Showing posts with label Barack Obama. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Barack Obama. Show all posts

Monday, April 08, 2013

B&E This Fortnight

INTERNATIONAL
BUSINESS, ECONOMY & FINANCE
Zero job growth!
America’s gold plated standards in political and economic leadership have become a laughing stock. And President Barack Obama – also being dubbed as “President Zero” by the Republicans is at the receiving end of this phenomenon which has engulfed America. In fact, the dust from the debt ceiling drama hadn’t even settled when the government report on jobs released on Friday became a more pressing concern for the Obama administration. Apart from narrating the pathetic state of unemployment, the report revealed that there was zero job growth in August – an indication that the economy has come to a halt and that further inaction by the administration might be lethal. As a result Obama has devised a $447 billion job growth package and the proposal has been sent to the Congress for approval. Half the budget comprises tax cuts. The rest would be allocated towards improving infrastructure to keep people on the job. Further, measures include easing stringent environmental emissions (which supposedly hamper employment). With elections round the corner and Obama’s approval rating dropping to an all time low, it is increasingly becoming difficult to imagine how the President who came into power with hopes and mass hysteria will repeat history once again.

Carol Bartz fired!
“I am very sad to tell you that I’ve just been fired over the phone by Yahoo’s chairman. It has been my pleasure to work with all of you and I wish you only the best going forward.” It didn’t take much time for Carol Bartz, the outspoken former CEO of Yahoo! to take out her iPad and write a mail to the company’s 13,000 employees informing them that she had been fired. Bartz’s two year tumultuous stint at the beleaguered web giant came to an end on September 07. One of the most celebrated entities of the Web 1.0 era, Yahoo! struggled to cope as Google took over the world wide web by storm. When Bartz took over as CEO, she had cut jobs, outsourced its loss making search business to Microsoft and attempted to streamline operation. She was partly successful in mobilising the stock at around $13, however, investors were uneasy and could not wait to see the impact of the fixtures Bartz had introduced. Moreover, she ended up publicly alienating Jack Ma, Group CEO, Alibaba (Yahoo’s key Japan ally) who in turn spun off the payment too, Alipay (one of the company’s most profitable asset) without compensating for Yahoo’s share. Further, the company missed second quarter revenue targets. Whatever the reasons were, investors didn’t like it and Bartz was fired. However, instead of cutting deadwood, Yahoo’s board should contemplate breaking down the business and selling it off. In fact, they goofed up when they turned down Microsoft’s acquisition offer three years back.


Source : IIPM Editorial, 2012.
An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri

For More IIPM Info, Visit below mentioned IIPM articles

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Saturday, October 13, 2012

In the name of the holy spirit...

World politics and religion are as intertwined as Barack Obama to his advertent (?) omissions; a brief phenomonological debate

Religious-political lobbying is not a new phenomenon, be it from the time of the crusaders, holy wars, World Wars or the latest war on terrorism; every time the world took momentous political decisions, lobbyists were actively present to influence governments in the name of their fathers, the sons and all the holy spirits available. Closer in time, if the current US President, Barack Obama, in his most historical inaugural address talked about secularism and specifically orated, “We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus – and non-believers,” it will take an extremely blind (or forgiving) phenomenologist to ignore the deliberate skipping by Obama of Buddhists (listed by CIA as being more in the US – 0.7% of US population – than Muslims, 0.6%), Unitarian Universalists (listed by US Census as being almost equal to the number of Hindus; 0.3% versus 0.4% respectively) and of many other registered religions. On the side of Martin Heidegger’s caution, if Obama’s considerate renunciation of all ‘other’ religions to the ‘non-believer’ category is only to be considered an expansive mistake, one believes it was quite a deliberately appropriate time to make it, given the global audience that was lapping it all up.

Freedom of religion in the US is considered to go hand in hand with Thomas Jefferson’s concept of separation of church and the State, which he enshrined in The First Amendment, which states “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,” and that neither can it prohibit the practise of any religion. But the honeymoon of religion and politics seems to never get over as many of America’s leaders have almost conspiratorially nurtured the same completely against The First Amendment.

The question is, if Jefferson’s clear ‘Wall’ between the State and the church was supposed to have been maintained very clearly and publicly, then where does one draw the line when US leaders naughtily flirt around with paradoxical religio-political issues? The previous President George W Bush, in his State of the Union address, not only renewed a call for Congress to materialise his “faith-based proposals” that would allow religious organisations to compete for more government contracts without strict conditions, but also attended a papal funeral. What’s so strange in that? In US history, he was the first sitting US president to do so (for example, even Pope John Paul I’s funeral was attended by Carter’s mother, not James Carter). Bush even met John Paul II to insist the Pope persuade US bishops to criticise Kerry’s policies on various Catholic-sensitive social issues.


Source : IIPM Editorial, 2012.

For More IIPM Info, Visit below mentioned IIPM articles.
 
IIPM : The B-School with a Human Face
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Wednesday, August 01, 2012

Better look dumb on paper?

As Ambassador to India, Roemer has had a wonderful stint full of achievements, but revelations of his diplomatic communications to the US government have undermined his character to a significant extent

Serena Williams, while losing quite unimpressively at the US Open this week, screamed at the match referee after sorely losing a point, “If you ever see me walking down the hall...walk the other way” Many Indian politicians might wish to replicate Ms. Williams’ greetings for Timothy Roemer, whose two years term as 21st US Ambassador to India (July 23, 2009 - April 26, 2011) provided unprecedented success for American interests in India. During his tenure, President Barack Obama made his longest stay in a foreign nation in India; US export to India surged by 17%, both countries signed the Counterterrorism Cooperation Initiative and many high level American diplomats including Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, Commerce Secretary Gary Locke, and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano made their visits to India.

While all that may be impressive, his amateurish interpretations of diplomatic affairs as an ambassador surprised many and have seriously undermined his achievements, as WikiLeaks cables made some of his official cables public. As ambassador, his statements were supposed to be highly responsible and he should have ideally not painted them with his own perceptions on the situation. But his cables have yielded rather undesirable results, ever since they caught the WikiLeaks bug.

As per one of the WikiLeaks cable releases, former National Security Advisor of India M. K. Narayanan told Roemer that India wants to “maintain a regular dialogue with China so as to avoid a repeat of the 1962 Indo-China war.” In another cable, he reported to US that Narayanan had told him that India was not interested in David Headley’s extradition. Narayanan strongly refuted this in the media.



Posted by at 11:38 AM
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Friday, July 27, 2012

As India Intensifies its Struggle against Corruption in The Political Sphere, Virat Bahri wonders why The Debate on Transparency can’t be Extended to India inc. as well, and how B&E Power 100 Companies can play a key role

“In God we trust; all others bring data!” Dr. W. Edwards Deming, American statistician”

“Earnings can be as pliable as putty when a charlatan heads the company reporting them.” Warren Buffett, Chairman, Berkshire Hathaway”


Ruling parties of the day in India are not generally concerned about any issue of voter confidence they face; unless of course it happens in election year. They are quite self assured about the incredibly short public memory, just as they are of their ability to sway popular opinion back in their favour through some deft political maneuvering as the time comes.

This time, though, matters have been very different, at least so far. Even as the first half of year 2011 comes to a close, the issue of corruption and how it stands in India’s way to becoming a First World country, has become too well etched in public memory for UPA to brush under the carpet. And this is a great victory for the ‘Anna Hazare’ brand of activism – however you may perceive it. For a nation with a score of 3.3 (equal to Albania, Jamaica & Liberia) and a rank of 87 in the Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index 2010, such a movement deserves Godspeed.

In these turbulent times, one does wonder, though, on the reasons why the debate on transparency still centres so much on politics and not on corporate India. That is surprising, since the 2G scam is where the most serious questions on the government started getting raised. Five executives were also arrested - Unitech Wireless (Tamil Nadu) Ltd. MD Sanjay Chandra, Swan Telecom Director Vinod Goenka and three high profile executives from Reliance ADAG.

Consider an interesting contrast in the following two situations, where protests on transparency came from unexpected quarters. While we recently witnessed how yoga guru Baba Ramdev took up the cudgels against the centre to declare black money at Swiss Bank accounts as national property, the US saw four orders (all shareholders of Goldman Sachs) of Catholic nuns protesting in the month of April against the excessive compensations amounting to around $70 million paid by Goldman Sachs to CEO Lloyd Blankfein and four other top executives for year 2010. Activism in the US face a significantly enhanced level of scrutiny from all stakeholders. In India, however, it’s still largely about government and bureaucracy, apart from serious land acquisition related protests from communities like Posco, Vedanta, Arcelor Mittal and Tata Motors. Of course, America learnt it the hard way when it was rocked by a series of accounting scandals like Enron, Worldcom, Tyco, AOL, Bristol Myers-Squibb, Merill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, et al. The Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) legislation of 2002 took some pathbreaking initiatives by making the CEO and the CFO accountable for the certification of quarterly reports and disclosure of all known control deficiencies and acts of fraud. Besides, it also made the management and the independent auditor responsible for reviewing the company’s performance. A 2009 survey of financial executives by SEC reveals that while there is significant cost involved in compliance, the benefits are many – 73% respondents said that their company’s internal control structure has improved, 71% admit that the audit committee’s confidence in their companies got better, 49% appreciate the better quality of the financial reporting, 48% say that the ability to prevent and detect fraud has increased and 40% agree that their confidence in other companies with SOX compliance has grown. A Lord & Benoit report showed that two years post-SOX, share prices of companies that enhanced internal controls for both years increased by 27.67%. For companies that only got SOX smart in year 2, share prices increased by 25.74% and share prices for those who failed to implement SOX at all declined by 5.75%.

Of course, all regulation in America itself looks on weak legs since it could not prevent the Lehman debacle and its aftermath, and America still laments the fact that no prosecutions have happened. The Financial Crisis Enquiry Commission was set up to analyse the root causes and deliberate on accountability for the crisis, which destroyed around $11 trillion in household wealth and led to 26 million Americans going jobless. The commission concluded that regulators and companies both failed in their duties miserably – they had enough warning signs and could have helped matters. That is perhaps why the Say on Pay bill, which was an important section of Barack Obama’s political agenda, gets American shareholders incensed like nobody’s business.

If the stringent laws in the US can fail to control human vice, then India needs to wake up immediately. Cases like Satyam have been few and far between so far, but we could be indeed committing the same mistake as the Americans did – they ignored the fine print when the times were good and the real estate bubble was in the pink of its health. India is a booming economy and corporates are showing stupendous results on the back of a strong domestic market. However, closer analyses reveal that a bit of paranoia wouldn’t harm at all. KPMG’s Fraud Survey Report 2010, which interviewed senior management of 1000 top Indian companies, found that 75% of respondents believed that fraud in India was on the rise and 81% said that the biggest issue was financial statement fraud. Major factors that are believed to be increasing such incidents include “ineffective whistle-blowing systems, lack of objective and independent internal audit functions with forensic skills, inadequate oversight of senior management activities by the audit committee and weak regulatory environment.” Also the maximum percentage of respondents from financial services industry perceive that the fraud in their industry is significantly high, followed by consumer markets. This is indeed a serious issue, since the financial services industry is a cornerstone of any economy. In B&E’s Power 100, 30 companies belong to this industry. In India, the public sector also controls around 250 large (40 companies in Power 100 2011) and small organizations, and a number of them are falling behind in terms of adhering to corporate governance norms. It is equally important to have independent committees to assess whether the government itself is doing justice to minority shareholders. As the government plans greater divestment from PSUs, such transparency could in fact be a blessing in disguise.


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Source : IIPM Editorial, 2012.

An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri
and Arindam Chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist).

For More IIPM Info, Visit below mentioned IIPM articles.

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