Why Indian Universities should abolish ‘placements’.

It should be obvious, but it isn’t. Placements are killing Indian education.
Every year, families, friends, neighbours and marriage bureaus go frantic about the size of ‘packages’ in Indian universities. 

What do we lose?

  • Work and fun become disjoint - It was Noel Coward who said, “Work is more than fun”. Thanks to the perceived safety blanket of mass recruitment we produce millions of engineers graduates who work at a bad job five days a week, just to have ‘fun’ on weekends. Beyond the indignity of labor, it signals a complete commoditization of a nation’s talent — like toothpaste or detergent. 
  • A throttled campus experience - Right from day 0 of college, there’s an inclination to do things that supposedly ‘help your profile’. While that is a good goal in itself, it loses meaning when all activities on campus are somehow meant to score brownie points for placements. In the process, most of us lose curiosity towards truly remarkable things. Undergraduate education, perhaps the best place to experiment and fail at things, becomes a throttled assembly line.
  • Contagious to management education - A bunch of extremely talented students pivot to CAT - entrance test for India’s prestigious institutes of management. For the most part, it is merely a great way to defer placements by two years. With lucrative salaries at offer, it makes intuitive sense for almost everyone. That compromises however, our ability as a nation to push frontiers of thinking. I’d argue that there are far, far better ways to leverage such talent than placements.

Imagine a world without mass recruitment

  • More serendipity, better jobs - Without the safety blanket, undergraduates will be pushed to pursue opportunities right from their sophomore year. In the process, they will build relationships with interesting people across industries. They will understand their true likes and dislikes. A job that is not determined by a 3 hour interview. A job where you are irreplaceable. A job that goes beyond a standard employer-employee pact.
  • Relaxed teenagers -  Somehow, all of this placement paranoia starts after high school. Subconsciously, parents are investing in an insurance policy that yields returns after college. With this insurance policy removed, teenagers will deeply engage with their ‘hobbies’. We won’t be a nation full of teenagers whose passions never go beyond being ‘hobbies’ at footnote of resumes.
  • Attack bigger problems - India’s IT services revolution is what Foxconn is to China. Not of all us are BPO workers, but the minuscule number of new solutions emerging out of India is alarming. Do we really want to be a nation with 1.3 billion people writing code at the lowest price for rest of the world? Can it be the only way to achieve 10% GDP growth?

    The argument isn’t against jobs, it’s against mass recruitment. It’s about finding our true aspirations beyond a salary cushion. Humanity’s greatest leaps are made by people who had only two choices - to succeed or die. How many of us are deliberately willing to position ourselves?

Effectual versus Causal: ‘Research’ in startups

It’s a critical balance, often debated among entrepreneurs. 

  • What amount of time and effort should be invested before launch?
  • Is granular research proportional to an entrepreneur’s understanding of risk?
  • At what level of detail can research start to stifle speed?

Professor D.Sarasvathy draws a clear line through a nuanced rendition of the famous Alan Kay quote - “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” 

In Prof. Sarasvathy’s words, entrepreneurs think Effectually - “To the extent that we can control the future, we do not need to predict it.” Managing uncertainty and chaos.

Causal thinking, on the other hand, says “To the extent that we can predict the future, we can control it.” Prediction dictates, while control takes a backseat.

The ‘control’ bit in Effectual thinking doesn’t imply total ignorance of research/data/evidence. It’s like being an airplane pilot. Before taking off, you’d at least ask the Air Traffic Control if there are planes on the same runway, won’t you?  That’s the bare minimum to fly.

P.S: If you have a moment, please read the Paper by Prof. Sarasvathy, delightfully sprinkled with annotations.

Regardless of whether your goal is to innovate around a product, service, or business opportunity, you get good insights by having an observant and empathetic view of the world. You can’t just stand in your own shoes; you’ve got to be able to stand in the shoes of others. Empathy allows you to have original insights about the world. It also enables you to build better teams.
“We look for people who are so inquisitive about the world that they’re willing to try to do what you do.”
We call them “T-shaped people.” They have a principal skill that describes the vertical leg of the T — they’re mechanical engineers or industrial designers. But they are so empathetic that they can branch out into other skills, such as anthropology, and do them as well. They are able to explore insights from many different perspectives and recognize patterns of behavior that point to a universal human need. That’s what you’re after at this point — patterns that yield ideas.
These teams operate in a highly experiential manner. You don’t put them in bland conference rooms and ask them to generate great ideas. You send them out into the world, and they return with many artifacts — notes, photos, maybe even recordings of what they’ve seen and heard. The walls of their project rooms are soon plastered with imagery, diagrams, flow charts, and other ephemera. The entire team is engaged in collective idea-making: They explore observations very quickly and build on one another’s insights. In this way, they generate richer, stronger ideas that are hardwired to the marketplace, because all of their observations come directly from the real world.
Strategy by Design, Fast Company

Why do entrepreneurs exist?

A CEO whom I particularly admire, puts Entrepreneurship as a form of Jehad - blatant, irrational and dogged (religious) warfare. It’s not about being right/wrong, better/worse or rudimentary/outstanding. It’s an existential question.

The fatigue amongst readers with Steve Jobs quotes notwithstanding, this one hits the nail right on.

I think most creative people want to express appreciation for being able to take advantage of the work that’s been done before us. I didn’t invent the language of mathematics I use. I make little of my own food, none of my own clothes. Everything I do depends on the other members of our species and the shoulders that we stand on. And a lot of us want to contribute something back to the flow. It’s about trying to express something in the only way that most of us know how—because we cannot write Bob Dylan songs or Tom Stoppard plays. We try to use the talents we do have to express our deep feelings, to show our appreciation of all the contributions that came before us. 

That’s what has driven me. 

— Steve Jobs, in “Steve Jobs” by Walter Isaacson.

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