And Chirag Says – Learn To Fail And Fail To Learn


Many of you would know my pal Chirag Mehta. He is one of the most forward thinking experts in enterprise software that I know. Even more impressive – he is an adjucnt faculty at Santa Clara University and San Jose State University, teaching graduate school classes in computer science. He is an excellent blogger – and it is with great pleasure that I host a thought provoking guest post from Chirag on my blog.

You can follow Chirag on twitter @chirag_mehta

Also check out his blogs and his linkedin profile

And Chirag says……

“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education” – Mark Twain

In a casual conversation with a dad of an eight-year old over a little league baseball game on a breezy bay area evening, who also happens to be an elementary school teacher, he told me that teaching cursive writing to kids isn’t particularly a bright idea. He said, “it’s a dying skill.” The only thing he cares about is to teach kids write legibly. He even wonders whether kids would learn typing the same way some of us learned or they would learn tap-typing due to the growing popularity of tablets. He is right.

When the kids still have to go to a “lab” to work on a “computer” while “buffering” is amongst the first ten words of a two-year old’s vocabulary, I conclude that the schools haven’t managed to keep up their pace with today’s reality.

I am a passionate educator. I teach graduate classes and I have worked very hard to ensure that my classes – the content as well as the delivery methods – are designed to prepare students for today’s and tomorrow’s world. At times, I feel ashamed we haven’t managed to change our K-12 system, especially the elementary schools, to prepare kids for the world they would work in.

This is what I want the kids to learn in a school:

Learn to look for signal in noise:

Today’s digital world is full of noise with a very little signal. It’s almost an art to comb through this vast ocean of real-time information to make sense out of it. Despite the current generation being digital native the kids are not trained to effectively look for signal in noise. While conceited pundits still debate whether multi-tasking is a good idea or not, in reality the only way to deal with an eternal digital workflow and the associated interactions is to multitask. I want the schools to teach kids differentiate between the tasks that can be accomplished by multitasking and the ones that require their full attention. Telling them not to multitask is no longer an option.

I spend a good chunk of of time reading books, blogs, magazines, papers, and a lot of other stuff. I personally taught myself when to scan and when to read. I also taught myself to read fast. The schools emphasize a lot on developing reading skills early on, but the schools don’t teach the kids how to read fast. The schools also don’t teach the kids how to scan – look for signal in noise. The reading skills developed by kids early on are solely based on print books. Most kids will stop reading print books as soon as they graduate, or even before that. Their reading skills won’t necessarily translate well into digital medium. I want schools to teach the kids when to scan and how to read fast, and most importantly to differentiate between these two based on the context and the content.

Learn to speak multiple languages:

I grew up learning to read, write, and speak three languages fluently. I cannot overemphasize how much it has overall helped me. One of the drawbacks of the US education system is that emphasize on a second or a third language starts very late. I also can’t believe it’s optional to learn a second language. In this highly globalized economy, why would you settle with just one language? Can you imagine if a very large number of Americans were to speak either Mandarin, Portuguese, Russian, or Hindi? Imagine the impact this country will have.

A recent research has proven that bilinguals have heightened ability to monitor the environment and being able to switch the context. A recent study also proved that bilinguals are more resistant to dementia and other symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease.

Learn to fail and fail to learn:

“For our children, everything they will ‘know’ is wrong-in the sense it won’t be the primary determinant of their success. Everything they can learn anew will matter forever in their multiple and productive careers.” – Rohit Sharma

As my friend Rohit says you actually want to teach kids how to learn. Ability to learn is far more important than what you know because what you know is going to become irrelevant very soon. Our schools are not designed to deal with this. On top of that there is too much emphasis on incentivizing kids at every stage to become perfect. The teachers are not trained to provide constructive feedback to help kids fail fast, iterate, and get better.

Our education system that emphasizes on measuring students based on what and how much they know as opposed to how quickly they can learn what they don’t know is counterproductive in serving its own purpose.

Learn to embrace unschooling:


Peter Thiel’s 20 under 20 fellowship program has received a good deal of criticism from people who are suggesting that dropping out from a college to pursue entrepreneurship is not a good idea. I really liked the response from one of the fellows of this program, Dale Stephens, where he discusses unschooling. He is also the founder of UnCollege. Unschooling is not about not going to school but it’s about not accepting the school as your only option. Lately if you have looked at the education startups, especially my favorite ones – Khan Academy, Coursera, and Codeacademy – you would realize the impact of technology and social networks on radically changing the way people learn. Our schools are neither designed to comprehend this idea nor to embrace it. This is what disruption looks like when students find different ways to compensate for things that they can’t get from a school. This trend will not only continue but is likely to accelerate. This is a leading indicator suggesting that we need a change. Education is what has made this country great and it is one of the main reasons why skilled immigrants are attracted to the US. Let’s not take it for granted, and let’s definitely not lose that advantage.
Photo courtesy: BarbaraLN

The Price and Prize of Social


When I read my friend Howlett’s blog on social enterprise – I had plans to write something on my blog too, but that feeling passed. I am not going to make any generalizations on social – just talking about my own case here. I will come back to the social enterprise topic some time in future.

Compared to many of my friends, I have been a late entrant to the whole social thing. And compared to many of them, I am still a lot less active on social media. Yet, I am way more advanced and active on social media than 99% of people I know. Has it helped me? yes, it has to some degree – both in my career and in my personal life ( and the distinction is lesser between the two today than even 3 years ago). But it has taken a toll too for sure in my personal life.

I started a personal blog around Christmas of 2010 – but became relatively active only about a year ago. I try to blog once a month at least – but have written about 8 posts in some months. Most of my posts have been in and around SAP and BI , but I have also written on politics, economics, food, sports and dogs. Pretty much any topic is fair game for me if there is a strong opinion I have on it.  And when it comes to opinions, I usually only have strong ones – for better or worse 🙂  .

I enjoy blogging as a medium to express my thoughts. And I have an explicit disclaimer that what I say is just personal opinion and not my employer’s opinion. But this does pose some challenges on occasion.

For example – at least partly due to blogging, SAP recognizes me as an influencer. And due to that I get some information earlier than others, and SAP picks up my T&E to attend some of their events, and I appreciate that. I try really hard to keep confidential info as confidential. But on the other hand it does not stop me from criticizing SAP on occasion.  The people who run the SAP influencer program, and senior SAP executives who talk to me have never told me what I should or should not write. But few others – including many friends – at SAP have often told me directly or indirectly that I am spreading too much negativity. I value their friendship – and I feel terrible when I hear this, since that is not my intention.

While I have no great  interest in happy talk  – I do say good things whenever I see it. And at least for HANA – me, John Appleby, Vitaliy, Harald Reiter and a few others do a lot for promoting and clarifying questions on Hana via our presence on twitter and SCN. And while I learn a lot from SAP during my interactions with them – I also pass on feedback from what I see on the field back to them. So hopefully things balance out some how from SAP’s perspective.

On career front, social in general has helped me. A large number of IBMers know me better via twitter and my blog , and it has helped me a lot in maintaining a very valuable network. I get to advise my clients better too since I have access to more people and information now due to social. I have won business in my day job thanks to name recognition from social media. And in general my managers have been quite supportive of me being active on social media. In return, I try hard to make sure there is no impact to my performance at work.

The biggest prize for me is the content I get from people like Jon Reed and Dennis Moore who curate the zillion tweets and blogs and send out high quality information. If it ever becomes a paid service, I would gladly pay for that. I would have never had a chance to get all this information without their feeds.

But for all the Prizes, I have a price to pay.  A day still has only 24 hours – and it means I am in front of a computer (or my phone) longer than I used to. And that takes time away from my family and my hobbies. That is NOT good – and is not sustainable.  So I have cut back on my social presence quite a bit. And I am sure I will overcompensate and will need a lot of time to find a good equilibrium.

If any one has a 12 step plan or something to find that equilibrium, please let me know.

Indian Political Economy – a crazy balancing act


When Pranab Mukherjee was selected as the presidential candidate by Congress, the first thought that crossed my mind was that Manmohan Singh can now do something right about the economy.  But given elections are just 2 years away – I seriously worry if populist measures will overtake good economic decisions.

India is a diverse country, and is not known to elect a politician based on economic brilliance. There is a good reason for that – the wealth accumulation is only with a small percentage of the population. Not enough votes will come in any constituency from those rich people. Added trouble is that several of the “haves” choose not to go to voting booth on election day. Lot of other things win elections – religion/caste , free benefits from government , subsidies and so on are the messages that win elections. The one other thing that wins elections is fierce loyalty to some political families.

The loyalty factor is kind of silly when taken to extremes. The most obvious case is the “Gandhi” family. Jawaharlal Nehru was India’s first prime minister. There were many other capable and eminent people who could have been the prime minister – but Gandhi liked Nehru the best. Nehru ruled several years, his daughter Indira Gandhi ruled several years and her son Rajiv Gandhi ruled after that. The current chief of Congress is Rajiv Gandhi’s wife, who is an Italian by birth – Sonia Gandhi. Her son Rahul Gandhi is an MP, and at some point after Manmohan Singh’s tenure – he will surely rule the country.  Every opportunity they get, the congress leaders will make a shout out for Rahul Gandhi to be the next Prime Minister.  What might not be well known to people outside India is the fact that Indira Gandhi had no blood relation to the father of the nation M.K.Gandhi. She took the last name of her husband Feroze Gandhi . You might wonder if a country with a billion people can only be led by one family. Well – that is how India works for the most part.

Economics in India from the time of Nehru was based on socialist principles. It led to what was called License Raj. Government decided which companies can get a license for what business, regulated prices, prevented lay offs etc. Nehru and his finance ministers wanted a “planned economy”.  C Rajagopalachari was an opponent to this idea – and the term license Raj was his creation, with a reference to the British Raj that India suffered through many decades. I think Nehru probably did not want a pure USSR type model, given that private business houses did flourish in India. But this policy led to India never exploiting its potential for 4 decades. I can be wrong – this was all before I was born, and my knowledge is all through reading and college classes and so on.

Wealthy families with ties to politicians got many such licenses.  And just like politics – business also had a few “first families” who grew by leaps and bounds when the rest of the country suffered.  Preamble to Indian Constitution states that it is a socialist republic. And a challenge in supreme court to change that was turned down. Not sure how many people remember this – but it was Feroze Gandhi who first unveiled a lot scandals involving business houses and politicians – including the LIC scandal that gave the Nehru Government its first black eye.

So throughout the first 40+ years of independence, India had a very closed economy.  The current Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was a Reserve Bank Governer and then the Dy Chairman of planning commission in the 80’s. So he has seen first hand the mess associated with the closed economy and failed policies. When he was brought into the parliament on a congress ticket, he was whom Narasimha Rao chose as finance minister.  He was the FM till 1996 – I remember that clearly since that is when I finished my college. It was fascinating to see several economics lessons from childhood being banished by a visionary Finance Minister and Prime Minister and the economy being opened up.

Looking back, I can imagine why Nehru and his colleagues believed India needed to depend on internal markets for its development. Their generation had to fight all their life to end the British rule in India. And British, and many others came to India on the pretext of trade. So international trade probably was not the most palatable thought for those leaders.  But since rupee was not convertible – there wasn’t a lot that private citizens could do in case they differed with the government’s idea of how an economy should work.

Although I did not realize at the time – I now believe Rao’s and Singh’s hands were forced.  And to give credit where it is due – the idea of reforms started with Rajiv Gandhi, although  the execution of the reforms only started with Rao in power.  There was practically no forex reserve in the country at a time in 1991 that India pledged Gold and got a bailout by IMF. Smartly, the government moved swiftly in deregulating most industries. They did stop short  of making this 100% liberalized – defence, alcohol etc continue to be regulated.

When Manmohan Singh was RBI Governor, Pranab Mukherjee was the FM. All I remember about that time is that they managed to not draw the last installment of the IMF loan that was available to them – which is admirable.  So, essentially Pranab was Manmohan’s boss. Fast forward to the time Pranab was the FM in Manmohan’s cabinet – and Manmohan was his boss, at least in theory. I don’t think he really deferred to the PMO on anything related to Finance.

Manmohan Singh never contested a Loksabha election. He was always nominated to Parliament through Rajyasabha. I think it was a wise move on his Party leadership’s part. He is not a politician – he is an economist and an administrator. There is no guarantee that he would have won an election had he contested. Pranab on the other hand is a career politician.  His genius in politics is at the same level as Manmohan’s is in economics.

His tenure as FM was not the best this time around – especially the retroactive taxation that he pushed through that was horrible , and drove a lot of investment away. Proof of the pudding is in the eating – and that pudding is not sweet any more. The economy is not growing all that much – and a lot of blame rests on the FM. And this is what Manmohan Singh needs to clean up, and in quick time.  When Pranab quit as FM to contest presidential elections, Congress seems to have decided to keep the FM role with Manmohan Singh as an additional responsibility. India needs an economist in that driver’s seat now. This is a great decision.

There are many areas where some action needs to be done quickly. With a coalition ministry, I wonder if there is a lot he can get away with, but here are 4 things that come to top of my mind .

1. Government Spending – this is not a new problem by any stretch. But it is out of hand , and it needs to be trimmed.

2. Tax reform – even if nothing else gets done on this front, the retroactive taxation policy should be killed pronto. Without that, there is no way more capital will flow into India

3. Cutting subsidies – probably going to be the hardest to do in India, especially with elections due in 2 years. There is very little chance that Manmohan Singh will be PM next time due to his age, so now might be a good time to bite the bullet and get it done.

4. Controlling inflation – when some things are regulated and subsidized, and some are not, it is hard to both grow and minimize inflation.  For example – If the LPG and Diesel fuel subsidy goes away, prices of everything will increase overnight. It will take some time for the market to find its equilibrium. On the other hand, if it is not done – growth will be affected.  Hard to balance when election is just 2 years away.

The next 2 years will be interesting to say the least !