Wednesday, November 30, 2005

Jack Welch's Straight from the gut

I'm around a little less than halfway through this book. Around the part were he is criticized heavily for his changes at GE. He is firing people left-right and center, and removing all unproductive businesses from the company.
I'm too a bit skeptical at this stage of the book, since working in Infosys has led me to believe that the Job Security given by a company to its employees is one of the primary reasons for a company doing well.
But Welch staunchly opposes this and iterates the fact that any such company is bound to fail.

It is an interesting book, and i recommend people to read it,esp people who think life is going be in a platter laid out for them..

Tuesday, November 29, 2005

SOX

A price worth paying?
May 21st 2005
From The Economist print edition





America's response to Enron and other scandals was the Sarbanes-Oxley law. It is costing plenty—but is it working?

THE Sarbanes-Oxley statute, which the United States enacted in an atmosphere of extraordinary agitation in 2002, is one of the most influential—and controversial—pieces of corporate legislation ever to have hit a statute book. Its original aim, on the face of it, was modest: to improve the accountability of managers to shareholders, and hence to calm the raging crisis of confidence in American capitalism aroused by the scandals at Enron, WorldCom and other companies. The law's methods, however, were anything but modest, and its implications, for good or ill, are going to be far-reaching.

Since the new accounting rules and regulatory infrastructure that goes with them are still bedding in, it is too soon for a definitive judgment. (That time may never come, in fact: academics are still arguing about the pros and cons of the Glass-Steagall act of 1933, a similarly momentous initiative.) It is early days for academic appraisals, but the ones that have been ventured so far tend to the view that costs will exceed benefits. Meanwhile, many of America's businessmen are deeply unhappy, and with reason: the initial costs of the new law have been bigger than expected. And it can be argued that, when it comes to repairing American corporate governance, the law anyway addresses symptoms more than causes.

With time, no doubt, the law's balance of costs and benefits will improve significantly: some of the costs have been once-and-for-all. Right now, though, the balance looks pretty unfavourable.

Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve, spoke up in defence of the statute this week. It was faint praise. He said he was surprised that a law which had been passed so rapidly had worked as well as it has—less of an endorsement than it first seemed, since laws dealing with issues as complex as these and passed as “rapidly” as was Sarbanes-Oxley can normally be expected to fail abjectly.

Mr Greenspan also noted that the law will be fine-tuned as experience accumulates. Quite so. Next day, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), along with the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB, created by the law), told accountants that they were being too inflexible, “overly cautious” and “mechanical” in interpreting the statute. They called for the exercise of greater discretion—something which, three years ago, the architects of the statute had seemed to frown on. Whether good or bad, therefore, SOX, as it has become known, is by no means as yet a settled regime, but a work in progress.

Its initial provisions are wide-ranging. As well as establishing the accounting-oversight board, the statute prohibits audit firms from doing a variety of non-audit work for their clients (in order to address some obvious conflicts of interest). It requires companies to establish independent audit committees. It forbids company loans to company executives. It calls on top executives to certify company accounts. And it extends protection for whistleblowers: no company may “discharge, demote, suspend, threaten, harass, or in any other manner discriminate against an employee” because of any lawful provision of information about suspected fraud. (Tip-offs from insiders are by far the most common method of detecting fraud.)

The law's most complained-of provision, however, is its section 404. This makes managers responsible for maintaining an “adequate internal control structure and procedures for financial reporting”; and demands that companies' auditors “attest” to the management's assessment of these controls and disclose any “material weaknesses”. Draconian new criminal penalties await transgressors.

A Master....

Master!
You are a MASTER of the English language!


Huzzah. While your English is not exactly
perfect, you are still more grammatically sound than people in the US
Still, there is always
room for improvement...


How grammatically correct are you? (Revised with answer key)
brought to you by Quizilla

Monday, November 28, 2005

How many people die each year worldwide?

Some useful, uselessinformation and Data...


According to the CIA World Factbook, as of July, 2005, there were approximately 6,446,131,400 people on the planet, and the death rate was approximately 8.78 deaths per 1,000 people a year. According to our nifty desktop calculator, that works out to roughly 56,597,034 people leaving us every year. That's about a 155,000 a day.

Still, more people are being born than dying. The population growth rate is hovering around 1.14%, which doesn't seem like much, but last year that was (back to the calculator!) 73,485,898 more mouths to feed. As the Factbook succinctly puts it: "For the 21st century, the continued exponential growth in science and technology raises both hopes (e.g., advances in medicine) and fears (e.g., development of even more lethal weapons of war)."

The legal information resource ItsMyLife.com offers some interesting mortality statistics for the United States. Of the 2,400,000-plus Americans who die each year, over 45,000 are killed in transport accidents. The number of homicides, poisonings, and drunk driving fatalities are roughly the same, at around 17,000 each. Perhaps more surprisingly, a stunning 178,000 Americans die from medical or hospital error every year.

For more details, the National Center for Health Statistics offers a free report. The United Nations also offers a 2005 World Health Report. One of its key findings: this year almost 11 million children under the age of five will die from a preventable disease

Collection of quotations

In mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them.
- Johann von Neumann

"When you encounter seemingly good advice that contradicts other seemingly good advice, ignore them both."
- Al Franken

When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him: 'Whose?'
- Don Marquis

Stoop and you'll be stepped on; stand tall and you'll be shot at.
- Carlos A. Urbizo


A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.


Insanity in individuals is something rare -- but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule.

Consumer Power..

A very interesting article that gives an insight on the power of the internet..

Power at last

From The Economist

Armed with the internet, the customer has finally got on top




“WHEN a customer enters my store, forget me. He is king,” decreed John Wanamaker, who in 1876 turned an abandoned railway depot in Philadelphia into one of the world's first department stores. This revolutionary concept changed the face of retailing and led to the development of advertising and marketing as we know it today.

But compelling as that slogan was, in truth the shopper was cheated of the crown. Although manufacturing efficiency boosted the variety of goods and lowered prices, advertising provided most information about products. Through much of the past century, ads spoke to a captive audience confined to just a few radio or television channels or a limited number of publications. Now media choice has exploded too, and consumers select what they want from a far greater variety of sources—especially with a few clicks of a computer mouse. Thanks to the internet, the consumer is finally seizing power.

As our survey in this issue shows, consumer power has profound implications for companies, because it is changing the way the world shops. Many firms already claim to be “customer-driven” or “consumer-centric”. Now their claims will be tested as never before. Trading on shoppers' ignorance will no longer be possible: people will know—and soon tell others, even those without the internet—that prices in the next town are cheaper or that certain goods are inferior. The internet is working wonders in raising standards. Good and honest firms should benefit most.

But it is also intensifying competition. Today, window shopping takes place online. People can compare products, prices and reputations. They can read what companies say about products in far greater detail, but also how that tallies with the opinions of others, and—most importantly of all—discover what previous buyers have to say. Newsgroups and websites constantly review products and services.

This is changing the nature of consumer decisions. Until recently, consumers usually learned about a product and made their choice at the same time. People would often visit a department store or dealership to seek advice from a salesman, look at his recommendations and then buy. Now, for many, each of these steps is separate. For instance, Ford is finding that eight out of ten of its customers have already used the internet to decide what car they want to buy—and what they are willing to pay—even before they arrive at a showroom.


Of course, the amount of time people spend researching and checking prices tends to rise in proportion to the value of the product—and cars are expensive. But consumers are displaying similar behaviour when they purchase other things, such as digital cameras, mobile phones or fashionable clothes. And while supermarket shoppers may not research in this way all the individual items they drop into their trolley, many suppliers of the packaged goods sold in supermarkets are already acutely aware that their customers, too, are better informed than ever before about the value or health implications of the products they sell.

Reaching these better-informed consumers with a marketing message is not easy, and not only because they are more sceptical. Many people now spend as much time surfing the web as they do with television, magazines or newspapers. The audience for advertising is splintering and its attention is harder to attract. On top of that, many people are arming themselves with technology to avoid marketing messages, such as pop-up ad-blockers for the internet and personal video recorders that make it easy to skip TV commercials.

Despite the flood of product and price information suddenly available, consumers are unlikely ever to become wholly calculating. Tastes and fashion will differ. Brands are likely to remain popular. But brand loyalties are weakening. A slip or delay can cost a firm dearly and hand the advantage to an opportunistic rival. This is how Apple's iPod snatched from Sony the market leadership in portable-music devices.


Many firms do not yet seem aware of the revolutionary implications of newly empowered consumers. Too many companies relaxed after the bursting of the dotcom bubble, assuming that the online threat had faded. This was a mistake. It is true that the vast majority of people still go to shops for most purchases (though online sales continue to grow). Before doing that, however, most have used the internet. More than 90% of people aged between 18 and 54 told America's Online Publishers Association in a survey that they would turn to the internet first for product information. The differences between the virtual and the bricks-and-mortar worlds do not worry consumers. But they should worry companies. Many consumers first encounter a firm through its website, and yet for too many firms, their online presence remains a low priority.

By contrast, some businesses have embraced the internet wholeheartedly, and been rewarded for it. Dell has by-passed retailers and used direct sales to become the world's leading supplier of personal computers. The web is also transforming the travel business, giving consumers the power to book flights, hotels and cars directly. And it has allowed hundreds of thousands of small businesses, from mom-and-pop stores to traders of collectibles on eBay, to reach a global market.

The explosion of choice that followed the opening of Mr Wanamaker's store is minuscule compared with the cornucopia already provided by the internet. But the consumer's choice is about to become even greater. Internet search firms such as Google, Yahoo! and MSN are now falling over each other to offer more localised services. These promise to open up a new goldmine in search advertising. And soon this facility will be available not just on PCs at home or work, but on mobile phones. At a touch, consumers will be able to find a local store and then check the offers from nearby outlets even as they browse the aisles, or listen to a salesman. When that happens consumers will truly be kings, and only those firms ready and able to serve these new monarchs will survive.

Sunday, November 27, 2005

Started Blogging


An Indian Express article re-kindled the fire to start blogging again. This time i'm not gonna give up. This is going to be the blog that stays with me for long time to come.

Peggy