Madhukar ShuklaProfessor Madhukar Shukla has been part of the faculty of XLRI, India's premier Business School, since 1990 where he teaches Organizational Behavior. He has worked with the National Productivity Council and Administrative Staff College of India, Hyderabad and served as Visiting Professor at ESADE (Barcelona), Spain during 1993-94. His fields of special interest include Organizational Design, Organizational Change and Development, Learning Organizations and Management of Creativity. His books: “Designing Organizations” and “Competing through Knowledge” remain relevant and well thumbed through. For the past few years it is his passion for Social Entrepreneurship (read his article in Wall Street Journal here) that consumes him.Madhukar gets the kind of adulation from his students that only rock stars and film stars get from the paparazzi. You have to visit the Madhukar Shukla Fan Club on Facebook to understand the kind of hysteria he generates among his students and XLRI Alumni across the world - many of them got re-connected to their alma mater after Madhukar set up his unofficial version of Alumni networks across the years. Since the time he joined XL and we met - he has been a friend ever since. Full disclosure, I am a fan too.Says Prem Rao ('74 batch alum) about Mad Shuks as his students call him, "Madhukar has done more than anyone else has ever done to bring together the alum of XL- across generations!". Madhukar was in Bangalore for about 10 days, giving us enough time to talk about books, music, people, films, poetry and of course his all consuming passion for building social entrepreneurs at XLRI. Here are excerpts:
The weight of the school bag has been the subject of much debate and speculation. Last January the Central Board of Secondary Education issued a circular to all heads of institutions, to lighten the weight of school bags, especially at the primary level. (see the video here). Sometimes schools have come up with ideas to alleviate this weighty issue. Apart from limiting the number of books that children need to study, schools have also been asked to make arrangements so that students up to Class II can deposit their books in the school itself. Diverse studies on school bag weights conducted by different NGOs across the country have found the average weight carried by a student to a school to range beteen 6kg and 10kg. Internationally, most countries observe norms that limit the weight of school bags to less than one-seventh of the weight of the student. The BBC quotes a study that shows that more than a third of Italian pupils carry bags which weigh more than 30% of their body weight at least once a week.The studies advise limiting the weight of backpacks in accordance with labor law standards. "Rate of low back pain in children are approaching those seen in adults. Although the economic importance of the problem is small at this age, the lack of certified limits for backpack carrying is short-sighted."While India's largest public school system - The Kendriya Vidyalayas actually prescribed a formula for the weight of the school bag. As per the norms, the bag for children in Class-I and II should not be more than two kg, while it should be less than 3 kg for students of Class-III and IV. The prescribed weight is less than four kg for children in Class V-VIII, while the upper limit is six kg for students in Class VIII-XI. What the norms miss out is that the school bags do not carry just books. There are story books, Music, DVD, make up, games, the occasional pets, iPods... the list goes on. Check out ths video and educate yourself.["allowFullScreen":"true","allowscriptaccess":"always","src":"http://www.youtube.com/v/9cqStzggozU&hl=en_US&fs=1?color1=0xcc2550&color2=0xe87a9f","allowfullscreen":"true"]WHAT IF...What if we give each child a Kindle (or equivalent eBook reader) on the first day they step into school. We could then load all the readings, supplementary reading and perhaps even the school library on to the reader. We could put the entire set of readings (class 1-12) along with the Wikipedia made available to them. The content could updated once the children go to the school or to a cybercafe. The weight of all the books and notebooks could be replaced by this device that weighs approximately 300 gms or about 10 oz.ADVANTAGES1. Latest content available and corrections incorporated easily. Think of the freeware that is available today (MIT has 1900 courses available for free as on date)2. Children can read at their own pace. Visually challenged readers can use audio features to listen to the text. There are lots of text to speech converters available.3. Possible to submit homework also online. Projects etc will be better researched4. Cheaper than buying textbooks and notebooks every year and for each subject5. One time cost of the Kindle can be paid back over the 12 years.UNANSWERED QUESTIONS1. How do we make Wi-fi connectivity available in rural areas?2. Who will bear the cost of the e-Book readers - esp for those who cannot afford it?The answer to both can be in Corporations stepping forth to put money gifting readers in schools they adopt. The content can be pre-loaded before giving it to the student. Once a quarter the content can be updated. Mass scale adoption will dramatically bring down the cost of the reader. Maybe we can experiment by doing a pilot in someNo more back breaking school bags. Now the children could simply carry their lunch box, water bottle, the iPod,Makeup box to school. How much easier would that be :)-----------------Acknowledgement: My friend Kaushik Chakraborty first suggested this idea. He recommended we give a Kindle to each employee when they come to for a Leadership Development program.
Mr R Gopalakrishnan of the Tata Group recently did this story on Corporate Novels for the Economic Times. The article is a great recall of all the "Corporate Novels" that have been written in recent times. In this story called Mixing Business With Pleasure, they have traced authors from corporate India who have penned their novels with stories that somewhere resonate with their experiences. While it is fiction, almost all of them have perhaps been triggered off by some incident or character(s) they have encountered for real. This probably is the formula for realistic fiction that the readers have appreciated generously as well as the sales figures of all these novels will vouch for. I feel honored that Mr Gopalakrishnan is aware of my novels - but I will feel better if I know that he read them as well. Do you think he has?
I believe this is maybe the tipping point. We are entering the phase where firms will slowly start becoming more overt in its political views. To take on the might of a government even when there is a potential economic downsize to it. Google has just initiated phase three. After all, Youtube, Facebook and Twitter are already blocked in China. Will it happen? A tipping point is always interesting to watch. What do you think?
Work and learning are becoming the same activity in a knowledge economy. Rather than sending executives off to a learning institution, it makes more sense to increase the learning component of their work. In the company I work for, nGenera Insight, our education program is quite simple: Everyone must blog. By blogging, they need to think about what’s going on the world. They need to become knowledgeable and develop their craft of writing. They need to put forward their thoughts and defend them. This is Executive Education fully integrated into work.
The best trendspotters are people who have this insatiable curiosity. It is not about age, background or education. You could have older people who possess a sharp curious mind and younger people who don't. Prof Henry Mintzberg (at McGill University), Klaus Schwab (at the World Economic Forum) and Paulo Coelho in my mind are great examples and inspiration of people who continue to be curious and have an innate ability to tap into trends. Paulo Coelho for example, is one of the first to have used twitter to interact with his readers (over 300,000 followers @paulocoelho), or to identify and promote pirate sites that offer his books illegally electronically on the Internet (http://paulocoelhoblog.com/pirate-coelho/ ) a great example about how you can have the courage and the vision to question your own industry…
Mass Customization may seem like an oxymoron. When you think of something as individualistic as career choices, it begs the question how far such a thing is possible. Organizations have long defined successful careers to represent a ladder. Ladders were for lads and too bad if the ladies chose to opt out of it. With the changing demographics, all that is changing at a reasonable pace.
Is Fidelity Outdated? When you ask such a question on Valentine's Day, it tends to grab attention. Anuradha Verma of The Times of India. Pritish Nandy, Suchitra Krishnamurthy, Rupa Ganguly have all shared their views. Columnist and film maker Pritish Nandy says, "Fidelity is not the issue. Has never been. What is at issue is fidelity on demand. You cannot get fidelity on demand in a marriage or any other relationship for that matter. People are faithful when they love someone enough to give up every other option, every other choice. And trust me, despite the contempt with which it is treated by many people today, fidelity is still pretty much common. It is not that impossibility which we think it is."
How do companies identify high potential employees? Different organizations use different approaches. There are a host of assessments that can provide data on various competencies that makes leaders successful. There are competencies that leaders need to translate their vision of the future into a strategy. They need to have the competencies to communicate and inspire the stakeholders to buy into that vision. They also need to be able to cobble together a team that will execute that plan.