THERE ARE several aspects to a university becoming world class. The most important aspects of these are—faculty, students and the research and learning that occur as a result of the interaction between the two. The university facilitates interaction between teachers and students resulting in research and higher learning with active involvement and support of the industry, community and the government. Thus, the quality of faculty and students that a university has is crucial in making it excel. Conduct socially relevant research and make students socially conscious. It is the quality faculty and students that ensure quality research, which is an extremely important component for a university to be classified as world class. Today education and research go hand in hand, as textbooks become obsolete even before they are printed. Excellence in research comes from establishing practices like a strong performance incentive in the form of grants from both industry and government for the faculty. These incentives however, must be tied up with accountability. The societal relevance of the research and students that a university produces is being recognised as more important criteria than the kind of jobs that the students land. Universities around the world are recognising that they need to be committed to carrying out research, projects and higher learning that benefits society. Billions of dollars may be poured into research, but if that research is not helping our society to prosper, then it is really not worth it.

The second point is to give autonomy and support to visionary founders. Universities in India are relatively young compared to universities in the West. So, in a way we are still trying to figure out our path. Universities require visionary founders and management who must have autonomy to chalk out the course for the university. This is how many top universities in the US were founded. If you look at corporations in India, this is how they have found a place in the international arena. Just 20 years ago, there were no Indian companies big enough to figure in the international reckonings even in the field of information technology. But today many top IT companies in the world are from India, thanks to their visionary founders, resources and freedom to compete in the market. Similarly, if some of the Indian universities with visionary founders get the right opportunity, they have the potential to emerge as the best in the world. Increase appetite for risk.

Indian institutions must increase their appetite for risk in order reach an international stature. This risk-taking percolates to different levels. It means encouraging entrepreneurial initiatives, putting in place some sort of a tenure system with performance linked promotion and tying up faculty compensation to grants. These are some of the standard practices that US universities employ to ensure they have dedicated faculty. At a vision level, I would like to quote our Chancellor Amma: “Learning and research should be important for life and not only for earning a living. It is very important to give a wholesome, holistic, well-rounded training to students so that when they graduate, they have the right perspective which brings them a lot of fulfilment in life.” What we also need is social vision. Sensitisation of students towards societal problems and the community around them is important. They have to realise that money is not the only factor that makes a difference in life. Getting involved in the problems of society and looking at ways to improve the situation at the grass roots and solve reallife situations is important. It is these students who will develop affordable healthcare for people who cannot pay high medical costs and address problems of environment, energy and water. The thought process that needs to go into such innovation comes only from interaction of the university with society. Hence it is one of those issues that should be given top priority.

My advice to the students would be to work as a team; in the modern context, working as a sort of a team is important. Our students take action in the face of uncertainties and don’t approach a project or a problem with maturity. The whole approach of the education system seems to create only students who can sit in front of computers as glorified typists, and textbooks become obsolete even before they hit the stands.

Teachers and students look for world-class content through open source as an alternative. Rural internships, implementing theoretical knowledge into practical situations and risk-taking abilities through innovative projects as suggestions to overcome the problem of making our graduates employable. Computer languages, algorithms...they constantly change.

Students need to keep pace with changes and develop an attitude to learn continuously. They should not be apprehensive of new situations that need innovative solutions. Also a problem to lament is the fact that creativity has made a silent exit from the educational system and so has the concept of entrepreneurship. The current educational system focuses on how efficiently to solve an old problem rather than finding out creative ways to solve new problems. Human beings are endowed with creative intelligence, which they should put to good use.

Once a student completes his or her education, the employment field is no longer segmented into mechanical, chemical, electrical or information technology. All that matters us whether he or she could solve problems and, problem solving becomes much easier when it is approached in multidisciplinary teams. People of different capacities should work together as a team to solve common work problems. A country like India needs to develop the culture of working together. We should not become a mediocre nation. Attend as many workshops and meetings and present papers and participate in debates.

Such conferences act as platforms, which gave birth to new ideas. Students should also get into the culture of research. For Western universities, our country offers opportunities for finding out solutions. The nature of the country’s problems is something countries in the West had not yet experienced. Indians should wake up to the need of finding out solutions for their problems and not wait for others to give them solutions.

The question now is can private universities help? It makes perfect sense for private universities to be teaching factories.

First, there is an ever-growing demand for higher education. Around five million Indians enter the 15-to-24 age group each year. Many more of them are interested in a college degree today than in the past. Public universities are in no position to absorb such large numbers of college-ready young women and men. Private institutions have inevitably stepped in to meet this growing demand.

Second, there is little teaching at most public institutions making students spending a fortune on private tuitions.

It perhaps makes more sense for students to pay higher tuition at private institutions with the expectation that they will actually get to attend lectures on a regular basis and perhapsacquire the necessary knowledge and skills to be meaningfully employed.

Third, appearances do matter. Step into the campuses of public institutions and then visit their private counterparts. Public institutions don’t have the feel and sense of modern educational institutions. Spider webs in classrooms and passages, broken furniture, empty laboratories and stinking toilets can hardly inspire the new generation of students.

Fourth, except for a few, there is no exit option for the majority of Indian students. More than 1 lakh students do head abroad for higher education but this number is quite small as a share of the total number of students entering college each year. Most of them have nowhere to “run” and must choose between crumbling public universities and shining private ones. Sixth, many students entering college, as well as their parents, do not have any real idea about what college education is all about. They are only too relieved and happy that some sort of foeducation is available. Private institutions can get away with providing bread crumbs to the less-informed and starved.

Here are some of the toolkits in social media space that will make your task that much simpler

Making the decision for your organisation to be on the social media bandwagon is really the easy part these days, a no-brainer even. It’s when you get down to business do you come across one of the most unrecognised hurdles of social media management—picking the right tools to manage your social media efforts. Too often have I seen folks getting hung up on evaluating tools to figure out what is the best tool for the job… and before they know it, days (if not weeks) have passed, and they’re no further down the road than the day they started! To remedy this situation exactly, we have compiled a list of tools—a social media toolkit, if you will—to get you started down the path.

HOOTSUITE:

HootSuite does two things, and does them extremely well—monitor all your social media feeds in one application and schedule your posts across a range of platforms and from a number of accounts in advance. Start using HootSuite and you can preprogramme your posts to follow a structured, automated and efficient workflow. Clearly, the ability to structure your post frequency means that HootSuite works better for businesses focused on pushing out content and “thought leadership” style posts to their audience. The product by itself has multiple levels of membership—both free and paid—but you can probably get away with the free version for a while, at least. Just keep in mind—this tool is clearly foroutbound communication, and does not replace good ol’ human interaction with your audience!

SOCIAL MENTION:

One-way conversations rarely work, right? It is equally important you are listening not only to your audiences but also to the social web at large, and Social Mention lets you do just that—monitor news sources, web sites, blogs or microblogs and a lot more—for key terms that may relate to your brand or industry segment. Each of these terms is measured in terms of the sentiment associated with the mention and who or what the source of these mentions was. Not only does this tool give you a high-level view of how your brand is perceived socially, it also gives you direct insight into opportunities where your brand can engage with individual influencers to set right misconceptions or quell rumors before they gain traction. Naturally, Social Mention suits businesses with some degree of social media presence—if you’re just starting out on the social media journey, none of the metrics will show any meaningful data. The best part? This is a free tool, so you can start using it from day one with no additional outlay.

TWEETREACH:

Active on twitter, and plan to run contests and other user engagement campaigns on the micro-blogging service? Tweetreach can then identify the reach and exposure for the hashtag you’ve selected for the contest/event —what this will do is show you not only what size audience the contest has reached, but the ability to see who has interacted with your hashtag or brand (i.e. retweeted and mentioned).

For a similar monitoring service for Facebook/ LinkedIn, consider Social Bakers, which offers competitive social media intelligence at substantial cost saving compared with a dedicated social media research agency.

GOOGLE ANALYTICS:

Your website is a key component to your social media measurement, and the level of insights that Google Analytics reveals about your site, your categories/sections and the audience is unparalleled, and not just because this tool is a free offering.

With Google Analytics, you can create custom reports and even track specific customers, and gather valuable information about which posts or pages attract the most visitors, and get social analytics for insight on how they interact, and more critically, whether your social media efforts are paying off! Of course, if you’re advertising on the web, the tool can also measure how much you are selling online and how well your ads are performing.

And that’s it—with this pick of tools, you have enough to get started to interact, listen and monitor your social channels. Of course, you can look at the excellent compilations in the links below for further tools for your specific needs once you’ve gotten your own social media workflow in place.

The Saga of the Facebook Feet Photos and the Tales They Tell

IF YOU’VE EVER posted a photo of your feet on Facebook, chances are that you have been reminded of those famous words from the Hindi film Pakeezah while doing so: ‘Your feet are very beautiful, don’t put them on the ground’. I say this with a-bathtubis- a-swimming-pool kind of conviction because I did: for the longest half a minute that my slow internet connection took to upload the photo to my ‘Profile Pictures’ album, my eyes played ping pong between two things–the photo of my feet and my ‘real’ feet, peeping out from behind the laptop. The camera had inflicted a version of persecution complex on me for decades: I am terribly nonphotogenic. Even my feet had not been able to escape that curse.

It was one of my first profile photos on Facebook, a time when I was faceless and thus optically anonymous. I had few ‘friends’ then–I hadn’t yet begun to say ‘yes’ to strangers. My ex-classmates from school and university were curious to see how I had aged. A photo of my foot, in spite of no anti-ageing cream ever applied on it, would be of no help to them. I now find that there are only three ‘likes’ below my feet. This is the moment I regret being human. If I was a Hindu goddess, there would be 83 million ‘likes’ on the photograph, a version of the virtual pranam. My mother, Facebook-illiterate but ever the curious onlooker from behind my back, asked whether I considered my feet ‘special’ (she always uses the word in quotes), special in the way Goddess Lakshmi’s is, she whose footprints are drawn in Hindu households in Bengal on Lakshmi Purnima night.

Over the next four years on Facebook, I found many kinds of feet, but it was of my mother’s mention of the goddess’s feet that came back to my every time. For all these feet that I spotted on profile and cover and Timeline photos belonged to women alone. What were the men doing with their feet? I asked a friend who works for Facebook. ‘Playing footsie,’ he replied with a winking emoticon. The mention of male feet immediately takes me to Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, where Crusoe, alone on the uninhabited island, discovers Friday’s footprints before he actually sees the man in person. And then there are Velutha’s feet in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. The absence of photos of male feet in my Facebook news feed directed my attention to the kind of men Friday and Velutha were: perhaps only the feet of the marginalised male could be made visible in the arts? The amateur sociologist in me reasoned– perhaps that explains why the fetish of foot binding, also called ‘lotus feet’ is meant only for Chinese women, not their men folk.

Facebook feet told stories. In late July this year, Alexandra Pringle, Editor in Chief at Bloomsbury Publishing, posted a photo of her feet resting on a table. Her nails were painted in a shade of red, a large cushion rested against a wall, a patch of sunlight fell on her legs–she had titled the photograph ‘Afternoon, Early Evening’. There were two comments below the photograph: ‘Nice case of the welldeserveds’; ‘Great toes’. The first was by a man, the second by a woman. In my mind, the photograph arranged itself in the mental folder that I have tentatively titled ‘Holiday Feet’. A fortnight later, a day after Indian Independence Day, I found a similar photograph: this time it was Trishna Chaudhuri, a teacher in The Sri Ram School in Gurgaon, who had put up her feet on the table in her balcony. The photo was titled ‘Brishti, garam chai and the newspaper’ (‘Rain, a cup of steaming tea and the newspaper’). Both Pringle and Chaudhuri’s photos of their respective feet were coded in leisure, a literal putting-my-feet-up.

Exactly midway between the time of Pringle posting her photo and Chaudhuri posting hers, Sukanya, one of my closest friends from school, had posted a photo of two pairs of feet from a recent holiday– my friend in her sandals, her daughter in her running shoes. I found this to be a subgenre of the Facebook foot photograph–in them, the steppinginto- my-shoes is tweaked to indicate a bloodline, a genealogy that can be traced through similar shaped feet and toes and nails. It’s a genre that never fails to stir the wannabe anthropologist in me–is that a part of the genetic inheritance, I ask myself, similar feet in various sizes that turns my computer screen into a shoe store. In one such photograph posted by the journalist and writer Smriti Lamech, she, her mother and five year old daughter are wearing silver anklets. This photograph of the ‘happy feet’ of three generations of women, where the feet are resumes of age and economic class, is the best ‘happy-family’ photo I have seen on Facebook yet.

The genre also includes photos of footwear, often of the kind that reminds me of Ernest Hemingway’s famous six word short story, ‘For sale: baby shoes, never worn.’ Chandini Santosh, a poet who often writes about her homebound lonely life, once posted this as a Facebook update: ‘So I am taking my stilettos to the beauty parlour, sigh. At least, they should have an outing.’ Photographs of shoes, one half of a pair, sometimes with the wearer’s foot in them, make Cinderellas of many Facebookers just as red altapainted feet make brides of women in our Facebooking imagination.

Recently, I found two interesting ‘Cover Photos’ on the Facebook page of Radhika Iyengar, Features Writer with Platform Magazine. In one, taken in Uttarakhand, a woman’s toes, with silver toe rings on them, peep out from under her red sari. She must be from a village, I conclude. In the other, a slipper with red marks on it is lying on sand, possibly a sea beach. In this too, the identity of the wearer is not revealed. That is, in my reading, a kind of subversion of Facebook’s privileging of the face. (Some day, I would like to post a photo of my bandaged feet as my identifying photo.)

Type ‘feet’ in your Facebook search box and you will find ‘more than 1,000’ results. It’s a buffet: happy feet, six feet under, fancy feet, feet fetish, kiss your lady’s feet, cute Indian feet, Soft Indian feet, Indian sexy feet, and so on. When I type in my password to enter Facebook these days, I often think of the ‘Please remove your shoes’ sign that stands guard in front of our places of worship, and when I log out, of my Facebook footprint.

How Anasuya Gupta transformed CICO Group, an 80-year-old construction chemicals company against formidable challenges—little business experience, a huge personal loss and tangible scepticism from those around her

The article got us thinking: all things remaining the same— customers, products, employees—does a company change when the gender of its C-suite does? Especially, when there’s more Venus, for example. To answer that, we couldn’t have hoped for a better story to tell than that of Anasuya Gupta, managing director and chairperson, CICO Group, a Delhi-headquartered construction chemicals company. In March 2008, Gupta had to take over the company after her third-generation entrepreneur husband Amit Gupta passed away. Needless to say, it was an incredibly difficult time for Gupta— faced as she was with personal loss, two young children grieving their father and an established business that was jittery about its future. Yet, Gupta, essentially a homemaker till then, has done much more than just douse those fears. In the past five years, that she has led the company, it has been on a consistent upswing— both in terms of business growth and operational efficiency—thanks to the many qualities Buchanan mentions in her story about good leadership; qualities that Gupta seems to have in heaps. In fact, Gupta caught my attention precisely because she demonstrated a key qualityBuchananmentions— vulnerability—with such ease at the Dell Women’s Entrepreneur Network in Istanbul where I happened to meet her in early June. Instead of first telling me about the huge business impact she’s had in the past five years (including doubling the company’s turnover, and completely buying back its private equity investors’ share), she spoke candidly about how she had personally navigated the ropes of business, including coaching her male colleagues on why they couldn’t use the ladies bathroom! Hers is an interesting journey on many accounts, and a worthy case study of transformative leadership. Read on to see the changes she brought on at CICO Group, and how:

Professionalism Discipline

I believe women are detail-oriented; sometimes, to the point of micro-managing. I’m like that too. In contrast, my husband’s policy was “Let Go. Let Be.” I have a certain image of what the office should look like, and that our employees should be well presented. I once even told one of our male employee to shave. In fact, I brought it up at a town hall meeting, saying untended facial hair was not acceptable. Each employee is an ambassador of the company, and each one must look professional. My daughter is constantly mortified that I say these things but it’s important to articulate, I think. Also, when I joined the business, I made a decision to make a few people redundant because I knew they would be roadbloacks in the journey ahead, including a few people who were very close to my husband. My husband never let go of people—ever. People just chugged along, sometimes without adding to their skills, or improving themselves. I view it differently. We have to demonstrate we are a highpotential company. So, when you condone under-performance, you’re setting the wrong culture. What’s the incentive for somebody to be an outstanding performer when even mediocre performers get the same benefits? It was important to be meritocratic and professional. We’ve tried to attract some really good talent, and bring in new people. In the past five years, we’ve also moved from Tally to ERP. We created a proper HR function. The biggest pat on my back really was when CICO won the Best Professionally Managed Organisation in our category at the 5th CIDC Vishwakarma Award 2013. I didn’t go up to the podium to receive the award though. I sent my AVP because I said if we’re getting an award for being a professionally managed company, a professional should go up to get it. This gentleman was so embarrassed. But I told him I was applauding from the audience, and he had to go up. I wanted to send a message to the company that we are a professional organisation, and that is something we deeply value.

Collaboration & Teamwork

One of the first things I noticed when I came in was that people didn’t work in teams at all. They worked in silos, and decisions were taken individually. The left hand didn’t know what the right one was doing. There would be instances where we couldn’t execute efficiently on orders because the chemical needed wasn’t available in the country. I understood what was wrong when I began asking basic questions—had the sales team spoken to the production people before taking the order, or why didn’t we get a particular business after qualifying for its tender specifications? Had anybody talked to sales to find out? More often than not, the answer would be no. I began to fix that. Today, we work in teams. For example, we have a pricing committee now unlike before where only one person would decide the price but when we went out into the market, we couldn’t sell because that price was too high. Yet, it was impossible to get the head of pricing to be flexible. Coming down on price was a big no-no. Now, the pricing committee has three people; and one person from sales has to be there for meetings so we get a sense of the market. It’s important to get all viewpoints, and it’s so easy to do that in the era of BBM and WhatsApp. It takes two seconds to ask—can we go up 50 paise, or come down a rupee? Forget functional teams or managers, even I don’t take decisions singlehandedly. I may agree to disagree. And, sometimes I might push a decision through. But, I listen to all viewpoints, and then take a decision. My husband had the advantage of the company being on his fingertips and he didn’t need to reach out as much for advice. I’ve managed so far only because I asked a lot of questions. A key advantage of being a woman is that we have the strength to say, “I don’t know.” A lot of men don’t do that. I find it very easy in meetings to say—can I get a minute to call my office and find out, or that I’ll come back with the details later. I owe this ability to my B.Ed. education. During that training many years earlier, I was taught that if you go into class, and a child asks a question, don’t camouflage if you don’t know. Don’t fudge an answer. Tell them you’ll find out and let them know. That’s been a big lesson in my life. In any case, nobody knows everything; we’re all learning all the time.

To me, this honest give and take of views and ideas is so critical a need for running a business that I’ve ordered round tables instead of the rectangular tables we have in our conference rooms. In a circle, you feel everybody’s voice is equal, as it should be. Otherwise, the notion of the “head of the table” creates a wrong impression and builds unnecessary hierarchies.

Ambitious Buy-Back

Fortunately, things have changed a lot in the past few years. When I took over in March 2008, we had a turnover of `38 crore. We have nearly doubled that and closed FY2013 with `65 crore. Also, we have managed to buy back the 45.33 per cent share that private equity investor Actis had in our company. They had come on board as investors in May 2000. Buying back our share was one of the biggest challenges I’d set for myself when I joined.

I would keep telling our employees that I want this to be your company entirely, and we must meet that objective together. So, we did our first buy back of 22.67 per cent in May 2010, and followed that up a year later with 11.33 per cent in May 2011. Our final buy back of the remaining 11.33 per cent happened in August 2012. I was certain as soon as I joined that I didn’t want to be questioned about the way I wanted to grow the business, or having to report to our investors. I wanted the company to reflect our voice, to be a vehicle for our ambitions. Today, our 200 people are located across five manufacturing units in Gurgaon, Haridwar, Kolkata, Chennai and Kasna. This isn’t an industry dominated by women.

I’m often walking into conference rooms and seminar halls full of men. The DWEN conference has been such a rarity—I’ve never seen so many business women together!

Diversity & Sensitivity

I think the men have adapted very well to the changes that have taken place in our workplace. There is definitely more respect for women. This is a brick and mortar company. I remember when I came in, I would see people call out to even women with a casual “aye”. I made it clear in an open forum that this was not okay to do. There’s no abusive language anymore. Because women weren’t in leadership positions in CICO before, people didn’t have to watch their actions as much. A more civilised, sensitised workplace is important to me. But, to be honest, I’m not always conscious about being a woman first, and then an MD. The gender ratio has improved at CICO since I have joined. I’ve made efforts to do that but it’s been difficult. I got in a lot of women at first but I have to confess I got tired. So many women I brought in disappointed me; they didn’t seem to have their priorities right. So, I decided, “Ok, let the men come in.” My intentions were good but I got disheartened. So, I gave up for a while. Now, I’ve restarted the process because when women are focused, their results are much better. For example, there’s this young girl in my office—28 years old who is part of the sales force team. She’s from West Bengal, and is posted in Gujarat right now. She uses a moped, and has done a tremendous sales job. She’s been a great inspiration. I thought if we could get a few more women like her, the impact on the organisation would be huge. So, now, I’ve started looking at positions where I think women can really be very successful. See, you can’t completely negate or deny the social context. There are some roles, areas, or factories where I don’t think sending women would be wise. This time, I’m not going to give up easily. It might not work out but I don’t want to have regrets that I didn’t try. As Sheryl Sandberg says, “Don’t leave before you leave.”