Organization as a kindergarten class

I am back and normal. :)

I like Tom's metaphor of organization as a kindergarten class. If we can make the offices playful and messy with ideas, celebrate people and their hobbies, build neighborhoods in the office space, get rid of "casual Friday day" kind-of bureaucracies, the spirit of creativity gets built into the system automatically.

Why don’t we do it then?

I believe it’s because the employees or the managers don’t come from a university that gives them a creative education. - An education where the primary motivation or emotion is knowledge or creativity. Recently, I was surprised when I happened to see one of my students' blogs. Her writing was free of redundancy or superfluousness, which were the basic qualities of her writings as part of the class assignments. University system imposes on her a feeling of formality and insularity, by encouraging her to get better grades by sounding 'good'. She loses her 'voice'.

Unfortunately, the creative, colorful kindergarten environment is translated into a linear, grade-driven environment of the universities. Its funny, how we can screw up things. I think Claude too has the same ideas. I really appreciate that.

Linus Torvalds built the UNIX operating system as part of a university class, made it free, and unconsciously spawned an "open-source" cult movement. Till then, software was just like any other product or service - it just couldn’t be free. Tom informs us that his professor hated the idea, and told him that he would get a bad grade. Linus responded, "That’s OK. Einstein got lousy grades in math and physics". Also, other sparkling creative individuals like Steve Jobs, Michael Dell etc. are dropouts. But, that doesn’t mean that I am dropping out. :)

However, I must admit that things are far better here than they are in India... we (Indians) are driven by something more dangerous - "security". - Security of raising a happy family who study and work for the same "security" again. So, most of the people end up in the same profession - engineering or medicine or finance... wherever there is money, basically. And, people end up being not only un-creative but also un-happy.

Okay, I know I am digressing a lot again.

All I am saying is: we (Indian or non-Indian) should try to be more creative as students, so that we can be creative employees or managers or CEOs.