Look Who’s Kidding

Professors who go to such unusual extents to reach readers are impossible to ignore

Professors of tricky subjects usually resist the risk of over- simplification, which is why they rarely write books with popular appeal. And when they do, their work often betrays an anxiety about having to trade rigour for readability.

A book that acquits itself marvellously of that charge is Indianomix by Economics Professor Vivek Dahejia of Canada’s Carleton University and columnist Rupa Subramanya of WSJ India. It uses game theory, incentive analysis and other nerdy tools to explain a wild variety of Indian oddities, ranging from why people are routinely late and cabs seem so resolutely lazy to how superstitions appear to validate themselves and railway-track hoppers are best nudged to safety. All this is breezy and believable, if a little nigglish.

But then Indianomix gets so casual in the confidence of its own devices that it begins to turn ticklish. It takes a 2 per cent gap in vote-share between the NDA and UPA as proof that the latter had ‘unforeseeable random factors’ to thank for its win in the general election of 2004, that ‘it was decided by a coin toss’ rather than any aam appeal or mind shift. Is this irony? A prank? A ploy to push reality relativism? A little later, Dahejia and Subramanya turn to Devdutt Pattanaik, a chief—ahem— belief officer who believes mythology clarifies the basics of business, defines a myth as a ‘subjective truth’, and suggests that America Inc could well have escaped the Great Recession had it kept wealth worship and regulatory order on an even keel, just as India Inc keeps Lakshmi and Vishnu.

For a book that goes the other way on the simplification scale, pick up How Stella Saved the Farm by Professor Vijay Govindarajan of Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth and his former colleague Professor Chris Trimble. This book, a fable about an animal farm inspired by Orwell’s classic, starts fabulously flippant and turns superbly sound as it goes along. Instead of ideals going haywire, ideas go livewire. Stella is a young ewe who goes gaga over an Andean alpaca called Alejandro and finds alpacan wool so soft that she gets the family of horses she works for to bet their farm on its future. As an idea, it’s a game changer, their only hope of surviving an onslaught of mechanised farms run by humans. But that is all it is—an idea. The real challenge is in getting it past all the bleats and snorts to see it through. Hoofs are stomped, nerves lost and wings flapped before horse-sense dawns on the farm’s chief mare, Deirdre: that it’s an experiment, and ought not to be treated like just another business operation. What counts are not the new idea’s losses, but the lessons they hold.

The authors say the story is drawn from their 2010 book The Other Side of Innovation, but it reminds me of their earlier 10 Rules for Strategic Innovators, which I felt signalled a ‘desire to deliver a sort of innovation algorithm for corporate engineers’, as I wrote in a review for Business Standard.

Well, if 10 Rules was geektalk, Stella is a fairytale, and it reveals the significance of its academic rigour only once you reach its ultimate question at the end: ‘Okay, so who really saved the farm?’

Who—or what? There is no snappy answer, is there? Beyond Stella’s idea and Deirdre’s openness, what ultimately saves the farm is a combination of diverse skills. Einstein the Rooster tests one hypothesis after another against its evidence, even as Maisie the Cow cracks the fashion market in alliance with ‘Stellalalala’ (as she calls her)… until our four-legged farmers rid themselves of all their idyllic assumptions that get in the way of the truth. It’s not exactly an algorithm, but a process of rational negation. Done well, it might even have given Orwell’s rebellious animals a chance of success.

How Stella Saved the FarmIndianomixOrwell