - we're consistently staffing them wrong. I'm amazed we're so proud of our call centres hiring fresh MBAs, when they're replacing lowly-paid customer service staff in the US who can barely speak a sentence correctly, let alone write one. Where's the pride in it? More importantly, how can we cry about attrition when we hire tigers to do pussycat jobs?
And the trend continues. I understand, virtually the entire batch of last year's grads from the Indian School of Business was hired away by these Brain Paralysing Outfits. If name-brand school is what you want, IIM-A typically produces risk-averse seekers of highly paid desk jobs, so they could be a better target for BPOs than the IITs.
And it's not just Indian firms seeking to use our talent at far below their intellectual capacity. A management grad working at one of my investee firms got an offer to work with Bloomberg in Singapore — in customer support, and at a salary no Singaporean graduate would accept even for a secretarial job. McKinsey is hiring at IITs for back-office analysts doing US-grade work at desi prices.
If you're going through the hiring process, what do you do? Well, it's hard to resist the lure of high salaries. But think about it — will you be using your brains? Is there any career growth?
Two signs of being the best in the world are that you're using your brain to the fullest — and that you get paid the most in the world to do it. Anything less is a compromise. Take the job if you want the money and have a loan to pay off — but get out of there soon. If you don't need the money, let the job pass you by.
You're not that desperate. Or are you?
Thursday, September 09, 2004
MM Hypothesis - Focus isn't bad, it is overrated
CAREER planning was never a complex thing when I was growing up. The formula or decision tree, as one would call it today, was rather simple. It depended on what you were good at by the time you reached Class 10, or how you did in the exams that year.
If you were good at math and science, you had a choice: you could become an engineer or a doctor. If you were good at science but not math, all you could become was a doctor. If you were good at math but not science, you could get into economics or commerce. If you were good at neither math nor science, you got into arts - and then had to marry somebody rich.
I didn't agonise too much over choices because it seemed to me that I had just two. Condemned with some ability in math and science and with no sugar daddies in the family album, I had to pick between an MBBS and a B.Tech. All I knew was that I didn't care for the sight of blood on others, and so couldn't imagine cutting up people. That was the deep analysis that resulted in me going off to engineering college.
Once in college, I realised that there was nothing to interest me there. I was far more turned on by the thought of quizzes, debates, elocution contests, writing essays and doing the entire literary and extra-curricular thing than getting into cathodes, anodes and diodes.
Where did this all end up? My career, if you can call it that, hasn't been a steady upward curve that HR guys like to portray, but an all-over-the-place ungainly splotch of things ranging from selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door, writing ads, directing commercials, designing websites, marketing software, running a TV channel, starting companies, thinking up products, speaking at conferences, doing a few non-profit-type things and, now, even writing a column. I'm not past my use-by date, so there's a chance of variety in the years to come too.
Not exactly what the decision tree - or, for that matter, my parents - had in mind for me. But you know something, with the exception of a few parental ulcers, it's turned out all right.
And I'm not alone. I have a doctor friend who's a creative director in a major ad agency and wants to write. Another doctor who did his MBA now distributes movies. One of my closest friends is yet another MBA who's a film director, now on his second movie, and dying to travel. Heck, even our president was a scientist. Given all that, I'm not the best adviser when people ask for focused career recommendations.
I've been asked: Mahesh, I'm interested in music but I also think I'd like to do an MBA - what do you think? My response: Do both. An MBA or an MCA? Do both, or do neither. It really doesn't make much of a difference. To me there's little point in focus for focus' sake.
My growing up was full of stories like: look at Mr X, graduate, postgraduate, topper throughout, then a doctorate, then 24 years in company Y and he's a senior vice-president of Someobscurity with a lovely house in Sometinytown, USA, with a green card, two brilliant kids, and he's such a success.
Somehow, the highly-focused do-no-wrong Mr Xs of the world never impressed me. My heroes have been different. I've been a huge fan of Richard Feynman, the Nobel-winning physicist who thought up quantum electrodynamics, helped make the atom bomb, figured out why the first space shuttle exploded, taught drumming to the Brazilian samba team, wrote a treatise on picking locks, and also figured out how to pick up women at a bar when he was scrawny, broke and not exactly good looking.
It blows me away that Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull is a hugely successful fish farmer. Or that Neil French, the legendary creative director I had the fortune of working with, has been an account executive, an art director and, among other things he wouldn't want me to mention in a business magazine, a bullfighter.
Focus isn't bad - but it's way overrated. We need the senior vice-presidents of Obscurities, but I believe we need the Feynmans, the Andersons and the Frenchs a lot, lot more.
If you were good at math and science, you had a choice: you could become an engineer or a doctor. If you were good at science but not math, all you could become was a doctor. If you were good at math but not science, you could get into economics or commerce. If you were good at neither math nor science, you got into arts - and then had to marry somebody rich.
I didn't agonise too much over choices because it seemed to me that I had just two. Condemned with some ability in math and science and with no sugar daddies in the family album, I had to pick between an MBBS and a B.Tech. All I knew was that I didn't care for the sight of blood on others, and so couldn't imagine cutting up people. That was the deep analysis that resulted in me going off to engineering college.
Once in college, I realised that there was nothing to interest me there. I was far more turned on by the thought of quizzes, debates, elocution contests, writing essays and doing the entire literary and extra-curricular thing than getting into cathodes, anodes and diodes.
Where did this all end up? My career, if you can call it that, hasn't been a steady upward curve that HR guys like to portray, but an all-over-the-place ungainly splotch of things ranging from selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door, writing ads, directing commercials, designing websites, marketing software, running a TV channel, starting companies, thinking up products, speaking at conferences, doing a few non-profit-type things and, now, even writing a column. I'm not past my use-by date, so there's a chance of variety in the years to come too.
Not exactly what the decision tree - or, for that matter, my parents - had in mind for me. But you know something, with the exception of a few parental ulcers, it's turned out all right.
And I'm not alone. I have a doctor friend who's a creative director in a major ad agency and wants to write. Another doctor who did his MBA now distributes movies. One of my closest friends is yet another MBA who's a film director, now on his second movie, and dying to travel. Heck, even our president was a scientist. Given all that, I'm not the best adviser when people ask for focused career recommendations.
I've been asked: Mahesh, I'm interested in music but I also think I'd like to do an MBA - what do you think? My response: Do both. An MBA or an MCA? Do both, or do neither. It really doesn't make much of a difference. To me there's little point in focus for focus' sake.
My growing up was full of stories like: look at Mr X, graduate, postgraduate, topper throughout, then a doctorate, then 24 years in company Y and he's a senior vice-president of Someobscurity with a lovely house in Sometinytown, USA, with a green card, two brilliant kids, and he's such a success.
Somehow, the highly-focused do-no-wrong Mr Xs of the world never impressed me. My heroes have been different. I've been a huge fan of Richard Feynman, the Nobel-winning physicist who thought up quantum electrodynamics, helped make the atom bomb, figured out why the first space shuttle exploded, taught drumming to the Brazilian samba team, wrote a treatise on picking locks, and also figured out how to pick up women at a bar when he was scrawny, broke and not exactly good looking.
It blows me away that Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull is a hugely successful fish farmer. Or that Neil French, the legendary creative director I had the fortune of working with, has been an account executive, an art director and, among other things he wouldn't want me to mention in a business magazine, a bullfighter.
Focus isn't bad - but it's way overrated. We need the senior vice-presidents of Obscurities, but I believe we need the Feynmans, the Andersons and the Frenchs a lot, lot more.
Wednesday, September 01, 2004
Sounds Of Life
Listening to the sounds of life,
Berating questions, Smelling answers,
Certain, Uncertain,
Aware, Unaware,
Believe, Disbelieve.
A spark of truth in that fleeting moment,
Questions that beg for answers,
Trust, Distrust,
Free, Unfree,
Happy, Unhappy
The sky is blue, or is it?
The truth is there, but “damn” it way over there!
Full, Hungry,
Peace, War,
Love, Hate.
Listening to the sound of life!
Berating questions, Smelling answers,
Certain, Uncertain,
Aware, Unaware,
Believe, Disbelieve.
A spark of truth in that fleeting moment,
Questions that beg for answers,
Trust, Distrust,
Free, Unfree,
Happy, Unhappy
The sky is blue, or is it?
The truth is there, but “damn” it way over there!
Full, Hungry,
Peace, War,
Love, Hate.
Listening to the sound of life!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)