Ramamritham infiltrates Al Qaeda

I think we have found the way to destroy Al Qaeda, or for that matter, any terrorist organisation. Don't send the Navy Seals or the National Security Guard or Special Forces. Send in Ramamritham instead !

This post has no place in what is ostensibly a business blog, but this writer could not miss the opportunity to ridicule Ramamritham anywhere and everywhere. So , with apologies , here's the story.

When the French forces recently retook much of Mali from terrorists, the press who followed them found a detailed letter and a number of documents in a building which was a base or Al Qaeda. The letter was to a thug and hoodlum called Moktar Belmoktar. It throws light on how Ramamritham has wormed his way even into Al Qaeda.

The letter was a "warning letter" to the said terrorist castigating him for not filing expense statements !!! It also was expressing displeasure at his skipping meetings which he was to attend !! He was also castigated for pricing below Head Office instructions - apparently for release of a kidnap victim he agreed to a price of 700,000 Euros when the going rate was  3 million. He was also censured for making a "business trip" to Libya without having taken approval in advance.

Moktar was also revealed to have complained that he was not being promoted and that somebody less qualified was instead given the job. He sulked for a while , refused to take phone calls and complained in his PDP ! Still not being promoted, he then quit and started his own rival murderous gang.

If Al Qaeda monsters have to file expense statements and take prior permission for foreign travel, we have nothing more to fear from them. They are doomed.

I shall make a few more suggestions to Ramamritham to further help him in his noble quest

• Impose a detailed dress code on terrorists. They have to wear a tie between Monday and Thursday. Friday, they have to wear  T shirts to show that they are cool
• Instruct them that not displaying their ID card while carrying out a terrorist attack is an offence and if found so, they will be sent back home
• Display the pick up and drop schedule every day. Moktar has to catch Innova No S-47D. He will be dropped only at end of his road and not in front of his home
• He can browse his personal email only between 12.41 and 13.04 every day . Facebook, Twitter, etc are banned. All Jihadist sites of Al Qaeda are open, but rival sites are banned
• Moktar has not filled last month's self appraisal form, demonstrating that he has adhered to the values of Al Qaeda (with examples). Therefore he may be asked to report to the HR manager for a dressing down.

All hail Ramamritham, for helping defang Al Qaeda.

Business Jazz – 25th May 2013 – The Visual Podcast

TOPICS THIS WEEK: Risk, Experimentation and Change

Part of running a business and being an entrepreneur is trying new things.

We're all about connecting with our community on this podcast. We think the most successful businesses are the ones that engage well with their target market. They build communities.

In this week's episode, we talk about changing the podcast to allow us to engage better and more directly with our listeners. In fact, we're thinking about how you can participate in the actual recording of the podcast. One way of doing that is using Google+.

Our conversation leads us to discuss how audiences and companies find each other and how they build relationships. Rather than trying to please everyone all of the time, the better strategy is to please a smaller subset of people who really get your business.

That involves taking a leap of faith. Risk is part of finding your true audience.

The video

Links to people and things we mention

Chris Brogan

New rallying point

You are a big part of the story of this podcast. We'd like you to be an even bigger part of it. To help with that, and to help us have discussions about being genuinely attractive in business, we've established a LinkedIn group. Please knock on the door and we'll let you in.

Country tally

Our confirmed country tally as of this week is: 8.

We know we have listeners in Canada, Ireland, the UK, the USA, the Netherlands, Croatia, Serbia and India. If you live in a country not on this list, please let us know. We're working on an interactive Business Jazz listeners map, which we hope to launch soon.

Listening to the podcast

You can listen to this week's podcast using the player at the top of the post or download it directly here: Business Jazz – 25th May, 2013.

We're also in iTunes. We'd love it if you subscribed or left some feedback.

Business Jazz Players

This podcast is a collaboration of people dotted around the world. Most of us have never met each other. It's quite a story and it's still evolving. 
If you'd like to read what's happened so far, you'll find it here: Our Story.

The Business May 29th 2013: The WFMYou Really Wanna Be Here Edition

The Business knows that you are excited about this.  In preparation, we think it is absolutely in order that you all tune your internet radios to WFMU and shake your butt off or laugh your face off, depending on what they are serving up at the moment.  

This week, The Business welcomes Ken Freedman.

Ken Freedman and his only friend Andy Breckman are the hosts of Seven Second Delay on WFMU, the legendary freeform radio station in Jersey City, New Jersey. For the past twenty years, they've picked a "radio stunt" each week, then tried to execute it in just one hour of live airtime. They've chain-translated a Village Voice S&M personal add through 15 languages, then back into English, written the ultimate New York Times "Metropolitan Diary" column entry, then gotten it published, and failed more times than they can count. Every other week, they bring their special potion of anti-comedy trainwrecks to the UCB Theatre.  When they're not on-air, Freedman serves as theStation Manager of WFMU, the longest running and most renowned freeform radio station in the United States.

Oh that’s not all oh no, oh we got Clare O’Kane as well!  Oh yeah!

Clare O’Kane is an actress and comedian who currently lives in Oakland, California. She is a part of Sylvan Productions, a group of weirdos who produce wonderful comedy shows all over the San Francisco Bay Area. Clare has performed in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, the Bridgetown Comedy Festival, as well as a few comedy festivals with fun, fake-sounding names like the Shits and Giggles Comedy Festival and the Too Much Funstival. You can also see her in the indie movie Bloodrape as a bass playing vampire from the nineteen nineties!

It would be foolish to miss this, so get there early cause we sell out.

Bring $5.  A high five is a sufficient tip.

BYOBurrito make sure the meat was listener supported. 

Tax evasion is a crime. Tax avoidance is a .... ?

In the good old days, this was an easy cliche. Tax evasion (breaking the law) was a crime. Tax avoidance (minimising paying the tax within the law) was something you were duty bound to do. Whether you are an individual, company, whatever. Period. Now it isn't so clear cut an answer.  And that says something about our times.

Witness the case of Apple. It does aggressive tax planning (all within the law). It has a big subsidiary in Ireland and has done a deal with the government there for a low tax rate. It does not bring overseas profits into the US, because it is double taxed then; so it leaves all its overseas profits overseas. All very legitimate. And yet there has been a huge outcry and a Congressional hearing where Apple is accused of not paying "its fair share of taxes".

Similar accusations are levied on Amazon, Google and Starbucks in the UK and indeed in many other countries. Nowhere are the authorities claiming they broke the law. They are just angry that these companies pay a low or zero tax despite large businesses in those countries.

From a public's point of view, there is no difference between evasion and avoidance. The expectation is that all companies must pay lots of taxes irrespective of the law and facts. Equally all rich people must pay big amounts of tax even if the law does not require them to do so. But for each individual himself, it is perfectly OK to evade tax (breaking the law). Queer set of values.

Almost everybody in India breaks the law when it comes to taxes. And before you protest too much, please answer if you have disclosed your savings bank interest as income in your tax return and if you have done no cash transactions above Rs 10,000. The less said about professions like lawyers, doctors and the like, the better. The salaried class is one of the worst offenders - their salaries are caught by the taxman under the withholding tax regime. Everything else, in the eyes of the salaried man or woman is not to be disclosed as after all they are paying "lots of tax" on their salaries.

Why does this work like that. Why is it OK for us to evade tax, but not for others even to avoid it. Is it just pure jealousy against the rich ? Is it just one law for everybody else and one law for us ? What is going on ?

For corporates and rich individuals, there is an expectation of  social responsibility at play here. It is not enough to follow the law. It is now required to be seen as "being fair to society" everywhere. This is a woolly concept ; after all what is the concept of fair.  But each company has to make its own "contract" with society. The more successful you are, the more demanding the contract.

Social responsibility has gotten an altogether new meaning, A far more challenging meaning. Companies have to be seen as "good citizens, whatever that means. Notice that the public's definition of a good citizen is "I break the law, but you shall do over and above the law". "

Its a tough world out there.

Business Jazz – 20th May 2013 – LegoMan, Storytelling and Being Human

TOPICS THIS WEEK: Storytelling, SOBCon, Social Media Camp, Customer Experience, Customer Clarity

What is your customer's experience?

Jane attended the recent SOBCon event in Chicago. This year's theme was exactly that and she reports back on some of the things she learned and taught about customer experience.

You'll also be introduced to LegoMan.

Jane was also a speaker at Social Media Camp, Canada's biggest social media conference. You'll hear how she hosted a Google+ hangout with participants from around the world. Jane even made the evening news in Canada.

Links to people and things we mention

SOBCon
Social Media Camp
Phil Sorrell's Social Hiking Podcast
David Bailey - An Englishman in the Balkans
Maaike van Dijk - Bokkers/Comma-M (Dutch)
April Ennis
Marti Konstant
Greg McQueen
Chris Brogan

New rallying point

You are a big part of the story of this podcast. We'd like you to be an even bigger part of it. To help with that, and to help us have discussions about being genuinely attractive in business, we've established a LinkedIn group. Please knock on the door and we'll let you in.

Country tally

Our confirmed country tally as of this week is: 8.

We know we have listeners in Canada, Ireland, the UK, the Netherlands, India, Croatia, Serbia and India. If you live in a country not on this list, please let us know. We're working on an interactive Business Jazz listeners map, which we hope to launch soon.

Listening to the podcast

You can listen to this week's podcast using the player at the top of the post or download it directly here: Business Jazz – 20th May, 2013.

We're also in iTunes. We'd love it if you subscribed or left some feedback.

Business Jazz Players

This podcast is a collaboration of people dotted around the world. Most of us have never met each other. It's quite a story and it's still evolving. 
If you'd like to read what's happened so far, you'll find it here: Our Story.

The Business May 22nd 2013: The Dynamic Duo Edition

THESE GUYS.  Our guests this week are two genuine articles.  

It’s Cory Loykasek and Donnie Divanian! 

Cory Loykasek is an SF based stand-up comedian using laid back rants to take a high-brow look at low-brow issues.  He is a regular on the For The People Comedy Tour and in 2012 performed in SF Sketchfest, Bridgetown Comedy Festival, and Outside Lands.   Is Cory Funny?  A lot of cool people think so.  This one guy, Derrick, he was the JV quarterback at his division III high school, went to prom and everything, thinks Cory is ‘pretty fucking good.”

Donnie Divanian will beat you at tennis and then make you laugh like he didn’t just beat you at tennis. He has performed in SF Sketchfest and the SF Fringe Festival (receiving a best of the Fringe award). He is also in the comedy group We Are Nudes. In 2010 they appeared in the NY times.

Your regulars will be there mmmboping as well, Nato “Issac” Green, Sean “Taylor” Keane and Bucky “Zac” Sinister.  

Bring your $5 and get there early cause we sell out.

BYOBurrito and eat it.  Eat the whole damn thing.

The economics of spot fixing

Yeah Yeah, I am that sort of a nerd. While much of India is agog with the spot fixing scandal that broke yesterday, this blogger ruminates on the economics of it. Yes, he is a weirdo !

Having got that out of the way, a few words on the scandal, for the 3 million non Indian readers this blog gets :)  There is a nonsensical game (anybody who suggests the word cricket in this connection will be personally bashed up by me) in which there is a cash machine called the Indian Premier League. Yesterday three players were caught, allegedly  hand in glove with bookies, manipulating results. That's all you really need to know.

What is baffling me is the economics of it. There are all sorts of reports, but I think it is safe to say that at least Rs 20 lakhs (some $40,000) was allegedly paid to the players to give away a minimum number of runs in an over. Let us say, for this to be profitable to the crooks who are betting on it, they must wager at least an equivalent amount at odds of say 5:1, otherwise its not worth it.  For this sort of betting to be accepted by the bookies and to remain valid, there must have been others betting at least 5 times this amount. So all in all some Rs 1.2 crores ($ Quarter a million) must have been bet.

All this simply on one over !!!!  An over, for the uninitiated, is of 6 balls and takes 3 minutes or so to complete. The way this scam seemed to have operated, there was about 2 or 3 minutes notice to the crooks that it was going to be fixed in that over.

What I want to know is who are these blokes who are prepared to gamble quarter a million dollars in 3 minutes on something as arcane as the number of runs given away in an over in an inconsequential match. And there are 40 such overs in one match and there are some 70 or so matches. The arithmetic is mind boggling.

Who are these jokers ? What do they look like and which planet do they come from ?

PS. Just for the record, the GDP per capita of India is $1,492.

The Structure of Competition: How Hidden Patterns Drive Firm Behaviour

In our behaviour and beliefs, we are influenced by various hidden structures and characteristics of the people surrounding us. Over the past decades, for example, hundreds of studies on social networks and "small worlds" have shown that with whom you have had prior relationships, and how these people relate to each other, influences the information we receive, how much personal power we have, how likely we are to find a job, get promoted, how creative and innovatie we are, and so forth.

This research on social networks basically draws lines between you and the people you know, and lines between those people you know who also know each other; lines between them and other people you don't know at all, etcetera, to reveal very different structures. We call these structures networks with or without "structural holes", with more or less "indirect ties", "network closure", and so on.

Ample research has also revealed that, just like individuals, the same type of structures influence firms in their behaviour and performance. In this case, the lines between different firms - referred to as "social ties" - can be determined by prior alliances between these companies, or shared members of their boards of directors (so-called board interlocks), or some other cooperative tie. Firms may not always realise it, but their strategic choices and success can be heavily infuenced by these social networks.

What a former PhD student of mine - Kai-Yu Hsieh (now an assistant professor at the National University of Singapore) - and I did is similar but also very different from this social network research. We started to draw lines between the different firms in an industry, not based on "social ties" but based on who competes with whom. Some firms in an industry namely compete directly with each other where others don't. For example, in the pharmaceutical industry, a firm making anti-epileptic drugs and cardiovascular drugs would be competing with another firm that makes cardivascular drugs but not with a firm that makes antibiotics medicine. The firm's competitors, however, could also be competing with each other, for instance if both also happened to make cancer drugs. The point is that, drawing lines between the different firms in various industries also revealed remarkably different structures - just like social networks do. And we wanted to find out if organizations, in their behaviour, are also influenced by such competitive structures; which we labeled "the structure of competition".

And the answer is "oh yes".

We deliberately selected two very different industries for which to compute these competitive structures. We analysed whom competes with whom among computer hardware manufacturers in Taiwan. And we computed the exact same structures for pharmaceutical firms in China. The type of strategic behaviour that we chose to analyse through these competitive structures was imitative market entry: how inclined would these firms be, dependent on their structure of competition, to follow each other into new markets? Or might certain type of structures induce them not to imitate each other at all, and in fact stay out of certain markets altogether?

Remarkably, in these very different industries the exact same types of competitive structures led to the exact same types of strategic behaviour. And the influence of the structure of competition was substantial: firms could display completely opposite behaviour when facing different structures (flipping from a strong inclination to imitate to an inclination to do the opposite of others).

We interviewed people in these industries to find out why these structures were influencing their behaviour so heavily. The first thing we found out was that, in spite of their strong influence, managers were not aware of the different type of structures. But they were aware of their influence. Our interviews suggested that operating within a particular structure seemed to leave a particular "imprinting effect" on a firm, making it more or less aggressive in its market behaviour and towards its competitors.

In this study, we analyzed the strong influence of these hidden structures of competition on firm's imitative market entry behaviour, but it seems likely that - just as in the case of social networks - they might heavily influence a whole range of other strategic variables and behaviours. Hence, we see our research - due to appear in the academic journal Organization Science - as just a first step to uncovering the hidden influence of the structure of competition on economic life.

Everybody bashes the Taxman

If you have been following the news in the US, you might have noticed an almighty hullabaloo over the the IRS (their tax man) having targeted Tea Party and Conservative groups. Much hot air and righteous indignation is being spouted and Obama has fired the IRS chief yesterday. Almost everybody on earth loves to bash the taxman (rightfully so !) and this is all good fun.

Except that I believe that in this case the bashing is wrong. Or at least much exaggerated.

What happened is this. The IRS admits that it subjected groups which bore the name tea party, or patriot to extra scrutiny. The fact that such groups are exclusively Republican and that the President is a Democrat seems to indicate political targeting. That is, of course, against the law. Hence all this noise.

But why did the IRS do this - after all, they are not fools. If you try and answer this question, a different picture emerges.

The problem all started with, in my view,  the appalling judgement by the US Supreme Court in the Citizens United case in 2010. In layman terms the Supreme Court decided that organisations were people and had the same right of free speech as you and me. Therefore there could be no curbs on their political activities and donations.

Overnight, all sorts of action groups sprung up and the money started being being poured into US elections of all kinds.  Many of these outfits do not want to disclose who really gives them money. The way to achieve this is to register as a social welfare organisation under the tax code which then grants you tax exempt status - something called Sec 501(c)(4) exemption !! You are not prohibited then from indulging in political activity - its just that the primary activity has to be social welfare in nature. The main purpose of these groups is not to avoid tax (for they do not really seek to make a profit). The primary purpose is to avoid disclosing who is giving all the money.

It is probably a safe bet to say that the majority of these groups (Republican or Democrat) have zero interest in social welfare and are primarily there for  political activity.

From 2010 to 2012, the number of such organisations doubled to some 3400. A large number of them were "tea party" or "patriots". Do you really expect the IRS to sit tight and watch all this. After all, it is their job to check whether these outfits really were primarily involved in social welfare. 

The IRS did not prosecute them or withdraw their status. All they did , in true Ramamrtiham style, is to harass them with lengthy requests for information, do audit reviews, delay decisions on their applications and commence painstaking procedures. In this my sympathies are entirely with the said groups as we all know what the incredible capabilities of Ramamritham are.

The real culprit is the political donations sloshing around consequent to that awful Supreme Court verdict.  In true US politics style, this will not be addressed - instead the IRS will be hauled over coals. Yuk !

I never thought I would ever write a post in defence of Ramamritham, but there you go ... !

The Business May 15th, 2013: The “HOBO YOU DIDN’T” Edition

We got our bindles tied to our sticks and we are ready for some rail splitting action!  This week’s guests are finer than a pot of Mulligan stew served by a hot lil bo-ette biscuit shooter.

We are tickled to welcome Jeff Seal, Crowned the Hobo Clown King in '86, '87 and '89.  He is an accomplished comic and clown, and a real delight.  

We are also pleased to have the ferociously funny Casey Ley!

Casey's comedy has been seen in festivals such as SFSketchfest, Bridgetown Comedy Festival in Portland, OR and the Moontower Comedy Festival in Austin, TX. He is the host and creator of the popular monthly stand-up show "This Feels Wrong" and a weekly comedy game show called "Mayhem Trivia." He's been featured on NPR and was voted the Bay Area's best comic by readers of SF Weekly in 2012

Also, a San Francisco favorite who has appeared on Last Comic Standing, The Late Late Show and in SF Sketchfest, Michael Meehan!

Michael is a self-taught comic, painter and sculptor. His art is forged from salvaged materials and a sense of the absurd.

Plus all your regulars, Bucky “Bindlesticks” Sinister, Nato “Paint Your Wagon” Green, Sean “Stack of Bones” Keane and Caitlin “Gandy Stiff” Gill.  

Grab $5 from your poke and get there early, we sell out!

BYOBurrito for your bazoo. 

Business Jazz – 12th May 2013 – Bad Service, Dead Cats and Dead Websites

TOPICS THIS WEEK: Customer Service

In this episode, we get into a conversation about customer service.

Roger's website was recently killed stone dead by a rogue squirrelly bracket ({). Unfortunately, the web hosting company didn't make tackling this issue very simple. Listener Dean Read also has a sorry story to tell about replacing a wheel on his car.

Jane relates a story from the other side of the spectrum. Her experience of WestJet. Which prompts Roger to retell a story he heard once heard from the remarkable Dinah Liversidge.

Links to people and things we mention

Chris Brogan
Dean Read
Dinah Liversidge

New rallying point

You are a big part of the story of this podcast. We'd like you to be an even bigger part of it. To help with that, and to help us have discussions about being genuinely attractive in business, we've established a LinkedIn group. Please knock on the door and we'll let you in.

Country tally

Our confirmed country tally as of this week is: 8.

We know we have listeners in Canada, Ireland, the UK, the Netherlands, India, Croatia, Serbia and India. If you live in a country not on this list, please let us know. We're working on an interactive Business Jazz listeners map, which we hope to launch soon.

Listening to the podcast

You can listen to this week's podcast using the player at the top of the post or download it directly here: Business Jazz – 12th May, 2013.

We're also in iTunes. We'd love it if you subscribed or left some feedback.

Business Jazz Players

This podcast is a collaboration of people dotted around the world. Most of us have never met each other. It's quite a story and it's still evolving. 
If you'd like to read what's happened so far, you'll find it here: Our Story.

Thou shall be subsidised whether you want it or not

The law is an ass. Governments are a bigger ass. Ramamritham is the chief ass. But even by those standards this takes the cake.

Those familiar with India knows that this poor country indulges in wasteful expenditure of the worst sort. Free colour TVs, grinders, etc have made the news. But the criminal, inexcusable and worst sort of government waste is the subsidy on Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG). If there was a word stronger than criminal, I would use it.

LPG  is supplied to all and sundry at a subsidy. It is sold at roughly half the cost - the government is supposed to pay the balance half to the oil companies , but it does so as and when it feels like it, or not at all. It is actually quite difficult to estimate how much the total subsidy is as the government hides this in different pockets but my estimate is that this monstrosity costs us some Rs 30,000 crores.

The really poor don't use any cooking fuel at all - maybe firewood. The poor use kerosene. Only the relatively rich use LPG. Its actually the middle class which is pocketing all this money.

The middle class moans about the cost of cooking gas . And yet you only have to go 1 mile near T Nagar and the gold shops in Chennai to see the amount of money the middle class has. The total "subsidy" for a  year that you can now get is Rs 3600 or so per family. Are you telling me that the middle class household cannot afford to pay Rs 3600 more per year for cooking their food. This is the same middle class which is snapping up the newest model of smartphones every year.  Its a complete farce.

The impact overall of this organised stealing is simply awful. India has made no investments at all in piped gas supply. LPG cylinders are  still being trucked all over the country. There is zero interest in any alternate fuels.  A whole bureaucracy has evolved around oil companies, agencies, transporters etc. Try getting a new cooking gas connection now - its possibly easier to learn quantum mechanics.  If you wish to do a case study on how not to treat a consumer, all you have to do is stand near a gas agency for an hour and witness the tales of woe of the people coming there.

Actually, raising the price of cooking gas cylinder by Rs 1000 per cylinder might be a good idea - it will cause Rajalakshmi to reduce her girth ! Eating less food, especially by the middle class, is a desirable social goal :)

The problem is that there is really no other choice. Private gas companies do offer unsubsidised cooking gas without all the contortions, but they are small scale and unreliable. Even then, quite a few consumers have opted to go there, simply because of the impossibility of handling Ramamritham's requirements.

Being a contentious citizen (!!!), this blogger went to his agency and asked not to be given a subsidy. He was willing to pay the full price. He was promptly told that this was not possible and he has no option but to take the subsidised price.

What sort of a place is this where a consumer offers to pay more and the seller refuses. If ever proof was needed that governments, and Ramamrithams, are an ass ..........

Teacher Appreciation

As we hit Teacher Appreciation week, I first want to give a shout out to my own children's teachers past and present!  THANK YOU!  THANK YOU for challenging them, loving them, encouraging them, teaching them, and caring about them each and every day.  You often have a thankless job, but there ARE a few of us who know just how hard you work, how much money you spend, how much time you sacrifice, and how much you must truly care about kids to be doing what you do each and every day.  

Here's a poem I found online about teachers that is PERFECT for this week.  Enjoy! 

Teachers

by Kevin William Huff

Teachers
Paint their minds
and guide their thoughts
Share their achievements
and advise their faults

Inspire a Love
of knowledge and truth
As you light the path
Which leads our youth

For our future brightens
with each lesson you teach
Each smile you lengthen
Each goal you help reach

For the dawn of each poet
each philosopher and king
Begins with a Teacher
And the wisdom they bring.

What a better way to celebrate teachers on TpT than to have another one of their GIGANTIC Sales!  Most sellers will offer 20% off and TpT will tack on another 8% off of that!  You get 28% off WITH THIS PROMO CODE:  TAD13 (Don't you just LOVE the adorable sign created by Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah Designs?!)

Are you a seller that is participating?  What is that FAVORITE item in your store that will be available for purchase @ 28% off??   LINK UP ONE item from your TpT store that buyers ought to check out!  

BUYERS:  Here ya' go...Here's that one item from some of TpT's BEST Sellers that is worth investigating!