Rajesh Jain

The Marketer’s ORCs (Part 4)

ORC #1: New or Existing Customers

Marketers have fallen into what I call the “Forever / Repeated Acquisition Trap.” [FAT/RAT] Because of the constant pressure to show growth and the ease of spending money on the digital adtech platforms like Google and Meta, most marketers have chosen the path of least resistance. A lot of money is being spent on acquiring (and in many cases re-acquiring) customers. Every other business is doing it, so it just seems the right thing to do. And every acquired customer is being bought via an auction – with the click sold to the highest bidder. Little wonder that customer acquisition costs have spiralled out of control. Anecdotal evidence is that in the past few years, the CAGR for CAC is 40%. This means that costs are doubling every two years – with little sign of it slowing down. Google and Meta’s share of the aggregate spend has been coming down but newer platforms like Amazon, Tiktok, Snap, Microsoft and Apple are rising rapidly.

While there is some spending on digital branding, most of the focus is on acquisition of new customers. These aggregate into the shiny new numbers that marketers show to their bosses every week in review meetings. There is little or no discussion on existing customers – how did their spending grow, how many churned, how many more are likely to churn, and how close the spend is to the lifetime potential. This is because attracting new customers via new spending is easy, while working with existing customers is hard. And yet no business and brand can be built with a leaky bucket. This is the conundrum marketers face.

As I wrote earlier in Marketing: Disrupted and Simplified: “…Marketers made a big and costly mistake. Seduced by the ease of spending on Google and Facebook, and the excitement of continuously acquiring new customers, they missed deepening relationships with existing customers. It is not just marketers but even CEOs who are at fault. The question that gets asked is: how many new customers did we acquire? There is little discussion about retention and revenue expansion from existing customers. (This is true for B2C and B2B brands.) In a competitive market, the focus shifts to landgrab and leads to an arms race of spending investor money or retained profits to show perpetual growth of website traffic or app installs. The rise of ad revenues of Google and Facebook testify to the marketers’ folly. By not building deep relationships with existing customers and by bombarding them with irrelevant messages, marketers have trained their customers to ignore their communications, thus reducing the efficacy of the only method of bringing existing customers back to their website or app for transactions. Once customers start ignoring the messages, the marketer has little or no choice but to spend 10X more on re-acquiring that same customer via the tech giants. With everyone doing the same, the only winners are the attention sellers (Google and Facebook), who in turn create even more powerful data hoses by giving consumers even more free utilities. The irony is that as marketers did not pay attention to their customer needs, they are paying even more dearly to the attention intermediaries to reach their own ex-customers.”

Marketers need to shift focus and budgets to existing customers, using Earned Growth (revenue growth from existing customers and new revenue from referrals) as the metric. Ensuring existing customers come back for more and bring their friends is the only way to build a sustainable profitable business. This conundrum thus has an obvious solution: flip the funnel, with existing customers at the top and new acquisitions at the bottom (and these ideally coming via referrals rather than ad spending).

Conundrum: To focus on continuous new customer acquisition or nurturing relationships with existing customers

Insight: Rising CAC is hurting profits; new acquisition is an unwinnable arms race

Solution: Shift to existing customers and Earned Growth as the North Star Metric

Thinks 793

Suzy Welch on her course at NYU’s Stern: ““Becoming You,” as I conceived it, would help avert this fate by encouraging M.B.A. students to think about careers another way—as a journey toward their “area of destiny,” the world of opportunity that exists at the intersection of their authentic values, their strongest skills and aptitudes, and the kind of work that interests and excites them intellectually and emotionally. Sure, some of my students would still end up in consulting and banking and tech, but if I taught the class right, others would have their eyes and minds open to—dare I say it—jobs in industry. That’s right, in companies decidedly not selling advice, professional services or shipping software and devices conceived by engineers—but making and doing real stuff.”

FT: “American crosswords elevate the answers. American setters prioritise fresh and lively fill, plucked anew from an ever-shifting culture and language. A setter’s word list is a prized possession and the clues themselves are, in most cases, little more than an afterthought to get the kapow into the grid. British crosswords, meanwhile, elevate the questions. While the answers are often pedestrian, each clue in a cryptic is a mystery unto itself, a deviously constructed linguistic locking mechanism, unopenable, until you open it. In this sense a cryptic is not a single puzzle at all but a puzzle made of puzzles. Solving an American puzzle is an exciting smash-and-grab job. Solving a cryptic is a sophisticated bank heist.”

Carolyn Coughlin: “Listening to win is, ‘Let me make the problem go away by telling you, you don’t have a problem.’ Listening to learn is getting underneath what’s being said and reflecting back to the person. And listening to fix is, ‘Let me take your problem and solve it for you, or help you solve it.'” [via Shane Parrish]

Ezra Klein: “Barnes & Noble’s resurgence is a reminder that there is nothing inevitable about its (or any bookstore’s) demise. Great bookstores and libraries still provide something the digital world cannot: a place not just to buy or borrow books, but to be among them.”

Mahesh Vyas: “Most of the employed persons in India are poorly educated. The maximum education of a bulk of those employed in India is high school graduation. As of September-December 2022, nearly 40 per cent of the workforce (we use the term to represent those who are employed) were high school graduates. The maximum education achieved by them was between the 10th and 12th standards. India suffers from a poorly educated workforce that is confined to poor quality jobs. Most employment is informal and in the unorganised sector. This is not new. But India is still unable to solve this old problem. Forty-eight per cent of the workforce had not even cleared their 10th exams — 28 per cent had cleared between the 6th and 9th standards and 20 per cent had cleared only the 5th standard. The last 20 per cent — those that cleared the 5th standard — could be considered largely uneducated because it may not be necessary to clear exams to be promoted from one class to the other till the 5th standard. Only 12 per cent of the workforce was a graduate or postgraduate. For reference, that ratio in the US is about 44 per cent for persons of 25 years or more.”

Ruchi Gupta: “The ability to remake a party requires three things of the leadership: first, the ability to consolidate power and enforce one’s will on the party; second, to effect wholesale change in the organisation and exercise control over those remaining; third, provide new messaging for the party which either shapes or responds to the feedback from the ground…A review of the trajectory of parties in our country and around the world shows that political parties are defined by their top leadership. Thus, each new leader has significant power to remake their party. The reason political parties in India seem mired in their past has less to do with voters’ preoccupation with history but more because there has been very little churn in the party organisation.”

The Marketer’s ORCs (Part 3)

Conundrums

I started listing out the Marketing OR Conundrums (ORCs) and came up with this list:

New customers or existing customers
Adtech or martech
All customers or Best customers
Pull or push
Browse or search
Reacquire or reactivate
Same experience or differentiate
Broadcast or personalise
Engagement or conversion
Multi-channel or omnichannel
SMS or email
Short-term or long-term
Growth at all costs or profits
Best of breed or full stack
Marketing cloud or modern stack
Data or gut
First-party or zero-party
Human or AI
Build or buy
Inhouse or agency
Marketplaces or direct
Incumbent or attacker

I put this list into ChatGPT and asked for more marketing conundrums. Here’s what I got:

Product-centric or customer-centric approach
Quantity or quality leads
Inbound or outbound marketing
Cost-per-acquisition (CPA) or return on investment (ROI)
Branding or direct response
Local or global marketing
Organic or paid growth
Compliance or innovation
Quality or quantity of content
Influencer or celebrity endorsements
A/B testing or multivariate testing
User-generated content or branded content
Guerrilla marketing or traditional advertising
Virtual or in-person events
Owned, earned or paid media
Targeting a specific demographic or targeting a broad audience
Product or service differentiation
Growth hacking or sustainable growth

I then asked ChatGPT for ten more to get the list to 50.

Short-form or long-form content
Automation or human touch
Mobile-first or desktop-first approach
Public relations or advertising
Guerrilla or ambush marketing
Content or context-based targeting
In-app or in-browser notifications
Product or market-centric approach
Brand or performance marketing
Virtual or augmented reality-based marketing

So, plenty of choices to be made. Let’s get started with some of the ones I consider as the most important ones.

Thinks 792

Arvind Narayanan: Sayash Kapoor and I call [ChatGPT] a bullshit generator, as have others as well. We mean this not in a normative sense but in a relatively precise sense. We mean that it is trained to produce plausible text. It is very good at being persuasive, but it’s not trained to produce true statements. It often produces true statements as a side effect of being plausible and persuasive, but that is not the goal. This actually matches what the philosopher Harry Frankfurt has called bullshit, which is speech that is intended to persuade without regard for the truth. A human bullshitter doesn’t care if what they’re saying is true or not; they have certain ends in mind. As long as they persuade, those ends are met. Effectively, that is what ChatGPT is doing. It is trying to be persuasive, and it has no way to know for sure whether the statements it makes are true or not.”

NYTimes: “Once A.I. can run disinformation campaigns at lightning speed, will democracy stand a chance? We seem headed toward a Matrix where “it will become cheaper to show fakes than to show reality,” Jaron Lanier, the father of virtual reality, wrote in Tablet. Will bad actors use A.I. to promote bigotry or hijack nuclear weapons?”

Noah Smith: “Basing wealth on productive assets instead of unproductive land is good for the economy — housing scarcity might pump up prices and build individual wealth for homeowners, but at the national level it simply holds back economic growth. And as it turns out, it’s good for middle-class wealth as well — in 2022, Japan’s median wealth per adult was about $120,000, compared to around $93,000 in the U.S. (And this is despite the fact that Japan’s once-legendary household savings rate has collapsed!) So Japan’s somewhat unusual choice not to tie middle-class wealth to housing prices seems like a smart one. Over the past two decades, the country has done better in terms of housing policy, construction, landscaping and urbanism than just about any country in the West. And it did this by embracing constant change rather than the physical stagnation that has prevailed in Western cities.”

Terminus: “According to Terminus’ new ABM Benchmark Report: B2B Digital Advertising which offers best practices for branding, messaging and imagery, other ABM platforms report an average of 8-20% ad fraud rates. The total cost of ad fraud exceeded $81 billion in 2022, and is expected to increase to $100 billion by 2023, according to Statista research.”

The Marketer’s ORCs (Part 2)

Modern Marketing

There are two memorable quotes about marketing.

Peter Drucker: “Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two–and only two–basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs. Marketing is the distinguishing, unique function of the business.”

Theodore Levitt: “The difference between marketing and selling is more than semantic. Selling focuses on the needs of the seller, marketing on the needs of the buyer. Selling is preoccupied with the seller’s need to convert his product into cash; marketing with the idea of satisfying the needs of the customer by means of the product and the cluster of things associated with creating, delivering, and finally consuming it.”

The soul of a business is marketing. Whether it is B2B or B2C, marketing is about conveying the value provided by the product, which in turn makes a customer decide that an exchange of money in return for the product is a transaction that’s worth doing. A marketer’s role thus becomes to create the conditions for such a trade.

Traditional consumer marketing was about creating the demand via media: memorable ads in print or TV, and then ensuring the distribution for fulfilment of demand. Modern marketing is much more complex with the rise of digital in the past 25 years. Every part of the value chain has changed: from the outreach (marketing via search engines, email, social media, and influencers) to the distribution (marketplaces, direct-to-consumer). Ratings and reviews also now play an important role in the purchase decision.

As Activate explains: “While traditional marketing’s focal point is the company’s product or service, modern marketing is more customer-oriented. Businesses that adopt a modern strategy always put their consumers’ satisfaction above all else, so they’re able to address their audience’s unique wants and needs. Since modern marketing uses a digital platform, it’s more customisable. It can also easily adapt to change, so it has no problem keeping up with the latest marketing trends. Plus, it can be accessed on any device, which means companies have a higher chance of reaching a global audience. All of these factors help build customer loyalty and trust, as well as worldwide brand recognition.”

GeeksforGeeks offers a good explainer on the difference between traditional and modern marketing:

The complexity of modern marketing also raises a lot of conundrums for marketers. Existing customers or new customers? All customers or Best customers? Reacquire or Reactivate? Broadcast or personalise? SMS or Email? Browse or Search? Growth at all costs or profits? Best of breed or Full stack? Build or buy? Work with an incumbent or join an attacker?

When I asked ChatGPT to list a B2C/D2C marketer’s conundrums, this is what I got:

Balancing the need for short-term sales with the importance of building long-term brand loyalty
Deciding whether to invest in expensive, high-production-value advertising or to create more cost-effective content
Prioritizing product innovation vs focusing on customer service
Choosing between a wide range of products and services or focusing on a specific niche
Balancing the need to acquire new customers with the importance of retaining existing ones
Deciding whether to invest in data-driven, targeted marketing or relying on gut instincts
Deciding whether to create a strong social media presence or focus on email marketing
Balancing the need for a comprehensive marketing strategy with the need for quick-hit tactics
Deciding whether to prioritize search engine optimization (SEO) or paid search advertising
Balancing the need for customer acquisition with the need for customer retention and growth.

In this series, I will consider the modern marketer’s ORCs (OR conundrums). Of course, the preferred option is an AND but because of limits on budget, time and other resources, marketing – like life – is about choices and trade-offs. In many cases, the answer may be obvious, but the execution is not so.

Thinks 791

FT: “Generative AI advocates say the systems can make workers more productive and more creative. A code-generating system from Microsoft’s GitHub division is already coming up with 40 per cent of the code produced by software developers who use the system, according to the company. The output of systems like these can be “mind unblocking” for anyone who needs to come up with new ideas in their work, says James Manyika, a senior vice-president at Google who looks at technology’s impact on society. Built into everyday software tools, they could they suggest ideas, check work or even produce large volumes of content. Yet for all its ease of use and potential to disrupt large parts of the tech landscape, generative AI presents profound challenges for the companies building it and trying to apply it in practice, as well as for the many people who are likely to come across it before long in their work or personal lives. Foremost is the reliability problem.”

WSJ: “We know what we’re supposed to do before bed to ensure a good night’s sleep: Set a fixed bedtime. Turn off our screens. Create a relaxing routine before bed. Now, sleep researchers say that what we think about as we try to go to sleep is just as important. They recommend that as we prepare to drift off, we practice something called savoring, which is imagining a positive experience we’ve had in great detail…Many of us ruminate as we’re trying to drift off. This is where savoring can help. “It gives your brain something else to focus on—something emotionally compelling and pleasurable,” says Dana McMakin, a professor of psychology at Florida International University, who studies savoring.”

Tim Martinez: “Pop quiz: 1. What problem are you the best in the world at solving? (you can’t solve all problems) 2.Whom specifically do you solve this problem for? (you can’t help everyone) 3. What information can you provide that validates your claim? 4. How long does it take to see the results/effects of your solution? (the shorter the distance the higher the value) 5.How much do you charge? (is your sales process overly complicated?) 6. Where can I buy it? Don’t let the answer to any of these questions be a mystery to you, your staff or your customer. Recommendation: have everyone in your organization answer these questions. Then work diligently to ensure alignment across the board.”

Why VR/AR Gets Farther Away as It Comes Into Focus: by Matthew Ball. “As we observe the state of XR in 2023, it’s fair to say the technology has proved harder than many of the best-informed and most financially endowed companies expected.”

Eric Ashman: “Navigating the startup journey can be an overwhelming experience. There is a lot to think about, and time passes quickly. You need to force yourself to pick your head back up. Let yourself see your startup from a broader perspective. Identify macro trends that might be impacting your team’s performance or future funding prospects. Get out and talk to customers, investors, and your employees. Spend time in other parts of your business and see your challenges from different perspectives. Sometimes our reaction to stressful situations is to hunker down, put our heads down, and relentlessly attack the one problem in front of us, trying to bludgeon it to resolution. Don’t fall into this trap. Don’t be the hound. Pick up your head.”

Economist: “For all that it lacks, Ms Bika’s school [in Nigeria] has one advantage. At the start of last year the state education ministry gave each of her teachers a small tablet with a black-and-white touch screen. Every two weeks they use it to download detailed scripts that guide each lesson they deliver. These scripts tell the teachers what to say, what to write on the blackboard, and even when to walk around the classroom. Ms Bika says this new way of working is saving teachers time that they used to spend scribbling their own lesson plans—and her pupils are reading better, too…There are doubtless many ways to teach a scripted lesson badly. But the idea in Nigeria is that they will tend to make classes more compelling. The scripts enforce instructional practices that are routine in many rich-country classrooms but often neglected in poor ones. These include techniques such as pausing frequently to pose questions to the class, instead of delivering long lectures at the blackboard, or encouraging pupils to try to solve a problem by chatting to the child sitting next to them. Detailed, prescriptive lesson plans are also supposed to relieve teachers of the burden of having to write their own. That, advocates hope, will leave them more energy for other jobs—such as making sure their charges stay engaged.”

The Marketer’s ORCs (Part 1)

Choices

For those who have read Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings”, the word “orcs” is a familiar term. They were the bad-looking, goblin-like scary warriors of the dark forces. As Wikipedia puts it, “Orcs are a brutish, aggressive, ugly and malevolent race of monsters, contrasting with the benevolent Elves and serving an evil power.”

I chose the word ORC to mean “OR Conundrum” – more like an AND/OR conundrum. As a business leader, my day is about meetings and choices I have to constantly make. Some decisions are trivial, while others are critical; some are inconsequential and reversible, a few are not. In most cases, the leader does not have a map but a compass, and thus the series of paths taken (or not taken) determine the final destination. Success or failure is an outcome of the choices one makes.

Growth or profitability? Emerging markets or Developed markets? Organic growth or acquisitions? Short-term or long-term? Hunting or farming? Best Customers or Rest Customers? Depth or breadth? Do inhouse or outsource? Replace or retrain? Office or hybrid? Pipeline or PO (purchase orders)? MQLs or SQLs? Discount or full-price? Private or public? Centralise or delegate? Hire or reject? Product or service? Family or professional? Point solution or full-stack? Branding or performance? Stay or sell? PE or IPO? Work or family? And so they go on – the OR Conundrums. ORCs. They are the make or break of a business.

Jim Collins wrote about OR in his book, “Built to Last”: “Instead of being oppressed by the “Tyranny of the OR,” highly visionary companies liberate themselves with the “Genius of the AND”—the ability to embrace both extremes of a number of dimensions at the same time. Instead of choosing between A OR B, they figure out a way to have both A AND B.” He added:

We’re not talking about mere balance here. “Balance” implies going to the midpoint, fifty-fifty, half and half. A visionary company doesn’t seek balance between short-term and long-term, for example. It seeks to do very well in the short-term and very well in the long-term. A visionary company doesn’t simply balance between idealism and profitability; it seeks to be highly idealistic and highly profitable. A visionary company doesn’t simply balance between preserving a tightly held core ideology and stimulating vigorous change and movement; it does both to an extreme. In short, a highly visionary company doesn’t want to blend yin and yang into a gray, indistinguishable circle that is neither highly yin nor highly yang; it aims to be distinctly yin and distinctly yang—both at the same time, all the time.

Irrational? Perhaps. Rare? Yes. Difficult? Absolutely. But as F. Scott Fitzgerald pointed out, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” This is exactly what the visionary companies are able to do.

Jim Collins calls upon leaders to reject the “Tyranny of the OR” and embrace the “Genius of the AND”. He writes: “Builders of greatness … embrace both extremes across a number of dimensions at the same time—purpose AND profit, continuity AND change, freedom AND responsibility, discipline AND creativity, humility AND will, empirical analysis AND decisive action, etc.”

As leaders, AND is the preferred choice – have the cake and eat it too. It can work for the big picture, but daily decisions are about trade-offs. And that is where the OR Conundrum needs to be faced and addressed – in business, with family, and with oneself.

In this series, I will focus on the ORCs faced by marketers.

Thinks 790

Praveen Chakravarty writes about approval voting: “Given India’s inherent deep identity cleavages, its electoral system must encourage and incentivise political parties to woo every section of society and not reward them for shunning certain sections. Indulge in a thought experiment. Let us suppose that when given a ballot of choices of candidates/parties to vote for, you are allowed to choose more than one candidate. That is, you no longer have to force yourself to make just one choice (most preferred or least non-preferred) but you can choose many candidates or parties that represent your interests. India’s electoral ballot currently has a NOTA (None Of The Above) button. Think of this new method as having a MOTA (Many Of The Above) button. The candidate or party that has the most ‘tick marks’ then wins. Would this change how you vote? Would this change how we choose winners? Would this produce different incentives for our politics?”

WSJ: “Expected acceleration in M&A deals in the IT sector has brought worries among customers about having to adapt to new—and sometimes unwanted—tech tools…Sameer Dholakia, a partner in the growth investment practice at venture-capital firm Bessemer Venture Partners, said a big risk of M&A integrations is the buyer’s inability to iron out differences in technology, such as programming languages or underlying cloud support. Mr. Dholakia—a former chief executive of email startup SendGrid who oversaw its roughly $3 billion acquisition in 2019 by cloud communications firm Twilio Inc. —said acquirers that ignore these kinds of differences typically end up offering a “Frankenstein-like” bundle of tech tools, rather than a single, unified solution…“M&A can often make sense on a product strategy whiteboard, but may not work in practice,” Mr. Dholakia said.”

Mint: “The United Nations, on India’s insistence, declared 2023 as the International Year of Millets. Millets are not just climate smart crops—requiring less of water and chemical inputs—they are healthier too. Due to low glycaemic index, a measure of how fast carbs turn into glucose in the bloodstream, they are suited for diabetics. Millets are gluten-free and rich in fibre, iron, calcium and other micronutrients, which explains a resurgence of millets in the diets of the urban rich even though the masses tend to prefer cheap calorie dense cereals. Today, urban consumers are spoilt for choice with scores of brands selling millets in packaged and ready-to-eat variants. These include cookies, health bars, breakfast cereals, pancakes, dosa-Idli premixes, and milk substitutes made from sprouted millets for the lactose intolerant. Fine dining restaurants and premium hotels are serving an array of millet dishes to the discerning customer.”

A quiz on India. I did quite badly — just 3/10.

Ray Dalio: “The mechanics [of debt] are pretty simple because the finances of countries’ governments work the same as the finances of individuals and organizations, except governments have the abilities to 1) print money and 2) take money from some people and give it to others. How this works is particularly important now because the US government (and people) are deeply in debt and need to spend on many things such as taking care of those who don’t have enough to pay for the basics, like supports for children in poverty, education, infrastructure, defense, climate remediation initiatives, mental and physical health initiatives, supports for other countries, etc. Because money and debt are not limited, those who make the decisions on how much to spend on what don’t look at how much money they have to spend and then prioritize what they should spend it on. They instead decide how much they want to spend and then decide whether they will get it from taxes (which is hard because people fight to keep their money) or borrow it, and if they borrow it, they have to decide whether they sell it to lender-creditors who want it or sell it to central banks who print the money to buy it.”

Gulzar: “I have long argued that despite its massive population, India’s economic foundations are built on an extremely narrow base. This means that the country needs to focus on broadening its economic base across all dimensions, and in its absence the limits to economic growth will become apparent very soon. The digital economy, which has been the basis for a good part of the high growth enthusiasm about India, may not be as large as is being imagined. No matter how disruptive the technology, the net addressable market of customers who are meaningful enough consumers may be far smaller than is believed. This can expand only with broad-based economic growth…The point to be made is the small size or base of India’s consumer class, digitally addressable market, and skilled engineering work-force. This is far smaller than widely believed.”

Youth Education and Skilling (YES): An Alternate Model

The Problem – 1

India is failing its youth. An education system that leaves them unprepared for the real world combined with limited job opportunities is limiting income opportunities and upward mobility for first-time job seekers. The problems in the education system start much earlier – with the way our schools work. None of these problems have been solved systematically by any government in Independent India. Along with lack of economic freedom, India’s pathetic education system (except for a few IITs and IIMs, and now a handful of private universities) is the most important reason for the lack of India’s prosperity. Government interventions and restrictions on education have hobbled generations of Indians. To transform India, we need economic freedom and education freedom. We need an alternate model to educate and skill Indians – one that relies on the innate desire in most individuals to learn, become better and productive. In this series, I will outline ideas for a possible solution – one that I call Youth Education and Skilling (YES).

Let’s begin by understanding the problem.

Mahesh Vyas (Aug 2022): “[The] transition from a world of education to a world of employment is a modern social norm in which education determines employment and employment determines our status in society. Unemployment can be a stigma, a source of social ostracisation, and even mental stress. In India, unemployment is still not recognised as a macroeconomic problem. As a result, it is mostly seen as a personal failure and therefore a source of various forms of social isolation. The transition from education to employment is critical in the life cycle of a modern citizen. It carries anxieties as much as it carries hope. Just as the 15-24 stage is crucial to the individual, the youngsters in this age group are also crucial to an economy. An economy needs to be prepared to offer jobs to the fresh annual cohorts of hopeful youngsters who are in this transition phase. A young, energetic and freshly educated population, if harnessed well, can deliver growth and savings and pave the path to prosperity. If not harnessed for long, they could become a source of social tensions…According to World Bank data, in North America over half of the population in the age group of 15-24 years is employed. The ratio of employed persons to the corresponding total working age population is called the employment rate. The average employment rate for North America was 50.6 per cent. For OECD countries it was almost 42 per cent and for the European Union it was 33 per cent. The same World Bank data places the employment rate for the 15-24 years age group for India at 23 per cent…India has the world’s largest youth population. This is the demographic dividend on offer. India also has among the lowest youth employment rates.”

Rishi Joshi (Dec 2022): “About 4,500 faculty positions are vacant at the IITs and about 500 at the IIMs (total sanctioned posts over 1,500). And over 6,000 vacancies in 45 central universities (total posts of about 19,000)…India produces almost 25,000 PhDs every year – the IITs themselves churn out hundreds of PhDs every year, if not more – along with over a million postgraduates. That’s probably more than what India needs and should be enough to meet the faculty needs of India’s best academic institutions, including the IITs and IIMs. And yet India’s universities and colleges struggle to find the right candidates for faculty positions. It’s the biggest vote of no confidence in India’s higher education system and by the insiders themselves.”

Shankar Acharya (Sep 2022): “According to [the] official data, the employment rate for youth [slumped] from 53.3 per cent in 2004-05 to the low 30s from 2017-18 onwards, barring a marginal uptick in Covid-hit 2020-21. The same data also show a disturbingly sharp rise in the rate of open unemployment among youth, tripling from 5-6 per cent in 2004-05 and 2011-12 to 17-18 per cent in 2017-18 and 2018-19.”

Akshi Chawla (Dec 2022): “Data from the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy’s household surveys shows [that] compared to January 2020, almost 14 million fewer individuals were employed in October 2022 – 4.5 million fewer men and 9.6 million fewer women.”

The Problem – 2

Vivek Kaul (Dec 2022): “Jobs are created in any country as small businesses become bigger, something that hasn’t happened enough in India. That’s the main problem area that government policies need to attack with vigour. In the end, it is worth remembering that while a youth bulge might theoretically be needed to drive economic growth in a country, practically if there aren’t enough jobs to go around, the bulge doesn’t really pay off.”

Jyoti Yadav (Feb 2022): “Afternoons are for charging phone batteries up to 100 per cent, evenings are for playing digital games in sportsgrounds, and nights are for climbing rooftops to catch the network signal. This is when mobile data is the cheapest and fastest, and so it’s the perfect time to plunge into the three Ps: political propaganda, pornography, and potboilers like the action-drama Pushpa, which is currently all the rage. This is how many among Uttar Pradesh’s “generation nowhere”, a term that scholar Craig Jeffrey has used to describe educated, unemployed youth in India, spend their days. There are few job prospects, college degrees gather more dust every year, and there is usually no family money to bank on, but these youth do have something to keep the abyss at bay: their standard daily quota of 2GB of data. A generation ago, masses of educated but jobless 20-somethings might have produced a wave of social anger, but while there are sporadic protests about unemployment, these tend to be siloised.”

Manaswini Panigrahi (Dec 2022): “Unemployment is a major social issue of our country amidst all other issues. it not only deteriorate the financial status of an individual but also make them socially exclusive by lowering their self esteem. This issue specially affect the young mass a lot. As per the World Economic Forum, of the 13 million people who join India’s workforce each year, only one in four management professionals, one in five engineers, and one in 10 graduates are employable. According to [another] report, almost 2 million graduates and half a million postgraduates are unemployed in India. Around 47% graduates in India are not suitable for any kind of industry role. Above all, the level of educated unemployment in India increases with higher education.”

Craig Jeffrey and Jane Dyson (Aug 2022): “High levels of unemployment and underemployment reflect two related trends: the very large numbers of young Indians drawn into education over the past 40 years, increasing demand for salaried jobs; and the Indian economy’s failure to respond with large numbers of new jobs. Development theory suggests that agriculturally based countries will make a transition into manufacturing and services, opening up jobs for young aspirants. But this transformation isn’t occurring in India. The number of people working in services in India rose only marginally from about 35 million in 2005 to 39 million in 2018-19. The number of manufacturing jobs in India declined over this period. Conversely, the proportion of young people in agriculture has been increasing in recent years. These trends have stopped India from experiencing the “demographic dividend” predicted by economists, whereby the productivity of a large youth population promotes economic growth. Not surprisingly, this dividend effect only operates if young people actually are in jobs.”

The Problem – 3

Vivek Kaul: “In the years to come, the one major factor holding back Indian economic growth will be the falling labour force participation rate. The rate has been falling for nearly a decade and a half now and isn’t a recent phenomenon. The labour force participation rate is defined as the ratio of the labour force to the population greater than 15 years of age. The labour force comprises individuals 15 years or older who are employed or are unemployed and willing to work and actively looking for a job. So, what does this mean? It means that every year the proportion of individuals over the age of fifteen who are a part of the Indian labour force is shrinking. One reason for this could possibly be individuals spending more time in school and college. The other major reason for this is that many individuals simply stop looking for a job when they cannot find one and drop out of the labour force in the process. Even to be counted as unemployed, individuals must actively look for a job… India’s female labour participation rate in 2021 stood at 19%. It was lower than that of Bangladesh at 35%. It was also lower than that of Saudi Arabia at 31% (not in the chart). What this tells us is that less than one in five Indian women aged over 15 are a part of the labour force. And that is very worrying.”

Economist: “much of the education given in much of the world is strikingly bad. Across the developing world many schoolchildren learn very little, even when they spend years in class. Less than half of kids in low- and middle-income countries are able to read a short passage by the time they finish primary school, according to the World Bank. Across sub-Saharan Africa, as few as 10% can.”

Sukanta Chaudhuri: “In 2021-22, government-run primary schools had 2.8 teachers on average for 5, sometimes 6, classes. Over 1.1 lakh, or 7%, had only one teacher; an indeterminate number, none at all… At this rate, we are unlikely to have a fully literate nation in the 100th year of Independence. That may or may not cause shame; it should certainly cause profound economic concern. We are squandering the demographic dividend at our disposal till mid-century. We are also dissipating the human resources to ‘make in India’, and the advanced resources for a true knowledge economy…India cannot prosper until we develop human resources with the same urgency as physical infrastructure, as reflected in budgetary increases. We dream of India making economic history. But it will not happen while so many undernourished children miss out on proper schooling.”

FT: “The need for software will only grow. The pandemic drove demand from consumers needing to work, shop, educate and entertain themselves at home — and from businesses struggling to control supply chains. Now organisations are looking to IT to blunt the impact of inflation. Robotics, automation, and the digitisation of even everyday products will require a lot more code. And a lot of legacy systems will need replacing… If automation makes the best IT brains more productive, this is a good thing. Scaling the capabilities of talented people is likely to lead to more breakthroughs. Computers taking over more technical work as humans move up to a higher level of abstraction has been happening since the dawn of computing. For the graduates of today, that means coding is still a good place to start.”

The Problem – 4

From the 2022 ASER (Aunnaul Status of Education Report) : “Nationally, children’s basic reading ability has dropped to pre-2012 levels, reversing the slow improvement achieved in the intervening years. Drops are visible in both government and private schools in most states, and for both boys and girls…Nationally, children’s basic arithmetic levels have declined over 2018 levels for most grades. But the declines are less steep and the picture is more varied than in the case of basic reading…Nationally, children’s ability to read simple English sentences has stayed more or less at the 2016 level for children in Std V (from 24.7% in 2016 to 24.5% in 2022). Slight improvements are visible for children in Std VIII (from 45.3% in 2016 to 46.7% in 2022).”

CNN writes: “For India, what economists and analysts call the “demographic dividend” could continue to support rapid growth as the number of healthy workers increases. There are fears the country might miss out, however. That’s because India is simply not creating employment opportunities for the millions of young job seekers already entering the workforce every year. The South Asian nation’s working-age population stands at over 900 million, according to 2021 data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). This number is expected to hit more than 1 billion over the next decade, according to the Indian government. But these numbers could become a liability if policymakers do not create enough jobs, experts warned. Already, data show a growing number of Indians are not even looking for work, given the lack of opportunities and low wages…Lack of high quality education is one of the biggest reasons behind India’s unemployment crisis.”

New York Times writes: “India has one of the world’s largest populations of young people, roughly 600 million people are under age 25 — a demographic shift that was expected to deliver once-in-a-lifetime economic growth. But prosperity for these young adults has proved elusive. The latest report from the Center for Monitoring Indian Economy, an independent agency, shows that even as the working-age population increased by 121 million since 2016, the labor force shrank by 10 million jobs; the unemployment rate among college graduates and postgraduates stands at a dismal 33 percent. As a result, graduates are forced to accept work for which they are overqualified. “That is a very bad signal for an economy,” said Indrajit Bairagya, a professor at the Institute of Social and Economic Change in the southern Indian city Bengaluru, “because it leads to a crisis of diploma disease. Your education is becoming less valuable every day.””

Ashoka Mody: “My understanding of economic history going back to the Industrial Revolution is that there are two ingredients of economic development and no country in the last 300 years has done without them: education and increased participation of women in the workforce. I can only reassert a million times that the notion that India can somehow achieve this super-economic power status without these two but with the magic of IT and payments systems – which seems to be the solution for everything – is misplaced.” He adds: “No country has achieved success without two fundamental achievements: good education and an increase in the participation of women in the workforce. These work as a combination. As women come into the workforce, they have fewer children, they adopt better child-rearing practices, and they devote greater resources to educating the children. The children therefore grow up to be more productive. That cycle perpetuates itself over generations. Today, India does not have well educated kids and it has an abysmally low labour force participation rate for women.”

An education system that doesn’t work from schools to colleges. A lack of adequate job opportunities. Not enough women in the workforce. Governments for whom neither education nor employment is a priority. A youth unorganised as a collective to make jobs an election issue. A world that is changing with four trends that haven’t been seen in 40 years: high inflation, increasing interest rates, geopolitical uncertainty, and deglobalisation. A future where technological innovation is accelerating. What can India do to create better futures for its young?

Football’s global success can be a good starting point for thinking about a possible solution.

The Beautiful Game

I am not into football. So, it was a pleasant surprise that I found myself in Qatar’s Lusail stadium one December evening watching the FIFA World Cup pre-quarter final match between Portugal and Switzerland. As I read about football, I slowly began to understand its global popularity. (India remains an outlier thanks to the craze for cricket.) A question intrigued me: could the ‘system’ of football hold answers to how India could rethink youth education and skilling? Let’s first begin by understanding the passion and organisation of football.

El Arte Del Futbol writes: “According to FIFA estimates, over 265 million people play football. And the sport has 3.5 billion fans worldwide…Football is among the easiest sports you can ever play or watch. You can easily understand the basics of the game in a few minutes. This isn’t the case with some other sports like basketball or baseball. You won’t easily understand how the points are given especially if you have never played or watched the game. But with football, even if you are new to the game you master the first basics and later learn the complex rules. You just need to know that whichever team scores the most goals – wins!… There are way more football tournaments than in any other sport. It has competitions throughout the year from January to December. This keeps football fans entertained daily and this has attracted more people to the sport. In fact, as some tournaments close in some seasons, others are open. And more are preparing to kick off. This keeps the sport active all the time.”

Niladri Chakraborty writes: The fact that football is so inexpensive to play is one of the main factors contributing to its popularity…[It] can be played anywhere wherever there is a space…There are no physical requirements for playing football…Football is known as “The Beautiful Game” for a reason. Football is a visually appealing sport. It is thrilling to watch a football match because of the crowd’s fever, the clamor of the spectators, the emotions, the green grass, and everything else. A flawless slide tackle, a beautiful freekick, and a screaming golazo to the top angle are all simply beautiful to see. This game has a certain quality that makes it enjoyable to watch…Every continent has top-tier football leagues. Major football leagues are indeed in Europe, but some leagues receive even more support from the public from other continents, like South and Central America, Asia, and the Middle East. Clubs support teams that represent a country’s region and help fans maintain their passion for football throughout the year. Multiple leagues in numerous nations create the possibility for international club competitions like the Champions League, which pits football clubs from various nations against one another.”

The Fox Magazine adds: “Football is a relatively accessible sport to engage in. That said, for more seasoned players, it’s all about mobilizing those skills for precision and artistry to make for a captivating, fast-paced game. In many ways, football can be deemed a very tactical and coordinated sport; without the right pass or the perfectly angled shot, the player risks making his team lose an opportunity to score. Whether it’s playing or watching a game, the appeal of football lies in its sheer unpredictability. A team might dominate for the first half only to be overpowered by their opponents in the second half of the match.”

Joe Tansey writes about the passion for the sport. “No matter where you watch a football match, one thing never changes. That one thing is the passion that everyone around the game contains for football. Regardless of what part of the world you are in, the passion for the sport remains the same. The same passion that is seen in homes across the world is seen at the stadium and on the pitch during each matchday. Every major stadium in world football is packed each weekend with fans that would do anything for their club and players that would do the same. No other sport in the world can rival the passion during matches and in the week leading up to each match every week in world football.”

Simon Kuper writes: “Fandom is often dismissed as a leisure-time pursuit, opium of the masses or stupid distraction. However, for many people, it’s more than that: a primary source of identity, or a crutch to get through life. And the English variety of fandom is so powerful that it has spread around the globe.”

Football Leagues

One of the interesting aspects of football is the league system. Wikipedia explains: “The governing bodies in each country operate league systems in a domestic season, normally comprising several divisions, in which the teams gain points throughout the season depending on results. Teams are placed into tables, placing them in order according to points accrued. Most commonly, each team plays every other team in its league at home and away in each season, in a round-robin tournament. At the end of a season, the top team is declared the champion. The top few teams may be promoted to a higher division, and one or more of the teams finishing at the bottom are relegated to a lower division.”

The European leagues are the most popular. Bundesliga writes: “All Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) members run their own domestic league system. This is sometimes referred to as the ‘pyramid’, with a nationwide first division at the top. Below that, as the pyramid widens, is where things differ. Depending on population size and the number of clubs, divisions will either remain nationwide or eventually split to become regional. That creates the pyramid shape in a diagram. Focusing on the top tier, the most common format consists of each team playing the other twice – once at home and once away – from fall to spring…It’s three points for a win, one for a draw, and the team with the most points after all the games is the champion…Teams move between levels of the pyramid at the end of each season. That means a set number of clubs at the bottom end of a division (except in the bottom-most league) will drop into the one below. Sides finishing at the top end of all leagues – bar the top tier – will move up a level.”

The English Premier League is one of the most popular. “The Premier League is the top tier of England’s football pyramid, with 20 teams battling it out for the honour of being crowned English champions. The league takes place between August and May and involves the teams playing each other home and away across the season, a total of 380 matches. The teams who finish in the bottom three of the league table at the end of the campaign are relegated to the Championship, the second tier of English football. Those teams are replaced by three clubs promoted from the Championship; the sides that finish in first and second place and the third via the end-of-season playoffs.”

The primary source of revenue is the sale of broadcasting rights. Wikipedia: “The Premier League sells its television rights on a collective basis…The money is divided into three parts: half is divided equally between the clubs; one quarter is awarded on a merit basis based on final league position, the top club getting twenty times as much as the bottom club, and equal steps all the way down the table; the final quarter is paid out as facilities fees for games that are shown on television, with the top clubs generally receiving the largest shares of this. The income from overseas rights is divided equally between the twenty clubs.”

Argentina won the 2022 World Cup. New York Times had a story on its potrero system: “The essence of Argentine soccer can be found late at night, in the circuit of games in barrios outside Buenos Aires. There, young players for generations have cut their teeth, maybe dreaming of suiting up for the country’s national team, but primarily entertaining late-night and early-morning crowds with an intense, wild talent for the game, playing on whatever patch of ground. “Potrero” is the term that sums up this system and style, rooted in the informal and improvised games born in the earthy, amateur fields of the 19th century, long before soccer became a profession with billion-dollar clubs and multimillion-dollar salaries. Every Argentine legend has had it in his blood: Alfredo Di Stéfano, Diego Maradona, Lionel Messi. They all kicked around in potreros, and when someone dribbles impressively or scores an amazing goal, it’s common for people to say, “That’s potrero.”…“The potrero system works like this: Teams arrange a five-on-five match, compete for a pot, typically around $1,000 put up by the players or sponsors, and the winner takes all. In general, a team organizes a potrero night, which features four or five games starting at 11 p.m. and finishing around 4 a.m. or 5 a.m. Over time, the players have gotten to know each other and many of them might play for a different team every week, depending on which club is short a player.”

Could football, its league system, and ideas from the potrero system enable the creation of an alternate model to educate and skill India’s youth?

Test Matches

I remember watching a TV program in the 1970s called Telematch. (It was one of the more entertaining programmes on Doordarshan at that time.) From Wikipedia: “Telematch was the name given to a syndicated series of 43 programmes from the West German television series Spiel ohne Grenzen originally broadcast on the WDR (Westdeutscher Rundfunk Köln) channel from 1967 until 1980. It was based on its French counterpart Intervilles and originally consisted of a match between teams from two West German towns, except for the last three years’ matches (1978-1980), which were contested between five towns. The match consisted of several games in which the participants would typically dress up in costumes. Often the costumes were elaborate and designed to increase the challenge of the game by making movement awkward. Games were played against the clock, or as a race.”

Could a similar idea lead to Indian villages creating teams of youth to compete in digital matches? The teams could be organised into leagues. The focus would be on skills which would need to be learnt and which would help employability for the participants. Since mobile access is available everywhere in India, a digital challenge would be the way to go.

Let’s take an example building on the leagues system. Take 32 teams – every village could be allowed one team of 10 youth (age 15-21 years) for every 1,000 population. These teams would be split into 4 groups of 8 teams. Each team would then play seven matches. The group toppers would then have a knockout system of seven additional matches – quarter-final, semi-final, and final – to decide the final winner. If a match can be played every two days, then a winner could be decided in a month. While this is linked with geo-location (the village), an alternate format could just have a team of 10 irrespective of physical location.

The winner from the 32 teams would get to move up a level and compete in another league with 31 other teams. A similar approach would create a winner to move up a level. Two levels could handle 1,024 teams (32 x 32), while four levels could handle over a million teams (1,024 x 1,024) and thus 10 million youth. India has about 175 million youth in the ages of 15-21 given that 25 million births happen each year.

The match-ups would encourage learning individually and in groups. They would test skills like English, coding, general knowledge, puzzles, and more. The goal would be to complete the matches in 30 minutes or so, with the playing happening on the mobile phones. Players could huddle together physically or combine digitally. Some games could test individual skills and others could focus on group skills – similar to how many inter-school tournaments work. Each of the matches would be digitally streamed so others could watch and also learn.

The matches would be played round-the-year, with each month of matches creating winners – thus ensuring there is continuous testing (and hopefully improvement).

FIVE

A few years ago, my colleague, Atanu Dey, had come up with an idea termed FIVE (Freedom, Independence & Values Education). Here are some of the ideas he had proposed in a private note to me.

Mission

To teach a generation basic literacy, numeracy, and those values that underlie freedom and independence.

Need

In the modern world, the inability to comprehend and communicate in English is a severe handicap. So also, innumeracy and the inability to reason effectively prevent a person from achieving their full potential for productively participating in society. Individuals so handicapped are not free and independent in any meaningful sense. They become dependent on handouts from the more productive not because of any intrinsic disability but merely because they have not had the opportunity to gain these essential, although simple, skills.

These barriers not only hurt the individual but also impose enormous social costs. The divide between those who get the required training and those who are left out creates an underclass that impoverishes society and prevents it from operating at its production possibilities frontier.

The “Modern Basic Skills” Divide

Literacy (in some language or the other), numeracy and the ability to reason have always been a basic part of any traditional education. These we can call the “traditional basic skills.” But now we have an additional bit which can be termed the “modern basic skills”:

Literacy in English
Facility in the use of computing/communications devices and the internet/world-wide-web

The urban, educated, middle-class-and-above are a minority segment of the Indian population. This segment has the motivation and the means to acquire at least to some extent the modern basic skills in the normal course of daily living and learning. This is not so for the vast majority of Indians.

The underclass constitute the large majority of Indians. They are the poor, the illiterate, the uneducated. They are found in urban India but are mostly residents of rural India. This underclass does not have the means to get the modern basic skills. Indeed, most don’t even have the traditional basic skills. It goes without saying that learning the traditional basic skills is a prerequisite to learning modern basic skills. But — and this is verifiably true — while they lack the means and the opportunity to learn, they do not lack the ability and motivation. They not only want to be educated, they aspire to learn English and “learn computers.”

Bridging the MBS Divide

Since the underclass is unable to get the modern basic skills both due to their inability to pay and the lack of suitable opportunities, the “Freedom, Independence & Value Educational Foundation” (FIVE Foundation) would create the “Modern Basic Skills Program” — MBSP — to bridge the MBS Divide.

These are the features of MBSP:

It will be free to anyone who wishes to learn the modern basic skills
It will not have any prerequisites
Instructions will be delivered using modern information and communications platform and tools
The program will be run in the local area and will be administered by local community volunteers
The learning will be self-paced and progress will depend on the student’s specific circumstances and abilities

The Educational Content

Since the MBS Program will not have any prerequisites, the content will start from the very basics — the English alphabet and the counting numbers. The instruction of English will be in English, not in any other language. This means the same content will be used regardless of what the native language of the student is.

The learning will not be categorised into subject areas; instead, the learning of the language (English) will proceed simultaneously with the learning of all other subject matters — arithmetic, logic, history, geography, physical sciences, social sciences, etc.

All the content will be “learner centric,” meaning that the learning will be a result of the interaction of the student with the content and there will be no teacher. There will be a facilitator present to handle any exceptions but the norm will be that the student interacts with the content at his or her own pace.

The content will be interactive and rich — meaning it will be text, video, audio and graphics. Moreover, the content will be fun. We learn best when we are fascinated, not when we are bored.

Skills

I asked ChatGPT “What are the skills youth need to excel in today’s world?” Here is the response:

Communication skills: The ability to effectively communicate with others is essential in any field or industry.
Problem-solving skills: Being able to analyze a problem and come up with creative solutions is a valuable skill in any situation.
Collaboration skills: The ability to work well with others and contribute to a team is increasingly important in today’s workplace.
Adaptability: The ability to adapt to new situations and learn new things quickly can be a major advantage in today’s rapidly changing world.
Digital literacy: Proficiency with technology and the ability to navigate and use various digital tools is essential in many fields.
Leadership skills: The ability to inspire and guide others can be valuable in any setting, whether it’s in a professional context or in a community organization.
Creativity: The ability to think outside the box and come up with new and innovative ideas can be a major asset.
Emotional intelligence: The ability to understand and manage your own emotions, as well as the emotions of others, can be crucial in building and maintaining relationships and working effectively with others.

A starting point to equip youth would be a program which included the following:

English language – reading and writing. This would also include development of vocabulary.
A core curriculum consisting of key concepts from multiple disciplines (maths, physics, chemistry, history, geography)
Computing, Internet and coding skills – being able to use search engines and new utilities like ChatGPT, and also write simple code in one or more of the languages like Python or Java

FIVE would have YouTube videos for teaching. An expert team would curate the videos for each topic. Platforms like Khan Academy have already created a huge amount of content. Here are the courses available from Khan Academy:

Coding is another useful skill. Hannah Meinke writes about the benefits of coding: “Learning to code has the inadvertent effect of teaching you how to think,” says Adrian Degus, CEO of Nuvro. He goes on to explain that he used to be more prone to solving problems emotionally. But his coding experience has taught him to approach problems logically. “Understanding logic, at a deep level, has improved my problem-solving proficiency tenfold,” he adds. Coding, in its most basic terms, is really just assigning a computer a task to do based on the logical guidelines you’ve outlined. Highly complex tasks are essentially a collection of smaller operations once you break them down. This methodical and logic-heavy approach to problem solving can be a boon for figuring out problems beyond a coding challenge.”

To this would be added other appropriate material. Students would be able to decide which sections they want to learn. The regular test challenges (along the lines of SAT and TOEFL) would provide directional inputs to the youth on what to learn.

While much of this is individual, there would also be team games. Solving challenging math problems is one such example. Coding too could be done in a group. While no individual is likely to excel in every subject, the hope is that they have enough exposure for the skills needed in job opportunities that come their way later.

What a purely digital platform misses out on is testing for skills like public speaking, debating, and presenting. These could be brought in at a later date when audiences (or smart bots) could act as judges.

Both the processes (teaching and testing) would need to be automated and not dependent on any human intervention; this is the only way to scale to millions. AI engines could work as judges where needed. The idea of teams and leagues brings in the necessary competitive spirit – just like football. The matches would be played at the same time nationally via an app with results available in real-time.

The Way Ahead

We know India’s education system is failing our youth. India cannot afford to lose the demographic dividend. A nation of unemployed or underemployed youth who do not see a path to a better life could even result in social unrest. The need is for disruptive thinking that builds on the digital infrastructure that exists and new technologies like Generative AI to craft solutions which can educate and skill with speed and scale. What I have outlined in this series with YES is such a possibility. It is doable without any government intervention. It puts the onus on individuals and peers to learn and improve themselves; my belief is that most people want to become better. It also creates a competitive fun process, which can identify the superstars – like Brazil’s league system did with Pele.

My father was born in a village in Rajasthan. Some of his teachers identified his potential at an early age and encouraged his learning. He got into a premier engineering college in Jodhpur and then earned a Tata scholarship to go to the US for higher education. It was his talent and education that pulled his entire family from a suboptimal life in a village in Rajasthan.

Even today, there are millions who are denied an opportunity to rise and excel because their education in government institutions in their villages is below par. Their potential is wasted – which is a loss to the world, for inventions and innovations are done by people. India’s 1.4 billion people can become the accelerator for a future era of superabundance – if we can ensure education and identify the best among our youth.

ChatGPT provided an answer in response to my question on what is wrong with India’s education system:

Lack of access: Many children in India, particularly in rural areas, do not have access to education due to a lack of schools or other infrastructure.
Quality of education: The quality of education in India can vary significantly, with some schools providing a good education and others falling short. There is often a lack of qualified teachers and inadequate resources, which can impact the quality of education students receive.
Inequalities: There are significant inequalities in the education system in India, with students from disadvantaged backgrounds or certain communities often facing additional barriers to accessing education.
Exam-based system: The education system in India places a heavy emphasis on exams, which can create a high-pressure environment for students and may not adequately reflect a student’s true abilities or potential.
Limited focus on practical skills: The education system in India tends to focus on theoretical knowledge, rather than practical skills that can be applied in the real world. This can make it difficult for students to transition from school to the workforce.

Many of these problems are interconnected. Conventional solutions are not helping India’s youth. We need thinking that can address the education and skilling challenges rapidly and at a scale of hundreds of millions. Technology is the only solution – we will not be able to train enough teachers fast enough to ensure we don’t lose a generation of youth to mediocrity.

The action needed from India’s government is to free up India’s economy so entrepreneurs can flourish. They will hire the newly educated and skilled – and provide the necessary feedback to improve the YES programme.

A combination of geopolitical events has given India a unique opportunity to rise faster. The world is very different from the one which facilitated China’s rise from the 1980s. But the basics for future prosperity do not change – education and good health for the youth, and economic freedom for entrepreneurs. YES can address the education and skills challenge – a prerequisite on the path to social mobility and wealth creation.

Thinks 789

Ben Thompson: “What is notable, though, is that the chief task for Netflix going forward is not necessarily execution, at least in terms of product or technology. While Hastings has left Netflix in a very good spot relative to its competitors, the long-term success of the company will ultimately be about creativity…It’s impossible to not dive into the history of Netflix and not come away with a deep appreciation for everything Hastings accomplished. I’m not sure there is any company of Netflix’s size that has ever been so frequently doubted and written off. To have built it to a state where simply having the best content is paramount is a massive triumph.”

Vitalik Buterin writes about stealth addresses: “Suppose that Alice wants to send Bob an asset. This could be some quantity of cryptocurrency (eg. 1 ETH, 500 RAI), or it could be an NFT. When Bob receives the asset, he does not want the entire world to know that it was he who got it. Hiding the fact that a transfer happened is impossible, especially if it’s an NFT of which there is only one copy on-chain, but hiding who is the recipient may be much more viable. Alice and Bob are also lazy: they want a system where the payment workflow is exactly the same as it is today. Bob sends Alice (or registers on ENS) some kind of “address” encoding how someone can pay him, and that information alone is enough for Alice (or anyone else) to send him the asset…A stealth address is an address that can be generated by either Alice or Bob, but which can only be controlled by Bob. Bob generates and keeps secret a spending key, and uses this key to generate a stealth meta-address. He passes this meta-address to Alice (or registers it on ENS). Alice can perform a computation on this meta-address to generate a stealth address belonging to Bob. She can then send any assets she wants to send to this address, and Bob will have full control over them. Along with the transfer, she publishes some extra cryptographic data (an ephemeral pubkey) on-chain that helps Bob discover that this address belongs to him.”

Peter Coy: “[Recently] Uri Levine, one of the three founders of Waze, came out with a book, “Fall in Love With the Problem, Not the Solution: A Handbook for Entrepreneurs,” which describes how the navigation app came together, along with advice on how to be an entrepreneur…I’ll tell you what Levine told me about Waze in a series of Zoom interviews and email exchanges, but I’ll preface it with my biggest takeaway: Being an entrepreneur is nothing like driving a car with Waze on. There are no turn-by-turn instructions. There is no certainty that you’ll get where you want to go. In fact, you probably won’t. Another takeaway: Having a great idea is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for entrepreneurial success. “The importance of the idea is about 1 percent to 5 percent of the journey,” Levine wrote to me. “The rest is a long roller coaster journey of failures — hard work over a long time.”…To him, loving the problem means remaining focused on customers’ needs — the problem — rather than getting overly attached to your latest, maybe-not-so-good idea for serving those needs.” Levine: “Go and speak with…people to understand their perception of the problem. Only then start thinking about the solution. Speak with as many potential users as you can. The outcome will be: 1. It will qualify and help you to fall in love with the problem, or even better, it will disqualify the problem. 2. It will provide you with the right perception of the problem 3. It will provide anecdotal stories for you to use on your journey.” More, more and more.

Michael Turner: “Science is all about big dreams. Sometimes the dreams are beyond your immediate reach. But science has allowed humankind to do big things — Covid vaccines, the Large Hadron Collider, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, the Webb telescope. — that extend our vision and our power to shape our future. When we do these big things nowadays, we do them together. If we continue to dream big and work together, even more amazing things lie ahead.”

Top of the lyne: “Word of mouth, viral loops and referral mechanisms can get you far and wide and deep within accounts, but there comes a time in every PLG company’s life when it’s time to send in the cavalry. Sales…For enterprise-wide adoption, your product has to reach new users (even those who aren’t natural adopters), new teams where it solves new use-cases, then enable new features that may not be compelling to individual users, but are to the collective – improved security, support, SSO – and all the other squiggly lines on the bottom right corners of pricing pages.,,That you’ve hit PMF and have hit the double/triple digit ARR through a pure self-serve model are perhaps good indicators that it’s time. But a more subtle tell, and where top-down sales becomes a true force multiplier is when the organic expansion levers are working and you have penetration within accounts.”

Rita McGrath: “For far too many companies, the people in their call centers and manning their front lines are looked at just as units of cost. Indeed, as Wharton’s Peter Cappelli points out in a recent article in the Harvard Business Review, the way we account for people expenses only encourages skimping on investing in your human talent. We don’t treat it as an investment, we treat it as an expense, even though many CEO’s will tell you “our people are our most important asset.” In extreme cases, companies take human beings out of the service equation entirely (looking at you, Frontier Airlines!). There is an alternative. Imagine if you saw, as Zeynep Ton writes about, all those people as sources of potential customer delight and loyalty – indeed, as sources of revenue growth?”