Goodbye `Arnold' Gary Coleman!

If more people were for people ....

How did Thailand come to this?

Wednesday, 19 May 2010
By Vaudine England  BBC News, Bangkok  

 

Three months ago, Bangkok appeared to be a successful South East Asian capital city - now government troops and anti-government protesters are fighting in the streets. The BBC's Vaudine England considers how it came to this.

Huge and thriving, Bangkok has long been seen - and seen itself - as a great city. But now there is blood on the streets.

It is hard to imagine how Thailand got to this - and how it will manage to recover.

One explanation is simply that a crazed rabble of poor people came to the city from the under-developed north, flaunting their love for a former prime minister - Thaksin Shinawatra - and being paid to do so.

Another vision talks of class war and a peoples' uprising, as the masses rise up on the barricades.

The reality lies somewhere in between and can only be understood by a brisk walk through Thailand's recent political history.

It is easy to speak of the 18 new constitutions in the past half-century, and the many coups. It is hard for people living in more settled countries to imagine that level of uncertainty about the basic rules of the political game.

Whatever version of the recent past is chosen, neither violence nor a death-defying commitment to democracy is unusual in Thai politics

Absolute monarchy only gave way to constitutional rule in 1932 and the play of power between the old feudal system, the military and various democratic forces has been fought out ever since, often with fatal consequences.

Certain big dates stand out: 1973, 1976, 1992, 2006 and now 2010.

Thailand's overwhelming image as a Land of Smiles - as a fantasy land of sun, sea, sex and surgery - has been carefully crafted.

It has seduced many, outsiders and Thais, into believing a façade of stability where there was perhaps more a papering over the cracks.

That paper is now badly torn. Deep-seated fissures, long in existence, can no longer be ignored.

If nothing else, commentators agree, the red-shirts have achieved that much.
Bloody history

Thailand lived under variations of military rule most of the time since the 1932 constitution, during World War II, into the 1970s.

On 14 October 1973, more than 70 protesters were killed and 800 were injured when troops opened fire on huge demonstrations held in support of pro-democracy students.

The then military government collapsed; a new constitution and new elections in six months followed.

On 26 September 1976, two students were garrotted and hanged, allegedly by police. Thousands of students gathered in their support and against military rule.

Two weeks later, on 6 October, that tension exploded into the killing by soldiers, police and right-wing mobs of at least 46 people. Students said many more died.

This moment marked the end of a democratic period, and caused parts of a generation to flee to the hills, joining a communist movement which was later decimated.

Troops on the streets of Bangkok in May 1992 Street fighting in 1992 left scores of people dead

By 1980, Gen Prem Tinsulanonda was appointed prime minister after a fellow general had ruled for three years following an October 1977 coup.

Gen Prem is now chairman of the Privy Council, and a target of red-shirt ire for what they claim was his role in the 2006 coup.

Coups and wobbly coalition governments led by appointed prime ministers carried Thailand into 1992, when Chamlong Srimaung led protests against the choice of Gen Suchinda Kraprayoon as prime minister.

King Bhumiphol Adulyadej famously called the two men into his presence to end fighting on the streets in mid-May that year, which had left scores dead, many injured and more than 2,000 people missing.
Back to future

Elections in September 1992 produced a Democrat-led coalition, with Chuan Leekpai as prime minister.

Thaksin Shinawatra proved very popular but highly divisive

Two years later, a telecommunications tycoon called Thaksin Shinawatra made his political debut, under the wing of Mr Chamlong.

In 1995, Mr Chamlong led his Palang Dharma party out of the coalition, causing the Chuan government to fall. Mr Thaksin was deputy prime minister in the next government.

Two coalition governments later, General Chavalit Yongchaiyudh was prime minister - he is now chairman of Mr Thaksin's Peua Thai Party.

The 1997 economic crisis brought back the Democrats under Mr Chuan. But elections in January 2001 gave Mr Thaksin a resounding win.

Mr Thaksin used this to accrue wealth and power across a range of Thai institutions. He earned a shocking human rights record and quashed the free press, but poured money into rural areas usually starved of attention.

In elections in 2005 he again won by a landslide, with the highest voter turnout in Thai history. He called another, snap, election in 2006, which the Democrat opposition boycotted. His win was ruled invalid by the constitutional court on 8 May 2006.

Plans for elections in October were foiled by the 19 September coup in 2006. Since then, two Thaksin-allied governments have been elected and stymied by court actions, leading to the current Democrat government, elected by another vote in parliament, not a general election.

Determining whether current troubles are sudden and shocking, or in fact an outgrowth of a long history of conflict - discussion of which has been suppressed by censorship and strict lese majeste laws - all depends on where you choose to start.

Whatever version of the recent past is chosen, neither violence nor a death-defying commitment to democracy is unusual in Thai politics.

How does HRM compare with ARM?

My newly hired office manager!

Prahalad’s core competence lay in big ideas

The guru of the bottom of the pyramid

Apr 22nd 2010      from www.economist.com

COIMBATORE KRISHNARAO PRAHALAD, universally known as C.K., was the most creative management thinker of his generation. He revolutionised thinking on two big subjects, business strategy and economic development, and made a significant contribution to a third, innovation. His admirers were legion, including bosses of some of the world’s biggest companies, heads of NGOs and founders of scrappy start-ups.

Mr Prahalad burst onto the management scene with two path-breaking articles in the Harvard Business Review, “Strategic Intent” (1989) and “The Core Competence of the Corporation” (1990), and a bestselling book, “Competing for the Future” (1996), all co-written with his former pupil, Gary Hamel. “Core competence” remains one of the most frequently reprinted articles ever published by Harvard Business Review.

Mr Prahalad shifted the focus of strategic thinking dramatically. He believed firms should seek not simply to position themselves well within their existing markets but to capitalise on their advantages to redefine markets in their favour. That, he argued, involves identifying and developing strengths, such as logistics or miniaturisation, that cannot easily be imitated by competitors. Firms should then “stretch” those skills to the maximum, setting themselves ambitious and industry-transforming goals, and using those goals to galvanise their workers. He cited a long list of successful Japanese companies, such as Sony, Canon and Komatsu, which had done just that.

Mr Prahalad was particularly struck by the ability of these firms to harness the ideas of their humbler employees. And, later in his career, he became increasingly fascinated by innovation. He argued that company-centric innovation was giving way to “co-creation”, in which firms collaborate with their customers and business allies. He also shifted his attention to the legion of small businesses that were redefining the corporate world.

Mr Prahalad’s work on strategy and innovation turned him into a superstar. He sat on the board of several prominent companies, including Hindustan Unilever and Pearson (which is a part-owner of The Economist), and worked as a consultant for others, including AT&T, Citigroup, Oracle and Philips. He subjected these corporate titans to often coruscating questions about their ability to “compete for the future”. He commanded huge speaking fees and lived in grand houses in Michigan and California.

But his native India always tugged at Mr Prahalad’s heartstrings. He was a leading member of Indus Entrepreneurs, a self-help group for Indian entrepreneurs. He was haunted by the contrast between the rich world he inhabited and the poor world he had grown up in. This led him to veer off in a radically new direction―and to produce perhaps his most thought-provoking book. “The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits” (2004) was a counterblast against two types of intellectual laziness: that of corporate titans who were ignoring the bulk of humanity and that of humanitarians who regarded profit as a dirty word. He argued that the world’s poor represented trillions of dollars’ worth of pent-up spending power. And he demonstrated that a legion of innovative companies in the developing world, including several in his native India, were learning how to turn these people into paying customers.

The book proved to be perfectly timed. Companies were waking up to the fact that technological innovation and economic reform were opening up new markets in poorer countries. Firms from those countries were growing in confidence. And academics were recognising the limits of their state-sponsored view of development. Mr Prahalad was lionised in the emerging markets, particularly in India, and hailed by corporate philanthropists, notably Bill Gates. The United Nations gave him a seat on its commission on the private sector and development.

What made Mr Prahalad such a creative thinker? And why was he able to keep reinventing himself when his fellow gurus were happy to trot out the same ideas for ever-rising lecture fees? For all his success, he was an outsider in the American-dominated world of management theory. He was one of nine children of one of Chennai’s leading judges and Sanskrit scholars, and spent a formative period in his youth working for Union Carbide, an American chemicals firm which later became infamous for the deadliest industrial accident in history, at a factory in India.

This outsider’s view went hand in hand with intellectual restlessness. Mr Prahalad invariably worked with a collaborator and never wrote more than two articles on the same subject. This gave his work an unfinished air. He did not revisit the idea of “core competences” in the light of the poor performance of some of the Japanese Godzillas he once worshipped, nor the idea of “stretch” in the wake of the epidemic of over-leveraging. Nor did he provide a satisfactory reply to critics who argued that the real promise of emerging markets lay in the middle of the pyramid.

Preaching, not practicing

This impatience led to one of the few failures of Mr Prahalad’s otherwise gravity-defying career. In 2000 he co-founded a software company, Praja, which was meant to act as a test bed for his ideas, particularly his commitment to bringing information to ordinary people. Instead, it ate up millions of his own dollars and was sold off two years later. He concluded that he was no good at the “blocking and tackling” that fills most managers’ days.

But then Mr Prahalad’s core competence lay in big ideas rather than in dotting the “i”s and crossing the “t”s. He taught the world’s biggest companies to think of themselves anew, as a “portfolio of competencies” rather than as a “portfolio of businesses”. He taught everyone to see the developing world not as an also-ran but as a vortex of innovation and creativity. The world of management theory has more than its fair share of charlatans, but C.K. Prahalad was the genuine article.

Copyright © 2010 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.

Angklung

The CII Indonesia event last evening was classy & truly `Remarkable'. I was quite impressed by their Angklung Orchestra and thought I should share this link, which is not of the orchestra that performed last evening, the latter which was greatly impressive.

Remembering CK.

"Be concerned about due process. People seek fairness, not favours... They often don’t even mind if decisions don’t go their way as long as the process is fair & transparent."



It was great knowing you CK. Thanks for the time spent, thanks for the guidance, thanks for your wisdom and thanks for being you. However the urgent has always driven out the important and the future continues to remain, largely, unresolved!