Branding Scotch but what about Taj Mahal?

Darjeeling, Basmati, Scotch

CYBER AGE From The Statesman
ND Batra

Recently, when I visited my colleague, he offered me a cup of Darjeeling brew. And whenever I used to visit my cousin in Mumbai, he would offer me Scotch.

I anticipated the pleasure and knew what I was getting. The recent Delhi High Court ruling that Indian brewer Golden Bottling cannot appropriate “scotch” or similar sounding words to brand its own whiskey is a most remarkable decision in the sense that it recognises a geographical region as the site of a global brand, which is in accordance with the Geographical Indications (GIs) clause of the WTO-TRIPs agreement. GIs confers intellectual property rights on a product from a region “where a given quality, reputation or other characteristics of the good are essentially attributable to its geographical origin”. Basmati and Darjeeling are no different from Scotch, are they?

The only way to get a sensible grip on a widely misunderstood but fashionable concept, knowledge-based society, is to define it in terms of intellectual property rights. Much of the rest is propaganda to shock and awe the innocent.

Many of us still can’t get over the shock that that a Texas-based company, RiceTec, was given the patent for a supposedly new strain of Basmati rice. Something which has defined the Indian sub-continent for centuries was gobbled up by a knowledge-based society, where assembling, re-assembling, storing, patenting and branding of information is becoming a major source of wealth, power and hegemony.

Contrary to what you learn from the high-minded, a knowledge-based society is not one whose members are inquisitive, knowledgeable, skilled or willing to learn all their lives. Rather, it’s a society where information and knowledge are created for money. It is its ability to build legal infrastructure, enforce laws and claim ownership of information through copyrights, brands, trademarks and patents. Danjaq and United Artists warn that only they can make James Bond 007 television and film series. RiceTec too asserted the claim that only it should have the right to call its rice variety Basmati including its variants, Texmati, Kasmati, etc., and forbid others from using similar sounding brand names.

It goes much against the popular belief, but a patent’s legal force does not lie in giving one the permission to exploit an invention; rather it permits its owner to exclude others from making, using or selling the invention. If it had gone totally unchallenged, the RiceTec patent might have been be used to exclude Basmati traders and exporters of the sub-continent not only from the US market but also from the rest of the world markets. It may sound far-fetched and paranoid that this could ever happen, but the law, they say, is like an Indian donkey: it can hit anyone with any leg at any time. But mostly the donkey favours the rich and the powerful. Competition for a share in the world marketplace is so ruthless that few would disagree with Intel’s CEO Andy Grove when he says, only the paranoid survive.

It’s not so simple to answer the question, what is patentable? US law requires that the invention must be practical, deal with processes, machines, manufactures, compositions of matters; or the new uses of the above. It must be useful, novel and non-obvious (unique). Plant patents, under which rice plant falls, according to US Patent and Trademark Office, “are granted to any person who has invented or discovered and asexually reproduced any distinct and new variety of plant, including cultivated spores, mutants, hybrids, and newly found seedlings, other than tuber-propagated plant or a plant found in an uncultivated state.” But Basmati is not only rice. Like Scotch and Champaign it is the flavour of a region, a cultural icon.

Since the uses and unique attributes of Basmati have been known for centuries, so one might ask: What did RiceTec add to it for which the company was granted a patent on some varieties? Probably nothing worth patent-able, but it does give us a glimpse into the shape of the knowledge society to come: creation of brand names, trademarks, value added-information; and not the least the ability to exploit information for commercial purposes through international treaties, backed by diplomacy, legal chicanery, FDI or even brute force.

This is, however, not to belittle the importance of intellectual property rights, without which writers, creators and inventors will perish, and society will stagnate. But we must demystify the slogans of the emerging information society and understand its modus operandi, its terms of empowerment.

Consider the trademark law, which was originally enacted to prevent unfair competition, and is used to protect words, symbols or images that identify a business or its products. Trademarks have existed since the Middle Ages and they have been always protected under the common law of usage. Coke, for instance, is a distinctive trademark of the Coca-Cola Company and it would be unfair competition if some other company were to use it. So are Kodak, Xerox, Exxon, the Golden Arches, etc. But when Donald Trump, a New York real-estate tycoon, plunders a cultural symbol like the Taj Mahal and uses it as trademark for his gambling casino in Atlantic City in New Jersey, there is something wrong the way the world is turning into a global marketplace. If a knowledge-based society uses religious icons and other sacred names to sell sneakers and other consumer goods, it is time to challenge its presumptuousness.

Commenting upon India and Pakistan forming a working group to bring Basmati into the GIs fold, Ashfak Bokhari wrote in the Dawn: “More often than not, bio piracy occurs in the West and that too primarily because of the inherent western bias towards the Third World. The West still suffers from the ‘Columbian blunder’ and assumes it has the right to plunder the resources of the non-West countries by treating their people’s knowledge systems as non-existent, hence empty of prior creativity and prior rights, and hence available for ‘ownership’ through the claim of ‘invention’.”

The (mis) appropriation of Basmati, a defining culinary-religious symbol of the Indian subcontinent, into an intellectual property right, as RiceTec has done, is a cultural assault and must be fought tooth and nail, along with other misappropriations of cultural symbols and sacred images of ancient civilisations, wherever they happen.

Media smart CEOs

Advice for golfing CEOs

Cyber Age
ND Batra
The Statesman

While we were waiting to tee off, my golf buddy who happens to be the CEO of a global company, asked me how a company should deal with journalists for whom bad news makes a good story. The news media, I agreed, have begun to play a very significant role in the conduct of both national and international business. 24/7 television news is converging with the Internet, making events live and spontaneous beyond the control of gatekeepers. The rise of bloggers, Online whistleblowers and public interest groups, enables the presentation of alternative views of what companies are doing.

Gone are the days when a business could be conducted beyond the public view. The reason for this heightened interest in what companies do is simple. The impact on people’s lives even if they are not directly invested in a company is tremendous. The very presence of Home Depot or Wal-Mart in a town raises fear and expectations. This gives rise to the need for intense scrutiny by the news media. When India’s Ambani brothers of the Reliance conglomerate were fighting, Wall Street was watching keenly.

Of course, the news media is itself a global business and is subject to rules and regulations like any other business. But in the United States and in many other democratic countries, especially in Europe, Japan, India and Australia, the news media has a privileged position.

In the United States, it is extremely difficult to win libel damages against the news media because of the legal provision that the plaintiff must prove what is called “actual malice,” or “wreckless disregard for truth.” Proving media negligence only is not enough to win libel damages. The near immunity from libel gives the news media freedom and encourages investigative reporting and keeps society healthy.

Because of the inescapable fact that our economic well being, pensions, retirement savings, environment and quality of life have become dependent on the marketplace, no business can escape media attention. Bigger companies invite the healthy suspicion of the media about their activities. Add to it millions of blogs that feed upon each other.

The conspiracy of silence is possible only in a one-party authoritarian state like China, which probably is one of the reasons why global corporations want to do business there. There are very few anti-business reports from China, which nevertheless in the long run might prove counterproductive. So what can be done?

A company doing business globally has to become media savvy and must understand how news organisations work and how they produce stories. Corporate communicators and diplomats have to understand the media’s sources of information and their reporting methods, and have to learn how to influence them by providing them correct information.

Companies have been using advertising as a major method of influencing the public ~ for example, oil companies, BP and Exxon-Mobil, make advertisements to divert attention from the alleged price gouging at the pump. Advertising is still a powerful mode of direct communication with the public at large. But advertisements cannot beat headline news, breaking stories, or special reports with which the news media try to draw public attention that is distracted by infoglut.

It is a big challenge to be heard in the Tower of Babel and more so, when the reputation of the corporate world, because of a series of accounting scandals and the personal misconduct of some companies’ CEOs, has created an air of diffused distrust in the public. Let us keep in mind that no reporter could ever turn a bad story into a good one, especially in crises, when news organisations and celebrity journalists try to outdo each other.

News is a competitive business and no one can afford to keep silent over a story that has an impact on the public. In good times, a company that has excellent working relations with the news media can strengthen its position by presenting positive stories and thus enhance its reservoir of public good will. Consequently, when a crisis hits the company, it will be able to draw upon the public sympathy.

Building social capital is as important as building market capital.
The traditional method of issuing press and video releases is still relevant, especially in local news media outlets, where the paucity of resources might prompt a local television station or a newspaper to repackage a company’s story as a news item. But national news media organisations are inundated with e-mail news tips, and video and press releases and so, they hardly pay attention to junk mail. It is therefore important to target the right people in the news media.

Steps for effectively dealing with the news media require research. But the following points can be helpful:

First determine whether you have a definite story and whether it needs to be told to the news media and why.
What is the audience for the story and which news media would be the best to reach? Which reporters normally cover such stories and which one of them would be most sympathetic to your story?
Is the reporter accessible for pitching the story? What angle would he adopt and how to influence him?
When the news media come calling for information and comments, the company should offer full cooperation; and the spokesperson should be ready with facts and figures or promise to provide the data promptly to meet the reporter’s deadline.
Information should be provided thoughtfully and judiciously. It is difficult to undo or correct the information once it is out.
Providing reliable and prompt information is one of the best ways to build bridges with the news media; when the need arises, the company can count upon the media good will.
Most of all, do not be caught with your hands in the cookie jar. And play honest golf.

Comprehending China's rise

China ~ myth of immensity?

CYBER AGE
From The Statesman
ND Batra

Is China like the Greek mythological figure Icarus flying too close to the sun on wings of feathers and wax? From Long March to Mao’s Thoughts to Cultural Revolution to no-holds-barred mercantile capitalism is quite a flight. China is a nation intoxicated with its future: “Rise up, people who do not want to be slaves.” “Motherland, 10, 000 years.”

Cleverly staged mass media propaganda and lobbying by people in high places including some of the top CEOs of major US corporations has helped the Chinese authorities in blurring facts with fiction, creating the perception of China’s relentless and inevitable rise to a global superpower. “You cannot afford not to be in China,” runs the refrain in many corporate boardrooms in the USA.

China fascinates corporate America with its myth of immensity but more so with its ruling party’s collective mind that controls the obedient masses: 1.3 billion worker-consumers who would one day buy every branded product made in the USA. You have heard the drumbeat, repeated ad nauseam. And China has come to believe that since Americans cannot do without its cheap goods, why worry about intellectual property thefts, currency manipulation to fuel exports, humongous trade surplus, or even the problem of nuclear proliferation created by North Korea and Iran?

Consider, for example, the 2008 Games. In 2001, the International Olympics Committee too took the bait, as The Wall Street Journal had naively put it, “to refashion the Olympics from a sports and merchandising extravaganza to an engine of political and social change.” That’s expecting too much from an organisation like IOC that has been paying little attention to its own widespread problems, bribery scandals and drugs, for example. If human rights were the deciding factor in determining the choice of the host city for the Games, Moscow under the Soviet Union and Berlin under the Nazis would not have been selected to host the Olympics. China won the right to stage the Games in spite of its abominable record of the suppression of human rights of the people of Tibet, the followers of the banned spiritual movement Falun Gong, political dissidents and scholars rotting in its jails without recourse to a fair trial.

Doing business with China is more important than human rights, though Americans along with rest of the world go on paying lip service to the problem. But Falun Gong is still alive and kicking, as a protestor demonstrated loudly on the south lawn of the White House, a most restricted area, during President Hu’s meeting with President Bush last week (“President Bush, stop the persecution of Falun Gong, stop the killing,” shouted the protestor).

Trade and the Olympics had no civilising effect upon Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union; therefore, to expect a miracle to happen in China because of the Olympics in 2008 or increasing international trade is puerile and silly. Rising prosperity would not force China’s Communist Party to give up its monopoly over power and become democratic. Since Deng Xiaoping took the road to capitalism about three decades ago, China’s economy has been opening up and growing rapidly with its gross national product rising to more than two trillion dollars. The rate of annual economic growth has remained above nine per cent. Made-in-China goods ~ toys, shoes, electronics, and even golf clubs and handguns ~ are found in every shopping mall of the world. Much economic benefits are expected from the 2008 Games because it has necessitated an investment of billions in infrastructure and information technology to modernise and showcase Beijing for the events. Millions of tourists would pour into China. But would they remain silent observers?

The Deng Xiaoping market economy revolution unleashed China’s entrepreneurial and organisational energies, but not without the help from the outside world, especially the USA, which magnanimously opened its markets to China. Today China is a healthier, better-fed and better-educated nation than most other developing countries but it remains a closed society. China feels that it can compete with the best, but can it tolerate the noise and chaos of an open society like the multicultural and multiracial USA, where the people demand accountability from their political leaders?

Beijing with the help of Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and Cisco has been trying to expand its control into the digital domain, but I wonder if it ever would have the same control over cyberspace as it has over Tiananmen Square. The Internet might bring about tremendous political upheavals in China.

Large centralised political systems break down due to internal pressures triggered by communications technology, unless they have built-in capabilities for adjustment, which China does not have at present. And so it is difficult to say what might happen in China in the age of the Internet, satellites, cell phones and hosts of other wireless, digital, and interconnected sensing devices that are becoming available. Can China control the uncontrollable, the digital generation swapping billions of text messages on cell phones, the generation that could organise itself into an upsurge? Look at the wonderful people of Nepal!

The authoritarian Communist regime may have no choice but to open its doors, skies and cyberspaces to a worldwide audience. China does not live on the Communist time but the Internet time, where changes occur fast; and events occur on a different time scale and generate different values.

Oprah The Shopping Mall Creditcards With Eyeballs

CYBER AGE

Women in cyberspace ~ so desirable, so vulnerable

From The Statesman
ND BATRA

The dotcom world is rising again. Companies that survived the last crisis have revamped their business models by turning cyberspace into an extended turf of their existing businesses.
Cyberspace has become a goldmine of valuable information left by surfers, which could be turned into databases for target marketing. Cyber profiling is emerging as an important business tool for reaching the right woman through narrowly focused and targeted popup and banner advertising and e-mail marketing.

Since most of the domestic buying in the USA, more than 80 per cent according to some estimates, is done by women, data miners and cyber profilers are concentrating on websites aimed at women, which is raising serious concern about information privacy.

It is no great surprise that advertisers and marketers have begun to use the Internet in befriending women because they control effective spending. Only in the matter of high expenditure items like buying a new house, car or going on a vacation, men do butt in with their wisdom, though even in these domains, the woman's voice is decisive.

Advertisers have known the truth all along. In the 1920s, radio began to develop as a mass medium with a potential to reach millions of women, most of who did not have jobs and stayed at home with children and extended families. Domestic product companies like Proctor & Gamble developed daytime serial dramas to entertain and hook women so that they could listen to soap commercials.

That's how daytime radio dramas came to be called soap operas. In the 1950s, when television started to dominate American homes, soap operas migrated to the new medium and they have continued to retain their popularity, in spite of the fact that most women work today.

Soap operas dramatise women's problems ranging from date rapes and workplace harassment to raising children and keeping up with husbands in a culture where matrimony is one block away from the divorce court.

Those who do not succumb to the charm of slow moving daytime dramas cannot resist the temptations of Oprah Winfrey, her talk show, her "O" magazine, and her Oxygen Media, where TV and the Web converge. She is probably the biggest electronic shopping mall where women come and go talking of George Clooney and Tom Cruise, but leave with bags full of goodies. Women are "inherently desirable" not only in cyberspace but also in the traditional media because they virtually control the purse. Why? Because women love to shop.

Men do not know even the size of their own shirt collar. Ask a man to buy an apple and he would bring an orange! Men can't buy their pajamas or decide on what colour their boxers should be. Home Shopping Network and other interactive television shopping malls run on the patronage of women. Men in the mall might push the cart, but women fill it up.

There lies the future of cyberspace as a medium of e-commerce, but that would require the building of high quality websites where women feel comfortable and do not mind shedding valuable data that can be aggregated and collated into reliable individual profiles. Imagine every woman having her own personal shopping corner in cyberspace where everyone knows her tastes and preferences and where all her problems can be solved.

So when a woman enters iVillage.com or Oxygen Media portal, she could join a women's chat group and make new virtual friends; explore fitness and beauty issues and food recipes, while working from home and parenting; find advice about her job and tips about marriage, dating and love; and publish her personal story on the Web.

There is a price to pay for in cyberspace free lunch is a thing of the past. As women become comfortable in their own cyber quarters, they will be scanned of all their personal data, including intimate details, but unlike at the airport, where touching and probing and electronic scanning can be so humiliating, in cyberspace it will be painless because they won't even know it.

Once cyberspace held so much promise for women, wrote Professor Ann Bartowin in the University of San Francisco Law Review, that it was the closest women could come to being "brains in boxes". "In cyberspace, we would not be judged by our bodies. No one would know when we have bad hair days. We would not have to wear make-up and high heels. We could be even 'men' without the hormones or expensive surgery. Then we began shopping and chatting over the Internet. Shortly thereafter, we learned that anyone in cyberspace could ascertain our gender, ages, incomes, education levels, marital status, sizes, consumer purchase proclivities, aspects of our health, and employment histories, and the number, ages, and genders of our children, and that this information could be used to sell us goods and services. Now, instead of 'brains in boxes', we are eyeballs with credit cards."

That's a terrible disappointment for women who thought that the anonymity of cyberspace would enlarge their freedom and empower them vis-à-vis men. But instead of reaching new thresholds of freedom and equality, women are being robbed of their privacy through surreptitious profiling. Welcome to cyber age.

Pit Bull Corporate Diplomacy

CYBER AGE FROM THE STATESMAN

Handling corporate crises

ND BATRA

Wal-Mart, according to a New York Times report, has been looking for a couple of wise guys who could help the global retailer to brighten its public image and to also fight its dirty battles the way politicians do during election times, for example, by doing opposition research on those who attack the company.

Wal-Mart should not forget that those who live in a glass house must not throw stones at others. There are better and more constructive ways for a corporation to build public goodwill than to have an overly aggressive attitude toward its critics. Every corporation gets into trouble but not all troubles turn into a crisis. Some crises are man-made due to criminal intent, negligence or poor product design.

A crisis by its very nature takes everyone by surprise and makes an excellent story for the media, which thrives on scoops and bad news. Companies like Wal-Mart, Proctor & Gamble, and Coca Cola, for example, are not darlings of the news media and a whiff of suspicion is enough for the media to spin yarns on criminal neglect and blame. Crisis management requires some of the best communications and diplomatic abilities on the part of top leadership. Pit bull dogs won’t do.

Although disasters that strike a company such as hurricanes, earthquakes or riots cannot be avoided, enough advanced planning can be done to mitigate the ensuing disastrous effects. Sincere efforts help the company to rehabilitate itself in the public eye and recover its reputation as a reliable company.

Manmade crises due to negligence such as the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska in 1989, Perrier natural mineral water contamination in 1990, or Union Carbide (Bhopal, 1984); or crises due to evil intentions as in Tylenol (cyanide lacing in 1980s) or Pepsi (the syringe hoax case, 1993) could be worse than natural disasters. Manmade crises occur mostly due to poverty of imagination.

But once shock and awe sets in, the crisis develops quickly and draws intense scrutiny by the public and the media. No one can come up with quick answers to myriad questions. This worsens the situation.

In spite of the best intentions and creative exercise of anticipatory imagination and scenario building, any corporation could be hit by a crisis. Smart ones, nonetheless, not only manage a crisis successfully but also turn it to their advantage and renew themselves and come out even stronger, as Johnson and Johnson did after the Tylenol crisis.

Response to any crisis will most likely be based on insufficient information but if a company has a crisis management plan and has built up a sufficient reserve of public and media goodwill, it can overcome the crisis successfully. Building social capital is important. Chemical, pharmaceutical, food, energy and building industries are most likely to be hit by a crisis. Add to it the possibility of terrorist attacks and you would feel that you have no choice but to prepare for crises and calamities. September 11, 2001 will forever remain a benchmark for unprepared-ness, and what the 9/11 Commission called “as a failure of imagination.” Varanasi shows that India is no better in this respect.

Strategic communication experts recommend some important steps for crisis management. For example, establish an early awareness system. Build worst-case scenarios in brainstorming sessions inviting not only senior leaders from different divisions of the company but also outside experts trained in crisis forecasting and management.
Dramatise each crisis to see its maximum impact upon various stakeholders and constituencies. Assess the probability of the occurrence of each crisis.
Prioritise stakeholders since the impact of a crisis will be different on different constituencies. For example, saving the lives of employees is more important in a terrorist attack than thinking about shareholders’ value or the company’s reputation.

Make crisis management an integral part of the company’s business case. Provide workshops and training in crisis management in a virtual environment and through simulation.
Create a crisis task force with command and control and clearly assigned budget responsibilities and accountabilities. Establish communications technology backup systems for data security. Develop a strong and trusting relationship with the media and with civic society activist groups. Do not forget to plan for legal liabilities.

Communication in crisis would depend upon what is at stake. In the case of a catastrophe, of course, human life takes precedent and communication strategy has to be different from the one when there is a product liability or sexual assault. The message and the medium of communication including face to face meetings, town hall gatherings, satellite conferencing, television appearances, newspaper interviews, company’s websites and blogs are equally important. In a crisis, the public hungers for every bit of information.

In a foreign country where the crisis has occurred, communications must be done through a local spokesperson, someone who knows the culture and has credibility. Although it is important that the company should speak with one voice, top managers should be familiar with the crisis plan and its proposed execution if the situation arises.

Defining the problem, getting and synthesising information from various sources to find the cause of the crisis, communicating with affected parties directly, and communicating with the media with as much openness as is necessary and as often as it is absolutely essential during the crisis are important steps that require the expertise of a seasoned corporate diplomat rather than a hired gun with the attitude of “Let’s nail them.”

Coping with info deluge

The always on info world

The always on info world

ND Batra
Fron The Statesman

There was a time when production, distribution and processing of information, news and entertainment, existed in a state of balance. We consumed and assimilated what was produced. And then there was time for silence, for gossip, and for imagination. But that was before computers, microwave and satellite transmission created a deluge that seems to sweep away everything else from our lives. Some of us, especially of the older generation, raised on the logic of linear thinking and writing, can’t handle what we see as an information flood.

Others, especially of the digital generation, raised on computer games, cell phones, instant messaging, kids born to multitasking, revel on this new culture of incessant message swapping. I have not heard net-generation kids complaining that there is too much information swirling around them.

David Schenk bemoans in his book Data Smog that – thanks to a ceaseless development of computer technology – information and data production has become so abundant that it clutters our minds as “a pollutant.” We produce too much information for our own good, and so fast that our minds can’t assimilate it, he said. Of course, what is a pollutant could become raw material for something new in the future, only if know what to do with it. In other words, we don’t have enough information on how to turn pollutants into useful products. Perhaps we need even better technology to manage information.

Making a sweeping statement, Schenk says that the phenomenon of accelerated information production and data collection is of recent origin, only half a century old. “For nearly 1,00,000 years leading up to this century, information technology has been an unambiguous virtue as a means of sustaining and developing culture… Then, around the time of the first atom bomb, something strange happened. We began to produce information much faster than we could process it.”

He does not mean that the atom bomb triggered an unstoppable information avalanche, though there’s no gainsaying the fact that the dropping of such bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki created a kind of information explosion that could not have been handled by traditional means of information processing, especially in a manner that would have created knowledge and understanding of what man had done to man.

Like Luddites of the 19th century, who out of fear of loss of jobs and their traditional lifestyles, destroyed machinery rather than adopting and accepting it, Schenk too seems to be giving up instead of trusting that human mind has not come to the end of its development and evolution. “We have quite suddenly mutated into a radical different culture, a civilisation that trades in and survives on stylised communication… The blank spaces and silent moments in life are fast disappearing. Mostly because we have asked for it, media are everywhere. Television, telephones, radios, message beepers and an assortment of other modern communication and navigational aids are now as ubiquitous as roads and tennis shoes – anywhere humans can go, all forms of media now follow: onto trains, planes, automobiles, into hotel bathrooms, along jogging paths and mountain trails, on bikes and boats...”

True, we are living in a world of multimedia ecology, and for some of us information generated by ubiquitous computing and the Internet is too much. Sometime ago, the television sitcom Hope and Faith introduced a double episode about wife swapping, which in spite of its suggestive open marriage indecency wasn’t as naughty as it might sound. In fact “Wife Swap” was a separate reality show, where two housewives in culturally different states (red and blue, for example) exchange households along with children, but without sharing beds.

In a parody of the reality show, in the Hope and Faith episode of wife swap, Hope leaves her home in Columbus, Ohio, and moves to live with a family in Manhattan, New York, where she finds that the high-tech New York family members have all the cyber-age gadgets but they seldom talk with each other as a family. The worst culprit is the work-alcoholic father, Aaron, who in a delightful mockery of “always on, always available,” is always talking to someone on his hand-free cell phone. When he looks at his “swapped wife” Hope at the dining table, she thinks he is talking with her, but of course, no, he is talking past her, with someone else on the other side, a client. The Manhattan man symbolised the multitasking man of today, always in communication, always networking, always connected, except when it comes to touching someone emotionally and keeping relations on a steady keel.

The Manhattan wife-swapping episode ended with the cell-phone addicted Aaron deciding to give up his always-on wireless communication gear, sell his multimillion-dollar apartment and return to his family’s bosom and turn to simpler things of yesteryears. But running away from information age is no solution. We have to consider the evolutionary possibility that confronted with an ever increasing deluge of information, the human mind might evolve and adapt and learn to improve the signal-to-noise ratio; new technology might help us to see patterns in what is called noise and clutter.

History of human evolution has been a struggle to transform nothingness to information, from empty cave walls to primitive carvings and murals, from rags and papyrus to manuscript writing, from zero-and-one sheep counting to decimal system to binary bits and bytes. Tools that help us to create information would also help us to find patterns of meanings in the flood of information that we generate.

Educating and training American GIs

GI Joe and GI Jane

How should we educate and train GI Joe and GI Jane so that they fit into the new global environment of terrorism on the one hand and multiculturalism on the other?

HOW MARKET-DRIVEN SELF-INDULGENCE COARSENS LIFE

Killing field of American popular culture

From The Statesman
ND Batra

Movies, television programmes and popular music do not always spur viewers to spontaneous immediate action, but their delayed, cumulative effects are immense. Television commercials, for instance, impact viewers and keep the market economy thriving.

If commercials make people buy, buy and buy, repeated violent programmes too could incite some viewers, especially those who are mentally disturbed, to kill people. A few years ago, Queen Latifa, the rap star, featured in Set It Off, an R-rated movie about four desperately seeking women who go on a binge, shooting and robbing banks. The movie was linked with several copycat fatal shootings, including that of an eight-year old girl, Tynisha Gathers of Bridgeport, Connecticut, who watched a bootlegged copy of the movie along with three other girls.

And later while replaying a scene from the movie, Tynisha was shot in the head, as it was shown on the tape, with a .380 caliber semiautomatic handgun lying in the house. Imitation and role-playing, no doubt, excite all children. Tynisha’s 10-year old sister was held in custody and charged with manslaughter, while gun-dealers and movie-makers hid behind their constitutional rights to bear arms and exercise unfettered free expression, of course, only to make money in the free marketplace.

Unlike constitutionally guaranteed fundamental rights, there are no fundamental obligations, except to pay taxes.The courts have been very reluctant to award damages in cases of personal injuries caused by the media, unless there is a definitive showing of “clear and present danger,” amounting to direct incitement of violence. Punishing the media for mere negligence, the courts have said in several media related personal injury cases, would chill free expression and lead to self-censorship, thus negating the purpose of the First Amendment.

Gun industry lobbyists repeat ad nauseam: Guns don’t kill people; people kill people. But this has not been a comforting thought to parents of children brought up in an environment of toy-guns (which look indistinguishable from the real ones) and senseless media violence. Every year hundreds of children either become victims of gun violence through media imitation or cause injuries to others.

The 1981 case of Olivia N v National Broadcasting Company, concerning the broadcast of the film Born Innocent, which dramatised effects of an orphanage on an adolescent girl, was a crying tale of horror. As recounted in the court records: a young girl is shown in a community bathroom peeling off her clothes and taking a shower. The water suddenly stops and she faces four other girls, who wrestle her to the ground, force her legs apart, and one of the assailants plunges a plumber’s helper into the girl, with a to-and-fro sex-act thrusting motion.

Four days after the film was broadcast, a nine-year old girl was attacked by some adolescents on a beach and “artificially” raped with a bottle. The attackers had done this after they had seen the movie Born Innocent and discussed the bathroom scene. The lawsuit alleged that NBC was negligent, in spite of several authoritative studies concerning media violence and its effect upon children. The California Court of Appeals ruled that if the television networks were subjected to “negligence liability,” the effect would be “self-censorship which would dampen the vigor and limit the variety of public debate.”

To win damages, the court ruled, the plaintiff would have to show that the movie incited rape. In another case, a 13-year old boy, who had watched and tried to imitate a stunt performed on the Tonight Show by the late comedian Johnny Carson, was found dead, hanging from a noose, facing a TV set which was still on. But when action was brought against the network, the court held that NBC was not liable because the plaintiff had failed to show “advocacy of violence” or “incitement to violence” leading to immediate action.

Ozzy Osbourne, notorious for lyrics such as Suicide Solution, that conveyed the message that “suicide is not only acceptable, but desirable” as a method of avoiding pain and despair, was not held liable by courts for death by suicide of several disturbed youths in 1980s.But what kind of enlightened public debate is generated by destructive free expressions such as in Born Innocent, Set It Off, or rap lyrics? Has the quality of life for orphans and women improved? Has artistic expression been enriched?

There has been growing concern about the coarsening of life in America, and many people blame the media, especially television, for widespread depredations of civic virtues.

Is it possible that the abuses of Abu Ghraib prison in which Iraqi prisoners were physically and sexually humiliated by patriotic US soldiers might have been the consequences of long exposure to senseless violence in popular culture?

How could such normal, decent people behave in this inhumane sadomasochistic way? Their subconscious minds must have been fed by brutal images, while growing up.

How ironic, to paraphrase an old fart, that as civilisation advances, civility declines. I believe it is the culture of self-restraint, not of advertisement and market-driven self-indulgence, which creates civility, social refinement.

CORPORATE GLOBAL DIPLOMACY

Power of persuasion
By ND Batra
From The Statesman

In its bid to take over Arcelor, Mittal Steel needs a better communication strategy and more effective global corporate diplomacy to persuade Europeans that the Mittals are no stealers and come as friends. As corporate India expands globally, it must communicate well. Excellent communication is the key to effective corporate public affairs and global diplomacy. Without a comprehensive communications strategy that takes into account significant stakeholders who interact with the company and form its business environment, global corporate diplomacy cannot be effective. The recent failure of Dubai Ports World in its attempt to take over the management of US ports is a case in point.

In this age of global transparency of the 24-hour news cycle and the Internet, and of reporting standards established by global watchdogs like the Global Reporting Initiative, companies can neither run nor hide. Companies just cannot afford not to communicate about a problem that concerns stakeholders in their business environment. And since they have to communicate, they must do it efficiently. At the heart of communication is persuasion, even when a company is just trying to inform stakeholders. Power to persuade is the soft power that companies exercise to win the hearts and minds of people. But to do so in a multi-channel environment over which they do not have much control, needs diplomatic finesse, especially when a company has to operate in a foreign environment.

Consider how the following factors affect the global corporate communication environment:

(a) Companies have become de-localised (Mittal Steel, IBM, for example). They are no longer woven into the fabric of local communities as they used to be in the pre-digital age. Company employees do their work in a virtual environment and their mobility makes them less concerned with what is happening in their neighbourhood. In an environment like this, it would take extraordinary efforts for global companies to communicate and present their position in a persuasive manner. China’s CNOOC did not know how to talk to Americ when it tried to take over Unocal.
(b) Perception is reality and many people perceive global companies as more powerful than the government, which draws enhanced critical scrutiny from the media and NGOs. The image of power that global companies project raises expectations as well as fear in the minds of the people. Growing expectations of corporate responsibility create unusual challenges for corporate communications and diplomacy.
(c) Because of the recent corporate scandals in the USA that has put many top corporate executives in jail, the American people expect greater openness and transparency from companies. This may not be true of some rapidly developing countries in Asia, where companies may get away with behavior that may not be acceptable in the USA, Japan or Europe. Since expectation of corporate behaviour differs from country to country, corporate communications strategies must take such variables into account.
(d) Effective communication takes place in a cultural context. Understanding the host country’s political culture is very important for corporate communication and diplomacy to be effective, a lesson corporate India must learn quickly. Political culture includes the legal system, and the rules and regulations which must not be violated in the host country. Although good corporate behaviour is not rewarded, bad behaviour is not only punished but also sullies the reputation of the company. Companies should be problem solvers and should not become part of the problem.
(e) Each country has abiding cultural symbols and icons which make global corporate communication quite a challenge. What is culturally and politically correct in one country may not be so in another country. Not understanding national cultural differences can create a nightmare for companies doing business abroad. While these general observations about the global communication context are important, in order to be effective, global corporate communication must be aimed at specific groups or audiences that are especially relevant to the company. Such groups are: customers, financial analysts, government authorities, and non-business stakeholders such as NGOs.

Customers are the most important constituency for a company. They are the reason for doing business and a very important source of a company’s strength. In a competitive environment, where one product may not be qualitatively much different from the other, keeping the customer coming back to the company requires communication at multiple levels — product, price, image, trust and most of all, reputation, the company. How a company presents itself publicly, through signs, symbols and slogans, and how customers perceive it would determine its place in the marketplace. Trust and reputation are the basis of communication with customers.

The US transparency law (Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002), for example, was enacted in the aftermath of Enron’s collapse and other scandals. Communicating effectively with market analysts and financial journalists is very important because it is through them that a company manages its image of financial strength and growth. Raising false expectations for short-term benefits can destroy a company’s reputation. Sometimes, when analysts and financial journalists, instead of being impartial and objective, become reporters and critics, they become part of the vicious conveyer belt, destroy public trust and provoke harsher regulations.

Corporate behaviour is regulated by rules and regulations, which are framed in the public interest and in consultation with the industry. But once the rules are in place, not only authorities but also public interest groups, many of which have established a global network to monitor compliance, closely watch companies’ errant behaviour.

Microsoft’s ordeal in the USA and Europe for anti-trust violation is a case in point. Worldwide, there are thousands of NGOs who have made it their business to scrutinise the behaviour of local, regional and multinational companies to protect the public and environment from exploitation. With clear and well-defined demands, global NGOs that have a huge and broad-based financial and legal support system can swing into campaign mode against a corporation and even a country, very quickly and very efficiently.

Think how Greenpeace International stopped asbestos-laden French carrier Clemenceau from coming to Gujara (India). Cooperating and communicating with international NGOs requires special diplomatic efforts.

Why I love Japan

Buddhism has made Japan a beautiful country.

Innovate or perish

N.D. Batra

Be creative and grow rich

A recent IBM ad, a company that has been trying to re-invent itself as the foremost global solution company, talks of “houses that make doctor calls,” sensitive cars that enable you drive safely, “power grids that fix themselves” and “silos that talk to each other,” and much more.

I am still waiting for some solution company, Bangalore, Inc. or something, to make a bold statement, Hey, we know how to predict where the next terrorist attack after Varanasi would occur. It should be that simple: If computers can predict precisely where a tornado would hit, they should be able to predict where the next terrorist attack would occur. I am sure India’s scientist president Dr. APJ Kalam and the young IIT geniuses would agree with me: For every problem, human or technological, there must be a software solution. Be creative or thou shall perish.
In any case, this is an age of smart ideas. Ideas are potential assets. Creativity matters and would set India apart.

Just think what businesses are doing to stay in business. There’s a new frenzy for reaching customers through newer modes of communications, including product placement in television programs.
The busiest shopping season in the United States has always been Thanksgiving through Christmas, but for businesses it is too risky to depend solely upon the holiday season for profitability, market share or even survival. Which has led advertising and marketing agencies to find creative ways of persuading buyers to open their wallets.
A decline of even 1 percent in holiday sales ripples through every trailer park and leaves many people shivering in the cold. So shoppers are being offered unprecedented discounts on sales of all kinds of goods from cars to carpets to offset a bad holiday season, if it were to occur.

Any idea that brings the shopper to the mall and persuades her to fill up the shopping cart is an invaluable asset. The United States desperate seeks ideas that can make things happen, whether it is to catch Al Qaeda operatives; or to persuade the shopper to take out the credit card and spend whether she has the money or not in the bank.

But how do you turn an idea into an innovation and bring it to the marketplace? “I am your idea,” said an Accenture blurb sometime ago. “One day you’ll look for me and I’ll be gone.” Ideas are ephemeral unless you grab them and make them do something. Make ideas work by sharing with people who know how to turn them into innovations and tangible goods.

Occasionally in social gatherings, someone would buttonhole me and say: India has some of the world’s brightest economists, why can’t their ideas be turned into something that would speed up economic growth in India? At such moments I nod in wonderment. India is full of bright minds, indeed! And they would be returning to India especially with the introduction of dual citizenship, a brilliant idea that would generate unprecedented opportunities for investment in India.

Besides, every time there is some discussion about India’s economic growth, naturally China’s sustained economic growth of 8-10 percent during the last two decades comes up for comparison. Two decades ago both the countries were struggling at the same level of poverty. But one day the Chinese paramount leader Deng Xiaoping had a bright idea. Capitalism is good, he mumbled after returning from a visit to the United States. Make money, not revolution. And the floodgates of entrepreneurial spirit opened up in China, even without political freedom.

Keith Bradsher of The New York Times wrote sometime ago that China, “by quickly converting much of its economy to an unfettered and even rapacious version of capitalism, has surged far ahead…. China has high-speed freeways, modern airports and highly efficient ports that are helping it dominate a growing number of manufacturing industries.” In a matter of years, China has become a manufacturing hub of the world, sucking most foreign direct investments. Once all roads led to Rome. Now all sea-lanes lead to China.

China’s miracle is not based on any grandiose economic theory, but on a few simple ideas: Excellent law and order conditions; good transportation and communications facilities; and the courage to let the people make money. In short, the Marwari and Gujarati spirit.
Ideas have no boundaries. You can take them from one field and make them work in another, for example, from the battlefield to the marketplace.

Americans are good at this; for example, American advertisers are using Jean Piaget’s theory of child development, sensory experiences and visual stimulation to sell EZ Squirt Ketchup to grownups. Said Alissa Quart in Wired, “Piaget is only the beginning. Just as the pharmaceutical industry steers medical research, marketing and advertising are beginning to guide the way scholars investigate brain functions, perception, and language.”

Consider, for example, cognitive science, a multidisciplinary area that includes psychology, neuroscience, sociology, and computer science. At the highest level, it is associated with the study of artificial intelligence and autonomous systems, but at market level its ideas are being increasingly used to study ”the psychology of acquisition and the science of material desire,” for better marketing and placement of products, anything from toys and cereals to jeans. That’s creativity.

Many of us do have qualms about turning the academia into a handmaid of the marketplace but in the United States various fields of intellectual endeavor are not sealed shut from each other. Ideas flow from one field to another and flourish wherever they find the best applications, whether it is the shopping cart or fighting terrorism.

It is all about the psychology of desire that transforms an idea into an asset; turns driving a car into love and adventure; turns zeros and ones into an outsourcing industry. And the same psychology of desire could also read the desires of terrorists before they hit again.

Digital world emerging

Scanning Digital Horizons
Digitally Seamless
Sensate Surroundings
Building Virtual Environment
Cyberspace-time Continuum
Potholes on the digital highway
Temptation Island in Cyberspace
The Mouse Says, Just Do It
Digital Mythmaking
Digit al Interdependency
Limits of Interdependency
Digital Synergy
Reinventing the Internet through synergy
Rise of digital intelligence

MAYBE HARVARD CAN'T HANDLE TRUTH

Mistaking trees for a forest?
By ND Batra
From The Statesman

Harvard faculty, finally, got rid of their inconvenient president, Mr Lawrence Summers, who has a wonderful habit of calling a spade more than a spade. All that Mr Summers wanted to do was to improve undergraduate education, especially in science and mathematics, so that the so-called Net Generation (N-Gen) could compete in a world where countries like China and India would have a dominant presence.

Occasionally, he publicly expressed his prickly thoughts about the research some of the most celebrated Harvard faculty members were doing. Some felt less valued and left. Others waited and gathered strength until they could strike the blow that felled a mighty man. Summers made no attempt to comfort anyone. Last year, for example, Summers said that women might be temperamentally and intellectually different when it comes to doing things. He supported his claim with anecdotal evidence of his twin daughters who, as little girls, used to call a small toy truck baby truck and the bigger one daddy truck. A boy would have made the two trucks crash headlong in a "battle scene."

At that time Mr Summers got into big trouble with his faculty, researchers, special interest groups and the media. Yet, his question has not been answered: Why can't women engage themselves profoundly with black holes and galaxies despite the affirmative action and equal opportunity and gender balancing and what not? Why does a woman feel more comfortable in the kitchen than in the lab? Is it cultural or genetic?

When I was on the faculty of Morehead State University, I asked a class, mostly of girls, what they planned to do after they graduated. Almost unanimously, the girls said they wanted to have good paying jobs, and then to find a husband who they could hopefully keep up with, and to have children. No further ambition? No, they said, keeping a family together was most important. Even those who were studying science did not want to spend their time in labs. Real life relations, associations and networking interested them more than abstract mathematical relations. Harvard and MIT girls are no different from the southern girls I had encountered, are they?

A few years ago, I was introduced to a good-looking young woman attorney working for an insurance company, who eventually became a close family friend. I used to imagine her climbing up step-by-step and one day breaking the proverbial glass ceiling. It was not only her acute analytical legal mind that impressed me but also her ability to connect with others. Nonetheless, she was a single woman desperately looking for the right man, and this made her just like any other well-educated woman trying to have a career as well as a family. And she did find one, a wonderful man whom she married and eventually had a son. But then she gave up her job, saying her little boy was more important to her than doing 80 hours of cerebral work a week. A brilliant mind baby-sitting, when she could have applied her intellect to solving tough problems!

You would say my anecdotal evidence is as fallacious as that offered by Mr Summers. Last year, Mr W Michael Cox and Mr Richard Alm of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas wrote in The New York Times that unlike musicians and athletes, "Scientists are made, not born." And they presented statistical evidence and graphics to prove that the "feminisation" of science professions has been taking place "one degree at a time." But they mistook trees for a forest. They still didn't answer Mr Summers' question: Why are there so few female Nobel winners in sciences, so few starry-eyed, mad, mad female scientists?

Imagine Mr Summers' audacity as he summed up his ideas before a conference at the National Bureau of Economic Research last year that made him most unwanted at Harvard: "So my best guess, to provoke you, of what's behind all of this is that the largest phenomenon, by far, is the general clash between people's legitimate family desires and employers' current desire for high power and high intensity, that in the special case of science and engineering, there are issues of intrinsic aptitude, and particularly of the variability of aptitude, and that those considerations are reinforced by what are, in fact, lesser factors involving socialisation and continuing discrimination."

The most controversial factor that got Mr Summers into trouble was the focus on "overall IQ, mathematical ability, scientific ability" in which the woman population, according to him, might be falling short. If you look at the Bell Curve, Mr Summers seemed to be saying, you would find fewer women on the extreme right, the genius portion of the curve. Even those few women who have an extreme high IQ don't apply their minds with intensity because scientific research requires "that the mind is always working on the problems that are in the job, even when the job is not taking place."

A woman might be bright but she would rather develop social networking and expand her relational universe than bother about what is happening at the far-out end of the universe. Heavens could wait until her children grow up. Mr Summers did not understand that in dealing with Harvard faculty, he needed a kind of corporate diplomacy that some CEOs of global corporations are learning to do today in order to handle the complexity of stakeholders.

Mr Warren Bennis, a former professor at Harvard Business School and currently chairman of the Leadership Institute at the University of Southern California, writing in Business Week, made a telling comment about the campus community that surrounds a university president. He said: "While campuses aren't exactly parliamentary democracies, they do have often-strident faculties (with tenure) who have a redoubtable habit of speaking out and up. They are also often extraordinarily talented, self-absorbed "abdicrats" who don't want to lead and don't want to be led."

Bush ushers new era of India-US friendship

Cyber Age From The Statesman

Partnership based on principle & pragmatism
ND Batra

Last week Ronen Sen, India’s ambassador to the United States, lamented that the American non-proliferation high priesthood and Indian go-it-alone self-reliant nuclear brotherhood have highjacked the debate and clouded the real issue: whether it is possible for two open societies to trust each other and work together.

By offering India “full civil nuclear energy cooperation,” President Bush made an extraordinary gesture of friendship and a bold move in establishing long-term strategic and economic relations with a country that most sensible US experts perceive as a reliable global partner. Nuclear partnership with India is another facet of globalisation.

Thinking outside the box, as they say, Bush did not let the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty stand in the way of his new global vision, where an economically strong democratic India would play a stabilising role in world affairs, especially in Asia. The strategic partnership to see India grow and “become a major power in the twenty-first century” is not about containing any other rising power, rather to let India develop as an alternative model of economic growth which preserves fundamental freedoms.

Rapid economic growth of India, 8-9 percent a year for the next few decades, would lift millions of Indians out of abject poverty, without diminishing personal and political freedoms. Besides, an economically dynamic India would spill economic growth all around and would make the military containment of China by the USA or another power absolutely unnecessary.

The Asian theatre needs more than one economic and political power in order to reduce the possibility of a single hegemonic power rising and dominating the continent. Asia needs dynamic multipolarity. The nuclear agreement would remove hurdles in India’s search for alternative energy sources to fuel its growing economy. And to set the tone of mutual trust Bush has acknowledged India “as a responsible state with advanced nuclear technology.”

Recognising India as an exception to the rule, and accepting the fact that India should “acquire the same benefits and advantages as other such states” is a bold diplomatic move on the part of Bush. Only a courageous American President could have taken such a step. In spite of the recent silly diplomatic blunder over visa for the three Indian scientists, on the whole India is being increasingly admired in the USA. Eventually the US Congress would approve the nuclear deal. India would be able to buy nuclear fuel for its existing nuclear power plants and shop for building new ones.

The recent visit of French President Jacques Chirac to India and the agreement on civilian nuclear cooperation has already raised India’s international profile. And in the course of time as trust in partnership increases and diplomatic relations improve further, a whole new world of sophisticated American and European technology would be open to India, enabling it to leapfrog decades of sluggish economic growth. In return India would do what other nuclear powers have been doing under the nonproliferation treaty, that’s, open its civilian nuclear power plants to International Atomic Energy Agency and continue the moratorium on nuclear testing. Its nuclear military arsenal remains off limit.

Global transparency is necessary to stop non-state nuclear carpetbaggers like AQ Khan from trading nuclear weapons. Critics in India fear that the deal would create dependency relations with the USA but they need to consider how South Korea, Taiwan, Japan and China have benefited from strong economic partnership with the USA, without compromising their sovereignty. India is too big and too complex to be dictated by any outside power.

India must go beyond the present information technology outsourcing, must go up the value chain and penetrate deeply into corporate USA to learn from its spirit of constant innovation in technology and business methods. It is surprising that the Indian elite is more interested in UN Security Council permanent membership than the lifting of nuclear sanctions. India alone cannot solve its energy and infrastructural problems.

Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline is in the realm of a distant possibility but even if it becomes operational, it may not be enough to meet India’s gargantuan need for energy.
It may not be a very secure means of procuring energy looking at the political situation in Balochistan. Even Saudi oil facilities, as the recent failed suicide-bombing shows, may not be very reliable.

Clean coal technology, nuclear energy and solar energy are practical alternatives for which the USA has opened its doors to India. India needs hundreds of billions of dollars of foreign direct investment in building power plants and world-class infrastructure to increase its manufacturing base in order to create employment opportunities. Nuclear energy would reduce excessive dependency upon West Asian oil.

Strategic partnership was one of the important themes of Prime Minster Manmohan Singh’s well-received address to the joint US Congress session last July. India and the USA, as Dr Singh said, are natural partners because both are open societies and share similar values. “There are partnerships based on principle, and partnership based on pragmatism. I believe we are at a juncture where we can embark on partnership that we can draw both on principle as well as pragmatism.”

Democracy, multiethnic diversity, and human rights are some of the values that bring the two countries together, but equally important is the fact that India and the USA need each other for fighting global terrorism. Bush’s no-holds-barred campaign against militant Islamic Jihad and Al-Qaida terrorism has changed the perception in the Pakistani ruling elite as well as the masses that negotiations are the only way to resolve long standing issues, especially Kashmir. Bush’s policies have helped India fight its own terrorism.

India’s global diplomacy should have one primary goal: accelerated economic growth that reaches the bottom of the barrel, India’s huddled masses. The partnership with the USA would certainly help India hasten the pace of economic growth and serve India’s global interests.

Yo Americans, go to India and prosper

CLYDE PRESTOWITZ, author of Three Billion New Capitalists: The Great Shift of Wealth and Power to the East, says "if you are a short-term investor, China is probably where you should put your money. But if you are in it for the long haul, you might want to bet on India. That certainly seems to be what George Bush is doing as he heads out this week to make nice with his newest international friend." Read more

Also read this wonderful article.

China Rising

China Rising, truly

"Dreams that the country’s economic liberalization will someday lead to political reform remain distant. Indeed, if current trends continue, China’s political system is more likely to experience decay than democracy," says Minxin Pei, a China scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for Internatioanl Peace. Read more...

Islam and free speech

Cartooning is not the way to change minds

From The Statesman

By ND Batra

The Danish cartoons and their subsequent recrudescence in several newspapers, television, and the Internet about Prophet Mohammad might have been a fundamental right to exercise freedom of speech; but they have turned out to be a premeditated insult to the religious sensibilities of global Muslims. Most Muslims have taken the cartoons as a deliberate assault on their collective psyche, a crude attempt to deconstruct their culture and destruct their sacred narrative. Humans live by their stories. Some would die for them.

In many ways we see ourselves and know the physical world through our stories. Our nervous system and our personal and historical memories define our ability, our sense and sensibility, to describe and capture reality. Millions of words, for instance, have been written about Islamic jihad and yet it’s doubtful if the truth about this notoriously complex concept, evil to some and yet sacred to others, has been completely captured.

If somehow we could know a way of tuning up and enhancing the nervous system to a higher level, the linguistic description and hence the reality would change. Pardon the digression but think of the time when zero was discovered, presumably by the ancient Hindus; and the subsequent development of decimal system; and how that must have changed the perception of reality by subjecting physical phenomena to measurement. Measurement is a form of description of reality; so is cartooning, lampooning and parodying.

But as TS Eliot said, “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.” When Galileo’s telescope was latched to the human nervous system, the linguistic description of the firmament changed and the earth, as it were, ceased to be a stationary planet, though the Church refused to accept it.Or consider some modern political events. Had satellite pictures not revealed the existence of the Soviet’s missiles in Cuba in the 1960s, Americans and the rest of the world would not have perceived the seriousness of the threat to the United States.

If the remote-sensing technology could pick up sights and sounds of human sufferings, it would become possible to know how the Chinese have been decimating the Tibetans and their culture. The Tibetan genocide, like the Holocaust, would find full linguistic description. Description either leads to action or generates guilt. Guilt too motivates action. Through communications technology, the human nervous system extends itself and gives a better or a fuller account of reality, and a feeling of liberation from the constraints of earlier description of reality. New reality demands new laws, ethics and social relations, and creates new life styles, as one can see happening in the burgeoning economy of China, where communism is dead as the dodo.

Communications technology—television antennas, faxes, tape recorders, the Internet—which made free flow of information possible, has killed communism. Was this the assumption of the European media that free flow of information in the form of crude satirical cartoons might debase and eventually dissipate Islamic religious fundamentalism?

History teaches a lesson that it is through the control of linguistic descriptions, narratives and stories that the powerful, the ruling classes, exercise their hegemony. I have always wondered how Britain ruled so successfully over India for about two hundred years. To a great extent the British succeeded in the exercise of their soft cultural power by supplanting the native stories and narrative descriptions with their own literature and legends, so that appreciating Chaucer was deemed more civilized than discovering the beauty of Kalidasa.

China has begun to transplant its stories and historical descriptions upon the young Tibetans, and by the time they grow up into adulthood, their reality will clash with the truth held by their parents—unless modern communications technology, including wireless Internet, short-wave radio and miniature antenna dishes, keeps them alive as Tibetans. By denying them the Tibetan language and access to communications technology, that’s, by controlling their collective nervous system, China might do worse damage than Hitler did to the Jews.

There is something remarkable about the Jewish people, in the sense that from the Old Testament through Steven Spielberg, they have been natural born storytellers. Because of the faithful anecdotal and photographic accounts of the concentration camps, and documentaries and movies like “Shoah” and “Schindler’s List,” it is impossible to deny the truth of the Holocaust, in spite of what Iran’s President Ahmedinijad might have said recently. Most of us feel guilty for not having stopped the Holocaust. The Tibetans have no great filmmakers, no storytellers, and no access to communications technology. They don’t believe in Jihad. They might perish in the silence of the Himalayas. Storytelling is a form of Darwinian survival.

If the recipe for cultural domination and power is through the control of narrative and communications technology, which are in essence the collective nervous system of a society, then it becomes important to find ways of creating resistance movement within threatened cultures. We must “understand, and expose the dynamics of myth-making in society,” said Professor Herbert Schiller, a distinguished scholar of information, and “discover what happens when that process touches the lives of millions of people.” When mythmakers of today have the reach of satellite technology and the Internet, consequences for ancient cultures and human rights can be devastating.

The violent reaction against the Prophet Mohammad cartoons is in reality a form of cultural resistance against global homogenization, cultural hegemony masquerading as free speech.

America is in perpetutal motion

US work culture: in perpetual motion
----------------------------------------------------------------------

From The Statesman
ND Batra

Business Week reported recently that the US economy is much stronger than what the doomsayers have been telling us. The reason is simple: the old statistical system used by the Bureau of Economic Analysis is not good enough to capture the economic reality, the reality of the knowledge economy of the digital age.

Not everyone shares Business Week’s optimism. Knowledge economy is certainly adding to the intangible growth of the economy, which shows up as overall growth in GDP, but why is it not adding up to people’s feelings of well-being? On the contrary, many Americans have a feeling of diffused and widespread anxiety about their future. Pensions have been disappearing. Healthcare benefits are being reduced. Not many people feel confident about retiring.

Sometime ago a local newspaper editorialised, “Too many people juggle multiple jobs but still can’t afford the basics of shelter, food and healthcare... The dignity and purpose of work are undermined when a person who gives a full effort cannot afford life’s necessities.” Americans with cell phones, mobile computing, multiple jobs and multiple shifts have begun to mimic what some chain restaurants tout: We are open for 24 hours a day.

It is a society in perpetual motion, waiting for a coffee break, never fully resting, though occasionally dozing on the desk like a sleepless driver on the steering wheel.Mergers and acquisitions, hanging upon us like a chronic sickness, eliminate jobs without reducing the workload, which is shared by workers lucky enough not to be fired. Experts tell us that productivity is rising. No, Americans are working longer and in multiple shifts to fight the fear of being de-skilled and laid off.

Productivity is a measure of a firm’s output in relation to the resources consumed or how much an employee produces per hour. But many employees take work home or work early and late hours, which adds to their productivity without adding to their income for the extra hours they put in. This seems to push their productivity high and also comforts the management, that has been sold on the idea that computer and telecommunications technology are pushing the profits up.

Most jobs are becoming commoditised and can be substituted and shipped abroad. Computer-assisted design and manufacturing systems do help designers visualise new products on their screens, which can be directly sent to factories in China where cheap skilled labour can do the manufacturing. Computer-integrated manufacturing requires limited human input and eliminates highly paid manufacturing jobs, thus raising productivity.

Experts say that it is possible to customise products that have been mass-produced since Henry Ford introduced the assembly line system and Frederick Taylor added scientific management to business vocabulary. Soon we would be able to customise everything: clothes, shoes, golf clubs, or whatever.

Researchers point out the cost-saving potential of computer automation by eliminating intermediary processes, for example, typesetting in printing; or the use of the Internet for document transfer, such as audio-visual scripts or tapes; and eliminating other tasks which do not directly contribute to the end product.

Teleconferencing does save money but it has also ended opportunities for many to combine their work with vacations. Now the ubiquitous cell phone is transforming vacations to working vacations and homes to working homes. Over 11 million Americans never leave home for work. They telecommute, raising the spectre of hidden electronic sweatshops that somehow escape the scrutiny of civic groups and labour unions because homebound sweatshops are invisible. In spite of the noise about rising productivity, some researchers are puzzled at the “Productivity Paradox.” Investment in information technology does not necessarily produce positive financial gains, partly because many firms invest in technology as they don’t want to be left behind in the rat race.

One reason why every firm is rushing to cyberspace to build a Website is due to the fear that someone else might grab the domain name, which should be rightfully its own. This does not necessarily add to their bottom line, so they go on re-engineering and merging and eliminating jobs, creating a spiral of greater workload for those who want to keep their jobs.

As Alvin Toffler and other futurists foresaw, the hierarchical pyramid structure of the organisation with the boss at the top protected from blue and white-collar workers by layers of middle management would be flattened. The middle management layer has begun to disappear. A new organisational model, the “core and ring” model is emerging in the cyber age. The model has a dedicated core of highly paid top level strategists and planners, who get work done either by an army of temporary workers or by outsourcing the work to virtual neighbours, be they in China, Mexico or Thailand.

Most work, including design, production, marketing and distribution, wrote Venketaraman and Henderson in a 1998 article in Sloan Management Review, can be out-sourced. Labour is not eliminated but it is turned into a commodity. It may be the final triumph of market capitalism, but it is a 24 hours-a-day work week, which keeps the USA at the core with an ever increasing ring of temporary workers spread all over the globe.

If US economy is on the rise, as Business Week wants us to believe, why don’t the American people feel good?

American culture: A culture of anxiety

Meditation on American culture

By ND Batra
From The Statesman

Culture may even be described simply as that which makes life worth living.
T S Eliot (Notes Towards a Definition of Culture)

Lee Gomes of the Wall Street Journal wrote sometime ago, “why no one has yet run for office by campaigning against the computer. After all, you couldn’t ask for a better sin-delivery system than a PC with a fast Web connection”.

Well, you might as well call a gun a death-delivery system, but no one dares run a political campaign against guns in the USA and get elected. If you talk against guns, some gun lover would fire back, “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people.”

If a politician runs against guns, it means that not only is he challenging the people’s right to bear arms (Second Amendment) but also getting into a crossfire with the National Rifle Association—the 500-pound gorilla who does not need a gun to kill you.

Senator John Kerry, during his campaign for the White House, eagerly flaunted his Vietnam credentials, Purple Hearts and all, as well as his love for hunting by going on a goose-hunt, which proved to be of no avail.

But Gomes had a point: “With a week or two of patient work, someone with their hands on the keyboard of such a system—no matter what his or her age — could download a Kinsey library of erotica, play videogames depicting the cruelest kind of violence, steal a studio’s worth of music and movies, and gamble away small fortune.” If politicians can’t fight against the “girlie men” and “bushwhooping women” of Hollywood, how would they fight the Internet, where no man or beast, except probably China, has much control?

Whether it was Dr Alfred Kinsey or the Playboy that liberated Americans sexually, or corrupted them, as Rev Jerry Falwell would say, nonetheless, sexual imagery, heterosexual, homosexual, omni-sexual, has been seeping into American social ecology, even into corporate brands. Is omni-sexual a new word in the American lexicon?

But consider this. A Saks Fifth Avenue ad showed two itsy-bitsy girls, one a coy blonde and the other a brash oriental with the belly-button up, pants slipping down with palms in her hip pockets, face-to-face on two opposite pages of a glossy magazine, with the tag line: “Saks loves it: both ways”. Both ways? Very naughty indeed, I thought and wondered if it were a new form of omni-sexuality.

A constant hovering anxiety in the Sex and the City used to be the question on the mind of every single woman who met a hunk: Is he gay? Of course, if he were a heterosexual, a girl could have a chance. She could steal him from his girlfriend or wife. But what can a girl do with a homo? Oh, yes! She could cry with Dame Edna in Back with Vengeance! : “Darling, this is not a shoe. This is a cry for help, my possum.” Dame Edna could get away with her conceit, “Sorry dear, I am just not feeling naughty tonight,” but what can a single girl with sex on her mind do in New York, the city of spin, spin, spin, and sin.Girls are not calendar-resistant, are they? They wrinkle. They shrivel. Boys move on.

Of course you have heard of water-resistant and wind-resistant, but what is calendar-resistant? That was Timberland’s ad for its men’s Mixed-Media Jacket, which crowed: “It is quite possible the jacket will last longer than you.” Something to leave behind to make the world a better place, when your “too, too sordid” self is gone!

You could pass on the jacket to one of your poor relatives whom you never liked or donate it to the Salvation Army. That, however, reminded me of a plumber who came to my house to replace a leaky pipe and said the new pipe had a life-long warranty. Amazed, I said: Whose life are we talking about? Yours or mine? He never felt so embarrassed. He had a triple by-pass a year before. Just like the Timberland’s jacket, the plumber’s pipe too was calendar (time)-resistant.

And that reminds me of something else that was touted as calendar-resistant. A few years ago, a 30-something brunette was shown gloating over her Seiko watch: “My husband has left me, but my Seiko is still with me.” Joy to the world! The American woman is free. Seiko is ticking and the woman is waiting for another “gentleman caller”. Would he ever come? And how long would he stay?

Talking of gentlemen and lovers, a few years ago I overheard an ambitious woman humming to herself: There are a thousand-and-one ways of getting rid of your lover. And she got rid of him, kept the sprawling house and the kids, and moved on to another city, another hunt. But that’s merciful, though she had a killer instinct and could have done more. In a red, red state in the South, where I was a professor once upon a time, the Bible Belt where there are more divorces and single moms than in the blues states, a colleague whose department work I was evaluating said to me in a loud whisper, “In my county, we don’t kill anyone unless there’s a reason.” I got the message loud and clear.

But that was no better than two men of God who one evening came to the beautiful Eagle Lake where the university had given me a living quarter and said that they wanted to deliver me from my sins. One of them said, “Do you go to church?”I said, no, but why? The other said: “Do you want to go to heaven or hell?” I said, “I would rather stay here.” They laughed and left me alone.

Just as the Internet and Hollywood deliver to us our daily pipedream of sins, men of God are always ready to deliver us from our daily sins. Some call it checks and balances. I call it a supply chain system of American values.

Corporate Reputation in The Digital Age

Good reputation equals good business
Cyber Age
ND Batra
From The Statesman

In the digital age, a company is nothing but its reputation and maintaining it is a big challenge.

Reputation is the foundation of trust and loyalty, which gives stakeholders confidence in dealing with the company. A company’s identity and image (along with its philanthropy) are the building blocks of its reputation.

Identity is a company’s assertion of its individuality and embodies the company’s vision, its reason for being there. It sums up its business case. The image of a company is the distinct memorable impression in the minds of the people as they interact with the company.

Together, identity and image raise the profile of a company, its reputation, its significance beyond commercialism and profit making. “A company’s identity,” says Paul Argenti of Dartmouth’s Tuck School in one of his books, “is the visual manifestation of the company’s reality as conveyed through the organization’s name, logo, motto, products, services, buildings, stationery, uniform, and all other tangible pieces of evidence created by the organization and communicated to a variety of constituencies.”

Stakeholders’ perception of the company, however, emerges from the totality of the impression, not so much from what is created by the company but in spite of it. While a company might do its utmost to build and control its identity, it cannot totally control the image, the impression and the perception, the public has about it.

A company’s identity and the image are never the same, but the closer they are, the better the reality. This is the basis of the company’s reputation. A company’s name, symbols, products, services, employees, buildings, its tangibles and intangibles, are not a cluster of facts but a dynamic system that creates specific value and meaning for stakeholders.

While it is desirable to achieve consistency in identity, McDonalds’ golden arches, for example, the perception of the company should no be expected to be the same in every country.

McDonalds’ is one of the fast food chains in the USA but in China it has the image of a classy American cuisine, desired by the young and the old, in spite of the fact that the identity of the company, its sounds and images, are quite consistent.The same identity provokes a different image in Karachi where several arsons have taken place without much public outrage.

A corporate identity must embody the company’s core values, the sum and substance of what is called its business case. Identity is the visualisation of its mission, and answers the unasked question: Who are we? What are we doing here?

Through logos, mottos, slogans and brands, a company enacts the drama of self-presentation and builds its image and perception in the mind of the public and various stakeholders. As mentioned earlier, while the identity of a company is a constant, image and perception are variables that ultimately determine the company’s reputation.

While a consistent and well-defined identity a company projects before the public helps it to build a perception of the company about what it stands for, the reputation is built over time and depends upon how the company conducts itself.

A strong reputation matters because it enhances a company’s attractiveness, muffles criticism and creates public support for a company’s activities.Customers don’t mind paying a little extra for a product when it comes from a company with a strong reputation for quality and fairness.

When a company faces conflicts, its good reputation enables corporate diplomats to conduct negotiations from a position of strength and self-confidence.

A company with a strong reputation attracts talented employees, who like to stay with the company for personal and professional growth. The likeability of the company by the employees and their day-today interaction with various stakeholders adds to the reputation of the company.

Employees become the corporeal identity of the company embodying its values and mission. But when a CEO is found with his pants down or his hand in the cookie jar, as it has happened with Enron, for example, the reputation comes crashing down. No amount of identity metamorphosis could bring the reputation back.

Apart from the integrity of corporate leadership that inspires respect and loyalty from employees and the general public, companies like Microsoft have enhanced their reputation by carrying out global philanthropic activities.

Corporate philanthropic giving at local, national and global levels should become part of a company’s business case. At the time of international catastrophes such as the Indian Ocean tsunami, Katrina hurricane in New Orleans, and earthquake in Pakistan, global companies get ample opportunities to showcase the humane side of their businesses by working with NGOs and other civic groups.

When a company is engaged in doing social good, let it be known to the public. After all, virtue is not hide in.

Some companies make use of institutional advertising to let the public know how involved they are in adding to the public good, just as Beyond Petroleum (BP), formerly British Petroleum, is doing with its corporate ads. It is informing the public about its commitment to the development of alternative sources of energy. BP looks green.

An imaginative and creative corporate advertising programme can enhance the reputation of a company and increase its likeability in the minds of various stakeholders. Likeability generates goodwill and creditability, which are precious assets for a company to attract and retain good, highly skilled employees.

Philanthropic activities of a company must be thoughtfully and tastefully publicised through corporate advertising to project the humane side of the company as Microsoft is doing through its global foundation to fight AIDS and tuberculosis.In contradistinction, what is Google doing? I want to know.