Desicritics

How Companies React To Major Crisis Events

Dr Bhaskar Dasgupta — Sun, 4 Jan 2009 20:17:29 EST

The infamous Mohammad cartoons crisis had reached global proportions. One of the most common reactions by Muslims was to embark on a consumer goods boycott against firms which were primarily Danish, but other firms were involved as well, all the way from New Zealand. Similar situations like these keep coming up, whether it relates to boycotts of Israeli made/associated firms/products, or environmental disasters, or religiously oriented issues, corporate firms keep on getting in the crossfire. Unfortunately and unlike nation-states, they are not organised to handle political, religious and other crisis like this. So it was instructive to read how various firms reacted in different ways to the Cartoon crisis.

The paper was quite interesting indeed. Crisis management of this scale is not something that firms do very well. Take for example the recent news story that Lehman Brothers so totally mismanaged their bankruptcy and demise that it cost creditors up to $75 billion US Dollars. The authors quote some interesting events such as:

Environmental catastrophes such as the Union Carbide/Bhopal industrial accident and the Exxon Valdez oil spill had long-term ramifications for the companies involved. Criminal and terrorist acts such as the Tylenol poisonings, the Lockerbie/Pan American disaster and the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks have sensitised the public to a world of intense danger. Some crises, such as the Perrier water contamination crisis, seem largely of the company's own making through quality control failure.4 Others, such as the Belgian Coca-Cola crisis, seem to have arisen out of nowhere, apparently attributable to mass hysteria triggered by the previous dioxin scare, but intensified by corporate mismanagement. According to Johnson & Peppas: “A senior Coca-Cola Enterprises official, Phillippe Lenfant, did state that the scare had been mishandled, that communication was inadequate, and that the company was unprepared for a crisis of this magnitude

But religion is perhaps the one which is most difficult to deal with. Usually religion is the furthest from the minds of corporate executives (with perhaps the exception of praying for divine intervention when sales tank or losses mount) and the authors point to some events:

In 1994, the McDonald's fast-food restaurant chain, during its promotion of the Soccer World Cup, printed the flags of participating nations on its disposable bags. Included was that of Saudi Arabia, which bears the Shahada (Islamic creed) including the name of Allah. Muslims were outraged that the name of God was printed on material to be crumpled up and thrown away.18 A similar situation arose when Amstel, the Dutch brewer, printed the flags under the caps of beer bottles, in contact with alcoholic beverage. In India, Reebok encountered huge controversy over its brand champion, Indian cricket captain Mohammed Azharuddin, autographing footwear – including on the sole – resulting in the name Mohammed being trampled in the dirt, which was seen by some as particularly offensive.

The authors have given a nice timeline for the Mohammad Cartoons crisis.

30 September 2005: Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten publishes editorial cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad.

12 Oct: Eleven ambassadors from Islamic countries complain to Danish prime minister and request a meeting with him.

17 Oct: Egyptian newspaper El Fagr reprints six of the cartoons together with an article strongly condemning them.

21 Oct: Danish PM replies to the ambassadors, indicating that freedom of expression is the foundation of Danish democracy and the Danish government has no means of influencing the press. (Refusal to meet the ambassadors has been subsequently condemned by 22 Danish former ambassadors).

28 Oct: Coalition of Danish Muslim groups files criminal complaint. A regional prosecutor investigates but decides against prosecution.

10 January 2006: Norwegian Christian newspaper Magazinet reprints the cartoons, greatly inflaming the situation.

26 Jan: Saudi ambassador to Denmark recalled; retaliatory boycotts against Danish products initiated in Saudi Arabia with supermarkets displaying signs indicating that Danish products have been removed. Norwegian foreign minister condemns publication of the cartoons in a Norwegian newspaper, on the grounds that they incite hatred or hateful expressions.

30 Jan: Jyllands-Posten publishes open letters in Danish and Arabic: “In our opinion, the 12 drawings were sober. They were not intended to be offensive, nor were they at variance with Danish law, but they have indisputably offended many Muslims for which we apologise.”

31 Jan: Danish Muslim group says the apology is “ambiguous” and demands a clearer one.

1-2 Feb: Media in many European countries (France, Germany, Spain, Iceland, Italy, Belgium, Switzerland etc) and in Jordan reprint the cartoons.

2 Feb: Boycott again mentioned in Friday prayers in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait; in Qatar, the Grand Mufti calls for boycotts of Danish products; in Yemen, posters of Danish PM set alight; in Lebanon, the boycott situation “has worsened significantly”; in Morocco, “the affair continues to run in the media”; in Egypt, “the controversy is the main topic in the media and Danish products have been removed from all Egyptian supermarkets”; in Sudan, “the president has issued a statement forbidding buying or trading in Danish products.”

3 Feb: Wellington NZ newspaper Dominion Post indicates an intention to republish the cartoons in spite of the outrage in the Middle East and the already-significant losses reported by Danish dairy giant Arla.

4 Feb: New Zealand ministers warn that the decision by New Zealand newspapers to publish the cartoons is irresponsible and could threaten NZ trade. Specific mention is made of Fonterra which “sells much of its product in Muslim countries”. NZ meat industry officials lambast the media for placing trade at risk. Danish and Norwegian embassies in Damascus and Danish embassy in Beirut torched.

6 Feb: Supermarkets across the Middle East remove Danish products from their shelves. Arla is losing €1.3m a day in sales.

7 Feb: The Iranian government sets up a committee to look at possibly annulling trade deals with countries that have published the cartoons, threatening more than NZ$100m-worth of New Zealand exports.

8 Feb: Politicians in Jordan call for cancellation of trade worth NZ$70m. Prime Minister Helen Clark condemns the publishing of the cartoons and refers to New Zealand's reputation as a “peaceful and understanding nation”. Arla – Fonterra's partner in the UK butter market – closes its factory in Riyadh as the boycott bites. Fonterra publishes advertisements in Middle Eastern newspapers emphasising the NZ origins of its Anchor brand milk powders. NZ diplomatic posts are placed on high alert.

By April 2006: retailers across the Middle East were beginning to restock Arla's products, although uptake was slow, with only 20 per cent of pre-boycott sales being recorded by the end of May. Market recovery proved slow in spite of Arla investing heavily in advertising campaigns in selected markets such as Algeria.

Dec 2006: The cost to Arla Foods of the boycott of Danish products in the Middle East amounts to approx. DKr400m for 2006. This equates to a loss of DKr40,000 for each of Arla's 10,000 Danish and Swedish co-operative members. “It's a relief that the boycott has come to an end … many products have been sold at discounted prices.” According to Finn Hansen (divisional director, Arla), “the boycott will have pushed back Arla's development in the Middle East two years.”

March 2007: Arla chairman Knud Erik Jensen was able to say: “We're back in the Middle East and expect to return to previous levels of sales by the end of 2007.”

What I found amusing was the last line, all that outrage and foaming and what was the result? Not much and not for long. But time heals all wounds, so to say, and all it needed was a bit of courage and lots of communications to heal those wounds. Arla went after the crisis with a perspective of doing something is better than doing nothing. They tried to communicate the fact that freedom of speech was part and parcel of western life and supporting the Danish stance. This did not work, and then Arla tried to distance itself. On the other hand, the New Zealand firms simply refused comment or tried to comment as little as possible, keeping heads down hoping that it blows over.

I have certain issues with this. Letting things blow over, especially when you are talking about quarterly financial reporting cycles, free flow of capital, footloose capital, fast changing credit ratings and the like is just not possible. Firms cannot absorb losses over such a long period of time. So one thing which corporates should remember is whenever governmental or Societal related boycotts hit you, you should immediately ask you’re your government’s support so that the firm can endure the boycott or survive the event. Public memory is short and as they say, a week is a long time in politics. It might take longer when we are talking about religion, specially considering that religion is the opium of the masses, but pass it will. You just need capital to ride over the issue.

Second is that corporates should not tie themselves to government or political stances. That is dangerous. Firms are not organised to handle political issues nor can they spin news as is required in today’s 24 hour news and media management. So they will simply stumble and cause issues for themselves. Keeping the head down is a good idea indeed.

Third is the use of gatekeepers. The authors recommend using gatekeepers to link into the populace. Looking at this cartoon issue itself, who would be the gatekeepers? I wrote some essays on this issue.

So go to Al Azhar or to Qum? Or start debates on Al Jazeera or MBC? Or get some fatwas in your favour? Or start dealing with the famed Muslim / Arab Street? And how do you keep them listening to the message? This area is highly emotional, charged with religious symbolism, prone to minefields, subject to linguistic interpretations, full of politics, in short, everything that a corporate executive will never have had handled before in his life. So how on earth would the executive or the corporate communications team know how to handle such aspects? I mean, they themselves make heavy weather of investor relations with bog standard corporate disasters such as losses. Can you imagine them working with a religiously sensitive topic such as this? That said, there is nothing like getting some discreet conversations underway with the gatekeepers and opinion formers directly (and be prepared to pay out of your nose, as these opinion formers are not going to be cheap), but put them on retainer and see what comes up.

Oh! Also pray.

All this to be taken with a grain of piquant salt!

Book Review: White Gold by Giles Milton

Dr Bhaskar Dasgupta — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 14:34:44 EDT

Slavery was - and still is - a world wide phenomena, but I best know it to have happened in the USA in the past, not least because it was a country which went to war with itself over many reasons and slavery was one of them. It recognised the gigantic crime it had committed and is still making restitution for it. It produced literary giants such as Samuel Clements and Alex Haley who wrote about slavery. That said, while I knew slavery existed elsewhere, I did not really know much about the incidence of European slaves till I read a very interesting story about Thomas Pellow. I am sure he will be as famous as Kunta Kinte and Spartacus, the other two famous slaves.

Thomas Pellow was a young lad from a coastal village in England, who was seized by Moorish pirates off his ship in 1715 and was enslaved. His story and that of the slave Sultan of Morocco, the forcible conversions, the attempts of the Europeans to buy back the slaves or to wage war to stop slavery are all quite well described in the book called “White Gold” by Giles Milton (ISBN: 0340794704). Do remember that I am not judging them that much. What’s the point of judging long dead people on the basis of today’s morality? Would you want to be judged on the basis of the morals existing in 2500 AD or 2500 BC? While the book itself is very highly recommended, I would like to extract a few aspects from the book which I found thought provoking and run them past you.

The first was the cost of slaves. While it is tough to estimate the price of slaves based upon local costs, I can do the mark to market based upon the price of slaves which the British government paid at that time. In 1646, the cost of a white Christian slave (let’s not mention the black slaves here) was averaging £38 per slave. That’s male slaves, mind you. Female slaves were brood mares, of course, and their redemption costs in 1646 ranged from £800 to £1392. I think there might be an element of ransom involved but well, that’s neither here nor there.

Considering that wealthy London merchants would hardly earn £40 per year, which was a gigantic sum of money for that time. In today’s terms, a very conservative solely inflation adjusted value would be £4,930 for the male slaves and £104,000-£180,600 for the female slaves. The average annual wage today is about £26,000. So you could perhaps get the male slave, but you will think twice about purchasing a female slave. Quite a turnaround, eh? Now, women are paid less than men, but back then, if you were a female slave, you would be worth 38 times that of men.

The second item brings me to the moral hazard question. You see, this is a classic example of moral hazards. The varied assorted Sultans had it great. They would go and grab Europeans from all over the European seaboard. Bring them back and make slaves out of them. Then get the boys working as slaves, turn the girls into brood mares. So you get work out of them and beat and torture them to convert them so that you get theological brownie points. When the Europeans come around bleating about slaves, ask them for very expensive gifts and then sell their own citizens back to them for huge sums of money. Repeat till they get tired and they wage war. Then sign a treaty and as soon as possible, break it and get the pirates pirating and slaving again. Repeat.

It is a brilliant conveyor belt of money, resources, sex and theological brownie points. If it did not rely on slavery and some very weird thinking, I would admire the sheer economic brilliance of it. And think about it, this system lasted for more than 300 years, longer than the United States of America’s history. It took the combined efforts of many navies, many decades and hundreds of thousands of people before slavery in the North African Arab states was stopped. But it could have been brought to an end earlier if they had stopped buying back slaves and used the money to invest in their respective navies to stop the pirates or to thump the assorted Sultans hard. Just one Sultan of Morocco, Moulay Ismail, is estimated to have had up to a million European Slaves during his admittedly long regime (not counting the Black African slaves).

Third, conversions to Islam. This is what was shocking to read. The fact that Christianity did exactly the same did not obviate my surprise to read the lengths to which the Sultan’s guards went to convert these slaves. Not that conversion would change their situation materially. And they were tortured in very gruesome ways (starting from the bastinado to actually sawing the person into pieces) and only stop when the person would agree to turn moor. If you were beaten every day for years on end, most will agree to be converted, if only to avoid the beatings and torture.

Now this was a problem because when the European politicians and ambassadors came around to ransom you, if you had turned moor, then you would not be ransomed. This is the reason why so many white Europeans were left behind and also the reason why so many European slaves did not convert despite torture. A possible reason for their resistance could also be attributed to their faith as evidenced by the example of the Saint Berard of Carbio and his four companions, who were the Franciscan Martyrs of Morocco in 1220. But again tragically ironic, you save yourself by converting, but you cannot be ransomed because you have converted. A medieval catch 22, if you know what I mean!

Fourth, I always thought that Arabs themselves never did the slaving, but only did the trading bit. But no, there were full fledged slaving expeditions. And perhaps “expeditions” is too weak a word for what happened as described. Thomas Pellow was a guard (he moved up the ranks after “gone Moor”, had a public circumcision and all…) in a slaving expedition and the numbers which are mentioned in the book are absolutely amazing. We are talking hundreds of thousands of camels and people who take off from Morocco and travel hundreds of miles across the western edge of the Sahara and then come back with hundreds and thousands of slaves. Now I did read about how the American, British and European slavers would pick up hundreds and thousands of slaves from the African ports and would have slaving expeditions brokered by the Arabs and other African tribes, but I never heard about Arab slaving expeditions. Well, it was quite interesting how they checked teeth, preferred children, and so on and so forth. But now the image of the stinking American slaving ship has been complemented by the image of a miles long Arab slaving camel caravan.

Lastly, and this is the crucial aspect. Back in those medieval times, nobody batted an eyelid at the fact that slaves were captured, mistreated, tortured, forced to convert, bought and sold etc. It was a fact of life and most importantly, it was theologically permitted. So everything was fine. But if you look around the world today, beyond some very limited circumstances (sexual prostitution, domestic servants and the like), slavery has largely vanished. More importantly, while slavery remains in the theology, nobody actually supports slavery any more. That reform has happened and people have accepted it, the Druze abolished slavery way back in the 11th century itself. So for people despairing of reform, do not give up your faith and hope.

I have spoken before about piracy and how the Americans stomped hard on it. This story of Thomas Pellow is before that time, but is quite interesting indeed to see how the Europeans approached this case of slavery in Morocco. During my research, I came across another slave, Ibrahim Pasha, who was Suleyman the Magnificent's first appointed Grand Vizier in the Ottoman Empire. I will be writing a further essay on him, but in the meantime, have a think about Thomas Pellow and his amazing if heartrending story of slavery. Perhaps this quote by Abraham Lincoln might help: "Slavery is founded on the selfishness of man’s nature—opposition to it on his love of justice. These principles are in eternal antagonism; and when brought into collision so fiercely as slavery extension brings them, shocks and throes and convulsions must ceaselessly follow."

All this to be taken with a grain of salt!

Technorati Tags: Arabs, Islam, Piracy, Slavery, Shipping, History

The CFO-CIO Cross-over, Part I

Dr Bhaskar Dasgupta — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 12:33:47 EDT

The CFO and CIO roles are interesting roles when compared from various dimensions. As it so happens, I just moved from supporting a CIO to supporting a CFO in a bank, so I thought of shedding light on some aspects of these two roles. The two roles are simple, one looks after the financial matters and the other looks after the information technology of a firm. One would expect the twain would not meet other than the CIO is supporting the CFO's technology and the CFO seeing the CIO as a supplier and a cost line, but life is much more complicated. In a small way, a good CFO-CIO relationship especially in financial institutions, can lead to massive competitive advantage.

Where does one start? One way would be to talk about the past and present of the technology/financial relationship and then my thoughts about the future. As there is a lot of information and facts about these two roles, this will be a series rather than an essay. But before delving into the prosaic matters of organizational structures and strategic alignment, there is the small matter of philosophy to be handled. And that is the philosophy of technology to the CFO herself. And this is where I see the crucial issue.

Accounting and finance, by their nature, are backward-looking and are oriented towards making sense of disorder according to strict rules. There is nothing wrong with that, because that is how you come up with a normative view of the world, something that you can compare and contrast with a fair degree of accuracy and consistency across the world. The field and thus the people working in it are also fairly predictive and reactive in nature. Their remuneration patterns are high and consistent in nature, job descriptions are standardised. This world handles change rather slowly, systematically and gradually, with due consideration and with controls - Salt of the (business) earth so to say. But that sits uneasily with the broader technology world.

The technology area, whether on the web 2.0, the applications, the networks, the technology people, their remuneration, the IC chips, the massively online multiplayer worlds, virtual worlds, ERM systems, virtual reality, Offshoring and outsourcing, SOA, you name it, are almost like the anti-thesis of what I described above. Change is something that is constant; it is creative destruction all the time. The basic foundations of what you believe in change so rapidly, skills become obsolete quickly, and so on and so forth.

You might want to ask, how does that matter to me as a CFO? Here is precisely where it hits the CFO, because technology is redefining our customers, our employees, our ways of doing business, our ways of valuing assets, the question of governance, the communication channels, the people interaction, the coverage of events, and so on and so forth. In other words, just when the CFO is desperately trying to make things simple, explain everything and keep things under control, technology is making things agile, mobile and hostile. You do not believe me? Well, here’s something that you can see for yourself. In a finance department, more and more people are non-financial or accounting people. More and more, the regulators are finding it difficult to just rely on accounting data and demand further information to control the business. And internally, the business also demands much more than just accounting data, it demands commentary which allows the business to be agile, mobile and hostile. Customers walk in and demand information which we cannot provide. Can you imagine trying to provide bank account level information as rich as what you can get from a web page counter software application?

How does the idea of a going concern relate to a website originated business which can be fully automated, dealing in virtual assets such as songs or coding applets with payment in Linden dollars and the possibility of doing a gift exchange within the World of Warcraft? How do you handle a customer who has no conception of paying for assets because he has spent his lifetime getting his songs, films, phone calls, entertainment, software, assets etc. for free or through swapping them online?

What is the role of an intermediary - like a financial institution - when the concept of assets themselves is changing and everybody is running like mad after Intellectual Property and Virtual Assets? How do you account for depreciation of assets which have no discernible way of judging decay or usage? I can put aside 33% every year for a machine because I guess it has a three-year life, but how much should I put aside for an online constantly regenerating random number generator which theoretically has an infinite life? Actually, most software online technology assets have infinite lives. And if the value addition is happening by a group of enthusiasts based on a free open source model, then what do you say to the tax man?

Lest you assume I am just talking about software, how about virtualization of servers? If the asset based was dependent upon a number of servers, then it has just been virtualized, and if you want to go for the virtualized servers, then they have just gone into the Google or Amazon cloud. It is not like everything is moving 100% into the technology world, but every bit of interest to the CFO is being impacted by technology and is making structural changes. Take the example of resource planning. Previously, if your business grew, you would simply increase the number of analysts and accountants you had and kept on supporting the business, but now you cannot do that. You have to have technology to preserve history, run the rules, generate the reports, do the regulatory stuff.

Basel II taught a deep lesson to the world of finance, namely that if a CFO ignores what’s happening in the business, then satisfying requirements such as Basel II will not be possible. This is so, because the front office business and their systems are simply unable to provide the information in the right fashion which the CFO wants, and mostly, it is because the CFO did not specify or demand the front office business and systems to be transparent and fungible as far as accounting and financial information are concerned. This very same point also applies to the CRO by the way. While there is a surprisingly large number of CFOs who are forward-looking and technology literate, CFOs should recognise that there is a philosophical tension between their profession and technology.

While you might differ, my gut feel is that a CFO has to have a very firm control over the technology that she/he has, what’s coming down the pipeline and what’s generally happening around the technical world. In other words, she/he has to be clued-up and work closely with the CIO to manage the business going forward. Now what does this “manage the business” mean? And what does “work very closely” mean? All these questions are strictly with reference to banking because the relationship between IT and Finance is industry and to a lesser extent size, specific. This is what we will find out in the next part.

The Value of Sustainability to Business

Dr Bhaskar Dasgupta — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 10:16:32 EDT

I firmly believe in the virtues of sustainable development. Forget about the green open-toed sandal brigade, it simply makes economic sense. Resources are limited and if you are not being optimal with your resources now and for the future, what kind of a manager would that make you? Looking around the world, one observes some enlightened global businesses heavily involved in sustainability in their business processes,

Who would like to pay more for electricity usage, or for recruitment costs, or waste an opportunity to be with loved ones rather than struggle through Heathrow, that gateway to hell? Who would actually want to be on the front pages of the tabloids as someone who committed unethical behaviour? There are economic upsides on the revenue side (you can sell more to this emerging sustainable consumer, taxpayer, citizen and shareholder) and on the cost side (your costs are reduced on the manpower, capital, materials, machines etc). But many firms and managers still think of sustainability as "green stuff" which is a shame. One way to remove this doubt is to define sustainability.

At a business dinner with the great and good of the British and the international industry, we were discussing the issue of sustainability. An interesting survey was presented by EIU and BT on this issue. The most prominent sustainability activities carried out in the company are environmental guidelines, PR matters, engagement in community investment projects, corporate charitable donations, employee volunteering, ethical trading and sourcing, supplier code of conduct, etc. Quite interesting, aren't they? A very wide range of activities and all they think of is that "green stuff", but when asked about what sustainability should contain in the context of their organisation, a totally different picture appears:

It should contain environmental impacts, ethical corporate behaviour and corporate values, carbon footprint, long term financial health / competitiveness of an organisation, product responsibility, regulatory compliance, social impact, good governance, community relations, workforce diversity and inclusion.

Can you see any difference from what the C-Suite people said about what sustainability should contain and normal business practice? I don’t. So while you might seriously consider it to be a fad, but work with people's Luddite behaviour. Do not say it is to do with sustainability. Say that it is simply normal business practice. For example, I was briefed by our brilliant sustainability chaps on how we can deploy a simple piece of code on the network which will automatically put monitors on standby after 10-20 minutes and switch it off after 30-60 minutes. When you come back, just move the mouse or hit the monitor on/off button. Guess what that will do to the power consumption of that particular monitor? It will reduce the yearly wattage consumption by over three times. Now you tell me, why on earth will you say no to saving two-thirds of your power costs? If you do, then I have a nice bridge to sell to you.

There is much more to this. Think about ethical behaviour. It is vital for people to behave ethically and it is not really that complicated either. You might spend millions on consultants to come up with ethical rules, but actually it is much simpler. Remember what your mother and father taught you? Be good, be nice, don’t do bad things to people, don’t steal, don't lie, don't bribe, don't break laws, and so on and so forth. I do not really care much about exclusions and lawyerly behaviour. And if you are going to argue with me about ethical behaviour, then let me ask you something. Is this what you will do to your child? Will you teach him/her to look at rules of behaviour and think they are to be broken and give them no moral compass? Then why on earth would you do the same in the office? Please don't come into the office drunk. Please do not steal from the company. Please do not be violent towards the staff, do not swear or abuse people. See what I mean? I was told once in a class of reputational risk management, "Don’t do anything that you would not like to read about in the tabloids tomorrow morning". Pretty simple, isn’t it? Because if you do, then your stock price will take a hit (if you aren't fired, that is) and you can’t have a more compelling economic argument than that. Remember, pulling up the stock price is much harder than pulling it down.

Think about diversity. It simply makes sense, more so in this day and age of tight resources (check out some of the industry turnover figures, it can go up as high as 20-25%). Secondly, it takes about six months to a year to really make an employee effective. Now why on earth would you not put in policies to keep your resources happy and with you? If you have to spend 25% of your time annually in dealing with resignations, hiring, negotiations, etc, then you are a masochist. That is such a waste of time! One could be using that time to develop more business and earn more money. So make an extra effort to manage your workforce smartly, get your employees’ daughters and sons into work to see what their parents do. Nothing like increasing loyalty than to have family in the same firm. Pull in more LGBT people. Make sure there are more women engaged in the firm. Make sure that people find working in the firm a good experience. Not only will you not keep your attrition rate low, you will attract better candidates. Who on earth wants to go and work in a firm which is full of Neanderthals? Well, only another Neanderthal, but then, if that is the case, you wouldn't be reading this essay anyway!

If you have a powerful sustainability policy and execution, then you protect your reputational risk. You get to be proud of your firm, when (not if, be prepared for some things happening which are going to impact your reputation), some bad event happens, then you can say: "look, we are good corporate citizens, we are sustainable folks, and mistakes were made, we apologise, we will make sure it does not happen again", and move on. If you do not show evidence that you are consistently sustainable, then nobody will believe you and your share price will tank, but otherwise, you can protect your job, bonus and stock price!

One final thing, keep a beady eye out on what governments are doing. Normally, I would have said that governments impact about 30-40% of your business via laws, rules and regulations. It is my belief that sustainable regulations will jump massively and we will end up with almost 60-70% of our business being driven or influenced in some way by government regulations. Now government regulations are usually meant for protection or guidance. So just pre-empt the guidance and protection as far as possible, but not too much. No point in putting in scrubbers on your chimneys when the rest of your industry has not, as that will simply drive you out of business. However you can surf this regulatory wave by pushing for industry wide scrubber regulations, trying to get cheap scrubbers, use the fact that you have scrubbers to differentiate your products from your competitors, reduce environmental penalty costs by installing scrubbers, and so on and so forth. It just needs intelligence and smartness to surf and manage the regulatory tsunami which is bearing down on us. And no point in moaning about red-tape, it will remain. Well, do moan, it’s good for the soul!

Overall, while there are many more exclusions and issues, I firmly believe that better management of resources is simply better management. Those who get it will make more money, those who don't, will pay for the first lot. Which lot are you with?

All this to be taken with a grain of piquant salt!

Technorati Tags: Management, Sustainability

Book Review: Who Speaks For Islam?

Dr Bhaskar Dasgupta — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 07:08:47 EDT

Since 9/11, there is a desire from all ends of the world to know what Muslims think? And who speaks for Islam. And as it so happened, I came across a book, Who Speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think, by John L. Esposito and Dalia Mogahed which claimed to report on a 6-year study of what hundreds and thousands of Muslims said and a research paper on what a few Canadian Muslims said and think. Here are my thoughts about the book and paper and my thoughts about the questions itself.

Let me get one thing out straight. This book by Esposito and Mogahed is one of the most useless pieces of analysis that I have ever seen. To top it all, a whole host of other luminaries have praised the book and findings. This worries me. For reasons which I will explain, the two authors made such basic mistakes in analysis that I am frankly bewildered. Could have been written by some zonked out undergraduates and these two senior academicians must have been busy or something, and the book went to print. Also, all these various senior people like Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Deepak Chopra, Karen Armstrong, Vali Nasr, Jessica Stern, Robert Pape, and Ambassador Edward P. Djerejian etc. seem to have had their press people give a statement on their behalf without reading the book.

This book was so bad that I gave up after page 139 and the ironic part is the book starts with a premise that it is scientific and based on data. But still, there are some good and interesting points and in all fairness I should mention those first.

They do mention most Muslims live in Asia and Africa and the Muslims are wonderfully diverse in terms of language, ethnicity, customs, dress, location, nationality, and what have you. So lumping all Muslims into one bloc is as appropriate as to lump all Christians into one or all the “west” into one lump (mind you, while saying that, they go on to make the same mistake, for example in page 97)
Page 47 talks about how significant majorities in all Muslim countries have pushed for freedom of speech. This is a good thing indeed, although sits uneasily with the cartoon demonstrations seen across the world.
A 2006 Gallup poll talked about how most of Americans want the Bible as a source of legislation. This was not surprising to me, but if they add in the West and all countries which have a liberal democratic framework such as Japan, India and others, the results will be different. But the numbers from Iran are similar to that of the USA. Curious, no?
Countries like Iran and Indonesia do not seem to like Sharia in their legal systems, but countries such as Egypt and Jordan want it. Curious, no? Is this because the latter two countries are Arab?
Page 66 talks about a reasonably good point, the USA does not know what the enemy wanted or thought about. Presumably the reference is to the Al Qaeda chaps. Well, from the perspective of intelligence agents, yes, the Americans knew what Al Qaeda wanted. OBL’s sermons and speeches are well-known. And as I have also found out, I am not sure if that knowledge would have helped anyway.
Interference by America and other countries in the business of Muslim (and frankly many other countries) is not something that I condone, they poke their noses into far too many places and is a classic example of imperial overstretch. So yes, good point that USA is interventionist and it should stop it.
A good Chapter 4 on women, nice coverage of women’s issues, how they work and behave, what they wish for and what their current situation is. While the data and issues mentioned were useful, it is a bit of a confused chapter which does not draw out the basic issues facing Muslim women. How to reconcile their religion with modern life. Unfortunately, when one looks to religious books for women related issue resolution, remember that others will do the same. So while one might argue using Sharia that women should be liberated such as in page 118, remember that using the same Sharia, female genital mutilation is allowable (it is debatable, but there is a case for it, which is against what they say in page 117).

The serious mistakes that this book makes are legion. This book is not scientific, it is not based on what one would understand as standard social science data, the analysis is horrible and the report is written by a drunk undergraduate. It is clear that this book, the Gallup research and the analysis is written not for the American populace but for the international non-American populace in a polemical, biased and ignorant manner. What is curious is why these other people got all excited about it and admired something like this?

How come they ignored India as a source of Muslim thought? curious and a big lacunae in the study as I would posit that those results would have made a substantial contribution to this study.
Why call Francis Fukuyama as a former neoconservative theorist in page 29? There is no reference to political theories before or after, no reference to realism or conservatism or liberalism. But mention it they did, and this started to turn me off because it was obviously meant as a personal slur.
And from page 32 onwards, this book shows up one of its biggest flaws. The severe and seriously ignorance confusion between Arabs and Muslims. After spending the first chapter talking about the fact that only about 20% Arabs make up the overall Muslims, and the fact that Arabs are Christians, Druze and many other types of people, the authors promptly forget it. Being an Arab is to be part of a linguistic group, not a religious group. And because of this basic mistake, every conclusion and recommendation they draw is miserably wrong.
The authors also confuse the terms west, USA, the Iraqi coalition, the neoconservative movement and the like. This confusion means the authors often rely on references to “some”, “they”, as the strawman (for example pg 95 and 99). So the authors pick up one comment by a right-wing commentator, extrapolate it variously to the entire West, USA, United Kingdom, the Western Press, you name it, and then try to answer it based on a vague formula.
On Page 36, the authors talk about there being no difference between Islamic Law and human rights. I found it curious that they did not mention the fact the Islamic world pushed for their own declaration of human rights when they said the universal declaration of human rights was not “appropriate”.
The authors also seem to be confused about what Democracy means. Democracy not only means that governments are elected by the people and sovereignty rests with the people, but also the people draw up the laws and they can change it. When laws emerge from a religious book helped by religious people, it is called as a theocracy, not democracy. So when people say that they love democracy but want Sharia as a source of laws and legislation, there is a certain inconsistency which has not been explored fully.
Their basic problem with Arabs and Muslims shows up in the next section and then continuously onwards, why is democracy absent in so much of the Muslim world. And despite pointing to South Asia, the authors forget that India, Pakistan, Bangladesh were all beset by imperialism equally. But India, Nepal and Sri Lanka have managed to hold on to democratic standards while Pakistan and Bangladesh have not. So just pointing to Imperialism as the main reason for democracy not holding ground in Muslim countries is far too simplistic which blows their arguments to bits.
Page 41 shows another fascinating confusion in the minds of the authors. This time its the conflating of the “west” and “secularism”. Secularism as an idea has a long history and it is not just from the West. I am not sure the authors have understood what secularism means and the philosophy behind it. It is the only way to handle heterogeneous populations.
While talking about imperialism, there are some big problems with that argument. The authors did not mention the Ottoman, Mughal or other Muslim imperialistic empires. They do not mention the fact that imperialism with respect to Muslim countries has been mainly European rather than American, but let us not confuse matters there. How about the fact that Japanese imperialism overran many Muslim countries as well in the east, but let us not go there either.
While saying that Sharia should be a source of law and then saying that they do not want religious figures to influence laws or the constitution. Erm, who will be the people who will be working on Sharia? Non-religious people? And how will that work? And then on page 93, a theoretical construct is made up about how Sharia protects citizens from the depredations of rulers. Well, it has never worked before in a millennium, has it? So what makes one think that it will ever? And why would the mullah’s be advisors to the rulers? See the confusion?
Around page 56-57, the authors talk about Islam and democracy in a confused sense. And this is another example of their total ignorance of what Secularism means. They give the example of France and state funding of churches, but do not talk about the concept of “lacite’”. Plus this debate is strange. In Islam, sovereignty is with God, the Quran (plus sunnah, hadith, etc.) is the constitution and Sharia is a sort of the / part of the legal system. How on earth are they even trying to draw any equivalence here?
Huge clangers of mistakes are made in the analysis of political radicals starting from page 67. Very confusing. They refer to many experts without actually giving any references. The authors assume things, such as terrorism is because of poverty and unemployment, a theory that I have rarely read from any expert. And after talking about a badly and wrongly drafted expert opinion, they slip into another badly drafted argument based on media reports. No consistency and very badly framed strawman arguments. And then in page 70, they compound the mistake by devoting a full section to this type of strawman argument which might be fine in polemics and emails but not in what is purportedly a serious book.
For example, while they spent much time talking about how the 9/11 attackers were not religious Muslims, they do not talk about the obvious next step. So what DID bring these attackers together? I am not going to talk about the obvious answer but the fact the authors did not even understand the next step is symptomatic of the poor analysis in this book.
In the next section, they went out and gathered few comments from some far right commentators and build up a huge counter argument based on those foamy arguments. This sounded childish to me and disjointedly argued.
In page 77, the old chestnut of the Pape’s Suicide Terrorism is dug up. Well, I do not have to say this again but trying to give me references to that silly study does not fill me with confidence that this particular study is any good either. But they go on to make more mistakes like trying to say the Tamil Tigers appeal to Hindu links to the Indian Tamils.
Page 81 throws up more issues. While the authors talk about anti-Americanism and talk about radicals. But hey, here’s the issue. You don’t hear about antiGermanism or AntiSpanishism, but they both have terrorism issues. So is that antiwesternism? The authors refer to far right commentators but do not mention George Bush has clearly said the war on terror is not against Islam. But then, that does not fit in neatly with the author’s biases.
Again in page 85, there is confusion between Muslim states and Arab states. And yet again ignore the glaring counter-example of Pakistan and Bangladesh compared to India as Muslim states. Frankly, a poor argument.
Page 87, “the war against Islam and Muslims” is nothing new, that slogan has been raised since time immemorial I am afraid. For example, one of the big things that Mughal Aurangzeb or any of the Ottoman pashas did when faced with challenges was to raise this same slogan or words to the effect. And guess what? The open-ended question of what do you resent most about the west, the answers were “sexual and cultural promiscuity”, “ethical and moral corruption” and “hatred of Muslims”. undefined, no? and no further analysis of it either.
Outright inconsistencies emerge, for example in page 92. Yes, I agree with the fact that Western countries should stop interfering in the Muslim countries, while saying that, I did not notice any mention of Lebanon where Muslim countries interfere with both hands and legs. And this is where the issue comes up, because if you don’t have the clear idea that you will always find countries interfering with others, you are living in cloud cookoo land.
Also, curiously, they continuously confuse Sharia with Fiqh. This is not the place to go into it but for them not to make that distinction (such as in pages 92-93) is worrying. Because of this, they tend to make some basic mistakes. For example, saying that what restricted Muslim rulers from acting like tyrants was Sharia. Erm, that is wrong on both formulation as well as knowledge of history. Its fiqh and secondly, Sharia never stopped Muslim rulers from being tyrants. This also leads to a massive confusion around what the mullah’s can do about government and legal society. Are they the rulers? Advisers? Lawyers? Senior House of parliament? What? And the authors do not address this point and just leave it dangling at “advisers”.

I am now tired of listing the flaws of this book. It is useless and frankly a waste of time and money. No basic data is presented nor is the analysis rigorous. As I said, what were worrying are the legions of congratulatory messages on this book. I do not think any of the so-called great and good have read the book and if they have, they have not understood it. More curiously, why on earth are these two so-called respected academics writing such drivel? Shame on Gallup, a respected organisation for producing pap like this. So in the end, this book does not tell me what Muslims really think. Or who speaks for Islam. And the fault lies solely with the authors, not with the people who they interviewed. (Here’s something which I wrote earlier on who actually speaks for Islam and who influences Muslims) The biggest problem with the book is the underlying theme that every American who reads the book is an idiot and has this patronising theme running through it. As a public policy book, this is pathetic and I am deeply disappointed with the authors. These authors have contributed more to the civilisational schism than trying to help cover it.

Which brings me to the other paper. It was published in a peer reviewed journal called as Government Information Quarterly in 2008, written by Nadia Caidi and Susan MacDonald of the University of Toronto. The paper is entitled, Information practises of Canadian Muslims post 9/11. Now this is what research looks like. A scientifically rigorous treatment of how Muslims think and do. While the area of investigation is different (and equally important and interesting), the methods that these researchers use, the analysis they come up with, all are fascinating and much more believable than the pap that Esposito and Mogahed have come up with.

It was a good sensitive study, asking intelligent literate Canadian Muslims, about their information practices, use of information sources, attitudes and opinions about information rights in a post 9/11 world. What the authors find is the Canadian Muslims hold a deep mistrust of the media, but they think that knowledge of media and information literacy is important. They also feel there is a need for far greater introspection within Muslim societies.

But fascinating public policy recommendations drop out, about how multiculturalism can help or hinder. Some issues with the study related to the fact that they did not consider another society, United Kingdom, which has seen home-grown Muslim terrorism in 7/7. Also, they did not consider Canadian Sikh immigrant terrorism either. Both of which would have provided a much richer analysis of this factor of multiculturalism and nationalism, but that can well be done in another piece of research. Immigration was another factor but not so much. What about the information media sources in themselves? Would it help to have public advisory councils which will help improve these fellow citizens’s trust in the media? What can be done?

Both pieces of work are interesting from many perspectives. The first one is for knowing how not to do research and put across public policy recommendations on such politically and religiously sensitive issues. The second is how to utilise information and information practices for Muslims who are definitely facing Islamophobia and a feeling of being targeted. Very thought-provoking indeed and much needs to be done to address these issues (but please, not how Esposito and Mogahed do). So while we do not know what the billion Muslims think, we can do something about making sure that the information channels are better managed and transparently dealt with in order for us to draw the poison of Islamophobia and support for terrorism.

All this to be taken with a grain of piquant salt!

Children - We Can Make a Difference

Dr Bhaskar Dasgupta — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 12:42:12 EDT

Anybody who has been on railway platforms in a reasonably big Indian city might have noticed a surprisingly large number of unaccompanied children. They are the children who have been abandoned, have run away from abusive homes, were orphaned or simply got lost. And as it is when children fall through the cracks, these kids have become drug addicts, are abused, sexually or otherwise. They have no future and simply have become the jetsam and flotsam of modern society, condemned to be on the garbage heap. Unknown, and uncared for, they sink to the bottom and simply fade away. But not for a tiny institution in Bhopal, which has given the most valuable of all things to them. It gave them hope.

I have noticed one thing common between refugees, orphans, drug addicts and prostitutes. Their eyes are dead. They do not sparkle anymore, are dead to the world, incurious, and they do not shine with life. They might be alive, but frankly, for all practical purposes, their souls are dead. And I think it’s primarily because of the fact that they have lost all hope. What is there to put sparkles in your eyes if there is no longer any hope?

One of the everlasting regrets of my life is that I was not able to adopt an orphan. A combination of government apathy and obstruction, plus other circumstances made it impossible for me to adopt and fulfil the pledge and promise I made to myself all those years ago when I visited the Missionaries of Charity home in Indore, India. The eyes of those orphans would light up when visitors came and I wanted to do something about it. But in the absence of that, I was trying to do my little bit for these unfortunate children just to give them a bit of hope and to put some sparkle back into their eyes.

While I was in Amsterdam, I spotted a news item in an Indian newspaper RSS feed about a small institution that has opened in Bhopal, India, which helps orphans, street children and children on the Bhopal Railway Station Platform. My sister and I decided to do a little bit to help them by giving each of them their individual lockers, a small place to call their own. My parents, being there in Bhopal, went over to the charity, asked about their space, got the lockers built and installed. This was over four months ago and it is only now that I finally managed to get to Bhopal to see for myself.

This is a story of the worst kind and at the same time the best human behaviour ladled on to the people who can least withstand it, as well as most need it. I saw three small girls , aged 1, 3 and 7 years of age. They do not seem to have any place to stay, their parents squabble, and it is unclear where they live. This one hall provides them with a temporary measure during the day when they can come in from the rain and get some education. The 7 year old girl is apparently extremely intelligent and she is testing at 3 levels above her age related education levels. There is another boy of 5 years of age, who got lost on a train. He is from south India and speaks Tamil, but he does not know where he is from, or anything else. Since they know nothing about him, he is a lost soul. A mother and father would be grieving somewhere for their lost son, but there you are.

I saw a recovering drug addict, a boy of only 10. These boys sell bits and bobs, such as tea or biscuits, on the trains which pass through the railway station. And with the little money they earn, they go purchase a bottle of whitener (the fluid used to correct typing mistakes) which is very cheap at Rupees 15. This is then poured into a cloth which they will sniff all day long. And for some reason, they would also cut themselves on the arms, thighs, chest, anywhere, deeply with a rusty razor blade to let the blood flow. Apparently, it makes them feel like flying. They are not violent, but just go into a deep somnolent daze. This particular boy had scars up and down his body. I saw another boy outside the school, about 13-14 years of age, who wanted to come in and have lunch. He was zonked out of his brains. He is my son’s age.

There are three boys that I was introduced to, who were beaten so badly by their parents and families that their bones were broken. So they ran away from home when they were 4-5 years of age. Because they do not know where they came from, (unlettered, illiterate children), now they cannot go back. My mother told me about how she saw this woman speaking to a child in the corner of a school. On inquiring, it turned out that this was his mother who had abandoned her child at the school because she could neither feed nor clothe him. But she comes back once every few months after earning some money, to bring some sweets. Mother and child get together for about 10-15 minutes.

A young lady, Ms. Deepika Suri, kicked this entire thing off. She is a high ranking police officer and she noticed these children running riot. Now we all know the challenges anybody would face to get any government to do anything out of the ordinary. But she is perhaps one of the real heroines of India. A quiet, lovely young lady, who saw a need, and swung into action. She found an abandoned building and had it fixed up to become a school cum residential hall cum orphanage for thirty odd children. She linked it with a government school to provide education, got political cover and basically got it up and running.

She did not get anything out of it. She is, by all accounts, very retiring and quiet. I have not met her and have only heard about her from the children and the teachers who think of her as a veritable goddess. And so she is. She gave these children hope. She fought against the apathy that is so endemic in society. She did not give up and she made a dream happen for these children. After it was up and running, the building fixed up, food and clothing arranged, bedding fixed, teachers and helpers in place, to get political cover, she got the chief minister of the state to inaugurate the centre called as “Disha” (a Hindi word meaning direction). And when the Chief Minister asked, what they needed, they said, can we please have lockers for the children? My father said that eight people volunteered to provide them.

As it so happened, there is many a slip between the cup and the lip and many months later, nothing happened so we decided to get those lockers for them. Why lockers, you might ask? Why not clothes, or food, or money? Well, there was a lot of thinking behind it.

These children, in my opinion, do not have anything personal and individual, no assets, no home, not even a toothbrush, nothing. It is a totally transient existence. And it is horrible, not to have anything to call your own.

But the idea was, that if they have a locker, with their own locks and keys, it becomes their little piece of home. And that is what we saw, there were thirty lockers and each had been decorated individually by their owners. The key was hung around their necks with a piece of sturdy twine, but some had put up photographs, some had arranged their clothes in pleasing manners, one even had managed to put in a tiny curtain in that locker.

The children put on a show for us, and I was very impressed by their range of abilities. Whether it was singing, dancing, poetry recital, drumming, recitation of multiplication tables or the 3 R’s, they were pretty good. One tiny dervish of a small boy was so enthusiastic, he wanted to volunteer for everything and he danced for us. Apparently, before coming to the centre, he would earn money for food by dancing for train passengers. And now he danced just for the sheer joy of it, the blooming smile on his face, the shining teeth (yes, they now have tooth brushes and tooth paste nicely kept in their lockers), well kept clothes and groomed hair all pointed to a happy boy.

A boy of 15 odd years posed as a radio commentator and gave a full five minutes of a radio news announcement. It was very impressive. The kids knew Sanskrit shlokas and hymns; they would worship religiously every evening. The teachers would ask each boy to think about what they did well and what they did wrong, to learn from their mistakes. The teachers and the associated NGO try to place these orphans with families.

One boy was from West Bengal and he had tuberculosis. He liked to eat fish curry and rice, which were his traditional diet, but for some reason he landed in Bhopal, many many miles away. So the NGO spent quite a lot of money and then managed to place him with a family in West Bengal where he can now get a proper diet and medical care in a good middle class family. Guess what? The boy ran away from there and came back to the centre in Bhopal, apparently he missed them so much.

I can talk so much about this, but this is a series of disjointed thoughts about a frankly tear jerker of an experience. I was telling my old friend about it and he offered to do some construction work at the institution, by building up the boundary wall (to keep the drug addict, junkies and thieves away) and refurbishing the toilets.

Small things, but that is the power of feeling and caring. Think back about Ms. Suri who kicked off the start, and now 170 children have passed through these halls of this school. It gave them direction and it gave them hope. It was a humbling experience to see this.

I end with a plea; do something for the poor children or orphans of your city. Nothing much, you rally do not have to do much. And you do not have to go far from your city. Why don’t you just purchase some cheap and cheerful dictionaries or colouring books for them? What about getting them some board games? Give them something, anything, go sing a song to them or just talk to them. Just show them that somebody cares, and that they have not been abandoned. After having faced the world that we humans have brought down on their tiny innocent heads, show them that they can have a direction to a better life, they can hope, the dead eyes can sparkle again. It can and has been done.

All this to be taken with a grain of piquant salt!

Technorati Tags: Charity,India,Children

Malaysia - Truly Asia But Not Fully Asia

Dr Bhaskar Dasgupta — Sun, 8 Jun 2008 06:33:45 EDT

It was a very pleasant surprise when I was invited to speak at a conference in Kuala Lumpur (KL), Malaysia. I have been to that neighbourhood so many times, but never to Malaysia. While I have blogged about the conference, this essay is about my impressions about the country. It is based on a very scientific and detailed analysis of reading the daily newspapers and observing the city and talking with some people. So yes, these are very facile observations on the national infrastructure, the people, history, cuisine, politics, economics and will end trying to predict the future of this extraordinary country.

Also, please remember that it was just a trip of six days in very urban setting speaking to the professional, technocratic and political class of Malaysians. To give you a comparison, it would be like trying to explain India or China based on a 5-day conference visit to Delhi or Beijing.

As you land in Kuala Lumpur airport, walk out to whiz down the highway to the city looking at the surroundings, check into your hotel and then stand on the 30th floor looking out over the twin towers, you get a sense of surprise and are impressed. The entire corridor between the airport and the city is landscaped as far as the eye can see. The neat townships, the wide highway, the tall skyscrapers, the hotels, the cars, the shops, the advertisements, nothing that you would see out of place in a European setting. And from what I understand, this infrastructure development has taken place in all the Malaysian states, by and large. So just by looking at the infrastructure, you would say this is a developed country. Extremely impressive indeed and something that my father said when I was talking to him. He visited Malaysia 40 years ago and we were comparing notes.

But what they still do not have is the developed country people, and thank God for that. By and large, the developed countries tend to end up having people who do not smile as much (how is that for a sheer generalisation?). The sheer warmth of everybody I met was astounding and simply amazing. Smiles galore, great big blooming smiles all over the place. And this is whether you are talking about your shop assistant to the driver of the coach to the chap who was watering the plants to the lady who was crossing the street. Very warm, helpful and warm people and that is what I found on every level, from the Prime Minister down to the ordinary bloke on the street. I didn’t get a chance to speak to the Sultan at the dinner but I have no doubt he would be the same. I just hope they keep this national characteristic.

I noticed a general and curious lack of history. A broad based observation here, but I went trawling through two large bookstores in KL, saw the Sunday editions of the newspapers, asked the concierge of the hotel about historic sites, looked around in the admittedly limited trips, and poked my nose into the colonial buildings, but, I did not get a sense that history existed or even exists for ordinary Malaysians. This is going to be difficult to explain, but it is a strange mixture of old mouldy buildings and monuments, loads of historical books, names of houses/streets referring to ages old dead people, frequent referrals in speech to old history, and so on and so forth. Was the rush to technology and modernity accompanied by the loss of history? Picked up some books written by their first political leaders and they also refer mostly to their current and not the past. Rather surprising and curious, especially when you see countries like Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, Philippines etc. where I did not get this feeling.

But that did not stop them from having the most amazing cuisine. I was interviewing a lady and on the spur of the moment, offered to do this over lunch at the hotel itself. And the sheer range of food that was available, just blew me away. I regretted I was on appetite suppressant medication, but still managed to put away some serious amounts of food AND lost weight. The combination of Japanese, continental, Malay, Indian, Chinese, yummy, wonderful, absolutely delicious. How on earth do they manage to keep their weight under control despite this wonderful gastronomic spread? The food court in the twin towers shopping mall had 30 different shops selling different kinds of food. I went around thrice before settling on Nasi Goreng from the Malay shop. Just great.

The corruption was unfortunately fairly typical of a developing nation. Again, no direct evidence, but only from what I heard from people. For example, when the father of Modern Malaysia, Tun Dr. Mahatir Mohammad, resigned from the ruling party while I was there, I was quite certain that a whole bunch of others will follow him. But no, almost nobody did. I was puzzled and after inquiring, the common response was, who on earth would be stupid enough to get out of the patronage party? Am I surprised? No, political parties are the same all over the world.

The economy is doing well, well diversified, not that much about of concentration in any one sector, not much government interference in the economy as shown by the low 12% of public consumption in the economy compared with about 20% for the USA and 22% for the UK. Nicely galloping along at 5-6% per year GDP growth, but subsidies are a worry. These range from industrial, agricultural, fuel, service and a whole load of them. If the government is not careful, the debt servicing could be an issue. But again, nothing that worried me terribly.

The last observation before my summing-up would be to point to a far more dangerous factor which is brewing in Malaysia. And that is the race factor. The sheer casualness with which race plays a part in politics, business and normal society is shocking for a person coming in from outside. To further complicate matters, this has a religious overtone and is getting worse day by day. I see the blog site of Dr. Mahatir Mohammad and am frankly horrified to read some of his pronouncements on race and religion. And that is wrong, public policy should never be established based on religion or race, because it will simply end up with angst. Especially when you have multiple religions and races in the country. Can you imagine a Prime Minister of any other country clearly stating racist views nowadays?

Take the emotion out of the arguments, help all Malaysians, such as all poor Malays. Do impose the national language for all Malaysians. Malays are ethnically and historically a combination of Indian and Chinese ancestry but now there is a strong but still controllable difference between the Indian Tamils, Indian Punjabi/Sikhs, the Chinese, the Malays, the mainlander and islander Malaysian etc. etc. In the list of the top richest Malaysians, only one was Malay. And this is after decades of affirmative action. On the other hand, the Indian Tamils are bottom of the pile and after they saw the success of the use of religion by Malays, they have also climbed on the Hindu religion bandwagon. This can still be controlled, stop that sucking up to the OIC, think of all Malaysians independently and uniquely. Malays look to Mecca, Chinese look to China and Indians look to India. Who or where is the lookout for Malaysia? But it is not that bad, I think the political class would understand this and can stuff the racist/religious monster inside the cage.

Bottom line and by and large, I think Malaysians can be proud of what they have achieved in their country. The emphasis on information technology, the way they have had a systematic plan to drag their country into the developed country status. I am also impressed by how well joined up the government, industry and bureaucracy is to push for Malaysian interests. This bill of guarantees for foreign investors is absolutely amazing and provides evidence that Malaysia is serious. This is something that other countries can only dream about but the way this kind of national will and drive for months, years and decades is good and creditable. All political parties are on-board with respect to national development and this country will improve dramatically indeed provided it manages to take all its citizens along with this national drive. Salamat Datang (welcome guest) indeed.

All this to be taken with a grain of piquant salt!

Rats!

Dr Bhaskar Dasgupta — Sat, 31 May 2008 12:07:26 EDT

Are rats cute? Just look at Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse. They have an entire carnival of their own and a worldwide business around them! Theme parks galore! We have movies about a rat that turns into the amazing chef in the 2007 film Ratatouille. They are holy and auspicious as well. The Hindu God Ganesh’s favourite animal is a rat (or is it a mouse?). And this year is the Chinese Year of the Rat and in Chinese terms, a rat is supposed to represent protection and prosperity. But rats are actually not cuddly creatures and can legitimately be said to be a fully paid up member of the team of the four horsemen of the apocalypse (Plague, Death, War, Conquest)

In a recent news report, the leading exterminator company in the UK talked about how the population of rats is increasing rapidly and has nearly doubled over the past few years. Not only doubled, but even more. This is because more and more of the British lands are being concreted over, so the rats do not have space to dig and create their burrows. Also because of the recent floods, they had to evacuate their burrows and move to higher ground. Hundreds of tons of food grains have been eaten by these furry creatures, but then, thousands and thousands tons more of food grains are eaten by these disgusting creatures across the world.

I don’t like rats (mice, bandicoots, every disgusting type of vermin), miserable creatures. I hate their beady eyes and how they scuttle across the rooms, good chef or cute mouse notwithstanding. My association to them goes back to my school days when one of my teachers used to regularly abuse us by calling us as station rats. Now, I don’t know if you have seen Indian railway station rats, but they are huge, scurry around in the excreta and muck and look absolutely filthy. So I am afraid they are not my cup of tea at all.

They are nasty things. They carry germs, disease and infection and god knows what else? There is a very good reason that food inspectors hate seeing rats in a kitchen, and when I saw that rat in Ratatouille actually clutch a piece of cheese to its plague ridden fur, I couldn’t stop shuddering. That went into the food that they were feeding their customers? Foul. It is the rats who also carry the fleas which transmitted the plague virus. It was because of their germ carrying capacity that tens of millions of humans died in the ravages of the black plague which have regularly swept through the world down the ages. This huge decimation of the population caused major dislocations to kingdoms, lead to wars, changed the path of the Christian Church and caused huge and brutal persecutions of minorities such as Jews (who were said to have caused the plague).

Rats also have been the cause of terrorism (near war) breaking out. In the misty mountains of Northeast India is a forgotten state called Mizoram. Almost forty years ago, a special type of bamboo flowered hugely across certain areas across the Mizoram and Bangladesh border. Its flowers are delicious and full of goodness. Well, because they are so good and nutritious, the rats eat them and grow huge. Not only that, they nearly double their breeding rate (from four to eight times in one year). Considering that you can end with about ten baby-rats in a litter, and female rats become fertile in a matter of months, you can see how the rat population can explode, and so it did!

When it did, they ravaged through the bamboo forests eating everything in sight. When there was no bamboo left, they went for the crops and soon, there was widespread famine in these parts of the land. Typically, and contrary to what Amartya Sen says, famines do occur in democracies, especially weak and corrupt ones such as India. This famine and lack of government support can be directly attributable to the rise of Mizo nationalism, the bitter Mizo terrorist campaign, the one and only bombing by the Indian Air Force on Indian citizens and eventual peace after thousands of deaths and decades of fighting.

As an aside, this bamboo flowering happens once every fifty-odd years and it is happening again now. Rats have already devoured all the flowers and have already eaten a huge amount of crops in the Mizoram state and Bangladesh side. Almost forty thousand tons of food has been destroyed in the Indian side itself, while some Bangladeshi districts are reporting up to 100% food stock destruction. The Mizoram government has a bounty out on them and is paying about 2.5 pence or 2 Rupees for each rat tail delivered (see a fascinating picture here). And the last time a huge famine hit Bangladesh, war broke out.

Strangely enough, while rats were the cause of terrorism, other RATS are being formed to fight terrorism. A very interesting grouping, called as the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, which comprises of the central Asian republics, Russia, China and some others, signed the “Shanghai Convention on Combating Terrorism, Separatism, and Extremism” in 2001. As part of this convention, a Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure (RATS) was set up in Tashkent. While it is difficult to analyse its performance, it claims to have prevented more than 250 acts of terrorism so far. And heaven knows - that area is full of those terror rats. Ranging from the Uyghur’s in China to the Chechnyans in Russia, Kurds in Iran to Islamists everywhere else, all these terror rats need to be flushed out, and what better way than to set a RAT to catch a rat?

Not only that, the US military research arm, DARPA, is turning rats into remote controlled animals who can go up ladders, sneak into ruins, under the ground, etc. on commands which electronically manipulate their pleasure centres. So they can be used for land mine clearance, for reconnaissance, for earthquake rescue under collapsed buildings, and generally be good. Nothing wrong with it, the rats love being pleasured and if in return for pleasure, they do something nice for us, I am all for it.

As a matter of fact, there is a pretty nice cocktail called as a Sewer Rat, made of Vodka, Peach schnapps, Kahlua and Orange juice. It is an acquired taste, I am afraid. And so is eating them, rat meat is considered to be a delicacy across quite a large swathe of the world and here’s a good site with some recipes (if you can stomach that!). Do you remember the scene in the Demolition Man, where Sylvester Stallone wakes up in the future and gets all weird rabbit/processed food to eat. He is dying for some “proper” American food and then he spots this tiny dingy place selling burgers and he dives into the shop and starts to eat burgers with huge big bites. Idly asking about the burger, he learns that it is made of rat meat. But despite a moment of hesitation, he crams the burger down while saying, “This is a rat burger? Good burger!"

I suppose I can agree with that quote, “I eat meat not because I like meat but because I hate animals”, so perhaps I will try a rat burger one of these days. Meanwhile, the impact of rats on food grains is much more important, and the loss of food to rats, the scarcity of food grains, the rapidly rising food inflation can well lead to war and terrorism all again.

All this to be taken with a grain of salt!

Technorati Tags: Healthcare, Agriculture, Inflation, Terrorism

Sisyphus And the Israeli-Palestinian Crisis

Dr Bhaskar Dasgupta — Wed, 14 May 2008 02:26:57 EDT

Personally, I was happy with the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, as it has saved me a few quid. You see, using software developed in Israel for counter terrorist purposes, the local council has saved hundreds of thousands of pounds by implementing a lie detection system over the phone. So when you call up our council to claim benefits, the operator says that you are being evaluated by this lie detection system, you would either not go ahead with the claim or would have the claim rejected because the system thinks you are telling ‘porkies’. The amount of porkies that are told in the aftermath of the Israeli Palestinian Crisis is monumental.

I have a morbid fascination with this crisis. It’s like a horrific car accident. You know you shouldn’t see the accident, but still you slow down as you pass the accident site, crane your neck and peer at the gruesome details. You know it’s a rather uncivilized behaviour and something that your mum would scold you for, but still you cannot avoid it. It’s the same with this crisis. You know that whenever you pick up this topic, you get hammered because you simply cannot be neutral and unemotional at all about it. Even if you are, then for some participant on one side, you will be biased. As simple as that, there is no independent observer on this issue. Ever!

Which is the reason why this book, The Israel – Arab Reader, A Documentary History of the Middle East Conflict, edited by Walter Laqueur and Barry Rubin, should be an indispensable part of your reference library. These two well known authors have done a great job in collecting some vital historical documents, which can be used - at least - to establish some facts on the ground when debating or arguing this issue. The documents are a treasure trove in a very convenient volume broken up into five parts. The first part relates to the time from 1882 to the end of the British Mandate. This part explains the roots of the problem. After this, the remaining parts four are from 1947 – 1973, Camp David to the Madrid Conference, the peace process from 1992 onwards till the intifada started and the peace process dried up.

This book is now in the seventh edition, and once you see it, you can understand why this is so. It contains manifestos, speeches, documents, interviews, memorandums, laws, declarations, reports, statements, parliamentary documents and speeches, United Nations speeches and resolutions, White Papers and the like. The editors have collected documents from Arabs, Israelis, British, United Nations, United States, Germans, Russians, etc. Once I started, I made it a point to read one document or section per day, and I finally managed to complete it. By this time, my hair was hurting so badly, that it had curled up like a Velcro mat. You know why? Because when one reads this, one is torn between two feelings, one – this is a car accident, drive away and two – it’s a car accident, bloody hell, what happened.

This is not the place to review who is right or who is wrong. Who is right or wrong is no longer the argument; it has gone way beyond that. The thousands of millions of words and pages which have been written, the millions of people killed, tortured, wounded, exiled, the decades of anger, hatred and war, the deep religious entwining, the ancient history of this blood drenched land, all those frankly preclude any rational and objective discussion of this issue.

Mind you, there have been thousands of solutions, such as the Two State Solution, Jordanian Solution, the One State Solution, the Ugandan Solution, the Madagascar Solution, and so on and so forth. The current state is a variant of the Two State Solution, which was established in 1948. There would be a Palestinian state and an Israeli state. There is no point in going for what-if’s, we are where we are. The One State solution is now slowly gaining credence. A recent and reasonably well argued book from the Palestinian perspective is written by my colleague, Ghada Karmi, called Married to Another Man, Israel’s Dilemma in Palestine. If you keep these two books in front of you, you will see what I mean by the great difficulty of trying to be independent and unemotional about this issue. The latter book is something that clearly Israel can never live with, as it is very emotive. But then, being the son of a refugee myself, I can empathise with Ghada about her feelings for her homeland which clearly show up in her work. Unfortunately, that emotional approach to this problem means that the book is more of an op-ed than a balanced and reasoned argument for a One State Solution.

The Two State Solution, unfortunately will be the only way forward for the foreseeable future, the only outstanding questions relate to the boundaries, the state of Jerusalem, refugees and security. But then, I definitely have no suggestions as to how this can be resolved, other than the fact that Israel should speak to Hamas and come to some sort of agreement. But I am also doubtful that this solution would be that easy. You see, this conflict has now reached civilisational levels, with the entire Muslim nation officially seeing the Palestinian cause as its own, while the majority of liberal democracies, broadly defined, are lined up with Israel. Conflicts at these levels are breathtakingly huge in concept, think about the crusades, the final solution, the English – Boer War and so on and so forth. The historical record is not good; solutions are generally imposed when one party is utterly exhausted or eradicated. But the core issue does not go away. Hundreds of years after the crusades were over, the issue still flares up in strange and weird places (witness the reaction of the Muslim nation when George Bush said that he was launching a crusade against terrorism.) But if it will be solved, it will be solved by the efforts of people like Laqueur and Rubin, who try to be independent and clearly want to resolve the issue without taking extreme positions such as what Karmi does.

But for what it’s worth, Israel and Palestine have been facing an existential problem for its sixty years and every year, like Sisyphus, they have been trying to resolve it. I can but look upon this train crash of a problem with deep despair and worry but still I think, at least my council tax bill will be reduced by two quid because of this problem. Now that’s not a silver lining on a planetary sized cloud. It is perhaps a silver molecule on a solar system sized typhoon, but hey, straws are straws. In the meantime, happy reading and lets hope Sisyphus keeps on banging away at this task.

All this to be taken with a grain of piquant salt!

Managing Discretionary Spending and Pensions

Dr Bhaskar Dasgupta — Mon, 5 May 2008 01:14:23 EDT

Companies generate funds for investments from various sources. These investments are again allocated to various purposes, such as business expansion, for improving processes, for purchasing new businesses, or what have you.

When you invest in a new business, you usually track the revenue generation or the new business that it has generated and if it has not brought in anything near what you originally thought it would, then you re-evaluate it and then leave it or digest it.

Investments can be measured easily by revenues or costs, but when one is talking about operational changes, technology investments, purchase or implementation of patents and other intellectual property or say buildings, it suddenly becomes extremely tough to evaluate whether your investments are doing well.

Here, I try to shed some light on how one can help manage discretionary investments.

In my short experience, I was continuously surprised at how lazy people are in terms of managing their investments, in other words their capital. I asked the same question when I was at a conference some months ago, namely how many people actively check their internal firm investments in the same manner they do their pension fund investments? Hardly any hands went up in the hall, where numerous senior managers were sitting. This is why so many firms have less than efficient internal investments.

Portfolio management has existed for many decades, since Harry Markowitz proposed his portfolio management theory way back in 1952 (here’s something for the conspiracy theorists, his major work was done in the RAND Corporation…). Since then, three generations of investment managers have grown up and applied the principles of portfolio management to their investments. Portfolio Management is applicable to any form of investments and the basic concepts are the same: diversify your investments, make sure you know what you are investing in, the effective and efficient capacity to disinvest is more important than to invest, the objectives for the overall portfolio might be different from the sub-component objectives, do regular reviews of your investment and finally, be as transparent as possible, etc.

What do you do with your investments in your pension funds? You check them regularly, no? You invest in your pension with the expectation of future gain or benefits.

Depending on your personal circumstances, you decide your investment profile and target areas and then monitor the risk-return profile regularly, you replace badly performing funds with better performing funds if required, etc. In other words, you do Portfolio Management. And frankly, that is what you do within firms as well. Or rather, this is what you should do. This relates mainly to financial institutions, although the concept will apply equally to any firm.

The support areas within the companies also invest, but not in bonds or shares. Instead, they invest a certain discretionary sum in technology, in improving and running those processes, in offshoring and outsourcing, in satisfying regulatory and compliance demands, in revenue generation activities, in setting up branch offices, etc. By their very name and nature of being support areas, they provide some business benefit, either by allowing us to operate as a firm, or reducing cost or satisfying regulatory requirements or increasing revenue or a combination of some or all of them.

In a firm, there are two types of spending: "Business as Usual" versus "Discretionary" spending. The former relates to the spending you have to do to support your existing business, while the latter relates to “new” spending, designed to support growth and explore new opportunities. This second type is that which we would call investment.

Bearing this definition in mind, there are some key questions to consider. For instance: Do you analyse your discretionary spending for suitability? Do you know what you are spending the money on? Do you check whether it is providing value? Do you stop investments? Can you respond to ad hoc information requests from the business on the return on investment footprint for the investments? Often, the answer is "no." So, if you do that analysis with your own pension, why not do so with your technology or operations investment? And if you wanted to do so, what do you do?

The level to which you will go to analyse your investments obviously depends on the size of the firm, how you run your financial systems, what kind of financial governance do you impose internally etc. But for a large global financial institution, what you do is to get a small team of senior chaps together and get initial agreement on what you want to achieve, what will be the methodology, logistics and how will this portfolio management function be governed.

The data you need is simple, such as the name of the programme or project or investment, start and end dates of the projects, which business unit is paying for it, which unit will be involved in the implementation, the status of the spend (committed, authorised, approved, spent…), the purpose of that investment (regulatory, revenue generation, enhancements…), when the benefits will arise and so on.

Don’t complicate matters, a simple Excel spreadsheet is just fine. There is much benefit in keeping things simple but mind you, it would be worthwhile to invest in some good technical expertise in reports, graphs and business intelligence to present the data. But I am getting ahead of myself.

There are two problems which are crucial to manage. The first is the process to get the data and the second is the data itself. Senior management engagement is vital for this, but then, anything of this nature will require senior management engagement anyway. If you don’t have senior management approval and push, then you might as well stop, because your life will be hell.

Nobody likes their spending to be made transparent and if you do not have backing, you will get trashed, ignored or worse, actively banned. You see, transparency means performance matching. If your head of operations has $10 million to invest, the business can legitimately ask him, where are you spending that money and how do you justify that investment? Also, show your productivity gains (as in return on investment…).

But if transparency is not achieved, then the head of operations can merrily go about spending money without any care for performance or improvement. Even if they are all above board, how do you know where the money is going? Is it going into unproductive causes? How much is left in the kitty? How much of the money is tied up on multi-year spending?

To answer all those questions, senior management support is vital.

Senior management cannot, by themselves, sit in on every meeting with the spending divisions. This requires the second solution, and that is to have relationship managers. Whether you are doing this at the technology level, the operational level, the business unit level or whichever level you are aiming at, you need senior relationship managers who can talk to the business managers at their level of expertise and experience. If you do not have serious relationship managers who can understand the spend patterns, the business that is being supported etc., the process and data will not be good. In other words, you cannot have a fixed income trading background relationship manager talking about investments with the chief infrastructure officer, they simply cannot relate to each other.

The third solution is to invest an indecently huge amount of time and money in the pre-training, communications, workshops, conference calls, etc. BEFORE the process starts off.

This portfolio management process has the capacity to seriously influence your entire organisation, from top to bottom, from trading to procurement, from regulatory reporting to market data. So, before you actually kick this process off, make sure you have talked, discussed, debated, argued with as many stakeholders as possible and then document the agreements and then talk, discuss, debate and argue again. It is easy to go wrong once underway and difficult to change direction when started, so front load all the push, training, motivation, and discussions.

Then come the data challenges. Even though you have a good simple data model, you will be surprised how difficult it is to get the data. Simple concepts become horrendously complicated when seen across national boundaries, cultures, ages, sexes, languages, charts of accounts, etc. For example, a simple question like, what is the difference between a programme and a project becomes exceedingly complicated (Go for a more than 10 million budget as an example, and it’s a programme with sub-projects, and anything below 100 K has to be a task which has to be rolled up into a project).

What do you mean by project / investment start? Does start mean that some steering committee somewhere has given the go-ahead or the capital allocation committee has said, yes or the CFO has signed off or the money has actually been transferred to your cost code? Or does it just mean the project / programme initiation document has been signed?

A data dictionary should be written and training has to be given. Regular training, communications, etc. should be the lot of relationship managers. One has to beware that this portfolio management process might conflict with local financial governance, so having a word with the local or functional CFO before rolling this out would be better. For example, the standardisation of the “start” of a project across the globe and all units could require all CFOs to adopt the same sort of financial governance in terms of signing off and transference of funds to cost codes. So, keep it simple. Remember what Einstein said, "everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."

Once the data starts rolling in, then get your business analysts and reporting gurus to work on it. A short, sharp presentation with some smart graphics showing the spending, its type and shape etc. is great, but add commentary to this analysis.

If you find that 40% of your funds are spent on regulatory aspects, which are multiyear in nature, consider asking the business COO and / or the CFO to ring-fence those sums into an SIV or in special codes which do not belong to the business or function.

This has huge advantages.

You do not have the temptation to dip into that pot. That pot of money is not something that you can influence, so you concentrate on value additive aspects of your investments, etc. It’s like the difference between spending your money on electricity versus spending your money on an iPod. Over the course of a year, both amounts would be the same, but you manage each investment differently and the same goes for mandatory spending.

Analyse when spending happens. The number of times I have seen people forget the yearly cycle is amazing. Spending behaviour changes over the year. The months just before accounting closes change as vendors and clients change behaviour, so that costs/revenues hit their books differently. People forget there is something called committed spending, especially in these days of outsourcing and offshoring. So if you want to cut costs, it is not that simple. If you were planning to put in gated funding, it does not work properly with outsourcing contracts. So commentary around that will help.

If you can get figures for return on investment, then there is nothing like it. That will make you the darling of the firm. You can turn around and ask (well, request…) the business owners: “You invested 100 million in that business, show that it returned the funds you said it would in the business case.” This commentary and visibility on the numbers is absolutely golden for senior management.

So what do you end up having? You have a process providing you with investment information which ends up giving management information on the investments. Now what?

Well, now you use this information in various management areas. Budgeting should be one. Performance evaluation should be another. Cash flow planning is another area where this can be used. Human Resource planning is an area begging for good portfolio resource planning. Across the firm, you will have very few good change managers and on the back of this process, you can hang a strategic resource plan. This structure also allows you to make investment changes with the greatest efficiency. This takes the emotion out of decision-making. If you have to cut your costs, then you can home into the areas where they are exactly possible, rather than areas where people “think” and “emotionally” believe costs can be cut. That is not good for the firm.

This structure also allows you to re-jig investments. If a strategic project is overrunning, then this structure and data allows you to make unemotional scientific decisions to take money from another project and give it to the project which is running a shortfall. Another advantage of this process is that it forces the entire firm to start talking the same language. Never underestimate the benefit of the firm using the same functional language and this is very useful indeed.

Think about it, your mergers and acquisitions will go much more smoothly if you have a clear-cut way to handle investments, both the old and new employees are clear about their business functions and their future. Again, the emotion is removed from the argument.

One way to get the language part right is to use a methodology. No point in hiring expensive consultants to tell you how to run your business.

Industry firms such as HP, IBM, Accenture and other firms release pretty good white papers on project portfolio management. If you want to go for a good book, then select this one by Shan Rajegopal, Philip McGuin and James Waller, titled Project Portfolio Management (ISBN:0-230-50716-6, Palgrave MacMillian). The book comes highly recommended and is written by authors who have obviously implemented project portfolio management.

They have written an excellent manual based on their experience with their clients. The only couple of criticisms one might have with the book is that they do not consider discretionary spending more widely, but rather take a perspective of technology spending only. However, that complaint is perhaps unique to Banking and Financial Services compared to other industries. Second, some more case studies might have been useful, but I suspect this kind of data would be very difficult to get. Still, you can do much worse than to keep this book on your reference shelf.

It is not an easy exercise. It needs much senior management attention and support, months and quarters of work and talk. You need to overcome a lot of cynicism and you have to work against the inertia of rest.

At end of the day, the data that you will get will be rich and will definitely be worth it. Don’t think that this is only for senior management; this can be done by any manager in charge of investments.

How do you know if you have done your job of portfolio management well? If your presentation to your management is received by raised eyebrows and the sentence, “This is interesting”, then you know that you have done a good job of it. But treat your investments as you would treat your pension, and your future life will be much safer, smoother and exciting.

All this to be taken with a grain of piquant salt!

Technorati Tags: management,financial institutions