meek-investor

If it wasn't so sad, it would have been a classic case study where everybody was at fault. The Marikana miners strike in South Africa is a disaster where every party - the miners, the company, the unions, the police and the government deserve censure for the way they have conducted themselves. Here is what happened. One of the platinum mines belonging to the mining giant Lonmin is in the Marikana area in South Africa. In early August there was a flash strike over pay demands. The situation escalated badly and resulted in a violent incident on 16th August when police firing resulted in 34 miners being  killed and 78 injured. Prior to this 2 police officers had also been killed. Since the infamous Sharpeville massacre in 1960, this was the worst violence in South Africa, and certainly the blackest day in the post apartheid era. The company Lonmin deserves some of the blame. Its workers are poor and live in shantytowns without any decent housing. Since 2001, the price of platinum ha...

Do you like Ben & Jerry's ice cream? Most probably a resounding yes.  But this post is not about its ice cream. Its about what it has done on Tuesday. What it did on Tuesday was to go to New York's Zuccotti Park where the Occupy Wall Street protesters are camped and dole out free ice cream to all of them. Nothing spectacular about that, except that it went on to publicly declare its support for the protesters. It also published a statement from its Board of Directors that the company has the deepest admiration for the protesters and is standing with them. You can read what the Board said here . Ben & Jerry's has long been a left leaning company promoting a variety of causes. Its founders Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield started the company with a clear social and sometimes political agenda. So should this latest action be surprising. Yes, because, Ben & Jerry's is no longer an independent company. It's a subsidiary of Unilever, a global multinational compa...

Murray Hill is running for the US Congress. At first glance, nothing seems to be wrong with that – surely anybody can run for Congress. But then Murray Hill is unique and a first. For its full name is Murray Hill Inc. It’s a company; not a person. An interesting article in the Economist (click here ) examines this quirky issue superbly. This is a consequence of a landmark US Supreme Court judgment in January. In a bitterly divided 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment free speech rights extended to corporations. The biggest impact of this ruling would be that no limits can be placed on political contributions by businesses. The impact of business on politics is bound to increase, and this has generally been considered to be not a good thing. But another consequence of the decision seems to be what Murray Hill is contemplating. It faces huge hurdles for sure – there must be a myriad of other laws that require a candidate to be of flesh and blood. As The Economis...

The word business is nowadays accompanied by a metaphorical holding of the nose. Post the financial crisis, businessmen would probably rank just above bankers and below more traditional last placers like real estate agents, in the list of reputable professions. Readers of this blog would know that the author is a staunch defender of business and advocates the view that the profession is unfairly maligned. An earlier post had touched on this subject. It was gratifying to read The Economist’s Schumpeter column, The Silence of Mammon , which argues that business people should stand up for themselves. The article recounts the two arguments it says proponents have put forth in defence of business – that many firms are devoted to good works and that businessmen have done more than any other institution to advance prosperity. It opines that these are not enough and puts forth three more arguments to counter the critics of business who have dominated the discussion on corporate morality – ...

The house of the Tatas has been synonymous with values which are unique in the annals of business history. This post is about why they more than deserve their illustrious reputation. This is from an e mail doing the rounds – these are apparently notes taken by Dilip Ranjekar , CEO of the Azim Premji Foundation. I haven’t requested permission from Dilip, or the persons who forwarded me this mail, to post this, but I am sure none would mind me spreading a story that ought to be told and will bring a lump to your throat. Here it is Last evening, I had a dinner meeting with HNS in Goa He narrated the 26th November 2008 terror attack on Taj Mumbai and there were some important points. Terrorist entry 1. They entered from the Leopold Colaba hotel entrance and also from the northern entrance - spraying indiscriminate bullets on the Taj security personnel and guests in general. 2. Though Taj had a reasonable security - they were surely not equipped to deal with terrorists who were spraying 6 ...

Are some sectors of business activity more "noble” than others ? Pure capitalism is completely agnostic in the softer emotions. But humans are not “pure”. They have emotions. So it is , but natural, that they rank some spheres of activity as more noble than others. Show me a human being who’ll say that being a real estate agent is better than being a teacher. It is rare, but sometimes you come across something you read that perfectly matches with what you have been thinking at the back of your mind, but never expressed. For me, The genuine nobility of manufacturing by Luke Johnson was a light turning on moment. Here’s an excerpt from the article that perfectly captures a nagging doubt I’ve been having “In almost any country, dealing in property, shares or companies will likely lead to riches far faster than running factories to produce the goods we all need. I would love an economist to explain to me the flaw in our system that leads to this far from ideal outcome. Most intelligen...

A lot has been, and will be said about the social responsibility of businesses. But what about the social responsibility of consumers ? This article set me thinking Each one of us, as consumers, have the power to make or break businesses – every time we buy, or not buy, something, we hold in our hand the fate of every business in the supply chain of that product. Should we not exercise this power in a “responsible” way. Most of our purchasing decisions are purely dictated by what is good for us – cheapest price, the best quality, whatever. Nothing wrong with that. But its worth a thought if some other criteria might also come into the equation. The area where consumers are beginning to act is climate change. Like buying locally made goods. Shunning products that are harmful to the environment (like gas guzzling vehicles). Carbon offsets in flying. And so on. A few companies have tried to compete on a social theme. Companies like The Body Shop, Ben & Jerry ice cream, etc. But in the...

What's the most precious thing in the world ? Depending on the context and the person, you can get hundreds of answers. If I ask the question in the context of Corporate Social Responsibility - What is the most precious thing a company can give to the community?, an expected answer would be money. It would not be mine. Mine would be time. My eyes were opened on how organised volunteering has become in some parts of the world from Chris Jarvis' excellent blog - Realizing Your Worth . Chris is a practitioner; that's his business and you can see from his posts, how much can, and ought to, be done. What social organisations often lack are some specific skills and numbers of committed workers. They have passion in plenty. They are committed to causes in ways I can only marvel. They usually feel they are short of just money. No; they are often short of organisational and management skills and of specific technical skills. Very often such organisations have grown from a small grou...

If you are a company doing business in the developing world, chances are that you are not far away from poverty in a very basic form. You cannot, and should not, be an island behind electrified fences. And at the same time, its not your job to solve global hunger. What can you do ? What should you do ? You are doing something, by the very fact of your existence. You provide jobs to people. There is no better way of fighting poverty than that. This is the greatest good that companies can do. Locational choices on where to operate are dictated by a whole host of considerations – nearness to market, availability of inputs, government incentives, cost structures, etc etc. I suggest that one more criteria be added – poverty around the location. Other things being equal, go to a place with higher poverty. Perhaps go to places where others haven’t been. Go outside of the big cities. This isn’t an ideological rant. In my business life, I’ve been part of many many locational choices. Our best d...

I’m posting a few pieces on Corporate Social Responsibility in the developing world. I had posted my views on what companies should NOT do here and what they could do here , a few months ago. I’m picking up the theme in relation to the developing world, because the circumstances and the maturity of CSR are , I believe, different in the developing world. In my book, the first role of a socially responsible organization is to follow the law. This is not so simple in the developing world as it might seem. The first question is “what law ?”. The laws of the country you are operating in ? The laws of the country you are headquartered ? You say it should be the law of the country in which you are operating in. But what if the law is silent on something which is taken for granted in other parts of the world – say for eg pollution. If the standards are lax in the country , would you follow only those standards, or would you follow those in the developed world ? Is "pollution outsourci...

Chris Jarvis has made a superb post in his blog Realizing your Worth on "Trust : Why businesses lost it and how to win it back." He quotes Charles Handy , an Irish philosopher specializing in organizational management who wrote in his book ‘What’s a Business For’ in 2002 this prescient paragraph: The markets will empty and share prices will collapse, as ordinary people find other places to put their money--into their houses, maybe, or under their beds. The great virtue of capitalism, that it provides a way for the savings of society to be used for the creation of wealth--will have been eroded. So we will be left to rely increasingly on governments for the creation of our wealth, something that they have always been conspicuously bad at doing.....Trust is fragile. Like a piece of china, once cracked it is never quite the same. And people's trust in business, and those who lead it, is today cracking." Click here to read this superb post.