Shravan's Random Notes - Let go of your self and experience life http://shravanshetty.posterous.com Most recent posts at Shravan's Random Notes - Let go of your self and experience life posterous.com Wed, 13 Oct 2010 11:23:47 -0700 Contemplations on our education system -Shravan Shetty http://shravanshetty.posterous.com/contemplations-on-our-education-system-shrava http://shravanshetty.posterous.com/contemplations-on-our-education-system-shrava
Contemplations 1- Shravan Shetty.pptx Download this file

Contemplations on our education system
Will Durant in the opening pages of his book , 'The Story of Philosophy' cites that "Education is the progressive discovery of our ignorance "
 
I have always believed that the education system needs to evolve with questions and not rote learning.
 
So here is a presentation which i have put together which has simple Quotations to think on ...
 
Think about it . When you are ready , do your bit , give your inputs where you can and ...
 
The Education nd evolution  shall truly begin ... of us and the world
Shravan

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Mon, 08 Jun 2009 11:20:00 -0700 Pintus Perspective http://shravanshetty.posterous.com/2009/06/pintus-perspective.html http://shravanshetty.posterous.com/2009/06/pintus-perspective.html As a daily habit, the 10-year Old Pintu was reading newspaper.
Suddenly he asked his father, " Dad! What does it mean by 'Governance System' ? " "Its Like..." father said while thinking, "See! I earn and bring money to home, mean's I am a 'Money Holder'. Your mother decides where and how to spend that money and that means she is 'Government'. That maid in our home is doing all the household works, so she will be 'Labour Class'. You are a 'Common man' or 'Public'. Your kid brother is 'Future' or the 'Next Generation', understand?". That day Pintu slept with all those thoughts. In the middle of the night he woke-up because his kid brother was crying. He wetted the matrices so he was crying. Pintu went to woke-up his mother. She was in deep sleep so Pintu went to the Maid's room to wake her up. But there his father was sleeping with the maid. So he came back with frustration. Next morning father asked Pintu, " Hey Pintu Darling! You understood the 'Governance System'? ". Pintu replied, " Yeah Dad, I understood! When money Holder is exploiting Labour Class, our Government is sleeping. Future of our nation is crying for not getting their basic needs fulfilled and in all this Common Man is suffering!"

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Mon, 08 Jun 2009 11:16:00 -0700 Swami Vivekananda s Views http://shravanshetty.posterous.com/2009/06/swami-vivekananda-s-views.html http://shravanshetty.posterous.com/2009/06/swami-vivekananda-s-views.html What ails INDIA? – in the words of SWAMI VIVEKANANDA
Following is the excerpt from the book “Swami Vivekananda ON INDIA AND HER PROBLEMS” PUBLISHED BY ADVAITA ASHRAMA
Physical weakness: In spite of the greatness of the Upanishads, we are weak, very weak. First of all, is our physical weakness. That physical weakness is the cause at least of one-third of our miseries.
Our young men must be strong. Religion will come afterwards. You will be nearer to heaven through football than through the study of the Gita. You will understand the Upanishads better when your body stands firm upon your feet. Strength, manhood, kshatra-virya plus brahmateja
Lack of faith in ourselves: We have lost faith. We have less faith than the Englishman and woman, a thousand times less faith.
We want faith in our own selves. Strength is life, weakness is death. Have faith that you are all born to do great things! Be strong and have faith and everything else is bound to follow.
Lack of Self- help: The whole national character is one of childish dependence. You do not deserve to live if you cannot help yourselves. Do not look to others for help; you must not depend on any foreign help. This is real patriotism..
Lack of obedience: Everyone wants to command and no one wants to obey. First learn to obey. The command will come by itself. Always first learn to be a servant, and then you will be fit to be a master.
Laziness, selfishness and jealousy: There is too much talk, talk, talk! We speak of many things, parrot-like, but never do them; speaking and not doing has become a habit.
We are lazy; we cannot work; we do not love each other; we are intensely selfish. Not three of us can come together without hating each other; without being jealous of each other.
Lack of organizing capacity: The faculty of organization is entirely absent in our nature. Why is it that 40 millions of Englishmen rule 300 millions of people here? What is the psychological explanation? These (Englishmen) 40 million put their wills together. Therefore to make a great future of India, the whole secret lies in organization, accumulation of power, co-ordination of wills.
Lack of business integrity: We have not yet developed strict business principles. Business is business in the highest sense and no friendship. One should keep the clearest account of everything in one’s charge; never, never apply funds intended for one thing to any other use whatsoever- even if starves next moment. This is business integrity.
Lack of love: No man no nation can hate others and live. Love never fails; today or tomorrow or ages after, truth will conquer. Love shall win the victory. Do you love your fellow -men?

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Mon, 08 Jun 2009 10:54:00 -0700 Lessons from Infosys http://shravanshetty.posterous.com/2009/06/lessons-from-infosys.html http://shravanshetty.posterous.com/2009/06/lessons-from-infosys.html

There is nothing like a soldier teaching another soldier about war

In Learning and development one needs to create programs and processes to leverage the cumulative learning and pass it on from one generation to another through formal and informal means. You will find below a initiative at Infosys

Business Is the Curriculum, and Leaders Are Teachersby Michael Chavez, Sushanth Tharappan and Gil McWilliam
Having organizational leaders teach employees seems like a wonderful idea, and generally speaking, it is. But to be a truly effective means for instruction, it has to be applied at certain times and in certain ways.
To CEOs, teaching may sound like a genteel retirement activity, though in fact, today's organizations have little choice: To keep their pipelines healthy, they need their senior most talent to teach as well as lead. Given global demographics, it will be more difficult to fill senior positions as people retire, so today's leaders are increasingly pressed to pass on their accumulated knowledge and wisdom before they leave.
Is it even possible to claim the title of leader without being a teacher? Management guru Noel Tichy writes in The Leadership Engine, "For winning leaders, teaching is not a now-and-then sideline activity. It is how they lead and at the heart of everything they do." Companies want more than mentoring, coaching and being a role model. They believe that at least some of their top executives ought to be seen as teachers in a more traditional sense, taking a turn at the front of a class of senior colleagues.
Expectations tend to run high for a leaders-as-teachers (LAT) initiative, but good planning trumps good luck: In short, there are plenty of ways to get it wrong.
One example of an organization using LAT successfully as a leadership development tool is Bangalore-headquart ered Infosys Technologies Ltd. Infosys' LAT initiative, called the Leaders Teach Series, is anchored by the Infosys Leadership Institute, which has organized and conducted more than 50 LAT offerings around the world.
Why Bother?
At Infosys, as elsewhere, three principal considerations drive the LAT approach to employee development:
a) Companies want to access tacit knowledge locked away in the minds of leaders. This knowledge, while often critical to business success, is wrapped in unique, hard-to-replicate experiences and a leader's professional context. Familiarity with customer requirements, sales methodologies, techniques for achieving operational excellence and processes for driving innovation are subjects that often are career-specific, rather than industry-specific or company-specific. Firms want to access and transfer this deep background in a way that it can be reapplied to new problems.
b) Companies hope to leverage the benefit of linking the medium with the message. By bringing leaders to the forefront of the process of developing other leaders, it sends a powerful signal to the organization about the value of specific insights and the importance of the development process itself. How might you, as a program attendee, prioritize an educational intervention taught by an outside expert as opposed to one taught by your boss?
c) Embracing LAT offers hope to organizations frustrated by the chasm between HR and the business. Engaging leaders in teaching leaves little room for disagreements on learning priorities between learning and development professionals and top dogs. To fully deliver the messages, frameworks and tools, leaders must be fully part of the process and supportive of the content. In such an environment, true partnership between HR and the line leaders should be much easier to achieve.
Five Caveats
The way of LAT, however, is fraught with peril. Certain factors weigh heavily in deciding whether LAT is the right tool for the job. Let's consider the tradeoffs:
a) LAT is like world peace. Who would argue it could be a bad thing? Shouldn't leaders always be the ones who convey the most important messages, strategies and knowledge?
But think carefully about why this approach is required. Putting leaders in front of their people as educators makes sense to participants only when this role reinforces the explicit strategic learning outcomes for which the program was designed. Three reasons stand out:
1. You cannot separate the teacher from the content. Alignment around goals, priorities and practices is central to the learning outcomes. Whether you like it or not, bringing leaders to the front of the room signals to participants that their messages should shift people's focus or that they should change their emphasis on content areas on which leaders present. What happens, though, if you didn't intend for your people to change focus? Maybe you just wanted to humor a certain executive.
2. You cannot separate what is being taught from its context. If a finance organization has turned to a new profit model to help managers evaluate projects and wants to socialize the model through a decision-making toolkit, perhaps the person best-suited to teach is the finance executive who led the effort, not an outsider - and not the CFO who was two stages removed. Find the intersection at which your organization' s unique expertise and knowledge meets the right senior leader.
3. Leaders must engage actively, not passively. Remember the old paradigm, "There is no better way to learn than to teach"? Having leaders prepare, engage and dialogue with participants puts them in the midst of developing organizational capability. They become part of the change that the educational program is pursuing. Not only will leaders learn more about how to articulate core concepts, frameworks and practices, but through teaching, they become champions and supporters of such change.
b) Great teaching involves the co-creation of knowledge. When leaders teach, the stakes are higher and the risks greater. Being a good presenter does not mean an executive will make a good teacher. Teaching is not telling. It is asking great questions that set the learning agenda and get people thinking and talking.
It is not enough to "transmit" knowledge from one mind to another. (To be sure, teaching would be an expensive way to do this; reading a book or paper is more efficient.) Rather, teaching involves both the teacher and the student - in the creation of new meanings, in finding applications and examples and in stretching the learner's and the teacher's imaginations.
A benefit of teaching by questioning is that executives-cum- teachers inevitably engage in a process of assumption-checking as part of their preparation, thinking through their actions and beliefs at a deeper level than they might have done while busy implementing their strategies in the first place, or when they were immersed in a welter of daily tasks.
At the same time, people vary in their teaching ability. Some are naturals. Some respond well to coaching or practice. Some are not naturals and have no stomach for coaching or practice. Given this variability, the learning organization must minimize the risks while enabling leaders to take their place at the front of the classroom.
c) Consider the opportunity cost. LAT requires leaders to invest a lot of time preparing so participants come away with new knowledge, behaviors and beliefs. One Fortune 100 company that employed LAT experienced extreme difficulty getting its top management to understand the time required. Management would say, "Sure, I'd love to do the session. When do you want me to show up?" In their minds, this would be like any other talking-head session: fly in, whip out some slides, speak and leave. That's not "Leaders as Teachers;" it's "Leaders as Communicators. "
To pull off LAT, senior leaders have to work closely with internal learning and development professionals - and often outside consultants and educators - to build learning outcomes and design the content, refine the materials and design, and rehearse the delivery. They may not be prepared to invest the time.
d) Don't think about it as an all-or-nothing approach. Still, there's no cause for despair: Sometimes the right answer is a more manageable blend of methods and teachers. To use finance as an example, outside educators might best deliver theory and generic example - such as setting up "Finance 101" concepts necessary to understand the logic behind the new profit-evaluation scheme - while an internal executive could teach its application to company-specific situations.
e) Scalability costs more, not less. Senior leaders may find it difficult to deliver multiple programs in multiple locations for multiple levels. In order to scale LAT throughout the organization, the task of teaching must be spread among many educators, an internal cadre that follows the program as it cascades.
Happily, there is a significant side benefit: the alignment of executive teaching staff at every level around common frameworks, tools and messages. Doing your LAT program on a large scale does, however, mean significant time and energy to "train the trainer" - several times more than for an ordinary program in which the educator pool is relatively fixed.
Those Who Can, Do - and Teach
To sum it up, we are seeing that more and more companies are focused on enhancing their organizations' capability to execute strategy. Indeed, today more than ever, building alignment around strategy has become a critical task for senior leaders. Although it's subject to several important caveats, if the strategy is important and the leaders willing and capable, they should teach.
Sustainable alignment comes not when leaders talk at their people about what needs to get done, but when they engage real issues, work with them directly and teach from experience. LAT programs, done well, can be an extraordinarily valuable tool to build the leadership bench. Institutional memory and organizational wisdom shouldn't have to retire when the leader does.
[About the Authors: Michael Chavez is a regional managing director at Duke Corporate Education. Sushanth Tharappan is head of deployment at Infosys Leadership Institute. Gil McWilliam is an executive director at Duke Corporate Education.]

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