BOOKMARK
The Narratology Of Balance Sheets
BY VISHAL KRISHNA
27 Mar 2009
Storytelling Organizations
Storytelling Organizations;
By David M. Boje; Publisher: Sage Publications;
Pages: 282; Price: £24.99
Writers, unfortunately and often, do not pay attention to their narrative, and to making sense. This book by David M. Boje teaches every apprentice of the written word the importance of examining thoughts and theories before putting an idea down on paper.
The book aims to capture narratives of companies’ past business events, and to give an argument some coherence in order to achieve believability. He throws certain theories at the reader with which he (the reader) may introspect before going out to write a story. Boje builds upon the usual journalistic tradition of asking what, where, when, why and who, followed by how, but he also goes beyond connecting the dots.
The author looks at how business organisations can employ story-telling techniques to gather support for the company’s goals from its shareholders and the public. Corporate annual reports, news stories and press releases are routinely mundane, repetitive and, not surprisingly, frequently ignored by writers. The question is: what do we, as writers, do with all this information? Boje’s contention is that information related to a company can be made lively and easy to understand.
The book explains theories such as Michel Foucault’s architectonic narratives, which basically stress on a structure for everything that is to be written. Boje presents eight ways of making sense in a business narrative — the beginning-middle-and-end method is one of them. Although the book does not offer any one solution in order to make sense out of business stories, Boje reminds us of the structure and chaos that exist between the pen and the process of thinking. He points to a direction and turns this book into a tool with which the writer can structure a narrative. In the end, there is no right way of telling a story, as long as readers are captivated with it.
To this end, Boje brings in dialogisms, where one element of the story becomes the storyteller. He illustrates the use of dialogisms with the example of Wal-Mart: for over 30 years, till before his death, Sam Walton based his annual reports on what consumers and employees thought of his company — often featuring their lives in his annual reports and his autobiography. Walton had the reports written carefully so that they would not speak of the company and its greatness. Instead, the focus was always on the target (the stakeholders), and the story would tell them there were no complaints.
David Boje David M. Boje is a professor of management at the New Mexico State University. He has published articles in management journals, including Academy of Management Journal, Leadership Quarterly and Management Communication Quarterly. Boje is former editor of the Journal of Organizational Change Management and founding editor of Tamara: The Journal of Critical Postmodern Organization Science.
The story-telling is a form of propaganda with which a CEO can control his sales force, vendors and customers, writes Boje. But he also says that even though a conglomerate will have some epic stories to tell, the general trend is to favour short reports.
However, approaching a story and shortening it depends on the writer’s ability to capture everything within a small space. To understand and resolve this conflict between a lot of information and little space, Boje throws in a paradox: he says there is no whole story — that a whole story is just a poetic illusion. The story is not about victors with swords, but about a simultaneous narrative with causes and effect, interpreted through characters in the story.
Companies also use writing techniques to prove their legitimacy. Enron was a classic case in point: it kept adding dead assets to its balance sheets, and presented to the world a high stock valuation over business that was non-existent.
Perhaps, the most important part of the book covers strategies related to story-telling. The author explains why elements such as the use of different media, or the hiring of consultants, becomes important for the narrative. He quotes IBM, which says that strategy narrative is important because of “the character of a company — the stamp it puts on its products, services and the market place — is shaped and defined over time. It evolves. It deepens”.
Boje’s work is a theoretical interpretation of how a writer would have to rethink a million times before he organises his script or story by weaving in all the characters. By doing this, the theories showcased in this book become essential reading for professionals in the film, journalism and advertising industry.
The beauty of the book can be captured only when the reader does not confine himself to any one theory. Instead, these theories can be connected to the reader’s real experiences in the corporate field, which can then go towards the writing of a fabulous tale. Sadly, we do live in a repetitive and monotonous era. Boje does well by reminding us of the basics. And it is here that he allows us to find who we really are as writers, and as organisations.
The Story Of My Assassins
Selection 1
Through The Prism Of Crime
The Story Of My Assassins;
By Tarun Tejpal; Publisher: HarperCollins;
Pages: 522; Price: Rs 495
In the story of my assassins, Tarun Tejpal examines the politics of power and shatters any illusions we may harbour of being a tolerant and just society. Set in the Hindi heartland, the book traverses across the multiple Indias that co-exist — urban-rural; educated-uneducated; elite-streetkid; and don-Guru. It makes hunger for power, violence and injustice its central theme.
All journalists have stories to tell. And given Tejpal’s extraordinary life since the 2001 Tehelka exposé, one is eager to hear his. He writes in the first person, weaving an extremely powerful plot and telling it skillfully. The police has foiled a plot to kill the protagonist. Who are the five killers, who is the mastermind? Through the stories of the assassins from childhood to adulthood, Tejpal explores the world of the underclass, the politician-police-don nexus — an India far removed from the reality of the urban educated Indian. The expertly crafted plot comes to a nail-biting finish much too soon.
Tejpal’s command over languages enables him to capture the north Indian idiom like never before. He paints vivid sketches of characters recognisable in everyday life. Also, the author takes a dig at everyone — the panting television journalist, the partner nicknamed Lincoln, the public school elite “who has no idea about the reality of India”. No comment on Indian society is complete without religion, sex and adultery. There is the mistress who works in a women’s advocacy group, all righteous about justice; and there’s Guruji, the protagonist’s spiritual advisor.
This book is a must-read. Cynical, yes — too much anger, violence, injustice, abuse — but extraordinary for its portrayal of modern society.
Sumita Thapar
Memory's Gold: Writing From Calcutta
Selection 2
Pen Sketches Of Kolkata
We live in times when the cultural manifestation of memory is increasingly cast in the digital mode. Digicams, Web albums, Facebook, Orkut, YouTube and blogs galore record the disappearing here and now. The narratives of memory are preferred in short, condensed fragments.
In this context, Amit Chaudhuri’s anthology of writings on Kolkata is a singular collection, for most of its 55 inclusions draw the reader in by their brief compass. Also, the fact that these pieces are eminently readable and combine to evoke a distinctive sense of the place shows the care he has taken in arranging and editing the material for Memory’s Gold: Writings From Calcutta (Penguin).
Robert Clive, a key architect of British India, once described Kolkata as “one of the most wicked places in the universe”. Chaudhuri’s book gives the lie to the English soldier’s dubious hyperbole. The brief introduction announces the editor’s project to trace “an aesthetic of the city”. As an editor, he includes the usual suspects — Rabindranath Tagore, Nirad Chaudhuri, V.S. Naipaul, Gunter Grass, Jug Suraiya, among others. But there is also a heartening inclusion of translations of original Bengali writing that bears witness to the many facets of Kolkata’s past, including a chunk of modern Bengali literary history by way of the work of the Krittibas group. Overall, the book is a nuanced selection of writings that remembers the making of the modern Kolkata.
Ram Shankar Nanda
Alert
ALERT
Bernanke’s Test
By Johan Van Overtveldt
B2 Book (Agate)
While the world scrutinises Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s strides to strengthen the crumbling US economy, Johan Van Overtveldt — in his analysis of the challenges that Bernanke is facing — looks at the careers of previous US Fed chairmen. The author believes that the current economic crisis that is testing the Fed chairman today is in fact rooted in the policies of Bernanke’s predecessor, Alan Greenspan (responsible for the subprime-induced credit crisis). In a detailed documentation of Bernanke’s obstacle, Overtveldt maintains a dispassionate and incisive stand.
Ganesh Ram V.
BROWSING
Ganesh Ram V.
Managing Director, Amoha Education
At the moment, I am reading Rediscovering The Veda by Frits Staal. The book gives insights on the language of the Vedas. Being in the language education industry, I wanted to understand how a language evolves over time. I read all genres — popular science, linguistics, management, philosophy and fiction, the last one only if the author is well-known. One book that I would recommend is A Brief History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson.
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MEDIA & ENTERTAINMENT
Picture Imperfect
Despite failures, filmmaking continues to lure corporates
GURBIR SINGH
27 Mar 2009
Sorry Bhai (left) & Black
Black And White: Mumbai Mantra’s maiden venture Sorry Bhai bombed, while Applause Entertainment’s Black was a hit
Speaking at the annual federation of indian chambers of commerce and industry (Ficci) convention at Mumbai in February this year, Mahindra & Mahindra (M&M) chairman Anand Mahindra had the audience in splits with his self-deprecating humour. M&M’s latest foray into the world of film-making was a “spectacular disaster”, he said. Mumbai Mantra, a company owned by a trust set up by Mahindra, had failed to make a success of its first two films. The first — a Bhojpuri film called Hum Bahubali — was unfortunately released at the time of the Bihar floods. The film too got swept away by the swirling waters. Its second movie — a Bollywood production — was equally unlucky. It was released on 27 November when everyone was glued to television sets watching Kasab and his gang wreck mayhem in Mumbai.
“The film was called Sorry Bhai, and we conveyed the box office disaster to the director telling him ‘Sorry Bhai’,” said Mahindra.
M&M isn’t the first business group unable to gauge the quicksand of Bollywood. Attracted by the glitz and glam of the tinsel world, the past 6-8 years have seen many corporate groups enter a business quite removed from their core competence. They have ended up burning their fingers and very often exited as fast as they entered.
Tata Infomedia entered the entertainment industry with a bang in June 2002 announcing Aitbar, a Rs 12-crore venture with Amitabh Bachchan in the lead. However, its appetite for Bollywood risk quickly fizzled out and the Tatas exited with ICICI Venture taking a controlling 50 per cent stake in the company in September 2003 for Rs 100 crore. Kumar mangalam Birla-promoted Applause Entertainment, which produced the successful Sanjay Leela Bhansali-directed Black, also exited by 2005 as it found the business too unpredictable.
Pantaloon chairman Kishore Biyani, too, tried his hand at filmmaking, launching 3-4 movies riding on actor Diya Mirza, all of which turned out to be duds.
But this is not to argue that corporate groups have all failed in film-making. The Manmohan Shetty-promoted Adlabs (now taken over by Anil Ambani’s ADAG) has been a successful production and distribution house. In case of UTV, film production has been its most profitable vertical, and the company is the first to put together the Hollywood studio model in India.
Is the film industry resistant to corporates, or do the corporate groups fail to get the Indian film formula right? According to Madhu Mantena, the young producer of the Aamir Khan starrer Ghajini, and head of Saregama Films, corporate groups have wrongly interpreted the relationship between the studio, the film-maker and themselves. “The corporate group creates the studio platform but not the movie; it is the film-maker and his creative team that creates the movie. The studio provides the platform, then carries the movie forward through marketing and distribution.”
According to Sanjay Bhattacharjee, a film consultant who earlier headed UTV’s film division, “Many of these corporate groups don’t know the value of the products and stars, and end up overspending.”
Meanwhile, the CEO of Mumbai Mantra, Andrey Purushottam, is planning to release two films this year. Part of his learning is to make mid-budget movies in the range of Rs 5-10 crore and focus on strong scripts. Mumbai Mantra has so far invested rs 50 crore in the business, industry pundits estimate, but the mood is clearly to go slow. Despite reverses like those suffered by Mumbai Mantra, Bollywood will continue to attract glam-struck corporates, as failure in the tinsel industry has never been a deterrent.
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SATYAM
One Fraud, Three Stories
Three months after Raju’s confession, several questions remain. Here are three versions of the Satyam saga
ANJULI BHARGAVA
27 March 2009
THE ARREST: Every camera lens in the state focused on Raju as he was arrested two days after his confession (AP)
Even as bidders line up to pick up the company he built, what must be going through Byrraju Ramalinga Raju’s head, sitting alone in his cell in Chanchalguda jail, roughly 15 km from his palatial bungalow in Jubilee Hills, Hyderabad? Stripped of his mobile phone, his personal possessions, contact with his family and the comfortable existence he led before the great fall, what must be the thoughts running through the mind of the former chairman of Satyam Computers?
Would all the implications of his actions, both for himself and his family, have sunk in by now?
Raju’s actions have alienated him and his immediate family from most people today. Once a highly revered figure (“Raju almost had a halo around his head,” says one former family friend) in Andhra society, he finds himself disgraced in his own city today.
Autorickshaw drivers have an opinion on him, and it is not charitable. “Chor hai,” says one rickshaw driver. “Andhra ka naam badnaam kar diya he (He is a thief… he has brought disgrace to Andhra’s name).”
His sons, Teja and Rama Raju junior — both of whom have to some extent lost control of their own companies, Maytas Infra and Maytas Properties (Company Law Board-nominated members are now on the boards of both companies), in the scam fallout — and their wives and his grandchildren are keeping a low profile. Barring his lawyer, his sons and a select few loyal friends, Raju does not get too many visitors. Only investigating officers from various agencies come to meet him. The intense media scrutiny has kept his wife Nandini away, so far. She has been largely in the confines of the Jubilee Hills residence since 7 January. His grandchildren — like the rest of his family — will have to face social disgrace from an unforgiving world. “The Rajus are persona non grata in Hyderabad today,” says a former family friend.
He has become the butt of many jokes. A popular one is: “Raju Raju, yes Papa. Cheating people? No, Papa. Telling lies? No, Papa. Open your balance sheet, ha ha ha.”
But jokes are just one small part of the vilification. The more serious indictment has been from the media, which has seen a steady stream of vitriolic stories, some with scant regard for facts. The local media that once lionised him has turned against him with vengeance.
Click here for enlarged view
With access to two newspapers daily in prison, Raju must be acutely aware of the public castigation. The barbs uttered against him by some who were his acquaintances in better days must surely hurt. When some stories appeared of how Raju had asked for a mosquito net in jail (he got a repellent, in fact), M. Damodaran, former Securities and Exchange Board of India, or Sebi, chairman (and the man under whose nose most of this transpired), said,“The mosquitoes must be very brave to go near him.”
He is equally alienated from his fairly extended family — several of whom have been implicated in the case. Some of his cousins are quite uncharitable, and claim that he owes them huge sums of money.
Barring very few who are sticking to his side and who stayed in the initial days with his wife in the Jubilee Hills house, most of the family are attempting to distance themselves from the episode. While one of his brothers, Suryanaryana Raju, has been trying his best to not get arrested, his younger brother B. Rama Raju, former managing director of Satyam, housed in the same prison, has already fallen out with Ramalinga. Rama Raju has hired a new lawyer to represent him, and has parted ways with Ramalinga’s lawyer who was initially defending both.
But the worst may be the complete alienation from Satyam, the company he built painstakingly over 20 years and for which — according to his supporters — “he risked everything”.
Is Raju thinking of all he has lost or the money he made through the scam? Is he ruing the loss of his reputation of being a “world-renowned visionary, global business leader and a thinker”? Stripped of all the accolades heaped on him over the years (see ‘Can Someone Apply The Brakes?’) does he feel his own nakedness? Is he feeling relieved that the duplicitous life he led is finally over? Or is he regretting his confession that prised open the can of worms?
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SATYAM
Into The Final Lap
As the race for acquiring Satyam approaches the last stages, many new questions are emerging
SRIKANTH SRINIVAS
27 March 2009
CHINESE AUCTION: While the identity of
most Indian bidders are known, there is
less transparency about several overseas
bidders (Pic by Reuters)
It’s ‘show’ time. Over the next 10-15 days, prospective acquirers of Satyam Computers will show their hands in support of their bids for the scandal-hit company. That includes plans on how they will go about dealing with the business, the staff and how they intend to satisfy the clients of what used to be India’s fourth-largest information technology firm.
“Given the way the acquisition process was run, the companies in the game are playing blind,” says the head of a private equity firm that is not in the running, but did not want to be identified. “They cannot even discount the worst-case scenario, because this is the worst-case scenario.” That sentiment is reflective of most views about the ongoing acquisition process.
No one really knows what and how much information Satyam’s board can or will share with the eight or so shortlisted bidders. Perhaps some about client lists, ongoing contracts and, perhaps, even something about the assets and known liabilities.
The head of one securities firm puts it rather colourfully. “It is like buying land in Sri Lanka that was formerly controlled by the LTTE,” says V.R. Srinivasan, CEO of Brics Securities in Mumbai. “It will be very cheap, but who knows where the mines and booby traps are?” But apart from the unknowns, many have had issues with the bidding process itself.
A Few Rumblings
Take the identity of all the bidders: while many are known, there is less transparency about several overseas bidders, just to accommodate their concerns. The overseas bidders believe that their identities should be kept private until such time the final shortlist of those eligible to make financial bids is decided upon.
As BW went to print, presentations were being made by Satyam board members to prospective buyers who made it to the initial shortlist; that was to be followed by discussions wherein individual firms make the case for being picked for the next round of financial bids. Before making their financial bids — slated for 9 April — bidding firms will conduct their own due diligence, limited though that might be.
“Unlike a traditional merger or acquisition, not being allowed to make representations or seek warranties can be a handicap,” says Venkat Rangaswamy, executive director of Edelweiss Capital, a Mumbai-based investment bank and securities firm. “That means you cannot sue the members of Satyam board or the investment bankers if you discover some unforeseen liability after you complete the transaction.” Which raises an interesting question: what is the value of a due diligence exercise in these conditions?
Those making it to the next round make a financial bid — essentially when they quote the price at which they will buy the 31 per cent preferential share offer and at which they will make the open offer to current shareholders. If the offers of two or more bidders with the highest price are within 10 per cent of each other, each gets the chance to revise its bid one final time. Then, the board picks the winner.
Sidelined!
But will there be other losers? Strangely enough, with all the public discussion about the company and the misdeeds of its founder, two classes of stakeholders have been very silent. The first is the individual investor, who has little power or voice.
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ADVERTISING
Media’s Annus Horribilis
A sharp decline in advertising revenues has hit the media across verticals
GURBIR SINGH
03 April 2009
Media’s Annus Horribilis
Source: TAM Media Research
The businesschannel launched by Ronnie Screwvala in April last year, UTVi, has begun a corporate restructuring exercise to raise another round of funding. The original business plan has gone awry. The expectation that UTVi would break the hold of business news leader CNBC has not materialised and the viewership and reach of the channel never took off.
“Against the first year’s cash requirement of Rs 110 crore, and expected ad revenue of Rs 40 crore, the channel has been able to garner barely Rs 15 crore in advertising,” says a senior insider, adding, “the target of a break-even by the third year is clearly not possible with ET Now also entering the fray next month”.
UTV Software Communications, in which The Walt Disney Company holds a 60 per cent stake, will thus bail out the business channel and take a 49 per cent stake in the new special purpose vehicle that will now own UTVi. This is expected to bring in Rs 80 crore-100 crore considering that the valuation of the business channel is unlikely to exceed Rs 200 crore.
With most media companies dependent on ad revenues, the slowdown has had a debilitating effect. The total advertising pie is estimated at Rs 20,000 crore annually of which television takes away Rs 8,500 crore and newspapers account for Rs 10,000 crore.
On television, the advertising volume in November last year fell sharply to 45.31 million seconds compared to the previous month’s 55.37 million seconds — a fall of 18 per cent in a single month. The print industry’s pain was worse. From a high of 20.99 million column centimetres of advertising in October last, ads fell 45 per cent to just 11.59 centimetres in November. Radio advertising, too, declined by 30 per cent from 9,176 seconds in October to 6,515 seconds in November.
The actual fall in ad revenue would be far larger considering that advertising rates have crashed between 15 and 30 per cent across all mediums. From November onwards, too, television advertising has continued to decline marginally. On the other hand, both print and radio ad volumes have been inching up. The April-May Lok Sabha elections are, however, expected to arrest the downward trend. “We expect an infusion of Rs 800 crore – Rs 500 crore in national media and Rs 300 crore on regional platforms,” TAM Media’s CEO L.V. Krishnan said.
News channels have been hit harder by the advertising downturn since most of them are free to air and are largely dependent on advertisement revenues. NDTV suffered a Q3 loss of Rs 125 crore compared to Rs 32 crore in the previous quarter. TV18 was in the red with a Rs 30-crore loss compared to a net profit of Rs 8.4 crore in FY2008. Deccan Chronicle Holdings’ net profit for the quarter ended 31 December 2008 fell sharply by 75 per cent to just Rs 25.7 crore compared to the Rs 103 crore in the previous quarter.
Notably, Hindi entertainment channels have been increasing their subscription revenues to 35-40 per cent of their total earnings. As Rajesh Jain, head of KPMG’s entertainment and media practice puts it: “These are expected to be robust even during the meltdown.” For instance, Zee Entertainment’s third quarter results ending 31 December 2008 showed ad revenue growing just 2 per cent to Rs 264 crore as compared to the previous comparable quarter. On the other hand, subscription revenue grew 17 per cent to Rs 227 crore in the same period. This also means subscription revenue now accounts for 42 per cent of the company’s earnings — up from 38 per cent in the previous comparable quarter.
What is the forecast for calendar 2009? Estimates vary. The Pitch-Madison survey expects a flat scenario. After a heady 17 per cent growth to Rs 20,717 crore, total ad revenues are expected to inch up just 2 per cent in 2009. WPP’s media arm Group M on the other hand is more optimistic forecasting a 8.9 per cent growth to Rs 24,900 crore by the end of 2009. In this, television is expected to grow faster at 11.4 per cent to Rs 9,353 crore as compared to the print medium that is expected to log a 7.4 per cent growth rate to inch up to Rs 10,770 crore.
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