Faster decision-making is the key to India’s higher growth. American economist Lawrence Summers who was at Mumbai university said India could take inspiration from a slogan pasted on the wall of the Facebook office: “Done is better than perfect”.
Speaking of Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, who earlier worked on his team as the chief in staff of treasury, Summers said, ” An attitude that she has now became a slogan at Facebook. It’s up on the wall -`Done is better than perfect.’ “If your government internalised that bit and it just had an idea that decisions had to be made, and we hoped that were made right, but they just had to be made, and there was a substantial acceleration of decision making in every sphere, I think that would make a very big difference for India over time. I guess the other thing that one is stuck by is a variety of kinds of infrastructural improvements in India as well. But in general, faster decision making in presumptial permission, rather than a presumptial prohibition, would go a long way ,” said he.
The President Emeritus and Charles W Eliot professor at Harvard University , former treasury secretary in the Clinton administration was speaking on “Reinventing the university: Reconciling equity and excellence in higher education worldwide”. While topclass universities are a microcosm of what India needs, he believed that the quality of universities determines the ate of a nation.
“The prosperity of nations is tied up with their success of their universities. It is no accident that Silicon Valley is essentially in the same place as Stanford University . It is no accident that the city of Boston is where Harvard University and is also the leading concentration of biomed talent….”
Emphasising that India will not be great without great universities, he said, “I know it is fashionable to argue that prosperity comes from the ground up and it does. But when it is suggested that it so mehow means that prim and secondary education should be a focus to the exclusion of higher education I will suggest that is a grave and enormous error.”
“No matter how universal literacy is, no matt how many people have been taught arithmatic, no matter how healthy all the children are, a society will not move forward without learning the touches of frontiers of what man knows and without being part of the ad venture of pushing those frontiers and that I would suggest is the work of universities.”
A great university he said, must be governed by the right academic culture of openness, have autonomy and a sense of fierce competition.Summers said India could be an export house of education.He said he could not think of a better place than India for Indian students to study .
