On Education
Value of a contributor mindset in society
The challenge in preparing our students for the world of work today is not so much building capabilities, but building a contributive orientation to work and society. This is our role as educators.
Maps of becoming – think tools for the evolutionary adventurer
What kind of people will society need in the coming future? And therefore, what kind of capacity-building should our education system focus on?
The challenge of citizenship training
As a teacher, how do you train students to become enlightened citizens of our country?
From teaching to enabling assimilation
What should be our techniques of education so that we don’t just transfer knowledge but help people transform?
Beyond academic excellence to human excellence
How do you help widen the notion of education from merely academic excellence to include the entirety of the human being?
Education for Enablement
How do you create an education system that does not just give people theory/ technical know-how but develops them into potential contributors for society?
On fulfillment & personal evolution
Personality as Strength
How can we take a vague notion like strength and specify it into concrete definable things to help people develop themselves in a concrete way (e.g. as able to do’s)?
How to evolve our identities?
Our identities – tacit or explicit descriptions of self – can sometimes limit our growth, experimentation & fulfillment with life. What can we do to ensure that we are not ‘stuck’ or frozen in our identities? This Little Book offers an approach.
What we measure we become
Our measures of success – often well-defined external achievements – can lead us to sub-optimal choices and decisions. This Little Book suggests that maybe it is time we re-examine our measures of success.
Human fulfillment – critical constructs
Can ‘fulfillment’ be converted from a fuzzy & vague idea into a set of precise constructs & tools, using which people can make specific & measurable changes in themselves?
On bringing change in people at scale
Collective Aspiration
What is collective aspiration and why is it such a fundamental driver in change?
The collective act of individualized seeing
How do you scale vision in an organizational collective? For example, how do you keep the torch of customer-service burning bright in every employee’s mind?
Invoking and Sustaining Excellence
How do you invoke excellence in people? One of the ways is through role modeling excellence.
Precision Knowledge Interventions
How can large-scale shifts in thinking be architected? One of the ways is by specifying the shift in the “knowledge-state” of the collective.
On Cognitive Empowerment
From why to why-not – building a new future by changing our stance
What stops us from accepting change and new ways of doing and thinking? What creates so much resistance to anything new? One simple answer to this question may lie in our stance of life. This Little Book proposes a shift from ‘Why’ to ‘Why Not’ in our stance to life.
Cognitive freshness
How can we keep the mind ever-fresh? This Little Book looks at three approaches, each deeper than the earlier, that could help us experience cognitive freshness in all parts of our life.
Exploring cognitive empowerment
Cognition gives us the ability to make choices, decisions, to recognize, to build new axioms and conclusions about ourselves, about the way the world works. Cognition is therefore a powerful tool for our evolution. What then are the possibilities that empowerment at a ‘cognitive level’ offers us?
On career design & contribution in the workplace
Career Counseling to Career Design
How can we go beyond giving-in to circumstances and following others blindly? How can we find freedom to choose what we want to become?
Becoming a change-maker wherever you are
Can we become change-makers and contributors within the narrow boundaries in which we live? Is there a way to expand our contribution without changing our workplace or our roles? This Little Book offers a new way to think about this question.
Examining our motives of work – can we ask more out of ourselves?
Often we find ourselves driven by a mix of several motives leading us to multiple and often contradictory criteria in decision making. This Little Book offers a framework to organize and categorize our motives.
Learning to Contribute – An approach to Karma Yoga
Published in the Vedanta Kesari, 2014, this article outlines a journey from selfishness to Karma Yoga – the highest ideal for work in the Indian tradition, with Contributorship as the achievable middle step; and provides a 4-step roadmap to becoming a contributor
On knowledge for enablement
Creating universal cognitive access – The last 12 inches problem
It is a widely known fact that more information does not lead to better understanding and more ‘informed’ action. We now face the new challenge of making sense of all the knowledge available to us at the press of a button.
Knowledge for enablement – the birth of a practice
How can the information explosion lead to improved human capacities? How can people be enabled to respond to increasing change with the knowledge now available? How can we secure the evolution of human systems in the age of knowledge?
Knowledge society – from ‘access’ to ‘assimilation’
How has society’s relationship with knowledge evolved and transformed over time? What is the nature of the new emerging relationship in the 21st century?
Exploring a new area of practice for knowledge practitioners
How do we build the bridges that help society as a whole, cross over from ‘abstract knowledge’ to ‘realized knowledge’?
Beyond access to knowledge, what next?
A new challenge is beginning to awaken in society – the question of digestion and assimilation of knowledge.