The Manangement Tip of The Day : Should You Be Nice or Tough?

November 06, 2013 Leaders often take one of two approaches: “Drivers” are good at establishing high standards, keeping people focused on goals, and continually improving.  “Enhancers,” by contrast, act as role models, giving honest feedback in a helpful way, developing people, and maintaining trust. Neither approach on its own is sufficient to increase employee engagement.  Instead, think in terms of “and” instead of “or.” You can demand a great deal from employees, but also be seen as considerate, trusting, and collaborative. If you consider yourself a driver, don’t be afraid to be the “nice guy” sometimes.  For example, when setting a challenging target, acknowledge just how hard it might be on your team and offer to help if they need it.  On the other hand, if you’re an enhancer, try setting demanding goals with your usual words of encouragement.  Both approaches need to be used with equal force to maximize engagement. Adapted from “Nice or Tough: Which Approach Engages Employees Most?” by Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman.

Two theories about gold

BS ; Devesh Kapur and Marla Spivack and Arvind Subramanian and Milan Vaishnav  

November 6, 2013 Last Updated at 11:00 IST

Swiss data secrecy suggests a sinister explanation for India's gold fetish

Gold has been all over the news in India lately because high and rising imports of the shiny stuff led directly to a deterioration of the current account, which in turn exacerbated the rupee's vulnerability over the past few months.

Three intriguing facts about India's gold imports (illustrated in the graphs) scream for an explanation. First, the increase in gold imports has coincided with a sharp decline in financial savings. Second, a predominant share of India's gold imports originates in Switzerland. And third, there is a large discrepancy in India's gold imports from Switzerland: in recent research we have undertaken, we find that while India claims to import large amounts of gold from Switzerland (more than $26 billion), Switzerland reports that it shipped gold worth less than $6 million (yes, million, not billion) to India, resulting in a large unaccounted trade. (Click for graphs)

There are benign and sinister explanations - not mutually exclusive - for these facts. Consider first the benign ones. As India started growing rapidly in the early 2000s, Indians sought an attractive and safe store of wealth (helped no doubt by a long-standing cultural affinity for the yellow metal). Around 2003, the world price of gold started climbing, rendering gold an attractive investment asset. After 2007, domestic inflation started soaring, rendering gold a safe store of value, relative to domestic bank deposits. These explain the decline in domestic financial savings, moderate at first but accelerating after 2007, and the associated increase in gold imports (graph 2).

Since the rising demand reflected in large part a demand for savings and wealth (rather than a desire for consumption goods such as jewellery, as noted in the last Economic Survey of the finance ministry), it got expressed in increased imports of gold bars (ingots). And since Switzerland is one of the largest exporters of such high-quality and certified ingots, imports had to be to a great extent from Switzerland rather than from other sources (graph 3). And since Switzerland chooses not to report its exports of gold on a country-by-country basis, the discrepancy in recorded Indian imports is easily explained (graph 4).

The conclusion? India "just" has to bring inflation under control and restore macroeconomic order, which, combined with a providential stabilisation of gold prices, will then allow the country to move beyond its gold fetish and its destabilising consequences.

But sinister explanations come in the way of that rush to comfort. And in an era of eye-popping scams and massive wealth creation, due vigilance and diligence are the need of the hour. It is no secret that the go-go years of the 2000s also created substantial ill-begotten wealth. With banks starting to toughen regulations and implementing more stringent know-your-customer (KYC) rules (since the mid-2000s), rich and corrupt Indians exited from the regulated banking system to gold as a "safe haven" - "safe", that is, from the authorities. Hence the rise in imports, which was, in part, the counterpart of the decline in financial savings (graph 2).

But suppose these Indians also wanted to stash some of their wealth overseas, especially in tax havens such as Switzerland, how would they do so? One possibility is by over-invoicing imports from Switzerland. Importers could claim that they imported gold worth $100 from Switzerland while in fact only buying gold $50, with the difference finding its way to Swiss bank accounts prized for their lack of transparency (hence the numbers in graphs 3 and 4).

According to media reports from last June, Switzerland ranked first among the major countries to which India despatched its secret tax and finance-related queries (232 in all) during the last fiscal year. In contrast, the authorities sent "only" 145 such requests to Mauritius. The gold trade channel, then, offers a convenient way of repatriating wealth to the tax haven, which also happens to be the source of imports. This channel is not only convenient, it is also "legitimate," at least in the limited sense that payments can be made through the banking system for prima facie legal (namely trade) purposes.

Of course, there is deceit in the underlying transaction, which must be facilitated or condoned. Note that capital flight cannot work if customs officials are honest and their procedures effective. They can verify the quantities and values of gold that importers declare and match them against banking documentation relating to the payment for imports. Hence, the sinister explanation requires some degree of incompetence or complicity of customs officials in capital flight.

Are they? We can never tell; but, as economic researchers, there is one - albeit indirect and imperfect - way of checking. We can exploit the insight in Robert Solow's famous saying that in economics there is only one law: "Every purchase is a sale and every sale is a purchase." In the trade context, every import is an export and vice versa. We can try and match at a very disaggregated level (and by partner country) what is being reported at the Indian end as imports with what is being recorded as exports at the partner end.

But here's the zinger. Swiss law, as it currently stands, does not require Switzerland to publish details of its gold trade. In 1981, under pressure from leading Swiss banks, Switzerland stopped publishing detailed statistics on monthly imports and exports of gold bars. The country's three largest banks complained to the authorities that country-level reporting was harming business, since it removed the veil of anonymity. Some have suggested that the underlying motivation was linked to the Swiss role in facilitating the gold trade involving South Africa, then under apartheid. Given the collapse of apartheid long ago, what is the rationale today for this norm? Mysteriously, Switzerland publishes detailed data on a lot of its trade - but not gold bars.

The international community has made great strides towards transparency in relation to anti-money laundering and to tax evasion. Especially, on the latter, Switzerland has been responsive to prodding by the United States and other rich nations. It is time to extend transparency to areas of concern to developing nations, which are struggling to improve governance and reduce corruption. Switzerland could help in this endeavour by publishing details of its gold trade. To be clear, we have no interest in conspiracy theories and stand ready to accept the benign interpretations for these facts. Yet, given the massive capital flows at play (and the shenanigans we have become inured to), Indians deserve assurances that all is, in fact, above board. Unravelling the mystery of India's gold fetish could well be in the hands of the bureaucrats of Berne. The clarion call from developing countries to Switzerland should be: "Publish or we perish."

Innovision Today :WORDS without borders

A helping handLinguistic enabler Sunil Khandbahale at INK 2013

Sooraj Raj Mohan : The Hindu :5 Nov 2013

Sunil Khandbahale did not know how to use a dictionary. 

He is now the proud creator of digital dictionaries in all 22 vernacular languages.

 SOORAJ RAJMOHAN listens to his amazing life story

Sunil Khandbahale is a picture of unassuming self-assurance and eager observation. For a man who has garnered much acclaim for creating online and mobile-based dictionaries for all the officially recognised Indian languages, he looks around with some awe at the interiors of the Le Meridien hotel in the city, where he was invited to speak about his work at INK 2013. “This is the first time I have sat in a plane,” he reveals with a smile, “I was more worried about checking in and buckling my seatbelt than the actual talk.”

Sunil, one of three children from a farming family in Mahiravani, near Nashik, says that he is the first in his family to have received complete formal education. “My parents were not financially well off, but they were determined to educate us. I originally wanted to become a painter but because I got good grades I was sent to an engineering college to study instrumentation,” he says.

For Sunil, who had studied in Marathi medium till then, the Government Polytechnic of Ahmednagar was a challenge. He was one among the minority who did not speak English, a factor that prompted some of the other students to leave the course and made Sunil consider the same. “I was on the brink of quitting but I remembered the sacrifices my parents had made to educate me and I could not give up on them. When I approached a professor with my problem, he suggested I get a dictionary. I found it to be a strange word and did not know what to do about it,” Sunil says.

Sunil did eventually learn its meaning and procured a dictionary, spending hours making notes and learning new words. By the time his course ended, Sunil was surprised to learn that he was among the few who had passed. The achievement led him to think that his friends who had left the course would have stood a better chance had they also had access to a dictionary. “The dictionary was my friend, and that friendship had helped me see that day. So I started making photocopies of my dictionary, with all my notes and observations, but the reach was limited. I then considered printing it as a booklet but that raised a lot of new costs I could not bear. This was in 1997, and computers were becoming popular, so I decided a digital dictionary was the way to go,” he reminisces.

After overcoming his lack of software know how (by sitting in a room with a borrowed computer and books for the better part of six months), Sunil finally released an online English-Marathi-English dictionary, the first of its kind. The venture met with much praise and soon Sunil was flooded with requests for more languages, which he promptly obliged, “Though my personal expertise could only be used for Marathi, Hindi and English, I soon reached out to linguists and experts in various fields for help, mostly at universities. When they saw that I wanted to create a linguistic community, they were immediately on board, asking for nothing in return.”

Sunil and his team have now created dictionaries for all vernacular languages to English and vice-versa, with around 22 languages to their credit.

However, he is far from done with his efforts, with his dream being a global linguistic community. “I have a four-stage plan; the first is to create dictionaries for all officially recognised languages, the second to cover all vernacular languages and dialects, because there are so many, in the third stage we plan to include international languages and the final stage is to integrate all this together into a collective where English is not needed as a link and users can directly translate from one language to another.”

And how many of these stages has he completed? “One so far, and it took me 13 years,” he says with a smile, before adding, “but now things should move faster thanks to all the help I am getting.” He says many interesting things as he speaks about his work, but his parting words are perhaps the ones that sum him up best, “The world is full of good people who are ready to help, all you need is a good cause.” More information and the setup files for his dictionaries can be found at his website khandbahale.com (Android and Java enabled devices). Android users can also do a quick search for ‘Khandbahale’ on the Play Store for a list of all Sunil’s dictionaries.

Bullish November : Its Hard To Beat a Person who never....

Bullish November : Its Hard To Beat a Person who never....
                                     Gives up.

காந்தி கணக்கு என்றால் என்ன?

எம் .எல் . ராஜேஷ்  தி இந்து  2013

காந்தி கணக்கு என்றாலே கிட்டதட்ட 'நாமம்' என்கிற அர்த்தத்தைதான் நாம் உருவாக்கி வைத்திருக்கிறோம். ஆனால், காந்தி கணக்கு என்றால் என்ன என்பதற்கான உண்மையான அர்த்தம் என்னவென்று பலருக்கும் தெரியாது. அதை இப்போது தெரிந்துகொள்வோம்.

மகாத்மா காந்தி உப்பு சத்தியாகிரகம் மேற்கொண்டிருந்தபோது, அவருக்கு வியாபாரிகள் அத்தனை பேரும் தார்மீக ஆதரவு அளித்தார்கள். அவர்கள் காந்தியிடம் “நேரடியாக எங்களால் இந்தப் போராட்டத்தில் கலந்துகொள்ள முடியாது. 

ஆனால், எப்படியாவது உங்கள் போராட்டத்திற்கு நாங்கள் ஆதரவு அளிப்போம். இதில் கலந்துகொள்ள வரும் தொண்டர்களை எங்கள் கடைகளில் எது வேண்டுமானாலும் வாங்கிக் கொள்ள சொல்லுங்கள். பணம் தர வேண்டாம். அடையாளம் தெரியாமல் பணம் கேட்க நேரும்போது, 'காந்தி கணக்கு' என்று எங்களுக்கு புரியும்படி சொன்னால் போதும். நாங்கள் அவர்களிடம் பணம் கேட்க மாட்டோம்” என்றார்களாம் அந்த வியாபாரிகள்.

அப்படி வந்ததுதான் காந்தி கணக்கு. ஆனால், நாம் இதற்கு அர்த்தம் வைத்திருப்பதோ புரியாத கணக்கு. ஒவ்வொரு சொல்லிலும் அதன் உள் அர்த்தத்தை புரிந்து செயல்பட்டால் அறிவு விசாலமாகும்.