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.

Cost for low value-added knowledge and execution of tasks keep falling, due to both a falling cost of information, and the increased competition from a more level playing ground. Power no longer rests in the hands of those with knowledge, not when knowledge has become such a public good. But it rests in the hands of those that know how to manipulate and utilize knowledge in the most value-adding manner.

The newspaper industry’s present-time struggles are partly due to inflexible and inadequate responses to the lowered entry barrier (on the supply side) and lowered valuation of its current product offerings (on the demand side). Also afflicted? Future of higher education. This is succinctly illustrated in the lament on the present course of training MBAs.

What will we sell them when the algorithmic skills we are now teaching will be available at zero marginal cost? What will we be selecting for when the preeminent source of value will be the skills involved in defining values rather than those involved in calculating the best means to achieve accepted values?

And just exactly what kind of thinkers will flourish in this new economy? You know, the ones that will lead the transition from the Age of Information to the Age of Interpretation?

These thinkers will be big- and nimble-minded enough to reason coherently about radically different cultural, metaphysical, technical, disciplinary, linguistic, and methodological perspectives; and tough-minded enough to take constructive, positive action in the face of radical inconsistency and incongruity among perspectives; to stare the future in the eyes even after realizing truth is not equivalent to certainty—and to think about the world while thinking about thinking about the world at the same time, having realized that all thoughts are fallible, but thinking itself is priceless.

Critical thinking and morality in education

I had little interest in the field of education, short of writing about the inadequacies of my own education. Then I came across Shafeen Charnia’s blog, where the shortcomings of our education systems are placed in context with much of corporate and social misdeeds.

This financial crisis has exposed, some says over-exposed (because it always has, and always will exist) corporate mis-behaviour. Executives have been called anything from greedy to immoral. Suddenly, morality found itself a central theme in the discussion of education reforms.

As a precursor to aspired characteristics such as integrity and accountability, morality is no doubt a good starting place for the future leaders and participants of civil societies. Yet one psychologist so far sees flaw in the logic, and pointed out that “true moral education encourages critical thinking and cannot be assumed to promote virtuous behavior any more than education about economics can be assumed to promote thrift.”

Many would argue that moral education should be left in the hands of the parents. But when parents fail, should the system pick up the slack? And just exactly how do we promote morality through the education system? And more importantly, should the promotion of such qualities be a part of its mandate? With a system that in some instances, still struggles to impress upon its students the basic skills of life, is the promotion of moral behaviour too much to ask?

Globalization and the right responses in education reform

American children are by no mean masters of rote learning. And nor should they be. But when it comes to talks of education reform, an overwhelming amount of focus is given to better GPAs and higher SAT scores. The end goal? The right college or university.

This is all good and well when the dissemination of knowledge is protected and monopolized by educational institutions. Those were the times when self-learning was a much more laborious and arduous journey, a journey that requires mental fortitudes not possessed by most. Going forward, perhaps outcomes will one day trump processes. Equality of information access ensures everyone gets to play. In the near future, perhaps other measures of learnedness can be created to replace the diploma-driven educational market.

Some would argue that the west cannot compete with children from countries in East Asia, where children possess higher technical skills. So let them be, and accept the challenge. Focus on molding our children into more creative, conscientious, culturally adaptable and well-rounded beings. While those societies are producing the next batch of knowledge workers, perhaps we want to charge forward and nurture the above-mentioned information “interpreters”.

picture source: ~ForbiddenEmotions

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.

Regulators

It’s hard to see how the phrase “financial innovation” could return with any kind of goodwill. Driven by his “Ayn Randian passion for regulatory minimalism”, and fearing lack of competitiveness that regulation weighed on said “financial innovation”, Greenspan opened the Pandora’s box.

In the aftermaths of banking collapses and Ponzi schemes, the SEC can hardly deny its failure in oversight. In one embarrassing expose after another, SEC is blasted for its inept and financial illiterate handling of warnings, its cozy relationship with the very bankers it was charged to regulate, and became a puppet that was captive to the powerful industry.  So the court can put the likes of Madoff away and the public can demonize the banking executives all they might, but the SEC deserves just as much wrath as its former wards.

Media

No matter how the broadcast media plays it, it will always run one of two risks. One is setting high journalistic standard, cover the news it deems worthy, works to inform, to investigate, and to inspire. It then runs the risk of appearing out of touch with the public. In the US, where news is de-centralized and competition is fierce, fear of low ratings has sent most networks to the latter approach. This now dominant reporting technique sensationalizes. Reporters claim that this will resonate better with its viewers, which more often than not, send all the networks racing towards the lowest denominator. For an outsider, coverage of highway chases, celebrity mishaps and other juicy scandals does nothing but dumb down its audience.

The broadcast media then commit a severe error in omission. By catering to the public’s guilty indulgences in vices and gossip, the media has missed its calling. So while the excessive liquidity and sub-prime crisis was brewing under the surface a few years back, we heard little serious discussion on the economy and its sustainability. Remember, those were the popular stories of 2007 and 2006.

And then there is the business reporting media that cannot decide which side they are on. The conflict of interest is glaring. Do they exist as mouth piece to the CEOs and analysts invited on the show with a scripted message, or do they exist to slice and dice data in order to inform its viewers? Considering the party footing the network bills, and the ongoing gamesmanship that nobody bothered to call out, are they not just as responsible for failing to do their jobs? Since the Cramer versus Stewart showdown, CNBC and its bretherens have been largely silent on accusations lashed upon it, and instead threw themsleves whole-hearted into the chorus of public fury. Are they silent in their atonement, or merely evading public scrutiny?

Education

Capitalism is a beautiful thing, especially the version taught in business school. It’s competitive but fair, rational and deterministic, and most of all, it’s supposed to be a force for good.

Needless to say, in the past few months, the public has begun to uncover the darker side of capitalism, especially when infused with greed and corruption. Educational institutions are not immune to public probe. Deans of business school across the US are admitting to “widespread failure of leadership”. Its decline in global reputation, along with questionable US economic prospects, has led to a drop in international student enrollment in American MBA programs.

By acts of omission, b-schools nursed a culture that inflated egos, placed a premium on performance at the expense of balance, instilled a reverence for mathematical models (in finance) or salesmanship (in marketing). It also funneled an acceptance of the status-quo corporate hierarchy. My post on some of the shortfalls of business school was picked up by Shafeen Charnia in his discussion of leadership. He says:

In both teaching and the corporate world, experience can give you the confidence to be adept in front of a room, but it doesn’t ensure leadership. It seems that one is taught how to use authority versus leadership. We all know that authority is about power. And power (and its abuse) are why we still and likely always will need workers’ rights laws and unions. It is also why some students don’t get to learn.

The Public

It would be unfair and naïve to not place a fair portion of the blame on ourselves. Granted, when times were good, it was hard to work up the will to ask tough questions. But there were signs, as well as a sizable and vocal group that voiced their concerns over the mortgage market, the banking system, and the economy as a whole.

If nothing else, this recession will force the general public to become more discerning citizens. Whatever trust that existed between the people and the government, its regulatory bodies, its hawking media, will be rigorously tested.

Greed is ingrained in our nature. Many organizational psychologists recognize this indisputable character of businesses and its executives, and work very hard to find a way to align corporate interests with consumer interests. End of the day, it is my belief that only consumers and investors can force and enforce corporate responsibility and accountability. In a society where technology is the barometer for transparency, businesses are finding it increasingly difficult to hide behind carefully orchestrated PR campaigns. Authenticity is not just a buzzword anymore, because the public is becoming more astute. If we can somehow translate our need for transparency and accountability towards a system that either rewards or punishes a business for its corporate behaviour, perhaps then we will no longer rely solely on the government and its regulators to safeguard our investments.

picture source: theakker3

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.

But perhaps that was the plan all along with business schools and their generous donors. Just like the military, business schools are probably better at training problem solvers instead of thinkers.  It didn’t profess to churn out Aristotles that philosophize.  Equipped with plenty of discipline and normalized by years of standardized training, we marched into the corporate world.  I then got into bed with Excel, let someone else worry about the bottom line, and became a cog.

2. Business school made us masochists

I was a mediocre student at best, struggling to keep up with endless lists of projects, papers, presentations.  After four years of hard labor, I barely made it out with honors.

The only subject that I liked was statistics.  Not because I was a huge fan of means and standard deviations, but because statistics was the only subject where the exams were open book!  All other subjects had exams that required an immense and inexhaustible capacity to memorize and reproduce.  Whether they’d be accounting principles and subsequent treatment of business scenarios, or spewing out every piece of marketing jargon that we could to cram into a 30-page exam, or to reproduce mind boggling hedging formulations. Exams were like bulimia for the brains.

The mantra in business school was “work hard, play harder”.  It wasn’t until I left school that I found out this was the mantra employed by every other sports team or cultish business organization.  Most of us bought the idea wholesale, because work and partying looked so cool in movies, and it worked for a while with coffee slurping and caffeine pills popping.

The type-A success stories graduated to high-rolling careers in banking or consulting.  When alumni visited our school, they would boast of working 80, 90, or over 100-hour weeks – because they were so dedicated to their careers and cared so much.  We were in awe.  They told stories of themselves falling asleep in the shower or taking naps in the bathroom, we thought they were hilarious.  Worse yet, most of us thought we could beat that.  Because at 22, we were all Superman with complete disregard for our bodies, and working inhumane hours get you a badge of honour.

3. I’m not sure I would trust me with your money

I can’t say it with a straight face anymore. But back then, “maximizing shareholders’ value” was something we strived to put on every slideshow that could fit during case study presentations.  If you’ve been to a business school, you know what I’m talking about.  It’s nothing to smirk at.

There is a fine line between corporate responsibility and civil responsibility.  Sometimes the line is gray and very blurry; other times it is, unfortunately, a zero-sum game.  I’m sure all business professors are well aware of the fact, and it must be a struggle to instill business principles into our impressionable mind, without crossing that line of ethics.  Because every marketing principle, every tax minimization tactic, and every financial hedging strategy could be turned into something sinister and potentially corrupt in the hands of an ethically ambiguous individual.  Give that person a budget to work with, put in some skewed incentive structures, add lax regulation, sprinkle genuine misunderstanding and ignorance of the marketplace, then top it with a 90-hour workweek, is it really any surprise that within the last ten years, we’ve had three severe instances of corporate breach?

The bursting of the tech bubble in the early 2000s was partially blamed on the team of analysts that talked up stocks despite evidence to the contrary.  Failing to sniff the trail of accounting misconduct and fueling the speculative frenzy based on investment banking relationships, the stock market wiped out $5 trillion of market value.  Everyone had invested in the stock market then, and almost everyone I knew lost money, directly, or indirectly.  That includes my college fund.

After 9/11, accounting scandals surrounding Enron and Worldcom, among others, eventually brought down Arthur Andersen, and forced the SEC to examine the relationship between auditors and their consulting branch.  We were in school then, and we most definitely did not delight in learning the new rules ordained by Sarbane-Oxley.

Again, the first decade of the 21^st century, saw us failing again to learn from neither the speculative hubris of the tech bubble, nor from the accounting fraudulence of the Enron era: banks, lawyers, and accountants had helped to create a debt-induced housing recession.  Skeptics that doubted reckless lending practices were either ignored by the authorities, or chided by the mainstream media.

It could’ve been isolated cases of bad apples that got us to where we are today.  But it is hard not to see those disastrous endings as results of concerted, if not colluded effort by those in charge.  Incentives are a huge part of the problem, and so is the overall framework in place that resulted in the hubris.  So it really begs the question from or an ex-business school student: who’s at fault here, the system itself, or the people in charge of the system?  And given the system and the opportunity, what would I have done?

4. Where did our sense of humor go?

We all took ourselves so seriously.

We studied separately from the rest of the school.  We had our own buildings, and were usually only friends or housemates with people from the business school.  We studied in private meeting rooms named after wealthy donors, many of which were heads or former heads of something publicly listed.  We held roles in clubs manned exclusively by business students.  The air of self-importance, cliqueness, and hierarchy can put Mean Girls in a corner.  At 18, we wore our first power suit, trying to walk on heels while looking professional.  At 20, we were using various permutations of the word strategy without really understanding what it meant.  At 22, some of us had signed on to jobs that made more than our professors, business professors!  On some days, it’s a wonder how all our egos could fit in one room.

I’m sure some people had it all figured out, and probably saw the whole thing as one big joke.  I was not bright, so I went along for the ride.

5. In pursuit of sustainable careers

Talking about career burn-outs in a big banking firm for a 22-year-old was not unlike talking about hangovers from the best frat party.  It sounds painful but the sheer awesomeness of the job, and the doors it would open for you, would makes the pain worthwhile.  At the time, the popular roadmap for soon-to-be bankers was to toil as an analyst for two to three years, then leave to get an MBA, or to move on to the buy side.

It occurred to me a while ago that this short-term mindset is hardly the exception among bankers of all ranks and ages.  Hardly anyone I know had plans to stick around for the long term at one firm, and nor should they have.  But the issue of employee attrition may be the problem behind a genuine disregard of corporate responsibility.  Short-term financial incentives begets short-term profiteering behaviour.  And when an entire layer of a business is expected to depart after two or three years of sweatshop labour, how realistic is it to expect the firm to create and foster a culture that emphasizes anything long-term? So is it any surprise that a couple of years of record profits were made on backs of unreasonable risk-taking activities?  No, because they were offsprings of short-term thinking.

It’s hard to say how much structural changes will really take place as a result of this economic fall-out. Business cycles will most likely continue oscillating in response to economic activities, and careers will be made and then broken.  But as business owners, investors, consumers and employees, a longer term, more sustainable way of doing business, of investing, of consuming, and of working, may be a solid way forward.

picture source: ~roscofox

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.

After a couple of years of manipulating spreadsheets, I returned to school and picked up, then subsequently dropped, the utopian study of politics. Slightly disillusioned over the ivory tower dissection of some irksome subjects, I turned to the idea of educating myself.

Needless to say, we live in a time when knowledge dissemination could not be greater and more easily accessible. The only thing required of us is our time and attention. After divesting myself of school, I had all the time in the world. I can safely report that, if you have the time and patience to learn, then there’s someone out there willing to teach you how to do it, most likely for free.

My point here? Learning does not always need to take place in school, nor does the departure from a particular time in our lives signal the end of learning. Unbeknownst to us, when we put our heads down at jobs, our exposure to the world narrows significantly. But learning need not stop there – if not for the selfish reason of keeping ourselves relevant in this ever-changing world.

Less than half a decade ago, marketing itself revolved around the 5 Ps, whereas now it would seem dinosaurous to teach it without incorporating the power of social media and consumer dialogue throughout the online space. A couple of years ago, we approached the financial market through the lenses of Black-Scholes. But nobody in finance today would be taken seriously without acknowledging at least some of the fatal shortcomings from which modern finance was built upon.

When I felt less than inspired during my working life, the idea of education or school always gave me hope. I think the promise of education allows us to temporarily shed the shackles of our jobs in whichever its current incarnation may be, and open our eyes to new possibilities.

Now that I am working through my version of DIY education, I think I have found the right balance again. In an informal and self-controlled setting, learning can be more liberating and more rewarding than what most of us have experienced within the hallowed halls that our parents paid dearly for.

picture source: ~shimpo