Dreams linger

They ember

Till the next dream

They flare again

As themselves are the fire

#spokenword

Happy International Migrants Day!

One of the few days in the calendar which is of significant meaning to me. Mobility is a frame of life, as aspiration and a will to do better for our families. On a personal note, I work with organizations who care for the the transnational subaltern at the scale of the homeland and the host land.

As a second-generation Gulf kid, migration is more than theory for the h index. Lived experience trumps the discourse on remittances.

From the girmitiya to the partition impacted to the tech folks on the H1B, precarity frames the migration journey.

Such an honor to be a discussant to a labor in platform economy panel with stalwart labor researchers organized by the Just Economy Labor Institute, Thailand. It was truly a global panel with Hong Kong, Indonesia, Cambodia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand, and the US present.

I owe my debt to Prof Neil Coe for the learning.

As a para-academic, I am indebted to such opportunities.

Thank you so much Pak Fahmi for the invitation.

A Zoomed Knowledge Conversation

I have a sense after a fair bit of entrepreneurship that there is a massive delta between what is taught in university and the skills needed in a real job. The basics of problem solving, communication, stakeholder management, self-managing, risk taking are hard to get.

The executive education scene is also made up of the same set of academics.

Coaches are too pushy for the sale. Where are people who can be a blend of an academic, executive, entrepreneur, and coach. Solutions would need to be bespoke, artisanal, and specific, akin to a therapist on call.

The professionals on the job are often lost as mentoring and real learning is not available. There is a market opportunity somewhere.

#entrepreneurship#learning

When a person leaves home, migrates the body only leaves as shards of the soul stick behind. The home and the host land are a part of a continuum, and never sharp binaries. We see this in Saravana Bhavan’s in the Gulf and Singapore, or the Hyderabadi Biryani places on the weekend.

Mumbai, the city of aspirations
Saturates the Air
Ever changing, mutating cartographies
The despair to survive
Etched on to the skylines of hope
The animal spirits of capitalism
Breeds circulatory flows of migrants
Keeps hopes fresh
And despair alive.

#mumbai

#spokenword

I have been talking and thinking about loss, pain, and failure recently and the manner we process it has an important bearing on how we experience life. As an impact driven entrepreneurial hack, failures have been frequent and fast leading to questions about where are you going?

The only certainty is uncertainty and the notion of stability which the previous generation took for granted is now past fast. Unstable can be reframed as being on the move, and mobility is a frame of reference and lens rather than the curated resume that hiring managers look for.

Well impact is determined in outcomes and not in years as the social contract has evolved. We are all on a platform where human talent is service on demand to the purveyors of power and capital.

A friend who is in HR recently equipped, why have you changed jobs?

Well, it is a function of the opportunities generated and the impact one wishes to imagine.

Well, most HR functions can be replaced by algorithms. Rain making is an art.

There is new white space to create each day.

ESG Reporting follows a rich tradition of compliance related discourses over the decades. Environmental and Social Risk has been around for forty years. A few professionals who can be repurposed for the just transition era:

– EHS Manager to Sustainability Lead
– Process Engineer to Carbon Assessor
-Safety Engineer to Sustainability Risk Professional
– Company Secretary to ESG Disclosure Professional
– HR Manager to People Positive Professional
– Finance Manager to Integrated Reporting Professional

A lot of the data sits within the organization itself. Not every paradigm does not need a ‘paradigm shift’ (a term borrowed from Thomas Kuhn’s STS Classic, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions).

History and Cultures are important to map ‘transitions’, no one knows period categories than historians. Culture is downstream of history. Transparency and Trust key to ESG Performance is a function of operating cultures.

#sustainability #ESG #hr#compliance#culture

The culture of learning, deeply and meaningfully should be a given as in the information economy most work is knowledge work, so why is L&D even a function. It should be a prerequisite for professionals in consulting, tech, and finance where the ‘job’ itself is to add value.

In some life, i would like to be a historian of the Indian Ocean and speak in Arabic, Farsi, Bahasa, Kutchchi and Tamizh.