Just back from a two day trip to Ahmedabad. The event: IIMA Entrepreneurs’ Meet.

Good fun. Good to see so many of the off-roaders meet and share their experiences. Sanjiv Bikhchandani (naukri.com), Deep Kalra (makemytrip.com), Shantanu Prakash (Educomp) and a host of other successful entrepreneurs - the event had to be an enriching experience.

A lot of beliefs corroborated and most important amongst them was that wisdom cannot be transferred. It had to be experienced and everyone has to find their own path.

Questions like what business to start, when to start and how to start are the questions no one can answer for you. Infact, if you still believe you need someone to answer these questions or even guide you in the quest of these answers, you are not yet ready for entrepreneurship.

A very interesting question came up during a general conversation with a fairly senior alumni. “What was the source of motivation to be an entrepreneur? What made you certain that you wanted to be an entrepreneur?”.

It may look an innocuous question but its actually difficult to answer. What made me think I wanted to do it, more so, so early in my career. I quit my campus job in 4 months knowing from the day one that it was not for me and then joined a startup IT services company. My next job was with a small IT products company and all these moves were just to prepare myself better for eventual plunge that I was going to take. The question is how come I knew I wanted this in my second year itself.

The fact is, you just know. It is an instinctive feeling that that’s the only thing you want to do. External factors do help, for example, the biggest contribution of Prof Sunil Handa is that he shows you that you are not the only one to have to pass through a tough phase thereby rationalizing the pain and making it easier to bear. The economic environment helps, supportive spouse helps, encouraging friends help, even Maniratnam’s “Guru” helps - but finally, its that queer little voice in your belly that screams.

It’s something like fire can only burn, it has to burn for that is it’s Dharma or destiny or whatever you may call it. A scorpion HAS to sting and an eagle HAS to prey. Similarly, an entrepreneur HAS to do that, he’s got no choice. The queer little voice inside would not let him do anything else.

At least that’s what happened with me, though being true to my craft of entrepreneurship, I cannot suggest to anyone that that’s a model scenario and that’s how it has to be. Find your own truth - for that is the essence of entrepreneurship - finding your own path.

Love it or hate it, you can’t ignore it.

Its math I am talking about - darling of a few, nemesis of many and the fact remains that without math you just can’t study any subject.

Humans and even animals possess an inherent sense of numbers though very elementary. You show a toddler two candies in one hand and one in the other and he will almost always go for two. A predator in wild setting would intuitively know a lone deer from a herd and will alter his hunting plans accordingly. Similarly, a prey would know if it is being attacked from one side or three and will make survival attempts accordingly.

The math teaching to kids starts to build upon this intuitive sense of numbers. The elementary math focuses on concrete examples from the child’s surroundings and moves on to simple operations like adding, subtracting, multiplication and division. There are techniques but most of it essentially revolves around real life instances and concrete situations.

Slowly, the math starts becoming abstract. Pre-Algebra introduces abstract situations and introduction to geometry starts building the platform. As the student progresses through grades, algebra starts becoming increasingly abstract. That’s when it starts demanding advanced thinking and analyzing skills from the student. He needs to be able to comprehend things which usually are just concepts and then figure out inter-linkages between them. He needs to logically decipher what leads to what and how, everything is distinct yet connected. This is a transition many of the students find difficult to make.

Go further and you meet coordinate geometry, trigonometry and calculus which demand abstract problem solving skills on a fairly advanced level. That’s where the kids who could not make the erstwhile transition from concrete math to abstract math generally flounder.

That a student has not been able to make the transition can be manifested in many ways. It could be a dislike for math, poor performance, stress and lack of confidence or a general disinterest. The situation becomes complicated if the kid wants to do science because high school physics, for example, does demand abstract math skills.

The situation is interesting - a subject, an area of enquiry which starts as being inherently present in us gets so alienated that so many kids find it a steady source of stress. More often than not, the culprit is faulty teaching.

The focus in middle school math should be on developing the abstract thinking skills instead of giving a set of techniques to solve problems and get the homework done. Techniques you forget if you do not work with them for a while and even if you do remember them by excessive repetition, it adds little value apart from enabling you to solve that homework problem.

The skills required at least till high school math are basic analytical skills and it doesn’t require an Einstein to master them. Moreover, these skills are extremely essential in almost any subject the child plans to pursue. You cannot do psychology, history or even literature if you cannot play with ideas in your head - ideas which have no physical equivalent.

High school math is a level which every student can achieve and should ideally have fun doing - even if they do not have an inherent passion for math.

The below par development of abstract thinking skills is typically what goes wrong with so many students who struggle through middle and high school years in math.

The answer lies in focusing on developing thinking and problem solving skills rather than “methods”. A child should know why he is doing what he is doing to solve a particular problem, how the second step follows the first and he should be encouraged to think what other ways he can come up with to solve the same problem. Some of them may be outlandish, some incorrect and some long and tedious routes to the same answer (or even the wrong one) - but, at every stage they should be encouraged, even made to think on their own and figure out ways of solving problems by themselves.

Give the child all the basic concepts and then involve him in “discovering” the solution. Encourage him to ask questions, howsoever illogical. Discuss the merits and demerits of his method of getting to the solution and then provide an easier, simpler, shorter, elegant way to do it. (Don’t be surprised if the kid actually comes up with a better solution !!!).

To borrow a phrase from Built to Last, by Jim Collins and Jerry Porass, the focus of the teacher should be to be a clock builder and not a time teller.

Do not give him cut and dried techniques to get to the answer. Get him to figure out his own way through the jungle by arming him with the right axe, flashlight and gun.

Of course, in a traditional class room setting, the task becomes much more complicated. Every kid would have his/her own pace of getting the concepts and unique style of “wading through the jungle”. It may not always be possible for the teacher to give detailed critiques of individual problem solving methodologies to each individual student. Moreover, the teachers are under pressure to complete the curriculum and also take along all the students together.

However, as long as we are unable to find out an alternative method of community teaching that focuses more on personalization, we have to live with what we have. It is a tough job but then making every kid good in math is a worthy goal and anything worth doing will invariably be challenging.

Sharing a nice link on alootechie which talks about the market for online tutoring being in the region of $12bn. The article also contains a reference to this piece in Financial Express.

And, to save the best for the last, its a very well written article in India Knowledge@Wharton which presents an interesting perspective on current trends and future direction.

Survival of the fittest is a macho term laced with a certain romanticism. Capitalism, in its pure form, is supposed to be a perfect example of a system embodying Darwinism at its core. If you are not proactive at reading the market, too hung up to adapt to changes, too inefficient to beat the economic efficiency curve or too exalted to serve the customer, you ought to be finished, eaten up alive and go belly up.

Then why do we see so much economic inefficiency all around. Why can the big corporations continuously afford to ignore, annoy and even infuriate the customer or why can a small business keep on sustaining extremely unprofessional levels of services. If the customer is really so important then why does he have to listen to weird music for 20 minutes before being hung upon when he calls “customer care”. Why can the phone company keep on putting new, weird and  un-agreed  to charges on your bill and still proclaim “happy to help”, why can the banks keep on applying charges for services as inane as getting an account statement or knowing your account balance, why can the cooking gas company afford to ignore your calls for three days and deliver the gas on fifth while proudly proclaiming they deliver within 24 hours.

A lot of these answers can be found in theoretical economics. You can say cell phone service providers in India are an oligopoly where none is different from the other in terms of service levels, switching costs are high because all of a sudden you don’t want your cell number to change after having it for 7 years and the service is an essential - you can’t go without a cell phone.

However, let’s try to examine the question as to what kind of a task master capitalism is - after all, it is supposed to be the best system known to man to support enterprise, innovation and efficiency and it is as close as a man made system comes to classic Darwinism.

The fundamental assumption of capitalism is that people want to grow, expand and earn more money. They also want to conserve money by paying less if they can for an equal product or service. Statistically, out of multitudes of people, some do aspire high and sustain capitalistic growth.

Now consider a situation where no body aspires for greater growth. No aspirations so the incentive to be innovative, market oriented and efficient becomes irrelevant. The scenario of course seems highly unlikely  because struggle for growth is almost as fundamental, if not just a variant of struggle for life. However, look closely and it is not that unlikely.

No further aspirations means one is satisfied with what one has got and this may happen with a small business as well as a large corporation with equal probability.  Complacency is  not an  endangered species in corporate sector. Moreover, it gets manifested in various forms - it could be an unwillingness to innovate or to go the extra mile for the customer. It can also be manifested in various “not so above board” practices we see all around us (I do not see what other name could you give to various services being included in your cell phone plan without you even knowing it and you being charged). The point is, companies start taking the customers for granted when they think they can afford to do that.

What’s the answer? Well, capitalism can induce only so much efficiency. For the rest, may be a more balanced customer-provider power equation would prove effective. Point is, how do you restore balance to the skewed power equation between a million dollar corporation and individual customers each of whom pays may be a hundred dollars every month for example.

The solution seems to be more and more aware customers. Give feedback to the company fast and strong. Also, share your experiences with others. That’s the only ammunition a customer has, and that’s what can shake the companies off their slumber - the customer can bite too.

The built in mechanisms in capitalism fall flat when somebody is ok with you taking your business elsewhere. But if you includes not just you but hundred others like you, that bite can hurt.

The current problem is, so few of us bite and that too, far too little.