meek-investor

Business jargon is complex as it is. It is made even more unintelligible by meaningless acronyms. Think of how much drivel we spout every day in the office. Yesterday, my daughter was telling me of the classes she had in her primary school. She said one of her classes was VCOP. For the life of me I could not understand what on earth it was. She didn't either ! I finally discovered that it was "Vocabulary, Connectives, Openers and Punctuation". Oh ! She was having an English class ! This reminded me of my first day at work, all those years ago. I had graduated from business school and was starry eyed and ready to take on the world . I was supposed to be a finance "cat". I walk in , into a leading company and was shown the management accounting template of the company which read like this I gaped at it open mouthed. Here I was, reasonably intelligent, from a good business school and I couldn't understand a word. It was a most humbling experience. We do this al...

The Business returns this week with its full cast and a warm-up performance by San Francisco Regional Air Guitar Champion "The Awesome." Fresh and smart meets loud and sweaty tonight at 8pm.

The Satyam affair broke out in early Jan with Raju's famous letter . Since then, two parallel chain of events have happened - one handled brilliantly and one handled abysmally. When the news broke, the company was on the verge of immediate collapse. The government acted swiftly in naming an eminent Board to take over. These individuals demonstrated why they are of so eminent a stature. They immediately took control, kept the business going, reassured customers and employees, staved off an immediate crisis, held an auction, found a buyer (can you imagine how difficult a task that would have been) and did a deal in 3 months flat. There is now a reasonable future ahead for the company, its employees, its shareholders and its customers. By any yardstick this is a stupendous achievement. I haven't really heard, or read about, the plaudits they richly deserve. They deserve a medal. Messers Karnik, Parekh, Achutan and everybody else involved in saving the company - take a bow. The oth...

I read the news from General Motors yesterday, that they are discontinuing their Pontiac line from next year , with some sadness. I grew up in the days when what was good for GM, was good for America. The best selling business book was, of course, "On a clear day, you can see General Motors". Any aspiring MBA graduate could reel off the famous five of GM - Chevrolet, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Buick and Cadillac. Every Hollywood movie of those days had one these beauties as a star character. GM was, after all, the largest company in the world. Those days, mass communication was still at its infancy. The internet had not arrived. Doordarshan had just made its tentative steps in India (with such wonderfully stimulating programs such as Krishidarshan). Yet all of us had known a lot about GM, even without stepping outside India and only seeing Ambassadors on Indian roads. Pontiac is 83 years old. It was introduced when Alfred P Sloan was the legendary chairman of GM. Its heydays were...

Failure isn’t what it used to be. Bankrupt newspaper companies are following the lead of AIG and Lehman Brothers and rewarding executives with large bonuses. The Tribune Co. is trying to pay out $13 million in bonuses, the Journal Registers Co. is trying to pay $2 million, and Philadelphia Newspapers has already given hundreds of thousands in bonuses to its corporate officers. Company spokesmen say the bonuses make good business sense by rewarding good performance and keeping executives from leaving the companies. Both arguments are hollow. The first rationale rewards performance in running the companies into the ground and the retention rationale assumes other newspaper companies are hiring and would want to hire the tainted executives. The issue of bonuses has emerged because newspapers filing for bankruptcy are not liquidating, but using Chapter 11 to create reorganization plans that will allow them to change the terms of the debt and union contracts. They have to seek approval from...

One final poser and I'll move on from this topic. You discover something about a key supplier of yours that you didn't know before. He employs child labour. Would you 1) Stop buying from him even though it may affect your business 2) Report his employing child labour to the authorities, but continue to buy from him 3) Ignore this, saying its his business and none of yours If you work for a global company, you probably have no choice - NGOs will roast your company alive. (Remember Nike in China ?) But , assume you are in a small local company. What will you do ? Would your answer be different, if instead of discovering that he employs child labour, you discover one of the following - He is cheating on VAT (excise, sales tax, whatever) and evading them , or, - He is discriminating against women Would your answer be the same ?

Today's poser. You resign from your company and join another company. Your were happy with your previous employer and he treated you well - you are moving just because a better opportunity arose. In your new job, you need to hire four good lieutenants. You know that if you approached your four buddies in the old company, they would join you (for they loved working with you). But if those four left too, the business in the old company would be seriously affected. This is one of those cases where in different cultures, you'd get completely different first responses. In some cultures, this is not a dilemma at all - you'd just do it. In other cultures, this would be a complete no no. But, as I mused before, I believe these are deeply individual decisions based on one's values and beliefs. There is no "right" answer. Would you place the call to your buddies ?