Machiavelli, in his book The Prince gives us several incendiary quotes that, one could argue, serve as a reference for modern-day entrepreneurs. Machiavelli’s philosophy epitomizes the struggles of a modern entrepreneur and serves as a guide for surviving that “dog-eat-dog” world.
“It is double pleasure to deceive the deceiver.“
Niccolo Machiavelli
In today’s world of competition, it’s frequently easy to ignore ethics and morals and focus instead on profit margins and bottom lines. Machiavelli serves as a guide for most politicians and some entrepreneurs as he gives them a way to bend the rules to fit their needs.
“The promise given was a necessity of the past: the word broken is a necessity of the present.”
Niccolò Machiavelli
In Machiavelli’s world, morals, ethics, values, promises, are all relative – and all that matters is the victory at the end. But what exactly does that victory entail? Are money, fame, and power the real answer to our quests for our being? As you might have seen in my article onPlato’s Eudaimonia, one can have a fulfilled life if one focuses on reforming society through innovations. Nietzsche takes it to the next level and gives us aclear blueprintfor overcoming societal pressures and vices to truly realize one’s inner potential.
While Plato and Nietzche lay out the high-level framework as to how far we can go, it’s hard to apply these ideas to daily practice. Imagine an average startup entrepreneur, struggling to support his fledgling business, trying to get through his next payroll, or worse – possibly trying to avoid bankruptcy because of his mounting financial obligations. I wrote about“going all-in”a few years ago to explain my journey during the initial phases of my startup; I am sure many of us had similar horror stories involving predator loans, merchant credits, vulture investors, financial consultants, and legal advisors and how we kept looking for theeasy way out, only to realize that these shortcuts lead us to worse situations. The last thing an entrepreneur wants to think about while fighting these fires is some idealistic vision laid out by Plato, Socrates, Nietzsche, or any other philosopher for that matter. In times of struggle, all that matters is to figure a way out of the current crisis. At least that’s how I felt when things were hard for me.
While Machiavelli can claim to provide answers and justifications for breaking promises, being facetious and even being directly unethical at times to win at any cost does not fit my moral compass. In my personal opinion these measures might bring short-term wealth, but do not bring long-term fulfillment.
What’s the best way to solve this? Let’s applycartesian skepticismto look at the solution from a different perspective.
I want to introduce Immanuel Kant, a Prussian German Philosopher from the Age of Enlightenment. Immanuel Kant is one of my favorite philosophers, as he provides a simple blueprint for decision making in hisCategorical Imperativedoctrine, and I have applied it in several sticky situations with great success over the years.
From Wikipedia –
A categorical imperative denotes an absolute, unconditional requirement that must be obeyed in all circumstances and is justified as an end in itself. It is best known in its first formulation:
“Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”
— Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals
According to Kant, we cannot operate on moral relativism, applying morals where convenient, and ignoring them when they are not. According to his reasoning, we first have a perfect duty not to act by maxims that result in logical contradictions when we attempt to universalize them.
Kant believed in the concept of perfect duties – in general, precise responsibilities are those that are blameworthy if not met, as they are an essential required duty for a human being.
“Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end.”
— Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals
Simply put,this maxim tells us that we should not consider fellow humans as some “means to an end” – in other words, we should not try to manipulate a fellow human being so that he can return a favor, or help us with a need. We should treat all humans with respect, and assume that they are autonomous and independent, and that their decisions oftentimes have no dependency on our actions.
“Thus the third practical principle follows [from the first two] as the ultimate condition of their harmony with practical reason: the idea of the will of every rational being as a universally legislating will.”
— Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals
The third formulation says that if everyone follows the first two formulations, there will be no need for laws and regulations. Humans will be able to reach a state of “self-legislation,” where each human will be able to make the right decision by following the first two formulations.
In business terms, this is the definition of the free market, or at least the utopian vision behind it. If each business works ethically, to win the business of customers, there will be no need for a regulatory body to enforce rules and regulations on these businesses.
“Act according to maxims of a universally legislating member of a merely possible kingdom of ends.”
— Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals
The fourth formulation describes a utopian world where each person is autonomous and working on these categorical imperatives, and ultimately making the world a better place (kingdom of ends). Imagine a world where every human acts in full awareness and adherence to their consciousness, acting in adherence to the first two formulations. Such a world would expect every human to be self-legislative, and this universe would not need any laws for social order. In this utopian world, every human being can be trusted completely to make the right decision at all times.
Business and Philosophy
The more I read Kant and Machiavelli and their perspectives on virtues, morals, and ethics, the more I wondered if any of these ideas are relevant to the world we live in. In the current climate, being called a “cut-throat” CEO is considered a great compliment for an entrepreneur, “shark” investor is a praise for a new banker, and being called a “vulture” is considered a good thing for a financial firm. Is this “dog-eat-dog” world ready for anyone other than Machiavelli? Frankly, Machiavelli seems like our true friend with quotes like these –
The fact is that a man who wants to act virtuously in every way necessarily comes to grief among so many who are not virtuous.
Niccolo Machiavelli
In the above quote, Machiavelli advises against acting virtuously, as most people in the world are not virtuous. However, by subscribing to the theory that some people in the world are not virtuous, some give themselves an excuse to break their own moral or ethical code of behavior.
I considered the ruthless world we live in, and how philosophy could be of any use in the challenges faced by modern entrepreneurs on a day-to-day basis. Like any other experiment, philosophy is best tested by considering some use cases.
Pet Walking
Imagine the following scenario – you are a pet owner, and you walk your puppy every morning and evening. You pick up after her every time, with the assumption that all other pet owners are doing the same, and you also know that it’s the “right thing to do.” What if one decides not to pick up after their pet, because some pet owners are not picking up after their pets? If you join the irresponsible pet owners, aren’t you making your neighborhood a worse place? In fact, if some pet owners forget to pick up after their pet, isn’t it the right thing to do to pick it up as well, just because?
In my pet walking example, applying the first formulation will look somewhat like this – “If I can make a universal law that no pet owner should pick up after their pet, I will stop picking up after my pet.” I am sure you will agree that such a law would be absurd – not to mention, our lawns would become unbearable as the result of such a law.
Applying Kant’s second formulation – “Pick up after a neighbor’s pet without any assumption that the neighbor will return your favor. Do this because this is the right thing to do.”
Applying Kant’s third formulation – “If all responsible pet owners follow the first formulation and pick up after their pet, and also pick up when an owner forgets without any expectation – all our gardens will be perfect!”
Applying Kant’s fourth formulation – “If all responsible pet owners follow the first formulation and pick up after their pet, and also pic kup when an owner forgets without any expectation, there will be no need for laws, regulations, fines, and tribulations to manage this pet waste problem.”
As far irresponsible pet owners are concerned, they might get some satisfaction from letting others take care of their basic responsibilities, but I am hopeful that they might feel guilty eventually, and decide to do the right thing. If they don’t have this basic level of conscience, their small violations often lead to bigger crimes and ultimately catch up to them.
If we can trust humans to be “self-legislating” with pet walking, then we should be able to trust humans in general on other matters as well. For the most part, humans don’t need laws – most of us wake up, get dressed, show up to work on time, take care of our families responsibly, and perform our duties as responsible citizens without the threat of punishment from the authorities. All of this comes from our internal core value system, and Kant believes that if we can strengthen that core with clear, non-negotiable guidelines (categorical imperatives), we can solve more complex problems as well.
Competitive Bidding
Imagine being in a competitive bidding war with another firm, but this other firm has always been unethical with their practices and quotes. One of your staff members advises you to be dishonest and provide a stronger bid in order to help you win the business. The reasoning? One can only defeat deceit with deceit.
Now let’s revisit the use-case of a bidding war with your unethical competitor, and see if the first formulation helps us. As always, you have two options:
Machiavelli’s approach: Submit a dishonest proposal, and stay in the race. Promises are meant to be broken, remember?
Categorical Imperative: Stay true to your values, and probably lose the submission to the unethical competitor.
In our example laid out above, if we adopt “It’s OK to be dishonest on a proposal to win against another dishonest bid,” as our maxim, we should be willing to take this as the universal law, and this implies that everyone should be able to cheat on their proposals. This eventually makes the bidding process useless and will make our dishonesty frivolous.
Loan in Crisis
The company is in a cash crunch because of a terrible year of losses. It would help if the company did whatever it could to survive. One of the ways the CEO could alleviate the problem would be by breaking promises to lenders, customers, and possibly employees.
For this use-case the second formulation helps us. As always, you have two options:
Machiavelli’s approach: Pursue your plans to become a wealthy person’s friend, to manipulate this person and extract a personal loan at all costs.
Categorical Imperative: Decide to come clean and not pursue this plan, at the expense of failing your business.
In the example above, if we follow Kant’s second axiom, we need to ignore the path that justifies deceit to solicit funds. However, once we decide that such a shortcut is no longer an option,we might think more clearly about following the right course of action, even if that means accepting failure in your business. Or there might be a more viable option, where you explain the perilous state of your business with complete honesty to this wealthy contact, provide him full details as to the risks involved, and allow him to make the decision. In my interactions with investors, friends, and associates, I have learned that providing the full picture might make you look vulnerable at times. However, being honest, even though it’s inconvenient to do so, allows you to treat your fellow human beings with the respect they most deserve.
Summary
Over the years, I am sure I have made some errors in my personal and business life. I can take stock of a few times I might have resorted to Machiavellian tactics at times. In those situations, I am pretty sure I ended up disappointed as a result. I never understood the cause of my disappointment instead of happiness, even when things worked. Thanks to my cartesian skepticism, I came across Kant’s categorical imperative. Kant’s doctrine gave me an unambiguous framework to make the right decisions, even in the most perilous of circumstances.
Let’s look at our use-cases and ponder the alternative of using Machiavellian tactics instead of Categorical Imperatives.
If one wins an award by making misleading statements, this person would live in fear that the customer might figure out his/her dishonesty eventually. Or even if the customer continues to trust them, he/she might end up failing on the project, as they were not a good fit to begin with.
Machiavelli’s prompt to “break a promise” might sound simple when the entrepreneur is in a bind. However, such breaches of trust can have a long-term impact on employee morale or put strains on your personal and business relations. More importantly, employees can decide to follow the entrepreneur’s lead and break their promises to the company when the company needs them most.
If one takes Machiavelli’s approach for deceiving a wealthy associate and taking loans from this person under false pretenses, this person’s subconscious might run into similar problems as he/she broke their morals and ethics and manipulated a fellow human being for his/her selfish ends.
I guess the above assertions about guilt might not apply for a person with no conscience. Machiavelli may speak to those people, lucky ones. However, I am a proud Kantian, and I will be satisfied with a life of minimal wealth, but opulent conscience – not the other way round.
At N2N’s 2019 Annual Meeting, held Dec. 20 at the Porsche Experience Center in Atlanta, Georgia, N2N leadership, employees, clients, and investors took some time from their busy working schedules to come together and reflect on N2N’s nine-year journey from its founding to the present.
Three of those in attendance were Hitesh Chokshi, one of N2N’s investors; Mark Sczesnak, Director of Product Development at ACI International and one of N2N’s partners; and Mike Vogt of California Virtual Campus, a client of N2N’s.
Chokshi remarked on his organization’s history with N2N, which began in 2016. One of the major reasons he and his investment partners chose to fund N2N, he said, is because of how impressed they were with founder and CEO Kiran Kodithala. “Character matters. Values matter,” Chokshi said.
As an example, Chokshi discussed Kodithala’s persistence and adaptability in his role as the leader of N2N. He mentioned Kodithala’s ability to spot opportunities and move the company forward, putting it on the “incredible trajectory” that it’s on today.
Mark Sczesnak of ACI International spoke to a different aspect of N2N’s work: as a partner. Sczesnak discussed how N2N had worked closely with ACI International to build a portal for college and university student payments.
Previously to working with N2N, he said, his team had a set of products, but they didn’t provide an integrated experience. N2N’s team worked closely with ACI in order to build a streamlined platform that could deliver a better experience to their customers.
As Sczesnak said, students often have multiple different people who are making payments, or making partial payments. “We need a partner like N2N to help us deliver that across multiple different ERP systems…we currently serve 340 colleges and universities, and it’s going to be our combined solution with N2N that changes the marketplace. We’re going to be able to deliver better experiences to our customers for a good price.”
Finally, Mike Vogt discussed the scope and scale of the California Virtual Campus (CVC) system, which allows online cross-enrollment for all of California’s community colleges. With 2.1 million students spread across 114 schools, the learning community is one of the largest in the world.
One of the biggest problems students were facing, Vogt said, was enrolling in different online courses at different schools across the state. Because the colleges were using three different SIS systems, N2N was brought on to manage the countless variables that were making it difficult for the systems to talk to each other and share enrollment information.
“We think of you as the great translators,” Vogt said, referring to the N2N team. He praised N2N’s adaptability and flexibility in solving this large, complex problem, as well as their ability to pivot as needed. As this project isn’t yet complete, N2N is continuing to work with Vogt to grant greater college accessibility to more students.
This past December, N2N celebrated its 9th birthday at its Annual Meeting at the Porsche Experience Center in Atlanta, Georgia.
N2N’s CEO and founder, Kiran Kodithala, gave the keynote, sharing and reflecting on N2N’s history and progress over the past nine years.
After a thoughtful, personal, and humorous look at where N2N has been, Kodithala turned his attention to where N2N is going. The company’s goal is and always has been nothing less than to change the world—and Kodithala and his team are doing it through technology for higher education.
“What we’re doing is illuminating students’ path to graduation,” he said. “We want to help them on their academic journey.” Through tools like a machine learning API that helps students identify courses that will help them graduate faster, as well as enrollment and registration tools, N2N is working hard to make navigating students’ higher education journeys easier and more accessible.
After some discussion of present offerings, Kodithala laid out the three areas in which N2N is investing in the coming years.
Customer Success. N2N is dedicating new resources to supporting customer success, primarily through opening a new office in India to support the development operations team as well as customers. The aim is to support customers in a holistic manner, from technical support to relationship building. As Kodithala says, “The only way we can change the world is by continuing to provide better solutions to our customers.”
Investment in employees. Kodithala emphasized that N2N will be investing even more in their current employees by providing them with better benefits, more skills training, and better technology. As N2N has grown, so too has its workforce, and N2N is dedicated to supporting its people with the best possible training and technology available. Kodithala also said that N2N is changing its hiring process in order to attract the best possible employees and give them the right support from day.
Double and triple down N2N’s focus on innovation. This last point is especially key to the way N2N will be moving forward over the next three to five years. Kodithala emphasized that innovation is a critical element of N2N’s future and their ability to support students moving through higher education.
Finally, Kodithala made a surprise announcement: he is putting into place a transition plan that would see him transition out of his role as CEO and into a role as Chief Innovation Officer over the next three to five or six years.
Referring to the way he opened his keynote, Kodithala said “The first question we talked about was what we wanted to be when we grew up. I wanted to be a scientist—and do I feel like a scientist? Some days. But there are some days when I feel like there’s too much operational stuff. There’s an operational struggle that prevents me from becoming the scientist and innovator that I truly want to be.”
While Kodithala is not stepping away from N2N in any capacity, he will be stepping into a different role that allows him to fulfill those dreams that he had as a high school student, and still has today.
Kodithala closed on an inspiring and ambitious note, saying, “We will figure out a way to learn from our experiences and build something better than what we already have. I am absolutely sure that all of this effort will allow us to illuminate the world itself. We want to truly change the world and support every single student on their academic journey.”
According to a recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, of the 36 million American adults today who completed some college but never graduated, about 10% (3.5 million people!) have been branded “potential completers.”
These are people who have at least 2 years’ worth of college credits under their belts, and who are most likely to respond favorably to recruitment attempts made by colleges looking to expand their student base into older students.
According to the article, these students are typically under 30. About half of them last attended a 2-year community college, and about half are minorities. All of them are most likely to reenroll in an institution in their home state, if they do return to college.
With the much-discussed enrollment crisis on the horizon, this is a pool of potential students that colleges and universities are now taking a much closer look at.
Reenrolling these ‘potential completers’ and helping them to graduate is a win-win-win situation. Students obtain the degree they’d already made such progress on – and already invested so much time and money into. Colleges and universities tap into a new market of older students to fill the seats left empty by declining birthrates and increasing skepticism about the value of an expensive college degree. And businesses, the economy, and society as a whole benefit from the influx of better-educated citizens and employees.
But what’s the best way to reach this segment of the population?
By making your institution analytical, attractive, affordable, and adaptable.
And by using N2N’s Illuminate.
Analytical: Harness the power of the analytics tools available today to target these potential completers, and then to provide extra support for them as they work to finish their degrees at your institution, keeping track of their progress and intervening whenever they begin to struggle. The Illuminate application integrates your apps, platforms, databases, and systems, and provides a comprehensive analytical overview of system activity that’s easy to access, updated in real-time, and actionable.
Attractive: Age doesn’t matter – every student, whether they’re 18 or 30, wants the college they attend to have cutting-edge tech and provide a seamless online experience. And in fact, the older the student is, the more likely they are to need offerings such as online classes in order to make school fit into their life. The Illuminate application allows institutions to easily, quickly, and affordably integrate new apps into their SIS ecosystem whenever they need to upgrade or provide a new offering.
Affordable: The older your students, the more they’ll be thinking about the price tag that goes along with that degree. Cutting tuition costs is important to attracting these once-and-future students to your institution – so cutting costs at your college or university is crucial, too. Illuminate allows you to automate large batch processes and eliminates the need for custom coding and DIY integrations, thus saving time, money, and freeing up resources for other important tasks.
Adaptable: Who knows what the future will bring? Potential completers may be inspired to return to school when a new technology emerges, and you’ll need to be ready to jump into the game right away to attract them to your institution. Illuminate allows you to snap new apps into and out of your IT set-up in minutes, no coding required, thus making your institution agile and ready for whatever the future holds.
If you’d like to find out more about how we can help your institution help potential completers finish their degrees, contact us for a free demo today.
Ever watched one of those TV shows about doomsday preppers?
You know, the ones where people stockpile food supplies, build underground bunkers, and practice what they’d do to survive in a post-apocalyptic world?
Well, there may not be a killer asteroid or a zombie apocalypse coming anytime soon, but there is one doomsday scenario that everyone working in higher education today is trying to prepare for – and that’s the enrollment crisis.
With the perfect storm of falling birthrates, increasing skepticism about the value of an expensive degree, and the ongoing financial challenges common to most colleges and universities, colleges are bracing themselves to deal with the effects of massive drops in enrollment predicted for the coming years.
A recent report put together by The Chronicle of Higher Education details the issues that are at play here, and describes the strategies that academic institutions can use to remain competitive and combat a decline in enrollment.
Two key strategies mentioned in the report are:
Agility: Adapting your institution’s offerings, marketing plan, campus environment…really, the entire college experience you offer…to the needs and desires of this new generation of students.
Affordability: Cutting costs wherever possible so that you can pass on those savings in the form of lowered tuition rates to students.
At a glance, it might look like these two strategies are incompatible. After all, most of the changes mentioned require an IT overhaul, or at least a huge investment of time and money into integrating new apps with your existing systems. And true agility is even more expensive – can you imagine significantly changing a large part of your IT ecosystem every year or two to remain competitive? How does cutting costs fit into this picture at all?!
That’s where N2N’s Illuminate comes into play.
Illuminate is an API Management Platform that removes the need for custom coding by seamlessly integratingnew apps with your existing platforms, databases, and systems, by leveraging existing APIs or by easily creating new ones.
For an affordable monthly fee, Illuminate makes agility not just possible, but easy.
Need to test out a few different apps to see which one works best? No problem. Snap each one into Illuminate quickly, try them out, and see which one truly fits your needs. You don’t have to worry about having to stick with a bad choice just because the cost to integrate another new app in its place is prohibitive.
Want a big IT shake-up every year? Go for it! There’s no reason not to, when you can add and remove apps, programs, and platforms in minutes, at no cost to you except the price of the apps themselves.
With this kind of radical, affordable agility in place, you can’t help but be competitively positioned for success in the coming years. Cutting tuition while upping your offerings and providing a cutting-edge campus? Illuminate makes it a snap.
Contact us today for a free demo of the platform that can help you stay agile, affordable, and competitive.
Everyone involved in higher ed ultimately has one goal – helping students succeed.
In fact, it might be better stated this way – helping as many students succeed as possible.
That means truly supporting every single student currently attending your institution, as well as making the top-notch education you provide available to as many new, incoming students as possible, too.
But of course, this is a mammoth task.
And the difficulty of this task is borne out by the data.
Could have been grades, could have been financial issues, could have been family situations, could have been behavior…
But so many of those ‘could have beens’ could have been a different story, if only there had been a better way to support them when they were still enrolled.
Then too, there are the potential students.
How much support is your institution really able to give, to help as many potential students from as many different backgrounds as possible enroll in your school in the first place?
And I’m not talking financial support, though that’s a part of it.
I’m talking strategically targeting specific high schools in your recruiting efforts…giving counselors the tools and info they need to help guide students through a successful application…offering flexible options like online classes so more students can afford and fit your college education into their lives.
There are only two ways to offer this intensive level of support for new and existing students – hire more people, or use new tech.
But either option seems to require more money than the budget allows.
But what if your institution could make a change in the level of support you’re able to provide both of these demographic groups – and without a huge financial outlay?
What if you could easily, quickly, and affordably implement a whole host of new apps that would help you provide exactly the type of support students need to succeed?
Apps for student use to make navigating college easier…software to enable better analytics reporting, and thus more strategic outreach and recruiting…student success software to better identify current students at risk…platforms to offer online courses…any app or platform that makes college access and college success more of a reality for more students.
The answer is N2N’s Illuminate.
Integrating all those apps and platforms into your existing SIS ecosystem yourself would be prohibitively time-consuming and expensive.
But once you have the Illuminate application, it becomes a simple matter of plugging their APIs into our platform, no custom coding required, for quick, seamless integration with every part of your existing SIS set-up.
At N2N, we believe a college degree should be accessible to all.
So we’re doing our part to help colleges and universities make that dream into a reality.
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