min-myinnersoul

On hindsight, the surprise is that it hasn't happened more often. Last week Pierre Wauthier, the Chief Financial Officer of Zurich Insurance, tragically committed suicide . This starkly illustrates the unbelievable pressures top business executives function under. Zurich Insurance is one of the top insurance companies in the world. Recently, it has been going through a bad patch, although by no means disastrous. The CFO is often the one required to stand up before investors to explain results and is invariably the target of criticism and calls to be sacked. The circumstances behind Mr Wauthier's unfortunate demise are not fully clear, but it is inconceivable that work pressures did not play a part. His widow has certainly hinted that Josef Ackermann, the Chairman of Zurich bore some responsibility. Ackermann denied any such thing but promptly resigned as Chairman. Only a certain breed of individuals reach the top of the business world. A masochist streak, politely termed as ...

There is one ritual that happens in all companies periodically without fail - an organisation restructuring. Old structures and divisions are thrown out of the window and new structures are announced. HR types take great pleasure in redrawing organisation charts, rewriting job descriptions and the like. Communication types have an orgasm designing communication packs and writing words like "restructuring to stimulate growth", "bringing the organisation closer to consumers" and such other waffle. CEOs like to stand up to the press and announce the change , to make up for lack of anything else to say about their companies. MIcrosoft did just that today , the trigger for this post. Steve Ballmer's version of the blah blah is "We are ready to take Microsoft in bold new directions". Balderdash. I have never seen a more futile activity than an organisation rejig. And yet companies do it all the time. The pattern is all too predictable. If the current organis...

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 c...

Which is the biggest ecommerce company in the world ? Take a guess. Amazon ? E Bay ? You would be wrong if you guessed either of them. The biggest e commerce company in the world is Alibaba. Its portals handled a sales volume of some $ 170 bn. That is more than the volumes handled by Amazon and E Bay combined. No, this is not some elaborate hoax dreamed up from 1001 Nights. Alibaba is indeed the largest e commerce company in the world. The reason you may have never heard about it is that it operates almost exclusively in China. It started life as simply Alibaba.com , a business to business portal. It then added Taobao - a consumer to consumer portal, whose similarity to E Bay is, of course, entirely coincidental. Now it has started Tmall , a business to consumer portal, which again, bears a completely coincidental similarity to Amazon. All this in just fourteen years. The last two, if you click on the link, you will see are entirely in Chinese. And therein lies the issue. Can Alibaba...

There's something about the corporate world that makes smart and decent people do incredibly stupid things. Maybe its the anonymity of being part of a company. Maybe its the pressure generated to perform. Maybe its the brutal focus on the ends and not the means. Don't know what . Why else would some British honcho in Sony decide to raise the price of Whitney Houston's albums on her tragic death. There was surely going to be a memorial upsurge in sales of her records. But what sort of a decision is that to raise the prices then ? Predictably there was a huge outcry; Sony had to back down and I'm sure the guy who did it has egg on his face. Similar is the decision by some Starbucks Manager near the World Trade Centre to raise the prices of water on that fateful day in 2001. Or the decision by the Chairmen of the auto giants to fly by private jet to Washington to plead with Congress for a bailout. Or the insistence by Jack Welch to award himself retirement benefits that i...

The word business is nowadays accompanied by a metaphorical holding of the nose. Post the financial crisis, businessmen would probably rank just above bankers and below more traditional last placers like real estate agents, in the list of reputable professions. Readers of this blog would know that the author is a staunch defender of business and advocates the view that the profession is unfairly maligned. An earlier post had touched on this subject. It was gratifying to read The Economist’s Schumpeter column, The Silence of Mammon , which argues that business people should stand up for themselves. The article recounts the two arguments it says proponents have put forth in defence of business – that many firms are devoted to good works and that businessmen have done more than any other institution to advance prosperity. It opines that these are not enough and puts forth three more arguments to counter the critics of business who have dominated the discussion on corporate morality – ...

The ten most valuable companies (in terms of market capitalization) are (see my separate post on this here ) 1. PetroChina (China) 2. Exxon Mobil (US) 3. Ind & Comm Bank of China (China) 4. China Mobile (China) 5. Microsoft (US) 6. Wal-Mart (US) 7. China Constr Bank (China) 8. Johnson & Johnson (US) 9. Proctor & Gamble (US) 10. Royal Dutch Shell (UK/NL) Now look at the list of the ten wealthiest persons in the world (Source Wikipedia ) 1. Bill Gates (US) 2. Warren Buffett (US) 3. Carlos Slim (Mexico) 4. Larry Ellison (US) 5. Ingvar Kamprad (Sweden) 6. Karl Albrecht (Germany) 7. Mukesh Ambani (India) 8. Lakshmi Mittal (India) 9. Theo Albrecht (Germany) 10. Amancio Ortega (Spain) These two lists say something about China, and India. China dominates the first list; a sign of the times. However it is completely absent from the second list , upto the Top 100 ! India does not figure in the first list anywhere, even in the top 100. But a number of Indians are on the second 100 li...

Which is the world’s largest company by market capitalisation now ? No don’t look – just guess. Lists of the worlds most valuable companies, largest by sales, etc etc are always dodgy – they rarely represent the truest picture as there are simply too many factors that aren’t common around the world for such comparisons. And they change all the time. But the latest list does produce some telling commentary on the way the world is headed. This is the top 10 in terms of market capitalization as of last week (Source : Bloomberg) 1. PetroChina (China) 2. Exxon Mobil (US) 3. Ind & Comm Bank of China (China) 4. China Mobile (China) 5. Microsoft (US) 6. Wal-Mart (US) 7. China Constr Bank (China) 8. Johnson &Johnson (US) 9. Proctor & Gamble (US) 10. Royal Dutch Shell (UK/NL) The obvious thing that stares in the face is the appearance of China at the top half of the table. Granted, the stock exchanges there have gone wildly up, with every indication of another bubble, that the govern...