I will be back and blogging away end of January 2009. Till then this much needed break will be welcome to concentrate on what really matters in my life.
Taking a 6 month break.....
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Monday, July 27 /
I will be back and blogging away end of January 2009. Till then this much needed break will be welcome to concentrate on what really matters in my life.
Leadership
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The key leadership ideas of Ronald Heifetz (King Hussein Bin Talal Senior Lecturer in Public Leadership at the Kennedy School)
Leadership
The activity of mobilising the community to tackle tough problems.
Technical problems
Challenges for which we already know the solutions. They generate only temporary stresses and can be solved with knowledge – eg, a faulty car engine.
Adaptive challenges
Problems in which the problem or the solution is not clear-cut. An example would be a patient suffering from heart disease; the patient can be restored to operating capacity but only if he takes responsibility for his health by making appropriate life adjustments. Adaptive work requires learning, and a change in values, beliefs or behaviour.
Equilibrium and disequilibrium
Leaders must balance stability and periods of stress or conflict. Adaptive change tends to require sustained periods of disequilibrium – but it must be carefully paced.
The pressure-cooker metaphor
Used to describe the importance of balancing equilibrium with disequilibrium. If the pressure gets too high, the pressure cooker can blow up. On the other hand, with no heat, nothing cooks.
Work avoidance mechanisms
People often fail to adapt because they want to resist the pain, anxiety or conflict that comes with engagement with the problem. Examples are holding on to past assumptions, blaming authority, scapegoating, denying the problem, jumping to conclusions or finding a distracting issue.
Charismatic authority
In times of distress, the community tends to trust those who appear active, who have a vision, and who promise stability. This can prevent people from engaging with problems when they must. Charismatic authority can generate a mindless following, or can devolve into bureaucratic institutions.
A holding environment is any relationship in which one party has the power to hold the attention of another in order to help them face up to their problems. Franklin Roosevelt and the programmes of the New Deal provided a holding environment for the nation during the Great Depression. The term originated in psychoanalysis to describe the relationship between the therapist and the patient.
Emily Stokes is a journalist currently studying at Harvard as a Kennedy Scholar and the above note was published in the FT.
Anthony Giddens on Climate Change and Culture
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Why Culture Matters: Climate Change is Cultural Change.
Essen Conference 2009
The Eclipse came and went
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Wednesday, July 22 /
India was no exception with most of the population getting a good view
Rajesh Kumar Singh/AP
Rajesh Kumar Singh/AP
Manan Vatsyayana/AFP/Getty
Rajesh Kumar Singh/AP
Next eclipse will take place on 11th July, 2010
Meeting Parliamentary Under Sectretary of State - David Kidney
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Volker Beckers - Chief Financial Officer, RWE Npower (far-left) and David Kidney - Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (centre)
Portcullis House, Houses of Parliament, 21st July 2009
Closing remarks by David Kidney at Npower Energy Challenge 2009 event at Westminster
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David Kidney - Parliamentary Under Secretary of State handing out letters of congratulations signed by the Prime Minister Gordon Brown
Overall Winners - Imperial College London
Undergraduate Joint-Winners - Oxford University
Portcullis House, Houses of Parliament, 21st July 2009
Overall Winners - Imperial College London
Undergraduate Joint-Winners - Oxford University
Portcullis House, Houses of Parliament, 21st July 2009
Visited Westminster
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Big Ben
Westminster Terrace has a wonderful view of the Thames and London Eye
The Imperial Team at Westminster Hall, the oldest part of Palace of Westminster (built in 1097). This hall has also seen coronation banquets (George IV in 1821) and state funerals (Winston Churchill).
Top Row - Phil and Andy
Bottom Row - Paul, Me, Alan and Sandro
Exclusive - Members of Parliament Bar on the terrace. As outsiders can't buy drinks here, this meant an MP picked up the tab for everyone.
Npower organized the day for us as a prize for winning the Npower Energy Challenge 2009. After the tour (included checking out the House of Commons), presentations and drinks reception, there was dinner at the Palace of Westminster.
Palace of Westminster (British Parliament)
21st July, 2009
Attended: Opening night of the BBC Proms
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The 2009 BBC Proms: Grand Opening night with Stravinsky, Tchaikovsky, Brahms, and the BBC Symphony Chorus & Orchestra.
Programme
Stravinsky
Fireworks 4’
Chabrier
Ode à la musique 9’
Tchaikovsky
Piano Concerto No. 3 in E flat major 16’
interval
Poulenc
Concerto for two pianos 20’
interval
Elgar
In the South (Alassio) 22’
Brahms
Alto Rhapsody 13’
Bruckner
Psalm 150 9’
Ailish Tynan soprano
Alice Coote mezzo-soprano
Stephen Hough piano
Katia and Marielle Labèque pianos
Jirí Belohlávek conductor
17th July 2009, Royal Albert Hall
A student challenge to build a zero emissions electric vehicle, and race around the world in 80 days
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Thursday, July 16 /
A good friend who is a colleague in the MSc at Imperial College London has decided to enter the history books in a race that would cover 40,000km across 6 continents in 80 days. Andy Hadland was one of my team mates for the successful Npower Energy Challenge 2009; he has now become part of the student-management team that is leading this project. Sharing the office at Imperial College has meant a lot of insider information about the project has filtered to me - definitely welcomed in an otherwise monotonous hard-working graduate environment. Furthermore, sharing the office has meant that everyone around shares the same level of excitement as Andy and can't wait for the race to begin next year.
Catching a glimpse of Brown and Mandelson
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Tuesday, July 14 /
An unannounced visit to Imperial College meant that both these characters of political folklore passed me while on the way to my office today.
Cultural Theory
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Sunday, July 12 /
Cultural Theory is a simple and transformational idea that throws up some remarkable new ways of looking at big, complex problems.
'As Matthew Taylor explains, “The four paradigms can be understood as theories of change in themselves and as critiques of the other ways of doing things. Indeed, cultural theory argues that each paradigm gains its strength primarily from its critique of the others."'
By: Nick Marsh
'As Matthew Taylor explains, “The four paradigms can be understood as theories of change in themselves and as critiques of the other ways of doing things. Indeed, cultural theory argues that each paradigm gains its strength primarily from its critique of the others."'
By: Nick Marsh
Farewell to an India I Hardly Knew
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MUMBAI, India — The first thing I ever learned about India was that my parents had chosen to leave it.
The country was lost to us in America, where I was born. It had to be assembled in my mind, from the fragments of anecdotes and regular journeys east.
Now, six years after returning to the country my parents left, as I prepare to depart it myself, the mind goes back to the beginning, to my earliest pictures of it.
India, reflected from afar, was late-night phone calls with the news of death. It was calling back relatives who could not afford to call you. It was Hindu ceremonies with saffron and Kit Kat bars on a silver platter.
India, consumed on our visits back, was being fetched from the airport and cooked a meal even in the dead of night. It was sideways hugs that strove to avoid breast contact. It was the chauvinism of uncles who asked about my dreams and ignored my sister’s.
It was wrong, yet easy, to feel that we did India a favor by coming home. We packed our suitcases with things they couldn’t get for themselves: Jif peanut butter, Hellmann’s mayonnaise, Gap khakis. These imports sketched a subtle hierarchy in which they were the wanting relatives and we their benefactors.
My cousins in India would sometimes ask if I was Indian or American. I saw that their self-esteem depended on my answer. “American,” I would say, because it was the truth, and because I felt that to say otherwise would be to accept a lower berth in the world.
What it meant to be American was to be free to invent yourself, to belong to a family and a society in which destiny was believed to be human-made.
I looked around in India and saw everyone in their boxes, not coming fully into their own, replicating lives lived before. If only they came to America, I told myself, so-and-so would be a millionaire entrepreneur; so-and-so would be as confident in her opinions as her husband; so-and-sos’ marriage would be more like my parents’, with verve and swing-dancing lessons and bedtime crossword puzzles; so-and-so would study history and literature, not just bankable practicalities.
I moved to India six years ago in an effort to understand it on my own terms, to render mine what had until then only belonged to my parents.
India was changing when I arrived and has changed dramatically, viscerally, improbably in these 2,000 days: farms giving way to factories; ultra-cheap cars being built; companies buying out rivals abroad. But the greatest change I have witnessed is elsewhere. It is in the mind: Indians now know that they don’t have to leave, as my parents left, to have their personal revolutions.
It took me time to see. At first, my old lenses were still in place — India the frustrating, difficult country — and so I saw only the things I had ever seen.
But as I traveled the land, the data did not fit the framework. The children of the lower castes were hoisting themselves up one diploma and training program at a time. The women were becoming breadwinners through microcredit and decentralized manufacturing. The young people were finding in their cellphones a first zone of individual identity. The couples were ending marriages no matter what “society” thinks, then finding love again. The vegetarians were embracing meat and meat-eaters were turning vegetarian, defining themselves by taste and faith, not caste.
Indians from languorous villages to pulsating cities were making difficult new choices to die other than where they were born, to pursue vocations not their father’s, to live lives imagined within their own skulls. And it was addictive, this improbable rush of hope.
The shift is only just beginning. Most Indians still live impossibly grim lives. Trickle down, here more than most places, is slow. But it is a shift in psychologies, and you rarely meet an Indian untouched by it.
Grabbing hold of their destinies, these Indians became the unlikely cousins of my own immigrant parents in America: restless, ambitious, with dreams vivid only to themselves. But my parents had sought to beat the odds in a bad system, to be statistical flukes that got away.
What has changed since they left is a systemic lifting of the odds for those who stay. It is a milestone in any nation’s life when leaving becomes a choice, not a necessity.
My parents watch me from their perch outside Washington, D.C., and marvel at history’s sense of irony: a son who ended up inventing himself in the country they left, who has written of the self-inventing swagger of a rising generation of Indians, in a country where “self” was once a vulgar word.
At times, my mother wonders if they should have remained, should have waited for their own country’s revolution instead of crashing another’s. And as I leave India now I can only wonder how history would have turned out if the ocean of change had come a generation earlier.
Because it came between their generation and mine, the premise of our family story has been pulled out from beneath us. We are American citizens now, my family, and proudly so. But we must face that we are Americans because of a choice prompted by truths that history has undone. They were true at the choice’s making; in India, I saw their truth boil slowly away.
They don’t crave our mayonnaise and khakis anymore. They no longer angrily berate America, because they are too busy building their own country. Indian accents are now cooler than British ones. No one asks if I feel Indian or American. How delicious to see that unconcern. How fortunate to live in a land you needn’t leave to become your fullest possible self.
And how wondrous, in this time of revolutions, to have had my own here.
I grew up in America defining myself by the soil under my feet, not by the blood in my veins. The soil I shared with everyone else; the blood made me unbearably different. Before I loved India, I loathed it. But that feeling seems now like a relic from a buried past.
I leave now on the journey’s next stretch, with sadness and with joy, humbled by India, grateful to have been at the revolution and to have known the revolutions within.
WORLD'S BEST TOURISTS
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Saturday, July 11 /
WORLD'S BEST TOURISTS
Japan
Britain
Canada
Germany
Switzerland
Holland
Australia
Sweden
USA
Denmark
(A study by travel company Expedia asked 4,500 hotels worldwide to rank tourists on their behaviour, Source:Expedia.co.uk)
(A study by travel company Expedia asked 4,500 hotels worldwide to rank tourists on their behaviour, Source:Expedia.co.uk)
The Creative Process
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Wednesday, July 8 /
“The creative process is not just iterative; it’s also recursive. It plays out 'in the large' and 'in the small'—in defining the broadest goals and concepts and refining the smallest details. It branches like a tree, and each choice has ramifications, which may not be known in advance. Recursion also suggests a procedure that 'calls' or includes itself. Many engineers define the design process as a recursive function:
discover > define > design > develop > deploy
The creative process involves many conversations—about goals and actions to achieve them—conversations with co-creators and colleagues, conversations with oneself. The participants and their language, experience, and values affect the conversations.”
Download the PDF
(Created in collaboration by Jack Chung, Shelley Evenson, and Paul Pangaro)
Finally graduating for a change
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Monday, July 6 /
From Left to Right: Robert Solow (1987 Nobel Prize in Economics), Me, William Sharpe (1990 Nobel Prize in Economics)
Istituto di Studi Economici e per l’Occupazione
Iseo, Italy, June 2009
Celebrating the 50th anniversary of the integrated circuit
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Without it the world would be a different place
2nd July 2009
