CEOs make 62X what average worker makes in bonuses alone

Read more: http://curiouscapitalist.blogs.time.com/2011/03/18/ceo-pay-up-average-worker-not-so-much/#ixzz1H9tyKF8T


From TIME posted by Stephen Gamble

Executives in the corner office now make 62 times more than the average worker, and that's just in bonuses alone.A study done for the Wall Street Journal, found that incentive pay for the chief executive officers of 50 major corporations jumped 30% in 2010. That's on top of their base pay. And it also doesn't include a whole bunch of other things, like generous retirement packages, gold-plated healthcare plans and use of the corporate jets. Remember how the financial crisis was supposed to wipe away the bonus culture of pay for short-term performance in corporate America. Yes. Well, not so much.

As a group the 50 CEOs got year-end payouts of $126 million. That was up from $83 million. Some of lucky (they would say deserving) recipients included Walt Disney's CEO Robert Iger, who received a $13.5 million bonus. That was an increase of 45.5% from a year ago. GM CEO Jeffrey Immelt, the nation's new jobs czar, got a $4 million bonus, after not receiving a special - check for two years in a row. And if you wonder where all that money you spend on Grande Caffe Mochas go, wonder no longer. Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz took home a $3.5 million bonus last year. It was the biggest bonus the Schultz has ever, repeat ever, received. And I thought we were still in tough economic times.

Of course, the news of higher pay for top executives comes at a time when pay for the rest of us seems to be stagnating. Yesterday, the government's Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that average hourly compensation for American workers fell 0.5% in February. The average worker now makes $40,672 a year. What we all make is up from a year ago, but by just 2%. Factor in inflation, and the average worker makes just $0.58 more a week, than they did a year ago.
The corporate PR teams are defending these bonuses by saying that the executives deserve the pay because stock prices and earnings are up. A Walt Disney spokesperson says that shareholder return at the company was up nearly 24%, substantially more than the Standard & Poors 500. But haven't we already learned, through bubble after bubble, that stock prices are a poor indication of anything. They are irrational, give us false positives, and crash.

But here's what is the real problem. Yes, if higher profits and a higher stock price warrant better pay for CEOs, why doesn't the same ring true for the average employee. Workers at Disney's Florida amusement park Walt Disney World fought for months last year and early this year for higher wages. What they finally ended up getting, in a new contract settled earlier this month, was an annual raise of 3% to 4% over the next three years. The workers will get a bonus, too, of $650, a mere 20,769 times less than Iger's bonus. As long as it remains that only a small segment of our population will be rewarded for better performance, while the rest of us do more and more work for the same pay, the wealth gap in America is certain to get worse

A Madoff Victim Speaks

A Madoff Victim Speaks

Both Coke and Diet Coke beat Pepsi

Diet Coke now 2nd most popular, after Coca-Cola

For the first time ever, Diet Coke has topped rival Pepsi-Cola to become the second-most popular soft drink in the United States. Coca-Cola Classic took the top spot, with more than 1.6 billion cases sold across the U.S. in 2010.But nearly 927 million cases of Diet Coke were sold last year, besting the 892 million for Pepsi-Cola, said a report by trade publication Beverage Digest released Thursday.

Most popular sodas in the U.S.
1.Coke

2.Diet Coke

3.Pepsi-Cola

4.Mountain Dew

5.Dr Pepper

6.Sprite

7.Diet Pepsi

8.Diet Mountain Dew

9.Diet Dr Pepper

10.Fanta.

Both companies saw lower sales overall, but the decline was much more pronounced for Pepsi products. Overall, Coke product sales were down 0.5 per cent. Pepsi saw a 2.6 per cent decline.
The achievement is a clear win for Atlanta, Ga.-based Coca-Cola Co. over its rival, PepsiCo Inc. The two have vied for dominance in the domestic U.S. and international markets for decades, before Coke took a clear lead in recent years.

Soft drink sales have fallen for six straight years as consumers switched to healthier alternatives such as juices and tea, and cut back on spending in the recession. The two rivals have moved into bottled water, fruit juices, energy drinks and sports drinks to try to maintain market share.
But the ascent of Diet Coke to the second slot speaks volumes about the growing appeal of diet-branded products in general. Ten years ago, only two of the top 10 most popular sodas were diets. Now four are on the list: Diet Coke, Diet Pepsi, Diet Mountain Dew and Diet Dr Pepper.
Coca-Cola has pumped up its traditional advertising, including online ads that have a new focus on social media. PepsiCo maintained some traditional ads, but also steered dollars toward its Pepsi Refresh Project, an online donation program meant to build brand awareness.

In 2010, to promote its Pepsi MAX drink, PepsiCo updated the classic 1995 ad campaign where two drivers of trucks containing Pepsi and Coke meet in a roadside diner and try each other's soda.

Seth Godin asks 'Is it Remarkable?'

Eli Pariser's talk on web filtering

http://vodpod.com/watch/5736793-tedtalks-eli-pariser-beware-online-filter-bubbles-eli-pariser-2011

Filters need to have a sense of social responsbility. The Internet needs to maintain the ability to introduce us to new ideas and upto date information.

Eric Schmidt Leadership Conference

General Mills buys into Yoplait

General Mills 'buys into Yoplait'


Yoplait is the world's second-largest yoghurt maker after Danone A 50% stake in French yoghurt maker Yoplait will soon be sold to US food giant General Mills, according to sources close to the situation.
The sources, quoted by Reuters, and in the French newspaper Le Figaro, say the anticipated deal will value Yoplait at 1.6bn euros ($2.2bn; £1.4bn).

The stake that is said to be changing hands is currently owned by private equity group PAI Partners.
Dairy co-op Sodiaal owns the rest.
General Mills, which makes Cheerios cereals and Haagen-Dazs ice cream, is said to have beaten rival bidders Groupo Lala from Mexico and Nestle.Yoplait is the world's second-largest yoghurt maker after Danone.All the companies reportedly involved in the deal declined to comment.

IBM pays out over bribery charges

IBM made additional profit thanks to the bribes it paid, the SEC said Computer giant IBM has agreed to pay $10m (£6m) in an out-of-court settlement of bribery allegations.The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) alleged that IBM had paid large bribes to South Korean and Chinese government officials.The bribes were channelled through local business partners and travel agents for more than a decade in order to win contracts, according to the SEC.The SEC said the bribes made IBM some $5m additional profits.The bribes included overseas trips, gifts such as cameras and laptop computers, and entertainment for Chinese officials.

More than 100 IBM employees had provided such bribes between 2004 and 2009, the SEC said.
During the 1998 to 2003 period, managers at a subsidiary and joint venture paid more than $200,000 in bribes to South Korean officials."Deficient internal controls" allowed staff to conceal bribes as "legitimate business expenses", the SEC said.

How Much Will Offshore Wind Really Cost?

Herman K. Trabish: March 17, 2011



A leading U.S. researcher explains how and why deep ocean offshore wind can be the cost-effective renewable energy answer.  The cost of harvesting offshore wind energy may be a lot lower than the early numbers from controversial projects suggest.

There are “almost 4,000 gigawatts of capacity within 50 nautical miles of U.S. coasts,” said Dr. Habib J. Dagher, Director of both the Composite Center and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)-funded DeepC Wind Consortium at the University of Maine, “and the total U.S. electricity capacity is around 1,000 gigawatts.” It is, Dagher said, “the largest single opportunity we have in renewable energy.” And, he added, “the majority of our population lives in the coastal states and has access to this resource.” The real question, however, is whether the resource can be harvested competitively. Dagher says his research consortium’s findings suggest it can if it is done right

“It’s unfortunate,” Dagher said, discussing the small Block Island shallow water offshore wind project off Rhode Island and the controversial Cape Wind offshore project off Massachusetts, “that people say that’s the price of offshore wind.”The five-to-eight-turbine Block Island’s power purchase agreement (PPA), currently under legal challenge, is priced at 24.4 cents per kilowatt-hour. The 130-turbine Cape Wind’s PPA is priced at 18.7 cents per kilowatt-hour. The average price of electricity in New England vacillates in the 15 to 17 cents per kilowatt-hour range.

The cost of electricity from those emerging offshore projects is, Dagher said, very expensive because they have “large uncertainties and a large learning curve. Those costs do not truly reflect where this industry will be in ten years if we scale up the industry properly.” They are, he added, “pioneering projects.” “Deep offshore wind and shallow or medium depth offshore wind are completely different technologies,” Dagher explained of the DeepC Consortium’s thrust. “The basic difference is the cost of construction offshore.”

Europe has built more than 20 shallow and medium-depth projects using heavy equipment to put turbines and other infrastructure in place. "The jack-up barges and cranes will cost you $150,000 to $200,000 a day to run. Building offshore is very costly. And there is the cost of capital, as well,” Dagher said. “The more building you do in the water, the more the capital costs go up.” Dagher and his group want to build floating turbines that can be towed out to sea and anchored, eliminating the costs and risks of construction. “Our approach is to do as much as we can on land, pre-assemble these units, and do very little in the water. That’s how we’re going to save money.”

Funded by DOE after being chosen in open competition, Dagher’s DeepC Consortium has evaluated fourteen proprietary floating turbine proposals and selected six to study in detail. Careful comparisons indicate that five-megawatt floating turbines will require no more “material costs” than fixed turbines, but will eliminate the costs of ocean construction. According to turbine manufacturers’ rule-of-thumb, Dagher said, “If you’re going to build something on land and it’s going to cost you a dollar, if you’re going to build it at quay-side, it might cost you three or four dollars and if you’re going to go out and build it twenty miles offshore, it might cost you six to ten dollars.”

Instead of “being at the mercy of the elements” in the “two or three months of the year you can do this kind of work” and paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in barge and crane costs, a quay-side-built, five-megawatt floating turbine can be towed twenty miles offshore with a twenty-ton tugboat in ten hours.
Using this strategy, Dagher’s group has concluded, offshore wind-generated electricity can almost match the price of electricity consumers are now paying, exclusive of the costs for delivering it. “Half of the price is transmission and distribution, the other half is generating electrons,” Dagher said. “If I’m paying sixteen cents, eight cents is used to make the electrons.”

The goal of Dagher’s consortium is to get the cost of generation “to ten cents per kilowatt-hour, plugged into the grid, by 2020, if we scale up to a thousand megawatts.”The crucial assumption, he stipulated, is that the industry matures enough by 2020 to the point where it achieves the capacity to build 1,000-megawatt projects. At that size, economies of scale will make it possible to build floating wind farms at costs that will meet the ten cents goal.

That goal includes the cost of transmitting the electricity generated at sea to the grid, a cost that will be considerable for early and small projects like Block Island and Cape Wind. When projects such as the Google-led Atlantic Wind Development consortium’s Atlantic Wind Connection transmission backbone are in place off the coasts, the costs of getting electricity to the grid will go down.

“Transmission and distribution is a key barrier,” Dagher said. “I think it’s a critical project.” Separating the building of transmission from the building of the wind farm “takes a huge load off the investors, the developers and the capital.”

One other thing is needed, however. “Everything starts with government policy,” Dagher said. "The U.S. needs a goal, a target,” he insisted. “Industry is ready to move but they need a stable policy.” And the policy, he added, must have incentives that ease the burden of taking on the enormous risks of entirely new and unproven technologies -- like floating wind turbines.

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The Problem With Pointing Fingers

E-mail: ccouch@nytimes.com.


Q. You work as part of a team that has made a serious mistake and lost business as a result. You know who dropped the ball and think that this person should be held accountable. How can you place the blame in an acceptable, professional way?

A. The last thing you want is a reputation for throwing co-workers under the bus. It’s far more politically savvy and productive to approach the mistake as a team problem.

“Recommend a post-mortem analysis of what happened, where you look at the chain of events, what occurred and what didn’t, and questions get answered in a good-faith process,” says Ben Dattner, a management consultant and author of “The Blame Game: How the Hidden Rules of Credit and Blame Determine Our Success or Failure.”

Even if it was clearly just one person who made the mistake, it’s helpful to look at ways the entire team can make sure the error isn’t repeated.

Jodi Glickman, president of Great On The Job, a communications training firm in Chicago, says that little is accomplished by focusing on one person’s mistake. “It’s not about the one error,” she says. “It’s about the breakdown in communications or the lack of understanding of responsibilities.”

You can, however, speak privately to the person. Let the person know you are aware that the mistake is his or her responsibility, Ms. Glickman says, and ask how you could help prevent it from happening in the future.

Q. What if someone blames you for something that isn’t your fault? Can you protect yourself without seeming overly defensive or childish?

A. Avoid a knee-jerk response and take a step back instead, says Lynn Taylor, chief executive of Lynn Taylor Consulting, a workplace productivity firm in Santa Monica, Calif., and author of “Tame Your Terrible Office Tyrant.” She suggests putting yourself in the other person’s shoes to try to understand why he or she is blaming you. “Is the person threatened? Are they confused about your role versus their role?” she says. Show empathy to help defuse the tension, letting the person know you understand that there is reason for concern.

Then look at the duties associated with your job to determine which project tasks were within your scope of responsibility and which ones weren’t, and take that to your manager, says Jill A. Brown, an assistant professor of management at the College of Business and Economics at Lehigh University.

Keep your tone professional, and stick to the facts. Acknowledge that while you weren’t involved with the problem, you will be happy to help resolve it, Ms. Taylor says. “You can go to the person who dropped the ball and offer to brainstorm ways to approach the client again or recapture the business,” she says.

Q. How does all the finger-pointing in a workplace affect its culture?

A. Unfortunately, finger-pointing or scapegoating is fairly common, says Ms. Brown — especially recently, as many workers have been feeling insecure about their jobs. When people are insecure, they tend to shirk responsibility for their mistakes, she says.

A culture of blame can create a very difficult work environment, says Alina Tugend, who writes the Shortcuts column for The New York Times and is the author of “Better By Mistake.”

Research shows that people in the workplace tend to copy blaming as a behavior, whether consciously or unconsciously, thus perpetuating the problem, Ms. Tugend says. “Conversely,” she adds, “when people see others taking responsibility for their mistakes or failures, they also copy that, creating a better overall work environment.”

Q. Giving and receiving credit for a job well done is important, too. What’s the right way to give credit to others?

A. Credit motivates employees, Mr. Dattner says, and when there is a lack of it, people become demoralized and disengaged. But make sure that the amount of credit you give is commensurate with the accomplishment, Ms. Taylor says. “If it’s a small thing someone did, for example, don’t make it a public event,” she says. Instead, thank the person privately or by e-mail — and be specific about what you’re acknowledging.

Vary the way you pat colleagues on the back. “If you say ‘great job’ to someone at every staff meeting, it loses its meaning, so mix things up,” Ms. Taylor says. Give credit only when it’s truly deserved and then do so in a variety of ways and places — at meetings, during a lunch, in an e-mail, by text or by memo, using different language each time, she says.

Q. Although acknowledging others is important for overall morale, does it benefit you directly in any way?

A. Giving credit to others publicly positions you as a leader, Ms. Brown says, because the ability to give credit is an important dimension of leadership. It also makes others want to work with you and for you, Ms. Glickman says. “If you share credit, are conscious of other people’s agendas and are always trying to make your colleagues look good, people will love you,” she says. “They will want to be on your team.”

Pepsi announces 100% plant based bottle

Pepsi Ups Ante on Plant-Based Bottles with 100% Non-Plastic Bottle


By Jonathan Bardelline

PURCHASE, NY — PepsiCo announced a response to Coca-Cola's PlantBottle, but unlike Coke's bottle, which is only 30 percent plant-based at the time, Pepsi says its will be completely derived from plants.

Pepsi will make its bottles out of switch grass, pine bark and corn husks, and like with Coke's PlantBottle, they're using natural materials to make PET plastic, so it can be recycled along with their current petroleum-based plastic bottles.

The beverage giant hopes to also use orange and potato peels, oat hulls and other agricultural byproducts from its Tropicana, Quaker and other operations in the future to make the bottles.

Pepsi will do a pilot run of the plant-based bottles in 2012, followed by commercialization based on the results of the test run.

While Coca-Cola beat Pepsi to putting out drinks in bottles made from plants first, Pepsi has the chance to put out the first recyclable bottle derived entirely from plants by a major company.

Coca-Cola's PlantBottles, which are also being used for Heinz ketchup and Odwalla juices, are still 70 percent petroleum-based. Scott Vitters, the company's global director of sustainable packaging, wrote in a GreenBiz.com post last year:

Our PlantBottle packaging is made by converting natural sugars found in plants into a key ingredient for making PET plastic. For those who want the technical specifics, we've innovated a way to develop plant-based MEG, a key component in PET plastic. PlantBottle is up to 30 percent plant-based because MEG is 30 percent of the total composition of PET plastic by weight. We still have more work to do to crack the code on a plant-based TA, which is the other 70 percent of PET plastic, but we know it is feasible.

Look Out Paypal: Visa Jumps Into Personal Payments

Visa took on Paypal today in the personal payment space, announcing that consumers in the U.S. would be able to receive and send funds to any eligible Visa account.

Consumers will have the option to send personal payments from a bank to a Visa account by simply entering a recipient’s 16-digit Visa account, email address or mobile phone number. The process is comparable to how users would send payments on Paypal.

The new Visa personal payments service was made possible by technical improvements and a new Visa transaction type that allows banks to accept incoming funds. The first U.S. banks are expected to make the personal payments available by the second half of 2011.

According to Jim McCarthy, global head of products at Visa, “For fifty years, Visa has worked to simplify payments at the merchant point of sale; we are now evolving our network capability to make it easier for our account holders to pay one another.”

Although Visa will be competing against a strong incumbent in the personal payment space, if there is one company that can unseat Paypal, Visa, which already offers personal payments in more than 70 countries, is it.

Visa has been relentless in building its presence in the personal payment space, as evidenced by the company’s purchase of virtual goods monetization platform PlaySpan and e-payment company Cybersource. Visa plans to use CyberSource, which it purchased for $2 billion, to pursue new opportunities in Asia and Latin America. In 2010, the company also introduced a Paypal competitor in Australia called PayClick.

Competing with PayPal, however, will be no small task. At the end of last quarter, Paypal announced it had 94.4 million active registered accounts, and was adding approximately one million active accounts per month. The company’s total payment volume was $26.9 billion last quarter.

Social marketing Advice

Vehicle Sharing: Is it feasible for the average owner?

Susan Johnston is a Boston-based freelance writer who covers business and lifestyle topics.


Since its launch in 2000, Zipcar has shaken up the car rental market and grown to include more than 550,000 members in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Its main selling points? The ability to reserve vehicles by the hour instead of by the day and the convenience of pickup locations all over major metropolitan areas. Similar services now include the nonprofits CityCarShare, I-Go Carsharing, and e-Go Carshare.


Now, new services are taking this model a step further. Instead of using a fleet of Zipcars, RelayRides, WhipCar, Spride Share, and Getaround allow car owners to rent out their vehicles to their neighbors when they’re not in use.

“Economically, it makes a ton of sense for both sides,” says Shelby Clark, the chief executive officer of RelayRides, which currently operates in Boston and San Francisco. “People underestimate how much it costs to own and maintain a vehicle.” AAA’s 2010 “Your Driving Costs” study revealed that that the owners of average-sized sedans spend more than $8,000 a year to own and operate their vehicle. Minivan owners spend more than $9,000 a year!

These sites allow car owners to offset some of these costs through rental fees. Owners get pricing guidelines based on their car’s year, condition, location, and other factors, but they ultimately set the hourly rate themselves.

For car renters, those rates can sometimes be lower than services like Zipcar. Tom Wright, cofounder of the UK-based WhipCar, says borrowers are motivated by cost and environmental factors. “Since they can use cars that are affordable and close to them, it doesn’t require extra cars and allows them to make better use of existing assets,” he says.

Many borrowers also appreciate that their money is going to a neighbor instead of a company, says Clark. Many of RelayRides’ car owners also offer special features like GPS, bike racks, CD collections, or even homemade cookies left in their vehicles.

But do the savings outweigh the safety and insurance risks?

As you can imagine, screening drivers and vehicles is a high priority for all of these sites. Wright says WhipCar conducts three-way conference calls with driving applicants and the DVLA (Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency, the UK equivalent of the RMV) to ensure that the person has a spotless driving record. WhipCar also requires that vehicles be no older than eight years and checks if the vehicle has been stolen or involved in accident. Other sites have similar policies, and some allow the owner and the driver to rate the experience afterwards based on the caliber of the vehicle and the driver.

Like Zipcar, peer-to-peer car sharing sites bear the cost of gas and auto insurance. In the case of RelayRides, drivers over the age of 21 are insured by RelayRides’ $1 million liability insurance policy but are liable for a $500 deductible (Clark says this ensures that they treat vehicles as their own). Drivers are also responsible for paying any parking or traffic tickets issued during their rental period. Getaround has very similar insurance policies.

Though car owners are not liable for accidents that occur while their car is being rented, some auto insurance companies are squeamish about personal car sharing. But state legislatures are, in some cases, taking the side of the consumer: California recently passed a bill on car sharing that makes it illegal for auto insurance companies to void the policies of car owners who rent out their vehicles. The state of Oregon is considering a similar bill.

Car owners outside of California and Oregon would be wise to check their auto insurance policy before renting out their vehicle. However, with growing environmental and cost concerns associated with cars, other states may pass car sharing legislation in the future.

Clark sees this as just one example of the sharing economy. “Society is increasing rejecting traditional forms for ownership,” he says, pointing to Netflix as an example. “In the nineties, everyone had these giant bookcases of VHS tapes. But at the end of the day, I didn’t really want to own all these movies, I just wanted to watch them. It makes sense to access that movie whenever you need it. The global economic crisis has forced people to take a step back, and realize that ownership might not make sense.”

Novartis cuts jobs in England

Swiss drugs giant Novartis reveals UK jobs cuts plan


The Novartis and Pfizer plans will be implemented over the next two years Swiss pharmaceuticals giant Novartis has announced job cuts at its Horsham site in West Sussex.A company spokesman said Novartis planned to reduce the total workforce of 950 at the site by 550. The move comes as a further blow to the UK's pharmaceutical research and development (R&D) industry.
In February, Pfizer said would close its research and development facility at Sandwich in Kent, which employs 2,400 people.Of the 950 employees on the Horsham campus approximately 330 are dedicated to respiratory research.
"With significant changes in healthcare systems aimed to contain or cut cost, this critical assessment and the subsequent potential changes to the Novartis UK organisation are key to maintain significant investment in innovative drugs and our research efforts in the UK," said Sue Webb, general manager at Novartis, in a statement.

The drugs industry in general is scaling back investment in R&D, despite the need to find new medicines as the patents on older drugs expire.  The Novartis and Pfizer plans will be implemented over the next two years.

BMW, Continental and SAP moving employees out of Japan due to Radiation

Japan radiation fears prompt firms to move employees


Airlines have cancelled and rerouted dozens of flights
Foreign firms are evacuating staff from Japan, after fears of radiation leaks at the Fukushima Daiichi plant escalated further. German car maker BMW and car part maker Continental are among companies moving employees out of the country. Others, including software group SAP, are moving staff to southern cities within Japan.

Workers have suspended operations at the nuclear plant after a rise in radiation levels.
Radiation levels in Tokyo were higher than normal, officials said, but not at levels dangerous to humans.
The expatriate staff of international banks, including Morgan Stanley, BNP Paribas and Standard Chartered, have reportedly left the capital city.

However, the Japan-based International Bankers Association said that none of its members had ordered its employees to evacuate, and some financial firms were continuing "business as usual".

Move offered

Although predominately staffed by Japanese employees, expatriates typically make up a large part of the management at the Tokyo offices of foreign financial firms.Companies are moving to ensure the safety of their staff after an explosion and fire broke out at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant, about 220km north of the capital.

SAP said it would evacuate offices in Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya. It said it had offered about 1,100 employees and their families transport and hotel rooms further south. Private equity firm Blackstone is closing its office in Tokyo and relocating staff as well, according to the Bloomberg news agency.
A spokesperson for chipmaker Infineon said: "We've offered to move staff to the south but only a small amount have decided to go."

Flight disruptions
Many airlines operating through Tokyo have been affected, with dozens of flights to Japan halted or rerouted.Deutsche Lufthansa said it was diverting flights away from Tokyo to Osaka and Nagoya, while Air China cancelled flights to the Japanese capital from Beijing and Shanghai. At Hong Kong's international airport, many passengers arriving from Tokyo said they were relieved to have left.
Cindy Khemalaap and her husband had been due to relocate to Hong Kong from Tokyo later this month, but decided to bring forward the move because of their fears about radiation and worsening food and fuel shortages.The US citizens had been living in Tokyo for five years, and they had to leave their dog behind.
"We just took what was necessary. My husband will have to go back at some point and sort out the rest of our belongings," she said."We didn't sleep all last night. There were more aftershocks."

Medline Settles Kickback Lawsuit for $85 million; INDUSTRY NEWS

Milberg LLP, Marek Law Office PC, Williams Montgomery & John Ltd and Clifford Law Offices PC Secure $85 Million Whistleblower Settlement

Mar. 14, 2011 (Business Wire) — Medline Industries, Inc., one of the nation’s largest suppliers of medical and surgical products to healthcare providers throughout the United States, along with its charitable arm The Medline Foundation (collectively, “Medline”), have agreed to pay $85 million to the federal government to resolve whistleblower Sean Mason’s False Claims Act allegations against Medline.

Mason alleged that Medline engaged in a widespread illegal kickback scheme targeting hospitals and other healthcare providers that purchase medical and surgical products paid for by federal healthcare programs, resulting in violations of the federal False Claims Act. Although a party to the agreement, the U.S. Department of Justice elected not to intervene in the lawsuit, which Mason pursued as a qui tam action on behalf of the Federal government on a non-intervened basis. The settlement is among the largest settlements of a False Claims Act case in which the government declined to intervene.

“This case demonstrates that, even when the federal government does not intervene, whistleblowers and their counsel can still work with the DOJ to successfully prosecute claims of government fraud,” said Mason’s counsel Kirk E. Chapman of Milberg LLP. “Since the government cannot possibly take on all False Claims Act cases, some recoveries require the additional efforts of tenacious private whistleblowers, such as Sean, and their counsel.”

Milberg, Marek Law Office PC, Williams Montgomery & John Ltd and Clifford Law Offices PC served as co-counsel to Mason, a former Medline employee who oversaw and administered rebates paid to hundreds of hospitals, skilled nursing facilities, hospices and other healthcare providers that entered into annual requirements contracts for Medline’s medical and surgical products. Mason alleged that many of these customer rebates were in fact disguised kickbacks which comprised Medline’s illegal kickback scheme targeting hospitals and other healthcare providers that purchase medical and surgical supplies paid for by Federal healthcare programs such as Medicare and Medicaid. Federal statutory and regulatory law forbids suppliers from providing remuneration to induce purchasing by Providers, and the False Claims Act prescribes that any claims for payment submitted to the government that are tainted by such unlawful remuneration are per se improper.



The False Claims Act allows private citizens to sue companies that they discover are defrauding the government, and to receive an award for their efforts. Following his discovery of Medline’s fraudulent scheme, Mason filed his original qui tam complaint in federal District Court in Chicago, Illinois in October 2007. Upon an investigation into Mason’s allegations, the United States declined to join the case. However, determined to hold Medline accountable for its illegal conduct, Mason nevertheless elected to continue to pursue his case and filed an amended complaint in March 2009.



Judge Suzanne Conlon dismissed the amended complaint in May 2009, but granted Mason’s motion for leave to file a Second Amended Complaint in December 2009. In February 2010, the court denied Medline’s motion to dismiss the action in its entirety. Discovery in the case commenced, and soon thereafter, Mason and Medline entered into a tentative settlement agreement that required approval from the United States, as a real party-in-interest. The DOJ approved the settlement agreement on March 10, 2011. For his part in bringing the fraudulent conduct to light and continuing the case on a non-intervened basis, Mason was awarded 27.5% of the settlement proceeds.



Case citation: Mason v. Medline, Civil Action No. 1:07-cv-05615 (Northern District of Illinois

Corruption 'threatens India's economic growth'

The report says that corruption may result in a volatile political and economic environment Continue reading the main story Widespread corruption in India costs billions of dollars and threatens to derail the country's growth, a survey says.The report by consultancy firm KMPG said that the problem had become so endemic that foreign investors were being deterred from the country.

It was compiled by questioning 100 top domestic and foreign businesses. Its release comes as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh struggles to cope in the battle against corruption.Earlier this month the head of the country's anti-corruption watchdog was forced to resign by the Supreme Court on the grounds that he himself faces corruption charges.

Over the last six months India has been hit by a series of corruption scandals including a multi-billion dollar telecoms scandal, alleged financial malpractices in connection with the Commonwealth Games and allegations that houses for war widows were diverted to civil servants.

Mega scams

"Today India is faced with a different kind of challenge," the report said. "It is not about petty bribes (bakshish) any more, but scams to the tune of thousands of crores (billions of rupees) that highlight a political/industry nexus which, if not checked, could have a far reaching impact.
Corruption scandals have weighed heavily on Mr Singh's shoulders "Corruption poses a risk to India's projected 9% GDP growth and may result in a volatile political and economic environment."

Critics of the government say that recent scandals point to a pervasive culture of corruption in Mr Singh's administration - adding to the difficulties of a politician once seen as India's most honest.The government denies the claims and has set up a parliamentary inquiry into corruption. The BBC's Sanjoy Majumder in Delhi says that most Indians routinely pay bribes for a number of services such as getting a driver's licence or a passport. But, our correspondent says, the KPMG survey makes clear that corruption is now no longer about such petty bribes but mega scams where billions of dollars are siphoned off by government and industry.

The worst-hit areas as identified by the report were real estate and construction - a priority for Delhi which plans to spend $1.5tn over the next decade to improve its over-burdened infrastructure.The report said that the country's telecommunications industry was also badly affected. Telecoms Minister Andimuthu Raja resigned in November, denying allegations that he had undersold billions of dollars worth of mobile phone licences. He is now under arrest.

However the KMPG report was not all gloomy. It said that despite the murky regulatory environment, business remained active in India with more than half of those surveyed saying they were unaffected by corruption. More than 80% of respondents disagreed that corruption had reduced their ability to access domestic or foreign funds, while 55% disagreed that corruption had affected their business.

It Came From Their Lab. But How to Take It to the Bank?

THERE are a lot of smart people in universities. Some may even be geniuses. Many of them are certainly good at inventing technologies that will change our lives.

But for the most part, universities aren’t particularly adept at extracting the full measure of profit from all those innovations. While university technology transfer offices routinely license the intellectual property developed on campus, the schools themselves often aren’t very nimble at retaining large stakes in the start-ups that exploit that property.

Investing in start-ups is the business of venture capitalists, some of whom have come up with a new formula for profits. It goes roughly like this: Give a few V.C.’s access to the technology deals. Let them raise some capital and invest it shrewdly. The V.C.’s become rich. And if the deals are done correctly, the schools share handsomely in the riches. As an incidental but significant benefit, it’s at least possible that venture capitalists, working with universities, could help create manufacturing jobs in the United States.

Is this vision realistic? Marc Singer hopes that it is. A managing partner at Osage Ventures, based in Philadelphia, he has done quite well over the last 17 years financing technology start-ups like Diapers.com, an online baby-care products retailer, and Redfin, an innovative online real estate broker.

But Mr. Singer and his partners, Louis Berneman and Robert S. Adelson, say they have found a new opportunity. They say that while technology transfer offices at universities do a good job of licensing start-up companies, the schools often waive the right to invest in subsequent financing rounds, perhaps because it may be hard to assess the investments’ risks and rewards in a timely way. In any case, the universities’ original share in these fledgling enterprises is diluted — and the schools’ profits, if and when they arrive, are a small fraction of what they could have been.

For example, Caliper Life Sciences, a company that sells research tools for microfluidics and lab automation, spun out of research at the University of Pennsylvania. The school initially owned more than 10 percent of the company, but declined to participate in later financing rounds. As a result, its equity was diluted to approximately 1 percent. The company went public and is now worth about $330 million, so even that slim share is valuable. But the university could have owned much more.

So the three venture capitalists raised $100 million and set up the new Osage University Partners fund. Research universities like Penn, the California Institute of Technology, Duke, the University of California, Berkeley, and Columbia assign their investment rights to it, and hold sizable ownership stakes in the fund.

The fund avoids consumer Internet plays, if only because those are rarely what the universities’ researchers produce. Instead, they invest in areas like material science, battery technology, therapeutics and energy.

One investment is in Avid Radiopharmaceuticals, which makes diagnostic tools for recognizing Alzheimer’s disease. It was acquired by Eli Lilly late last year. Then there is Gevo, which makes a chemical that, when blended with water, creates a fuel that the company believes will cost half as much as oil.

“These are companies that require a meaningful amount of capital,” Mr. Singer said — sometimes up to hundreds of millions of dollars.

They may also require a significant amount of labor, because their projects generally lead to manufacturing, Mr. Singer said. By contrast, many of America’s leading Internet companies have transformed daily life, but they haven’t produced many jobs. Netflix, the online movie service, for example, employs about 2,000 people, and Zynga, the maker of casual games like FarmVille, employs 1,500.

Yet the employment rolls of a manufacturing company with the same stock market value as an Internet company are typically much larger. Zynga, though privately traded, has an estimated value of $10 billion, based on its most recent round of financing. Sara Lee is also worth about $10 billion but employs more than 33,000 people.

Ford Motor, which is valued at about $50 billion, or as much as Facebook — again, based on its most recent round of private financing — employs almost 200,000 people making cars, or 100 times more people than Facebook has hired. But a tech start-up company that makes stretchable electronic circuits that open up new design possibilities for electronic devices — like MC10, another of the university-financed companies, could ultimately generate sizable employment.

Lest anyone think that they are engaging in some form of altruism, Mr. Adelson says he and his partners have analyzed these projects as businessmen. “It is totally centered around the profit motive,” he said.
One of the questions we had to ask ourselves is whether this is the area we’d want to invest in,” he said. “Would there be the returns?”

THEY built an index of start-ups from 50 top-flight universities that had licensed their technology to those start-ups but had not invested in them. What they discovered startled the V.C.’s. There was a very respectable 33 percent rate of return — though, granted, there were no wild, out-of-the-park home runs like a Facebook or a Zynga.

(Actually, in terms of V.C. record-keeping, those are more like out-of-the-park-and-into-the-next-county home runs.) They also found that there were few strikeouts. In fact, about 40 percent of the investments had a positive return.

A result, they say, is that if universities have a bigger stake in companies, they will make more money and can finance other start-ups. And many can fulfill a mandate to create local jobs. “The tech transfer community has become increasingly oriented toward job creation,” Mr. Adelson says. “In a lot of ways, we are part of a larger puzzle that universities are trying to solve.”

400 richest americans own more than the lowest 50% of population

The 400 Richest Americans Are Now Richer Than the Bottom 50 Percent Combined

By Cord Jefferson


On Wednesday we told you that a rather shocking number of American politicians aren't much like most Americans at all, pulling in six-figure salaries to add to their existing seven-figure fortunes. Today, thanks to some quick math by the documentary filmmaker Michael Moore, there's another way to look at how rich our leaders are compared to the rest of the country: In 2009, if you were to add up the total fortune of America's richest 400 people, that amount—$1.27 trillion—would be more than the holdings of the bottom 50 percent of Americans, less than $1.22 trillion.

Says Moore:
By contrast, in 2007 the bottom 50% of U.S. households owned slightly more wealth than the Forbes 400; the economic meltdown has hurt the bottom more than the top. (And in fact, in 2010 the net worth of the Forbes 400 jumped to $1.37 trillion.) That top 400, by the way, represents .0000035 percent of all households in the United States.

Granted, many of the nation's top earners, including Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, contribute a tremendous amount of their wealth to charity each year, and will continue to do so. But many others, like Charles and David Koch, who contribute to a wide range of right-wing causes, are also actively fighting to weaken working-class rights (as they did in the recent Wisconsin union fracas).

On top of all this, it's worth mentioning that, of the 25 richest Americans, just three are women, and none is a person of color.

Stephen King: The Horrors of the TeaParty

Warren Buffett buys Lubrizol chemicals firm for $9bn

Mr Buffett said he was keen to use his cash pile to buy more companies. Warren Buffett's investment firm Berkshire Hathaway has announced what it has described as one of the largest deals in its history.
It is buying chemicals company Lubrizol for $9bn (£5.6bn) in cash, the equivalent of 28% above its latest market valuation.
Fast-growing Lubrizol saw its net income rise by 46% last year to $749m.
Mr Buffett told shareholders this month that Berkshire expected to use its cash pile to buy more companies.
"We will need both good performance from our current businesses and more major acquisitions," said Mr Buffett in his annual letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders.

"We're prepared. Our elephant gun has been reloaded, and my trigger finger is itchy."
Lubrizol, which had revenues of $5.4bn last year, makes chemical products used in engine oils as well as the plastics and pharmaceuticals industries. Mr Buffett described the firm as the sort "we love to partner".

Lubrizol chief executive James Hambrick said the deal was "a clear endorsement of the growth and diversification success" his company had achieved.
The deal is still subject to shareholder approval, but is expected to be completed in the third quarter of the year.

Anonymous leaks Bank of America e-mails

Online activist group Anonymous has released a cache of e-mails which it claims show impropriety at Bank of America.The leak, which includes correspondence between staff at BoA subsidiary Balboa Insurance, details plans to delete sensitive documents.It does not explain why the files were to be removed or how this supports Anonymous' accusation of criminality.

Bank of America has denied wrongdoing and called the claims "extravagant".
The company has been subject of rumours that its secrets would be leaked online for months.
But it was expected that Wikileaks would publish the secret documents, not a site associated with Anonymous.

Wikileaks connection

In late 2010, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange said he planned to release documents in early 2011, which could bring down a well known bank.Previously, he had claimed to be in possession of a hard drive containing internal documents from a senior Bank of America official.The Wikileaks release has yet to appear, and it is unclear if those files are the same ones obtained by Anonymous.

One of the documents appears to show an employee of Bilboa Insurance asking a colleague to deleted certain loan identifying numbers from their computer system. No information is given about the reason for the deletion, or whether it was ultimately carried out.An Anonymous member, posting updates on Twitter under the name OperationLeakS said the e-mails form the first part of a series of planned leaks that will prove Bank of America engaged in improper mortgage foreclosure practices.

What is Anonymous?

'Anonymous' describes itself as an 'internet gathering'. The term is used to describe a collective of people who come together online, commonly to stage a protest. The groups vary in size and make-up depending on the cause. Members often identify themselves in web videos by wearing the Guy Fawkes masks popularised by the book and film V for Vendetta.Its protests often take the form of disrupting websites and services.
The name Anonymous comes from a series of websites frequented by members, such as the anarchic image board 4Chan. These sites allow users to post without having to register or provide a name. As a result, their comments are tagged "Anonymous". In the past, members have staged high-profile protests against the Church of Scientology and plans by the Australian government to filter the internet content.

Many Anonymous protests tackle issues of free speech and preserving the openness of the net. But BoA said the clerical and administration documents do not relate to foreclosures.
"We are confident that his extravagant assertions are untrue," a BoA spokesman said.
Leaked e-mails
The e-mails were initially posted online online at http://bankofamericasuck.com/.

That website has only been available intermittently, having been overwhelmed by requests.Subsequently, sites mirroring the content have sprung up and the documents have also been released through peer-to-peer networks.However, some of the torrents, such as the one hosted on the Pirate Bay, have been removed.
Anonymous members have engaged in a campaign of action against websites and companies that assisted the United States government in its attempt to isolate Wikileaks.It has previously posted internal e-mails from computer security company HBGary and launched denial of service attacks against PayPal and Visa.The leaked HBGary e-mails proved highly damaging to the firm, containing details of its secret work with several high-profile clients.

Bank of America stopped handling payments for Wikileaks, after it published leaked US embassy cables.
Firms are increasingly concerned about the prospect of disgruntled staff taking caches of sensitive e-mails with them when they leave, said Rami Habal, of security firm Proofpoint."You can't do anything about people copying the content," he said.
But firms can put measures in place, such as revoking encryption keys, which means stolen e-mails become unreadable, he added.

An Architect speaks passionately about people who are literally dying to work

Dying to work

Mental health in workplace matters more than you think

Dianne Buckner, CBC News

When it comes to the pressing priorities of an average entrepreneur, managing the mental health of staff is probably not at the top of the list. Concern about whether or not employees are feeling good about their work and their lives likely has to take a back seat to issues related to surviving this tough economy, such as improving sales or reducing expenses.But touchy-feely as emotional well-being may sound, the fact is that issues such as anxiety, depression and burnout present some very real costs — and not just to individual enterprises, but to the economy as a whole.Whether or not small business owners are feeling the heat to address these issues, the pressure is there on a number of fronts.

"For the first time in Canadian history, employers are confronted with a legal duty to maintain not only a physically safe workplace, but also a psychologically safe work environment." So says a report done for the Mental Health Commission of Canada by Dr. Martin Shain of the University of Toronto.'Mental health disability claims have been on the rise for several years in Canada. In fact, it's predicted that mental health will be the leading cause of disability claims very soon.'

—Julie Holden, Banyan Work Health SolutionsThe report, called Tracking the Perfect Legal Storm, outlines a variety of developments in Canadian courtrooms that indicate the legal system is less tolerant of workplace factors that threaten psychological "safety." Increasingly large fines are being imposed on companies that don't consider the toll their workplace policies may take on employees' mental health. And as Shain points out, many employers are unaware of this "brewing legal storm."

And there are not just legal risks connected to ignoring mental health. Even when burnt-out or psychologically damaged employees don't sue, there's the risk of lost productivity."Mental health disability claims have been on the rise for several years in Canada," says Julie Holden of Banyan Work Health Solutions. "In fact, it's predicted that mental health will be the leading cause of disability claims very soon."

This all sounds very alarming — but it also sounds very familiar.

Eight years ago, while working at Venture, I reported on the growing awareness around "work-life balance." Researchers at Labour Canada, as well as independent private sector consultants, were warning companies that they had to do better in terms of helping employees balance the demands of their jobs and their home lives. Absenteeism was climbing, along with the cost of company health plans, as employees took advantage of subsidized prescriptions for anti-depressants and anti-anxiety pills.

The most striking aspect of the report (at least to my mind) was that for years, companies had actually been trying to do something, adopting all sorts of new strategies to help employees cope. On-site daycares and gyms, work-at-home strategies, and even "mental health days" had become common.
But these methods didn't seem to be working. The worrying statistics kept pouring in, and worsening. Since then, I'd say that awareness of mental health issues has continued to rise, as has the instinct to address them. So the fact that Shain and Holden are again sounding the alarm bells isn't a surprise, but a solution doesn't appear to be any more imminent now than then.Widespread, unavoidable doses of stress seem the norm in our 21st-century lives, and it doesn't just come from our modern, hyper-competitive workplaces, but also from a wide variety of societal and cultural influences. Small business owners may be interested to know that companies with fewer than 20 employees appear to be doing better than larger firms, according to Statistics Canada. Absenteeism is lower with those employers, running around eight lost days a year in 2009. By comparison, workers in transportation and warehousing lost 14 days in 2009. It was 13 for health care and social assistance workers, and 12.6 in the public sector.But on the other hand, larger companies have more resources and flexibility when it comes to handling a mental health crisis. (There are free resources on the subject of mental health in the workplace, and entrepreneurs could look under the section aimed at "senior leaders.")"I had to get rid of an employee who'd been with us 11 years," says an entrepreneur who spoke to me off the record. "She was poisoning the atmosphere. Everything was bad, her outlook was completely negative. "He spoke to the employee, and although she stayed with his company for another year, things didn't improve. "I had no choice but to fire her." I'm trying to be the quintessential liberal-minded employer," says the entrepreneur, who has just six employees. "I want to be fair, but I don't think any small business owner can afford to keep someone who isn't pulling their weight."

Of course, large companies have entire departments devoted to human resources. Stephen Fletcher works in HR at Newalta, a Canadian waste management company with 3,000 employees coast-to-coast. The company has a comprehensive mental health program, including a "flex benefit" program where employees can choose from a variety of stress-busting goodies such as fitness club memberships, counselling and even fishing or hunting licences. Even so, "stress claims are edging up," admits Fletcher, noting that anyone from top performers to less-stellar employees can fall victim to overload.

And it's hard to add up what it costs organizations."There are so many hidden costs," says Fletcher. "Absence alone doesn't reflect the effect on other workers, their productivity, on customers, and so on. There's a major ripple effect that has a lot of soft costs that are very difficult to track." Ihere are more than enough reasons for employers large and small to do their best with this particular challenge, not the least of which is human decency. And daunting as managing mental health may be, Fletcher tells me "it does make a difference to try."

I believe him.

MBA Summer Rotation at Levi's -apply now

From the Levi's Website

Right now, we're looking for talented MBA’s who have a deep interest in the world of retail apparel to join our merchandising and marketing teams for 10 weeks this summer. If you're chosen, we'll teach you what you need to know about the world of merchandising and marketing. After all, the Levi’s® brand is the original and definitive denim brand in the world. In return, you'll advise us about your generation and what they're looking for when it comes to clothing.Our program will give you a chance to work on a strategic initiative that is presented to senior leadership, in addition to impacting consumers hrough marketing and merchandising rotations.

And to top it off, you'll spend the summer in beautiful San Francisco!
Position Overview

The Levi’s® Merchandising & Marketing MBA intern will be a key contributor to driving the Levi’s® Men's business worldwide. This role will exist in an environment of tremendous change and excitement: the Levi’s® brand is currently re-organizing from regional business units into a global business unit, with Merchandising, Design and Marketing (internally called “the Hub”) sitting at the creative core of the new organization.
This internship will provide a unique opportunity, as it features two 5-week summer rotations. One rotation will be in the Men's Merchandising group. The second rotation will be within Marketing or Strategy. The combination of learning experiences just might bring your consumer focus skills to the top of the pack.

The major responsibilities of these groups include:

•Merchandising: Razor-focused on understanding our core consumers and the competitive environment in order to create brand-right and market leading product. Merchandising has aesthetic, financial, and strategic ownership over Levi’s® Men's product, and therefore success as a merchant requires not only a discerning aesthetic eye, but also sound business management and leadership skills.

•Marketing: Understanding our core consumers and the competitive environment in order to deliver leading brand marketing programs and communications for the Levi’s® brand. Marketing works very closely with Merchandising to ensure product and brand marketing is tightly integrated. Marketing also requires a strong balance between a discerning aesthetic eye and sound business management and leadership skills.

•Strategy: Shape key forward-looking growth strategies that are also aligned with broader corporate goals. Strategy plays a key role in both driving major cross-functional projects for the Hub, and acting as the “devil’s advocate” in challenging and pressure-testing strategies that are being developed or are underway. Strategy requires a “jack of all trades” skill set and attitude, as projects are highly varied and are usually highly complex and high-profile.

The nature of the work during the internship, will include:

•Owning a major work stream focused on uncovering and assessing growth opportunities in the denim market.
•Participating in key go-to-market process activities, from either a merchandising or marketing perspective (depending on rotation), which could include product and/or marketing development.
•Supporting organizational transformation as the Levi’s® brand moves from a regional model to a global model, and unlocking ways to improve methods of collaboration.
•Highlighting and implementing ways to foster innovation within the company.
•Providing insights and support to executives across the company on timely work streams.

Qualifications

•Strong passion for human-centered design.
•Strong passion for executing well-rounded consumer experiences , across product, marketing, social/digital, in-store, etc.
•Strong interest in the apparel industry.
•Currently enrolled full-time in top-tier MBA program, with expected graduation in spring/summer 2012.

How to Apply
On-campus recruiting efforts will take place at the following business schools:
Duke - Fuqua
Harvard Business School
Northwestern - Kellogg
Stanford GSB
UC Berkeley - Haas
University of Michigan - Ross

If we're not recruiting at your campus, you may apply via the Careers section of LeviStrauss.com Search: MBA Internship

Kudos to Google's current Prosocial actions

Google aids Japan quake victims and I am impressed again by what they are doing to help the world. I am an undisguised fan of Google for many things (mostly making my life easier in searches and in finding information) but this is one very good thing. Another is their tracking of disease that could threaten humanity.


The tool was developed to help people find victims or report their whereabouts. Google has launched a version of its Person Finder service for people caught up in the Japanese earthquake.The website acts as a directory and message board so people can look for lost loved ones or post a note saying they are safe.It is designed to be embedded on websites and social network pages to reach as wide an audience as possible.
The system has proved useful after other disasters that have stopped people getting in direct touch.

Victim log

In its first few hours, the Japan quake Person Finder had logged more than 4,000 records. The extent of the damage caused by the Japanese earthquake is not yet known but its magnitude and the widespread devastation wrought by the subsequent tsunami is likely to see tens of thousands displaced. The Person Finder was developed to solve a problem common in the aftermath of many catastrophes when many different agencies are on the ground giving aid and gathering information about victims.Google's Person finder was used in the aftermath of the 2011 New Zealand earthquake. Before the advent of tools such as Person Finder it was much harder to compare the information gathered by separate agencies and help to re-unite families and friends.
Underlying the site is a common format for describing people who are lost or who want to announce they are safe by whatever means they can. In the wake of disasters, many volunteers in other countries often scrape sites for this formatted information and add it to the People Finder database. Others take information from blogs, texts and tweets and convert it to the format so it can be put in the database.The system was first used following the Haiti earthquake that struck in January 2010. That first tool was based around work done in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina that hit New Orleans.

Guatemalans threaten to sue US over sex infection tests

The US government is facing a potential lawsuit on behalf of Guatemalans who were deliberately given gonorrhoea or syphilis in medical tests decades ago.Lawyers have given the US authorities until Friday to find a way to settle claims out of court or face action. Hundreds of Guatemalan prisoners and mentally ill patients were infected, without their consent, to study the effects of penicillin.

Last year, the US government apologised for the "reprehensible" experiments.
Lawyers representing several Guatemalans have written to US Attorney General Eric Holder asking for a way to resolve the issue out of court. The lawyers said that they would file the lawsuit in federal court in Washington unless the Obama administration responded positively to their offer by Friday. "We have decided to create one opportunity to see if we can settle the issues presented in this tragic situation without involving the judicial process," the letter from lawyers Andres Alonso and Terrence Collingsworth said. The lawyers say their action could become a class-action lawsuit on behalf of more Guatemalans. It is not clear how many plaintiffs there could be, as the lawsuit would include those infected but also their relatives and survivors.
The study carried out by US scientists took place in Guatemala between 1946 and 1948.
Evidence of the programme was unearthed by Prof Susan Reverby at Wellesley College in the US.
The Guatemalan government of the day gave permission for the tests, she said. But the people infected, prisoners and those suffering mental health problems, were unaware they were being experimented on.

Major problems for international marketers include:

Legal constraints-

Countries have a variety of different laws to cope with advertising and they are unique to each country. The solution would be to have competent expert legal advice before entry to the country and to do an annual review of the changing legislation that might impact operations. It is important to understand which countries do not permit your product to be advertised. For example, large food stores may not advertise in France. Many countries do not allow the advertisement of pharmaceuticals. The concept of deceptive advertising may be different in different countries. In Germany you cannot compare your product to your competitors and in some countries coupons are illegal because it is not permissible to offer the same product at different prices to different customers. In addition, some products are permitted to be advertised in limited media or at specific times of the day and may be limited to the number of times that they may be run in a specific period of time. Given that this is a highly complex set of rules, running afoul of the law could cost brand equity and fines so expert in country advice is indispensible. Finally, in certain countries the access to media is denied to foreign nationals and companies of foreign origin. This creates great challenges for advertising and marketing. Sometimes access is granted after prolonged negotiations or after obtaining permission in the form of “no objection” certificates. It is important to understand these issues and their potential solutions before investing in an international market. “Global mass media is a powerful tool for cultural change and as such it receives continuing scrutiny by a wide variety of institutions.” (Cateora p 484) You also need to know if there are special taxes affixed to advertising.

Linguistic limitations-

Unless you are a native speaker of a country who is up to date with all of the slang, innuendos, idioms, jokes and technological meanings you have no business designing advertising in another country. For example: Can you define the meaning of the Australian expression “Fair Dinkum”? It is English but do you understand it? Even native speakers do not understand the potential pitfalls of dialects, other religious groups within the country and regional areas can have great differences. Encoding and decoding of an idea between two people of different linguistic backgrounds is filled with pitfalls. Even if the home office decides on the basic message for a product, the native language speakers must be allowed to shape that message and adapt it as necessary. They will, if done properly and by using multiple translators and target audience feedback shape the wording, the level of directness of the message, the writing style, the type of humour, the idioms and slang to get your message across in a way that you cannot. They also understand the unspoken understandings that certain words imply or do not imply. Low levels of literacy can also cause problems for the advertisers.

Cultural diversity-

In North American countries, we have been exposed to some cultural diversity but we do not understand what it is like in other countries. There are other countries like South Korea that are very uniform and do not understand diversity at all. In international marketing, it is what you do not even have an awareness of the can sabotage you. Decisions about marketing mix are most often affected by cultural differences among country markets. Consumers respond it terms of their culture, its style, feelings, value systems, attitudes, beliefs and perceptions.

If you are creating advertising and the individuals in the ads stand too closely together for the culture and marketplace you may inadvertently communicate something sexual. You might unintentionally communicate a cross generational disrespect through dialogue that would create hostility. You might not understand the body language involved in the presentation of a gift in a commercial and undermine your intent. A specific color may have meanings of which you are unaware. Culture is complex and often symbolic. Without a native’s appreciation of the subtleties disastrous unexpected controversy could result. Advertising must interpret or translate the qualities of products and services in terms of the consumer needs, wants, desire and aspirations. The emotional appeals, symbols, persuasive approaches and other characteristics must coincide with cultural norms. Hiring expert help to formulate international marketing materials that is true to the company’s goals and yet tailored to the marketplace is very important. The advertising company should be able to demonstrate its market research and comprehension of the market place and that it has a complete grasp of the dialects, subgroups, preferences exhibited by racial groups, religious differences, psychology of the consumers and many other factors. Changing traditions and gender roles can cause problems too. In India where women have traditionally held specific roles companies can get into trouble by reinforcing those stereotypes.

Media limitations:

The problem here could be as simple as having no access to quality paper upon which to print your message. It could be as complex as having no printing presses or television stations.

Consider Red Bull’s tactics. They started out by influencing the thought leaders, throwing parties at universities and hiring the “hot chicks” on campus to drive their logoed cars and giving out samples. They cultivated “casual relationships” and sponsorships with extreme sport heroes. They did not engage mass media until they had made a significant impact on the area and they did so in order to solidify their conquest. Even when they did turn to mass media they did so with their own style or quirky hand drawn cartoons. The point here is that when budgets are tight and even when they are not, nothing beats true creativity! When the media are limited, other forms of messaging from loud speakers to public showings of movies can be tried.

Production and cost limitations

In other countries all of the media and supplies are available but at prohibitive costs. In these cases creativity is required. Cost escalates, however, when you must reach multiple language, religious or ethnic groups within the same geographical territory. Now every form of advertising must be tailored to each group or be so universal that everyone could relate to the same representation. That’s difficult! Again, I remind you of how much Red Bull did before they engaged expensive media.

References
Cateora, P. R. and Graham, J. L. (2007) International Marketing. NewYork, NY: McGraw-Hill

http://www.consumerpsychologist.com/international_marketing.html

Websites face restrictions on how they watch what their users do. (UK)

New net rules set to make cookies crumble

The way websites track visitors and tailor ads to their behaviour is about to undergo a big shake-up.

From 25 May, European laws dictate that "explicit consent" must be gathered from web users who are being tracked via text files called "cookies".These files are widely used to help users navigate faster around sites they visit regularly.Businesses are being urged to sort out how they get consent so they can keep on using cookies.

Track changes

The changes are demanded by the European e-Privacy directive which comes into force in the UK in late May.The section of the directive dealing with cookies was drawn up in an attempt to protect privacy and, in particular, limit how much use could be made of behavioural advertising. This form of marketing involves people being tracked across websites, with their behaviour used to create a profile that dictates the type of adverts they see. As part of its work to comply with the directive, the IAB - an industry body that represents web ad firms - created a site that explains how behavioural advertising works and lets people opt out of it.

The directive demands that users be fully informed about the information being stored in cookies and told why they see particular adverts. "It's going to happen and it's the law.” Christopher Graham Information Commissioner (UK).Specifically excluded by the directive are cookies that log what people have put in online shopping baskets. However, the directive is likely to have an impact on the more general use of cookies that remember login details and enable people to speed up their use of sites they visit regularly.It could mean that after 25 May, users see many more pop-up windows and dialogue boxes asking them to let sites gather data.

Data delay

The exact steps that businesses have to go through to comply with the law and gain consent from customers and users are being drawn up by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS). A spokesman for the DCMS said that work on the regulations was "ongoing" but that the technique solutions would not be complete by 25 May.In a statement, Ed Vaizey, minister for Culture, Communications and the Creative Industries, said he recognised that the delay would "cause uncertainty for businesses and consumers".

Cookies are used by websites to save user preferences between visits.

"Therefore we do not expect the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) to take enforcement action in the short term against businesses and organisations as they work out how to address their use of cookies," he added.Information Commissioner Christopher Graham said: "I cannot bark at the industry at the moment because I have not got the regulations." However, Mr Graham stressed that the government's confession that the regulations will be delayed should not be a spur to inaction.

"My message is that this is not your 'get out of jail free' card," he said.

The response to complaints about firms that flout the directive will be viewed in light of what they have done to prepare for it, continued Mr Graham. Businesses should be considering how they will communicate with customers to get consent and look at the technical steps that might make that process easier, he explained.
Early work by the ICO suggests that gathering consent by changing settings on browsers may not be sophisticated enough for the demands of the directive."They have to think seriously about this," said Mr Graham. "It's going to happen and it's the law."

Wikileaks reveals :US pushed Genetically modified food on EU

Senior U.S. officials in Paris advised the George Bush administration to launch a military-style trade war against the European Union for resisting genetically modified foods, according to newly released WikiLeaks cables.The then U.S. ambassador to France, Craig Stapleton, asked the government to penalize the EU and particularly countries that banned the use of genetically modified (GM) crops.

The move came in response to a 2007 French ban on a GM corn variety made by U.S.-based company Monsanto."Country team Paris recommends that we calibrate a target retaliation list that causes some pain across the EU since this is a collective responsibility, but that also focuses in part on the worst culprits," wrote Stapleton in a December 2007 cable."The list should be measured rather than vicious and must be sustainable over the long term, since we should not expect an early victory. Moving to retaliation will make clear that the current path has real costs to EU interests and could help strengthen European pro-biotech voices," said Stapleton, who was then President Bush's friend and business partner.

GM foods are grown from crops that contain altered DNA so that they are resistant to disease, and grow faster and bigger, for instance.The Grocery Manufacturers Association estimates about 80 per cent of packaged foods sold in the U.S. and Canada contain GM food. Some animal studies have shown serious health risks, including infertility, accelerated aging, organ damage and birth defects, linked to such foods.

U.S. diplomats pushed GM crops: cables

Other newly released cables show U.S. diplomats around the world pushed GM crops as part of U.S. global food policy.For example, the U.S. applied pressure to the Pope's advisers to champion such crops to counter the opposition by many Catholic bishops in developing countries who were vehemently opposed to it."Opportunities exist to press the issue with the Vatican, and in turn to influence a wide segment of the population in Europe and the developing world," said the cable.However, the U.S. suffered a setback when one of the U.S.'s closest allies on GM, Cardinal Renato Martino, head of the powerful Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace and the Pope's representative at the United Nations, withdrew his support for the crop, according to another cable.

"A Martino deputy told us recently that the cardinal had co-operated with embassy Vatican on biotech over the past two years in part to compensate for his vocal disapproval of the Iraq war and its aftermath — to keep relations with the USG [US government] smooth. According to our source, Martino no longer feels the need to take this approach," said the cable.Other cables show U.S. diplomats working directly for GM companies such as Monsanto joined forces with Spain to persuade the EU not to strengthen biotechnology laws.

007 and International Women's Day

Market research and the primitive mind of the consumer

"The trouble with market research is that people don't think how they feel, they don't say what they think and they don't do what they say." So said the late advertising don David Ogilvy, and his words get to the heart of what is still one of the biggest challenges in business: How can you tell if people really like what you are trying to sell them? Technology offers an answer to the question that Ogilvy, who died in 1999, probably never envisaged.

Market researchers are already experimenting with desktop and smartphone applications that promise to reveal the subconscious layers of a consumer's brain. What's more, because this technology can work automatically and in real-time, it could potentially be used to evaluate the emotional responses of millions of people before any product is released. And, with one small caveat, this power could transform market research and indeed the whole world of business forever.

(Oh yes, the "small caveat": to go along with this, you must be prepared to believe that computers can decipher the intricacies of human emotion.)

Market failure

Old-fashioned market research is straightforward and unemotional: you get a sample of product testers and ask them what they think of a particular concept, product or brand. But surveys and focus groups assume that people know what is going on inside their own heads - and that is a risky assumption. "80% of new products brought to market fail, largely due to failures in traditional techniques", says Rob Stevens, co-founder of UK market research company Bunnyfoot. "I can't think of any other area of business where such a failure rate would be considered acceptable, yet somehow, in market research, it is."

Lie to me

Mr Stevens likes to describe his company as a real-life version of The Lightman Group - the fictional agency in the TV series Lie to me starring Tim Roth.

Like Roth's character, Bunnyfoot's staff are trained to spot clues in the facial expressions of product testers, which betray their inner feelings - a process known as "facial coding". They also use eye-tracking technology to monitor exactly where a person looks during a product test. Though relatively old and low-tech (facial coding goes back to Charles Darwin), these techniques are capable of yielding business insights.

A product tester's facial expressions are filmed while they surf the Boden website

"When you ask a product tester if they spotted a particular feature on a webpage, they often tell you did," says Mark Batty of online clothing retailer Boden. "But when you look at the eye-tracking, you discover that they never saw it all."Boden is in the middle of a usability study of its website, and as its e-commerce manager, Mark Batty has learned to not put much faith in testers' explicit responses. "Often their verdict of the whole site depends on whatever task they did at the end of the test," he adds. "If they enjoyed the final task they would be full of praise about the site, even if their facial expressions revealed that they had struggled with it at the beginning."

Look into my phone

The problem with manual techniques like facial coding is that they require a researcher to sit through hours of slow motion video, logging every mind-numbing frown and every humdrum cascade of the pupils. This means that studies are necessarily limited to a small sample of testers.
Boden's usability study, for example, had a sample of just thirty people across three countries.
A product tester's responses to a TV advert are automatically decoded by ThirdSight's software
But this obstacle could soon be removed, by allowing computers to do most of the donkey work. "Facial expressions can be read by a computer - it's just the movement of pixels in a piece of video," says Dr Roberto Valenti of the University of Amsterdam. Dr Valenti and his colleague Dr Theo Gevers are so convinced of computerised emotion recognition that they set up a spin-off company called ThirdSight to cash in on it.

"A researcher gets tired, they need to be paid, they need to be trained."
A smartphone monitors and decodes a person's facial expressions as either "positive" or "negative"
"But our software never gets tired and it can analyse thousands and thousands of faces at the same time."
ThirdSight's latest achievement is to get automatic facial coding software running on a smartphone, using the phone's inbuilt camera to record a product tester's expressions.

Machine learning

Of course, all of this hinges on the accuracy of the software. And so far, Thirdsight's claims of accuracy are relatively humble. They acknowledge that you still need a human researcher to oversee the software, because it is oblivious to context or hidden meanings - it will treat both a happy smile and a bewildered smile as 'positive'.

But other scientists are less conservative.

"We can normally tell between different emotions with pretty high accuracy," says Professor Peter Robinson of the Computer Laboratory at Cambridge University. "Our computers can get an accuracy of two thirds or better - which is about as well as most people can do it."

Prof Robinson's team is trying to free up emotion recognition software from simple rules, such as smile = happy. Instead, they're programming it to digest many types of human expression - facial and eye movements, hand and body gestures, the tone of the voice. Professor Peter Robinson says his emotion recognition software can be just as accurate as a human

Through a technique called "statistical machine learning", the software then trains itself to recognise which indicators are important and which are not. If this kind of power and accuracy could be incorporated into a ThirdSight-style smartphone or internet app, then potentially millions of people's emotions could be accurately decoded. "If you do an experiment on Facebook, you've got half a billion people in your sample," says Prof Robinson. "That means the statistics become rather bizarre, actually, because you are sampling almost an entire population to get a result."

So, theoretically at least, the day may come when no product is doomed to flop - because businesses will have access to almost complete certainty about their market.

Cyber attacks on Canada and France mining for G20 insights

Cyber attack on France targeted Paris G20 files


It appears that somebody was trying to sneak a look at documents ahead of the G20 summit in Paris. They also went after Canadian information on finance and actually shut down DFAIT for a day.The French finance ministry has confirmed it came under a cyber attack in December that targeted files on the G20 summit held in Paris in February.

Budget Minister Francois Baron said an investigation had been launched, adding: "We have leads".It follows a report in Paris Match magazine that claimed a sustained cyber attack sought documents related to the G20 and international economic affairs.
More than 150 computers at the ministry were affected.
'Determined professionals'

"We noted that a certain amount of the information was redirected to Chinese sites," an anonymous official was quoted by the French magazine. "But that [in itself] does not say very much."An official complaint has been filed with French courts, and the matter has been taken up by the secret service."The actors were determined professionals and organised," Patrick Pailloux, director general of the French National Agency for IT Security told Paris Match."It is the first attack of this size and scale against the French state."

The summit agreed a list of targets for reducing imbalances in the global economy in order to head off future financial crises.The topic was particularly contentious for the Chinese, who resisted calls to target exchange rate valuations, currency reserves and economic surpluses.The US and other countries accuse China of buying up trillions of dollars in foreign reserves in order to hold down the value of the yuan and gain an unfair competitive advantage in trade.

Resume mistakes

Unfortunately, some keen souls are standing out rather too much, according to recruiters who have faced everything from a CV written in rhyme to the hopeful who went straight to the top with his references – and cited God. Although clearly eager to impress with his credentials, that unfortunate candidate fell at the first hurdle, as he could not offer any contact details for the Almighty. Another candidate boasted that he was a direct descendant of the Vikings, while someone else modestly listed “Master of Time and Universe” under his experience.

The blunders emerged in a survey of more than 700 employers by website Careerbuilder.co.uk to find out what employers advise against in job applications. Other jaw-dropping mistakes included the candidate who submitted a photograph of somebody else - raising some question marks over his ability to think ahead, given he had yet to have an interview - and the applicant who only gave their name and number with the phrase: “I want a job.” The attempt from a jobseeker who offered their CV on a page torn from an exercise book and another sent from email address “lovesbeer” also failed to make quite the desired impression.

Employers' biggest pet hate was spelling errors and typos, followed by CVs filled with off-putting reams of text, chunks lifted from the job advert and those lacking a cover letter. Businesses did not like CVs of three pages or longer, those that were not targeted at the position and any that listed objectives instead of a career summary. What did get the right sort of attention were references to communication skills, problem-solving ability and computer software skills, among other keywords.

Nearly one-third of UK employers said they spend one minute or less reviewing a CV, while more than one in ten admitted 30 seconds or less. Roughly one in four employers said they detected a lie on a CV in the past year - although researchers could not say whether that included the surprised recipient of a CV listing “lion taming” as a hobby.

“You want to stack the deck in your favour when writing a CV,” said Tony Roy, president of CareerBuilder EMEA. “Make sure to highlight key accomplishments with quantifiable results, so employers can see how you put your skills into action. It’s also important to remember that employers often use electronic devices to screen and rank CVs. “Pepper in keywords from the job ad into your CV as it relates to your experience to improve your ranking.”

Social marketing Advice

EuroDisney Case Study

Case One: EuroDisney


1. What factors contributed to EuroDisney’s poor performance during its first year of operations?

Even though Disney has a theme song that says “It’s a small world after all”, the world remains quite diverse. The biggest factors that contributed to the poor performance during the first year of EuroDisney’s operations were: a poor understanding of the marketplace, the issues and the cultural differences between two nations and two differing approaches to business and life. The major factor was ethnocentrism of the American leaders counterbalanced by French national insecurities. I have to suggest that the powerful and perhaps arrogant leadership style of Michael Eisner contributed to the problems. Even so, the problems were wider than that. Assuming that people would come from all over Europe as part of the business plan but failing to comprehend how diverse those consumers would be was another major part of the problem. Even though Europe has recently united as the European Union, they have been strongly distinct and independent cultures for centuries.

Disney failed to understand the French national character, their insecurities over cultural invasion after having been an occupied nation twice in the last century and their deep commitment to maintaining their identity and liberty. The arrogance of the French is based on insecurity as a global minority and the arrogance of the Americans was based on a wide open optimism and global success. The collision of the two ‘arrogancies’ was “formidable” as the French say.

2. To what degree do you consider that these factors were a) foreseeable, b) controllable by either EuroDisney or the parent company Disney?

A study in history and an understanding of the characters of Europe and the European market place would have enabled the Disney executives to anticipate many of the problems. Some problems were controllable and others were inevitable. Those that were inevitable, however, needed an approach that would soften the reaction rather than exacerbate it. It was inevitable that the choice of France as the location would ruffle French feathers. Their history of occupation shaped their reaction. Their coolness to all things anglophile is legendary. If we simply consider an individual personality, it would be easily understandable that a proud woman who had been enslaved and brutalized might have some lingering issues with dominant behaviour and may especially have trouble looking into the eyes of her rescuers who had seen her at her worst.

Even so, they chose France perhaps for its cache in the American psyche (more ethnocentricity). The dominance of the American executive insisting on only English being spoken was like pouring gas on the situation in a culture that monitors words which are absorbed from other languages by an official government body. The idea of pushing business according to an American ethos was an affront to the French who take their liberty and unionization very seriously. Coming from the union free Southern United States, the clash was profound. These were all quite predicable for anyone who cared to see beyond their own ways.

3. What role does ethnocentrism play in the story of EuroDisney’s launch?

The truth is embodied in this seemingly ambiguous statement “you don’t know what you do not know”. The trap is that when you do not understand or know something there is no little red light that says “you don’t get it”. In fact, there is no perception at all that there is something missing. Ethnocentricity carries us deeply into this trap and Disney fell head long into it. They certainly had the resources to get marketing opinion from European sources that would have saved them millions in mistakes. I think though, that the powerful personality of Eisner, coming off of several victories where he forced his vision through the objections of the American business community to win big and be therefore validated set the entire EuroDisney enterprise up for failure. Eisner and his trusted team believed that any opposition or obstacle had to be overcome with strength of will and vision and that collaboration would not serve the vision well. Add to this the spectacular success of Disney in Tokyo and all of his personal input verified his approach. Unfortunately, it takes three points to make a pattern and he had only 2. Consultation was the only way to avoid the nightmares encountered in France. The culture was so different from America or Japan that there was little frame of reference in common. Believing all Europeans enjoyed the same sausage or Europeans vacationed in the same way that Americans did was easily corrected by cultural awareness that would not have cost much but they were too ethnocentric to even know the questions to ask. I imagine they had no ears for those who tried to tell them. Sausage might just be sausage to Eisner who probably did not eat it but to Europeans, it is as distinct as different wines.

Attempting to impose American values, such as nondrinking on the French or appearance rules would have been easily understood as a mistake if they had even asked. I also know from a course in Children’s literature that the Disney version of fairytales like Cinderella were almost unrecognizable to those who had grown up on the European (original) versions of the stories. Thus, Disney did not even have the transfer of cultural understanding in the tales that they assumed that they had.

4. How do you assess the cross-cultural marketing skills of Disney?



I imagine that they are significantly better now but they were dismally unequal to the task at the time. They simply did not do their homework. In a nation of couturier fashion and elegance, to emphasize size and glamour was ‘tres gauche”. Bigger and better is a selling feature of the American psyche not of the French. They eat one croissant not a dozen donuts. They buy one designer handbag rather than 6 knock offs. The assumption of a common bond over fairytales was erroneous. The belief that the society functioned like the American society was just wrong because the French are highly unionized, and quite highly socialized in a political sense. Liberty and independence are even more ingrained among the French than the Americans. They believe they invented the concepts and the Americans high jacked them for their constitution.



5. Why did success in Tokyo predispose Disney management to be too optimistic in their expectations of success in France? Discuss



In Japan Disney found an insatiable curiosity about American ways and American forms of play because of the rebuilding of Japan by the Americans who dropped the bombs on Hiroshima- their conquerors. Japan had been broken by and then rebuilt upon an American capitalistic model. (Please do not read criticism into this. I am not sure Truman had any choice given the personality and military spirit of Japan). The Japanese had been inundated with American cultural icons since world war two and Disney cartoons were a staple in Japanese experience. The success of Disney was more the success of the Japanese people at adapting to a new world after defeat than a triumph of marketing and cultural understanding. Unfortunately, the success without much cooperation, deeper understanding or adaptation led to the false belief in the Disney magic touch world wide.





6. Do you think the new theme park would have encountered the same problems if a location in Spain had been selected? Discuss



I think that the choice of France over Spain was an error. The Spanish people do not have the same issues with Americans as the French do. Americans tend to be more competent in Spanish than in French and they have a greater experience with the Spanish culture and personality because of their exposure to Latin American cultures and immigrants. Even Hemmingway fought on Spanish soil during their civil war. Moreover, Spain is a favoured vacation destination in Europe for many other European nationals. The warmer, sunnier weather and the more welcoming culture would have all worked to the advantage of Disney. Like Japan, Spain was a defeated nation after WW2 and needed help in rebuilding. The civil war and the alliance with the Axis left them bankrupt rather than proud. Spain needs and wants tourism and welcomes it more hospitably than France does. Spain would have been more challenging than Japan but far less challenging than France. There certainly would have been some protest against Americanization but it would have been at a reduced level. Never the less, it would still have been important to hire local cultural experts because the fairytales would not have translated there either and the cultural and business norms would have been unique unto themselves. If Disney had tried to employ the same lack of cultural sensitivity and awareness that they did in France many of the problems would also have happened in Spain.



7. In light of the near-bankruptcy in 2005 evaluate the proposed plans to strengthen Disney’s appeal to the French market.



Renaming the resort to Disney Paris was an important first step in placating the French and realigning the Disney management to the proper pattern of thought. Europeans may have joined in an economic Union but they still hold nationalism near and dear to their hearts. Under direction of the new CEO Disney also introduced a European character from a fresh start called “L’Homme Citouille” (This is brilliant as the French tend to enjoy this sort of character as attested to by the character “Le Bonne Homme” which is a snowman and an important character in Quebec and symbolizes their winter spirit.) Helping to shape the infrastructure to bring more inexpensive flights to Charles De Gaulle airport was also brilliant. Understanding the French and European vacationing styles led directly to the new passes enabling visitors to enjoy two sites rather than one. Disney Paris provides a lot of employment in a country racked by unemployment and has become the most visited site in France surpassing the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre combined. That is a significant improvement and I think Disney Paris is here to stay. (I wonder if Disney has considered an attraction based on the “Little Prince” series of books which are French and provide a huge canvass for attractions and interactive adventures?)



8. Now that Disney has begun work on the new Hong Kong and Shanghai locations, where and when should it go next? Assume you are a consultant hired to give Disney advice on the issue of where and when to go next. Pick three locations and select the one you think will be the best new locations and select the one you think will be the best new location for Disneyland X, and discuss.



Australia, Brazil and India are the locations that I would consider. India loves Hollywood and has created its own Bollywood. It is fascinated with American culture but has a knack for hybridizing the content. The Indian culture tends to embrace technological advancement and its myriad festivals make it likely that they would embrace DisneyIndia.. English is widely spoken and the population of the second largest nation in the world is certainly attractive from a business perspective. It has a young population with more than half the citizens under 35. Unfortunately, its poverty rate while it would provide plenty of unskilled labour and its lower per capita income of PPP approximately $1000 US per year makes the level of economic development still too low in my opinion. This is a nation to watch and it remains third on my list for expansion by Disney when the individual buying power increases.

Australia is an obvious choice for its distance from other locations so that it would not cannibalize other locations attendance and the fact that it is English speaking. It is also close enough to the Asian markets that people from Japan might enjoy the variety. English language would facilitate the transfer of technology and fairytales to Australia. It would still be vital to have in country expertise pertaining to culture and business. At a per capital income of $40,000 US according to the World Bank statistics, the buying power is satisfactory but the population numbers only about 21 million people which is less than the size of Canada. It is, however, a more compact nation which enables easier travel to the Disney location. Canadians are able to access the American market through easy transportation so it is well serviced and loves Disney World. I think the similarities in the national characters make it likely that Australian (with the requisite grumbling) would love it too. It has long enjoyed Disney movies as an adjunct to its own culture so it has been primed for this expansion as well. Australia should remain on the list for future expansion especially as it has such a distinct set of animals but it rates second on my list.



The final country and my choice for expansion is Disney Brazil. It is a powerful emerging nation with a strong culture. It emerged strongly from the recent economic troubles and its GDP is growing. Brazil is the world’s fifth largest population with an estimated 192,272,890 people. Their GDP is $1,612,539 Trillion (9th) with a per capital income of $10,455 adjusted to $7,737. At this level of individual income, vacations become accessible for the general population. It is in a good location to service Latin America, the Caribbean and South America. A problem might arise in the language barrier between Portuguese and Spanish, however. While the country is a mix of diverse ethnicities, the language is quite uniform across the entire country. The native population alone would be sufficient to support the venture. As always, it would be vital to have in country consultants and experts to determine appropriate attractions, marketing and business processes. In all of the locations, I think it is likely that American tourists will be drawn to worldwide Disney sites for the familiarity and a sense of safety in their travels.

9. Give your choice of local X for the newest Disneyland, what are the operational implications of the history of EuroDisney for the new park?



Disney has extensive experience now in opening theme parks. In such a successful organization I have to believe that they learn from their mistakes. After all Walt Disney is said to have gone bankrupt before making it big with Disney animation and he certainly set the example for learning and prospering from his errors. Disney also corrected the ‘personality’ factor when they dismissed Eisner and chose someone much more humble to replace him. The lessons were difficult but I believe that they will take the financially painful lessons – the only kind I believe that corporations learn from- and translate it into more profitable launches in the future. Disney will do their homework in future. They will understand the culture, the country, this history and the potential difficulties before embarking on a new venture. In addition, they will have a team of nationals and Disney staff who speak the language fluently to help the American team. Finally, they will have a group ready and able to handle media and cultural crises promptly and tactfully.