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.. continuing from Bricks for a Fool's Paradise
"It's a wonderful life" is a favourite Christmas movie. It is mine too, it brings optimism, a staple of entrepreneurs. "He asks her if she wants the moon, and he offers to "throw a lasso around it and pull it down."" When ethereal ideas convert to day to day realities, do they survive their own weight?
What to teach?
It is essential to bridge the gap between available engineers and what is needed in the future. This forms the goal of the training. Since we know the engineers need to be on par with any engineer in the world, we need to define the characteristics carefully, at least at their current age. What is apparent is that an engineer from just about any other country is usually more responsible both in terms of handling themselves and professionalism towards work. In terms of teamwork though, if channelled right, an Indian engineer is inherently more team oriented than elsewhere. In most companies, an effort is made to collect engineers and then form a team. As teamwork is important and the plan is to train, it makes send to pick engineers that are good team workers to begin with, encourage this behaviour and train in technical area. Also since emphasis is on channeling a behavour, it makes sense to get people who are open to forming such behaviour.
> Hire only fresh engineers.
> Teamwork and other work culture classes form essential part of training. Occupy 20% of syllabus.
> Heavy on practical project
> Teach how to learn on their own - wean away from a teacher. How to discuss a new topic and come to conclusions.
> Learn in depth rather than breadth.
Suddenly training turns out to be very different from normal college training. Emphasis is on learning and not on grades - in fact remove examinations altogether since if the group is small, you know the status of each engineer any day. Rather than promoting fierce competition for marks, you emphasize collective learning. Method used in KarMic is Socratic method, ask a question and pull the answers from someone, anyone in the group, discuss the answers till EVERYONE understands. There are no examinations, assignments are given, to be done in groups or individually. If this is followed by a practical project, all knowledge is integrated correctly. Indian idea of quality, "product for your own family" comes in handy. Producing large numbers is not fashionable anymore.
Teach Whom?
It may be easy to teach someone a technical topic especially if he/she is intelligent but the teamwork issue and long term employment have added a new dimension. Training becomes more a career teaching, than a topic teaching. "You treat a human being and not a disease", my father, a doctor usually says. In our training as well, apprenticeship and creating a decent human who can deal with technical issues becomes critical since you want long term association . Just instantaneous brilliance has limited value in such a proposition. Further, changing basic behaviour is much more difficult compared to changing level of understanding of a topic, that right choice of candidates is critical.
One needs therefore a close association with candidates for a long time prior to hiring. The selection is sounding more like choosing a right marriage partner. The problem of choosing candidates was solved by finding professors in colleges who understood the KarMic model and recommended candidates they would consider as right marriage partners for their own children. If any reader outside India does not understand this, it is understandable but the task of finding the right qualities has been adapted to a well understood parental role in an Indian marriage.
Social Obligations
Long term perspective puts even a fledgling company on notice. Women do not usually have a free choice after marriage in India. The investment on a woman engineer may therefore not be recovered. In India, we could easily have avoided hiring women without adverse reaction, it is allowed to make such discrimination. We made a conscious choice to hire women on an equal basis; argument was basically that if you were in her shoes, you would feel really bad if turned down based on sex. Turns out putting someone else's shoes to check for equality gets used for many situations. Fully one third of engineers in KarMic are female.
Poor form another large class. Starting with stunted dreams, money adds many thresholds to them, sometimes insurmountable. Wanting a significant portion of world's analog engineers in the company, means one can not possibly keep aside any pool of talent. Rural engineers tend to be bad at English communication. Usually they do not make it through normal filters. However, I had attended many international conferences where Japanese scholars were lousy at English, their technical content was unblemished though. Later though, even if their English was poor, they had rehearsed their presentation prepared by someone with better English. We can suddenly start looking at people from North Karnataka as though they were from Japan. While ability to communicate is always an advantage, sometime one can mistake it for capability. It is alright to teach difficult chip design in Gurukul style in Kannada if necessary. Somewhere McCaulay got forgotten. Much talked about English advantage is not what we should compete with; we should do it solid results. One way to equalize the playing field in selection of the poor candidates is to make everything free. This is popular subsidy mechanism used all the time in our country.
With requirement of hands on learning, the course expected a group of engineers to design a chip, get it fabricated and tested, a year long process. The course was designed around this concept since the final silicon teaches a tougher lesson than many hours of class, especially if it does not work.
Fees?
We needed to calculate costs in setting up a training centre. We did it by assuming money for initial costs such as deposits was borrowed from banks to be repaid in 10 years. Adding a monthly mortgage of this amount to a reasonable monthly cost of facilities got an expense number irrespective of number of students. Then add per person cost to arrive at a yearly budget. Reasonable analysis for a novice at those sort of thing. These calculations are shown to prospective candidates. The cost of training came to about Rs 2 lakhs (~$4600) while training about 16 engineers per year even with ridiculously low teacher's salary. We decided that we should charge this to the candidates since entrepreneurship means paying real cost of things. SUBSIDIES kill entrepreneurship, that is why so many small scale industries are sick.
However to solve a poor student's problem, this is a loan provided by the design centre the engineer will belong in the future. You have trusted an engineer with a loan that a normal bank would not touch. A twist is that the company reduces the loan amount to zero in four yearly instalments - an initial engineer's advantage slowly converts to a company's advantage. In essence the engineer has not paid anything over a long term.
Our assumptions is that the lost earnings of a year are more than made up by the more rapid capability of a well trained engineer. In typical American style, the value of the training is emphasized by noting that the 2 lakh rupees corresponds approximately Rs 200 per hour per student to the teacher, much higher than amount required to buy a good meal or a movie. So they were there to learn, I was not there to teach.
Proof of the pudding?
In the first year of existence, 8 engineers designed two projects, which were fabricated and found functional. They won awards at India's VLSI conferences. That year as far as we know, no other institution in India had silicon.
Welcomed with Open Arms?
Since the institute was named a Training Centre, it attracted a bunch of derision, these being in the shudra class, compared to the so called class A category. KarMic Training Centre is not accredited, is not affiliated to any university but carries on creating good engineers.
"Gandhi could do without the Nobel Peace Prize. Whether the Nobel committee can do without Gandhi, is the question." What do you say when the secretary of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Geir Lundestad, says, "The greatest omission in our 106 year history is undoubtedly that Mahatma Gandhi never received the Nobel Peace Prize."
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/We_missed_Mahatma_Gandhi/articleshow/2181375.cms
Thursday, February 01, 2007
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
Bricks for a Fool's Paradise
Technorati Profile
When number of years you have passed through seems larger than what you expect to have before you, decision processes are different. Personal needs have been met, thoughts turn to caring for others and matters of legacy.
Late nineties were heady days if you were in IT industry and a company my friends, Mark, Brenda and I had started was doing very well, doubling revenue every year. I was a silent partner. It was time to think of business expansion. Many issues; what technical area to work in, at what rate to build the company, how to arrange for the required wealth, where to start the company. Since these discussions were taking place in Dallas, which country of the world the venture was set up was immaterial.
One by one, slowly the answers came, more philosophical than commercial. With my experience of having started a high quality IC design group in Texas Instruments in 1988-89 in Bangalore, which had an enviable 97% retention, it was a natural choice to build something in this space. Analog chip design is a difficult area of chip design, at that time it had about 10000 engineers world-wide and about 600 RF engineers compared to close to a million engineers in digital design engineers. It was contiguous area of our work and had a higher immunity to economic forces. The venture would have been successful anywhere in the world, the mode of it's build-up would be vastly different. We wanted at least one percent of world population of analog engineers, hopefully more of RF engineers.
My friends, though from financially modest families, had always worked with several foreigners and believed that foreigners also should also move forward. This opened up the possible choice of location, it could be set up anywhere. It resonated with my philosophy, learnt at my mother's side, that others deserve as much as want for ourselves. We also typically hired people that wanted to start something since such people tended to be self-driven.
There was a television show, that showed three (I think) girls sitting in front of a table with marshmallows. ( These are soft cotton like candy!). They had a choice of eating one immediately or two if they waited till the announcer ran an errand and came back. Stanford followed these girls for many years and girls who waited and ate two marshmallows were more successful in their lives. They showed that more than intelligence or hard work, delayed gratification, was a strong precursor to future success. You want such people in your company.
I was also fascinated by Israel. One fine day a team from Israel in some complicated technical area would show up at a big company. They knew so many minute details of a new technology, such as communication, it scared many in the established company. It turns out that Israel incubated such companies and sheltered them to grow to a critical mass.
Complexity of the work we chose meant that people needed to freely interchange ideas, work as a team. We decided therefore that we will train a bunch of engineers and build the company starting with a strong team culture. It was also imperative that the team stay together for a long time, the comfortable conversation between engineers meant that knowledge resided between them as well as with them.
Though because of personal issues, India was a possible destination, we came to the conclusion, it needed to be India. If experienced engineers were available, on the job training was an option but in my experience less desirable. Cost of training engineers instead of their earning for the company made India a natural choice. Teamwork was also natural to Indians, it blossomed under proper encouragement, again an observation from earlier experience. Gurukul system suited Chip Design well, even if it has not been tried before.
My earlier experience in India was that there were very few graduates from colleges who could do the type of work we planned. Taking the few analog engineers within the country from other companies did not make sense, it did not increase the net pool of qualified engineers. So we started on a venture which initially would us cost more but had goals that were very long, if we survived. Economically counterintutive, STUPID! There was a comfort that we were unlikely to harm anyone (First do no harm!), worst that would happen was that the venture would fail and there would another dozen analog engineers in the country.
Now the time to embellish. This moves fast.
It was always fascinating that engineers could work from Lake Tahoe, 200 miles from San Jose. There were amusing products which provided solar power to laptop computers. Couple that with the fact that first call that goes out from an engineer who has got a raise is to his mother, who does not understand why but is happy. Link seems to be that for a long term, we work hard to please parents and elders, being away is a recent phenomenon goverend by cost of capital. It was possible to imagine that in a few years when fibre optics would criss cross the country, it was possible to do world class work from villages. Knowledge industry is different, this cost of information transfer reduced, upsetting the old apple cart. Working close to home became possible and therefore is preferable. Even if it the norm these days is to move out of home, it is unnatural.
If you want to be in a difficult area of technology, it is preferable to have a stable group, in order to build you have to look at long term, which means you have to treat your potential employee fairly today as you would 10 years later. One gripe in big companies is lack of control, so change that, move from an employee as a cog in the system to the employee as owner of the enterprise. If making money is not a primary objective, why not have employees be masters - provide huge participation in the share capital. Once you believe employees are as smart as you are, why solve the problem of predicting the future alone, build a biological organization, let employees determine what is best.
Politics enters an organization when relationships are impersonal, when a group is large. Why should the groups be large? In older days with large capital, economic size required size. Large companies spend a lot of energy trying to exert control to get divisions to align. It should be equally possible to motivate co-operation between small companies. If virtually you have a large companies, it could be broken up into many small companies. Less politics, better connection between an engineer's toil and the results, better ownership. If in the long term, it is an engineers' company, they should know all aspects of the company. Make rules and tell engineer's why of them so they can modify rules when necessary. Many many more.. it is fun to find synergies.
Only hitch is that such companies do not exist, so be the change you want to be, you will be the first. We are usually not comfortable with the idea of being the first, but we should be.
To be continued....
When number of years you have passed through seems larger than what you expect to have before you, decision processes are different. Personal needs have been met, thoughts turn to caring for others and matters of legacy.
Late nineties were heady days if you were in IT industry and a company my friends, Mark, Brenda and I had started was doing very well, doubling revenue every year. I was a silent partner. It was time to think of business expansion. Many issues; what technical area to work in, at what rate to build the company, how to arrange for the required wealth, where to start the company. Since these discussions were taking place in Dallas, which country of the world the venture was set up was immaterial.
One by one, slowly the answers came, more philosophical than commercial. With my experience of having started a high quality IC design group in Texas Instruments in 1988-89 in Bangalore, which had an enviable 97% retention, it was a natural choice to build something in this space. Analog chip design is a difficult area of chip design, at that time it had about 10000 engineers world-wide and about 600 RF engineers compared to close to a million engineers in digital design engineers. It was contiguous area of our work and had a higher immunity to economic forces. The venture would have been successful anywhere in the world, the mode of it's build-up would be vastly different. We wanted at least one percent of world population of analog engineers, hopefully more of RF engineers.
My friends, though from financially modest families, had always worked with several foreigners and believed that foreigners also should also move forward. This opened up the possible choice of location, it could be set up anywhere. It resonated with my philosophy, learnt at my mother's side, that others deserve as much as want for ourselves. We also typically hired people that wanted to start something since such people tended to be self-driven.
There was a television show, that showed three (I think) girls sitting in front of a table with marshmallows. ( These are soft cotton like candy!). They had a choice of eating one immediately or two if they waited till the announcer ran an errand and came back. Stanford followed these girls for many years and girls who waited and ate two marshmallows were more successful in their lives. They showed that more than intelligence or hard work, delayed gratification, was a strong precursor to future success. You want such people in your company.
I was also fascinated by Israel. One fine day a team from Israel in some complicated technical area would show up at a big company. They knew so many minute details of a new technology, such as communication, it scared many in the established company. It turns out that Israel incubated such companies and sheltered them to grow to a critical mass.
Complexity of the work we chose meant that people needed to freely interchange ideas, work as a team. We decided therefore that we will train a bunch of engineers and build the company starting with a strong team culture. It was also imperative that the team stay together for a long time, the comfortable conversation between engineers meant that knowledge resided between them as well as with them.
Though because of personal issues, India was a possible destination, we came to the conclusion, it needed to be India. If experienced engineers were available, on the job training was an option but in my experience less desirable. Cost of training engineers instead of their earning for the company made India a natural choice. Teamwork was also natural to Indians, it blossomed under proper encouragement, again an observation from earlier experience. Gurukul system suited Chip Design well, even if it has not been tried before.
My earlier experience in India was that there were very few graduates from colleges who could do the type of work we planned. Taking the few analog engineers within the country from other companies did not make sense, it did not increase the net pool of qualified engineers. So we started on a venture which initially would us cost more but had goals that were very long, if we survived. Economically counterintutive, STUPID! There was a comfort that we were unlikely to harm anyone (First do no harm!), worst that would happen was that the venture would fail and there would another dozen analog engineers in the country.
Now the time to embellish. This moves fast.
It was always fascinating that engineers could work from Lake Tahoe, 200 miles from San Jose. There were amusing products which provided solar power to laptop computers. Couple that with the fact that first call that goes out from an engineer who has got a raise is to his mother, who does not understand why but is happy. Link seems to be that for a long term, we work hard to please parents and elders, being away is a recent phenomenon goverend by cost of capital. It was possible to imagine that in a few years when fibre optics would criss cross the country, it was possible to do world class work from villages. Knowledge industry is different, this cost of information transfer reduced, upsetting the old apple cart. Working close to home became possible and therefore is preferable. Even if it the norm these days is to move out of home, it is unnatural.
If you want to be in a difficult area of technology, it is preferable to have a stable group, in order to build you have to look at long term, which means you have to treat your potential employee fairly today as you would 10 years later. One gripe in big companies is lack of control, so change that, move from an employee as a cog in the system to the employee as owner of the enterprise. If making money is not a primary objective, why not have employees be masters - provide huge participation in the share capital. Once you believe employees are as smart as you are, why solve the problem of predicting the future alone, build a biological organization, let employees determine what is best.
Politics enters an organization when relationships are impersonal, when a group is large. Why should the groups be large? In older days with large capital, economic size required size. Large companies spend a lot of energy trying to exert control to get divisions to align. It should be equally possible to motivate co-operation between small companies. If virtually you have a large companies, it could be broken up into many small companies. Less politics, better connection between an engineer's toil and the results, better ownership. If in the long term, it is an engineers' company, they should know all aspects of the company. Make rules and tell engineer's why of them so they can modify rules when necessary. Many many more.. it is fun to find synergies.
Only hitch is that such companies do not exist, so be the change you want to be, you will be the first. We are usually not comfortable with the idea of being the first, but we should be.
To be continued....
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