There’s something very wrong when common sense is completely thrown out of the window. We all know that law can be an ass and lawyers an unbelievable pain in the aforesaid part of the anatomy, but this story takes the cake for the ultimate in nonsense. Only in the United States would something like this be even remotely comprehensible.Two Sprint employees who worked in their store in Denver were fired....
Thursday, 29 April 2010
Wednesday, 28 April 2010
Nuke Power Point
If you ever listed the most undesirable inventions in the world, Power Point should feature somewhere at the top of the list. This blogger’s visceral antagonism to Power Point may be well known to long time readers – there’s a series of posts on this here.It was therefore with unbelieving incredulity that I read of Power Point’s infiltration into the US army in the New York Times’ report here. I had...
Monday, 26 April 2010
Hong Kong or Singapore ?
An old stale subject, but since I happened to read an article in the Financial Times on this, why not add to the zillion words already written on this comparison.Both are financial centres; both are dynamic and vibrant city states. They are the usual two choices for any company’s Asian headquarters. As a financial centre, after London and New York, Hong Kong is ranked third; Singapore fourth. They...
Sunday, 25 April 2010
A worthless post on the nature and cause of spamming - with due apologies to Adam Smith
Every day morning, my one sure chore is this – open Blogger after dodging the net nanny and delete the couple of spam comments that my blog has attracted. Irritation has started to give a little way to intrigue - who are these guys and gals and what are they trying to do ??These days common email services such as Hotmail, Yahoo and Google have pretty good spamguards; so the number of spam emails can...
Thursday, 22 April 2010
The problem with too much cash
Too much cash. An envious position to be in, but there are a few companies in this predicament. What do you do with all that cash ?Apple is the best example of a company with a massive cash problem. Yesterday they announced results that blew the market away. But they also have a problem. Cash. Lots of it lying idle. Actually $42bn of it. Earning a princely return of 0.75% per annum. And they are...
Wednesday, 21 April 2010
Om namo GDP aya namaha
“This house believes that GDP growth is a poor measure of improving living standards”. That’s the proposition in the live online debate being currently run by The Economist. You can access this debate here. At the time of writing this post 68% of the online voters agree with this proposition.
It seems rather the in thing to agree with the proposition. You can plausibly argue that there’s more to...
Monday, 19 April 2010
Why is loyalty a four letter word ?
A very nice piece from Lucy Kellaway in today’s Financial Times touched me. It touched me because it could be me she was writing about. Lucy is a brilliant journalist and her pieces in the FT are something I always read – she brings a down to earth realism, without the spin, that is very refreshing.This is a topic most readers of this blog will not relate to, for you are young and probably at the...
Sunday, 18 April 2010
Mad Hatter Tea Party
Last Friday was the deadline for tax submissions in the US. In recent years this has become a media event, thanks to the “Tea Party Movement”. This blog is not a political blog, even on a Sunday, so I will try not to comment on the politics of it. I can’t but resist drawing your attention to the sound intellectual basis for the “Party”, especially considering the towering genius in Sarah Palin who...
Friday, 16 April 2010
Oh be obese
Should a life insurance company invest in the shares of fast food companies ? They have been accused of “dining” on fast food profits while preaching the gospel of healthy eating to their customers in a paper that was published yesterday by Harvard researchers. Only somebody from Harvard can do research on such a crucial, life critical (pun intended) and urgent issue facing the business world.Insurance...
Tuesday, 13 April 2010
Two cheers for Labour's Cadbury law
The Labour party in the UK has announced a “Cadbury Law” as part of its election manifesto. This was motivated by the aftermath of the Kraft takeover of Cadbury. It has many good and some bad features and can potentially be a model for takeover law in many countries.The broad proposals are as follows- M&A transactions have to be approved by a two thirds majority and not just a simple majority.-...
Monday, 12 April 2010
What's your CQ ? Are you Glocal ?
Everybody, who’s anybody, is a management guru. Yours truly included. No wonder airport book shops are filled to the rafters with all sorts of business books. I’ve often wondered who reads all of them. Most of them are boring ego trips, or say the mind blowingly obvious in obscure jargon.This mini tirade has been triggered by a book review I read. The review introduces two pieces of jargon I had never...
Sunday, 11 April 2010
Much ado about nothing
People get very worked up about their job titles. It seems to be a matter of life and death whether you are an Assistant General Vice President or a Deputy Senior Group Executive. On this gloomy Sunday, a typically dreary , foggy, day in Guangzhou, I decided to do a learned treatise on job titles .
Some people lay great store on the words in their job titles. Vice President is a very commonly coveted...
Friday, 9 April 2010
Ni Hao Great Britain
A crying shame, it is. This blog is not meant to be political in nature and is (usually) not prone to hyperbolic hand wringing. This post does both, unashamedly. I just could not believe that the Digital Economy Bill was “passed”, or rather rushed through the British House of Commons. Actually what took place was the ‘Third reading”, which is not the same thing as passing. But we won’t get into quaint...
Wednesday, 7 April 2010
ICICI Bank is a foreign bank !
This blog started life a year and a bit ago with the very first post titled “What is 'American Goods' anyway ?" . Now I return back to the same theme after reading a news item that the Reserve Bank of India has declared both ICICI Bank and HDFC bank to be “foreign banks”.
For those unfamiliar with the Indian banking environment, throughout the socialist days of the 70s and 80s India lived with a...
Monday, 5 April 2010
The wedding photography business
Where there is a human need; there will be a business. Welcome to the highly specialized world of wedding photography.
Not the Indian variety. The Indian wedding has now become a video occasion of the silliest sort. Bright lights are shone at all and sundry, and in the hot Indian clime, it is a virtual torture. Most people are unused to being videoed ; so they put on their most solemn expression...
Sunday, 4 April 2010
Three cheers to the Beeb
This blogger is a complete, total, unabashed , fawning admirer of the British Broadcasting Corporation, affectionately called the Beeb in Her Majesty’s realm. There is simply no media organization in the world that comes anywhere close to the BBC. Period.
Yes, the BBC is the most trusted news organization in the world. Yes, the BBC’s radio and TV programmes are produced with a professionalism that...
Friday, 2 April 2010
Now you can't sue me
Well, almost. You can sue me, but your chances of winning have considerably diminished. In a landmark ruling yesterday, the British Court of Appeals ruled in favour of the science writer Simon Singh in the libel case brought against him by the British Chiropractic Association (BCA).Simon Singh is a British science writer. In a column in The Guardian in April 2008, Simon Singh criticized the BCA making...
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