Friday 11 November 2011

Re: Letter to Netanyahu: time is no longer on Israel’s side

Spot-on analysis. What the author doesn't mention is that America's one-sided middle-east policy controlled by Israel will lead to its unilateral foreign-policy epitaph because very soon China will stamp its authority on the issue by siding with the Palestinians. Chinese have nothing to lose and that single master-stroke will shift the whole middle-east and its oil towards China leaving Israel and Saudi as pariahs.

The two-state solution is simple. And Israel should take it while it is available on platter. After that if the Hamas or any other organisations don't keep their side of bargain, Israel has enough power to protect itself. Isn't it disingenuous to claim that Israel cannot protect itself even with America's Nukes on it doorstep?

But as Mahatma Gandhi demonstrated, success can be achieved by stretching your hand out first. So, as a friend of Israel, I think the long-term peace and stability of the region and Israel's own long term security is in the hands of Israel itself. But does it has the strength to stretch its hand out first? That is the trillion-dollar question.

Regards,

Pradeep

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Letter to Netanyahu: time is no longer on Israel’s side
By Kishore Mahbubani

Friends of Israel unite! The time has come to send a common message: time is no longer on Israel’s side. Geopolitical forces are moving inexorably against it.

One cardinal mistake no small state should make is to put all its eggs into one basket, even a basket as strong as the US. Despite its huge influence, Israel cannot change the shifting geopolitical tides. America’s power has peaked: its economy will not shrink in absolute terms but it will shrink irresistibly in relative terms. This would have happened naturally but gradually. But the continuing economic crises in the US will hasten the decline in America’s influence. Shrinking budgets will cut defence and aid expenditures. A crippled economic giant with no rockets to launch its astronauts into outer space will lose its “mystique”. Countries will no longer hesitate to vote against American preferences.

This is what happened with the Unesco vote of October 31. The news agencies reported correctly that 107 countries voted in favour of admitting Palestine into Unesco and 14 countries voted against. What they failed to report is that these 107 countries represented 77.5 per cent of the world’s population; the 14 countries just 7.3 per cent. The American founding fathers called in the Declaration of Independence for “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind”. The American decision to suspend Unesco funding clearly showed no such decent respect.

There can be no doubt where the opinion of “mankind” is headed on the Israel-Palestine issue. The world is exasperated with Israeli intransigence on the two-state solution. It is even more exasperated with the continuous increase in illegal Israeli settlements on the West Bank. Some European states voted with Israel but their citizens are clearly sympathising more and more with the Palestinians. The world knows that while Americans and Europeans love to preach the virtue of speaking “truth to power”, they have displayed total cowardice on the Israel-Palestine issue.

This cowardice now poses the greatest existential threat to Israel. Few friends of Israel dare tell it the inconvenient truth that time is no longer on Israel’s side. American power is declining relatively. Europe is becoming progressively irrelevant. Equally important, the power of the Islamic world has troughed. Now the relative influence of the Islamic world can only increase, despite the many challenges it faces. Turkey’s assertiveness, especially on the Israel-Palestine issue, is a sign of the new world order that is emerging.

The democratic revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia also end the era of pro-Israel dictators. Future leaders of these countries will have to reflect their populations’ sentiments. No future Egyptian government can impose sanctions on Hamas as Hosni Mubarak did. Pressure to speak out against Israel will grow. In Saudi Arabia, Prince Turki al-Faisal has warned that, “With most of the Arab world in upheaval, the ‘special relationship’ between Saudi Arabia and the US would increasingly be seen as toxic by the vast majority of Arabs and Muslims, who demand justice for the Palestinian people.”
The 5bn non-American and non-Muslim peoples of the world will have to make a clear choice: between supporting Israel (with lukewarm dividends at best from a declining America) or voting against Israel (buying insurance from a rising tide of anger in a more assertive and democratised Islamic world). Equally important, justice weighs in favour of giving the Palestinian people a right enjoyed by virtually every other people in the world: statehood.

Neither the US Congress nor Israeli nuclear weapons can protect Israel when the balance of geopolitical forces tips against it. And Israel could well trigger such a tipping point with any unilateral military strike against Iran. No one can predict the consequences when Israel becomes totally isolated from the global community. But it will not be a pretty picture. Hence, Israel’s friends should act quickly and send a short letter saying: “Dear Prime Minister Netanyahu, time is no longer on Israel’s side. Please work quickly to implement the two-state solution that President Bill Clinton proposed in January 2001.”
The late Israeli foreign minister Abba Eban once said: “The Palestinians never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity.” Sadly, the same may some day be said of the Israelis.

The writer is dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at National University of Singapore, and author of The New Asian Hemisphere

Tuesday 1 November 2011

A message to the new Apple CEO - a humble plea

Dear Mr. Cook,

I'm a Apple consumer and fan. Since Steve Job's death two things bother me:

1. In the keynote you addressed - you mentioned that the overall market share for Apple's iPhone is just 5% and there is a huge scope to grow.
What do we make of this statement. Steve Jobs never ran after market share. He created markets and let consumers come to him.
Does this mean, you are going to run after market share and in the process stop innovating and let the service levels fall?

2. I pre-ordered Steve Jobs Biography from the app store. On the day, when it was due to download, I had loads of problems. Finally, it loads but the front page ironically wouldn't load where Steve Job's photo was on.
After 2 days, I get an email from Apple explaining me to delete the book, logout and login and then re-load it. I did and it worked and I thought it was a one-off glitch and would never happen again.
(incidentally, it never happened in the past) But I was willing to give Apple the benefit of doubt.
Yesterday, after I tried to download The Spectator Magazine again (I had lost it because I had upgraded to iOS 5. Again, losing one's data when upgrading software never happend in the past). While downloading The Spectator, it gave errors atleast 6 times. I tried 30 minutes later and then it finally worked.

What worries me is, will Apple go downhill from here???? both in terms of product innovation and service levels?

Contrary to what some people who have never used Apple products say, I can vouch that using these products has changed my life not just in terms of efficiency or security but in every possible sense.

Please do something before the culture is changed for ever.

I hope Steve Jobs has put in place the systems needed to sustain the high level of innovation and service. Being the immediate CEO after Steve Job's passing away, it is your responsibility to make sure that the culture of innovation and service and the resulting pipeline of products is maintained. Your first responsibility is towards your consumers and not towards market-share or share-holders. If you can keep hold of the existing customers, rest will take care of itself. The only way you can keep hold of them is by continuous product innovation and high-quality service.

Regards,

Pradeep Kabra

Monday 15 August 2011

Indian Cricket's 'artificial turf' Moment???

While a billion+ souls in India argue about the cause(s) of the present annihilation of Indian cricket at the hands of the magnificent Strauss & Co's England viz., the illogical scheduling by the BBCI, the over-the-top old legs or the Men Vs Oldies argument, I wonder, if technological change and the resistant to it has anything to do with the future of Indian Cricket?

Once upon a time, in the good old days, Indian Hockey was at the top of the world. Hockey was played on grass and the Indians led by the Legendary Dhyan Chand & Co, won everything in their sight. Then came the 'Western Conspiracy' to overthrow the Indian hegemony. This was 'achieved' by introducing the 'artificial turf'. No matter what the Indians say, the fact is that, the Indians just couldn't or didn't adapt to the new platform and are still playing the catching-up game.

I wonder if the same is true for Indian cricket now? In the longer version of the game, Indian batsmen's technique to survive is to bring the legs forward and block the ball with the pads. The umpire cannot rule LBW because the batsman is too far outside the crease. But now with the introduction of the technology like hotspot and hawkeye, the trajectory and direction of the ball can be accurately projected in time thus negating the front-foot blocking technique of which the Indian batsmen are masters. Now, they will be forced to play every ball on merit. That needs the re-adjustment of technique and they need to un-learn and re-learn pretty quickly.

This 'artificial turf' moment is the real reason why Indian cricketers and BBCI has been resistant to use the hotspot for LBWs. Only after the present crop of veterans including Tendulkar, Dravid and Laxman retire, we will know if the Raina's, Kohli's and Sharma's have it in them to adjust and adapt. That is where the future of Indian cricket lies and not in the present fiasco, whatever the cause for that maybe.

Pradeep Kabra

Thursday 4 August 2011

Re: China crashes into a middle class revolt

Dear David,

Thanks for this article in today's FT.

Don't you think your article smacks of the western double-standards when dealing with China.

Especially your interpretation that after 40 people were killed in a rail accident in a country of 1.5 billion, will the banking system or the management of the economy to be safe is a stretch.

If you compare the same with India - which is of-course West's darling democracy - more than 40 people die virtually every day in rail accidents. But nobody bothers about it. I haven't seen any articles in any of the Western newspapers including FT when thousands die in major rail accidents in India every year. Why? Because India is a 'democracy' so the Western firms from News Corp to GM can easily do business in India.

But in China, the West and it's companies find it difficult to deal with the Communists who keep them out or in line. That is the real cause of grouse and not the accident.

Four months after the nuclear disaster, the contaminated food is still coming out on super-market shelves. How come there is no major articles on that in the Western press. If it was in China, you guys would have wrote zillion of articles criticising the communist party. I don't see how the democratically elected Japanese parliament is doing a better job than say what the communist party is doing in China managing 1.5 billion people.

Instead of becoming a mouth-piece of corporate interests or be overtly political, why don't we empathise with the tragedy and the affected people, suggest expertise from our experience and help to prevent such disasters in future and move-on instead of displaying such sycophancy?

Regards,

Pradeep Kabra

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China crashes into a middle class revolt
By David Pilling in Financial Times - published on 04-Aug-2011

When a student asked Sigmund Freud about the meaning of his cigar-smoking habit, the Austrian psychoanalyst is said to have replied: “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” By the same token, sometimes a train crash is just a train crash. But the recent high-speed rail accident in China is not one of those.
For many Chinese, the crash and its subsequent mishandling – including what looked to some like an attempt to bury the evidence – have been a revelation. An outpouring of anger has exposed a profound cynicism about how China is governed.

The death of at least 40 people on a high-speed rail line that had become a totem of China’s sleek progress towards wealth, modernity and national prestige is symbolic on many levels. If the trains are not safe, what of the banking system or the management of the economy itself? The tragedy has become a public relations disaster for a Communist party leadership dominated by engineers and technocrats. Just as Mao Zedong sought to create an industrial revolution by force of will in the Great Leap Forward, so China’s present leaders seem to think they can leapfrog technology through modernising zeal alone.
China’s high-speed rail network, built in less than a decade, is the world’s longest. Its trains were supposed to travel at speeds that would put Japanese technology to shame. Instead, the crash has exposed hubris, incompetence and corruption in a single, tragic crunching of metal. Perhaps not since Tiananmen Square more than 20 years ago has the Communist party looked so naked in the face of public contempt.
Certainly, previous scandals have exposed the rotten governance lurking beneath economic success. In the past few years alone, Chinese people have seen their children crushed by poorly constructed schools and poisoned with tainted milk. Both tragedies resulted from corruption and lack of regulatory control that the state subsequently sought to cover up by suppressing press stories and imprisoning the parents of affected children. The train crash is different in at least two respects. First, high-speed rail was explicitly a national project. The leadership took great pride in China’s ability to “digest” and “improve on” foreign technology. Officials had already laid out ambitious plans to sell the Chinese system to Malaysia, Brazil, the UK and the US.
The national endorsement has made it difficult to pin the problems on local officials. Even before the fatal crash, the government sacked the rail minister on suspicion of corruption. A subsequent decision to lower the maximum speed from 350km per hour to 300km was a tacit admission of dangerous technological over-reach. We don’t yet know the reason for the crash. But pushing the system beyond its technical capacity and cutting corners to free up slush money are plausible factors.
Second, many of the crash victims must have come from China’s new wealthy elites given the, much-criticised, high price of tickets. When school buildings collapsed in Sichuan in the 2008 earthquake, the victims tended to be the children of poorer families. Melamine-tainted baby formula affected a broader cross-section of people. But wealthy urbanites would have had the knowledge and money to buy foreign formula if they chose. That made it slightly easier to quash the story, particularly in an Olympic year when the country was in celebratory mood – or else!
Partly because the victims of this tragedy are members of the new middle class, it has been impossible to keep a lid on the story. Users of Weibo, a Twitter-like microblogging site, have produced an outpouring of contemptuous comment. One posted photos of the rail minister’s fancy watch collection, an indication of his less than modest lifestyle. Weibo alone boasts 140m users, mostly from the urban middle class that the Communist party is supposed to have co-opted into its modernising project.
A middle class revolt is particularly dangerous for the Chinese leadership. It undermines a recent truism of Chinese analysis, sometimes referred to as the Beijing consensus. This contends, among other things, that people don’t worry too much about democracy, freedom of expression and free markets so long as they have a technocratic leadership capable of delivering economic progress.
The cult of GDPism appears no longer to hold. China grew at 10.3 per cent last year, and should clear at least 9 per cent this year. But while taxi drivers riot in Hangzhou over low wages, the revolt over the train crash has been over the more abstract concept of governance. China’s middle class wants a leadership that can contain corruption, ensure safety and not put pride above engineering principles. It wants, in the arresting words of a commentary in the People’s Daily – of all places – economic growth that is not “smeared in blood”.
The anger appears to breathe life into an old argument, all but abandoned in the face of China’s relentless economic progress, that a rising middle class will demand more accountability of its leaders. If that turns out to be true, then, alongside the people who tragically lost their lives on the tracks outside Wenzhou, the Beijing consensus itself may also have perished.

david.pilling@ft.com

Tuesday 26 July 2011

On America's Debt Crisis

It took a Genius like George Bush to achieve this in just 4 years.

When Bush came to power, US had surplus. Bush distributed all that money to rich Americans by means of Tax-Cuts and in his whimsical wars in Iraq and Afganisthan . Then the left over was handed to the bankers as TARP & QE 1,2 all ofcourse in the name of saving the economy from downturn.

Now the Republicans say not just NO to tax rises but insist on only reducing the expenses thereby hitting the poor only.

That's how rich become more rich at the cost of poor. American style.

Pradeep

Friday 10 June 2011

Re: The Swami's Curse

Dear Sir,

Instead of applauding (like the majority of Indians do) the efforts made by Anna Hazare and Swami Ramdev Baba, your article smirks of prejudice.

Corruption is the biggest problem in India along with lack of infrastructure. While it has been proved repeatedly that the 'elected' parliamentarians are themselves corrupt and crooks (if you check out the stats, as of December 2008, 120 of India's 522 parliament members were facing criminal charges) how do you expect them to make honest rules and stick by them?


Regards,

Pradeep Kabra

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The swami's curse
A populist yogi ties the government up in knots
Jun 9th 2011 | DELHI | from the print edition of Economist


BUSHY-BEARDED swamis in women’s clothing. Gurus on hunger strike. Anti-corruption sit-ins. You might have thought the Indian government would know how to deal with these, thanks to long practice. Yet this week its bungling of a public protest turned a loony yogi who peddles quack cures for AIDS, cancer and corruption into a rallying figure for an angry public and opposition. The muttering about changing leaders is growing.

This week’s farce involved the saffron-clad Baba Ramdev, whose wealth, popularity on television and delusions of political grandeur led him to call a fast to the death in Delhi at the weekend. His chosen cause is the repatriation of billions of dollars supposedly stashed abroad by the rich and crooked. He says such cash would pay to wipe hunger from the land. Given public anger over food and fuel inflation, such a claim, however bogus, goes down well.

In more confident times Congress’s long-serving leaders would surely have brushed him aside. Pranab Mukherjee, the canny finance minister, has been atop politics for long enough to remember how a much more powerful guru, the “flying swami”, Indira Gandhi’s yoga teacher, adviser and rumoured lover, was swept into obscurity amid scandals over a personal arms factory and crooked aircraft deals.

Today, the government seems to have lost its touch. Beset by accusations of graft, it may soon have to eject a dodgy-looking coalition ally, a Tamil party thumped in a state election in May. Despite softer economic growth and falling investment, India’s rulers have dared launch no reforms or pass any laws of note this year.

Nor has it known how to tackle problems as they flare up. Instead of preventing the guru’s protest, or letting it take its course, the government tried to control it. First, ministers got the guru to give an empty promise that his gathering would be called off. Then, when he breezily broke that, as tens of thousands of supporters converged, they panicked and sent in stick-wielding police, who lobbed tear gas and attacked the sleeping camp on June 4th.

Beating sleeping anti-corruption protesters while television cameras roll is not the most sensible public-relations policy. Many demonstrators are in hospital and one has been paralysed. Nor does it say much for India’s democratic process, since Mr Ramdev had permission to stage an event (though not, the authorities say, for a mass protest). The saving grace was that the hairy-armed guru was arrested—and photographed—trying to escape while dressed in female attire. Unabashed, he said he would raise a force of 11,000 “so that next time we do not lose any battle”.

The gleeful opposition, the Bharatiya Janata Party, says the Congress party is showing all the leadership qualities of a “headless chicken”. That insult may be routine, but even senior Congress insiders privately voice dismay.

In April Manmohan Singh’s government caved in to another hunger-striker, Anna Hazare, who extracted a big concession, winning for his supporters a right to co-draft an anti-corruption bill. That annoyed parliamentarians and others who say elected politicians, not activists, should write laws. On June 8th Mr Hazare launched another protest in Delhi, while his supporters paraded with posters showing the prime minister, Manmohan Singh, as an incarnation of Ravana, a ten-headed demon of Hindu mythology, shouting “these devils are eating the country”.



Perhaps the summer heat is to blame. Perhaps tempers will ease when the monsoon reaches Delhi next month. Yet the bungling shows that Congress’s back-room managers face a long-term problem: finding able, youthful leaders they can promote. Mr Singh was dutifully wheeled out to defend the attack on Mr Ramdev’s camp, but few believe that he takes day-to-day political decisions. He is 78, and is a technocrat with little appetite for political scrapping. He relies on Mr Mukherjee, only slightly more sprightly at 75. Power is yet further divided, since Sonia Gandhi, Congress’s boss, influences political strategy behind the scenes.

For several years, the youthful leader-in-waiting, who was supposed to inject new blood into the tired party, has been Sonia’s son, the 41-year-old Rahul. Yet Mr Gandhi, who was arrested (and released) in May while trying to speak up for farmers who had had their land stolen, failed to make much of an impression in recent local elections and is facing the most sustained criticism of his brief career. Until Congress can provide better leadership, expect the opposition, social activists and nutty gurus to take advantage.

Tuesday 7 June 2011

Euro's Confidence or The Ass Trick?

The European Politicians 'mistakenly' view the strong Euro as a sign of confidence in it rather than weakness in the dollar.

This reminds me the story of 'The Ass Carrying the Statue'

The ass was being driven into town to the temple, with a great statue of a god on his back. Before too long, he noticed that everyone was taking off their hats and bowing as he passed by.

Now the foolish ass imagined that the people were bowing out of respect for himself and his head began to swell with conceit.

"Why should I be forced to carry on like this, if I am so important?" he thought to himself, and so he dug in his heels, let out a great bray and refused to take another step.

His driver at first could not make out what was making the ass behave in such a way, but when he realised what the problem was, he hit him very hard with his stick and yelled at him. "You vain and stupid ass, do you really think the people are worshipping you, a mere ass? Be on your way at once!"

Pradeep Kabra

Tuesday 24 May 2011

Re: Things That Might Disappear In Our Lifetime.......

I agree with all the items in the list except item no. 5 & 7 viz., The Land Line Telephone & Television

The reasons are as follows:

5. The Land Line Telephone - This is one of the beast which will survive like dot-matrix printer or fax-machines. This is because, majority of the world's broadband is still delivered via the traditional land-lines. The alternative is very expensive fibre optic cable infrastructure. I believe only AT&T/Verizon has done that in America and that too at the cost of competition and long-term price rigging for consumers. Till the satellite technology is mastered - which is going to be very difficult because of the fight for band-width between multiple telecom/technology/house-appliances operators and the military (check-out the fight and the resultant corruption in India's bandwidth auction)
Hence even though nobody uses the Landline for the purpose of making phone calls, it will survive, just as dumb pipes to transmit broadband.

7. Television - The great thing about television is its adaptability. When television first came and started beaming serials and live telecasting sports events in our rooms, it was liberating. It was really revolutionary. But then it followed the American model of privatisation and ads which were supposed to be supplementary became central thereby destroying the whole experience. But in the countries like UK and most of Europe the television is still state sponsored. In UK for example, every family has to pay £145.50 /annum compulsory. That allows BBC to create ad-free wonderful television and survive against the ad-based commercial peers.
But the main reason why TV will survive is not because of this model which is not through-out the world (I wish Indian govt. had taken care of the old Doordarshan) but because of the technology. Due to good broadband facilities in most of the developed world and due to the concept of 'streaming' even in the developing world, TV can be transmitted to your PC and then watched as per your convenience on the TV set using the set-top boxes made by Apple/Google etc., This is already being done via BBC iPlayer in UK, Hulu Player in USA and more.

Regards,

Pradeep


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Something to think about.

Whether these changes are good or bad depends in part on how we adapt to
them. But, ready or not, here they come

1. The Post Office. Get ready to imagine a world without the post office.
They are so deeply in financial trouble that there is probably no way to
sustain it long term. e-mail, Fed Ex, and UPS have just about wiped out the
minimum revenue needed to keep the post office alive. Most of your mail every
day is junk mail and bills.

2. The Cheque. Britain is already laying the groundwork to do away with
checks by 2018. It costs the financial system billions of dollars a year to
process checks. Plastic cards and online transactions will lead to the
eventual demise of the check. This plays right into the death of the post
office. If you never paid your bills by mail and never received them by mail, the
post office would absolutely go out of business.

3. The Newspaper. The younger generation simply doesn't read the
newspaper. They certainly don't subscribe to a daily delivered print edition. That
may go the way of the milkman and the laundry man. As for reading the paper
online, get ready to pay for it. The rise in mobile Internet devices and
e-readers has caused all the newspaper and magazine publishers to form an
alliance. They have met with Apple, Amazon, and the major cell phone companies
to develop a model for paid subscription services.

4. The Book. You say you will never give up the physical book that you
hold in your hand and turn the literal pages. I said the same thing about
downloading music fromiTunes. I wanted my hard copy CD. But I quickly changed
my mind when I discovered that I could get albums for half the price without
ever leaving home to get the latest music. The same thing will happen with
books. You can browse a bookstore online and even read a preview chapter
before you buy. And the price is less than half that of a real book. And
think of the convenience! Once you start flicking your fingers on the screen
instead of the book, you find that you are lost in the story, can't wait to
see what happens next, and you forget that you're holding a gadget instead
of a book.

5. The Land Line Telephone. Unless you have a large family and make a lot
of local calls, you don't need it anymore. Most people keep it simply
because they've always had it. But you are paying double charges for that extra
service. All the cell phone companies will let you call customers using
the same cell provider for no charge against your minutes

6. Music. This is one of the saddest parts of the change story. The music
industry is dying a slow death. Not just because of illegal downloading.
It's the lack of innovative new music being given a chance to get to the
people who would like to hear it. Greed and corruption is the problem. The
record labels and the radio conglomerates are simply self-destructing. Over 40%
of the music purchased today is "catalog items," meaning traditional music
that the public is familiar with. Older established artists. This is also
true on the live concert circuit. To explore this fascinating and
disturbing topic further, check out the book, "Appetite for Self-Destruction" by
Steve Knopper, and the video documentary, "Before the Music Dies."

7. Television. Revenues to the networks are down dramatically. Not just
because of the economy. People are watching TV and movies streamed from their
computers. And they're playing games and doing lots of other things that
take up the time that used to be spent watching TV. Prime time shows have
degenerated down to lower than the lowest common denominator. Cable rates are
skyrocketing and commercials run about every 4 minutes and 30 seconds. I
say good riddance to most of it. It's time for the cable companies to be put
out of our misery. Let the people choose what they want to watch online and
through Netflix.

8. "Things" That You Own. Many of the very possessions that we used to own
are still in our lives, but we may not actually own them in the future..
They may simply reside in "the cloud." Today your computer has a hard drive
and you store your pictures, music, movies, and documents. Your software is
on a CD or DVD, and you can always re-install it if need be. But all of
that is changing. Apple, Microsoft, and Google are all finishing up their
latest "cloud services." That means that when you turn on a computer, the
Internet will be built into the operating system. So, Windows, Google, and the
Mac OS will be tied straight into the Internet. If you click an icon, it
will open something in the Internet cloud.. If you save something, it will be
saved to the cloud. And you may pay a monthly subscription fee to the cloud
provider. In this virtual world, you can access your music or your books,
or your whatever from any laptop or handheld device. That's the good news.
But, will you actually own any of this "stuff" or will it all be able to
disappear at any moment in a big "Poof?" Will most of the things in our lives
be disposable and whimsical? It makes you want to run to the closet and
pull out that photo album, grab a book from the shelf, or open up a CD case
and pull out the insert.

9. Privacy. If there ever was a concept that we can look back on
nostalgically, it would be privacy. That's gone. It's been gone for a long time
anyway. There are cameras on the street, in most of the buildings, and even
built into your computer and cell phone. But you can be sure that 24/7, "They"
know who you are and where you are, right down to the GPS coordinates, and
the Google Street View. If you buy something, your habit is put into a
zillion profiles, and your ads will change to reflect those habits.. And
"They" will try to get you to buy something else. Again and again.

All we will have that can't be changed are Memories.!!!!

Saturday 21 May 2011

The 'mayavi' World of BrandZs!!!

The biggest mis-fortune of the liberalized media is the mis-management of conflict of interests. The best example is the recent publication of BrandZ Top 100.
http://www.millwardbrown.com/libraries/optimor_brandz_files/2011_brandz_top100_chart.sflb.ashx

Ofcourse, the methodology will be given, after-all we live in a democracy in the West. But once you start reading the fine-print including the people behind the publication, things start getting bit more fuzzy. In this specific case of BrandZ Top 100, it is published by a branch of WPP. Now, WPP will have huge interest in the concept of branding because they deal in advertising for the same brands. Isn't it a conflict of interest then. As usual regulators are either sleeping or have been made to look other way in the name of 'small government', 'pro-business policies' blah-blah-blah.

Coming to the specifics, after we cross the management jargon, the list is still mis-leading because of at-least three obvious reasons:
1. The inclusion of Utilities where competition and choice doesn't matter.
2. The Distribution Models which restricts competition and choice.
3. Non-inclusion of Aspirations for brand-story.

1. The inclusion of Utilities: What are Utilities doing in a branding exercise. The nature of utilities is distribution of 'scarce' resources. People have no choice but to go with them. The selection is based on availability and price, not on brand. Whether one buys fuel or go to bank for a loan, the same principal applies.
2. Restrictive distribution models: Again, the way the regulation works is people do not have a choice. Without choice there is no brand. For instance you go to a restaurant, you get either Pepsi or Coke. But not both. Similarly, you go to a petrol station and do we have a choice of fuel from 5 different companies? When the distribution models are masked under protectionism, does brand matters there?
3. Non-inclusion of Aspirations: Clearly, a brand is not just about buying the products but being associated with it not just in the present but in future. What about the aspirations to join the team behind the brands?

The simple questionnaire to define brand loyalty is: Are you happy with the product and will you come-back and recommend it to others?

Covering the methodology under gobbledock of company's earnings to brand-equity makes no sense. It just complicates the matter so that the marketing departments of these companies run to the same people for consultancy services.

The best way of doing a branding survey is:
a) restricting it to products where there is competition and people have choice (automotive/tablets/mobile phones are very good example(s), Banks/Oil Companies are bad examples)
b) capturing not just the present purchase but aspiration to buy the brand's products in future.
c) capturing the aspiration of not just buying the products but to join the team to create future great products.

The irony here is the top-ranked Apple. It's marketing and brand management is based on the company's strategies and not on the consultancy provided to WPP or it's marketing spend. For example, as soon as Steve Jobs declared on the Apple Keynote Presentation that Apple deals and leads in POST-PC products, they pulled the plug from the wonderfully creative 'get a mac' ads. That is how brands are created not just by increasing marketing spend.

To put is simple, the Brand is a representation of not just the products sold but also the culture of the company behind it, the creative team's skills, the aspiration of the students/prospective employees to join that team, the aspiration of the people to buy those products in future etc.,

If all this looks subjective, then of-course it is because the brands are felt by HEART not analyzed by minds and definitely not by company's earnings.

Pradeep Kabra

Tuesday 29 March 2011

Re: On airlines, snow excuses and gobbledygook

Dear Mr. Skapinker,

You mention that the report lays out 4 important lessons. The main lesson the report misses is this:

Public Utilities should never be privatised. The purpose of a utility in an economy is to serve its consumers only. It is diametrically opposite to the profit-only motive of the private debt-laden over-leveraged companies.

That is the biggest lesson. But unfortunately, in the Ango-American form of Capitalism, nothing can be done about it. After each disaster, Committees will be formed, Reports will be generated. But nothing will happen.

Regards,

Pradeep Kabra

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Dear Pradeep,

Many thanks for your email. Of course, public utilities do have their problems too.

Regards,
Michael

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On airlines, snow excuses and gobbledygook
By Michael Skapinker
Published in FT on 29-Mar-201

It took an hour for the spring sunshine to burn away the early morning fog in London on Thursday – too long to prevent a clutch of flight cancellations. There was a queue at the Swiss International Air Lines desk at London City airport and, in the absence of any apparent alternative, I joined it.

An airline employee called out some passengers’ names. I asked whether he could tell the rest of us what was happening. Apparently not. Eventually, one of his colleagues passed along the line, handing out a telephone number. “Can I still get to Basel today?” I asked the not-particularly-interested person who eventually answered my call. He could get me on to a Lufthansa flight via Frankfurt, but I would need to be at Heathrow in an hour.

It was 7.20am, the traffic was thick, so I sent apologies to the five companies I was meant to be seeing and headed to the office, wondering why no one had said: “Ladies and gentlemen, we will try to sort you out, but we are unlikely to get you away before early afternoon. If that doesn’t work for you, please accept our apologies. This is the number to call to arrange your refunds.”

Why don’t companies do the simple things? Because they do not think the problem is their fault (true, in this case), because their staff do not have enough training, information or authority, or because, as organisations, they lack “situational awareness”.

I picked up this bit of jargon in a 76-page report that appeared on the day I missed my meetings. The report came from an inquiry into a far more consequential weather-related snarl-up: the snow that almost shut Heathrow for two days in December, exposing Europe’s busiest airport to worldwide ridicule.

The inquiry was an internal one, headed by David Begg, a transport expert and non-executive director of BAA, Heathrow’s owner. But this was no snow job: BAA invited former airport chief executives from Montreal, Zurich and Chicago to join the inquiry, as well as Roy Williams, who was head of New Orleans International airport when hurricane Katrina struck in 2005.

The report provides an illuminating insight into BAA’s inadequacies, but the lessons extend beyond airports. The principal one is how vital “situational awareness” is. It means more than knowing what is happening. It means having the organisational ethos and systems to anticipate and deal with problems before they get out of hand, whether the threat comes from storms, product failures, consumer dissatisfaction or political upheaval. Companies that lack situational awareness often know a problem is coming, but appear unable to deal with it until it has damaged their business and reputation.

Heathrow knew bad weather was on the way; forecasters had said so. It also knew the snow would strike at the busiest time of the year – the weekend before Christmas. Indeed, with almost every seat sold, the airport was heading for the busiest weekend in its 64-year history.

Measured over that period, the storm was not remarkable – the kind of snow London can expect every five years. It did fall particularly fast, but it did so over the rest of Europe too. On the worst day, Sunday December 19, when Heathrow ran only 5 per cent of its flights, Paris Charles de Gaulle managed 44 per cent, Frankfurt 48 per cent and Amsterdam, recovering from a poor performance two days previously, reached 81 per cent.

There were almost no flights for the 9,500 passengers who spent the Saturday night at Heathrow without enough blankets and water. BAA tried to bring in more blankets, but the lorry could not get through. It was only two days later that Heathrow opened heated marquees with toilets and information screens.

The report lays out the lessons. The first is to have an ambitious, overarching goal: in Heathrow’s case, that it should never close, except for safety or other emergency reasons. Every organisation should have its equivalent. A second lesson is to have a crisis team from key parts of the organisation (including, in Heathrow’s case, passenger welfare). A third is that it have a roster of on-call trained staff.

Fourth, and most important, is to have a single, authoritative source of information to relay to staff and then to customers. The most common complaint in these situations is that no one seems to know what is happening. Heathrow had some barely believable communication barriers: for example, the “crisis support team” could not see the airfield and relied on telephone or handheld radio reports from snow-clearing squads.

Once an organisation has the right processes in place, it should be applying them every day, starting with the smallest problems. I am sure the Swiss airline people are used to snow. But having watched them at work last week, I am not sure I would like to be in their hands in a real crisis.

michael.skapinker@ft.com

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Monday 31 January 2011

Re: Economic growth is not a race to the moon

Dear Clive,

Thanks for this article in today's FT.

The fact is, the secret of America's success in the post-war period was lack of competition more than productivity and other things you mention.

With Japan and Germany (including most of Western Europe) out of the way and Russia closed, America had the whole pie to itself. Hence the un-hindered growth and great life-style for the next 6 decades.

Now, most of the Europe is definitely back on track. But with the China and partly India joining the race, no matter how much productivity America tries to improve, it is not going to help.

The only solution for America is to adapt with lower expectations.

Regards,

Pradeep Kabra




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Economic growth is not a race to the moon
By Clive Crook
Published: January 30 2011 21:30 | Last updated: January 30 2011 21:30
My first take on Barack Obama’s State of the Union address was to find it disappointing. The US president missed the perfect opportunity, I thought, to prepare the US for the fiscal squeeze that must come. Having read the speech more carefully, I feel I was unfair. I was too kind.

Not that I retract everything. The lack of fiscal specifics was the biggest failing. (Next month we shall see whether Mr Obama puts it right in his budget.) And this was partly balanced by some stirring stuff about unity and optimism and American exceptionalism and so forth. But I was too indulgent of the president’s main theme: jobs, innovation and competitiveness.

How could anyone object to that? In 1994, back when he cared more about demystifying economics than scourging conservatives, Paul Krugman wrote a wonderful essay on competitiveness for Foreign Affairs. He was rebutting – too mild a word – the then-prevailing Clintonian orthodoxy, as advanced by Robert Reich and others, which held that competitiveness was the key to prosperity. This myth has never gone out of fashion with business leaders. Mr Obama, in his turn, has now taken it up.

Mr Krugman’s point is not hard to grasp. The ultimate source of higher living standards is growth in productivity, and growth in US productivity has little to do with whether Japan, or China, or any other country is growing quickly or slowly. Admittedly, his own thinking has since evolved. Last week he wrote a column on competitiveness that did not even mention productivity. Never mind, he got it right the first time.

The metaphor of growth as a race with winners and losers – all that stuff in the speech about Sputnik moments, falling behind, winning the 21st century – is nonsense. Over the long haul, if US productivity rises, so will US living standards. Why should growth in China or India hold back US productivity? No reason at all.

Once conditioned to think “productivity” whenever a politician says “competitiveness”, you look at economic policy differently. Winning begins to seem overrated. What exactly do we win, you wonder? Being number one in worldwide production of solar panels would be nice, but how would that raise economy-wide productivity? The key to improving living standards lies not in winning the race to develop showcase technologies, but in accumulating capital, diffusing knowledge and accommodating the disruption that this entails.

Granted, this is a bit of a simplification. Skills tend to cluster. The literature on research and development suggests that social returns are higher than private returns, so the case for subsidising it is strong. The link between productivity and wages has weakened in the US in recent years, partly because health costs have driven a wedge between the two. All such caveats aside, productivity is still the key, and you do not raise it by putting men on the moon (even if you get pens that can write upside-down as a spin-off). Productivity is about doing boring things well.

Educate your workers. Build roads and bridges (high-speed trains, optional). Don’t punish savers. Don’t overregulate. Let good businesses flourish and bad ones fail. “Higher productivity” is another way of saying “lower costs” – so let companies strive to lower them. Welcome cheap imports: they raise real incomes.

What use is that, you might say, if the jobs all go? The jobs don’t all go. Unemployment is high in the US today because demand collapsed, not because the US is “uncompetitive”. Eventually, demand will revive and employment will recover.

Even in good times, foreign competition forces workers to find new jobs. If you are going to object to that, complain about labour-saving innovation as well. A successful economy is not one that avoids displacing workers, but one that speeds them back into good jobs.

Assisting this transition is a proper role for economic policy. In the end, though, the pay these jobs command will depend on physical and human capital – that is, on productivity.

Aside from the muddle over competitiveness, the president also seems confused about innovation and jobs. They rarely go together, at least in the first instance. The desire to cut costs, including labour costs, is why most innovation happens.

The president envisages a surge of investment and employment in clean energy. You can justify this on environmental and national security grounds; you can justify it as stimulus spending, too, which might boost aggregate employment. But clean energy is a disruptive technology: go to West Virginia and ask a miner. At full employment – or as part of a revenue-neutral package, which the president seems to have in mind – it would destroy as many jobs as it created.

The US is a remarkably rich country because it has a remarkably productive economy. Mainly, I credit its daunting work ethic, its appetite for economic dislocation and its post-1945 surge of investment in education.

The work ethic is unimpaired. By European standards, economic dislocation is still tolerated. But the US education system, despite the country’s pre-eminent universities, is failing. I don’t doubt that this is the biggest threat to future US living standards. The president mentioned it in his speech. That part, I loved.

clive.crook@gmail.com