The New Millennium will belong to the Right Brained

THE KNOWLEDGE ERA
by NIIT's Rajendra Pawar
A LEARNING FIRM
by Modicorp Institute's V. Gupta
TQM IN THE NEW WORLD
by DGP Hinoday's S.B.Tilloo
QUALITY IN THE 21ST
by Qimpro's Suresh Lulla
BEYOND CONFORMANCE
by IIT-M's J.A.H. Ashiq & R. Raman
TQM: THE FUTURE
by IIM-B's M.R.Gopalan
INTEGRATED CHAIN
by Andersen's S. Bhattacharyya
THE FLEXIBLE MANAGER
by E&Y's K.N.Memani
UNCERTAINTY AHEAD
by MDI's Biju Verkey
MANAGING TOMORROW
by MDI's N. Mrinalini
THE RETAILUTION
by Shoppers' Stop's B.S.Nagesh
MEGA-RETAILING
by KSA Technopak's A. Singhal
THE PARETO PRINCIPLE
by IIM-B's Y.L.R.Moorthi
ON-LINE RETAIL
by IIM-B's Pradeep Kumar

Today we are seeing the emergence of a society where there is a resurgence of the human being. During the Industrial era the optimal utilisation of the 5Ms - machines, men, material, money and methods defined a successful business. In the post-industrial Knowledge society, raw materials, we can say, are bits. But the machine is the Mind. So, the picture changes quite dramatically. Now we are preoccupied with the Mind. It is immediately possible to see that the coming century will be, what I would like to call, the 'Century of the Mind'.

There is another fundamental difference between the Industrial era and the Knowledge era. Earlier, if you had two atoms and you divided them between two people, they got one each. But today if I have one Bit, I can duplicate it for you, and we can have one Bit each. This is a very fundamental reality. It is actually providing to society an opportunity to share without greed.

Look at Internet. Internet facilitates gathering, sharing and processing of information by removing boundaries, leading to the creation of a new, networked world. In this early phase, Internet generates no profits, but leads to creation of huge wealth. I feel this is the early articulation of new wealth. The Internet has posed a new business model which is causing discontinuities in the older business models. It is leading us into a period of abundance.

Coming back to the Mind, we must understand that with the change in the factors of production, the ability to get predictable outcomes has changed. And it has become extremely important to start understanding how to get the Mind to produce more and more. The big challenge is understanding the Mind and understanding the mental processes. This requires redefining technology. The technology has to move away from how to do manufacturing, to how to process Thought.

But when we talk of the Mind we talk of the intellectual development of the Mind and we also talk of the emotional development of the Mind. It is interesting to note that over the past so many centuries, while the intellectual dimension of the human Mind has evolved in a dramatic way, the emotional dimension has not been subjected to education. The right side of the brain is still highly underdeveloped. So when we talk of the Century of the Mind, the opportunity in front of us is to invest our energy and time to work on the emotional development of mankind. In this new Internet world where one is not sure of the user on the other end, it will become imperative to understand how the user thinks and feels. It is necessary to develop a deeper understanding of cognitive processes.

I believe that the second half of the next century will be dominated by women. Women are more natural in experiencing and, therefore, expressing their emotions and have largely retained that ability. Men, on the other hand, have been trained to appear strong, suppress their emotions and deal with cold logic as a preferred way of interacting in society. The new millennium will belong to the right brain - to sensitivity and feelings, not just logic and reason.

Another important question is how do we redefine management so that people may bring out the best in themselves. That is why we talk of empowerment in good management practices - helping people realise their full potential. Good HRD practices are pre-requisites in the Knowledge society. You can't afford to take people for granted. Also, we are beginning to see the explosion of one-person companies. Because if I have my machine - the Mind -with me, why should I be subservient to anybody?

NIIT's preoccupation with people and ideas recognises that we live in the Knowledge era. From the Agricultural era to the Industrial era and now the Knowledge era, the fundamental shift is that Minds are replacing machines. Earlier, technology used to be concerned with using machines to convert materials from one form to another. Now it is information which is getting converted. The product is information and the input too is information. Corporations are shifting people away from mechanistic work to make smarter use of their time with sophisticated desktop tools at their disposal to do all the routine work.

Once you appreciate the nature of the digital age it becomes clear that the new technology will be, on the one hand, about extending the capabilities of the human Mind and, on the other, about developing cognitive systems. The challenge will be to teach the computer to learn about the human Mind so that we can move away from learning computers.

NIIT is today building a Knowledge Corporation for the future. In the last18 years, we learnt to deal with Knowledge and the interplay between various forms of Knowledge. In Knowledge management, the focus is on creating new Knowledge, using it for some advantage, abstracting from that and then communicating to others so that they can also benefit from it.

This is what is being done at NIIT. With the two sides of its business -learning and software - almost equally balanced, NIIT now finds itself in a position to take advantage of the strong synergies between software development and IT training. It is the same model as that of a hospital being attached to a medical college.

Software projects open a window to the real world for NIIT to practise what it teaches, experiment with it, and abstract practical Knowledge. The essence of that Knowledge is then transferred back into the classrooms where the teaching is invigorated by its connection with real-life applications.

IT training in turn gives an edge to NIIT's software business, which candraw upon a large pool of human resources in an industry where the competition for talent is stiff.

In fact, this unique model puts NIIT today in the Knowledge business, rather than just the software business or the education business. With software development and training supporting each other, the whole becomes substantially greater than the parts. And the mission remains the same' bringing people and computers together....successfully'.