Why doesn’t India take terrorism seriously?
The Statesman/CYBER AGE/ND BATRA
The heart-wrenching picture of Manisha and Anisha, daughters of the slain Indian engineer K Suryanarayana, wailing beside their father’s body at the time of his cremation, “Shattered Dreams,” as The Statesman captioned it, should open our eyes to the fact that war against terrorism will never ~ ever ~ be over.
Some analysts and commentators have been dumping Islamic terrorism with Maoist insurgency and incidents of communal violence, as if they were a continuation of the same problem. It is just like a quack telling you that cancer and malaria are the same disease because both kill their victims, much like traffic accidents kill people, which is no way of facing the horrific realities of international terrorism.
The modus operandi of terrorist attacks in Afghanistan or Iraq is no different from that in Kashmir where in April 32 innocent people, Hindus only, were dragged from their homes and killed in Doda and Udhampur; or Varanasi where in a temple attack 30 people were killed in early March. You see the monstrous face of Islamic jihadism: death and destruction multiplied thousand times by an endless cycle of television images, disembodied end-of-the world sounds and images of scarred and mutilated humans and buildings, fear magnified and mirrored on hundreds of ghostly faces everyday.
Fighting terrorism is not a gentleman’s game. It consumes a politician, as President George Bush knows. Superb intelligence gathering, preemptive and preventive measures and anticipatory disaster plans could go a long way in minimising the damages, if India would take terrorism as seriously as the United States of America does, and politicians are prepared to pay the price in terms of popularity. President Bush’s popularity is down in the drains but he keeps fighting terrorism. Since September 11, 2001, there has been no terrorist attack in the USA. When would one say that about India?
Eradicating terrorism is not a simple matter of bringing one evil man to his heels; or killing a militant here and a militant there. Although its origin lies in religious fanaticism and a blind hatred of non-believes, at an organisational level terrorism must be considered as an enterprise that manufactures dread, customised for each political and cultural market. The response of each country, therefore, has to be different. Though the USA cannot directly help India fight terrorism, working together on a long-term basis, especially in Afghanistan, would strengthen both countries’ efforts in fighting terror.
Osama bin Laden alive and kicking in Pakistan is not alone. Nor could he plan and execute bloody carnages in so many places without the brainpower and resources of a multitude of strategists and financiers living in sanctuaries in Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Arab world. Chris Patten, chancellor of Oxford University and former EU commissioner for external relations, last week wrote a piece in The Wall Street Journal holding Pakistan singularly responsible for the prevailing instability in Afghanistan, and asserting that the nation’s primary export to Afghanistan today is terrorism.
“Every few days,” wrote Lord Patten, “the resurgent Taliban carry out another deadly attack on school children, aid workers, or local and international security forces... On the most basic level, attacks in Afghanistan, including suicide bombings, are often planned and prepared at Taliban training camps across the border.”
And Pakistan has done nothing to stop them in spite of President Pervez Musharraf’s protestations to the contrary. Lord Patten, former governor of Hong Kong, knows what he is talking about. So should US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, though for diplomatic reasons she may not be able to speak up as frankly as Lord Patten has done regarding runaway radicalism in Pakistan: “Demilitarising and de-radicalising Pakistan is truly the key to bringing about stability in Afghanistan and the wider region.”
The killing of Suryanarayana should be seen in the light that the Government of India or any other government wouldn’t be able to assure anyone’s safety unless terrorism is rooted out at its source, which according to Lord Patten flourishes in India’s neighbourhood. But the terrorists also flourish in open and secular societies in Western Europe, Canada, the United States of America; only more so in India. That’s what complicates the matter.
How do we recognise the enemy who may be also amidst us without violating the values of the open society that we are trying to protect? It is puzzling that the global financial system is very much intact and the confidence of the investor remains unabated, but wails of mourners continue.
Attacks against ethnic minorities adversely affect civil liberties, which are already under threat. In the USA, law enforcement authorities have been given expanded powers of surveillance including wire-tapping and e-mail scrutiny. Last week’s Washington Post-ABC News poll indicated that 63 per cent of Americans approve President Bush’s domestic surveillance practices to fight terrorism, though his overall approval rating has sunk very low.
Open societies face a serious dilemma. As law enforcement authorities try to locate and destroy international terrorist cells functioning openly or clandestinely in their own backyards, they need to do so with minimum loss of civil liberties and without endangering the security of ethnic and religious minorities.
Whatever happens in Kashmir should have no repercussion in the streets of Ahmedabad.The struggle against international jihadist terrorism is going to be a relentless, long drawn out global campaign from which India cannot escape. India has no choice but to keep fighting.
Tuesday, May 16, 2006
Tuesday, May 9, 2006
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.
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.
Tuesday, May 2, 2006
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.
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.
Tuesday, April 25, 2006
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.
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.
Tuesday, April 18, 2006
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.
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.
Tuesday, April 11, 2006
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.”
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.”
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