I asked
myself if I was right in deciding that I should stop caring about promotions
and other forms of career advancement.
Was I right in thinking I had ascended the pinnacle of my academic career,
such as it was? Was it time for me
resign or retire from an active pursuit of a career?
That in
turn took me on a long journey of reflection on the motivations that brought me
to where I was. I record some of those
reflections for my own benefit rather than for sharing with anyone or even less
so for posterity.
To put my
career related thinking in perspective I need to go back to what brought me to
IIMB in the first place and the many turn of events thereafter and the
realisations from the same.
I cannot
say for sure what exactly made me turn to academia. I can recall there were many considerations.
I was
surely intrigued by the huge changes that were happening in the world of
business as enterprises got bigger and bigger through mergers, acquisitions and
other forms of consolidation. Sitting in
the world of private equity I got to see first hand the growing power of size. I began to feel that David Korten did have a
point when he warned the world about the growing influence of corporations in
our daily lives, in his book When Corporations Ruled the World.
I wanted
to acquire an understanding of the economic forces at work and what they might
mean for all of us. I may have even
wanted to make a seminal contribution to academic theory that could eventually
alter the course of events in the world of business.
I was
quite sure that the world of finance had an important part to play in these
developments. But for the advent of
financial capitalism in its various manifestations such as investment banking
and more specifically, mergers and acquisitions the wave of consolidation would
simply not have been possible.
Little
did I realise at that time that many more capable minds were at work in academe,
exercising their powerful intellect about this and nearly every other aspect of
the world economy that one could possibly think of. My rather unrealistic and
exaggerated notions of what I wanted to accomplish were as much a result of
poor literacy as of my inability to imagine, let alone come to terms, with the
realization that the intellect that I thought I had was not a universal
monopoly; much worse that my intellect, such as it was, indeed was quite puny,
and was in rapid decline as I would come to realise much later.
There was
another motive running in parallel, which is sharply suggestive of the utter
lack of clarity that pervaded my thoughts at that time. Lack of clarity of purpose has continued to
dog me even today even as options before me disappear with every passing day
and advancing age.
That
motive was a desire to further advance my career in the investment industry
through the sheer power of intellect and knowledge, stepping aside from the
world of deal-doing that was getting to be increasingly a game of social
skills. A PhD seemed to be the entry
ticket to this path.
And then there
was the growing realization that I was perhaps temperamentally inclined to a
job and career that was academic or quasi-academic. I wanted to turn to something that would need
nothing more than working with my intellect and called for limited social
skills.
I am not
sure which one of the above sealed the issue for me. But here I was, applying to academic
institutions, convinced that I had hit upon the ideal career path for the rest
of my active life.
Subsequent
events helped me realize that I could not have made a worse choice. Further, the choice I had made was a
testimony to how little I knew about the world of academics.
Nanni....Namaskaaram...
No comments:
Post a Comment