Why Malaysia does Aussies’ dirty work for refugees? A Concern over pact on asylum!

Tweet



Diplomatically SpeakingBy Dennis Ignatius
 

The problem of asylum seekers is a serious one and Malaysia is right to cooperate with other nations to curb human trafficking. However, any cooperation should not be to our disadvantage.

Malaysia and Australia an-nounced last week that both countries had reached an agreement in principle that would allow asylum seekers arriving Australia by boat to be transferred to Malaysia for “processing.”

Prime Minister Julia Gillard said that the deal would send a clear message to asylum seekers that they “can be sent directly to Malaysia where they will be at the back of the queue.”

Malaysia, for its part, believes that the agreement would send a strong signal that our country should not be used as a transit point and that human trafficking is something that we do not condone.

The agreement is highly controversial in Australia which has been struggling to deal with an influx of boat people or “irregular maritime arrivals” (IMAs), as they are rather euphemistically labelled. In the past 16 months, some 150 boats carrying 7,426 IMAs mostly from Sri Lanka, Iraq and Afghanistan have reached Australia. Few would qualify as genuine refugees.

Australian law, with its emphasis on human rights, makes it extremely difficult and costly for illegals to be summarily deported once they become subject to the Australian judicial system.

Other western countries also face the same conundrum. Over the last two years, for example, several hundred boat people from Sri Lanka have managed to reach the west coast of Canada. Within months, all but a handful of them were released pending a review of their cases. No one is under any illusion that any of them will eventually be deported.

The legal system in Canada is such that even murder suspects cannot be deported if there is a possibility that they might be subject to torture or other cruel and inhuman treatment, including the death penalty.

One of the beneficiaries of this benevolence is a Malaysian murder suspect wanted by our police. Malaysia’s request for his extradition has been denied on the grounds that he might face the death penalty. He is presently pursuing the Cana-dian dream as a free man.

Australia is therefore seeking to interdict illegals before they arrive in Australian waters and detain them in offshore detention centres well beyond the reach of Australian law. The objective is to literally let them rot in such centres as a warning to other would-be asylum seekers. Some might argue that this is the moral equivalent of extraordinary rendition.

Australia has been desperately seeking to persuade a number of different countries, including Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and Timor Leste, to serve as regional detention centres for Australia bound asylum seekers. None, however, have agreed until now. The deal with Malaysia is, therefore, a breakthrough for Gillard’s policy of outsourcing Australia’s detention centres.

While off-shore detention centres might make perfect sense for Australia, what is less clear is how it would benefit Malaysia.

Malaysia already plays reluctant host to tens of thousands of illegal immigrants and refugees. It is a well-documented fact that they endure great hardship and abuse.

The fundamental problem is that Malaysia has steadfastly refused to accede to the UN Refugee Conven-tion. All refugees are treated as illegal immigrants and are subject to arrest, detention, punishment, and deportation. According to Amnesty International, more than 6,000 refugees are caned every year, while others have been trafficked to Thai gangs by corrupt local officials.

Given this situation, there should be genuine concerns as to the fate of those who are now going to be transferred from Australia. In an attempt to assuage public concern in Australia, our High Commissioner in Canberra has stated that the transferees would not be detained in Malaysia but would be allowed to “mingle” with the population at large.

What this “mingle” means is anybody’s guess, but one thing is certain: they will join the vast sea of suffering humanity that comprises Malaysia’s illegal population which is now estimated to number in excess of a million people.

There might even be questions about the legality of this whole exercise under Malaysian law. Will their refugee status be recognized by the Government? Will they be allowed to seek employment to support themselves? Will they be guaranteed safety from RELA harassment? How long will they be allowed to stay in Malaysia? What would happen to them if they are not accepted for resettlement in third countries?

Furthermore, there is a good possibility that rather than discouraging the use of Malaysia as a transit point it might well make us the principal holding area for would-be Australian asylum seekers. Do we want such a dubious distinction?

Clearly, unless Malaysia is prepared to radically alter its approach to illegal immigrants and refugees, we are headed for a right royal mess.

The problem of asylum seekers is indeed a serious one. Malaysia is right to cooperate with other countries to stymie the immoral work of people smugglers and human traffickers. As well, we certainly ought to take our obligations towards genuine refugees far more seriously than we now do.

Becoming a dumping ground for unwanted illegals or doing Australia’s dirty work, however, neither serves our interests nor does justice to asylum seekers.

The Government should seriously review this flawed initiative.

Rocking the refugee boat

Comment By Baradan Kuppusamy

The proposed Malaysia-Australia pact on asylum seekers is aimed at deterring people smuggling but the plan also has its detractors.

THE proposed Malaysia-Aus-tralia pact to tackle people smuggling, under which Malaysia will accept 800 asylum seekers caught entering Australia illegally by sea in return for Australia resettling 4,000 registered refugees living in Malaysia for over four years, is a path-breaking deal.

However, the political opposition in Australia and human rights advocates are slamming the plan as cruel and ineffective.

Australia wants to send 800 boat people to Malaysia for processing as part of a one-off deal, which the government hopes however will be a first step in developing a regional solution.

But human rights advocates said the plan would not stop thousands of asylum seekers from risking their lives on perilous boat journeys to Australia each year.

Others in Australia defended the proposal, saying it would act as a deterrent to people-smuggling in Asia.
Australia has long attracted people from poor and often war-ravaged countries hoping to start a new life, with more than 6,200 asylum seekers arriving in the country by boat last year.

Most are from Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Iran and Iraq and they use either the coast of Malaysia or Indonesia as a starting point for a dangerous sea journey to Australia.

“This landmark agreement will help take away the product people smugglers are trying to sell – a ticket to Australia,” Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard said in a statement.

“The key message this will deliver to people smugglers and those seeking to make the dangerous sea voyage to Australia is – do not get on that boat,” she said.

“Under this arrangement, if you arrive in Australian waters and are taken to Malaysia, you will go to the back of the queue,” she said.

Starting from the back of the queue in Malaysia is not what the refugees or asylum seekers want, especially the long delay that this involves.

In this way, Australia aims to curb the people smuggling syndicates that launch the boats crammed with people towards its coast.

Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak said the agreement was beneficial to both countries and strongly signalled that Malaysia should not be used as a transit point.

Australia would fully fund the arrangement, a joint statement issued by both countries said, adding that the one-off pilot project aimed to “undermine the business model of transnational criminal syndicates, particularly in people smuggling and human trafficking in this region”.

Both countries will work closely with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) to implement the arrangement, which would be finalised soon, it said.

Australia’s opposition has however slammed the deal as good for Malaysia but lousy for Australia with its opposition leader Tony Abbot saying that “this idea that they will take one and we will take five just risks Malaysia becoming the open back door to Australia”.

Since early 2010, Australia has intercepted more than 140 boats carrying asylum seekers while Malaysia has also caught dozens of people embarking on rickety and overcrowded boats to Australia.

The increasing number of boat arrivals has become a divisive issue in Australia, with the opposition demanding stricter laws to deter would-be illegal immigrants.

Speaking on the sidelines of a summit in Jakarta recently, Najib said the asylum seeker deal would be mutually beneficial to both Malaysia and Australia.

“It’s a big issue in Australia (and) it’s also useful for us because we will send a strong signal that Malaysia should not be used as a transit point and that human trafficking is something that we do not condone,” he said.

Human rights groups have however criticised the plan, complaining that Malaysia was not a signatory to the United Nations refugees’ convention, and claiming that refugees in its detention centres lived in squalid and overcrowded conditions.

But Najib has given an assurance that asylum seekers taken to Malaysia from Australia would be treated humanely.

“What is important is that the entire operation will be conducted under the auspices of UNHCR and the IOM as well,” he said.

Besides, Malaysia had given a clear undertaking that people would be treated with dignity and respect.
Nevertheless, Immigration Mini­ster Chris Bowen acknowledged that the new policy would be controversial.

“I expect protests. I expect legal challenges. I expect resistance,” he said. “(But) nobody should doubt our resolve to break the people smugglers’ business model.”

The Malaysian and Australian governments have asked senior officials to finalise a memorandum of understanding in the near future to set out detailed arrangements.

Saturday May 14, 2011

Concern over pact on asylum

By SHAILA KOSHY koshy@thestar.com.my

KUALA LUMPUR: The Law Council of Australia is concerned with the implications of the recently announced agreement between its government and Malaysia to exchange asylum seekers for refugees.
Its president Alexander Ward said the council “does not agree the trade of asylum seekers for refugees is an appropriate solution to this substantial issue.”

“The council has significant concerns in relation to how this agreement will be managed and how the human rights of asylum seekers and refugees will be protected,” he said in a statement yesterday.

Headlined “Law Council concerned over Australian-Malaysian Asylum Seeker Agree-ment”, the council's statement was posted on its website www.lawcouncil.asn.au.

It noted that Malaysia was not a party to the United Nations Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, a convention to which Australia was a party and therefore obligated by its protocols.

“For Australia to enter into an agreement with a country that is not party to the Convention raises significant concerns regarding the treatment of asylum seekers who are sent to Malaysia,” said Ward.
“Previous concerns have been expressed about the treatment of illegal immigrants in Malaysia.”

While few details have been released about the agreement, the council said it had noted the statement by the Malaysian Bar president, Lim Chee Wee, on May 9 calling for the two governments not to proceed given “the legal situation and conditions that asylum seekers and refugees and their families in Malaysia are degrading, demeaning and dehumanising, and wholly unacceptable to any civilised society”.

The council added that it would closely review the details of the agreement when they are released by the Australian government.

What’s wrong with the international monetary system?

WHAT ARE WE TO DO By TAN SRI LIN SEE-YAN

Tweet



President Johnson stated in 1968: “To the average citizen, the balance of payments, the strength of the US dollar, and the international monetary system are meaningless phrases. They seem to have little relevance to our daily lives. Yet, their consequences touch us all consumer and captain of industry, worker, farmer and financier.”

This is true when international financial arrangements are working well; and becomes even more evident when they are not. While not all would argue there is no life left in the international monetary system (IMS), almost all would agree the present system contains inherent contradictions which lead to frequent breakdowns.

Basic principles

Four basic principles underlie the IMS: (i) a country’s sovereign right to regulate internal demand to maintain stable conditions at home in terms of employment and domestic prices; (ii) free international movement of goods and capital and here, substantial progress has been made in meeting this goal; (iii) a system of mixed exchange rate regimes – from fixed exchange rate (eg China) to flexible exchange rate (eg US dollar, British pound and euro) to degrees of managed floats (eg yen and the ringgit); and (iv) a nation’s right to hold international reserves in the form of gold, US dollar and other major currencies. In addition, lines of credit are available from the IMF. The reserves available and potentially obtainable set a limit on the cumulative size of a country’s balance of payments (BOP) deficit, thus acting as a BOP constraint in domestic policy making. But there is no such corresponding limit for surplus nations. The system is asymmetrical; it “punishes” those in deficit and lets the surplus nations alone.

Most countries experience some trade-off between unemployment and price stability. As unemployment is lowered by policies to expand demand (as with the US stimulative packages), the higher is the price that has to be paid in rising inflation. The trade-off varies over time, and from country to country. The rationale behind this relationship centres on the tendency for money-wage increases to outstrip rises in productivity even under conditions of high unemployment. The current state of a jobless growth in the US with low inflation in the face of continuing high unutilised capacity shows no trade-off at this time. But as demand picks up and as growth picks up and unemployment trends down, inflation is bound to creep up.

G-20 finance ministers and central bank governors gather for a group photo during the IMF and World Bank spring meetings in Washington on April 15. — Reuters

What’s wrong?

First, there is the adjustment problem. The present IMS has no reliable mechanism to eliminate BOP dis-equilibrium (ie payments imbalances). This is fundamental. There are three possible ways of correcting a payments deficit: use of trade and capital controls; adjustment of exchange rate; and government policies working through internal changes in income and prices. All three go against the the principles underlying the system. So, when a country experiences a deficit, there is no assurance the deficit will be eliminated before its reserves are used up; or depending on the extent to which market forces are allowed to sufficiently depreciate the currency; or whether domestic policies are tightened enough to reduce demand.

Second, there is the problem of the exchange rate, which usually doesn’t react fast enough to correct imbalances. Destabilising capital flows exacerbate the problem. The IMS is also subject to massive (especially speculative) flows of funds which could complicate BOP adjustment. The flooding of cheap US dollar funds into emerging markets following QE2 (2nd phase of Fed’s quantitative easing) have led to capital controls and managed exchange rates limiting their appreciation. Of late, the size of speculative flows has become too large for even the larger emerging markets to cope. This is not the end. In the event QE2 exits, the impact of large capital withdrawals on the exchange rate can be just as destabilising.

Third, there is the problem of liquidity. The system has no arrangement to generate in an orderly and predictable way, increases in foreign reserves that are needed to meet demands of growing world trade. The creation of SDRs (Special Drawing Rights) in the IMF, as and when needed, is supposed to do the job; but in practice, increases in SDRs have been few and far between. By chance, the Fed’s recent expansionary program, including QE2, is now over-doing the job; indeed, these capital flows have become too large for orderly adjustments to take place.



Finally, there is the confidence problem. The system allows persistently large surplus nations to do virtually whatever they please in postponing real adjustment. Today, about two-thirds of global reserves is held in US dollar-denominated assets (especially Treasuries). China’s international reserves today amounted to about US$3.1 trillion, of which US$1.15 trillion is invested in US dollars. It has been estimated that Italy’s entire sovereign debt (principal plus interest until 2062) totalled US$3 trillion. In terms of oil, China’s reserves can buy 25 billion barrels of Brent crude, equivalent to 13 years of its net oil imports. Indeed, it could pay for the entire Nikkei 225 list of companies, with US$30bil in change. That’s how big China’s reserves are.

True, the Bretton Woods system had served the world economy reasonably well. In a sense, the system operated well in the 50s and 60s but was on borrowed time. The “tearless deficits” during this period left a legacy of a large and growing “overhang” of foreign dollar holdings, which frequently threatens a confidence crisis. Persistent US deficits had since led to a diminution in the quality of the US dollar in the eyes of most foreign holders.

Global payments imbalances require a co-ordinated global action to resolve. This is hard to come by. Of the four problem areas, I think the matter of speculative and exchange rate instability is serious. This involves two aspects: (a) threat imposed by the “overhang” of convertible claims against the reserve currencies (especially US dollar) where such claims are today touching 15% of global GDP (6% 10 years ago); and (b) the danger of private speculative runs against currencies under pressure, especially the greenback. They are inter-related. To top it all, the IMF practice of allowing nations to choose their own exchange rate regimes didn’t help the adjustment process. Fixed exchange rates operated uneasily alongside flexible exchange rates, including managed floats and permutations of these two major regimes, in the hope that somehow policies would be co-ordinated to converge and foster imbalances adjustment. Nothing like it will ever happen as each regime did its own thing to protect its national interest.

And so, until today, the four problems of adjustment, exchange rate, liquidity and confidence underlying the IMS persisted. One thing is clear: there is no political will to reform. The US, for which reform means the diminution of the dollar’s global role, is lukewarm. And Europe is distracted more than ever with protecting the status of the euro and the EU’s sovereign debt crisis. France, as chair of G-20, wants to find an IMS that more accurately reflects the new structure of the world economy. But the major emerging nations, especially the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China & South Africa) want to move away from a virtual one-reserve regime to one based on multiple reserve currencies.

Are payments deficits good or bad?

For most, payments deficits are instinctively bad. But think about it. After all, the purpose of international trade is to obtain goods and services from abroad at less than can be produced (or not available) at home. Imports are the benefits of trade. A trade deficit means more goods and services are being received from abroad than are being given up. Surely that’s good from the deficit nation’s point of view. But this deficit has to be financed. So, the nation either loses reserves (uses savings) or borrows (living on credit), and this may prove uncomfortable as the deficit persists. In the end, the deficit country has to take corrective action, such as deflationary domestic policies (austerity measures), exchange controls, or devalue its currency. All of them conflict with one or more of its domestic economic goals. There is a cost to adjust.

The soft solution is to use reserves (“its function is to render exchange rate stability compatible with freedom for individual nations to pursue national economic goals”). While drawing down reserves or borrowing may reduce the conflict of objectives, it nevertheless increases the potential for future conflict.

That’s exactly what’s happening in the US. It has run persistent deficits for so long that its debt is now too high (close to 100% of GDP) and its liabilities to nations accumulating US dollar reserves (especially China and Japan) have grown so large that it can trigger off a confidence run on the greenback.

This has proved inconvenient at a time when the US continues to need expansionary policies to bring down its high unemployment. Surplus nations have the opposite problem since these surpluses are inflationary and reflect an inefficient utilisation of reserves in the form of involuntary foreign lending. It can be viewed as the mere hoarding of resources that might have enhanced future output and welfare if added on to domestic investments instead. To sum up, today’s mixed exchange rate regimes provide no mechanism for systematic and effective BOP adjustment that does not conflict with major goals of public policy.

IMS reform

Reform of the IMS is clearly needed. V. Lenin once said that “the surest way to destroy the capitalist system (is) to debauch its currency.” The IMS is at the heart of the world economy. When rules of the global monetary game are unclear, inadequate, some even obsolete, nations find it difficult to play; indeed, some may exploit them to their advantage.

This undermines the very fabric of the IMS. Some history. In 1944, Bretton Woods gave birth to the IMF and today’s US dollar-centred IMS. The Bretton Woods conference was dominated by two strong-willed economists, H.D.White (US) and J.M.Keynes (UK). The UK wanted a system in which global liquidity is regulated by a multilateral agency (IMF), while the US (for self-interest) preferred a US dollar-based system.

Because of its enormous political power, the US got its way. Keynes, for all his intellect and persuasiveness, failed to: (i) endow the IMF with the power to create a new global reserve unit as an alternative to the US dollar; and (ii) secure a global regime which forces surplus as well as deficit nations, and the issuer of the reserve currency as well as its users, to adjust. It’s a pity as Keynes’ failures haunt us to this day. Nations with chronic surpluses (Germany, China and Japan) and the US as dominant supplier of US dollar reserves, do not face the same pressures to adjust their imbalances as do deficit countries that are often bullied to do so.

In my view, what is needed is a tripolar IMS organised around the US dolar, euro and RMB (China’s yuan or renmimbi). Let’s face it, neither the euro nor the RMB are in any position today to challenge the US dollar. The world will be better off with a viable alternative to the US dollar. Their interplay forces on the reserve currencies a market discipline earlier and more consistently. This way, central banks seeking to accumulate reserves will have a choice, so that the US no longer has “so much rope with which to hang itself” (so says my friend Barry Eichengreen). Another view is to transform the IMF’s SDRs into an international reserve currency (IRC). The trouble is, the SDR is not market tradable. To be an effective IRC, the IMF will have to be accorded the role of a world central bank. This is unlikely; indeed, a non-starter, as it was in the Bretton Woods days.

At the recent G-20 finance ministers meeting in Paris, all central bankers acknowledged that global imbalances remain a critical problem, and that a solution will involve policy co-ordination. Yet, each played down its own role. Until a solution is found, the “accumulation of foreign exchange reserves is a powerful instrument of self-insurance.” There is no political will to reform only the will to congregate and obfuscate. In the Bretton Woods days, the might of the US called the day. Today, it’s nobody’s call. What a pity.

Former banker, Dr Lin is a Harvard educated economist and a British Chartered Scientist who now spends time writing, teaching & promoting the public interest. Feedback is most welcome; email: starbizweek@thestar.com.my

Asian economies recalibrate to address inequality

Tweet

ASIA should have a smile on its face. The region's economy is displaying resilience in the teeth of a structural rise in oil and commodity prices. Overheating is a greater threat than a swoon in growth.

Yet the tone of some officials' recent comments has been strikingly cautious, reflecting an awareness that Asia has failed to seize the chance during the past decade of strength to address long-standing vulnerabilities.

Asia is still hopelessly dependent on final demand from rich countries. Investment, the seed corn of growth, remains far below levels scaled before the 1997-98 financial crisis, except in China and India.
Cross-border financial and monetary linkages are puny. Infrastructure, the sinews of every economy, is patchy. Asia generates less electricity than Latin America and has proportionately fewer phone connections.

So far, so familiar.

But policy makers are drawing increasing attention to another shortcoming of Asia's export-oriented growth model: inequality.

Disquiet over a widening gap between the haves and the have-nots was a factor in Singapore's election on Saturday, which ended in gains for the opposition.

And the urban-rural fault line running through Thai politics is in good part a rich-poor divide.

“There has been a significant increase in attention to inequality globally, and particularly in Asia,” said Xiaoqing Yu, the World Bank's lead economist for social protection in East Asia and the Pacific.

“Countries realise that inequality is contributing to social tensions and lost opportunities,” Yu said.
“Global events in recent months point to that,” she added, alluding to turmoil in the Middle East.

Even the International Monetary Fund, synonymous with stony-hearted austerity, has taken to stressing that “inclusive” growth is critical to the credibility of market-oriented reform and long-term development.

Inequality, up to a point, helps drive efficiency. But excessive inequality holds people back and stifles consumption. People cannot be expected to spend freely if they have precarious, low-paying jobs and scant social protection.



“It's really important for the region to continue to target more inclusive growth,” Anoop Singh, director of the IMF's Asia-Pacific department, said recently in Hong Kong. “It would not only reinforce stability, it would also help facilitate the rebalancing that Asia needs toward domestic demand and against simply an export-led model over the medium term.”

China is the best-known illustration of the economic and income imbalances spawned by such a model. Living standards on the seaboard, where export industries are concentrated, are many times as high as in the interior.

But South Korea is also counting the cost of a political economy geared toward supporting exporters at the expense of consumers and domestic service providers, according to Kwon Young Sun, an economist at Nomura.

The Korean economy recovered strongly from the 2008 global financial crisis, thanks to a largely undervalued won, huge fiscal stimulus and lower interest rates.

The ensuing increase in inflation and domestic debt penalised wage earners, while corporate profits rose as a share of national income.

The resulting widening in income inequality was one reason why the governing Grand National Party fared poorly in by-elections held on April 27, Kwon wrote in a report.

He said he expected the government to tweak policy in response, favouring consumers, smaller companies and lower-income families, rather than producers, big companies and rich families.

Other governments across Asia are also reacting. China is increasing health and welfare spending, while Hong Kong has just introduced a minimum wage. The Philippines is experimenting with a conditional cash transfer programme to help the poorest.

Yu of the World Bank said the 2008 crisis had brought home the need for a degree of social protection in a region where the umbrella of the extended family had largely substituted for public welfare.

“Even governments that traditionally have not put a lot of emphasis on poverty, inequality and protection now realise that they need some kind of mechanism, even if it's modest, to cope with a shock,” she said.
Of course, it will take more than a social safety net to temper inequality. As technological progress puts an ever-growing premium on skills, poorly educated workers are falling behind.

Here, the task for governments was to ensure a more level playing field by investing in skills development, Yu said, adding that Singapore, Australia and South Korea were showing the way.

In the grander scheme of things, nurturing a more equal, better-educated society will be critical if Asia is to avoid falling into the middle-income trap. This is when per capita incomes stall because countries fail to graduate from a reliance on resources and cheap labour to growth based on innovation and productivity.

South Korea has successfully made the transition. Malaysia and the Philip-pines are struggling to escape the trap.

If it avoids the trap, Asia would account for half of world output by 2050, up from 27% now; if it fails, the proportion will be about 32%, according to a report prepared for the annual meeting of the Asian Development Bank (ADB), held last week in Hanoi.

The report captured the prevailing circumspect mood, warning that Asia needed to address “daunting multi-generational challenges and risks.”

The ADB's managing director general, Rajat M. Nag, said the message was clear. “Your rise is not preordained; it is plausible, but you've got to earn it,” he said.

“You've got to make some policy decisions now to reduce inequity, increase the basic education, address issues of governance and corruption, show leadership and have strong regional integration if you are going to avoid the middle-income trap.” Reuters

New consumer mindsets

 Books Review by CHOO LI-HSIAN


Author: John Gerzerma and Michael D’Antonio Publisher: Jossey-Bass

Tweet

Spend Shift: How the Post-Crisis Values Revolution is Changing the Way We Buy, Sell and Live

IN their book Spend Shift: How the Post-Crisis Values Revolution is Changing the Way We Buy, Sell and Live, John Gerzerma and Michael D’Antonio show how consumers are “moving from mindless to mindful consumption” in an attempt to cope with their post-crisis loss of purchasing power and trust in institutions. In doing so, consumers are becoming “increasingly powerful and unpredictable”.

How they consume products is based as much on their emotional state as the environment around them. The book cautions that for companies “prone to celebrating a leadership position and a competitive market advantage, commoditisation may lie just around the hairpin corner.”

Consumers are resetting their spending and their lives to the new post-crisis financial realities. Through more strategic spending, consumers are voting for values with their dollars and influencing corporate behaviour. Communities are moving from capitalism to social collectivism supported by common values, a shared spirit of entrepreneurship and new skills in areas such as social media.

In response to this, many companies and brands are also making a very intentional effort to prioritise principles over profits, offering greater authenticity and creativity. At Walmart, Microsoft, Zappos and other companies, the authors met with executives who are applying new technologies side-by-side with old-fashioned customer-first practices to make their companies more relevant, resilient and profitable.

Stewards and staff of companies that are doing well by doing good ultimately also feel better about their positive impact on the communities they serve and the planet they share with their customers.

To tell the story of Spend Shift, the authors travelled from coast to coast, visiting large cities and small towns across eight American states to examine the value shifts sweeping the nation. They sat across kitchen counters, talked to small business owners and interviewed people from over 50 start-ups and large corporations. Their resultant efforts help readers to realise the depth and dimensions of the economic crisis and its consequences for American society and the world at large.

Marrying these real-life stories with solid research from Young & Rubicam, they analyse the changing consumer psyche, document the five shifting values and consumer behaviours that are remaking America and the world; and explain what it means to businesses and leaders. In stark contrast to the usual tired narrative of America’s decline, the book offers an uplifting alternative account of innovation, inspiration and surprising opportunity.

The authors introduce us to people who are reinventing their lives and livelihoods in the wake of the “Great Recession” that has “rearranged priorities, awakened creativity and reconnected us to the people and things that really matter.” We meet Torya Blanchard, owner of “Good Girls Go to Paris”, a tiny crepe restaurant that serves low-cost but high-quality meals in Detroit, a city where shuttered shops now outnumber those that are occupied.

There is Paul Savage, CEO of Nextek Power Systems, which champions electrical equipment made from direct current (DC) systems, Thomas Edison’s original creation.



We encounter Leslie Halleck, the first in her Dallas locality to start raising chickens in her backyard, who created a business to train other locals to do the same. Leslie stands as a shining example of how households across America are moving to more self-reliant lifestyles by shifting from consumption to production.

Through Cuban immigrant and Dallas librarian, Mariam Rodriguez, we discover how public libraries have become training centres for those who need to brush-up on skills, conduct a job search, or get free instruction in English as a second language. Library use in America has in fact reached record levels during the recession as people seek out education and community cheer. Sixty-eight percent of Americans now have a library card, the highest percentage ever.

We learn how technology and social media forums are helping to make generational and geographical divides disappear. The book talks of how senior editor of Make magazine, a bible for do-it-yourselfers, Phil Torrone partnered with Limor Fried to create Adafruit Industries, which sells kits and parts for original open-source hardware electronic projects out of a small loft in lower Manhattan. Adafruit sponsors “MakerFaires”, an online social forum where Millennial-aged electronics enthusiasts are mentored by retired engineers from NASA and Boeing.

The authors also reveal how Rob Kalin and his partners in Brooklyn created Etsy, an online place where artisans around the world could display handmade work and sell these to global buyers.

New business models with innovative incentivisation ideas have also emerged from the ashes of the crash. Partners, Lynn Jurich and Ed Fenster, solved the basic problem in rooftop solar energy that roadblocks many aspiring adopters – upfront cost. Her San Francisco firm, SunRun, gives homeowners guaranteed fixed energy costs through fixed leases for 30 years (that can be transferred to subsequent house owners) along with free maintenance with little or no investment; setting a fixed cost for power. SunRun’s customer base has increased by over 400% in 2010.

We speak with Andrew Mason, founder of Groupon, the group discounting phenomena that mobilises the masses with daily deals on products, services and even meals. The discounts are unlocked and activated when a threshold number of people agree to pay for the coupon or “groupon”. We see city council recycling manager Jon Norton working with RecycleBank to initiate the use of trucks mounted with scales and bins with electronic identification tags; so that the paper, glass and metal left on the curb by homes can be weighed and the households rewarded with shopping discounts.

In Western Massachusetts, locals have even created their own currency called Berkshares (named after the Berkshire Mountains) to help native shops survive competition from national chains moving into small mountain towns. Thirteen bank branches and community businesses have agreed to exchange these dollars to keep cash within the community.

The shift has not only been harnessed by small start-ups but also by the behemoths of big business. A case study shows how Scott Monty, head of social media at Ford Motor Co has moved the company toward openness and transparency. His goal was to start conversations with anyone who cared to speak to Ford. The Fiesta Movement on Twitter required that Ford actually allowed people to talk about the car in a way that was “unedited, uncensored, unscripted.” This new culture, coupled with new products designed through close counsel with customers and Ford’s refusal of Government bailout money, has helped to engender new respect and interest for the brand.

As the world economy struggles to find its feet after the last economic earthquake and its aftershocks, people are clearly coping by moving away from the material towards the more fundamental and the ethical. The book is vital reading for any marketer seeking to recalibrate their campaigns after the recession.

It provides a useful blueprint on new consumer mindsets and movements in the 2010s. It shows how businesses can adapt to the new consumer spending reality (more inquisitive, less acquisitive); repositioning themselves to appeal to this new sense of value tied to traditional values.

Aaron rules Malaysia's Twitter land

By HARIATI AZIZAN sunday@thestar.com.my

Tweet

Aaron Lee may call himself an average Joe but this student is Malaysia's top Twitterer.

OUR Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak may be the leader of the country but in twitterverse, another Malaysian rules the roost: Aaron Lee.

Err.. who, you ask? Better known as Ask Aaron Lee on the social media network, the international marketing student from Universiti Malaysia Sabah has notched a total of 169,056 followers 60,409 more than Najib, according to twitter counter Twitaholic.com.

The self-proclaimed Average Joe is quick to put things into perspective when the issue of his popularity is broached, though.

“Well, I guess that is only true (that I'm more popular than the PM) in Twitter because I have the time to manage my account more actively . . . since I don't have a country to manage!” he quips, before adding “As we all know, our PM is much more influential.”

Still, Aaron admits that he relishes being at the “top”. “It is definitely a nice spot to be in, although there are more accounts catching up like @AirAsia.”

Of course there are sceptics. First, there are the “Never heard of him” reaction when his name is mentioned.

Then there is the fact that the number of followers does not necessarily equal influence.

Huge following: Aaron at the recent global digital media conference iStrategy Singapore with friends Stephanie (left) and Amelia.

 

As fellow twitterer G. Yeoh highlights: “Twitterers who follow massively insane amount of people, and then get followed back doesn't count as popular'...” (Aaron follows 131,738 twitters).

Grey, another twitterer, nonetheless notes that “Aaron does have a lot of followers, including a few of the social media people in town... so maybe he is genuine.”

Crucially, before one dismisses him as a narcissist who cannot stop broadcasting what he had for breakfast and lunch or a shameless fame-seeker, it must be recognised that Aaron's tweets mainly deal with queries on social media hence the moniker Ask Aaron Lee.

He receives various questions from social media network problems to latest tech and business trends.
He points out that Twitter allows him to do the two things he likes connecting with people and learning new things, especially about social media.

“When I started using Twitter, I only wanted to connect with people. I love connecting with new people and engaging. I also love to learn and one way to learn is to read and tweet about it.”

The social media advice he offers is based on his own experience, he adds. The most common question people ask him, he shares, is “how do you build your followers?”

“Second question would be are you a celebrity?', which I usually respond with I wish' and a big LOL'.”

The strangest question he has ever been asked, he reveals, is What is the meaning of life?'

“Of course I didn't know, so I used Google and found out that the answer was the number 42' which appeared in the movie The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.”

Aaron says he started tweeting in March 2009. “I actually stumbled onto Twitter by accident. I posted a link of a blog and I got curious about the site. I searched around and saw people talking; so I followed them and responded to them, and a few minutes later they responded back! Then I realised I had stumbled onto something big because it was something I couldn't do on other sites like Facebook.”

Now, he says, Twitter is his favourite social media network, Hands down.' What he likes most about Twitter is how fast it moves compared with other social networks.



“Stuff goes viral instantly, just like the news on the earthquake which hit Japan recently, and it allowed me to keep up-to-date with real time information from people on Twitter. So happens, one of my followers was from Japan, and I was able to get real time information from him quicker than a lot of people.”

Malaysians, however, generally prefer Facebook to Twitter, he concedes. “I think they feel more connected on Facebook as their friends are already on it. Not many Malaysians like to tweet, I guess.''

Still, he believes that Twitter is growing in Malaysia and this year could probably be the year (it explodes here).”

Unlike many social media proponents and observers, Aaron feels that Malaysians are not ignorant about the safety and privacy issues of social media.

“Most people around the world aren't really aware about their safety and privacy on Facebook anyway. Last year, someone from the US was fired because she posted something bad about her students in school. It shows how open Facebook or Twitter is.”

His advice to them to keep safe: “I would recommend thinking twice before you say or post something on social networking sites or set the privacy to be closed to the public. Today, even employers are online and they will monitor their employees' account.”

As for the use of social media among Malaysian politicians, Aaron feels there is a lot of room for improvement.

“I've seen improvements over the past year but I wish more of them would be more personal and more responsive. I notice there isn't a lot of two-way communication online.”

He says our PM has the best online profile and the best strategies on the social media network.

“Our Prime Minister created #TanyaNajib and allowed people to ask questions on Twitter and he would answer them on a video. I do hope in the future, he would take in more serious questions and stream the answers live on the Internet.”

He counts himself lucky to have the support of his family and friends.“At first they were sceptical about me being on Twitter but today they are extremely supportive.

“My brother is on Twitter too but he is not as active as I am. My mum and dad don't tweet but my dad is on Facebook and he has been extremely supportive, reading my feeds and liking' them.

“Some of my friends do poke fun at the nickname @askaaronlee just for laughs but my close friends are extremely supportive of what I do online,” he shares. Living in Sabah, Aaron shares that Internet connection can get testy but he is not deterred.

“The reception here is not good in certain parts of the state, I depend a lot on 3G so that I can bring my social networking' with me most of the time. And when the reception is not as good, I just land line (streamyx) when I get home.

“It's tough for me not to be online as most of my work requires me to be online. When I am not online, I am either reading a book, out with my friends or attending classes at my university.”

What is certain is that Aaron cannot imagine life without social networking, especially Twitter.
As he puts it, Twitter has changed his life completely.

“Three years ago I was on Facebook playing games and today, I am connecting with amazing people around the world like Alyssa Milano who is following me on Twitter.

“Last year, I was invited to attend a social media conference in Singapore because I connected with the creative director of Philips, @thomasmarzano, one of the speakers of the conference on Twitter. Today we're good friends.

“In April next year, I'll be hiking the Himalayas for charity with people whom I've connected on Twitter.”

LinkedIn IPO to value firm at $3.3bn

Tweet



LinkedIn's IPO in New York next week is expected to spark a gold rush of social networking flotations

Josh Halliday and Dominic Rushe,guardian.co.uk

Inside LinkedIn HQ, Mountain View, California. The firm expects to raise up to $274m in the first IPO for a major US social networking group Photograph: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg News

LinkedIn, the social network for business professionals, will be valued at $3.3bn (£2bn) when it floats on the New York Stock Exchange next week, setting off a multimillion-dollar gold rush of social media companies.

The nine-year-old social network plans to float on the NYSE on 19 May and said it could raise as much as $274m. In January the firm said it was looking to raise $175m in the initial public offering.

The firm is cashing in amid an increasingly frenzied investor appetite for the next generation of internet firms. It will become the first major US social network to go public and follows the float of Renren, China's version of facebook, which saw its stock soar 40% in its first day of trading on the NYSE earlier this month.

LinkedIn's float is expected to be followed by a wave of flotations including those of Groupon, the online discount business; Zynga, maker of the Cityville and Farmville online games, and Facebook. Facebook's valuation has soared in recent months as investors clamour for shares in the privately held company. The company was valued at $50bn when investors put in more cash in January but its privately held shares have since traded at prices that suggest the firm could be worth more than $70bn.


Analysts said LinkedIn's flotation would be seen as the first real indicator of investor appetite for US social media firms. Colin Gillis, internet analyst at BGC Partner in New York, said: "Renren had everything – it's Chinese and it's social networking. LinkedIn is going to be the first real indicator of demand for the US social network firms."

LinkedIn has about 100 million users and turned a profit of $15.4m on revenues of $243m in 2010. Though other social networks are far larger, notably Facebook with about 700 million users worldwide, the business orientation of LinkedIn's members make them potentially more valuable to advertisers. The company managed to grow through the recession and turned profitable last year having made operating losses from 2007 until 2009.

At $3.3bn, LinkedIn would be priced at 13 times last year's revenues of $243m – a lower multiple than its peers. Facebook has a multiple of 32 times its estimated 2010 sales, according to Nyppex, a private-share market.

The company will offer 7.8m shares at $32-$35 each – the top of its previously expected price range. It said it intends to use the proceeds for general corporate purposes, including working capital, sales and marketing, general and administrative matters and capital expenditures.

Reid Hoffman, co-founder and chairman, and the chief executive, Jeffrey Weiner, are selling a small number of shares, less than 0.5% of the company. They will join the company's other shareholders, Bain Capital, Goldman Sachs and McGraw-Hill, in selling 3m shares in the public offering. LinkedIn will offer a further 4.8m shares.

Other major investors – Sequoia Capital, Greylock Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners, which together own about two-fifths of the company – will not be participating.

Unlike more mainstream advertising-supported social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, LinkedIn has a "freemium" commercial model, offering premium services to paying customers, while basic features and registration are free.

According to its flotation prospectus, filed in January, revenue from paying users dropped to 27% of overall revenues for the first nine months of last year, down from 41% in the previous year. Job listings and recruitment contributed 41% of net revenue in the same period, up from 29%. Advertising revenue remained steady at 32%.

Morgan Stanley, Bank of America and JP Morgan are LinkedIn's three lead advisers.

Newscribe : get free news in real time

Apple bumps Google as most valuable brand

by Don Reisinger

Tweet

Chalk another one up for Apple.

Apple is the world's most valuable brand with a value of $153.3 billion, according to Millard Brown Optimor's annual "BrandZ: Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands" study released today. In just one year, Apple's brand value has increased by 84 percent, the study said.
Google, the leader in the study for four years running, was knocked down to second place this year, losing 2 percent of its brand value to end up at $111.5 billion.

 

(Credit: Millard Brown Optimor)

IBM, McDonald's, and Microsoft rounded out the top five with brand values of $100.8 billion, $81 billion, and $78.2 billion in brand value, respectively.

The marketing and advertising industry, not surprisingly, believes strongly in the importance of brand value. "Strong brands, while not immune to the vicissitudes of the market, are more protected, prepared, resourceful and resilient," David Roth of WPP, parent company of Millard Brown Optimor, said in a statement.

If that's the case, Apple's ability to insulate itself from market issues has exploded over the last several years. Millard Brown Optimor said Apple's brand value has increased 859 percent since 2006--the first year of the BrandZ study. Moreover, Apple's year-over-year growth has easily overshadowed the rest of the market. According to the study, the top 100 brands have seen their combined value increase by 17 percent to $2.4 trillion since last year.



Apple wasn't the only fast mover in the study. Facebook's brand value jumped to 35th place, increasing 246 percent year over year to $19.1 billion. China's biggest search engine, Baidu, saw its brand value increase by 141 percent year over year to $22.5 billion, which gave it 29th place.

Such companies have helped tech lead the way in brand value. The researchers said tech companies make up one-third of the top 100 brands worldwide. Amazon.com was also able to beat Wal-Mart to become the most valuable retail brand with a value of $37.6 billion.

Emerging markets are playing a bigger role in the top 100 list. Back in 2006, just two companies from emerging markets made the list. Last year, that tally reached 13. And this year, 19 of the top 100 brands came from emerging markets.

Millard Brown Optimor's BrandZ study is derived from both financial performance and "in-depth" interviews of consumers about their perceptions of brands and why they choose a specific product over another. The company's database includes 2 million such interviews from 30 countries.

Don Reisinger is a technology columnist who has written about everything from HDTVs to computers to Flowbee Haircut Systems. Don is a member of the CNET Blog Network, posting at The Digital Home. He is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.

Newscribe : get free news in real time

Targeted killngs, a human rights concern?

Tweet

Global Trends By MARTIN KHOR



The killing of Osama bin Laden, the bombing of Muammar Gaddafi’s house and the deaths of civilians by drone missile attacks are some incidents that highlight the many questions of the legality and human rights in the issue of targeted killings.

THE killing of Osama bin Laden was undoubtedly the biggest news last week. While the shooting of the al-Qaeda chief filled the headlines for days, the confusion over what happened and questions over legality of the killing had taken over the discussion soon after.

United States officials had originally announced that Osama was killed in a firefight in the house in Pakistan he was occupying, and that he used his wife as a human shield.

A few days later, it was admitted he had been unarmed, and there was no use of a human shield. Instead, there was no firing on the US forces, except for one person at the initial stage.

The death of Osama came a few days after the Nato bombing of the house of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, which the Libyan authorities said had killed his son and several grandchildren.

This raised the question of whether it is legal for one state or states to kill persons, including political leaders, in other states.

These two events, in Pakistan and Libya, highlight the issue of targeted killings carried out by a government agency in the territory of other countries.

For example, drones controlled by operators thousands of miles away are increasingly being used to fire missiles at buildings and vehicles in which the targeted persons are believed to be in, with high “collateral damage”.

Drone attacks killed 957 civilians in Pakistan last year, according to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. This was almost as many as the 1,041 civilians killed by suicide bomb attacks in the same year.

The high civilian deaths and casualties by US drone attacks have caused great public resentment in Afghanistan and Pakistan, with the leaders in these countries warning the United States to control or curb the attacks.

As worldwide public clamour increased last week for more information on what really happened during the raid on Osama’s house, United Nations human rights officials also called on the United States to disclose the full facts, including whether there had been plans to capture him.

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay called for light to be shed on the killing, stressing that all counter-terrorism operations must respect international law.

Last Friday, a joint statement was issued by Christof Heyns, UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, and Martin Scheinin, special rapporteur on protecting human rights while countering terrorism. Both report to the UN Human Rights Council.




They said that in certain exceptional cases, deadly force may be used in operations against terrorists.

“However, the norm should be that terrorists be dealt with as criminals, through legal processes of arrest, trial and judicially-decided punishment,” they added.

A Reuters report from New York on Thursday said: “The legality of the commando killing of the al-Qaeda leader is less clear under international law, some experts said. President Barack Obama got a boost in US opinion polls, but the killing raised concerns elsewhere that the United States may have gone too far in acting as policeman, judge and executioner of the world’s most wanted man.”

The German newspaper Sued­deutsche Zeitung expressed misgivings about the legality of the killing.
“Which law covers the execution of bin Laden?” wrote its senior editor Heribert Prantl.

“US law requires trials before death penalties are carried out. Executions are forbidden in countries based on rule of law. Martial law doesn’t cover the US operation either. The decision to kill the godfather of terror was political.”

In May last year, the issue of targeted killings was addressed in a landmark report to the Human Rights Council by Philip Alston, who was then UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions.

Alston, who is a law professor in New York University, criticised the CIA-directed drone attacks, which he said had resulted in the deaths of many hundreds of civilians.

“Intelligence agencies, which by definition are determined to remain unaccountable except to their own paymasters, have no place in running programmes that kill people in other countries,” the report said.

Alston suggested that the drone killings carry a significant risk of becoming war crimes because intelligence agencies “do not generally operate within a framework which places appropriate emphasis upon ensuring compliance with international humanitarian law”.

More generally, the report said that in targeted killings, there has been a highly problematic blurring and expansion of boundaries of the relevant legal frameworks – human rights laws, laws of war and use of inter-state force.

“The result is the displacement of legal standards with a vaguely defined “licence to kill” and the creation of a major accountability vacuum,” said the report, concluding that many of the practices violate legal rules.

It warned that whatever rules the United States attempt to invoke or apply to al-Qaeda could be invoked by other states to apply to other non-state armed groups.

The failure of states to comply with their human rights law and international human rights obligations to provide transparency and accountability for targeted killings is a matter of deep concern.

In light of the increasing use of targeted killings in recent weeks and years, the issues and proposals raised in the May 2010 report should be seriously followed up.

Britain's super-rich get even richer!

Tweet



Britain's richest people got collectively wealthier by 18 percent as the rest of the country weathered harsh government cuts, according to an annual list published Sunday.

Indian-born steel tycoon Lakshmi Mittal retained the top spot in The Sunday Times Rich List for a seventh straight year, despite seeing about £5 billion ($8 billion, 5.7 billion euros) wiped off his fortune.

The 1,000 richest people in Britain saw their wealth continue to bounce back from the recession and increase to a collective fortune of £395.8 billion.



The number of billionaires in Britain now stands at 73 -- up from 53 last year and almost matching the record of 75 set in the list of 2008 before the financial crisis. Forty are British-born.

Russian businessman Alisher Usmanov moved from sixth position to second spot in the list after adding £7.7 billion to his fortune, which is now worth £12.4 billion.

Usmanov owns a large stake in Russian iron and steel firm Metalloinvest and recently courted controversy in Britain by trying to build up a controlling stake in English football giants Arsenal.

His bid was thwarted last month when US sports tycoon Stan Kroenke took control of the Premier League side.
Meanwhile the fortune of Mittal, the London-based head of ArcelorMittal, the world's largest steel maker, fell by around 22 percent to £17.5 billion in the past 12 months, the biggest drop on this year's list.

The huge fall in the 60-year-old's wealth was driven by a plunge in the share price of ArcelorMittal as the global steel industry struggled to cope with costly raw materials and slow demand.

The highest new female entry is Chinese businesswoman Xiuli Hawken, 48, who made her fortune converting underground military shelters in China into underground shopping malls. She was ranked 61st, with a fortune of £1.06 billion. She lives in London.

Another new female entry is Mary Perkins, who founded the chain of glasses shops, Specsavers, with her husband Douglas. Their wealth has increased 42 percent since last year and stands at £1.15 billion.

The increased wealth comes as most of the country faces harsh austerity measures introduced by the coalition government to cut Britain's record deficit.

The list, which is for those who have Britain as their home or main base of operations, is based on identifiable wealth such as land, property or significant shares in publicly quoted companies, and excludes bank accounts.

- Britain's top 10 billionaires in The Sunday Times Rich List 2011 (last year's rank in brackets):

1. Lakshmi Mittal -- steel -- £17.514 billion (1st)

2. Alisher Usmanov -- steel -- £12.4 billion (6th)
3. Roman Abramovich -- oil, industry -- £10.3 billion (2nd)
4. The Duke of Westminster -- property -- £7 billion (3rd)
5. Ernesto and Kirsty Bertarelli -- pharmaceuticals -- £6.87 billion (4th)
6. Leonard Blavatnik -- industry -- £6.237 billion (15th)
7. John Fredriksen and family -- shipping -- £6.2 billion (16th)
8. David and Simon Reuben -- property, Internet -- £6.176 billion (5th)
9. Gopi and Sri Hinduja -- industry, finance -- £6 billion (new)
9. Galen and George Weston -- retailing -- £6 billion (7th)

© 2011 AFP
This story is sourced direct from an overseas news agency as an additional service to readers. Spelling follows North American usage, along with foreign currency and measurement units.
 

Newscribe : get free news in real time

Golf legend Seve Ballesteros dies, Fierce commitment and uncharted brilliance!

Tweet




Link to this video
 

Seve Ballesteros, the legendary five-time major winning golfer, has died at the age of 54 after losing his fight against cancer.

The news was confirmed by a statement on the golfer's official website which said: "Today, at 2.10am Spanish time, Seve Ballesteros passed away peacefully surrounded by his family at his home in Pedrena.

"The Ballesteros family is very grateful for all the support and gestures of love that have been received since Seve was diagnosed with a brain tumour on 5th October 2008 at Madrid Hospital la Paz.

" Ballesteros' brother Baldomero told reporters the funeral will be held on Wednesday in Pedrena, while Miguel Angel Revilla, head of the local Cantabria government, said the region would observe three days of official mourning.

Ballesteros had been recuperating at his home in northern Spain after a series of operations since being diagnosed with two malignant brain tumours in 2008.

His condition worsened on Wednesday, at which point he was admitted to hospital; rumours had swept Spain last week that Ballesteros's situation had taken a rapid downturn. On Friday, Ballesteros was under heavy sedation and his family released a statement confirming his situation had deteriorated.

In an unfortunate coincidence, the Spanish Open – the last competition Ballesteros won as a professional in 1995 – is currently taking place in Barcelona. José María Olazábal, the golfer closest to Ballesteros and inspired by him since childhood, was too emotional to speak to the media in the aftermath of his Friday round in Barcelona. "I can't talk," Olazábal said. "I can only wait, and cry."

Another Spanish golfer and Olazábal's playing partner, Miguel Angel Jiménez, was in tears upon completion of his second round. Olazábal, Europe's Ryder Cup captain, recently stated his dream that Ballesteros could be alongside him for the meeting with the United States in Chicago next autumn. The pair met a fortnight ago, at which point Ballesteros was in a wheelchair.

Olazábal's manager, Sergio Gómez, reported that Ballesteros's daughter had passed on details of her father's condition on Thursday. "Seve's physical condition was not good when José María went to see him, but they talked about golf and everything," Gómez said. "Then came the call yesterday to tell him that Seve was in a critical condition."

Ballesteros's illness initially came to light after he collapsed at Madrid airport in October 2008; during the intervening period, he has rarely been seen in public. Since his first surgery, which lasted 12 hours, he has undergone almost continuous chemotherapy and radiotherapy. In 2009, after his fourth chemotherapy course, Ballesteros labelled it "a miracle" he was still alive.

In 2010, during his last television interview with the BBC, Ballesteros spoke of fighting cancer. "You can't have it all in life," he said. "One day you feel fantastic, the next you never know what is going to happen. You just take a look at how many days of glory I had before. It has been a fantastic life and this, what has happened to me, is what I will call destiny; one test that God is putting on me."

Ballesteros, who retired from professional golf in 2007, was earlier regarded as a pioneer for the European game overseas. He had turned professional at the age of 16, in 1974, finishing second to Jack Nicklaus in the Open at Birkdale only two years later.

He was the first from this continent to claim a Masters title, in 1980, a feat he repeated at Augusta three years later. Ballesteros was the winner of the Open in 1979, 1984 and 1988. Besides winning a total of 87 titles in his career, Ballesteros played in eight Ryder Cups, claiming 20 points from 37 matches. He also captained a successful European team, fittingly on his home soil in Valderrama, 14 years ago.

Ballesteros had not been deemed well enough to make a planned trip to St Andrews to say a farewell to British fans at the time of last year's Open. At the Masters last month, Phil Mickelson dedicated a Spanish-themed champions' dinner to the absent Ballesteros, the man he credits with his own decision to start playing golf.

Newscribe : get free news in real time

Fierce commitment and uncharted brilliance

By James Lawton - The Independent

Ballesteros's death was more than the end of a great sports career

Seve Ballesteros, pictured in 1976

The great matador Manuel Benitez announced to his young sister that he would dress her in the finest clothes – or in mourning. His compatriot Seve Ballesteros never made such a declaration. It wouldn't have been appropriate on the lips of a golfer, because when Seve was young the game he embraced as if it was life itself made no great call on Spanish emotions.

Last night, though, we could measure the extent of his achievement because much of his country, and the wide world of sport, were indeed in the deepest mourning.

There were times when the golf of Ballesteros was almost incidental. The passion and the grace and the burning eyes and the windswept hair and the noble head and the wild, fist-pumping self-belief were what commanded the attention of his people as much as the superb anarchy of his play, and they sent a great charge through a game that had never known such fierce commitment and uncharted brilliance.

Ballesteros's death, which came after a typically brave and stoic reaction to the crushing news of a cancerous brain tumour, was more than the end of a great sports career. It was the last sigh of a man who brought a flamenco snap to everything he did, whose life of 54 years was perhaps not so cruelly compressed as it might have seemed at the first news that he had gone. Not, at least, for anyone who had seen the poignant truth that when Ballesteros could no longer play golf as masterfully as a god and, sometimes, as impishly as a street urchin, a central part of his existence had disappeared.

Ballesteros at times hinted as much. His obsession with golf, a game far from the heart of most young Spaniards, was nurtured by the evidence that it could provide a boy of humble stock with a good living, something far above the expectations of his father, who worked on the land around the Real Golf Club of Pedrena on the Gulf of Santander.

Severiano's uncle Ramon Sota was professional champion of Spain four times and once finished sixth at the US Masters, a title his nephew would win twice in a blaze of virtuosity. The boy could see the most desirable of lives and he pursued the ambition as single-mindedly as the torero Benitez, better known as El Cordobes. But there was a price, one he acknowledged in the wake of his failed marriage to Carmen, the mother of his three children, and later the death in a car crash of his girlfriend.

Ballesteros saw more clearly than ever before that when he embraced golf, playing in the moonlight on a course banned to caddies but for one day of the year, he had immersed himself in a game which had brought him unimagined fame and wealth but one that also, when it withdrew its favours, and was no longer susceptible to his fierce will, had left him with a hollow place in the pit of his stomach – and a sometimes almost unbearable pain in his back.

El Cordobes had played with the bulls in the Andalucian breeding fields in the night, a gypsy boy, impertinent and impatient, and Ballesteros fashioned his game, almost completely self-taught, on the forbidden course and then on the neighbouring beach. The bullfighter risked his life; the golfer placed his in a tunnel from which in the end there was really no escape.

That was the truth which, at least in the view of so many of his warmest admirers, haunted the corridors of the La Paz hospital in Madrid, before he died surrounded by his family at his home in Pedrena.

Life isn't a game, of course, but the tragedy behind the glory of Seve Ballesteros was that sometimes he plainly found it hard to distinguish between the two. He wept unashamedly in defeat and was distraught when he finished second as a 19-year-old at the Open at Royal Birkdale in 1976. Ballesteros always lived in the moment, and if such anguish was hard to understand after he had been beaten only by the superstar American Johnny Miller, and tied with Jack Nicklaus, it was soon enough widely understood that the thin, intense youth played only to win. It wasn't considered an ambition; it was a birthright.

He won three Opens along with his Masters titles, and each time he won a major he seemed to journey a little deeper into the improbable, even the surreal.

When he won his first Open, the American Hale Irwin sneered that the Claret Jug had gone to the "car-park" champion, a wild hitter who had had to retrieve his ball from under a car. Ballesteros smouldered and went on to dazzle the world.

Before the range of his genius began to ebb, irretrievably, he was able to produce one last great expression of it. It was in his final major triumph at Lytham in 1988. He overwhelmed the tough and gifted pro Nick Price with golf that was filled with all of his nerve and invention and a touch that was rarely less than exquisite. For his last round he wore a blue sweater, and the banner headline was inevitable: Rhapsody in Blue.

But then if Seve Ballesteros was in some ways a rhapsody that turned into a lament, his meaning was never threatened, not even when his life rushed away these last few days.
When he received the grim diagnosis, he thanked all his admirers for their messages of support and said he would fight with as much courage and serenity as it was possible to muster. Serenity was something that had been denied him for some time, even to the extent that reports of an attempted suicide were not lightly dismissed.

But then if it was true that in his last days Seve Ballesteros found a degree of that elusive serenity, it may have had something to do with the fact that finally he understood quite how he was valued by the galleries he had fought so hard, and sometimes so desperately, to please. There was a time when he seemed to believe that everything he had achieved was finely balanced on the brilliance of his next shot. Of course it wasn't. Few sportsmen on earth had less reason to worry about the meaning of what they had done – and how much they would always be loved.

Related articles/Post

•  BJCC Golf and Country Club News
• Seve Ballesteros, who brought a flamenco snap to all he did
• 'Seve made you love him. Made you wish you could be him'
• Ballesteros, passionate genius with unique talent
• Paul Lawrie: Seve, my hero

Give, you should receive!

Tweet

Are you a giver or receiver?

SCIENCE OF BUILDING LEADERS By ROSHAN THIRAN

 “Great leaders are great givers” - John Maxwell

I have often been told that money cannot buy us happiness. But now scientists beg to differ. They say it can make us happy as long as we spend it on someone else!

According to three scientific studies done by University of British Columbia Professor Elizabeth Dunn and her team, “regardless of income, those who spent money on others reported greater happiness, while those who spent more on themselves did not.”

In tests, those giving money away were far happier than others spending it on luxuries for themselves. Giving away as little as a couple of ringgit daily is enough to significantly boost happiness levels, according to Harvard professor Michael Norton.

The same can be said of countries. According to a global study by Arwin and Lew, “the statistical evidence from this study therefore suggests that as far as happiness is concerned, it is better to give than to receive aid.” Leveraging the World Database of Happiness, this study found that countries that gave more aid had a direct correlation with happiness whilst receiving aid did not impact happiness.

A large banner displaying the image of Mother Teresa in Calcutta, India. Mother Teresa, who died at age 87 in 1997 in Calcutta where she is buried, says “a life not lived for others is not a life.” — AP 

Interestingly, it seems the same for businesses. Businesses that are primarily focused on enhancing shareholder value (i.e. receiving profits), have unhappier people compared with start-ups and social enterprises (companies that give to its communities).

In fact, in a recent UK poll, people in large companies have a far higher disposable income than their grandparents, yet are not happier. Unhappy people mean lower productivity and higher healthcare costs.

Most people forget that inspired leadership is more about people and not products or profit. And people are inspired by organisations and leaders that give rather in addition to receiving.

History is awash with the value of giving. Christopher Chapman's 1680 grave in Westminster Abbey reads: “What I gave, I have. What I spent, I had. What I left, I lost by not giving it.” Longfellow wrote, “Give what you have. Notable author John Bunyan reminds us, “There was a man, though some did count him mad; the more he cast away the more he had.”

Of course there are some who believe they have little to give, and that their gift will make little difference. Mother Teresa confounds that by saying, “A life not lived for others is not a life.” If anyone truly lived a life of giving, it was Mother Teresa.

Leaders sometimes give at great personal cost to themselves. Gandhi lost his life to his cause. So did Martin Luther King. But their leadership legacies live forever.

Today, we see a different form of leadership. A leadership of wanting to receive more and more. The Wall Street Journal suggested that a culture of greed' was to blame for the recent financial crisis with billionaire investor Stephen Jarislowsky echoing that extreme greed' was to blame. Even when organisations were falling apart, we read of its leaders receiving more and more. In the movie Wall Street Gordon Gekko, in his greed is good' speech, crystallised why receiving is the new leadership mantra.

But yet when we explore new research on legendary leaders', the following are the top three leadership traits identified:

• Legendary leaders seek significance (people) rather than success (profits). They value people - their families, employees, and customers. They make decisions based on the impact to key stakeholders.

•  Serve a purpose rather than achieve results. Legendary leaders resist the pressure for immediate gratification and focus on long term purpose. They evaluate new products and services on the needs of the marketplace and how it improves the lives of its users.

•  Legendary leaders focus on “what can I give?” rather than “what can I get?” They follow a philosophy of abundance. Instead of fighting to get a bigger piece of the pie, they work to make the pie larger.

Reading through the top three traits of legendary leaders, it paints a picture of a giving leader. The opposite of Gordon Gekko in Wall Street. They focus on people, not only on profits, have long term purpose and bring benefit to society. Interestingly, social enterprises are organisations that focus on significance, ensuring impact to the community and these organisations end up creating new markets in the process.

I recently was invited to be one of the main judges at the latest reality show from TV3, Sejuta Impian (to be aired Sunday weekly from May 15th). The show centres on enabling Malaysians to be able to fulfil their dreams', as long as these dreams' benefit the community in some way or form.

As I watched the 92 finalists come and present their cases for funding, I was inspired by how Malaysians want to impact the community. More interestingly was the mushrooming of social enterprises with a clear social mission and a solid plan of sustainability through profits.

More and more organisations today are transforming from profit-driven' only into social-driven' missions. GE is moving into green territory with its eco-imagination' mission. Google “does no evil” whilst AirAsia's social mission is to ensure “everyone can fly.” Everywhere organisations realise that giving ensures a bigger return and are altering their focus from profit singularly to a more community-based mission.

Social enterprises and giving' companies don't just donate cash and gifts. They give back to society by making the world a better place, engaging with stakeholders and the community around them. They give back to their employees with great workplace practices.

Companies who consistently try to take into account its stakeholders and community outperformed the S&P 500 by more than twice the average over the past 15 years. (Schmidt, 2000). This result was confirmed by Harvard University, who found community-based' companies showed four times the growth rate and eight times the employment growth when compared with companies that are shareholder-only focused (Harvard University, 2000).

How is it that giving' companies outperform the traditional maximising shareholder value' organisations? In C.K. Prahalad's book Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, he challenges big companies by showcasing that we could make bigger profit and margins by focusing on people who earn less than US$2 per day.

His book showcased how social enterprises that championed the poor and other social causes reaped significant bigger margins than the big boys. Grameen Bank in Bangladesh outperformed all other banks but their core mission was to serve the poor, not to enhance shareholder value.

Traditional businesses compete either on price, quality level or service as their competitive advantage. NGOs often use value of service or societal benefit to generate their competitive advantage.

Social enterprises tap on both these competitive advantages but additionally tap into further social advantages that can be used for competitive purposes, such as community support, superior brand identity, customer commitment to the cause, and employee engagement.

Nothing unites people more (especially your employee base) than to work together towards the greater good of mankind and the community. Giving' truly excites your employees and gets them committed to your cause, ensuring higher margins and profitability.

We often hear of stories of leaders who jump out of their big CEO roles and gravitate towards new roles which have more meaning. It is a strange phenomenon that they all reach a stage in their careers when leaders feel compelled to suddenly give back'.

Peter Lynch was at the peak of his career, having grown the Fidelity Magellan fund, when he decided to leave to set up a philanthropic fund. So did Bill Gates, Carnegie and Rockefeller.

Why does it have to be so late in one's career that giving happens? Giving is simple. Giving is not only providing financial support. The best leaders believe that “you get the best out of others when you give the best of yourself” and they start giving early in life.



So, how do leaders in business give throughout their careers? Below are three simple ways that each of us can begin the process of giving back.

• Listening - The greatest courtesy a leader can give is to listen. Everyone wants to be listened to. The problem is most leaders have no time to listen and be an empathetic ear to colleagues, subordinates, suppliers, and customers. You will be surprised by the information and ideas you may receive in exchange for listening.

•  Giving feedback to employees - Courageous leaders know that giving and receiving feedback are needed for inspiring relationships. 70% of employees feel they hear too little feedback and have too little interaction with their direct manager, with limited positive feedback and constructive feedback offered. Most view the annual performance appraisal as being a broken process for delivering feedback. I personally struggle with this as it is extremely time-consuming, but the more feedback you give, the better your team performs.

•  Developing others - Leadership is not a platform to use people but to develop them. The legacy of a leader is not one who achieves the most, but one who builds up other great leaders who will accomplish more. If you want to succeed as a leader, focus more on what you can do for others rather than what you expect others to do for you. Teach, coach and mentor your employees. In return, they will outperform for you.

Give always

I am going to end this article with a short story on why giving sometimes even gets you out of trouble, especially poor drivers. A few years ago, an accident took place with a woman's car crashing into a man's car. Both cars were wrecked. But amazingly, neither got injured.

As they crawled out of their demolished cars, they both counted their blessings with the man shocked by this miracle. “Even more amazing,” said the woman, “my wine did not even break. Here, have my bottle to celebrate our survival,” as she gives the new bottle to the man.

The man smiled and with his manly grip opened the bottle, drank half and handed it back to the lady, who simply put the cork back in and handed it back. Flustered, the man asked, “Aren't you having any?” To which the woman replied, “No. I think I'll just wait for the police.”

Final thoughts

Giving is limited when you give of your possessions. It is when you give of yourself that you truly give and reap the rewards. As Albert Einstein said: “The value of a man resides in what he gives and not in what he is capable of receiving.” Be a generous leader keep giving to your people.

l Roshan Thiran is CEO of Leaderonomics, a social enterprise passionate about transforming the nation through giving. If you are interested in giving back to the community or being part of supporting leadership development for under-privileged kids, call +60176362047or login to www.diodecamp.com

China's First Space Station

Tweet

How China's First Space Station Will Work (Infographic)

Karl Tate, SPACE.com Infographics Artist

Date: 06 May 2011 Time: 01:26 AM ET

Photos: China's First Space Station

Sneak a peek at China's plans for its first orbital space station and the milestones to build it.

 

Source:
SPACE.com: All about our solar system, outer space and exploration
Newscribe : get free news in real time