With a Defence like This...

Debris Dumped into The Sea by Military Operations causes havoc for Marine as well as Human life. Unfortunately, all Advice is yet Unheeded

Ex-British PM Margaret Thatcher had a doctrine regarding ocean pollution caused by perilous military activities: conservatism is good for actions with long term negative consequences! Her vision formed the cornerstone of the London Dumping Convention that banned the release of military debris into the seas. Consequences notwithstanding, a majority of countries do not have such a convention and freely release military debris into the oceans, causing enormous damage to marine lives.

At the recent UN International Marine Debris Clearance conference, Paul Walker, director of Global Green inferred that a massive 8000 tonne of hazardous material has been plunked near Hawaii by the US army. US vessels have been dumping 34 million litres of untreated liquid waste and 16 tonne of plastic waste every month! Alarmingly, more than 400,000 rockets and bombs are drifting around US coasts! During the Cold War, under the shield of the Iron Curtain, the Soviet Union released 2.5 million curies of radioactive material into the Arctic Ocean, the Sea of Japan, the Barents Sea, and the Kara Sea, according to the Yablokov report. France carried out 137 nuclear tests under the sea between 1975 and 1996, creating an artificial crater with a diameter of 140 meters. The tests conducted in French Polynesia caused havoc to 1 million cubic meters of sand and coral. Japan’s seas are contaminated with chemical weapons with a total bulk of over 6,600 tons. And that is not counting the most recent irradiated water being released from the Fukushima plant.

But if military debris isn’t dumped in oceans, then where? Research institutes like Coastal Zone Enhancement Program in US or Swedish Geotechnical Institute talk about measures like recycling and reuse of oceanic debris.

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Source : IIPM Editorial, 2012.

An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri
and Arindam Chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist).

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B-SCHOOL SPECIAL - Where’s that killer instinct?

Without question, public and private organisations have entered an era of socio-economic globalisation. In such a global market, competitive and innovative changes are necessities to survival. the one stop solution for nations is to ensure the growth of entrepreneurship. Are B-Schools listening?

If truth be told on how globalised the Indian economy currently is – almost twenty years post liberalization – one would feel close to being ashamed. The Carnegie Endowment and A. T. Kearney study, The Globalization Index, ranks various countries of the world on a multitude of parameters, finally providing the consolidated Globalization Index (GI) ranking. In the last report that came out around two years back, India is ranked second from last. Algeria, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Tanzania, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Kenya, Colombia, Peru, Nigeria, Senegal, Vietnam, Morocco, Ukraine, Botswana, Tunisia, Croatia, Panama, Uganda, Chile and others are easily ranked ahead of India. India has had more or less the same rank in the previous years. So where is the mistake India is committing?

In one of our editorial researches, we found out that there was a direct correlation of this with the huge failure in India to encourage entrepreneurship. True, there have been radical leaders like Ratan Tata, Azim Premji, Narayana Murthy and some more. But then, these have only been a handful. And the blame for this failure falls to a large extent on the plethora of Indian B-schools that have existed in India teaching “management education,” yet failing to teach entrepreneurial education. The Columbia GSB report, Role For Entrepreneurship in India, shows that Indian entrepreneurs actually might be “hindering economic development,” while the US entrepreneurship system “has been quite successful” for their economic growth. The report says that entrepreneurs might be playing a “possibly negative” role in India even in Bangalore.

A shocking report of Duke University, America’s New Immigrant Entrepreneurs, proves how wasteful Indian education has been – as Indians prefer starting companies in America than in India. The report shows that Indian immigrants, over the past 8 years in the US, have filed the “second highest” number of patent applications (more than 10,200), have started the highest number of manufacturing and innovation-related service companies (24%), the highest number of bioscience firms (10%), the highest number of software firms (34%) and much more. Compare that to India, where contribution of small and medium enterprises to the GDP is a pathetic 5%.

Evidently, there’s something critically lacking in India’s B-school education, where a majority of students are more focussed on getting jobs than on starting new companies within India. A concrete study held in 2002 at the University of Arizona found that five years after pursuing MBA, the average income of entrepreneurship majors was almost $72,000 higher than students who majored in other subject or were just standard MBAs. Not just this, entrepreneurship graduates were more likely to form new companies which had annual sales of $50 million and employed close to 200 employees.

But then, why don’t Indian B-schools teach entrepreneurship as a separate specialization, course or even as a term subject, given the fact that the more entrepreneurs a country has, the more the employability of masses increases, and the more equitable the income growth becomes (vis a vis the Gini Index)? Can MBA education not play a greater role in providing formal entrepreneurship education in India?

Anuj Guglani, founding CEO of Ace Associates (who has worked for auto majors like Honda and GM after the completion of his MBA course from IIT Delhi), says, “MBA education, particularly entrepreneurship as a subject, is very important for starting or handling a business today. It cultivates a vision and completely changes the way your thought-process operates.” Pramit Samal (an alumnus of IIPM’s programme in Planning and Entrepreneurship), who is the founder Director, Glocal Trading (P) Ltd, comments, “Wide-ranging areas that form an entrepreneurship programme could help individuals beat the odds & grow their business which in turn drives the economy. Being an aspiring entrepreneur myself and having interacted with many more like me, I can confidently say that the subject matters a lot when it comes to the real life.” Paresh Rajde, Founder MD & CEO, Suvidhaa Infoserve provides a deeper analysis, “Entrepreneurship is not just about teaching business and management skills. It involves teaching techniques and approaches for identifying, creating, and evaluating opportunities...”

In fact, Indian B-schools should take a lesson from their global counterparts. Babson College, a B-school based in Massachusetts, has been ranked the best amongst all global B-schools focused on entrepreneurial programmes. The college has been ranked by the Entrepreneur magazine and The Princeton Review as being the best for both its graduate and undergraduate programmes. Their secret? All students majoring in entrepreneurship undergo a trial by fire. Divided into 30 teams, the students are required to launch, run and dissolve a business – all within nine months. Does any Indian B-school have the wherewithal to undertake such an exercise? They possibly cannot, and more because of funding issues. The government has no structured B-school entrepreneurship projects funding mechanism. That leaves B-schools with the option of getting private equity funding for student projects. In one line, India dismally lacks such entrepreneurial funding.


For more articles, Click on IIPM Article.

Source : IIPM Editorial, 2010.

An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri and Arindam chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist).

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DEAR GLADIATORS OF THE ADLAND WELCOME TO THE ARENA!

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There are a few rules are to how this combative, frontal, bold, in-your-face, name-calling can be played well to the audience; some which Scotts Goodson, the founder and CEO of Strawberry Frog (an independent agency) offers.

Rule #1: It is best for brands playing catch-up. It is silly to use the comparative ad-form if you are a leader, simply because you are unnecessarily bringing your competitor into discussion and prominence. This is really neither required nor desired.

Rule #2: Comparative advertising is ideal for a challenger brand, which genuinely believes (and can prove) that its brand is better than the established market leader. Problem however is that, during these times of modern-technology, catching-up might just take overnight, but sustaining it is a big challenge.

Rule #3: It is also critical to introduce humour in this genre, to kill boredom or self-conscious defensiveness.

At present, this form of advertising is gaining public attention yet again in the country. And this time, the Pepsi and Coke have been replaced by HUL (with its Rin) and P&G (Tide). With court proceedings coming into play, this literal act of washing dirty linen in public seems to have entered a completely new phase of re-definition altogether. So is comparative getting less politically correct and more aggressive and audacious to attract more attention? Is controversy the new hand-maiden of advertising, keeping pace with the tone and tenor of an era where novelty, sensation and thrills rule the life and times of a reality-show loving public? What follows is a direct conversational spill-out of our interactions with some members of the Adfrat.

Moon Moon Dhar, Creative Director of Perfect 10, a Delhi-based agency quite frankly says, “For me, it’s much-ado-about-nothing! It is clearly a sign of the sensation-seeking times we live in. With the crowded media space, a proliferation of products in the me-too zone and crazy competition, this kind of attention-grabbing tactic is bound to come centre stage.”

Renowned film-maker and former actor Aparna Sen summarily dismisses the ethical angle with a pertinent question, as she says, “When was advertising ever about ethics and morality anyway? It’s a calling that is totally engaged in manufacturing greed and creating wants. Ultimately, it’s about the consumers willingness or resistance to bite into the juicy, seductive ad proposition. Period.” Soma Bahn, GM, Corp-Comm & PR of the Kolkata-based healthcare company Medica Synergie, expresses horror at the latest HUL and P&G duel. “The first time I saw the TVC, I genuinely thought that HUL was showing it to tell customers that HUL and Rin belong to one family. Later, I got to know about the truth and was appalled! How can HUL ever hope to win customers by insulting its competitors? Wouldn’t promoting its own brand virtues in a positive and engaging manner be so much more professional and effective?” Not all witnesses are in a state of shock however, one of whom is the explosive ad and theatre maverick Bharat Dabolkar who says, “I am totally familiar with this genre and I have used it effectively during the past in many campaigns (like Nutramul v/s Bounvita, Zenith Computer v/s IBM). But there have always been measurable parameters anchored in fact, with demonstrable proof. They have always attracted controversy, but that comes with the new territory that is won.”

But the truth is, even someone like Dabolkar, who is quite at peace with such catfights (having been a lover of the trend-setting mock heroics of the iconic Pepsi v/s Coke face-offs across countries) was taken by surprise by the HUL versus P&G display. “This spat however is disgusting. But I am not surprised at all.”

There are some in the ad-world who question the very questions that are being raised. One such individual is Sid Ray, Executive Director of Response ad-agency, who says he does not understand why ethics is gaining the spotlight, “At the end of the day, it’s the consumer who accepts or rejects the brand proposition. He doesn’t care about morality or ethics.” Even former McCann veteran Santosh Desai agreeingly says, “Ethics come upfront only when consumer interest is damaged, and not when it comes to a silly mud-slinging. For me, it is a tired attempt to generate some interest into a flagging category. As both a strategy and tactic, it is hopelessly transient, at best catering to the current dumbed down media craze of projecting everything as a confrontation.”

Ad film-maker Prasoon Pandey also has no issues with this genre as he says, “I remember watching the delightfully entertaining, humorous and engaging Pepsi TVC a few years back, where they had a bottle of Coke being excavated from a cave. That was simply fabulous! Creativity is the key even in such cases.” But ad-guru Alyque Padamsee is not amused. “I think anyone who indulges in name-calling is inviting his opponent(s) to respond, triggering-off an internecine war that leads to grave damages on both sides, in terms of brand reputation and image.” Padamsee believes that this is a self-defeating exercise by HUL, and it would make more sense to “use the stones to build, rather than demolish.” He is convinced that controversy fetches eyeballs, but seldom emerges the winner in brand-building because consumers ultimately want the steak, not the sizzle! Veteran Nargis Wadia believes that this whole affair is in “a bad taste and represents bankruptcy in the ideas department and a desperation to attract attention.”

Some criticise it, some enjoy it, and some simply use comparative advertising as an interesting playground to bring the catfight before public eyes. Brave displays, bold words and boastful actions, these are what the new gladiators of the ad-world are learning fast. Welcome to the arena!

For more articles, Click on IIPM Article.

Source : IIPM Editorial, 2010.

An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri and Arindam chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist).

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