An ode to Pan Am

The words "appalling" and "airlines" are synonymous in the language (allegedly English) spoken in the US of A. It wasn't that way some time ago. Pan Am was synonymous with "wonderful", as long as it flew. It was THE airline in the US. Unfortunately it went bankrupt in 1991. But the brand is still powerful amongst a certain generation (not comprising readers of this blog !). Those with a taste for nostalgia, which prompted this post, click here .

No amount of vitriol can be considered excessive when it comes to US airlines. All of them are uniformly awful. Extreme masochism can be the only excuse for condemning somebody to a flight on an American airline. The worst airports in the world are all in the US. From the moment you enter to check in, to the time you get out at your destination, it is pure torture. Inside the US, you have no choice but to reconcile to extreme pain, but it beats me as to why anybody flies long haul in an US airline when other options exist. To read an eminent American's surprise that airlines can actually be pleasant elsewhere in the world, click here .

Pan Am wasn't like that. It could compete with the best in the world.  If you were to go the US, you chose Pan Am. Unfortunately 270 people chose Pan Am on that fateful flight in 1988 which was bombed over Lockerbie - a blow from which the airline itself never recovered. Its decline had started much earlier with the oil price shocks and increasing competition, but that terrorist act was a body blow. It shut shop in 1991, ending a glorious chapter in US aviation. Only to unleash the monsters that inhabit the US skies now.

I have no idea who owns the brand rights to Pan Am, but certainly to an older generation, it represents civilised flying. How about an entrepreneur reinventing the airline and launching a decent flying option in the US.  Standards have fallen so low there, that there surely must be a segment which is willing to pay higher prices to travel in a humane manner. Now, that's a thought. Any takers ? Maybe the thoughtful train can morph into a thoughtful plane ?

PS - I have just got down from a plane. One of the finest airlines in the world, in one of the finest airports in the world. I am thanking my stars,  that its a million miles away from the country where "terrorists" rule the sky.

JOURNALISM AS CHARITY AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP

Many journalists pursuing new online initiatives are learning that good intentions are not enough for providing news.

The latest group to do so is former Rocky Mountain News reporters who started rockymountainindependent.com this past summer using a membership payment and advertising model. The effort collapsed Oct. 4 with them telling readers, “We put everything into producing content and supporting our independent partners, but we can no longer afford to produce enough content to justify the membership.”

There problem is hardly unique. The conundrum facing many journalists is whether to pursue the noble work of journalism as unpaid charitable work or to become engaged as journalistic entrepreneurs with a serious attitude toward its business issues—something many despised in their former employers.

If journalists want pay for their work, if they want to provide for their families, and if they want to pay mortgages, they need to spend more time figuring out how to provide value that will extract payments from readers and advertisers. To do that they have to construct organizational structures and activities that support the journalism; they will have to ensure that startups have sufficient capital; and they will have to engage staffs in marketing and advertising activities, not merely news provision.

One of the most difficult issue for these new journalism providers—as well as existing print and broadcast providers—is that journalists tend to overestimate the value of news for the public. What the public actually wants is less, not more, news.

It is not that the public doesn’t want to be informed, however. It is just that journalists spend so much time, space, and effort conveying commodity news that provides little new and helpful information for readers and cannot generate sufficient financial support. By commodity news I mean the simplistic who, what, and where stories about what happened yesterday. Those kinds of stories are readily available from many sources and provides readers little for which they will pay.

Instead, in a world of ubiquitous commodity journalism, successful journalists need to be spending time exploring the how and why of events and issues and helping readers understand and cope with what is expected next. Effective journalism in the new environment needs to focus more on today and tomorrow than on yesterday.

Success in the contemporary journalism environment it is not merely about providing news, but about providing helpful and advisory news explanation based on solid values and identity to which readers can relate. It must be part of entrepreneurial journalism or new ventures will fail.

To get there, however, journalists starting up new enterprises will need to develop resources and entrepreneurial motivation to sustain their efforts more than a few months. Most new commercial and noncommercial enterprises require 18 to 36 months of operation before they develop a loyal audience and achieve a stable financial situation. Unless journalists are willing to work for free during that time, they will have to raise capital to survive; and if they want their new organizations to thrive and develop they will have to provide a different kind of news than most are used to creating. It will need to be unique and better than what is already available.

4 STRATEGIC PRINCIPLES FOR EVERY DIGITAL PUBLISHER

As publishers move more and more content to the Internet, mobile services, and e-readers, these digital activities change the structures and processes of underlying business operations. Many publishers, however, pay insufficient attention to the implications of these changes and thus miss out on many benefits possible with digital operations.

This occurs because publishers become focused on issues of content delivery and uncritically accept the fundamental elements of the processes involving platforms and intermediaries. In order to gain the fullest future benefits from the digital environment, however, publishers needs to strategically consider and direct activities involving the users, advertisers, prices, and purposes of their new platforms.

In creating business arrangements with platform and service providers and intermediaries, 4 fundamental strategic principles should guide your actions:

1. Control your customer lists. The most important thing you do as a publisher is to create relationships with and experiences for your customers. It is crucial to ensure that your content distribution and retail systems do not separate you from those who read, view, or listen to your content. If you do not operate your distribution or pay systems, or don’t have strong influence over their operations, this important part of the customer experience falls outside your control and— worse—you never establish direct relationships with customers that allow you to get to know them better, to create stronger bonds, to use them to improve your products, or to up-sell services. If you must use intermediaries, ensure that you have full access and rights to use e-mail, mobile, and other addresses for all your content customers and that you have some influence over the look, feel, and content of the contacts that your service providers have with your customers.

2. Control advertising in your digital space. Users see advertising placed on your website, your mobile messages, and your e-reader content as part of your product and it affects the experience you deliver to them. It is not enough to control the size and placement of ads; you also need to control the dynamic functionality, types, and content of ads. The experience your product delivers is of little interest to outside providers of digitally delivered advertising, but it must be to you. You should control your own advertising inventory and maintain approval rights and—as with audiences—you should have the ability to make direct contact with advertising customers so you can add value by working with them to achieve greater effectiveness and provide better benefits across your content platforms.

3. Control your own pricing. Do not put yourself in the position of merely accepting the ad suppliers’ price and payment for advertising appearing in your digital product. The digital space and audience contact that you provide is the product and service being purchased and some contact is more valuable than others. Know how your value compares to that of competitors and set your prices according. Don’t be a price taker, be a price maker. Digital advertising will not grow to become an important part of your business if you let the most important decision of the revenue model reside in someone who does not care about your business.

4. Drive customers to platforms most beneficial to you. Digital media give you the opportunities to serve customers where and when they want to be served, but you need to use those opportunities to drive them to your financially most important product. Internet sites, e-readers, mobile applications, and social media are highly useful for contact and interaction, but not yet very effective for revenue generation. The best effects typically result from increasing use of your offline product or driving traffic to your most finally effective digital location. Make sure that all the distribution platforms you use are configured for easy movement to other digital platforms that benefit you most, even if they don’t directly benefit your service provider.

Digital publishing can only become successful if you get the business fundamentals correct by controlling the most important commercial aspects of the operation. The value configuration created by customer interfaces and partner networks must be arranged to work in your favor and strategic thinking needs to guide how you organize and direct those activities.

One people divided into warring nations

Moreh is a border town between Burma and India in the state of Manipur. If you go there, you'll hear a strange language spoken - Tamil. When Indians were kicked out of Burma some 50 years ago, many Tamils who had settled there began the long walk back home. Some came all the way back. Many decided to just cross the border and stay there. Hence the Tamil in Moreh.

At the other end , the famed Grand Trunk Road once stretched all the way to Lahore. And you could go from there to the Khyber Pass. Undivided India stretched all the way from Burma to Afghanistan.

Today we are a divided race. Split into half a dozen countries which don't see eye to eye with each other. What a tragedy.

One of my most memorable trips was the one I made to Pakistan about four years ago. Its not easy for Indians to go to Pakistan, as its not easy for Pakistanis to come to India.  When the opportunity came for me to go there, I grabbed it with both hands.  I could go only to Karachi - visas are city specific.  But it was such a lovely trip.

Karachi is the Bombay of Pakistan. And it looks and feels exactly like Bombay. After all, we are one race.  Everything that is good and bad about an Indian city, applies equally to Pakistan. The average guy on the street is wonderfully warm and welcoming. There was only welcome for me as an Indian; not once was there even a hint of anything else. We speak the same language - separated only by a different script. We eat the same food - the same roti, dal, sabzi. We watch the same movies and do a jig to the same songs. We love the same stars - Amitabh, Shahrukh, Aishwarya, et all.  We are as crazy about the same funny game. Except when India plays Pakistan, we usually cheer for each other.

Many common misconceptions of Pakistan that Indians have is just plain wrong. Pakistan in not rabidly religious - its as religious or unreligious as India is. Middle class Pakistani women in Karachi are as free, dress as smartly and are as liberated as Indian women. We share the same hopes, aspirations, joys of life. Just as I yearned to travel to Pakistan, my colleagues there yearned to travel to India. How wonderful it would be if I could go to Lahore, to Peshawar and someday even to the Khyber pass.  To my Pakistani colleagues, it was the yearning to travel to Bombay, to Kanyakumari and gaze out into the three seas ......

Alas, this is unlikely to be much more than a dream in our lifetimes. We have fought three wars.  We have been separated for more than a generation.  Both of us have enormous misperceptions of each other. Hatred has been stoked. Mistrust is rife. We are one people who have become enemies.

We can help in a small way. Until the internet came, we had little opportunity for contact and understanding . But now, social networks abound. It should be easy to reach out. And yet it rarely happens. I bet that none of our blogs has a single Pakistani or Bangladeshi or Burmese follower. And I bet few of their blogs have an Indian follower.

On the ground, we'll probably be divided for sometime to come. Maybe a longtime to come. But in the blogosphere, we can become the one undivided race we truly are.  Worth making our small contribution.   Mufti saab, follow my blog; and if you write one; I'll be your first follower.

For my Indian friends, I'll leave you with a song from across the border, which you have surely heard and enjoyed.

Obil Boil

Oil on the boil again, screams the headlines in India’s Economic Times. Or as our wonderful little friend Chotu might say, Obil Boil. I am certain that his words were prescient and not just a child’s lisp of mama’s olive oil.

Crude oil prices have touched $80 a barrel. The US dollar has continued to weaken and since oil prices are globally stated in US dollars, they are bound to rise further. I argued that the world must get ready for expensive energy for the foreseeable future here, but governments have lost a golden opportunity, when oil prices were low consequent to the recession, to prepare their citizens for the coming times when oil prices will be in 3 digits.

This has profound implications for the whole world. Firstly inflation will inexorably rise. The risk of inflation in the near term is the highest, with two huge factors contributing to it – the price of oil and the stimulus money that governments have spent. When oil prices rose last time to the peak of $147 , we had riots as it has a direct impact on the cost of food. The impact on poorer countries was disproportionate. Secondly the world will see a massive transfer of wealth from everywhere to OPEC – primarily the Middle East. Such a transfer of wealth is without parallel in history, with profound geopolitical fallouts.Churchill’s famous words may have to be rephrased to “never in the field of human history have so many paid so much to so few”.

Even now, it isn’t too late for governments to act. They must slowly abolish all subsidies on petroleum and then keep increasing the price of petroleum products in small doses so that people are slowly taken to the high oil price world, instead of a cataclysmic jump. They must not reduce prices when crude oil weakens occasionally – instead they should build up a fund to cushion against periods of extreme rise.

One of the possible fallouts of a sustained high oil price world might be that the world will start to go more local than go more global. Products may start to be produced nearer where they are consumed. Jetsetting around the world may start to become rarer. Brits having strawberries in December may become a thing of the past. Perhaps in the world of the future, a Chotu saying Obil Boil, may become common place and not raise an aaawww anymore. Now, that is not a nice thought.

What was he thinking ?

You normally associate business leaders with high intellect, sound judgment, and in general, greater ability than many of us, mere mortals. Then I read this front page report in today's Guardian in the UK.

I had promised to myself that I'd stop writing about either bankers or Goldman Sachs after my last two posts on the subject. But what can you do when somebody makes a speech like that. And where does he chose to make these remarks ? In St Paul's cathedral, no less.

If you know of any greater act of appalling judgement, please let me know.

Oct 14th Re-Cap

It was a veritable barn-burner of a show on October 14th at The Business! That is not to be confused with a barn-raiser, which connotes a successfully comedy show in the Amish community. Instead of churning butter, the audience churned with laughter. Instead of scorning technology, we used microphones to provide amplified sound. And instead of a bunch of guys with beards standing around and talking, our show had performances from Alex Koll and guest star Kyle Kinnane.

Sean Keane began the show discussing his childhood speech impediment, his illustrious career as a teenage musical theater performer, obscene phone calls, writing fake letters to the newspaper, and finally, how his dad started kissing him hello and goodbye at age 51. Truly a moving and unsettling set. Alex Koll followed, delivering a preview of his hosting gig the next night at the SF Weekly Music Awards. ("7:30 - Arrive. 8:05 - Introduce yourself. 'Hello. How's it going?'") He also explained the similarities between Charles Manson's parole board testimony and the menu at a really good Chinese restaurant. Chris Garcia followed with an extended impression of a ex-Live 105 employee turned alcoholic vagrant. Though thrown off by audience member W. Kamau Bell's repeated suggestion of "Fishbone" as a 90's alternative act, Garcia-as-hobo delighted the crowd.


Before the show, audience members were asked to fill out index cards listing something they were afraid of. The night's next performer, Bucky Sinister, opened his set by reading the cards and riffing off of each of the frightening topics. Perfect for October and the impending Halloween season! Bucky also explained to the crowd why it might be useful to have a tattoo, of your own hand, on your chest, flipping the bird. (Because when the cops arrest you, and your hands are cuffed behind your back, you can still flip them off.)


Guest performer Kyle Kinnane was delayed by an overturned Safeway truck on the Bay Bridge, but his set didn't suffer in the least. He did express dismay that the horrible traffic snarl was caused by something so uncool as spilled produce. We also learned some entertaining and, again, somewhat disturbing information, about what it is like to use a bar bathroom in a really bad part of Chicago.

Finally, headliner Hari Kondabolu continued the night's informal theme of hilariously unsettling personal confessions and finished with Kondabolu Klassics about Vitamin Water and gentrification.. It was perhaps the greatest show The Business has had, in terms of quality, variety, audience, and, of course, penis references.