How can a CEO redisover his/her role and reposition?

Whatever it is, a CEO represents the highest ranking official executive of an organization. There are some things that have not changed over time when it comes to their responsibilities. They are:

• Stand up and own things w.r.to their organizations
• Lead, direct and execute at a high level
• Set up the vision and spell out the core principles
• Understand the market, company’s position and competitors.

In today’s context of a well-established start-up eco-system, companies spring up freely. On the shoulders of the young CEOs, are stacked heaps of responsibilities. These, coupled with expectations from shareholders and market, can pull the CEOs in multiple directions and push them into an abyss. Digital ways and abundance of technology are to be accorded respect and negotiated.

What are the areas to watch out for the CEOs?

• Do not deviate from the core principles. An organization has something in its DNA. The DNA can be adapted but not completely mutated. Stick to the DNA. It is the CEO’s responsibility to fit the pieces of vision, mission, direction value, core principles, strategy etc. Your speech and actions must communicate this unswerving faith in your DNA. JPMorgan Chase stands by “Exceptional Client Service and Operational Excellence.”

• You can be successful both ways i.e. you can choose to be the public face of the company or stay behind the scenes. It is not necessary for every CEO to be like Mark Zuckerberg! Many CEOs have quietly gone about their work in the background shunning publicity.

• Markets and the investors can be unforgiving. They are quick to pounce on you and pass judgement. It is said that many CEOs live quarter to quarter! This is where your vision, your demands from the key shareholders and board and your bringing together the elements can help you navigate smoothly. Guidances and interaction with public should be managed effectively.

• Focus on learning, skilling, reskilling and development continuously. Fall in love with your employees first. The erstwhile CEO of HCL Technologies Mr Vineet Nayar practised this and shared his experiment in a book titled “Employees First and Customer Second.” Many companies like GM, Dunkin’ Donuts promoted their HR leaders into CEO positions. This is generally unheard of where it is commonplace to think of CEOs from marketing or finance. Spending time on building a dream team is the most daunting task of a CEO. One of Udemy’s (a MOOC provider) advertisements says that 42% of employees consider learning and development as a key factor before taking up a job.

• Quit acting like a COO. Many CEOs find pleasure staying in their cabins throughout the day, conducting internal reviews, pouring over the operation records with a magnifying glass and coming out with possible cost cutting measures. Does this sound familiar? If a CEO’s time goes more into the above activities, the organization has a massive problem. A CEO, who doesn’t revel in building business networks with its key customers, vendors and suppliers, will not add much value. The CEO cannot succeed in all but one who doesn’t even try stands little chance of chartering his organization. Many sales teams, out of compulsion, take their CEOs to a meeting that is moving towards closure. Some do out of compulsion knowing very well that there is no incremental value coming out from the CEOs. Some others do not hesitate to reach out to their CEOs and use their time wisely in specific areas! A CEO can lose a deal but not the value arising out of the associated network!

• When you move from an entrepreneur of a start-up to a CEO as your company grows in size, remember to reposition. This involves giving up certain responsibilities and learning to take additional things. For example, you can no longer be involved in all decisions of the organization like painting on the wall to hiring every employee. You may no longer remember every one’s name. Don’t be surprised if you get a LinkedIn request from a seemingly unknown person who happens to work in your company. Similarly, you may not be the one involved in meeting all your clients. Learn to give up in order to grow. Think of the movie “The Intern” starring Anne Hathaway and Robert De Niro.

• Finally, the CEO should aspire to be the CMO (Chief Motivational Officer)! 

Here is one metric that can be applied to the CEOs from whom you want to learn a few things. Every CEO may be part of many conferences and meetings. Take the WEF (World Economic Forum) for example. It is not uncommon for many unheard of CEOs buying space there and setting up a stall. Instead, find out how many leading universities have invited the CEO to deliver their valedictory or convocation address. There is something in that! Standing up before graduates and having the guts to share some life lessons means something. And the icing on the cake is that such invitations cannot be bought easily. Leave it to the universities to do the due diligence and you enjoy learning from their choice!

Should we certify the quality at "exit"?

In today’s India, not a day goes by without a comment on NEET (the entrance exam for medical courses) or any such entrance exam. If some student meets with an unfortunate end citing pressures, blame it on the entrance exam. Going by that logic, we should scrap all exams!  Education belongs to the centre – state area and is used or misused by both. Some states think their board education system is the best and they have the right to decide how they would admit their students. Other states follow an entrance examination. In a big country like ours and given our landscape and rural population, it is only right that all these factors are considered.

The problem arises when these factors are used to label or certify a person for his/her skills. Our focus should be on helping less fortunate amongst us and bringing them up to a nationally or globally recognizable standard. The second challenge is that we have guaranteed the right for any Indian citizen to live anywhere in the country. When a qualified person moves from one domicile to another, he or she carries the qualifications, skills and capabilities too. These should be transferable across India whether they refer to plumbing or medicine or engineering.

The first step is to define the associated capabilities/skills both technical and non-technical clearly.

This is not dissimilar to the learning outcomes. By the word “doctor”, we assume the person has certain capabilities. These do not arise because the person has passed 50 courses in medicine related subjects or has studied from a top medical college. It comes with a certain level of mastery of specific subject areas and/or associated experience. These areas can be studied as two subjects in certain universities or 4 subjects. That doesn’t matter. By listing all the capabilities, we have many advantages. The subject areas can be modified/updated depending on the way the profession evolves. The people, pursuing this profession, have clear ideas on the outcome. It also brings in consistent nomenclature to be used throughout the country. We have colleges, in India, that award “Metallurgical engineering”; “Metallurgical engineering and material science”; “Material science and metallurgical engineering”. No one knows how the capabilities of each differ. This is, certainly, not a diversity to be celebrated!

Once we do this, what is next? How do we screen the candidates for undergoing a course that will help them to acquire the said capabilities? Who gets to decide a 4-year course of university is better suited to this than the 5-year course of another university?  We don’t have standards for comparing universities by each degree or course rigorously. Where do the different state boards of education stand as compared to CBSE? To top it further, can a 100% marks secured in Mathematics of TN state board be considered equivalent to a 100% in West Bengal board? No, we will need far more mechanisms to do that.

We should aspire to set up validation mechanisms that compare different boards, courses and educational institutes against certain specific outcomes based on transparent parameters. The government owes this to the entire student community. The NIRF ranking is a good start. Consistent and verifiable display of information from each university is to be made mandatory. This is akin to display of credentials of every contestant in an election thanks to the electoral reforms. Today, if we look at the newspaper, the only parameter advertised by the institutes is the placement record. The student community knows not whether these claims are true. Every school boasts of its infrastructure and faculty. Look at the plight of students. How will they gather right information and make decisions? This is a subject that can be discussed on its own merits. But, right now, instead of getting into such level of details, why don’t we start with validating the quality at the exit gate? An example is a professional qualification like CA or CWA. They define the body of knowledge, type of exams to be written, quantum of practice or experience before someone can be said to have acquired this qualification. A doctor has multiple skills/capabilities to achieve before getting the official qualification and associated perks. That testing of the skill can come in the form of exams, interview, internship, practice at government hospitals etc. No matter which universities they study, they should sit for this prescribed procedure for acquiring qualification. The best thing is that these validation mechanisms are and should be only based on merit and be fool proof to tamper. Another useful option that can be evaluated is whether to make a minimum period of service in a rural area mandatory as part of the validation or immediately post-validation. This, if conceived and implemented well, will be equivalent to “Matching” that happens in the US and remove the disparities amongst the aspiring students when applying for post graduate courses.

In India, we have reservations in place to help disadvantaged people. It is very likely that these will be perpetual for no party dares to tweak it. Some states have high level and some others have medium level. Whatever they are, the respective state governments are free to decide on their applicability and choosing of students for various courses in their state. But, this will not come in when sitting for validation procedure. There is no reservation or nor a rank list. It is simply a formal and complete evaluation of the person as per the definition for acquiring the title or capability.  A doctor with a 90% marks in his final exams and another one with 75% marks, can practise medicine so long as they have successfully cleared the validation procedure. Imagine next time you visit a doctor, you don’t need to dissect his pedigree before deciding to trust yourself with him or her. Or we won’t have the problem of producing engineers who don’t know how to operate a machine or handle important tool sets!

Such a hands-off approach on the study and admission procedures to a clear well -articulated tight exit validation mechanisms are the need of the hour. We have the bar council, medical council and others who are more interested in the duration of course, facilities etc. There is nothing wrong in doing so. These can be guidelines issued and proper inspection agencies can verify the claims of universities periodically. But they should safe-guard the exit! Such a validation agency should be set up by the centre as an independent body. This body should have access to experts in various fields to set the standards of validation of knowledge and make it relevant and up-to-date.

Such a clean and professional validation body can benefit the nation as well as the aspirants in many ways. Firstly, it presents a uniform, consistent and comparable qualification mechanism. The would-be consumers can avail the services reasonably confident of the quality. Secondly, over a period of time, these skills can be made highly comparable to the western standards. Even if not, the gaps or differences can be understood clearly. For example, an Indian doctor needs to pass certain exams before getting approval to practise in the UK or US. What are these set of exams? What is that gap in the body of knowledge which these countries regard important? Answers to these will help our validation body to come out with recommendations, hold parleys with other agencies in the west and provide a clear direction in terms of upgrade or a country specific additional part as the case may be. Thirdly, the validated credentials serve as a reference/verification when the aspirants want to study abroad further. The foreign educational institutions need to be concerned only with the validation body to understand all the details. They will have less to worry about the type of semester, duration, quality of subjects studied etc. Finally, such a rigorous validation will have a domino effect in terms of raising the quality of education, infrastructure, faculty, labs etc. Students will automatically move to schools or colleges that offer them best chance of passing the validation. This will consequently put pressure on the institutes to own up and deliver quality education.

Technology that redefines education sector

% of Knowledge Retention

When talking about technology innovation, automatically we tend to talk of industry or service. What about education? Technology is becoming more and more ubiquitous in all educational campuses. It has become integral to the process of learning. We have online learning; interactive digital classroom. This impacts students, professionals undergoing skills enhancement or new skills acquisition as well as those imparting education. Like any other organizations, higher education institutions too must adopt technology to remain innovative.

Here is a set of technology trends relevant in this context:

1. Smart Campus – What is a smart campus? This is a digital or physical space in which smart devices and humans interact freely. Some are in the preliminary stages. But this will become a de facto phenomenon in the coming years.
2. Personalization in delivery – Like insurance or banks that personalize a product specifically for an individual based on a lot of factors, more and more personalization will happen in the way education is delivered. Take for example “Nudging.” This is about using data for driving certain behaviour in order to make learning fun and help the students succeed. The data can be used to make time for swimming or sport in between classes or prescribe good habits with examples to a lab session interspersed with studies.
   
   
3.  Credentialing tech - Eliminating fraud in education space is quite critical. Technology can help in creating and securing digital credentials. This will be quite useful for the educational institutions in admission process as well as recruitment.
4. Life cycle and career Management - Students should continue to have a centralized outlook into their educational path. This should be the case as the students move from one phase of their educational journey into another. More integration of cloud based business applications with learning management solutions will become the norm. Institutions will have more hybrid platforms to deliver, assess, measure the entire life cycle of learning and administration. This will also help in career aspirations of the students across different streams.
5. BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) – Imagine the various wireless presentation technologies that allows users as well as consumers to project materials from a device onto a screen via wi-fi. More and more institutions are adopting BYOD policies and seamless integration of the existing systems should follow. 

Indian higher educational institutions like universities, centre of excellences, research labs have shown appetite for technology. A lot more needs to be done by others in the next level. But to truly succeed, we must inject technology starting from primary schooling in order to expand the base at the bottom of the pyramid. For that, both the environment, infrastructure and reskilling of current teachers’ eco-system are required to be done.