Reader’s Digest

The once-beloved magazine is making news today as it files for bankruptcy protection. As a die-hard fan of Readers’ Digest at one time, this might have come as a sad news to me…just about a decade ago, but today, I am simply happy that something is going wrong in the house, for it gives them a reason to take a closer look at who they really are, and fix some of the basics.

The magazine has become just a bunch of crap, from what it used to be 10-15 years ago. I used to love reading RD in my grandpa’s house, in fact it formed an important part of my initial literary sojourns, as I am sure was the case for many other adolescents. One of my first expenses when I started earning in India was to subscribe to RD. I had a bad experience with it with so many insert-advertisements, sweepstakes invitations by mail, and lots of irrelevant, completely nonsensical content including interviews with Bollywood damsels! I thought to myself, maybe RD India  has gone to the dogs,  and the mother-ship would still be intact. Again, when I came to the US, I started subscribing to RD. and found it to be incorrigible! In one copy, I counted the advertisement pages to be around 30% of the book itself! I canceled the subscription after a few months.

There was a time when RD wouldn’t even take advertisements, they did a huge readers poll just to start advertising, that too only small unobtrusive ones…from there it has been a steady decline, driven by sole objective of profit making, give your address for subscription and you start receiving all sorts of crap.

I guess, in the magazine industry, there are clear choices, you either go down the advertising path, add on subscribers just to shore up your numbers and make all your money from advertising and other activities (like selling the subscriber base contacts etc.). One good example of this in India was Business Week that gave away the subscription for next to nothing, but you get a lot of ads. And most of the time, these magazines are just “just another” magazine on the desk, you never craved to read it, you never waited for it in the mail, leave alone the thought of preserving one!

The other path, the more courageous one, that made great magazines like Readers Digest and National Geographic was to focus only on building a highly loyal subscriber base and meeting their expectations over and over, being always careful not to annoy them in any way. These were the ones you cherished, you wanted pass on those articles to your family and kids, you tried to preserve these for the future, the whole experience from subscription to reading to preservation was a joy in itself-this is precisely what RD and its owners failed to understand.

The result?

U.S. circulation at Reader’s Digest plunged 14 percent last year to 8.31 million from 9.68 million, compared with a drop of less than 1 percent for the top 10 magazines, according to Magazine Publishers of America.

I might be just the right sample for Readers’ Digest, they charged me a subscription fee of $10 for a year and then sent me crap which made me cut that to an expense of just about $3. Instead, if they had charged me double of that ($20) or even more ($25), without the associated advertising crap, I would have still subscribed to the magazine and remained loyal-I have discouraged some of my friends too from taking a subscription; a business can probably do just fine without a loyalist, but an active terrorist is a dangerous proposition .

Book Reviews

The Siege: By Ismail Kadare

What are the first thoughts that come to you when you think of War? Death? Bloodshed? Glory? Tyranny? Kings? Soldiers? Strategy? Peace Treaties? Have you ever asked the simple question, if you took an army of 30000 people to lay siege on another nation, and it took 3 months to do it, where would you ask them to pee during that time? Assuming that you didn’t want to make your entire camp a huge s***hole, you would want to create sanitation facilities on the scale of a city itself, correct? What about food supplies for these soldiers, again assuming that you did not know how long the siege was going to last, you would want to ensure a constant flow of supplies to the camp from *somewhere* right?

This was the first book on I read on war, that was not steeped in the glory or the tragedy or even the suffering. Instead it intelligently approaches war from the perspective of an operational strategist, planning supplies and facilities for an operation. At the same time, there is an enormous human struggle in the background between the attackers and the defenders (who we learn to sympathize with), the war room decisions, the actual execution of grand strategies, their successes and failures, are all told with the tastefulness of a master storyteller that Ismail Kadre is, building up to a fantastic climax.

Palace Walk: By Naguib Mahfouz

This was an immersion experience, into a totally different world. The novel is the first of a trilogy based on contemporary life in Egypt. It revolves around a single family with a dominant patriarch, his submissive wife and their children. What makes the read absorbing is the author’s inimitable style of walking through the story, casually, patiently from each character’s perspective. There are no magnificent things happening most of the time, still, the plot and the characters are so interesting that it urges you to read on. It gave a glimpse of the life in Egyptian Islamic families in the pre-World war era. Putting down the book, one gets the feeling of having lived in those settings for a considerable length of time, knowing those characters intimately. Am planning to read the next two parts as soon as I get the time.

யாருக்கும் வெட்கமில்லை-A Matter of National Shame

The recent expose by TimesNow of the “sale” of seats in medical colleges in Tamilnadu and Karnataka just confirms something that has been common knowledge to anyone who has been through the admission process in India, but still no one has been able to do something about it.

Death of merit: Capitation scam exposed

Brazen Auction of Seats in Bangalore

Just look at the video of the expose, especially look for the reaction of the minister at the end-he says he has never been involved with the institution, but then immediately goes on to say-”We have run the college for 25 years and there has been no capitation fee!” Shame on you! TimesNow also found the minister’s name on the website proudly displayed as the Chairman of the institution, with his wife as the chairperson-the website has been taken down since then. There is a popular political satire by Cho Ramaswamy that I am reminded of-”யாருக்கும் வெட்கமில்லை” (Translates approximately to “No one has any shame left”).

 We pride ourselves on being one of the best countries for primary and college education, but beneath the surface, that sophistication comes at an enormous cost to the common man and through a process that lets several of the corrupt political sharks get to keep the costs so extracted. Simple law of economics tells us that any time there are subsidies for a product or service, it masks the real price of it, and if there are no effective controls on the seller, he/she could extract the economic rents that represent the differential, to illustrate with a popular example, a Ford car model (I forget the name now) released with a price tag was lower than what people were ready to pay for it and over time the dealers found this out and comfortably increased the price tag with a “market adjustment” and kept the extra money for themselves.

Now, if there are people ready to pay the entire 40 laks for a medical seat, and there are enough of them, then the price of the seat should be 40 lacks and not 4 lacks! I am not suggesting that every student be forced to pay the huge fee, but let there be scholarships and subsidies to meritorious students to bring that amount down to the current fee levels, for the rest, let the government (and the medical college) collect the true price of the education they provide, with appropriate tracking mechanisms to make sure that the entire amount goes into the right coffers. That way, the system will be transparent, and any “minister” who demands an extra on top of the hefty fee will be fooling himself, as no sane person will be ready to pay for it.

10 Books, 10 Authors, 10 Countries…

I signed up for the Orbis Terrarum challenge for 2009…

http://orbisterrarumchallenge.blogspot.com/2009/01/rules-and-regulations.html

The challenge is to read 10 books from 10 authors hailing from 10 different countries. Here is my list so far…

India:                               The White Tiger              Arvind Adiga (Done)

Albania:                         The Siege                             Ismail Kadare (Reading)

Egypt:                             Palace Walk                        Naguib Mahfouz (Next in line…)

Canada:                           Anne of Green Gables   L M Montgomrey

I will soon post my reviews of each book.

Flawless Execution

Has it ever happened to you that you saw a company’s advertisement about an offer or a new marketing message or a promise of a certain experience etc. and you went out of the way to make use of it. And then for some reason it was not available, or you did not get what was promised? As a result you went from being completely indifferent to the company, to developing a bit of aversion to it or in the worst case even becoming bitter and completely opposed to the company and its products. Welcome to the world of scary marketing managers-with brilliant insights, great plans and bad execution.

While I don’t have any grand theories on how this could be avoided, I recently came across an instance of failed execution and formulated some ideas on how it could have been different.

First on is at Chase bank, now Chase started this whole “Chase picks up your tab” marketing message that basically says that when you use your debit card (that you “enroll” in this plan) to make a purchase, Chase will pick up the tab for you once a year on a random transaction. Now, I like those odds, maybe they will pick up a big transaction and give me a hundred dollars back-I can take that gamble. To their credit, they had complete consistency in marketing this message with emails, on their website and even in their branches with huge placards explaining the scheme and benefits-so far, the perfect marketing plan ever. And I finally ask the clerk behind the counter to enroll me in the scheme and he blinks! He looks around helplessly and finally says-“You are going to have to come back some other time to do that-all our officers are busy now”. I still persisted, asking another lady who seemed a little more knowledgeable, she in fact went ahead and explained all the benefits of the enrolling in the plan and could she enroll my card? No, all the officers were talking with other customers and she herself could not do it.

Now, there was a classic moment of truth…here I was taking time out of a busy afternoon to do exactly what Chase wanted me to do-and these two employees can’t just make it happen. I would have spent at least a thousand dollars on that card the same month on a flight ticket (but I ended up using another card), I have even turned a bit opposed to using the debit card anymore (“if I can’t get the offer why should I bother using it?”)

It would be naïve to assume that somehow those two employees were at fault. They probably weren’t empowered to do it. Or they did not have the appropriate training on how to do it. Or rather, Chase did not have a mechanism to help me do it on my own so that those employees are not burdened and I am happy as well with an hour saved on that afternoon.

What could Chase have done better? Quite a few things actually…

1. Multiple Channels: Instead of forcing customers to show up at a branch to sign-up it could have been online and if they absolutely needed to have a conversation with me, maybe a follow-up phone call.
2. Call to Action: In all their messages, they could have emphasized a simple method to enroll my card on my own instead of just saying “Enroll today”
3. Training: When a program is important enough to throw up banners all around the branch, every employee should be informed enough at least to talk intelligently about it.
4. Follow-up: At the least, they could have had a simple operating procedure of getting the customer’s phone number and an appropriate time to call them back (and of course call the customer back at that time).

That would be flawless execution, otherwise it will just be another marketing exercise in futility-a lot of dollars wasted on grandiose gimmicks and advertisements with no return; often generating a lot of ill-will as a result.

Two Reasons to Celebrate…

As I write this post, there are several reports suggesting the death of LTTE supremo Prabakaran, and complete decimation of LTTE and it’s vicious leadership. This is the news I (and several of my countrymen) have been longing to hear for 18 years since the murder of one of the greatest leaders India has produced. Of course one could argue back and forth about what the motivations for LTTE were, for what it did. However, one fact should be clear as daylight for any observer of this and other conflicts in the recent times-’Everything comes back around’. India aided and abetted the LTTE in the beginning of the conflict despite the knowledge of their subversive activities against innocent civilians, and we paid the ultimate price of losing a great leader and several others to their terrorist attacks on our soil.

Interestingly, United States decided at some point to dabble with terrorists by encouraging a group of rugged fighters calling themselves Taliban, to fend off an aggression by USSR. Fast forward a decade,they lose two standing symbols of capitalism and thousands of their dear sons in war-after-war fighting the very forces they helped create.

Lesson: There is a beautiful verse in Tamil:

பாம்பாட்டிக்கு பாம்பால் தான் சாவு

(Approximately) The one who rears a snake, dies through the snake.

The second reason for celebration? The Indian voters, in a display of incredible clarity decided to dump the commie bullshit-wagon TOTALLY…See this and THIS-both fantastic news. This is especially heartening in the context of the current economic crisis and attempts by the leftists to paint the entire gamut of capitalism as bad. Hope Congress gets the message and opens up more sectors for reforms rapidly so people can see the results within the next five years.

Related Post Here.

Hats off to the Wise Aam Aadmi of India!

The Adage from the Oracle…

“It’s only when the tide goes out that you learn who’s been swimming naked.”
- Almost every investment bank
- Every other financial services firm
- The auto industry
- Iceland, the country
- Bernie Madoff
- Ramalinga Raju

and now, Allan Stanford.

Warren Buffett is a genius .

Awards for the best swimmers in each category here:
http://www.economist.com/business/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12796770

UBS Bows to US Pressure: Are Indian Regulators listening?

Something very significant happened yesterday. For the first time in history, a Swiss bank (UBS) came out of its shroud of secrecy and agreed to provide the names of 250 account holders to the US government authorities. Here is the report on it.

This should be a wake-up call for Indian tax authorities as Indians are rumored to be the second largest investors in these Swiss secret bank accounts. In fact all countries should start a concerted effort to dismantle this veil of secrecy around the Swiss banking system, so that the next best option for a criminal looking to offshore his loot becomes some unstable country like Cayman islands, thereby reducing the incentive to send money offshore.

I have always wondered why on earth a democratic, civilized country would open up its banks for all sorts of criminals to load up, with a stupid tradition of maintaining customer privacy. Who knows, eventually we might even find accounts linked to Al Qaeda in these banks.

Jakarta Diary: Part I

As I sit on the 17th floor of our high-rise apartment, one of the innumerable towers that form the incredible Jakarta skyline, I am amazed by several things about this beautiful country.

The first thing that strikes you when you land in the simplistic Jakarta airport (once you clear the long slow-moving immigration queue), is the traffic, if you are lucky you could get from the airport to the city in half hour and if you are a bit unlucky it could easily take two hours. I had the experience of doing both. The irony is, there is a huge patch in the middle of every major road in the city which could easily be converted into 1.5 lanes if not two. But No-Jakartans would not do that. Instead the roads are lined with trees almost infinitely. My father says that if a tree falls in a road due to some reason, they replace it with a new tree almost every time within the same week. These are not sort of “we-too-are-green” kind of trees that I have seen in some other cities. They are all very well maintained, lush green. It is humbling to see a country so resolutely adopting to be green in spite of all the troubles that it brings with it!

If you have any liking at all for observing people from a different culture, Indonesians offer a remarkable case study in contrasting microcosms living in harmony. An Indonesian friend remarked to my father-“Our religion is Islam, but our culture is Hindu”. This is visible in the innumerable statues of Hindu Gods and Goddesses on the streets of the city. This contrast extends beyond religious beliefs into their economic conditions as well. On one side of our apartment is the striking skyline that stretches across Jakarta, standing as a shining example of a nation that has boldly ridden the free market tide (and has had serious scars to show for it-check the conversion rates of Jakarta’s currency-Rupiah), one that has successfully attracted foreign investment and managed to raise standards of living for a major section of the society. If I just walk across the room, the window opens up to a different sight-a huge slum with people living in dilapidation. Of course an enormous wall separates the apartment from the slum serving as a grim reminder to the barriers these unfortunate people have to scale to improve their quality of life.

That being said, Indonesians, even the ones I saw in the slums are among the very few people who I am truly jealous of, the reason in the next post.

A Dream for An Awakening

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122867595766686077.html?mod=article-outset-box

Will the middle class truly create the next revolution? The most frustrating aspect is that, even if we all get together and decide that we will change the country tomorrow, I cannot think of even one good leader who has the potential to be at the helm of that change. 

May be this time change will be more organic, more bottom up…without glorifying any leader in particular, having a self-policing public that does not need a charismatic leader, but makes sure that anyone who is elected will be forced to perform well..

Pipe dream? Maybe. But every change in the world started off as a distant dream, didn’t it?