📝 Quote of the Quarter
Human mind does not deal well with nonevents. The
quarter began with my wife Gauri returning from Kailash parikrama in early
July. In the background was the nonevent: something that could have happened but didn't. It was to occur two months later. As I continue with life, taking tomorrow for granted, Kahneman's quote is a great reminder (see My favorite Daniel Kahneman quotes)
𖣯
Strategy Corner
The progress of AI is surprising to me, like most of you. And
yet it feels like a deja vu. In this context, it was wonderful to revisit the
chapter on creative destruction by Joseph Schumpeter written in 1942. For him,
"Every piece of business strategy acquires its true significance only
against the background of that process (of creative destruction) and within the
situation created by it." For more, check out: Joseph Schumpeter, creative destruction, and the significance
of business strategy.
🏃♂️ Innovation Stamina
Corner
Prof Rishikesha Krishnan organized an innovation workshop in
July as a parting event at IIMB where his friends and collaborators came
together. I gathered three kinds of challenges from the workshop: Measurement,
management, and mindset. What should we measure to assess the innovation
capacity of a firm/sector/country? How are R&D and innovation managed in Indian firms and at the sectoral policy level? What cultural barriers hinder the
growth of innovation capacity in India? Hope to write more on this in the
coming months.
🚀 Deep Tech Corner
It was an honor to have Prof. Satynarayanan Chakravarthy,
co-founder of The ePlane
Company as a guest speaker in my course "Strategic management
of technology and innovation". Over the past three decades, Satya has
done something remarkable at IIT Madras. He set up a world-class laboratory on
combustion, bet on a technology (electric air transport) that is challenging
combustion, and built an eVTOL startup that will fly us from airport to home in
20 minutes. Hats off to Satya and team!
🎨 Design Thinking Corner
It was a pleasure to interact with a diverse set of people
like school principals and real estate developers and explore design thinking
as a participative problem-solving approach. I think I was successful in
communicating why we have poor designs like the SIR citizenship
enrollment or public space crowd management in temples. However, the spirit of
fail fast was harder to communicate. Participative problem solving was alien to
both school principals as well as to the real estate developers. In fact, one
of the key challenges was that people were turning to the person at the top for
solving problems, making him/her the bottleneck.
🧘♀️ Mindfulness Corner
I continued with the "confusion to clarity" theme
in my mindfulness workshops. Confusion is better than false clarity.
Acknowledging that I am confused and awareness of the challenge is an important
starting point for the journey from confusion to clarity. And sometimes false
clarity expresses itself in odd places like while having samosa and chai. And
we start arguing over whether "Ram was real?" This is where I
remember Nagarjuna and his two truths perspective. Sometimes
confusion turns into a black cloud and pushes us into odd corners. The recent
student suicide in IIT Bombay prompted me to ask, "What are the key dimensions of mental health?"
🤔 Question of the quarter
"How do I get rid of the fear of failure?" asked
one participant during the tea break. He was a business owner running his
business successfully. But a past failure haunted him. Aren't success and
failure two sides of the same coin? With a strong desire to be successful, are
we sure we are asking the right question?
📚 Book of the quarter
Technological progress implies human progress, sooner or
later. That is a dominant assumption of the modern society. Daron Acemoglu and
Simon Johnson challenge it in their book "Power
and progress: Our 1000-year struggle over technology and prosperity".
In India around 1750, spinning a hundred pounds of raw cotton took 50,000 hours
of labor. By 1825, with industrial automation in Britain it was down to 135
hours of labor. But the real income didn't move much. Acemoglu & Johnson
say, "The spending power of an unskilled worker in the mid-1800s was about
the same as it had been fifty of even one hundred years earlier." In
contrast, the second half 19th century, British railways increased productivity
both in transport and across several other sectors, and also generated new
opportunities for labor. In India though, "The railways became an
instrument of oppression both by commission and omission," adds Acemoglu.
AI seems to be going along the textile automation trajectory, the authors warn.
⛺ Trekking Corner
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