Everything About Business Except The Bottom Line: FunnyBusiness

Study Says A Baby's Diet Determine Earning Power ( If you are a boy)

If a new study published in the British medical journal, The Lancet,  says  providing babies with good nutrition can dramatically  increase their earning power. The study was conducted in Guatemala over  a 30 year period.

It's long been known that children of well off parents grow stronger and wealthier the children in disadvantaged families. While nutrition has  always considered a factor --it was just that one factor of many: joining education, the economy and the culture,

However, in this study the only variable was what the babies ate.
According to the report by the BBC

During the 1970s, some of the babies in the study were given a very nutritious food supplement, some a less nutritious one.

When the researchers returned three decades later to see how the babies - now men - were faring, they found that men who had had the very nutritious supplement up to the age of three were earning nearly half as much more per hour than the other villagers.

The girl babies who had become women did not have similar wage differentials, possibly because they had less choice about where they worked.

About that last line. Do You Think?

If the study stands up to academic scrutiny it could have  significant implications on how nutrition is managed in developing countries.

China's Labor Day Celebration: The Golden Week

  While Americans are looking ahead five weeks to our next three day weekend, The Chinese are getting ready for their Labor Day Celebration. Only it's not a day , or even a three -day weekend. It's an entire week-- one of three Golden Weeks celebrated throughout China. Oh, and no one gets paid for their time off.

This is the 20th Golden Week. The idea is not  so much to give people time off from work but rather to get them time off so they will spend money. It seems that while China's economy and middle class are red hot, the mental mindset of the Chinese is more frugal than the economy needs it to be.

From the China Daily,

A government official said that despite the huge flow of people during the Golden Weeks and the problems that causes, the holiday system would remain for at least the next few years, because "there is still a lot of potential to be explored". Wang Kecheng of the National Bureau of Statistics, said: "The system has contributed a lot to boosting domestic consumption and demand, which makes its existence necessary."

He was speaking at a press conference attended by officials from 18 government departments. Official statistics have shown that the past 19 Golden Weeks have contributed 670 billion yuan ($86.7 billion) to the economy. Zhang Xiqin, deputy director of the National Tourism Administration, said: "With per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP) estimated to keep growing, there is a huge potential for tourism development during the Golden Week holidays." He said that developing tourism and expanding domestic consumption and demand was good for the economy and the trade surplus, unlike investment, "which is already overheated".

What are the Chinese spending their money on? According to Helen Wang at Across the Pacific  color tvs computers and diamond engagement rings.

Although China has 1.3 billion people, only 400 million are in urban areas. Coming from a culture that is extremely frugal, the middle class Chinese are both savers and spenders. There are people who are looking for value and a bargain price, and there are others who are seeking a premium branded product.

Some of the most popular products among the middle class are color televisions, mobile phones and personal computers. Interestingly enough, in big cities like Shanghai, diamond engagement rings are big sellers, even though the concept of Western-style engagement prior to marriage does not exist in China.

Want to learn more about the Chinese consumer? The Harvard Business Review in brief offers a great insight into Chinese workers and consumers.

Workers

Consumers

 

Year of The Pig

  It's the Chinese New Year and there seems to be a flurry of articles and blog posts about what it's like to be an American working in China.

Geoffrey Fowler of The Wall Street Journal(subscription required) has a great article about the Chinese working culture,

"I was riding the elevator a few weeks ago with a Chinese colleague here in the Journal's Asian headquarters. I smiled and said, "Hi." She responded, "You've gained weight." I might have been appalled, but at least three other Chinese co-workers also have told me I'm fat. I probably should cut back on the pork dumplings. In China, such an intimate observation from a colleague isn't necessarily an insult. It's probably just friendliness."

Fowler reports that many offices have a tea lady who constantly makes teas and heats up lunches for employees. Fowler describes this job as being like an office nanny. And, while American women may wear their tennis shoes to work and then change into their designer shoes for the office. Chinese women do the exact opposite -- wearing their stilettos on the street and slipping into slippers in the office.

While many of us have the impression that working conditions in China are abysmal, for at least one industry the working conditions in China are an improvement over life in the USA.

Dvorak Uncensored has a post about a game programmer who has opted to move to China to gain some work-life balance.

"He soon learned that China has laws in place that make such work conditions as he was enduring at home illegal. Work days there can be no longer than 11 hours, and employees are only legally allowed to work 36 hours of overtime a month. “There are places in the US games industry where the base work week is 50 hours and that doesn’t even start to account for the extended periods of ‘crunch time”, he says. “In China, you couldn’t legally run a shop that way. And heck, who wants to live their lives that way?”

Some of the work perks include:

“We will have an onsite chef for breakfast, lunch and dinner”, he boasts. Massages, dry cleaning, company supplied drivers, language and cultural tutoring (English or Chinese), haircuts, fitness memberships, car washing and maid and grocery services are just some of the other perks Balanced Worlds have in store for their development staff".

While Americans may be moving to China for the shorter work week, young Chinese  say they are working to shop.

French Newspaper decides Bloggers are no longer second class citizens

For some journalists, it's akin to Chicken Little declaring, "The sky is falling. The sky is falling."  Not only is the French newspaper Le Monde,welcoming bloggers ---they are giving them equal billing as professional journalists.

Mon Dieu.

From Loic Le Meur blog,

Le Monde is one of the first newspaper in the World to offer blogs to their readers, under the Le Monde brand. They have also published a ranking of the 10 top blogs, mixing their journalists blogs and their readers blogs, showing them at the same level, based on blog readers recommendations.

The Le Monde blogging policy comes at a time when American newspapers are continuing the slippery slope into circulation oblivion. A slip, that Jennifer Saba reports in Editor &Publisher ,the financial experts expected.

"Circulation declined as expected," wrote John Janedis, senior analyst with Wachovia Equity Research, in a note. He, like others, points to the effects of the Internet that is giving print circulation a whipping.
 
"We expect the companies in our coverage universe to continue to improve their online presence, using both their own Web sites, as well as to purchase other online assets, to help combat the continued decline in circ trends," Janedis wrote.
 
Bear Stearns analyst Alexia Quadrani doesn't even think yesterday's bad news -- daily circulation plunged 2.8% and Sunday fell 3.4%, one of, if not the worst drop in recent years -- will do much to shake The Street's confidence. Or lack thereof.
 
"Overall we believe these results are in line with expectations of low to mid single-digit average declines and therefore do not expect a material impact [on] the publishing stocks," Quadrani wrote in a note. For that, she's waiting for October advertising results.

The folks at Freakonomics have different take on the situation.They say the circulation drops are intentional

Not everyone is convinced that newspapers are dying, of course. Jack Welch wants to buy the Boston Globe; Dow Jones just managed to find a buyer who paid $282 million for six smaller newspapers; and of course several months ago, McClatchy bought Knight-Ridder. Circulation declines notwithstanding, these transactions suggest an underlying value that the newspapers’ own articles do not reflect.

The media executive Allan D. Mutter makes a very interesting point on his blog about circulation declines: a lot of them are essentially intentional. That is, circulation figures are falling in part because many newspapers—in response, I am guessing, to recent audit scandals at Newsday
and elsewhere—have stopped distributing free or cheap copies of their papers, which used to be helpful in padding circulation figures.

But, as Music City Mafia pointed out,

Circulation is the least of the newspaper’s worries. Advertisers are heading for the exits in droves. Car dealers have traditionally spent more money in the local paper than all other media combined. And that has held steady for decades. But newspapers share of dealer’s budgets (according tot the N.A.D.A) has deopped from 51% to 36% in the last two years. I assumer that similar numbers exist for your favorites: Real Estate Agents

Speaking of Liquid Bans--India says NO to Coke and Pepsi

It was not a good day for Coke and Pepsi. A court in India denied their request to lift a ban on selling their beverage products. The products were banned last month  by the communist-ruled southern state of Kerala because high levels of pesticides have been found in the drinks.

 To defend itself Pepsi launched a two -prong media campaign. The blog, Satish and his thoughts is  not that impressed.

Pepsi has fired recently two shots in air for self-defense. The first one was an advertisement claiming that the tea Indians drink has 14.2 ppm residue of pesticide which is 28000 times higher than such residue in Pepsi. The Tea Board of India has described the claim as "totally false". It is a classic case of the pot calling the kettle black. Tea is as old as Indian civilization and is the most favourite drink among Indians. It is processed plant leaf unlike Pepsi whose ingredients are so zealously guarded secret that the formula has been
stored in some unknown vault. Assuming that tea contains dangerous levels of pesticide, it does not absolve Pepsi of the charges already made against it. Moreover, tea is boiled before use whereas colas are taken directly thus reducing the harmful effects.

Satish also reports that Pepsi Co Chairman Rajeev Bakshi is supporting a ban on selling "fun" drinks in primary schools. Bakshi's is reported to have said - "Soft drinks should not be consumed at that age. If schools ban them, we will not contest them".

Meanwhile, Frank Lavin, under secretary for international trade has said the ban is a setback for the Indian Economy. Lavin is quoted as saying the ban could hinder American investment dollars in the region, adding,

" it would be unfortunate if the loudest voices were those who did not want to treat foreign companies fairly.

Meanwhile The Insider which reports on conspiracy theories and the New World Order, headlined the controversy this way:

Coke and Pepsi banned in India for putting poison into drinks

The addictive sugary American drink, "Coca Cola", has been banned in many regions accross India, because the product is being contaminated with poisonous chemicals which the company claims are "safe".

Tests show that the amount of harmful chemicals in the mixture is actually being gradually increased. The mass media is not reporting which chemicals are involved or their effects in humans, they are simply described simply as "pesticides", and the long history of contamination now on record is allegedly not deliberate.

The ban has now spread to the UK according to UPI:

Britain's University of Sussex has banned all Coca-Cola products from its student union to protest the company's alleged business practices.

Other British campuses are expected to follow suit amid calls for a nationwide student boycott against the soft drink giant, the Independent reported Saturday.

U.K. Students Against Coca-Cola has been pressuring the purchasing consortium that provides food and drink to British campuses to cancel its four multimillion-dollar contracts with Coke, the newspaper said.

While Satish says he now longer drinks "fun" drinks because of the health risk, he comes down hard on the government ban.

The Kerala government’s jumping into the fray and banning production as well as sales without any proper investigation is just like severing the head for curing headache. The announcement through ads by Pepsi’s brand ambassador – a popular film star that he would go to USA to drink Pepsi if it is banned in India is equally preposterous. Even the news report in Washington Post that Americans drink over 100 times more colas than Indians is not going to help matters. That Indians are not very much dependent on the colas has been proved by the most unexpected gain made by tea after the ban was imposed.

Image Credit:Yahoo! News

Women Entrepenuers in Afghanistan

  Last night I saw the   documentary,The Beauty Academy of Kabul, --the story of six American hairdressers --funded by the Beauty Industry---who go to Kabul, Afghanistan in 2003 to open a beauty school.

Watching the documentary inspired me to do some research on the state of working women in Afghanistan. You can read that post on blogher.

You can listen to an interview on NPR's Fresh Air with the film's director Liz Mermin and academy teacher Shaima Ali.

If the documentary is not playing in your community, you can sign up for an email alert letting you known when it's on DVD.

Image Credit: Shadow Distribution

Same Time Meetings-- taking multitasking to the limit

From the web developers perspective, the content management system was easy to use. For those of us who had  to work with it , it's been buggier than Bugs Bunny.

the web developer's solution was to have us participate in some training sessions on the software.   I was given the trainer's name and email address. I thought I was setting up a time for a training session over the phone.

Turns out the training would take place over MSN Messenger. When I protested, the web developer insisted this was the best way.

It wasn't until I had gone through two of these sessions that my trainer shared he lived in Cairo,Egypt -- which was when I finally understood why I had to participate in a training session via a chat room rather than a phone.

The thing about getting trained via a "real time" meeting is that it feels like watching the Internet via dial-up. It's incredibly time consuming and boring. My approach is to have some knitting available and I keep track of home many rows I can get done while I'm waiting for the next set of instructions.

What would take 15 minutes on a phone call clearly takes over an hour via a training session on MSN messenger. In selling us on this training session , the web developer reminded my client that this training was free -- maybe from his perspective it's free but not from my time or the other person in the office who is also going through the training. It's sucking up a lot of time.

A friend of mine works for a major corporation that also uses real time meetings, only they call them "same time"meetings  that's because they conduct these meetings at the same time they are supposed to be attending
a different meeting.

So let's say you are on a conference call but your boss also needs to meet with you and the only time available is during the conference call-- the boss will hold a "same time" meeting via their real time platform

What's the point? Just to say you've done it? Can most people's brains really work as a split tunnel and hear what is going on during the teleconference or Webex meeting and simultaneously conduct a "same time meeting"?  Is this a skill that can be learned? Do we want to learn it? And what does it say about corporate cultures that promote it?

I think the little green icon has it right..all you hear is blah, blah, blah.

In England they don't want cowboys painting your house

I may not have overheard the conversation if my walking partner had not  gone into the  Aster Cafe for a bathroom break. Sitting in the outdoor terrace a group of four people where having a conversation about work life. It was too tempting. I had to eavesdrop.

The conversation centered on the differences between working life in the U.S. and the UK..specifically what is required to get a job as a "house" or "commercial" painter. Most interesting fact that I overheard is that  painters aren't called painters in the UK, they are called decorators.

According to the guy who was holding court Sunday afternoon, you can't just pick
up a paint brush and buy some Benjamin Moore to become a decorator. You have to go to school.

Which got me to thinking about some of the people I've known who simply decided "painting" was a great way to earn some money so they got some business cards and started painting. Not sure that anyway asked their credentials or even would know if there were credentials to ask about.

A quick search on the web and it seems that this attitude of "how difficult can it be?" still pervades in the U.S. In providing help in how to hire a professional painter, eHow.com doesn't even suggest asking about credentials, just references.

	Contact several painters. Ask friends, neighbors, builders and designers for recommendations. If you're having difficulty locating house painters, check the yellow pages.
5.	Have the painting contractors inspect the site and quote a price for the job. Make sure the contractors are quoting on the same specifications - areas to be painted, number of coats and so forth.
6.	Ask the painters for references and contact them. Were the customers happy with the job? Did the painter complete the project in a timely and professional manner?

Instead of hiding the fact that a company's painters have received on the job training, many companies promote that, in fact that is part of the marketing strategy for  College Works Painting.

             The Painters

The College Works Painting crews are made up of a mix of college students as well as others who have had years of experience in the painting business. The common thread amongst all the crews is that they are the kind of people that any of us would feel comfortable to have paint our parents' or grandparents' homes. The painters, like the Branch Operators, are there to serve you and your satisfaction is their priority.

Which brings me back to my eavesdropping session, the expert on British "decorators" said until very recently, people were required to have 7 years of training( I would assume this includes being an apprentice)  before they could work  on their own professionally.  He added, that this has recently been cut back to two years. And, he added, that all "decorators" working professionally have to be certified. 

As the Painting & Decorating Association in the UK says,

"It’s easy to be taken for a ride by the cowboys – it               pays to choose a qualified professional."

Image Credit: Flickr member Wade Allsopp

Iraq's Only All Women Radio Station

If there is one thing that unites all small businesses it's cash flow. Yesterday as I was driving in my car and listening to the Satellite Sisters  I heard them mention the campaign to save radio Al-Mahaba--the only first all independent women radio network in Iraq.

They are having some serious cash flow problems and need to raise $100,000. It seems that a roadside bomb blew up their transmitter. A new one costs $100,000.

The fund raising is being managed by  OKIINC.org—Opportunity for Kids International, a nonprofit  American relief organization that helps the street children of Iraq. OKIINCwas instrumental in starting the station with a grant from the United Nations Development Fund for Women.According to the Satellite Sisters, "100% of the donations will go directly to the radio station for a new transmitter and other operation expenses.

The fund raising campaign started last October. At the time the radio station did receive a great deal of media attention including The Wall Street Journal, New York Times and USA Today
Mona Mahmoud wrote an article in USA Today...

A woman called to say she had been beaten by her husband so much she feels like killing him. Another  woman said she was afraid of her husband at the outset of her marriage, but she has learned to assert herself. Now he is the one who is  afraid.              

Other women said they never wore a hijab but are now being forced to wear the head covering because of pressures or threats from  newly powerful religious groups in their neighborhoods.

Launched earlier this year, al-Mahaba, which means "love" in Arabic, is the first independent women's radio station in Iraq. The format is a mixture of news, music and talk.

Ruwaida Kamal, 30, who hosts a program, said callers address a slew of personal and political issues that affect them as women,  including family relationships and the wearing of head scarves.The station receives between 70 and 100 calls a day, says station executive director Ali Abbass Hamoudi, 42.

And as Donn Esmonde wrote in the Buffalo News

"The station is the 21st century version of Radio Free Europe, which broadcast the sweet               breeze of freedom across the Iron Curtain's stale air. The same message falls now on ears of Iraqi women still in shackles who fear that the new constitution will turn extremism into law."

 

Your support will be appreciated.

Honey, I shrunk the World

While I still love my frequent flyer miles as much as the next person, I have not been diligent about monitoring them. My friend Nancy White has and what she has discovered is something that Northwest Airlines is apparently not sharing with their customers---in its world  the distance between two location is a lot closer.

I was checking my frequent flyer miles on Northwest Airlines and thought, hm, the total qualifying miles seems low, considering I flew from Seattle to NY, to Austin back to Seattle. Only 3,346 miles. That didn't seem right. So I went to the Flying Distance Calculator. Hm, quite a discrepancy. Considering the lower nautical mile figures, NW is crediting me about

NW Says LGA to IAH - 709 miles
Flying Distance Calculator says - 1229

Sea to Newark NW says 1201
Calculator says 2080

Houston to Seattle NW says 937
Calculator says 1626

Now if Northwest raises prices because fuel is going up, yet they are actually flying LESS miles due to some crazy math, something is wrong here. I'm losing 2088 miles (and, with my elite status, another 50% on top of that.)

This is the 25th anniversary of frequent flyer programs. There are some that say, there is now a chink in the chain of brand loyalty that frequent flyers have for their airlines. Prior to 1981 when people wanted to fly somewhere they would call a travel agent and say,

"I'd like to arrive in San Francisco around 4:00 p.m." 

However, after airlines launched frequent flyers, consumers completely changed their behavior. Instead of selecting an airline that met their schedule, they would say (still to a travel agent).."how close to 4:00 can Northwest Airlines get me to San Francisco?"

What used to be a 25 minute window of tolerance now opened to up to over 3 hours.

Dan Reed, at USA TODAY recently wrote a comprehensive article on the status of Frequent Flyer Programs.
Some of his findings:

The world's 180 million frequent-flier members - many hold memberships in multiple programs - are earning miles faster than ever. Their accounts are brimming with 14.2 trillionmileage points, up from 6.6 trillion at the end of 2000, estimates Randy Petersen, publisher of InsideFlyer magazine and WebFlyer.com. Frequent fliers earned 2.7 trillion credits in 2005 alone.

Reed also reported that while people are earning more points, airlines are giving fewer away.

Henry Harteveldt, an analyst at Forrester Research, says only 26% of North Americans who buy their travel online - and most of them do - profess loyalty to one carrier. Harteveldt says that frequent-flier programs have become "golden handcuffs" in which "elite status becomes a disincentive to change rather than an incentive to stay."

What went wrong? Well according to Rolfe Shellenberger, the marketing executive who brought the first frequent flyer program to American Airlines, they got "greedy."

Their purpose now is to generate more revenue" in the short term rather than maintain and build customer loyalty that will financially benefit the company over the long term, he says.

Indeed, U.S. airlines generated $4 billion in additional revenue last year by selling mileage points to partner companies at prices of up to 2 cents per mile. The partner - a credit card company, a car dealer or a mortgage firm, for example - will then use the points to reward their customers for purchases.

 

As it turns out Northwest is not the only carrier who sees the world as a much smaller place.According to Lilia Eflimora sharing a comment on Nancy's blog.

Nancy, could be legitimate reduce for the cheaper tickets. KLM resently changed to that: e.g. most of my latest flights to Russia were credited with 25% miles just because I had cheapest tickets. No gold wings anymore :(