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India - News
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News Updates - 21
November 2000 Global Entrepreneurship Monitor 2000 As Leaders - Women Rule - Business Week Tide of U.S. Collegians Studying Abroad Swells - Los Angeles Times Oh? Calcutta? - Los Angeles Times Global Entrepreneurship Monitor 2000 The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor 2000 study was conducted by a prestigious group of researchers from the following 21 countries: Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, India, Israel, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Korea, Norway, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom and the United States. India ranks as the eight most Entrepreneurial country in the world. The study - founded by entrepreneurial scholars from US' Babson College (Massachusetts) and the London Business School in 1997 - is strongly-supported by the Kauffman Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership, the largest organization solely-focused on entrepreneurial successes at all levels. An excellent measure of total level of entrepreneurial Activity is provided by the GEM - Total Entrepreneurial Activity Index (TEA), which was computed by adding the proportion if adults involved in the creation of nascent firms and the proportion involved in new firms.
Scientific surveys of over 2,000 persons in each country - over 43,000 total - were used to determine the level of entrepreneurial activity in each country. Nearly 800 experts were interviewed by the national research teams. This provided an unprecedented portrayal of the national variation in entrepreneurial activity and its impact on economic development among the participating countries. All countries with a high level of Entrepreneurship is strongly associated with above average economic growth India’s Unique National Features and Key Issues
Boston - Twenty-five years after women first started pouring into the labor force--and trying to be more like men in every way, from wearing power suits to picking up golf clubs--new research is showing that men ought to be the ones doing more of the imitating. In fact, after years of analyzing what makes leaders most effective and figuring out who's got the Right Stuff, management gurus now know how to boost the odds of getting a great executive: Hire a female. That's the essential finding of a growing number of comprehensive management studies conducted by consultants across the country for companies ranging from high-tech to manufacturing to consumer services. By and large, the studies show that women executives, when rated by their peers, underlings, and bosses, score higher than their male counterparts on a wide variety of measures--from producing high-quality work to goal-setting to mentoring employees. Using elaborate performance evaluations of execs, researchers found that women got higher ratings than men on almost every skill measured. Ironically, the researchers weren't looking to ferret out gender differences. They accidentally stumbled on the findings when they were compiling hundreds of routine performance evaluations and then analyzing the results. A study by Hagberg Consulting Group in Foster City, Calif. conducted in-depth performance evaluations of senior managers for its diverse clients, including technology, health care, financial-service, and consumer-goods companies. Of the 425 high-level executives evaluated, each by about 25 people, women execs won higher ratings on 42 of the 52 skills measured. ''I would rather hire a woman,'' says Anu Shukla, who sold her Internet marketing-software company Rubric Inc. earlier this year for $390 million. ''I know I'm going to get a certain quality of work, I know I'm going to get a certain dedication,'' she says, quickly adding that she's fully aware that not all women execs excel. But if women are so great, why aren't more of them running the big companies? Thousands of talented women now graduate from business schools and hold substantive middle-management jobs at major corporations--45% of all managerial posts are held by females, according to the Labor Dept. Yet only two of the nation's 500 biggest companies have female CEOs: Hewlett-Packard Co.'s Carly Fiorina and Avon Products' Andrea Jung. And of the 1,000 largest corporations, only six are run by women. UNREWARDED. For one thing, there's still a pipeline problem: Most women get stuck in jobs that involve human resources or public relations--posts that rarely lead to the top. At the same time, female managers' strengths have long been undervalued, and their contributions in the workplace have gone largely unnoticed and unrewarded. Women are also more likely to disregard as a useless power trip another long-held management bugaboo: keeping information tightly controlled. ''It's better to over communicate,'' says Shukla, whose Web startup, Rubric, made 65 of her 85 employees millionaires. Rather than dispensing information on a need-to-know basis, she made sure information was shared with all of her employees. She also created the CEO lunch, inviting six to eight employees at a time to discuss the business with her. Tide
of U.S. Collegians Studying Abroad Swells More American college students went overseas to study last year than ever before--a 14% increase. That marked the third straight year of double-digit growth, according to a survey released Monday by the Institute of International Education. Several factors drive the trend: a search for ethnic heritage, a wider array of programs, a booming economy and strong dollar that make living overseas cheaper, and a growing international job market. Students "increasingly view themselves as connected to the global economy," said Allan E. Goodman, president of the institute. The surging popularity draws students like UCLA senior Parag Ladhawala, who found that the management courses he took at Delhi University in India last year give him an edge in job interviews, especially for jobs overseas. Besides learning Hindi, Ladhawala, whose family is of Indian descent, said prospective employers see that he has become much more resourceful and self-sufficient. Far
More Come Here to Study By shipping bodies overseas, "those students will not be using our parking lots, or living in the dorms or standing in line at the cafeteria," said Jessica van der Valk, director of UCLA's Education Abroad office. John A. Marcum, systemwide director of the UC Education Abroad Program, said the university works hard to make sure that students can go overseas without missing a step toward completion of their degrees. Like other universities, UC has arranged for programs that extend beyond the traditional overseas courses in the social sciences, the arts and humanities. "The place I was staying was $75 a month," said Ladhawala, recalling his housing in India. Compare that to the $550 a month or more the UCLA senior has spent on an apartment in Westwood. Oh?
Calcutta? The No. 2 city, unjustly overlooked by travelers, is
surprisingly enjoyable as a chapter in an epic human story CALCUTTA - Our expressions of amusement clearly disturbed the dozen or so other spectators at the low-budget sound and light show patently over-billed as "Pride and Glory," a feel-good promotional slide presentation about the beauty and charm of Calcutta, complete with lilting jingle. Maybe you had to be an outsider to appreciate the irony of an Indian "Pride and Glory" exercise happening in the shadow of the oh-so-British Victoria Memorial. My wife, Stacie, and I were sitting in the Maidan, the city's huge central park. In front of us was the enormous, domed white marble museum dedicated to Queen Victoria and that part of Calcutta's history that the Chamber of Commerce production conveniently overlooked: the 139 years - 1772 to 1911--when this was the capital of the British Raj and the second-largest city in the British Empire. But for all its flaws, Calcutta is the most fascinating of India's major cities. The best place to begin appreciating Calcutta is at the beginning: the Kali Temple, reachable by India's lone--and surprisingly adequate--subway line. "Calcutta," you see, is the mangled English pronunciation of "Kalikata," "city of Kali." In the Hindu pantheon, Kali is revered as a mother figure, the giver of life, and also as the destroyer of evil. Kali's next-door neighbor is Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity Hospital for the Dying and Destitute, where a different sort of tourist ethic prevails. Visitors are encouraged to enter a ground-floor ward and observe. Stacie and I knew that what awaited us was not pretty, but we wanted to witness, if only for a moment, the celebrated work being carried on in Mother Teresa's name--the work of giving dignity to the dying. Hard is the heart that can leave this scene of pathos without making a generous donation. Central Calcutta invites pedestrian exploration, but to see the outlying sites requires a ride. The Indian Tourism Development Corp. and the West Bengal Tourist Authority operate eight-hour "luxury" bus tours for the bargain price of 100 rupees, about $2.40 when we were there. We boarded one of the tour buses on Shakespeare Sarani, a major avenue in Calcutta's upscale Chowringhee district. Off we rode through the Maidan, which on Saturday mornings swarms with white-clad boys aspiring to become India's next cricket superstar. We looped around the Raj Bavan, the former British governor's residence, modeled after Lord Curzon's palatial manor in Derbyshire; in 1998 it was the commodious home of the state's communist governor. Then it was up and across the Howrah Bridge over the Hugli River, the western channel of the Ganges. Downtown Calcutta is a grid of banks and government buildings centered around the old Dalhousie Square, now BBD Bagh (the letters stand for the names of three Bengali heroes). To the west is the silver-domed General Post Office. On that site, when it was Ft. William, stood the infamous "black hole of Calcutta." In 1756 the impetuous 19-year-old nawab (ruler) of Murshidabad, Siraj-ud-Daula, attacked the British garrison holed up inside the fort. Of the 146 prisoners his men force-fitted into the 18-by-15-foot guardroom for the night, only 23 survived. Sir Robert Clive avenged the massacre the next year, killing the nawab and securing Bengal for the crown. Our rickshaw puller let us off near the deceptively named New Market, a Victorian red brick hall just off Chowringhee. From there it was but a short walk past dozens of humble street cafes to Calcutta's best dining experience, Aaheli, where for $9 each we worked our way through a traditional Bengali feast. And "work your way" is entirely accurate. You are supposed to finish each of the seven mounds of food--most of them unrecognizable to us—before moving on to the next, because they are arranged in a linear progression of tastes that goes from mild to spicy and back to mild. Alcohol is not served, and in the purest Bengali tradition, neither is silverware. We walked back to our hotel, the Great Eastern, where our laundry was stacked on the bed in neat piles, each piece tagged to identify it among the thousands our dhobi-wallah had washed that day. And so it is with Calcutta: The city that at first exposure seems alarmingly overwhelming turns out also to be reassuringly neat and orderly. |
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