Startups have open offices – mostly. Everyone from the twenty year old founder to the twenty one year old employees are all sitting around in open cubicles. It is a visible symbol of a non-hierarchical work culture. In a country where hierarchy is everywhere, this comes across like a breath of fresh air and becomes a great draw while hiring. But are they really productivity boosters (because the boss can keep an eye on you) or creativity enhancers?
As if to test my resolve someone sent me a screen shot of Ola cabs who purportedly were now offering a boat service to get around the city. Look at the way humor works in the social media world. Venkatesh Krishna who tweets as @VenkatTweetz modified the Ola screen shot and suggested that a boat service would be more effective instead. That screenshot seemed to have gone viral. So there was no reason to suspect that it was someone’s idea of a joke.
Left to nature alone, the population on earth would be give or take 50% men and 50% women, according to what's become known as Fisher's Principle. But look at the statistics: US has just 15% women in C-suite, only 20% senators or law firm partners. Women surgeons represent only 21% of surgeons. For all those who believe that women are more than adequately represented in the teaching profession, remember that only 24% of full time tenured professors are women. How do we explain this?
It is always the same story. We have no dearth of B Schools in India. We have more than 150 of them in that list. That list does not include the departments of business education and management in every other university that grants the equivalent of an MBA. Talking of Indian Institutes of Management, we now have 19 of them – the latest one being in a place called Sirmaur, Himachal Pradesh. Being located in a remote location makes it harder to find good faculty to come and teach there and even harder for employers to trudge the extra distance to hire one or two students. In any case only 10% of MBAs are really employable.Here are 5 easy to implement ideas that will improve business education in India.
Pursuing an unusual goal is not the sign of having a jagged resume. It is usually an accomplishment that makes you wonder, what motivated the person to take up the challenge. It usually is something that brings out the desire in a person to persist despite setbacks and hardships. The person may finally not even have succeeded. But it is quality of persistence that a jagged resume will show far more effectively than a regular resume.
Laurie Pickard (Twitter @NoPayMBA ) who now lives in Kigali, Rwanda, completed her MBA-level education using only MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). She is now telling the world how to do it through her website NoPayMBA.com and Fortune, CNN/Money, Financial Times have all talked about her idea. She created to document her studies and to serve as a resource to other learners, has been visited by readers from nearly every country in the world.
I was always told when I was growing up that those who need style do it because they lack substance. Be good at your work and that is good enough. This belief is not true anymore. Both are important. Branding is really about “the truth told well” as a well-known agency used to say.
