The Two Million Minutes Blog

BOSTON GLOBE ARTICLE - India & the Olympics

Going for gold in India

By Derrick Z. Jackson

Globe Columnist / August 23, 2008

IN WINNING India's first-ever individual gold medal, rifle shooter Abhinav Bindra said he tried to treat the Olympics as just another tournament. "If you think of the hype, the medal, your mind thinks of the Games as a dangerous situation," Bindra said. "The Olympics is a serious thing, but I don't want to take it seriously."

Bindra's attitude is instructive. In the final days of the Olympics, host nation and emerging industrial giant China competed with the resource-spoiled United States for first place in the medal count. Together, the two countries had won nearly 200 medals by yesterday. Meanwhile, India, the world's second-most populous nation, had only three. Now, no nation wants so little loot per capita. Bindra himself said, "With our depth of talent and expanse of people, I firmly believe India can be a world-class sporting power."

But as every American who ever needed computer support knows, India is the 100-pound weakling laughing all the way to the global awards stand. As China and the United States produce athletes in very different, yet equally obsessive ways - and as we treat college and pro athletes as demigods and allow our children to become enslaved to high school coaches and suburban soccer programs - India is producing brainpower.

According to its 2007 review of intangible assets of intellectual property, talent, and trained workforce, the consulting firm Brand Finance rates India as third in the world behind the United States and Switzerland. In the 2008 Global Outsourcing 100, five of the top 10 companies are Indian, as are one-fifth of all firms.

India obviously has barely touched its potential, still faced with vast poverty, corruption, and infrastructure needs. University of Michigan global management expert C. K. Prahalad this spring told Indian business leaders that if India, which is already producing 3 million college graduates a year, can educate the poor, it will have the world's largest pool of trained people power by 2022.

"I would like to see 500 million skilled technicians, and I think this is possible in the next 15 years," Prahalad said. "We need to create a capacity for becoming the education laboratory of the world. We also need to focus on our arts, science, literature, and heritage, strive toward creating an environment from which can emerge 10 Nobel laureates. We have won Nobel prizes in literature, medicine, physics, chemistry, economics, etc., and I don't see why we can't produce more such laureates.

"India needs to become a source of global innovations, by generating new businesses, technologies and new business models. To create these new models of innovation, we need to stress on education by making education affordable to one and all, without any lowering of quality. The bottom of the pyramid, 800 million poor Indians, can become a major source of innovations, if empowered with the tool of education. . . . With our people, culture, and the right mindset, we can and need to create [a] minimum 30 multinational Fortune 100 companies."

Notice that Prahalad did not say, "We need to focus on gold-medal winners in the Olympics."

It is not that India does not care about sports, as any cricket fan knows. Bindra returned home to instant celebrity. There is talk of India bidding to host the Olympics in 2020. But it is also interesting that the nation's first individual gold medalist also happens to be the 25-year-old chief executive of a company that makes controllers for computer games. While many half-educated American athletes retire into a fog to find meaning in the rest of their lives, Bindra wins the gold, then mints more gold as our children become zombies playing with his products.

Bindra wants India to do better in the Olympics but also issued a philosophical warning that sport is not the end all. "It's like being at the top of a mountain, you keep climbing and then suddenly there is nothing," he said. "It's just a kind of emptiness . . . now that you have achieved what you have worked all your life, it's just done. Life goes on."

Precisely by winning only one gold, the world's second-largest nation is showing us how life does go on.

Published by the Stanford Graduate School of Business

The United States Can Learn from High School Students in India, China

May 2008

STANFORD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS —Most Americans have heard that the United States lags China and India in math and science education, but they often dismiss that reality, assuming that the leaders emphasize rote learning at the expense of teaching well-rounded original thinking.

Entrepreneur and venture capitalist Robert Compton says he carried those same assumptions until he traveled to India. There he found high school students as proficient in English literature and geography as they were in calculus. They had clear career plans and approached their goals with a focus he never saw in the United   States, even in his own two daughters who were straight A students at an exclusive private school.

Realizing that no statistic could do justice to what he had seen on the ground, Compton launched a new career as filmmaker, documenting students’ high school curriculums and study habits in India, China and the United States.

The result was 2 Million Minutes, the film Compton screened on May 14 at the Graduate School of Business. He talked with MBA students about his concerns that the weaknesses in the U.S. school system today could handicap the entire American economy for generations to come, and how students could help bridge the disparity.

“When Finland was ranked number one in math and science education, I wasn’t so worried,” said Compton, president of medical device maker Sofamor Danek. “But when it’s the two largest countries in the world that have fast growing economies and people who are coming out of poverty and driven to achieve, I am worried.”

Compton cited a calculation from Stanford economist Eric Hanushek (the Paul and Jean Hanna Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution) that a nation’s gross national product growth correlates directly to the level of math and science scores achieved by its students.

Despite his own concern, Compton said the best response to this educational disparity is to forge better bonds with India and China. He criticized the United States for severely limiting the number of foreign engineers who could immigrate on H1B work visas, and he urged GSB students—some of whom take part in cooperative programs with the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore or China’s Tsinghua School of Economics and Management —to collaborate with overseas talents on new businesses. “We can not keep the brains at a distance,” he said.

The title, 2 Million Minutes, represents the approximate number of minutes in a four-year period, to show how different students spend their time. As the film goes back and forth between typical days in the three countries it shows American students attending football games in their high school’s brand new $30 million stadium, while Chinese students display medals won in math competitions. Indian students meet for teacher-led study sessions at 7 a.m. on Saturday mornings while their American counterparts gather at a friend’s house to casually study for a test with the television on and Grey’s Anatomy competing for their attention.

While the Americans attend sports, socialize, work in part-time jobs and study, their Chinese and Indian counterparts pretty much study nonstop. And while even the best American students say they don’t feel challenged in schools, the most brilliant in China and India are constantly challenged to learn more.

The average U.S. student, his film states, spends 900 hours in a classroom and 1,500 hours in front of the television. And, by the end of high school, Chinese students have spent twice as much time studying as Americans.

The experience led Compton to radically change his own daughters’ education incorporating more tutoring and to develop his own math testing system based on what he saw in India to better parse comprehension and identify areas of weakness.

But he said that nationwide, this was not a challenge that could be fixed quickly, since it would require a dramatic shift in culture and values. “The fault lies not in our schools but in ourselves,” he said. “We are a sports, recreation and leisure country. We need to lift academic and intellectual achievements at least on par with athletic achievements.”

As a first step, Compton has already started working with some communities to help them more publicly recognize and reward the best students. He said the United States needs to appreciate how valuable engineers will be in the future, not just to create better software but to rebuild a host of ordinary consumer products like washing machines to make them use water, space or some other resource more efficiently.

“To me, this is one of the most exciting times in history to be an engineer,” he said. “Everything will have to be reinvented.”
The speech and film screening were sponsored by the Business School’s Global Management Program.

—Andrea Orr

What if the U.S. won no Olympic medals?

As I prepare to go to the Beijing Olympics, I wonder what would happen if the U.S. came home with no medals. From the first Olympic Games in 1896 through 2006, the U.S. has always fared very well, leading the world with 973 gold medals and 2,405 total medals won. No other country on Earth, big or small, comes even close to America’s athletic prowess.

But as I pack my bags, I wonder – what would happen? What if the U.S. won no gold, no silver and no bronze medals? Even worse, what if the U.S. team finished 25th in the medal competition – way behind both smaller and larger countries? Would we handle it with the same nonchalance we have about our children ranking 25th in the world in mathematics? Would it merit a Blue Ribbon panel whose recommendations are never implemented? Would it generate a brief mention in the news and then pass from our minds?

No way! Dropping to 25th in the world at the Olympics would be a national embarrassment. There would be an outcry of humiliation from Americans. The President, Congress, Governors, in fact every elected official worth their salt would demand “athletic reform.” Experts would be appointed to analyze our programmatic weaknesses compared to other countries, and every American would expect serious, measurable changes to take place within four years before the next Olympics. We would muster the will and exert every effort never to lose again in the global athletic contest of the Olympics.

So why are we so apathetic about the decline of our children’s intellectual achievement – where 24 countries outperform U.S. students in math, arguably a more important contest than any sport. Each year our children’s ability to compete academically in the world gets worse, and each year Americans seem to care less. Elected officials give the illusion of caring, but no truly hard choices are made, and no meaningful improvements are seen.

Fortunately, America has been relatively unchallenged economically for the past 50 years. During that time our country won the race to the moon, won the Cold War and became enormously wealthy – on the strength of science, engineering and industry that produced the biggest, the fastest, the best of everything. But times have changed.

Our accumulated wealth and a historically liberal immigration policy have allowed us to ignore how rapidly other nations are enhancing their intellectual capital. China, for example, has gone from the extreme poverty and illiteracy produced by the Cultural Revolution to become the fourth largest economy in the world – in a mere 30 years. That’s right – only 30 years! Today, the U.S. has a trade deficit of $1.5 trillion with China, and China holds $150 billion in U.S. Treasury securities, second only to Japan. China has become both our supplier of goods and our banker. Does that worry anyone else out there but me?

China and India, the two most populous nations on Earth – each four times our size – are producing more and more well-educated young people, particularly in math and science. Their cultures revere, recognize and reward academic excellence, and so they are perfectly tuned to the global technology competition of the 21st century.

As Americans we believe in being number one – in sports, technology, innovation, creativity, the military and in the global economy. But all of that success is based on being number one in educating our children – something we are no longer achieving.

Isn’t it time we admit to ourselves this is more serious than the Olympic Games. Americans traditionally rise to the challenge and prevail. It’s time to rise to the challenge of educating our children to the highest level in the world and ensure they bring home economic gold medals.

Go U.S.A.!

Senator Lugar Takes Note of Two Million Minutes

It is gratifying to know that a U.S. Senator as busy as Senator Richard Lugar took time to send a letter to the U.S. students who were in the film. Below is his letter to Brittany.