On Learning & Education
In retrospect, I've been very lucky to have received the rigorous and high-quality education that I had. But could it have been better? Are business schools evaluating itself for the role it inadvertently played in the financial drama of 2008? Are our education systems up to snuff in the 21st century? Will technology and new communication techniques fundamentally change the way we learn? Here are some thoughts.
Armed with technology, globalization changed the way of life for many of us in a shocking span of time. The way we work, live, communicate, learn, has been completely transformed. Learning has undoubted changed too. But how will this change impact the way we value education and knowledge-based work going forward?
In the past few years, more and more educational materials have moved off of campus firewalls, and onto the web for all to consume. We are talking about entire course curriculum, reading list, lecture notes and videos. When the accessibility of information is no longer constrained, and the cost for knowledge acquisition is inconsequential, what does that mean for the education of knowledge workers?
Horizontal playing field
A horizontal playing field means that students and workers in less privileged countries or regions have a much more equal starting point, where the only determinants of success is motivation and hard work.
Right now, the up-and-coming parts of the world are still performing relatively mundane and technical tasks outsourced from the west. But let’s not forget how much of a leap that had been already. Computer engineers two decades ago were a rare breed and commanded high salaries. Nowadays, programmers with little business experiences are a dime a dozen. And they compete directly with well-educated coders from India, Russia, and China.
But as the next generation of customer service operators and programmers become exposed to the vast sea of free information readily available on the net, what’s preventing them from “pricing options, or calculating weighted average cost of capital, or mechanically ploughing through ‘five forces’ analysis”? It seems to me that any activities that require only technical proficiency will become low value-added tasks going forward, and can be contracted out.
Value deflation in certain areas of knowledge-based work
In the coming decades, information will become more free and more readily available than ever before. As a result, more than one category of jobs will be made obsolete, or attain the endangered status in their current forms. It’s not only the low level tasks that get outsourced anymore. Read more...
The human mind cannot grasp the causes of phenomena in the aggregate. But the need to find these causes is inherent in man’s soul. And the human intellect, without investigating the multiplicity and complexity of the conditions of phenomena, any one of which taken separately may seem to be the cause, snatches at the first, the most intelligible approximation to a cause, and says: “This is the cause!”
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace [via The Big Picture]
The populist pitch-forking movement has duly commenced, and fingers are pointed in all directions. In a classic case of pot calling the kettle black, all the players are now seizing populist rage to divert attention from itself. The momentum must be maintained, should the public calm down and re-assess, everyone is culpable.
Government
The whole debacle surrounding the AIG bonus is ridiculous. The government passed the legislation with the inserted lines that allowed for bonuses in the first place. Even if Chris Dodd is the culprit, surely it only serves to highlights the incompetence and indifference of the system. If what he’s saying is true (that the administration made him do it), then it shows complicity. This indignant outrage shown by politicians from both sides is nothing but political grandstanding to placate mass anger. Better this mess is channeled towards the evil executives than at the government, right?
The de-regulation of US financial system started with Clinton, and continued with the Bush administration. Policies from ten years ago directly contributed to the California black-out (Enron), and the current mortgage crisis. Without the government’s collusion in both banking deregulation and predatory lending practices, corporate greed would’ve had little opportunity to spread.
It doesn’t take much digging to see the hypocrisy of politicians now railing against exorbitant executive compensation or incompetence. For the most part, those very politicians were responsible for the rise in reckless risk-taking behaviour of those financial Einsteins. Members of the public are beginning to see the thinly-guised witch hunt as a way to deflect blame and secure public support. This kind of shameless and ingratiating behaviour from publicly-elected officials is insulting and condescending: because it pushes accountability away from itself, and props up effigies of greedy corporate executives for the public to burn. Read more...
If I was eighteen, and clueless about what I wanted to do with my life, I would do business school all over again.
I’m not eighteen anymore, so I would not go back to business school. Not when there are many other ways of learning out there.
1. I’m not fit to give you any business advice
A couple of months ago, a friend of mine headed back to school in a remote community in interior BC. She wrote to me, excitedly about her new surroundings. She was also excited about a business idea she’s had: the campus was set up miles away from the nearest town, so why not start a grocery delivery service for the hungry students? I was the only person she knew with a business degree, so it found me.
I started to write back somewhat vague and non-committal, than I stopped typing, hit the ENTER key, and wrote the following: “The thing is, a business degree is probably the least helpful to someone that wants to start their business, because in business school, all we got trained on was how to service someone else.”
I wrote this to concede that I had little practical advice for her.
I was not wholly clueless when it comes to entrepreneurship – I did get my hands dirty on a business for a couple of years during university, and that has proven to be one of the biggest confidence-booster of my life. But whatever skills I had gained during this time became neutered in a classroom setting.
School trained us to become task-masters, one that is great at driving efficiency, expediency, and a razor-sharp ability to prioritize. We become extremely proficient at functional tasks, but terrible at matters involving creativity and imagination. It takes a smart and able person to answer a question correctly, but a non-conformist to re-phrase the questions posed in the first place. In face of the current crisis, I think that kind of out-of-the-box inquisitiveness might have been helpful. Read more...
I’ve felt ambiguous and conflicted about education for a long time, because it inspires while it stifles. But here are two ways it has always resonated with me.
One is learning for learning’s sake. Now looking back, and without sounding nauseatingly cheesy, there is something pure and unadulterated in the joy of soaking in the world. I was never a science person. But I still remember in Grade 11, the excitement I felt bubbling from my belly, when trying to explain to my mom the idea of atmospheric pressure and rain formation and somehow likening it to the pan on the stove that was steaming our vegetables for dinner.
But I am also diabolically practical. So this form of learning left me feeling somewhat indulgent. Coming from a family where money was never something to be taken for granted, I always felt slightly guilty if what I was putting in my brains was somehow not contributing to the process of attainment that would eventually be responsible for putting food on the table.
The second source of turn-on is the sometimes masochistic pleasure of having to perform under pressure. Yes, I am perfectly aware of what that sentence sounded like. But the truth is, when overwhelmed to just the right degree, education has contributed greatly in honing my “getting-things-done” skills.
For me, education hit the right spot in high school. It was broad enough to sample from, yet challenging in its particularities to stimulate quite a bit of brain activities. But university, not unlike technical colleges, tends to churn out specialists, whether in the fields of art history, chemical engineering, or accountants.
The often repetitive and dogmatic field of business studies made me more cautious, practical, and cynical about the institutional delivery of education. It also iterated the value of an education by continually flashing dollars signs in front of students in the forms of sponsored conferences, prized internships, and the ultimate plushy fruit – a prestigious, high-paying job. Read more...
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