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<ul><li><keyword id="6355629" type="General" weightage="100" keywordseo="google" source="Orion">Google</keyword> is inviting applications from women in Asia-Pacific countries to apply for its scholarship worth $1000 for 2022-2023.</li><li>The scholarship will be awarded based on the strength of each candidate's commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion, innovation and academic performance.</li><li> The last date to apply for the scholarship programme is December 10, 2021.</li></ul>Google is welcoming women living in Asia-Pacific countries to apply for scholarships worth $1000 for 2022-2023 school year to help students pursuing computer science degrees excel in technology. The scholarship will be awarded based on the strength of each candidate's commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion, innovation and academic performance. The programme is open to students who meet all the minimum qualifications and it strongly encourages women interested in computer science to apply. The applications for 2022 are already open and the last date to apply for the scholarship programme is December 10, 2021, 11:59 p.m. (India time). Eligibility criteria for the Generation Google scholarship programme — <ol><li>Candidates must be currently enrolled in a full-time bachelor’s degree for the 2021-2022 academic year.</li><li>Applicants must be a second year student at an accredited university in an Asia-Pacific country when completing the scholarship programme.</li><li>Must be enrolled in computer science/computer engineering, or a closely related technical field.</li><li>Should have a strong academic record with leadership qualities.</li></ol>Other terms and conditions — <ol><li>The scholarship amount must be spent on tuition, fees, books, supplies and equipment required for the classes at their primary university.</li><li>Enrollment will be verified after the winners are selected, and all scholarship payments will be made directly to the student which has to be used for tuition and education-related expenses.</li><li>The award will be withdrawn of any scholar who no longer meets the eligibility requirements or who does not maintain the eligibility requirements.</li><li>Selected recipients will receive instructions from Google on how to receive the award and in case of failure to complete these steps by the specified deadline will disqualify recipients from receiving the award.</li><li>Google employees are not eligible to apply for Google scholarships.</li></ol>What are the requirements to apply for this scholarship? <ol><li>Resume/CV highlighting technical projects and participation in community engagement</li><li>Academic transcripts from your current or prior institutions.</li><li>Responses to two short answer essay questions (check details down).</li></ol>Candidates are required to submit two 400-word essays, which have to be written in English. These essays will assess your commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion, and financial need. These are the two topics on which essays have to be submitted — <ol><li>What is a significant challenge that you believe women in the tech industry face and how do you see yourself being part of the solutions to this challenge? Keep in mind that impact can happen in many ways and at different scales.</li><li>What impact would receiving this scholarship have on your education? Describe any circumstances affecting your need for a scholarship and what educational goals this scholarship will enable you to accomplish.</li></ol> SEE ALSO: <a target="_blank" class="c-link c-message_attachment__title_link" href="https://www.businessinsider.in/careers/news/hcl-announces-first-career-programme-for-engineering-freshers-to-bag-their-first-jobs/articleshow/87500602.cms">HCL announces ‘First Career Programme’ for engineering freshers to bag their first jobs</a> <a target="_blank" class="c-link c-message_attachment__title_link" href="https://www.businessinsider.in/sports/news/india-vs-afghanistan-at-t20-world-cup-it-may-not-be-an-easy-win-for-virat-kohli-and-boys/slidelist/87498627.cms">India vs Afghanistan at T20 World Cup — It may not be an easy win for Virat Kohli and boys</a>

Google announces scholarship for female computer science students residing in Asia-Pacific countries

<ul><li><keyword id="6355629" type="General" weightage="20" keywordseo="google" source="Orion">Google</keyword> hosted its seventh Google for India event.</li><li>Google shared its plan to help India fast track its digital transformation and the role it wants to play.</li><li>Here are the key highlights from the event.</li></ul>Google hosted its seventh Google for India event and this time the emphasis was on making the internet safer for a billion Indians and empowering the country to become a leading digital economy. The search giant says it wants to play the role of a catalyst as the country is looking to grow in the digital space. During the event, it laid the roadmap of its plans in India and made some major announcements. Here are the key highlights from the event- <cmsannotation type="cmsannotation" annotationid="Climate concerns" comment="subhead" text="Climate concerns">Climate concerns</cmsannotation> With climate change being real, Google is working on a range of climate-related efforts in India to fulfil its commitment to being carbon-free by 2030. Google is working on a <a href="https://www.businessinsider.in/tech/news/google-announces-new-climate-related-efforts-for-india/articleshow/87775123.cms">range of climate-related efforts </a>in India. Google has partnered with India Meteorological Department to launch weather alerts for any extreme climatic conditions as India gets affected by events such as heavy rainfall, heatwaves, cold waves or thunderstorms. These alerts will be available on Android phones and Google Search. Users can also use voice commands such as “Weather near me” to get spoken weather alerts. As many parts of India suffer from natural disasters such as floods, Google has sent about 110 million notifications to 20 million affected people. As pollution affects some parts of the country, Google has partnered with the Central Pollution Control Board to provide the latest Air Quality Index information from their nearest station. <cmsannotation type="cmsannotation" annotationid="Education, learning and skill development" comment="subhead" text="Education, learning and skill development">Education, learning and skill development</cmsannotation> Google is also working to develop the digital education and learning space in India. It has partnered with <keyword id="1017386" type="General" weightage="20" keywordseo="coursera" source="Orion">Coursera</keyword> to deliver new courses for students to upskill their digital careers such as IT management, data analytics, UX design and others. The Google Coursera prices will range between ₹6,000 to ₹8,000 and it will also award 1,00,000 scholarships for Google Career Certificates Graduation cap in partnership with NASSCOM Foundation, Wipro, Times Internet and Tech Mahindra. Google will connect students to job opportunities through a consortium of companies. Through its Google Classroom program, it allows users to download class work whenever they have internet access and work on it later. Google Search is bringing free learning content such as the practice problem feature and the company is working to make this feature accessible with poor internet connectivity. Google Read Aloud feature on Search-Google will also read aloud search results in the user's language. The feature will work with Hindi for now it seems and work with any mobile browser, says the company. The read aloud feature will expand to more languages soon. Google is also bringing the read aloud feature in native languages for Indian users. It will first be available in Hindi and will then expand in other languages. Google showcased its Look to Speak app that was launched last year. It will now support five more Indian languages. <cmsannotation type="cmsannotation" annotationid="Making digital payments more accessible and intuitive" comment="subhead" text="Making digital payments more accessible and intuitive">Making digital payments more accessible and intuitive</cmsannotation> Talking about <keyword id="2750705" type="General" weightage="20" keywordseo="google-pay" source="Orion">Google Pay</keyword>, Ambarish Kenghe, VP for Google Pay, said that it had over 15 billion transactions annually. The company is bringing <a href="https://www.businessinsider.in/tech/apps/news/google-pay-users-in-india-will-soon-be-able-to-interact-in-hinglish-split-bills-and-sell-their-products-online/articleshow/87774356.cms">new features</a> for payments such as Groups and Bill Split. The payment app will also be available in the Hinglish language to its users. Google Pay will also let users speak out the bank account number, instead of typing it when transferring money to one. Users can say it in Hindi or English and Google will figure out what the number is. Google Pay is getting a My Shop feature where a small store merchant can showcase the entire inventory from the app itself. <cmsannotation type="cmsannotation" annotationid="Making healthcare affordable and accessible to all" comment="subhead" text="Making healthcare affordable and accessible to all">Making <keyword id="6354525" type="General" weightage="20" keywordseo="healthcare" source="Orion">healthcare</keyword> affordable and accessible to all</cmsannotation> Google's also looking to improve the healthcare facilities digitally. Google Assistant will now support end-to-end vaccination appointments. It will guide users to register a person for COVID-19 vaccination via Google Assistant in their native language. Google brings the Mitra program in partnership with Armaan. It is aimed at benefiting women who are pregnant and very often lack access to basic healthcare. With Google’s AI, the program can pinpoint who is more at risk, and make sure they access the service better. The non-profit organisation, Armaan, will help get women back into the program and save their lives, especially during pregnancy. In India, one woman dies every twenty minutes during childbirth. SEE ALSO: <a href="https://www.businessinsider.in/tech/apps/news/google-pay-users-in-india-will-soon-be-able-to-interact-in-hinglish-split-bills-and-sell-their-products-online/articleshow/87774356.cms">Google Pay users in India will soon be able to interact in Hinglish, split bills and sell their products online</a> <a href="https://www.businessinsider.in/tech/apps/news/instagram-video-selfie-verification-feature-tricked-by-a-barbie-doll/articleshow/87773617.cms">Instagram’s video selfie verification feature can be easily tricked with a Barbie doll</a> <a href="https://www.businessinsider.in/tech/news/qualcomm-developing-windows-11-processors-to-take-on-apples-m-series-chips-performance/articleshow/87772497.cms">Qualcomm developing Windows 11 processors to take on Apple's M-series chips’ performance</a>

Google for India 2021 highlights: All the major announcements from the event

<ul class="summary-list"><li>Nandita Gupta became an accessibility product manager at Microsoft after starting her career in a factory.</li><li>Inspired by her grandfather's loss of sight, she returned to school and paid her way with scholarships.</li></ul>This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Nandita Gupta, an accessibility product manager at Microsoft in Redmond, Washington. It has been edited for length and clarity.I'm an accessibility product manager at <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-cuts-azure-jobs-cloud-2024-6">Microsoft</a>. I have electrical engineering and human-computer interaction degrees, and my internship experiences were in manufacturing and robotics research. I decided to pursue human-centered computing with a focus on manufacturing as a career.I worked as a process controls engineer at a factory that made baby wipes for three years before quitting and returning to school in the fall of 2019.I started working as a product manager on internal tools at Microsoft in March 2021. Since December 2021, I've worked as an accessibility product manager for Accessibility Insights, a suite of products that helps developers code with accessibility in mind. I lead the product direction, plan future initiatives, and work with teams to create enjoyable and accessible experiences for developers.<a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-job-optimize-linkedin-profile-jasmine-bortters-2021-10">Landing my first job at Microsoft</a> doubled my income, and I'm doing what I always wanted to do — make an impact.<h2 id="59e6f5ad-1bbb-40de-9551-4c2872dffc15">In 2019, I found myself at a crossroads as a process controls engineer</h2>As a young girl, I saw my grandfather lose his eyesight, which left an indelible mark on my career choices. I yearned for a purpose beyond manufacturing and dreamed of helping people like my grandfather. There came a moment in my manufacturing job when I asked myself, "What am I doing? What happened to helping people like Grandpa?"I took a leap of faith and <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/quit-tech-job-launch-startup-now-make-400000-2024-4">left my stable job</a> to pursue my passion for accessibility. I invested my savings into a single semester of graduate school with plans to apply for scholarships and assistantships, a decision that was both terrifying and exhilarating.I was determined to apply for every scholarship to earn my degree. When my bank balance headed toward zero, I secured a graduate assistantship and received my first <a target="_blank" href="https://alltogether.swe.org/2019/09/georgia-tech-students-benefit-from-motorola-solutions-scholarship/">scholarship</a>. In February 2020, I earned the <a target="_blank" href="https://buildyourfuture.withgoogle.com/scholarships/google-lime-scholarship">Google Lime Scholarship</a>, worth $10,000, which covered the rest of my graduate program.As they told me I had been awarded that scholarship over the phone, I cried tears of relief. I had been sinking into depression the previous few months and was consumed by financial worries. Receiving this scholarship was one of the most emotional moments of my life.<h2 id="825835b3-3d52-4b6d-86c9-19bb21d400f0">The COVID-19 pandemic added new uncertainty</h2>My journey to Microsoft was not easy, but I wouldn't change anything about it.When the pandemic hit, the summer internship I had lined up was canceled, and my job prospects seemed bleak. I tried to connect with companies and finally connected with a Microsoft recruiter at a virtual networking event. I shared my passion for accessibility and inclusion with the recruiter, and they said it was something they needed at the company.The meeting led to a quick screening with HR, followed by a four-round interview loop and, finally, a job offer. Taking the Microsoft job <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/personal-finance/doubled-income-learning-ask-what-want-2021-2">doubled my earnings</a> from my last job — my annual income was around $75,000 in manufacturing, and the move to Microsoft brought my total compensation to over $170,000. My work schedule is flexible, and I typically work around 50 hours a week.<h2 id="108af3ff-9b57-491f-990b-9a4ed360b542">Accessibility resonates deeply with me</h2><a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/how-accessible-technology-helps-disabled-neurodivergent-travelers-2023-10">Accessibility</a> is not just personal — it's a fundamental human right. My mission is to inspire others to design and deliver products that are accessible and inclusive, ensuring individuals like my grandfather feel seen and valued.One of the most impactful accessibility initiatives I've been involved in is <a target="_blank" href="https://www.nanditag.com/zooatlanta">my collaboration with Zoo Atlanta</a> as a graduate researcher. Our team crafted an inclusive experience for Zoo Atlanta visitors, particularly emphasizing those with visual impairments.Another exciting project I worked on was <a target="_blank" href="https://affiliate.insider.com?h=62ec6310aee776749bc3248733a3b678fdf2272465373ada9e3edca4333a65d1&amp;postID=6667346fe01a10ede1c535cd&amp;postSlug=doubled-income-microsoft-started-career-factory-2024-6&amp;site=bi&amp;u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.microsoft.com%2Finsidetrack%2Fblog%2Fshifting-left-to-get-accessibility-right-at-microsoft%2F">Shifting Left to Get Accessibility Right at Microsoft</a>. The case study showcases the importance of proactive accessibility and how the organization implemented a culture of accessibility.<h2 id="7a2d9613-44f2-4bfe-a82d-1e933f031429">Don't leave a single stone unturned in your pursuit of your dream</h2>It's important to embrace a <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/lifelong-learner-secret-success-learn-what-kind-you-are-2019-12">life-long learning mindset</a>. When trying to pivot my career, I used resources like TED Talks, the Nasdaq Entrepreneurial Center, and MasterClass to gain insights from experts. I then gave my own <a target="_blank" href="https://www.ted.com/talks/nandita_gupta_look_within_yourself_embarking_on_my_accessibility_journey">TEDx Talk</a> through the TEDx Georgia Tech organization.It's better to have tried and failed than to never have tried at all. Every decision you make will teach you valuable lessons, and even if you don't end up where you originally intended, there will be something to gain.Have you doubled your income by pivoting your career and want to share your story? Email Lauryn Haas at lhaas@businessinsider.com.

I doubled my income at Microsoft after starting my career in a factory. I only had enough money for 1 semester of school, but I was determined.

For most of his youth, Bryan wanted to be an astrophysicist.He was obsessed with the Hubble telescope, and his bedroom ceiling was dotted with plastic glow-in-the-dark stars. When the Scholastic Book Fair came to his library, he'd beg his parents for cash to buy NASA photo books. To him, space science seemed the pinnacle of innovation, excitement, and existentialism.So when, as a sophomore in college, he told his parents he was going to major in accounting, they gave him what Bryan (which isn't his real name) could describe only as "a look.""An accountant?" he remembers his mother saying. "Why would you want to be an accountant?"Certified public accountants have long been cast as penny-pinching list checkers with vanilla personalities and a zeal for taxes, but that stereotype seems to turn off Gen Z more than any previous generation. That perception plus the industry's actual hurdles and pitfalls have compounded in the past several years to create a <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/shortage-accountants-we-should-be-worried-recruit-young-talent-2023-2">nationwide accountant shortage</a>.The American Institute of Certified Public Accountants says about 65,000 students in the US completed bachelor's or master's degrees in accounting in the 2021-22 school year, 18% fewer than a decade earlier. Of those who study accounting, only a portion become <a target="_blank" class="" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-get-hired-top-consulting-firms-bcg-mckinsey-pwc-2024-7">certified public accountants</a>. About 30,000 people took the CPA exam in 2022, compared with nearly 50,000 people in 2010.Meanwhile, longtime accountants' ranks are dwindling fast: Three-quarters of CPAs in the US were thought to be at or near retirement in 2019.It's hard to overstate the consequences of a lack of accountants. It's not just the neighborhood CPA taking longer than usual to finish your tax return — we've already started to see it can mean financial mistakes and discrepancies at the highest levels of corporate America. Last year, for example, Advance Auto Parts said turnover of accounting staff was a cause for "material weakness" in its financial reporting via a filing extension request to the Security and Exchange Commission. Container maker Tupperware recently had similar delays in filing because of "significant attrition" and "skill set gaps" in its accounting department.Accountants have become an <a target="_blank" class="" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/shortage-accountants-we-should-be-worried-recruit-young-talent-2023-2">endangered species</a>, and that's endangering the financial ecosystem. But bolstering their ranks is no easy feat."The pay is crappy, the hours are long, and the work is drudgery," said Richard Rampell, a retired accountant in South Florida. "And the drudgery is especially so in their early years."Can America's most boring profession get sexier, stat?The archetypal accountant, the dull quant wasting away in a cubicle, is far from a fantasy. Though CPAs can do plenty with their skills — forensic accountants working at the FBI, auditors helping a Fortune 500 company analyze the books of a hotshot business it's considering acquiring — the stereotype seems unshakable. Even the American Institute of CPAs has a <a target="_blank" href="https://youtu.be/Gnwz_qotLJQ">video</a> titled "Accounting: It's not what you think.""I always joke that nobody dreams of being an accountant when they're in the sandbox," said Amal Shehata, an accounting professor at New York University's Stern School of Business who worked at PricewaterhouseCoopers for 10 years.But the stereotypes exist for a reason. "It's hard to put lipstick on a pig," Rampell said. He started his career at Ernst &amp; Young (EY) in the late 1970s, then ran his own CPA firm in West Palm Beach for 45 years. "The truth is that there's not a lot of glamour in accounting," he said. "You can go out and have good, interesting clients, but that can take five or 10 years to know enough to get to that point." Accounting was never sexy, per se. But young people have never been more put off by unsexy careers.A job used to be as good as the long-term security it could guarantee. But now, many Gen Zers are hesitant to pursue jobs their peers consider overly safe or predictable. "I think there was a greater appeal to the industry in a previous era, when certainty and maintaining a job at one place for your entire career was seen as the ultimate goal," said Bryan, who's 23. "Now it's not."In a recent survey by Deloitte, 86% of Gen Z respondents said that having a sense of purpose was important to their overall job satisfaction and well-being. Deloitte's report also describes them as "increasingly willing to reject assignments or employers who don't align with their values." (Deloitte is also a Big Four accounting firm, along with EY, KPMG, and PwC. The company declined a request from Business Insider to discuss its efforts to counter the accountant shortage.)Gen Z is also, notably, the first generation to have truly grown up with social media. They spent their childhoods watching a stream of what everyone else does with their lives, and many have become convinced that that's much better than whatever they're doing with their own. In this way, social media has incentivized them to focus on doing things their peers deem interesting or exciting. And, well, accounting isn't readily Instagrammable.Then there's the double-whammy problem of becoming an accountant, which is both harder to achieve and pays less than other finance jobs. A CPA candidate usually needs to get a master's in accounting to satisfy the requirement that they take 150 credit hours. After that comes the CPA exam: four grueling four-hour tests that must be passed within 18 months. And before they can officially get the title, candidates need to spend a year working under a licensed CPA.Bryan finished his graduate program in May and is set to begin his first job as an audit associate at a Big Four accounting firm in October. He's taken one of the CPA tests, which he described as "beastly," and he spends most of his free time studying for the other three. "I think that it's necessary, but at the same time, it is definitely a substantial burden," he said.Students can get higher-paying and arguably more exciting finance jobs right out of college without doing all that. That's what Bryan almost did. After a particularly tormenting high-school calculus class crushed his astrophysicist dreams, he considered pursuing investment banking. Most of his friends and classmates were going into finance, he said. And it's no wonder why.Entry-level investment bankers can make <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/investment-bank-analyst-associate-starting-salaries-goldman-sachs-jpmorgan-citi-morgan-stanley">more than $100,000</a> in base salary plus <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/how-bankers-spending-bonuses-yachts-porsches-real-estate-luxury-goods-2022-2">annual bonuses</a> in the tens of thousands their first year out of undergrad. Bryan says he'll make $72,000 in his first year at his firm — one of the largest, most prestigious, and best-paid public accounting firms.Though junior investment bankers tend to work heinous hours and toil over pitch books, the field is widely seen as more posh. Bankers get to work on deal teams that advise the world's top executives on market-moving mergers and IPOs. They also tend to have direct access to other fancy Wall Street jobs at hedge funds and private-equity firms.Everyone I talked to agreed that the first thing to do to get more accountants is to pay them more."Raise the pay a lot, pay as much as the investment-banking firms," Rampell said. "So as long as there's demand for accounting services, tax preparation, auditing, and financial-statement preparation, there will be people that will rise to do that work. The firms will have to pay to meet the demand." Rampell worries that if salaries don't go up, the shortage could become a "vicious cycle": Fewer accountants means those who are around have larger workloads, and those people are more likely to quit because of the long hours and low pay.As someone who ran a CPA firm for decades, Rampell said that paying employees more than his competitors was worth the cost. "I got more productive people, I got smarter people, I got harder-working people — people that were more ambitious and wanted to go places as opposed to people that just wanted work 9 to 5."There are some signs that some firms are responding to calls for salary changes. Margaret Burke, the talent acquisition and development leader at PwC, said in a written statement that the firm has increased entry-level salaries for audit and tax associates "over the last several years," but declined to say by how much. She also pointed out that PwC gives performance-based raises and bonuses "at all levels."Shehata, of NYU, said she also hopes alumni at top firms will help provide scholarships to make the cost of an extra year in grad school less exclusionary. "As academic director, one of my priorities is really trying to find funding for the students who want to do the master's degree," she said. "The expense can be prohibitive."The way accounting is taught could also help stanch the shortage, Shehata said. "It's up to us as academics to make the curriculum exciting and interesting," she said. "To me, that means it's relevant and it's timely." For example, she recently taught a class about the intersection of the blockchain and accounting."What I try to encourage students to consider is the long game," she added. "Yes, there are hoops and obstacles and expenses to getting the credentials, but ultimately it pays off. It's not always the first job; it's later in life that those credentials and those skills can really pay off and benefit."She said that's particularly true for those students who aren't sure what they want to do in the long term, because accounting is a skill you can draw upon in many types of industries. Shehata said some of her former accounting students, for example, were at places like Google and Apple in fraud detection. "Accounting is everywhere," she said.Perhaps the most important class to improve is the first one students take, Principles of Accounting. In May, the National Pipeline Advisory Group published an<a target="_blank" href="https://aboutblaw.com/bd3J"> 88-page report</a> on "talent solutions" for the field, which included reworking the intro course, given its "potential to shape a student's perception and ignite interest in an accounting career." Bryan described this introduction as critical. The 101 classes "don't really do very much to convince you that accounting is more than bookkeeping," he said. "I think that if you were to change the way that those courses are taught to make it more applicable and less 'Here's how to do this transaction,' I think you'd do a pretty good job of dismissing people of that notion."The report's suggestions included "placing highly engaging instructors" in those classes, "incorporating gamification and other technology" to "stoke engagement and demonstrate the vital role technology plays in the accounting profession," and exposing students to "more real-life accounting practitioners in a range of career vocations."The report underscored another way to bolster accountants' ranks: make it easier to become one. It recommended easing the 150-credit-hours requirement by "measuring competency versus just academic experience" through "experiential learning that earns college credit" — that is, less time in the classroom.Some firms have piloted similar models. EY has a Career Path Accelerator program, essentially an alternative to a master's-degree requirement, and Burke, of PwC, pointed to its work-for-credit program at Saint Peter's University.Rampell thinks that while supply and demand will naturally work itself out, in the meantime, "there'll be a lot of pain." The shortage, he added, is "sort of like when you want to find a doctor but you can't make an appointment for three months because they're so busy."Shehata said a shortage costs companies themselves and the investors who put their trust and money into them."If you're running a business, you need to be able to make educated, informed decisions. How do you make informed decisions if you don't have the accounting data?" she said. "We want to make sure that we have trust in our capital-market system. People make decisions based on financial reporting — there are people's livelihoods and investments in that."<a target="_blank" class="" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/author/emmalyse-brownstein">Emmalyse Brownstein</a> is a reporter on Business Insider's finance team. Her coverage is focused on Wall Street culture and careers.

America's most boring job is on the brink of extinction

How small-town Maine embraced a family that fled the Taliban

Sjoerd van der Wal/Getty Images; Samantha Lee/Business Insider<ul class="summary-list"><li>"Disruption" has become the buzzword of buzzwords in the transportation industry.</li><li>But the supposed disruption isn't true disruption at all - it doesn't fit into Clayton Christensen's theory of disruptive innovation, as explored in his book "The Innovator's Dilemma."</li><li>Nonetheless, automakers are actually disrupting themselves from within.</li><li>The "disruption within" isn't about cheap, small, fast. It's not about catching the industry off-balance and ill-prepared to respond.</li><li>It is about big companies that have a lot of money recognizing that they can spend literally billions to attack a new business opportunity.</li><li><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/?hprecirc-bullet">Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories</a>.</li></ul>This story is part of Business Insider's <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/category/on-the-radar-transportation">"On the Radar" series</a>, a collection of stories, analysis, and interviews revealing how the transportation industry will evolve over the next decade.Disruption.I've heard it. You've heard it. We've all heard it. In the global auto industry, a multitrillion-dollar business that employs millions directly and indirectly, there is no more potent a concept these days. Disrupt now! Disrupt or be disrupted! Prepare for disruption! In almost two decades of covering the car business, I've never seen such a frantic effort to pile into a once relatively obscure idea, one that's both useful and widely misunderstood when not outright misinterpreted or misapplied - which is often.It's time to correct that and make an effort to describe what's really going on in the transportation industry. I'm calling it the "disruption within," and it's going to shape the future of this global industry.The first thing you should know is that I'm a disruption purist. Let me use a story to explain. In 2015, I went up to General Motors and interviewed CEO Mary Barra. Barra had been in the chief-executive role about a year at that point, and she had landed right in the middle of trench warfare, on the heels of the ignition-switch recall, and five years removed from GM's bankruptcy. It was hardly an ideal beginning for GM's first female CEO and the first woman to run a major automaker. It would have been a rough start for anyone, regardless of gender. But Barra was clearly under extra pressure.I'm on record for thinking that Barra is the finest CEO in GM's history and one of the best business leaders America has ever produced. She has also put together the best management team in the industry - a critical achievement because GM is always a management challenge, first and foremost.However, when Barra and I sat down in her office to talk, she said exactly what I didn't want to hear.<h2>Do that disruption thing</h2>Bill Pugliano/Getty ImagesGM CEO Mary Barra."We're going to disrupt ourselves, and we are disrupting ourselves, so we're not trying to preserve a model of yesterday," she said."Oh no," I thought. Another CEO from an old-line company who thinks it can beat the disruptors at their own game. You know, somehow do that disruption thing itself, getting ahead of all those nimble merciless companies with a dozen employees, venture capital, a WeWork space, some laptops, and cold brew on tap.I was immediately reminded of a TV commercial for some tech service from years back in which some young guys in casual dress are pitching their talents to a stuffy old firm run by aging people in suits. "We have a website," the dudes say nonchalantly because everybody has a website. "You have a WEBSITE?!" the oldsters respond, incredulous. "On the WORLD WIDE WEB?!"So yes, when Barra said that word - "disruption" - I cringed.I wasn't convinced GM was going to be able to figure out Cadillac, much less fight off the Ubers and Lyfts and Teslas and Google Cars and everybody else who was preparing to storm the Detroit battlements and knock people like Barra out of their lovely high-rise offices.I had another reason for not believing her: I had read Clayton Christensen's seminal book "The Innovator's Dilemma." (Christensen, a Harvard Business School professor who was widely admired for his character and scholarship, died in January.) For what it's worth, I was also familiar with Joseph Schumpeter's "Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy." Christensen's book contains the theory of disruptive innovation, and Schumpeter's lays out the idea of "creative destruction" in modern capitalism. Disruptive innovation isn't supposed to happen in large incumbent firms. The whole point is that with their established expensive systems, they're vulnerable to new players who, in a nutshell, start out with a cheaper, crappier product that's still good enough to get the job done. Gradually, the disruptor acquires customers, grows its business, and consolidates its innovation. By the time the big slow incumbent figures out that it's in trouble, it's too late. The disruptors have already changed the game, and the incumbent is doomed. That's the shorthand version, but you get the idea.<h2>Tesla isn't disrupting anything</h2>Ringo H.W. Chiu/Associated PressNo disruption here.By this analysis, Tesla isn't disrupting anything. Christensen told me that Tesla is essentially improving on prior innovations. In other words, it is improving the automobile - an invention that has been with us, more or less, since the late 1800s.I would build on that insight to argue Tesla has absorbed the risk of creating a new car company - and basing it on electric propulsion - and that that is Elon Musk's true innovation. He has developed a growth market for risk in an industry that has always been averse to it.More power to him. But again, the notion that Tesla and its rather expensive cars are disrupting anything, at least as far as the actual theory goes, is ridiculous.In fact, pretty much all the touted "disruptors" are bogus. Waymo is hoping to replace human drivers with robots, but the businesses that they're attacking - ride-hailing and freight - are what economists call nontransferable and not susceptible to being undermined by anything except price slashing in mature markets. There's no cheap way to replace the hardware or software, so labor is the only thing that can be taken out of the equation. The technology is staggeringly expensive, but the bet is that removing people could change the cost structures of taxis and semitrucks, and boom, all those billions spent were worth it.(They might also be worth it if we could drastically reduce auto-related fatalities and provide easier transportation for the elderly and people with disabilities.)Mind you, I'm not disagreeing with this strategy. I've talked to numerous folks at Waymo, including CEO John Krafcik, and their ambitions are noble, their talent is considerable, their dedication is impressive, and their intelligence is indisputable.Thinking all this through has led me to the conclusion - debatable, of course - that there's disruption in the sense that Christensen defined it and a new sort of disruption, of the type that I think most of the established well-capitalized players in the traditional industry are talking about.I call this the disruption within. <h2>What the 'disruption within' is all about</h2>Joshua Lott/GettyClayton Christensen.The disruption within isn't about cheap, small, fast. It's not about catching the industry off-balance and ill-prepared to respond. It is about big companies that have a lot of money recognizing that they can spend literally billions to attack a new business opportunity.That business opportunity is appealing because, as we all know, the economics of the car business are difficult. My go-to quote in this matter comes from Bill Ford. A few years ago, I was sitting between Ford and Jim Hackett at a dinner in Detroit. I asked Ford to describe the auto industry and he said, "It's a tough business - you have to fight for every sale."So it is, and if you do that very well, you can achieve a profit margin that might break 10%.That's not bad, but it isn't Apple, either (the tech giant's margin has averaged 21% from 2015 to 2019). It isn't Porsche (the Germany luxury automaker enjoys 15%). And it isn't Ferrari (which pulls down a comfortable 22%). If your life meant managing a 10% margin for the next few decades, you might also want to "disrupt" your business.This is what drove Barra and Dan Ammann to buy an obscure self-driving startup in San Francisco for what wound up being an all-in price of $1 billion. Their plan was relatively clear: acquire an autonomous-mobility firm whose tech could be integrated with GM-made vehicles and commercialized in an urban setting - because that's where the ride-hailing customers are. Integrated is the key word here. Yes, Cruise Automation is now just Cruise and a separate company, with Ammann as CEO and cofounder Kyle Vogt as chief technology officer. But the overall "stack" of the undertaking is highly vertically integrated, with GM and some other investors owning pretty much the entire thing. It's their talent, their management, their capital, their cars, their technology, and ultimately their business. After a lot of follow-on investment, Cruise is now worth almost $20 billion. That valuation has cost GM a few billion at this juncture. There is no better example of disruption within. Does it look like classic disruptive innovation? No. Is it innovation? Yes. Does it fulfill Barra's directive for GM to disrupt itself? I think it does.Sticking with GM, let's talk about electric vehicles, which I considered to be yesterday's mislabeled disruption. After having their dominant narrative of what Michael Lewis once called the "New New Thing" stolen by self-driving schemes, EVs are back. <h2>Electric cars aren't disruptive - in fact, they aren't even all that successful</h2><a href="https://newsroom.porsche.com/en/2019/products/porsche-taycan-world-premiere-live-all-electric-sports-car-18445.html">Porsche</a>The Porsche Taycan EV.But why? Objectively, EVs have been a bust. The most successful EV company in history is Tesla, and it has taken them more than 15 years to sell about 350,000 vehicles annually. That meager output has also been achieved without yearly profits at a cost of billions and billions of dollars. After a wild rally in early 2020, the stock is up over 3,000% since Tesla's 2010 initial public offering, so I don't think investors are unhappy. And even the evil short sellers, in Musk's mind, have been rewarded from time to time.Ten years ago, I stood in the parking lot of Dodger Stadium and listened to Carlos Ghosn predict, while standing next to a Nissan Leaf, that EVs would capture 10% of the global market by 2021.EVs fell about 8% short of that. In fact, the market for EVs would have to double from 2 to 4%, then double again to even get within striking distance of Ghosn's goal. You might ask yourself: "Why is there any excitement around this at all?You might also ask yourself, for example, why Barra recently said the focus of GM's future research-and-development investment would be on electric vehicles - and why she and her extremely capable right-hand man/chief car guy Mark Reuss intend to roll out dozens of EVs in the next few years and have made Cadillac into GM's main electric brand.The reason is China, but I'll get to that in a minute.No rational business person - even with just a passing acquaintance with the theory, much less a Harvard MBA who might have spent time with Christensen in person - would intentionally disrupt their business. To do so would be extraordinarily difficult. Your goal would have to be taking established products and cheapening them, then convincing your customers that these products are suitable replacements for what they're used to.Some customers might go for this, pleased by the much lower price. But most wouldn't, and in the end, even if you pulled off a textbook self-disruption, you might do so much damage to your brand that it wouldn't have been worth it. Forget the degradation in profits and downgrading of your production capabilities.The threat of true disruptive innovation is that its progress is largely out of the control of the enterprise being disrupted, unrecognized until it's too late: a viable alternative before the established player can mount an effective counterargument. When faced with those odds, why wouldn't a company invest some winnings in self-disruption? Instead of a chaotic, unpredictable scramble to catch up - usually hopelessly - you get to update Wall Street every three months on how you're doing (if you're a public company). In this context, disruption isn't agony. It might actually be fun.<h2>Why the auto industry is the perfect framework for disruption from within</h2>REUTERS/Ralph OrlowskiA Porsche 911 Carrera 4S at the Porsche factory in Stuttgart-Zuffenhausen, Germany.The auto industry is the perfect framework for disruption from within because, quite frankly, it's all but impossible to start a new car company, as the notable lack of them over the past seven decades demonstrates - as does the dismal track record of EV startups from that optimistic 2010 period. I would go so far as to insist that the only EV efforts from that time period that have endured are Tesla's and what GM has been doing since it "killed" the EV1 in the 1990s.With this understanding, it should be obvious that disruption within is actually just a savvy form of research and development - a skunkworks mentality that encourages the development of new business ideas.Newsflash: This isn't disruption in the Christensen sense. Rather, it's what mature companies are always trying to - wisely invest their profits in remaining competitive and capitalizing on new opportunitiesSo why is there so much fear and trembling around the whole disruptive framework?It could be because of a more anxious society. Businesses were disrupting from within in the 1950s, but the pace of life, certainly the pace of media, was slower. In the 21st century, whole consultancies have been built around the notion that all success is under constant threat and only a warrior mindset can keep an enterprise from insolvency.But it could be thanks to the Silicon Valley-fication of business thinking. Software allows a small number of people to capture total market control very rapidly at a low cost of entry. So we have Google and Facebook worth many billions of dollars but with modest physical footprints relative to, say, Ford with its numerous factories and army of workers. However, software-driven companies are under relentless threat of being undermined by the very system that allowed them to grow so big so fast. In transportation, this can lead to chaotic efforts of apparent disruption, such as scooter startups invading cities and wrecking quality of life. Disruption from within is more orderly. Take for example Cadillac's Super Cruise hands-free self-driving technology. It was introduced several years ago and does exactly one thing - allow for true hands-free highway driving - quite well. It has been available on just one vehicle since its debut, as GM has sought to refine the technology and ensure that it's safe. There have been no accidents, so the carmaker is adding it to several new models.Legitimate Christensen-style disruptive innovation is coming to the car business. Before his death, Christensen himself offered the case of small cheap electric vehicles in China - simple transport that's ideal for congested cities. Local manufacturers could create fleets of such microcars and threaten larger Chinese and Western automakers hoping to capture millions of new vehicle sales in the region.It might not go that way, and that's why GM is pressing to electrify its range; the company sells more cars in China than in the US.That said, disruption from within and disruptive innovation could happen simultaneously. After all, while Chinese buyers might start out with an inexpensive basic vehicle, Cadillac beckons, as it always has.This story is part of Business Insider's <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/category/on-the-radar-transportation">"On the Radar" series</a>, a collection of stories, analysis, and interviews revealing how the transportation industry will evolve over the next decade. <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/how-teslas-model-3-compares-to-volkswagens-new-ev-ide-2020-2">How Tesla's Model 3 compares to Volkswagen's new EV</a></h3>

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