You should consider yourself lucky that you don’t have to deal with Orange and France Telecom (aka FT) here in France. We have had no possibility to receive VOIP calls for over 2 weeks. We can call out but no calls arrive. Sometimes a caller gets to voicemail, sometimes not. We have no conventional “fixed” line so callers have to know our mobile numbers or catch us on skype, gtalk etc. The cordless phones ring fine when tested from the router.

Neither Orange nor FT seem to be remotely concerned and say they’ll try to get someone along soon to look at it. I am expecting them to say we have the wrong plan and will subscribe us to yet another one that takes another 3 weeks to get set up as they did recently without telling us. That time we had no services at all for 3 weeks and had no idea why until calling about 5 times (long waits) by mobile phones at great cost (no offer to recompense). I’m not surprised that the suicide rate at FT is so high.

Despite my wife’s exceptional patience and calm it must be a really shitty places to work especially for someone who has to deal with us:-) However, I hear Telstra in Australia has an even worse reputation.

Incidentally while I’m crapping on famous brand names, I have been waiting patiently for about 8 months for my son’s almost new Sonyericsson W910i mobile phone to be returned by their UK repair shop. Now they really are a totally fucked up company when it comes to customer relations. The only way I get a response is by public tweeting with an @SonyEricssonUK included but as only the kind but powerless marketing people are watching I don’t get very far.

It suddenly struck me that Sol Trujillo used to run either FT or Orange France and then Telstra:-)  Where is he now? Verizon?

Any tips on dealing effectively with such “enterprises” will be most welcome.  Also a suitable new category on A Bright Fire is needed methinks.

related: http://brontecapital.blogspot.com/2010/08/virtualization-one-more-benefit-and-one.html

UPDATE Monday 30th August : France Telecom specialist phoned my wife on her portable today to say their servers are F*%$ed up until Friday so why don’t we plug in a phone to the normal sockets.  Sure enough it now rings, and, of course, the internet is dead, a side effect he didn’t mention to my wife.

Meanwhile in a chat with John Hempton (see link above) I learned that he is an activist and now takes any corporation (aka call centre) that keeps him waiting too long on the phone to a small claims damages court (actually he files a claim threatening to do so) and gets paid off with 100% success rate.  Luckily for him the claims office is en route by bicycle from home to office.

Still no word from SonyEricssonUK on phone repair/replacement.

Continuing with Thursday’s China theme, SocGen’s Albert Edwards has been looking at the emergence of a trade deficit in the People’s Republic and the implications.

The backstory here is the recent, surprise announcement from Premier Wen Jiabao and Commerce Secretary Chen Deming that China would record a trade deficit in March – the first since April 2004.

The deficit, of course, is one result of the massive Chinese stimulus package focused on infrastructure, which has sucked in massive amounts of commodities.

And obviously Edwards thinks this is going to have serious ramifications.

read full story: http://ftalphaville.ft.com/blog/2010/03/25/187316/devaluing-the-yuan/

If indeed China were to de-value their currency (by letting it float freely) how would the China bashers in Congress react?  Would they put their brains in gear before their mouths or is that too much to hope for?  See below for more evidence of problems in China.

Is China blowing bubbles?

Yes, says Citigroup’s Willem Buiter, who thinks the Chinese authorities will fail in their efforts to prevent a classic boom, bubble and bust asset sequence.

http://ftalphaville.ft.com/blog/2010/03/25/186756/is-china-blowing-bubbles/

More unexpected trends:  http://www.ft.com/cms/0e45e12c-0619-11dd-802c-0000779fd2ac.html?_i_referralObject=15585205&fromSearch=n

Today, with the ability to componentize a company, and separate its marketing from its production from its distribution, it’s more obvious when the jobs have shipped to another state, or another country. But the history of work in America is an inexorable, inevitable shift to the work of the mind.

And I, for one, think that’s a good thing. Because the more people we have engaged in medical research, or designing great electronics, or simply making trenchant observations on our internet economy, the better for us.

We are a White Collar nation, and our future is very bright.

http://www.cenedella.com/stone/archives/2010/01/our_white_collar_nation.html

Extract:

For me the basic dynamic of the mortgage bubble is some Ivy League dickwad hawking a billion dollars of securitized subprime mortgages to a pension fund, and then Hobie-sailing off into the sunset with a bonus after they all blow up. Of course my seeing it that way might have a lot to do with my own personal psychological prejudices, and I get that some other person with different hangups might choose to focus on Barney Frank deciding to “roll the dice on home ownership” with the GSEs…

This GSE story is a big one, but if it gets used as a path back to a “The Market Reacted Rationally” version of history, we’re screwed. It has to be looked at as an important part of a diabolical whole, a symbiotic scheme in which the banks and the state were irreversibly intertwined in an enterprise that on both sides was never about market economics, but crime. Because otherwise… the diversionary notion that one side or the other is wholly to blame is part of what makes the whole scam possible…“

Or perhaps the dysfunctional government article referred to in my previous post is a deliberate smokescreen?

http://jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com/2010/01/class-warfare.html

http://trueslant.com/matttaibbi/2010/01/04/fannie-freddie-and-the-new-red-and-blue/#

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/origins-american-kleptocracy

More comment:

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2010/01/limiting-the-destruction-wrought-by-irrational-exuberance-in-a-one-party-state.html

This week’s exercise in Party Management (what can we give these disparate folks to do, so they will feel important?), no doubt cooked up by some PR firm on K Street in DC, was to have mini tea bag parties around the country.  The real picture, if you ignored Fox TV : groups of 10-100 people, average age 67 (Fox, this is your demographic), whining in the rain about taxes.

IF someone had been at each event, asking: “Do you make less than a quarter of a million dollars in income per year?”, I can guarantee you that almost all of them would have said, Yes.

And then, with their No New Taxes signs on their shoulders, the interviewer could have asked the final question: do you realize that, under Obama’s budget, you will have a tax reduction?  Boy, that would have spoiled their party.

Is this current crisis an IQ test?  Of course it is: life is an IQ test.  Is it Darwinian?  You bet: life is Darwinian (unless you live in Louisiana, which just voted to put Creationism on school curricula).  Will some lose, and some win?  Absolutely.

The days of Karl, and his antics, are really over.  In fact, the Pentagon’s propaganda office was taken apart by the Obama people this week.  Now, the message of the nation will again come from the White House, and the State Department, and not from the Pentagon. 

Staging goofy tea bag parties against tax increases that the people in the crowds would not be paying?  Was it the ghost of Karl? 

Had to be. 

It certainly was not for the benefit of: the town, the county, the state, the country, the world.  Did it benefit the party?  On the face, the answer would be Yes.  But, a day later, when they all realize that they actually were not paying higher taxes?  Will they have that moment?  Are they smart enough? 

That’s the next test.  Who will they be more angry with, since anger is the currency of the current party hacks?  With the party hacks?  Or with Obama, who didn’t raise their taxes after all?

I’m afraid the answer, again, will be (b).

Last week, I gave a keynote talk at the CRIM Crystal Ball Conference in Montreal, and the speech seemed to be really well received. I had decided ahead of time that the best way to talk about today’s problems was to have a frank conversation about how the world really worked – not how it was supposed to work, nor how we all thought it worked a few years ago, but how it really was working during the already-infamous Bush era.

 This was an era in which many systems were broken, and whole sectors were coming apart, driven by the failures of key players. The media have already blamed the regulators (or lack of regulations), greedy CEOs, off-balance sheet banking practices, unethical hedge fund operators, removal of the uptick rule, general short-selling in wolf packs, the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, program trading, physicists coming to Wall St., the ethical collapse of the rating agencies, the fall of Fed power, the global liquidity bubble, speculation-driven oil pricing, oil price manipulation by oil providers, and bad luck.

 There is a simpler way to describe what happened: intellectual honesty, and real honesty, went by the boards.

 The people involved in all these things generally knew they wouldn’t work for long, knew they were unethical, knew they were skirting the legal (or were illegal), and knew they were lying to themselves, their families, and their colleagues about the long-term effects of what they were doing.

 I had dinner last week in Washington, D.C., with a top lobbyist, who told me proudly that she had led the charge in repealing the Glass-Steagall Act. (This allowed banks to get involved with non-bank, high-risk activities.) I had heard that the bankers spent $1B to get rid of this iconic piece of learning from the Great Depression; she confirmed it. Ten years later she is 38, and she laughingly told me over hors d’oeuvres that she now recognizes it was a huge mistake, adding that she no longer represents the banks.

 Oops. I guess that’s how you destroy empires.

 Which leaves the obvious unfortunate impression: the banks themselves must have known what a mistake this would be.

 Yesterday, in a lunch discussion with serial entrepreneur Al Davis, we covered all this ground in about an hour, and then he said, “You know, this all comes down to the board of directors.” And that brings us to today’s subject.

 We can blame the regulators who really came from industry, we can blame the bankers and CEOs and their lobbyists, we can blame the politicians who pretended that no regulation was good regulation, we can blame co-presidents George Bush and Dick Cheney. But, with the exception of the last two, there is another layer of governance that should take most, if not all, of the responsibility: the board of directors.

 Too much is made of the symptoms of bad management, and much too little is made of those really responsible for the quality of this management.

 At different times, I’ve written open letters to specific boards, but today I wanted to write an open letter to all boards. If you are a corporate board member, please read this carefully; I’m betting that, after reading it, you’ll agree: you were probably not doing your job.

 Let me start by breaking the neck of the good-old-boy scheme: most board members are friends (or even relatives) of the CEO, or work for him or her. Those who are not – even the most independent “outside” directors – tend to be selected on a rank of the CEO’s ability to direct, manipulate, or intimidate them; OR because they are guaranteed not to look too closely at the company.

 This formation step is the first place where things go wrong.

 A good board of directors should number 9 to 11, and have the following composition:

 The Chairman, often  the past CEO, and certainly NOT the current CEO.

The CEO.

The CFO. This will surprise most readers.

At least half the directors should be “outside” directors.

There may be a rotating spot for one or more employees (the German model).

The General Counsel.

The CTO or CIO should also be considered, since most strategic decisions involve technology inputs that others may miss entirely.

 Outside directors should be just that; not just golf cronies or the targets of interlocking board favors. Rather, they should bring strengths from areas of current or planned company operations.

 In the old model of governance, it was generally agreed that the primary job of the board was to hire and fire the CEO: he/she was its primary, and often its only, point of contact with the company.

 There are some things we can now say about this Old Model:

1. It did little or nothing to prevent corporate fraud and misbehavior.

2. Despite words to the contrary, it did nothing to protect shareholders, and much to protect the CEO.

3. It delivered any pay scheme the CEO wanted, via the Exec or Compensation Committee.

4. It did not prevent the current collapse of today’s many broken systems and companies, but rather encouraged this tragedy; i.e., it didn’t work.

 Let me give a few examples of what I mean by “it didn’t work.”

 AIG wrote insurance in amounts far greater than its total book value, or the value of all its reserves, creating liabilities infinitely beyond its ability to pay. Today, the now-defrocked longtime CEO Hank Greenberg continues to “protest too much” on TV: that he is the good guy, the government got it all wrong, if only he were still in charge all would be fine, the government wrecked his company, and so on.

 How did Hank and his short-term successor, Milton Sullivan, get away with it all? It would appear, among other things, that they used the usual tricks: find famous, busy people who make you look good and have no time to dig deeply into company affairs; and make sure your board is too large, so that nothing ever really happens at board level. In AIG’s case, that number was 17, or about eight more than are really useful.

 Over-large boards are the first sign of an errant CEO.

 How, exactly, did the board let this most egregious set of affairs take place? Obviously, they could not rely solely on their CEO; he’s lost it. But THAT’S WHY THEY ARE THERE: to hire and fire the CEO. This whole board should be named, shamed, and pictured somewhere, so that no one ever hires them again for any but the most menial types of yard work. (We have saved you the trouble. See our “TakeOut Window” below.)

 What about the board of Lehman Brothers? Or Bear Stearns? Who exactly  authorized 30/1 leverage on contracts that no one could understand, in numbers beyond count? Some board members, from the Old Model, would say: Well, that’s a level of detail beyond what we were asked to look at.

 Of course! Because, like Bernie Madoff’s accountant, they wanted you to stand up and sign off on something that was illegal, unethical, or just plain stupid. We can blame the hedge jackal packs, unrestrained by the uptick rule or anyone at home in the SEC, but let’s put the real blame where it belongs: on the board that got the companies into these messes.

 In the New Model, a board member would take the initiative to get answers for him or herself. In the New Model, the CEO looks to the board for real guidance and assistance. In the New Model, the CFO has twin allegiances, to the CEO and to the board. In the New Model, we substitute the charismatic, closed dictator for the engaging, transparent leader.

 In this vein, I’d like to suggest a checklist of questions for new board members:

 1. Are you going to be a good director, or a bad director? Define this now, so you can read it later when you’re under pressure.

 2. What kind of ethical leadership will you bring to the board, and to the company?

 3. How will you know if the company is meeting its Mission, and how will you assist in this?

 4. Who do you answer to? Who else?

 5. Are you willing to be fired or replaced if the company appears headed in the wrong direction? If not, please resign now; you’ll be saving yourself big legal bills later.

 6. Do you accept responsibility for corporate impacts beyond those on shareholders? Impacts on employees? Impacts on customers? Impacts on the planet?

 7. Are you going to miss some meetings, sit quietly, and collect your checks, or will you ask tough questions, make all meetings, and delve into areas needing more explanation?

 8. Are you emotionally prepared to fire the CEO? If circumstances required it, would you be prepared tonight?

 Let me give you a couple of surprising examples of failed boards and failed CEOs, in my opinion.

 Let’s take the two most famous, hero-worshipped idols of the modern corporate age:

   Lou Gerstner, IBM

   Jack Welch, GE

 What if it turned out that Lou smoothed earnings throughout his time as CEO of IBM in order to look great to the Street and to max out his personal compensation plan by keeping stock prices up? What if this smoothing was done illegally or unethically, by ransacking the company’s pension program, violating mandates for funding his own employees’ futures, and taking the money instead to buffer earnings shortfalls?

If that were true, you’d probably say he should go to jail, rather than be a hero. AND you’d say that his board of directors should have known about this transgression all along, and stopped it! Right?

What if it turned out that Jack smoothed earnings throughout his time as CEO of GE in order to look great to the Street and to max out his personal compensation plan by keeping stock prices up? What if this smoothing was done illegally or unethically, by ransacking the company’s insurance reserves, violating government mandates for funding the risk taken by his own insurance firms, and taking the money instead to buffer earnings shortfalls?

If that were true, you’d probably say he should go to jail, rather than be a hero. AND you’d say that his board of directors should have known about this transgression all along, and stopped it! Right?

 This brings us to quarterly earnings reports. Some modern-day CEOs have claimed that the combination of quarterly reporting and Wall Street’s savage punishment of any company not beating pre-set expectations by at least a penny – well, it’s impossible for a CEO, under today’s stock-heavy compensation plan, to stay above the law.

 Remember when SNS broke the story on Microsoft smoothing its earnings, back while Billg was CEO? And then, a bit later, the company’s internal auditor apparently sued the company over this very issue, settled in court, got his payoff, and all the papers were sealed by the court forever?

 See, it really isn’t hard to find these things.

 So maybe the board of directors has another problem to solve: how to pay CEOs.

 Today, it’s all about the stock price: cash for stock prices, bonuses for same, stock grants and stock options for the same thing; often tens of millions in compensation, all keying off the stock price.

 I would like to suggest that all F500 boards, worldwide, instruct their Executive Compensation Committees to immediately restructure the CEO compensation package, in this way:

1. Reduce dependency on quarterly performance, and reward longer-term goals and timeframes.

2. Expand the parameters beyond stock price, to include customer satisfaction, employee engagement, and sustainability. Define these to your own satisfaction.

3. Offer bonuses for attracting and retaining especially important talent, one of the CEO’s most important tasks.

4. When appropriate, also offer incentives for “real” innovation, in everything from processes to products. At the top, make these grants large and rare. At the bottom, make them small and common.

 Great companies don’t fail because of one madman; they fail because of one too-timid board. And great civilizations don’t fail because of one company gone awry; they fail because core beliefs and values fall away, which we’ve seen in the U.S. recently.

 When Rome collapsed, it wasn’t because the city burned. It was because the dream that once was Rome, of a great and civilized empire, stopped burning in the heart of every Roman.

 This is the task of being a board member: to bring that fire to the enterprise, insist that it spread throughout, and make sure it survives through intellectual, and real, honesty.

 Keep in mind: the CEO needs you. If she doesn’t, either fire her or resign.

 Your comments are always welcome.

Students, Luis Echarte, and Mark Anderson at Plantel Azteca

One of the very positive results of our last Future in Review Conference www.futureinreview.com was an invitation from well-known Mexican business leader Ricardo Salinas-Pliego to come and visit the school, Plantel Azteca, he has funded through his Fundacion Azteca for the last decade.

My son and I had a chance to visit this amazing school, and a number of Ricardo’s other enterprises (and the data center at the heart of these modern operations) last week.  As many of you are already aware, these include (and are not limited to) TV Azteca and Azteca America, Fundacion Azteca, Plantel Azteca, Iusacell, Afores Azteca (pensions), Seguros Azteca (insurance), Banca Azteca, and Elektra (the largest specialty retailer in Latin America).

Our tour, led by Luis Echarte, Chair of  Azteca America and CEO of the Fundacion,  included a sit-down presentation about the school, and a chance to meet some of the faculty and students, the latter of which were hard at work in every class we visited.

One of the most moving aspects of this school is its charter: the poorest students from Mexico City, and the surrounding states, are tested, and the brightest are invited to come to the school, at the Fundacion’s cost, for the best education money can buy.  (The children test at the top of their grades in the country after attending, according to Luis.)  They board with relatives or friends in the city, wear handsome uniforms, and stand up when unannounced grown-ups walk into or out of their class.

(Kids don’t behave this well in my home town –)

They seem happy, and were eager to show off their English in helping my limping Spanish along as we visited their classes, including a special computer laboratory class we were able to see.

I imagine, at this point, most readers of this blog are picturing small, rowdy classes in Microsoft PowerPoint or Word.  Well, no doubt these are taught at some point, but what I found there was a group of about forty kids listening quietly to their instructor in a class designed to provide them, by graduation, with Cisco certification in working on networks (WiFi, LANs, and WANs), routers, and switches.

Want to sit in?  I did.  This is an incredible school.  Elsewhere, younger kids were learning using a Promethean electronic whiteboard linked to a computer, as a teacher taught them Mexican geography.

Here are some more photos of the visit:

Luis Echarte and Mark Anderson with the Cisco Crowd

Our certified Cisco instructor in WiFi, LANs and WANs

I come to realize that these kids will have no trouble with 1:1

Touring the grounds with son Evan and the administration

We’ll have some important announcements to make shortly, but I can tell you now that Plantel Azteca is a truly amazing combined effort between these gifted students, and the Fundacion Azteca, and that this would be a perfect place for the country’s first successful one to one computer learning implementation.

And, perhaps for a minute or two, I thought there really was a chance that Medvedev would act as though he came from, or were hoping now to create, a 20th century country, with 20th century business practices.  It’s never too late, right?

What better way to win a business negotiation than to cancel the CEO’s visa – and that of almost all his key engineering staff?  Or intimidate the CFO until he quits, which happened yesterday?

This goes on, of course, even as Medvedev gives public speeches showing he isn’t really Putin’s Poodle, by appearing to criticize The Boss in public over the importance of property and shareholder rights, and business practices, etc. etc. etc.

BS.

I was going to write a bit about how the Russians would win this argument, using the same fake tax/eco permit/government pressure tactics Shell and others experienced in being squeezed out of their investment positions, but I held off.

That was stupid.

Given the experience that these powerful western companies have had in Russia, why would anyone, underline Anyone, invest there today?  No free speech.  No democracy.  No real parliament.  No rule of law.  A general attitude of thuggery, violence and assassination as common business tactics.  I mean, really, who is dumb enough to say to him or herself, ah, that only happened to those other guys, that could never happen to me?

Even for the most philistine-like business czars, Putin/Stalin’s Russia takes the breath – and the money – away.

Does Russia now end up being the not-secret hub of a new, KGB/FSB global kleptocracy?  Is this a bad 1960s James Bond movie?

With the assassination of Litvinenko by a charged KGB operative who then gets immunity by running for – and achieving – a parliament seat, nothing is too far-fetched, and indeed, the movies seem tame compared to killing with transuranium elements and assassinating critics in cold blood as a little present on Putin’s birthday.

I have noticed McCain raising a little Hell about all this, but why isn’t the world at large taking on the Bear?  Is Europe so cowed over future gas and oil supplies that she dare not peep?  We have a monster rapidly taking shape on the global horizon, and it’s past time for the rest of the world to speak up.

Or, as Robert Mugabe would say, Don’t bother.