meek-investor

You may have heard of the 100 km traffic jam in Beijing where traffic moved at 1 km a day - that's right a day; not an hour. This post is a learned treatise on handling exactly such a situation. There's no point cursing or wailing. It won't get you any further than 1 km a day. No point abandoning your automobile to come and get it another time - whenever you get it you still can only do 1km a day. You have to turn to India for advice; for Indians love to spend half their waking lives absolutely stationary on the road. The first thing you need to do is to climb your car over the divider (yes, that's possible) and drive at 100 kmph on the opposite side of the road. Since you can absolutely rely on 5000 other people doing the same, you will progress 1 km and then come to a screeching halt. You can also  confidently rely on the fact that people stuck in the opposite direction would have also done the same and therefore the street now has the proper order of two armies faci...

Once upon a time, long long ago, before gils was born, there was a time when there was only a single TV channel in India. Of course , it was government controlled - Doordarshan was the only channel and those who want to experience that torture can tune in to CCTV today. The powers that be in Doordarshan decreed that prime time viewing must be Krishidarshan (a program on agriculture, for those unfamiliar with the concept). But even in that era there were some gems which evoke nostalgic memories. This post is about one of them. Apologies to the non Indian readers of this blog - second successive weekend post on a very Indian matter. But then when you search for something for long  and finally find it, you can't help but go a little over the top. I've been looking for this TV clip on the internet for a few years with no success. Finally found it. Yesterday  So the post naturally follows. Promise to desist from purely Indian matters for a while after this. There was an organisat...

It has not been a good month for newspaper unions at bankrupt newspaper companies or the government corporation that insures pension funds. As part of their reorganizations, a number of bankrupt newspaper firms are not paying money owed union pensions or are quietly letting the guaranty pick up the tab for retiree costs. Unions of Philadelphia Newspapers LLC (The Inquirer and The Philadelphia Daily News) were forced to accept 12 cents on the dollar for the $12 million the bankrupt company owned to employee pension plans as part the reorganization plan. The Chicago Sun-Times off-loaded $49.1 million of its underfunded pension obligations for 2300 retirees and employees to the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. The paper and it suburban subsidiaries were purchased out of bankruptcy without the new owners assuming the pension obligations. The Dayton News Journal dumped $15.4 million in underfunded pensions payments on the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. , which will ensure 1,100 current and fo...

Californians are the best example of the concept that it is a thin line separating genius from madness.  The genius of Californians is well known. If there is one single place that is deemed to be the most creative in the world, it has to be somewhere in California. Many of the world's greatest inventions originate from there. Maybe its in the water; maybe its in the air, but something makes creativity flourish in California. It is then a mystery as to why such creative people are adept at scoring own goals. California adopts a particularly virulent form of voter activism. All sorts of ideas are presented to voters in referendums and if passed, have to be observed. A series of such voter passed Propositions have made California virtually ungovernable, at least financially. Witness the annul ritual of theatre in passing of their budget. In keeping with that tradition, California voters  passed two years ago Proposition 2, designed to create humane standards for farm animals. La...

India is 63 years old today. Well, India is several millennia old, but also only 63 years young. It is Independence Day for India the country, as it exists today. Bits and pieces have gone away – Pakistan, Bangladesh and so on. But a large part came together, as it never had had all through its history. People with different cultures, different languages, different religions, and even with wildly different looks, came together as one nation this day 63 years ago. At midnight on that momentous day, as the Union Flag came down and the Indian tricolor came up, Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister made the famous Tryst with Destiny speech . You can even view a small portion of the speech here . India’s independence heroes came from all parts of the country – as diverse as the land itself. There wasn’t even a common language they could speak in. And yet, they came as Indians, first and foremost. Not as Punjabis or Bengalis or Maharashtrians or Tamilians. But as Indians. To my mind, t...

You may have followed the drama of Mark Hurd's exit as the CEO of HP; if you haven't, here's a good summary of what happened. Hurd was very successful  at least in Wall Street's eyes, as HP's boss. All numbers, by which Wall Street judges companies were up and markets loved Hurd after the seemingly chaotic Carly Fiorina. But its rumoured that Hurd was despised by many of HP's employees, not least because while he was cutting costs brutally, he was awarded an annual compensation in the range of $50m. HP seems to be lurching from one disaster to another. After all the drama of the Compaq acquisition and the public ouster of Fiorina, sometime ago a scandal broke out over the investigation of press leaks from insiders that  led to the ouster of the then Chairman Patricia Dunn. Now Hurd is gone in another messy saga. But this post is not about HP. Its about how even very smart people do very silly mistakes.Harvard Business Publishing carried this very good article ...

The news came out yesterday that Brenda Barnes was stepping down as Chairman and CEO of Sara Lee. She's stepping down on medical grounds; she had suffered a stroke in May. May we wish her a speedy recovery. I had posted sometime ago on The "Different" Brenda Barnes . She's a great role model for women who take a career break to raise children and come back successfully to top management. She's one of the best examples of women juggling career and home in a balanced way. Many successful career women choose to focus almost exclusively on their career. Brenda Barnes is different. She stepped off and stepped back again. Successfully. Her stint at Sara Lee was a mixed bag. She restructured the company and focused it as a foods company, selling of bits and pieces. She certainly  developed a strong management team - the interim CEO is a person some readers of this blog will recognise from past association. But shareholders did not see success in the share price. Neverthe...

Comparisons between China and India are sure to provoke a yawn . Its an overwritten about topic . However, when I saw a report in the Wall Street Journal comparing the Indian and Chinese entrepreneur, I could not, but help, write a post. The report says both sets of entrepreneurs are extremely bullish about the future. Both don't think the recession has not really affected their future prospects. Both believe their lives will be dramatically improved in the years to come. All very good. Everybody knows that optimism is in short supply in the West and in excess in the East. The differences are also predictable. Indian entrepreneurs start out to "be their own boss". Chinese entrepreneurs start out to make money. Indians seem to be motivated to go down this route by the family and by role models. Chinese seem to be motivated by the government. Indians rely more on family financing or known investors. Chinese rely more on banks. Indians seem to rely on creativity to launch a...

Political correctness has seeped into every facet of life. Witness Goldman Sachs's recent policy banning profanity from emails. Fair enough - it seems reasonable that employees should not using four letter expletives in formal communication. But then where does normal venting of spleen end and profanity start ? Apparently asterisks aren't allowed too. You can't say s@#*. You can't use popular abbreviations such as WTF. Where will this end ? I know where it will end. There will be a Chief Language Officer appointed ! Goldman's reaction is perfectly understandable. In Senate hearings (now commonplace risks for any company), the famous email from Thomas Muntag has been oft quoted  "Boy, that timberwolf was one s___ deal" - now you can understand the title of this post, can't you. This innocuous email has come to haunt the company as pompous and self righteous senators (whose vocabulary of four letter words is no less fearsome) have used it to portray the...