Thursday, January 27, 2005

Davos today   Town meeting N. R. Narayana Murthy, Chairman of the Board and Chief Mentor, Infosys Technologies, India Lubna S. Olayan, Chief Executive Officer, Olayan Financing Company, Saudi Arabia Charles O. Prince, Chief Executive Officer, Citigroup, USA John A. Thain, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, New York Stock Exchange, USA Daniel Vasella, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Novartis, Switzerland Facilitators Ged Davis, Managing Director, Centre for Strategic Insight, World Economic Forum Carolyn J. Lukensmeyer, Founder and President, AmericaSpeaks, USA   Pasted from <http://clients.world-television.com/worldeconomicforum_annualmeeting2005/_S13133.asp>   (Another participant said  Islam is beautiful. Unfortunately it has been hijacked by a few and we need to nbring it back to its own story. )   Charles Prince,  Citicorp:  what is lacking is we need to be able to deal with complex issues.deal with complex issues that can leading populations and countries to deal with long term issues.   The town meeting  published a list of issues arrived at by vote, poverty, gloablization, etc.  But note that the issues raised by vote do not correspond with the issues raised by the speakers.   I Posted at the site,   The list of issues done by vote does not map well into the comments by the speakers. For example, Charles Prince of Citicorp said we lack capacity to deal with complexity. The list of issues proceeds as if they can be done one by one, in isolation from each other.   Prioritizing is a bad method for design: which part of the airplane are you willing to leave off? Is a list of priorities a good way to proceed?   The complex issues are more likely to lead to looking at governance, wealth, social belief and technology choices, population and environment, taken together as a single issue.   Pasted from <http://www.forumblog.org/blog/2005/01/davos_speaks.html>   Panel: Does business have a noble purpose? Lord Browne of Madingley, Group Chief Executive, BP, United Kingdom Ian E. L. Davis, Managing Director, Worldwide, McKinsey & Company, United Kingdom Carly Fiorina, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, HP, USA Rakesh Khurana, Professor, Harvard Business School, USA Moderated by Laura D. Tyson, Dean, London Business School, United Kingdom   Pasted from <http://clients.world-television.com/worldeconomicforum_annualmeeting2005/_S12874.asp>   Tyson, london business school, one moral view is that they only are there to increase share  used to be mainstream view. Corporations provide education?   Ian Davis Mckinsey and co london Products and services  are voted by consumers.   Rakesh Kurana, Harvard Business School.. Oldest unviersity Means of maintaining community property, churches were corporations,  salries used to be twice president, now it is 62 times, 40 times employees, now 500. to do collectively what they can't do alone. See themselves as coaches but want to be paid as star performers.  Every corp wants to pay at 75 percentile.   Lord Brown BP,  we must tell people the best is yet to come. You can't tell us we are useless. Light heat and mobility or lose the plot. Must look at everyone in the company, and what contribution, risk and contribution. (Eliot Jaques view).{fails to note that doing the work is a reward, money is secondary.]    I got to see Clinton's interview with Charlie Rose at Davos  on Swiss Television, and it will be posted soon at the link i gave below for the Davos presentations. Quite amazing for tone, and the appreciation of the audience was full. He obviously is not sleeping while there, very tired.   Clinton: I see people leave here with energy but wanting to know what next. Clinton Initiative. There needs to be score, Turner and Gates and their foundations do it, William Jefferson Clinton Foundation.   Charlie Rose, we are on the cusp of a moment. What are the possibilities.   Clinton: In Iraq We are where we are and we will be better off is there is a good government. Good relations with neighbors connecting with the people.   The people who win should have a moral obligation to include others. [seems to me a long shot]. Iran is a bad story, when the US deposed Mossadigh (sp) and then we get the Shaw, and then Khomeini, and that pushed us to Sadham, and we knew everything he was doing. The US is deeply responsible.   Iran is the most perplexing [what about Pakistan}, has two governments, pres Hutami,  and the parliament. liberals won six elections, two each for pres, parliament, municipality. But the President can push it aside. Thirty percent governing over the wishes of seventy percent.   What none can answer, how the 2/3 would react if there was a military action against the nuclear capacity?   Israel do it? Clinton: there is no "it". If Iran  used it  Its nuclear capcity they would be toast. Do the 1/3 want to support terror? (he thinks dirty boms are 100 fold).   In 1981 Israel bombed a nuclear plant.  It delayed Sadham.  There is no target in Iran we could take out. I don't think that option is available.   We need a mega deal.  National greatness, product of the accumulated dreams and nightmares of the people. Yeltzin:  We were invaded by Napoleon and Hitler.  An invation is our nightmare from the past. China Our number one nightmare is internal disintegration, so we had to control Tibet. So what is the Iranian image of national greatness? Does it require nuclear weapons.   Lot of research about the US election. We got a draw on Iraq,  Bush got votes because of 9/11.   More American troop? I don't know, and I don't know if we can do it. Soldiers staying too long. Tipping point? We should be trying to make it work.   First lets see what happens in the elections.   China? Environment. Bush speech? Freedom has been the purpose since Teddy Roosevelt changed his mind. Wilson was leading with the call for freedom. It is not new. The cold war led us to some compromises.   What counts is how the administration handles this. Is a person against privatizing social security against freedom? What is the content? What does it mean in terms of policy?   I thought we should have let blix finish the inspections. In the 90's we did not plan for large scale occupations.  Two wars, but not long term occupation. We could stay in Afghanistan we could do it because of support, but we didn't have the international cooperation in Iraq. We never planned for the occupation   Kosovo 80% of it was US military but only 15% of peace keeping.   You know Bush? Yes.  Budget, environment, and lots of issues we disagree on. . Demonizing democrats, but why get frustrated? They are in business to beat us. Don't be mad at them, be mad at ourselves for not taking them on. Different from me in many ways. I get him. He is cleverer than people think.   Israel: arafat knew the way to the whitehouse. What now?   What's happened? Abbas won. Work against the terror. Sharon has said he will get out of Gaza. This is good. We should all get involved again.  I think we would have made it if Rabin hadn't been murdered. Rabin had less scars that Barak. He had standing. We have had a several year gap. Now we have to move faster. Put some serious money into the territories.  These people can't keep shafting the people. Hamas would blow up a bomb. Pipeline into there to support businesses. We need a time table that is realistic. My gut is we need to not just let it simmer. Delay is our enemy.   What now? Relationships, experience? Foundation. UN US govt.   for interdependence. My life is a mystery to me.   Tsunami represents the democratization and internationalization of philanthropy. We should have gone into Rwanda. Congress would have been against it.  I don't want anybody younger than me to die needlessly.   Here was a comment posted later at the blog   Bill Clinton just finished a typically masterful appearance in front of a packed main hall in which he said many things, but one among them was that he often leaves Davos feeling frustrated about actually taking action on the many issues that are identified here as needing urgent intervention. He has his own event planned in September, the Clinton Global Initiative, for which everyone who comes will be expected to sign on to taking specific actions that the conferees will decide on. In fact the Forum itself has many very effective followup programs, including its quite interesting recent Governance task force which I'd urge everyone to read about on the forum home page. But follow-through is absent way too often. That was illustrated today. Clinton's remark echoes some frustration that I heard earlier following the session that Loïc Le Meur describes in a post below. The topic was how companies can effectively tackle the bottom of the pyramid--developing products that both generate profit and aid the world's poor to improve their condition. The ultimate example is the cellphone, but there are many ways this is starting to happen.   However, too slowly. Not enough companies have begun to deliberately target this opportunity, which CK Prahalad among others (in his book "The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid" published last year) has identified. He was there. But conspicuously absent in the relatively crowded room were companies. While a few longstanding advocates of this approach, like Hewlett-Packard, had representatives in the room, there were very few from companies not already on the bus.   The irony is that yesterday the Forum had a very stimulating group brainstorming session in which about 1000 people separated up into small groups and came up with their proposals for what are the world's most urgent problems. One of the three that the entire group ended up agreeing on, properly, was global poverty. So if poverty is the biggest problem and here we had a session focusing not only on how to alleviate it but how companies could find business opportunity in doing so, why weren't more companies there? People are happy to say it's a problem but less willing to put their time and money where their mouths are.   Interestingly, that governance report of the Forum's was largely about the difficulty of introducing long-term thinking into a business environment governed by short-term quarterly thinking on Wall Street and among investors. The bottom of pyramid session, and the absence of companies, implicitly demonstrated that long-term thinking is still in very short supply even among the companies who send executives to Davos. I find that sad.   (I'm senior editor for technology at Fortune Magazine)   Pasted from <http://www.forumblog.org/blog/>   I jut read  Thomas sowell Applied Economics.   "In short, economic development has reduced the role of geographic factors, which made economic development possible in the first place." The implications are powerful, that leveling out undermines the very conditions of development, because there is no capital.   The book is traditional economics, trating economics as a rational system like a machine. He does not look at say housing from the point of view of owners of capital, real estate and mortgages (owners of mortgages as positive paper, not mortgagees). He discusses the problem of the California energy costs as though it was a market driven, not monopoly driven phenomena, and then that it was interfered with by the state, who become the bad guys. We need more system in the system if we are to understand it.   Hillary Clinton tighening up the language.   Clinton. "Once you embrace that truth — that the ideal number of abortions is zero — voters open their ears. They listen when you point out, as Clinton did, that the abortion rate fell drastically during her husband's presidency but has risen in more states than it has fallen under George W. Bush. I'm sure these trends have more to do with economics than morals, but that's the point. Once we agree that the goal is zero, we can stop asking which party yaps more about fighting abortion and start asking which party gets results."   Pasted from <http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/TheNote/story?id=156238>   Reading The Man who Found Time, Jack Repcheck about James Hutton who discovered the chronology of the earth's age.  In the 1750's   His early training in medicine and chemistry leads me to see that science is a phase in the history of art, which I have long ascerted, but also medicine.   The fall of the isthmus project, half of all the capital in scotland Went to a project to build forts on both sides but they were defeated by the Spanish., leading to the union with England in exchange for paying off the Scottish debt. A business failure leads to the collapse of the nation. Leads me to some musings.   If Hutton is looking at the landscape for the age of the Earth, he is fortunate that he found an object into focus which he worked out well farming for fourteen years.  Where then the hell is the site of the mysteries of psychoanalysis? The mysteries Murakami (see below) is talking about? No, wait, psychoanalysis is a method, like dissolving a rock in acid. It is not the subject. The subject is… but where is it? In the mind, the mind's reflections, dreams, communication of one's character to another, or at the other end, in the culture and the way it pulls and plays with our minds, forming our half thought out thoughts, conclusions in which we did not participate but were colonized?   What is the subject object, the object subject, of mind? Like dusk or dawn, colors our world, lights it, but comes and goes. A subtle interaction of sun air and earth's turning.   During Hutton's early life,  the fall of Bonnie Prince Charles, at 25 leading a revolt to regain family monarchy. In a Scotland now modern, and while romantically inclined, most people, especially in civilized Edinburgh, realized the dead-end desire of such a restitution to a militant highland culture that had worn out and did not fit the modern world, like a world of blowguns and poisoned darts in a Borneo Jungle. His army of 150 taking Edinburg, marching then with new recruits of 5000 hoping for Catholic support and not finding it along the highway, meeting 15,000 brits and retreating to Scotland, Edinburgh now retaken by Glasgow, his folks get hacked to death and the highland culture expropriated and destroyed,  and he retreats to a life of 30 years of drinking in Rome.   He spent some time in attractive Paris And I wonder how could the Paris of the enlightenment, of Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Voltaire, , Montesquieu,  with its cafes and boulevards, parks and attractive neighborhoods ( before the rebuilding which gives us the Paris of today but was inspired by Louis the fourteenth) become the Paris of the unrest of the revolution two decades later? The interplay between ideas and circumstances, where circumstances create ideas and ideas create circumstances with the tectonic upheavals of mind, culture, and civil society. And all this is going on in the context of power and relationships as young men and women follow their noses into careers and the new families.   Is our time any different? The median family income of undergraduates at Harvard (they declare less than full assets and still) is around 200,000. Who is passing on what to whom?   The tide turns against Bush..?   White House Drops Effort to Relax Media Ownership Rules By STEPHEN LABATON  4:13 PM ET The administration will not ask the Supreme Court to overturn a ruling that struck down changes to media ownership rules.   Pasted from <http://www.nytimes.com/>   We might begin to see many of these.   Updike in New Yorker on Murakami, the issue of "God",  and what it is, is getting lots of attention.  I think we are seeing a reaction against fundamentalism, not by being more hard edged materialized but much more psychological, valuing in the subject of life and the life of experience, which embraces the objective and subjective in a single experience.  http://newyorker.com/printable/?critics/050124crbo_books>   From the inarguable truth of the second observation the possibility of one’s spirit leaving one’s body could be plausibly deduced in a prescientific, preëlectric age when, Oshima points out, “the physical darkness outside and the inner darkness of the soul were mixed together, with no boundary separating the two.” In Murakami’s vision of our materialist, garishly illuminated age, however, the boundary between inner and outer darkness is traversed by grotesque figments borrowed from the world of commercial imagery: Johnnie Walker, with boots and top hat, manifests himself to the cat-loving simpleton Nakata as a mass murderer of stray felines, jocularly cutting open their furry abdomens and popping their still-beating hearts into his mouth, and Colonel Sanders, in his white suit and string tie, appears to Nakata’s companion, Hoshino, as a fast-talking pimp. The Colonel, questioned by the startled Hoshino about his nature, quotes another venerable text, Ueda Akinari’s “Tales of Moonlight and Rain”: Shape I may take, converse I may, but neither god nor Buddha am I, rather an insensate being whose heart thus differs from that of man. Posted by douglass carmichael 7:55:23 PM    comment []