Month: September 2009

Business schools have changed little over the past year, in spite of the contribution of their philosophy of business, risk and finance to the 2008 bubble. What must they do?

More history classes would help. Would-be business titans need to learn that economic history is punctuated with crises and disasters, that booms inevitably give way to busts, and that the business cycle, having survived many predictions of extinction, continues to prey on the modern economy. The 2008 debacle might have come as less of a surprise if all those MBAs had been taught that there have been at least 124 bank-centred crises around the world since 1970, most of which were preceded by booms in house prices and stockmarkets, large capital inflows and rising public debt.

History courses aside, business schools need to change their tone more than their syllabuses. In particular, they should foster the twin virtues of scepticism and cynicism. Graduates in recent years, for example, seem to have accepted far too readily the notion that clever financial engineering could somehow abolish risk and uncertainty, when it probably made things worse.

Back home, it’d help if the IIMs taught from something apart from cyclostyle copies of HBR cases.

The U.S. is considering legally preventing ISPs from restricting or delaying their subscribers’ access to specific sites.

Protecting this principle, known by the catch-all phrase net neutrality, is important because it is the most basic assumption we make online: that we can access any website, play any media, download any file, limited only by the bandwidth/download cap in our tariff plan.

In the absence of protection, ISPs – both cable and phone companies (in the US and in India) could create a ‘tiered Intenet’:

They want to tax content providers to guarantee speedy delivery of their data. And they want to discriminate in favor of their own search engines, Internet phone services and streaming video — while slowing down or blocking services offered by their competitors.

Imagine (this is ONLY hypothetical) that your ISP – say Sify in India – enters into a partnership with Microsoft. Under the terms of the agreement, Sify will give requests made to the search engine Bing twice as much bandwidth as to other search engines like Google (say, in return for a small percentage of ad revenues from the search).

Or say (once again, hypothetically) Airtel Broadband starts an online radio service, and manipulates network management to reserve more bandwidth for that service as opposed other (maybe a competitor’s) online radio or music streaming service.

Or that you could make VoIP calls only from your ISP’s ‘approved’ software (which may or may not be freely available).

Or that if your ISP notices that you download too many movies and music, your access to those websites could be ‘slowed down’ (blocking access is a strict no-no, so this could be a very convenient workaround for the ISP).

Finally, this sort of forced neutrality, of course, could interfere with ISPs’ network management and compel them to allocate more bandwidth than they have available:

In such a scenario, wireless carriers may have to rethink how much they charge for data plans or even cap how much bandwidth individuals get, said Julie Ask, a wireless analyst at Jupiter Research.

It’s a debate we aren’t having in India yet – and we should. We’re a resource-hungry but bandwidth-starved nation; our demand for smoother YouTube videos and faster (illegal) music/movie downloads creates strong incentives for our ISPs to resort to network manipulation.

Effects in popular culture. Exhibit One, the Streisand Effect, which is

the widespread dissemination of information caused by an attempt to suppress that information. In 2003, when Barbra Streisand sued a photographer documenting coastal erosion to remove photos of her seaside mansion from his Web site, the pictures ended up plastered all over the Web.

There’s also the lipstick effect, the CNN effect, the NASCAR effect, and (my favourite) the CSI effect.

Same day, two reports.

Indians should change their lifestyle for the sake of the Commonwealth Games: India
Americans should change their lifestyle for the sake of the planet: India

Scott Adams of Dilbert fame:

I’m fascinated by the debate over fixing/expanding the healthcare system in the United States. The issue is so complex that people understandably fall back on basic philosophies of the free market system to reach an opinion. For example, if you think the government tends to screw up everything it touches, and the free market does a good job, you might come down on the side of less government involvement in the healthcare system. But that view ignores the confusopoly effect.

A confusopoly – a term I concocted several years ago – is any industry that intentionally makes its products and services too complicated for comparison shopping. The best examples of confusopolies are cell phone carriers and insurance companies. And health insurance companies might be the most confusing confusopoly of all. I suspect that no individual has the knowledge, time, and information necessary to effectively compare two health insurance plans. And in that environment the free market doesn’t operate efficiently.

A corollary of that seems to be that the more complex the issue, the more jingoistic the arguments around it will be, and the more the incentive to resort to symbolic gestures. Case in point: illegal slums in Bombay? Simply move the regularization date forward from 1995 to 2000 and hey presto! Illegal slums down by a few hundred thousand.

When a company sends two employees to New Zealand to buy an iPhone and tear it apart, just so that they can report its innards 27 hours before anyone in the US can, it’s worth reading about. Especially when the company specializes in this sort of stuff.

And you know what?

IFixit’s Wiens has been taking apart gadgets for six years, and he said his favorite observation is the inadvertent harmony between rivals such as Apple and Microsoft. The two are fierce competitors, Wiens said, but once you look inside their gadgets, many of them are made by the same people. The Zune HD and the iPhone, for example, were both made by Foxconn, a major manufacturer in China.

“You’ve got these arch nemesis devices, and they’re the culmination of years of effort by Microsoft and Apple,” Wiens said. “But they’re being assembled and shipped out of China by the same company. At the same time you know the product managers at Apple and Microsoft hate each other’s guts.”

Does your software firm do this? A ‘driver’ who writes the code, and the ‘navigator’ who sits beside, critiquing the code in real-time:

Consider the game “Where’s Waldo,” in which a cartoon character is hidden in an intricate design. Most people can eventually find Waldo after poring over the drawing. Similarly, when programmers check code for errors, it takes time to examine the logic and find mistakes.

Now imagine if someone sat next to the artist from the very beginning. Obviously, the onlooker should be able to find Waldo more easily. The character would stand out. In the same way, one programmer looking for errors in code as another writes it can follow the logic in real time. Ideally, the navigator immediately catches anything that is incorrect. My colleagues agree with this analogy.

With tales of incompatible idiosyncrasies.

When the French disagreed with the US’ decision to invade free a Middle-Eastern country, it gave an iconic snack an identity crisis:

On March 11, 2003, Representatives Robert W. Ney (R-Ohio) and Walter B. Jones, Jr. (R-North Carolina) declared that all references to French fries and French toast on the menus of the restaurants and snack bars run by the House of Representatives would be removed. House cafeterias were ordered to rename French fries to “freedom fries”. This action was carried out without a congressional vote, under the authority of Ney’s position as Chairman of the Committee on House Administration, which oversees restaurant operations for the chamber. The simultaneous renaming of French toast to “freedom toast” attracted less attention.

The French, for their part, showed great restraint (and a touch of amusement):

“We are at a very serious moment dealing with very serious issues and we are not focusing on the name you give to potatoes”

Article contains several examples from modern history, including what the British did to the German Shepherd during WW1.

This kind of quest to claim popular culture as one’s own never fails to remind me of this.

From someone who’s seen it up close and personal, an account of how the 80s and 90s changed book publishing beyond recognition. The old:

But it was our office archaeology that I remember the most. There was a primitive chaos to it all — the hybrid scent of tobacco and mimeograph ink, and the sounds of ringing phones, of typewriters zipping along until the warning bell pinged near the end of a line, and of the clack-clack-clack of the return handle as the carriage reset.

It’s easy to talk about what the computer changed everything in the 1990s, but it’s surprising how disruptive the Xerox machine and the fax machine were in the 1980s:

The Xerox machine meant that suddenly, not one manuscript was submitted to one publisher, but that 10 copies went to 10 publishers simultaneously. The first publisher to claim the book won, cutting a six-week process to six days or sometimes six hours…. The fax machine accelerated the process of signing contracts, and beamed manuscripts overseas for worldwide auctions.

The description of the transformation of the 1990s is worth reading for the sheer number of artifacts and practices that the computer rendered obsolete – probably almost overnight.

When I leaf through my collection of old Readers’ Digest issues from the 1980s, I’m always struck by photographs of directors and chairmen of companies at their desks, with nothing but a few sheets of paper and a large gold pen in front of them – how in the world could they manage without a computer and an afternoon game of Free Cell?

This CNN-IBN report about Shashi Tharoor’s “cattle class” incident has half of its words lifted entirely from Tharoor’s tweets.

The report is 321 words long. 115 words are the full text of his tweets, and 28 words from the final paragraph are two of his earlier tweets re-written in third person. So 143 / 321 = 45% or nearly half of the report are Tharoor’s words, merely reproduced.

Oh, and lots of the other words are phrases like “The Minister, who is in Liberia on an official visit, tweeted late night on Thursday that he had…”, “he tweeted…” followed by the tweet.

@jeanmarsh first noticed this report. Also, turn to Rajdeep Sardesai’s and Suhasini Haider’s blog posts for solid opinion on the faux austerity drive.