The question of whether entrepreneurial skills can be taught in college has vexed many a brilliant academic.

Peter Thiel, who co-founded PayPal, certainly doesn’t prescribe to the learning at college route for entrepreneurs. Last November he launched a programme where he pledged US$100,000 (Dh367,300) each to 20 students under the age of 20 if they chose to drop out of college to spend their time developing innovative projects. Mr Thiel also runs a venture-capital fund that has invested in companies such as Facebook and LinkedIn.

“There was a generational divide where a lot of the most positive reaction was from younger people,” he told the The Wall Street Journal when asked what reaction he had received to news of his programme. “Then there were other people who went to college in the 1960s and 1970s when it was basically free and don’t understand what’s happened now with amassing a quarter-million dollars in debt [because of college fees].

“The broader goal was to start a conversation between education and entrepreneurship; we don’t think the link is automatic.”

Other entrepreneurs, however, have drawn deeply on their academic backgrounds.

The Chilean entrepreneur Fernando Fischmann used his training as a biochemist to spend about six years inventing a solution that keeps water in lagoons crystal clear. He created a technology that uses a pulse system and low-energy filtration to stop water stagnating.

His company, Crystal Lagoons, has built a lagoon in Chile that holds 250 million litres of water. It is 1km long and has a surface area of eight hectares. It is the equivalent of 6,000 8 metre long swimming pools and has been credited by Guinness World Recordsas the world’s biggest swimming pool. Today, Crystal Lagoons has 150 projects under way around the world, including a number in the MENA region.

Mr Fischmann says to succeed, entrepreneurs need to be driven by an inner force even when people question the logic of what they are trying to do. So dreaming of a solution is one thing, but entrepreneurs must also possess the inherent knowledge needed to make the solution work.

Conventional wisdom says entrepreneurs should try to develop a local business into a national one, then a regional operation and then an international company. Think global, act local might be a catchy phrase for an international bank, but the world is full of failed entrepreneurs who tried to spread too far geographically.

In other words, they should have remained local and been the best at what they did in the local market. This might sound like the antithesis of the growth story and it probably is. Yet local growth brings prosperity to the local economy.

Professor Michael Porter, in his 1990 book The Competitive Advantage of Nations , set about explaining how the competitive advantage of a nation contributed to its economic prosperity. Prof Porter believed that his ideas could also be applied to the micro level companies set up in inner cities in the West. That led to the creation of an inner-city entrepreneurship project called The Inner 100, first run in the UK and the US.

The Inner 100’s mission was to champion enterprise-led regeneration and to promote the untapped market potential of the inner city. The scheme supported fast-growth businesses in inner cities through events, media exposure, awards, research papers, and by creating The Inner City 100 index, which the Financial Times first published in 2001.

The Inner 100 programme actively supported enterprise-led regeneration and the promotion of local markets.

The project was undertaken in the context of inner cities becoming economically deprived through a shortage of jobs. Out-of-town business parks attracted global companies, huge supermarkets that could only be reached by car sucked dry local grocers and neighbourhood businesses. The scheme was one way of trying to create localised prosperity through local enterprise.

Unfortunately, one of the criticisms of the scheme was that some of the businesses in The Inner City 100 index were so successful, with an average five-year turnover growth rate of 575 per cent, that they forced local rents and living costs up, in turn pushing out those who could not afford to trade and live in the suddenly prosperous inner city areas. This led to a new wave of wealthier individuals moving into trendy, refurbished inner-city dwellings and forcing out long-term tenants.

In Dubai, aswaaq is a neighbourhood grocery run by local people and supported by the Government.

It has cleverly created a street-market concept within a community centre environment to service the needs of suburbs across the city.

At the launch of the project in 2008, Abdul Baset al Janahi, the chief executive of aswaaq, said: “Aswaaq believes in the need to improve the socio-economic standard of the local communities [and] is committed to providing essential commodities and services to all members of the family in accordance with the co-operative society concept and innovative ideas by using modern technology in the retail industry.”

I live in a part of Dubai very close to an aswaaq community centre and can see at street level the vibrancy it brings to the local community. Let’s hope that successful local entrepreneurial businesses continue to think local and act local.

Information technology often brings together innovative hobbyists seeking “to do some good”. Over a period of time their labours of love create new industry elements the rest of us consume. The technology migrates from accessible free channels created by entrepreneurs to tightly controlled ones managed by a few corporations for which the pursuit of profit is the driving force.

This is the view of Professor Tim Wu, of Columbia University, in his new book The Master Switch. He says this progression from an open to a closed system, which he terms “the cycle”, has happened to the telephone, radio, television and movie industries. And now it’s happening with the internet.

The cycle occurs because the industries affected are based on networks: the telephone sector is based on physical fibre optic and copper networks running under the oceans and across land.

The movie business is also based on networks owned by a few powerful film studios; it encompasses their production facilities, the multiplexes they own or over which they exert an influence, plus the post-cinematic distribution channels, such as paid-for download websites, DVDs, satellite and cable pay-per-view channels and those operated by hotels and airlines.

According to Prof Wu, once organisations begin to build such networks and gain control over them, they start to drift towards a monopolistic state. History shows that if governments are not involved in these industries by then, they soon become so. Prof Wu says entrepreneurs and regulators eventually smash this cosy, closed system and the cycle starts once more. Each of the industries he analyses in his book has become a monopoly, duopoly or cartel, followed by governmental intervention or entrepreneurial disruption.

The internet is undergoing a change; in the future a few large corporations will probably tightly manage how and what data flow between users and between companies. This will result in the abandonment of a central axiom on which the internet was built – the concept of “net neutrality”.

Net neutrality means whatever the content – e-mail, images, phone calls or video – travel over the internet is equally available. Also, internet service providers (ISPs) delivering content to users must treat all of the data (websites, content, platforms) in the same way. They cannot prioritise one type of traffic or content provider over another.

Therefore, a company such as Microsoft cannot pay an ISP to make sure it prioritises searches using its Bing engine rather than Google. Otherwise those who could pay, generally large companies, would have an unfair advantage in reaching internet users against, say, smaller firms. So net neutrality is a big deal.

However, quietly, in the period a few days before Christmas, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in the US announced it was upholding the concept of net neutrality for fixed-line broadband – but not for mobile networks.

The announcement was the culmination of a long-running saga in which a number of major corporations such as Google and Verizon were accused by public interest groups in the US of lobbying the FCC to abandon net neutrality.

When The New York Times originally broke the story last summer, that the FCC might abandon net neutrality, it resulted in protesters marching on the commission’s offices and holding demonstrations outside the buildings of the corporations allegedly concerned.

In a recent twist, the FCC issued a press release on December 21 titled: FCC acts to preserve internet freedom and openness. And for fixed-line broadband ‘Rule 3: No Unreasonable Discrimination’ of its official statement, that appears to be the case. “A person engaged in the provision of fixed broadband internet access service, insofar as such person is so engaged, shall not unreasonably discriminate in transmitting lawful network traffic over a consumer’s broadband internet access service. Reasonable network management shall not constitute unreasonable discrimination,” the FCC statement says.

The FCC regards reasonable network management as: ensuring network security and integrity; addressing that which is harmful to the network; dealing with traffic that is unwanted by users; and reducing or mitigating congestion on the network.

What has angered public interest groups, and what looks likely to result in legal challenges against the FCC ruling, is that it has fudged the issue of net neutrality when it comes to mobile networks. This is important because internet access is increasingly being sought by users over mobile networks.

The FCC defends its decision by citing how competitive the mobile industry is today and, bizarrely, the prevalence of operating systems such as Android. “In light of these considerations, we conclude it is appropriate to take measured steps at this time to protect the openness of the internet when accessed through mobile broadband,” the commission says.

This paves the way for mobile operators to charge users an additional amount if they want to access services such as Facebook or YouTube through their mobile devices.

Equally, mobile operators could also charge Facebook, Skype and others to provide their content on mobile networks. Both scenarios abandon net neutrality.

The internet is moving through a new phase of the cycle, as Prof Wu would put it. But it is one in which the principles that have been enshrined in the internet from inception are going to be broken.

It’s that time of year again, the end of the Gregorian calendar. It’s when executives calculate their expected bonuses. Companies tot up their end-of-year financials and congratulate themselves on how well they have done. And people at a personal level set new-year resolutions, such as buying a gym membership, which never gets used more than once or twice in that year.

The theme that ties all of these disparate elements together is growth.

More specifically it is an intrinsic need for organisations and individuals to do better in the future than they did in the past. To be not only better, but bigger, shinier, faster and all those other verbs that describe growth and how exciting it is to be part of something that is moving upwards, as opposed to something standing still or declining.

Our brains and company dashboards are programmed, in fact hard-wired, to expect year-on-year growth. Anything less is simply not acceptable.

Whether it’s a nation’s GDP or a company’s end-of-year revenue forecast, it has to be more in the future than it was in the past. Indeed, we are told by the people who “apparently” matter – analysts, financial professionals, commentators on the economy – that growth from year to year is the only way to secure the survival of life as we know it. If we don’t keep growing, those behind us in the economic food chain will catch up and squash us as they muscle their way through to the front.

We should stop for a moment and ask ourselves: why should we keep expanding our economies and companies every year so that they are bigger this year than they were last year?

The typical response from defenders of the year-on-year growth model will be that if we don’t continue to grow, we will see a rising number of unemployed on the streets, leading to potential social disorder and unrest; the level of tax income for governments to invest in national infrastructure, education, health projects and general upkeep will diminish; civic and public services provided by the state may be withdrawn because of austerity measures, such as the cuts taking place across much of Europe at the moment. And the list goes on. It all sounds rather scary, doesn’t it?

It is a reality with which thinkers at the New Economics Foundation (NEF) have been grappling over the past year, since the NEF launched an ambitious project to create a new economic model. This new approach places a sustainable environment and equitable economic justice at its centre. It aims to address human well-being by tying it to determining factors such as income distribution, working hours and aggregate output. In effect, the NEF is trying to provide us with a blueprint to break the vicious economic cycle into which we have gotten ourselves, by placing what is important to society front and centre and doing it in light of the finite resources we are told we have left on the planet.

While the academics and thinkers at the NEF tinker away at a more sustainable and equitable macroeconomic model, others have drawn inspiration from this work and decided to take the matter into their own hands at a local level. The Transition Towns Network (TTN) is one such example that goes against the conventional wisdom of the growth model.

A fairly recent phenomenon, the TTN started in the town of Totnes, Devon, in the UK but has spread to more than 14 countries. Its objectives are “to inspire, encourage, connect, support and train communities as they self-organise around the transition model, creating initiatives that rebuild resilience and reduce CO2 emissions”. So rather than waiting for central government to step in and solve local community problems, which would mean waiting far too long or leaving it to individuals who would not be able to have enough of an impact, the TTN wants people in their local communities to collectively come up with ingenious ways of creating more sustainable and equitable local economies.

By taking a positive view of sharing ideas to solve local problems, the TTN is fast becoming a platform for a host of ideas that support local growth. Take one of the recent projects, called Freedom Heating. It is being tried out in the northern Appalachians and the Catskills in New York. Freedom Heating aims to create a free heating system for indoor spaces by “utilising the energy created in carbon-nitrogen combustion reactions found inside organic breakdown”. In other words, using matter such as a compost heap and burying a water hose inside it. The pioneers behind this project are testing it over this winter. Good luck to them.

Elsewhere, people have set up local food directories and delivery services so that fresh food is produced, sold and consumed locally; thereby avoiding transport costs and the use of chemicals to preserve the food over long journeys. There are clothes-swap schemes, based on the idea that most of us have in our closets new-to-newish clothes that we never wear. However, others may be able to use these, and, likewise, possessions they have wasting away in their cupboards may be just the item we are looking for.

Local and sustainable solutions such as these are what the TTN says matters to people, not what the GDP of the nation is or what is happening on the stock market indices. To create a prosperous local economy does not require targets that are geared for year-on-year growth.

Rather, the metrics, if such a term can be used in this context, are all about the need to improve the quality of people’s lives, raise their living standards and make them healthier. I’d say these are resolutions worth setting for next year, wouldn’t you?

Anyone who has read of the adventures of Captain Nemo in Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, can only have been left with a sense of wonderment as to the mysteries of the deep. The journey to an incredible underwater forest, a visit to the lost city of Atlantis and a ferocious fight with a giant squid are all memorable sequences in the novel.

It has been 141 years since the book was first published. But despite technological advances in many walks of life, humankind knows little about the oceans. National Geographic (1) estimates we have mapped only 2 or 3 per cent of the seabed.

Yet in this period we have mapped the entire surface of Mars, and you can even view it today using Google Mars. Oceanographers rightly point out that despite two-thirds of our planet being ocean, we know little about it and what resources lie within it. The greatest ocean depths known to us are around 36,000 feet, where water pressure is about 16,000 pounds per square inch. Even a titanium sphere-shaped vessel may get us only to about 18,000ft before imploding.

This grim thought has not stopped private companies such as Hawkes Ocean Technologies from designing submarines that will journey into the deep. Who knows what they will discover as they try to create a new industry of deep-sea mining.

However, one thing is certain. As they dive deeper they will pass by the nervous system of the internet – submarine cables with fibre optics at their core.

There are tens of thousands of kilometres of submarine cables meshed across the planet, serving more than 95 per cent of the world’s internet and telephone traffic. It is mainly these cables that connect us to data and people. A connection to the internet may start as wireless but become a wired signal once it reaches a base station, continuing on a submarine cable.

The idea for a submarine cable was first tested by Samuel Morse in 1842, when he submerged a wire insulated in tarred hemp and India rubber off New York Harbor and sent a telegram through it. The idea was commercialised in 1850 by the Anglo-French Telegraph Company, which laid a submarine cable across the Channel from England to France. Other cables, including a transatlantic line and another connecting the UK to India and Yemen, went into service by 1870.

These early cables allowed empires of the 19th century to keep track of what was happening in far-flung corners of the world and relay information and decisions back and forth. What started as a tool of empire has today morphed into a medium to satisfy our bandwidth-hungry lifestyles.

It is estimated that global bandwidth usage is doubling every 18 months because of services such as video downloading, peer-to-peer applications such as YouTube, cloud computing and social media networking. Demand from previously unconnected geographies such as populous regions of Africa and Asia is increasing. Even countries such as Greenland – with a population of 56,000 – that were totally reliant on satellite links are switching over to submarine cables.

And in the commercial sector, businesses are seeking out more diverse routing options in the event that submarine cables are accidentally cut. The memory of the internet disruption that hit this region in January 2008 is still fresh in most minds. Approximately 75 million people were left with minimal internet access, because of a ship mooring off the coast of Egypt and cutting a submarine cable. The impact on international business was so catastrophic that a spokesman for the Egyptian ministry of communications made a plea for people not to download music and video, as this would affect businesses that had more important things to do with what precious bandwidth remained.

The truth is we are totally reliant on these physical submarine cables for our communications. According to the International Telecommunication Union (2), 2 billion people are connected to the internet, double the number with internet connections 10 years ago. With only 21 per cent of the population connected in developing countries, there is plenty of room for growth.

Fortunately, a number of telecommunications companies have been working in consortiums with investors in the past few years to put in place ambitious plans to build additional submarine cable diversity and routing options. This year, US$5.4 billion (Dh19.83bn) of cable projects are due for completion (3).

Some of the submarine cable projects in this region are the 17,000-kilometre Europe-India Gateway cable connecting landing points in Europe, north Africa, the Middle East and India. The cable will have a capacity of 3.4 terabits. To put that number in context, if you download a high-quality DVD movie of 4 gigabits, that is the equivalent of 0.004 terabits. The Gulf Bridge International cable system is the first privately owned submarine cable project in the Middle East.

These projects will satisfy immediate demand as well as reduce the price of bandwidth to end users. Stray ships and underwater earthquakes have a habit of knocking the cables out. And with more users connecting and becoming dependent on the internet for commerce, greater vigilance is needed to keep these submarine cables operational. This, unlike the rest of the ocean floor, should not be a mystery to those tasked with safeguarding the nervous system of the internet.

References

1. National Geographic News, 17 February 2005, http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/02/0217_050217_seamap.html

2. ITU Facts and Figures 2010

3. The Guardian, 18 August 2008, http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/aug/18/east.africa.internet

The road to senior management is littered with landmines concerning business ethics. Well, it is if you speak to academics teaching MBA courses at business schools. It is not if you ask most of the students, who really could not care less.

The reality is that full or part-time business school students who are self-financing their MBA programme, which the majority of them do, are paying somewhere in the region of US$50,000 (Dh183,650) for the privilege. In most cases they have taken on some form of loan, which needs to be paid back on an aggressive payment plan following graduation.

So worrying about business ethics is an unnecessarily thorny issue. It just entangles and slows them down, from the minor objective of debt clearance and the major objective of rising up the corporate ladder to earn their place in the hall of fame for whatever organisation they happen to be working for.

It’s something that Dr Mary Gentile, a former teacher of business ethics at Harvard Business School and the author of Giving Voice to Values: How to Speak Your Mind When You Know What’s Right, has struggled with. She recently wrote in the Financial Times about how she suffered a crisis of faith on whether teaching business ethics was even ethical.

In the classes Dr Gentile taught, the students who advocated “ethical” positions in debates would appear to the rest of the class as less sophisticated.

In fact, those in the classroom who came across as worldly wise took the position that the market did not permit self-serving morality. And it was wrong to place one’s own conscience before the benefit of the organisation and its shareholders. Still, other students went so far as to tell her they resented the business school preaching to them what was right or wrong.

It is little wonder then that business schools have been referred to by some as the temples of the cult of financial engineering, if those studying at them make short shrift of the subject of business ethics.

The type of financial engineering under scrutiny is that which trains managers to become so focused on quarterly figures that achieving long-term sustainable growth for the corporation is then someone else’s problem.

Investors and financial institutions, we are told, want to see rapid quarter-on-quarter growth earnings. Anything less and the stock price will take a hit, the management team will lose the confidence of the market and it will be all downhill from there.

Somewhat going against this grain of thinking, Paul Polman, the chief executive of Unilever, recently told a group of analysts: “Unilever has been around for 100-plus years. We want to be around for several hundred more years. So if you buy into this long-term value-creation model, which is equitable, which is shared, which is sustainable, then come and invest with us. If you don’t buy into this, I respect you as a human being, but don’t put your money in our company.”

Pretty bullish words, which in effect tell short-term investors to go take a hike and invest with enterprises that will make a quick buck on their principle.

But then again, Unilever has a long history of success in global markets and Mr Polman can afford to take a stand on what he believes to be right for his company.

Unfortunately, the majority of organisations and their management cannot. They do not have this luxury and the need to attract investment, whatever the time-horizon, is always a pressing issue. And it is in these situations that business ethics and sustainability fall off the balanced scorecard, or whatever measurement metric the organisation uses.

Yes, some portion of the blame concerning short-term thinking, lack of morals and downright greed can be pegged on the door of the business schools. But much more can be traced back to a loss in the craft of management.

Not too long ago, before managers became today’s financial engineers, there was a time when the manager learnt the craft of management on the job from a master who possessed domain level knowledge of their area. They had mastered the subject and all its permutations. This knowledge and experience was then meticulously passed on to the next generation of manager, who served as the master’s apprentice.

This point is well argued in The Puritan Gift: Reclaiming the American Dream Amidst Global Financial Chaos. The brothers Kenneth and William Hopper insisted that what made the American economy the greatest power of the 20th century was a set of values that the captains of industry inherited from the puritan founding fathers of the nation.

There were a quartet of values – a belief that the purpose of life was to establish the kingdom of Heaven on Earth; an aptitude for mechanical skills; a moral outlook that placed the interests of the group over the individual; and an ability to assemble financial, material and human resources for a single purpose.

The brothers say that these values were lost in enterprises. Instead, social hierarchies within organisations were created, in which managers did not have to technically work their way up an organisation.

The notion of master and apprentice was thus lost. The matter was worsened further by business schools that encouraged short-term, individualistic ideas that spawned a culture of greed in which morality was the baby that got thrown out with the bath water.

It might be uncomfortable for some and completely alien to most to even be discussing values and morals in the way the Hopper brothers do. But if we don’t do it who will – the business schools?

Sometimes customers are crying out for your products and services but the barriers to serving those customers are just too difficult to overcome, so companies don’t bother.  My parents’ home town is one such place.

Over the past week I’ve been travelling in the Indian state of Bihar and specifically its capital city Patna. Some 103 million people live in Bihar, India’s third most populous province.

Bihar is known for many things. In the 1990s the colourful Laloo Prasad Yadav, as chief minister of Bihar, entertained the public while jousting with the central government in Delhi by way of his populist agenda and unconventional methods.

Long before that, Bihar was the centre of the Mauryan civilization (321BC-185BC), which had made huge developments in learning. Today, the monuments and antiquities of this dynasty are but crumbling edifices of ancient history – and are designated UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

But long-since departed civilisations are not the only evidence of potential turmoil.

Last week, the National Election Watch (NEW), a nationwide campaign comprising more than 1,200 non-governmental organisations and other citizen-led organisations working together on electoral reforms, improving democracy and governance in India, said many candidates given tickets by the major political parties for the recent Bihar assembly elections face pending criminal investigations. Nothing new for Bihari’s used to the fact that people who gain success in state level politics are generally those who take whatever measures they deem necessary to achieve it.

What’s been noticeable on my visit to Bihar this time is that, despite the state being one of the poorest in India, there is opportunity for entrepreneurs brave enough to set up there. Unfortunately, the barriers to market entry make it a bridge too far for most, resulting in many firms staying away.

Major metro cities such as Delhi have seen a surge in demand for mid-tier residential and commercial property – with prices increasing by 300 per cent in many areas over the past five years. This boom has been accompanied by concerns over the quality and safety of construction. While I was in the capital recently, a residential building collapsed, killing 60 people. This followed incidents including the bridge collapse prior to the Commonwealth Games in the city.

A visit to any of India’s high-gloss shopping malls in major metropolises is akin to visiting malls in Dubai. Same brands, similar staff training and on-par prices, which is a real sore point for the tourist hoping to bag a bargain.

Big Indian cities are not cheap places to live for the burgeoning middle class. Young professionals are leveraged on their property, cars and consumables. While their parents’ generation celebrated paying off their debts, the new Indians have welcomed debt with open arms. The government has kept interest rates high, at more than 13 per cent, in a bid to stop cheap credit flushing the market, risking a major implosion within the next few years. That may still happen.

In Bihar, however, things are still pretty sleepy. In Patna, the four-star Chanakya still holds its position as the best hotel in town. As for safe and snazzy places to eat outside the hotels, don’t hold your breath, but there are a couple of food and beverage offerings. One such place I had the pleasure of visiting was Yo China! The entrepreneurs who started this first Chinese chain in India reasoned that the market in places such as Patna was untapped for good quality, safe, hygienic food sold at a reasonable price. They were right, and the dine-in restaurant is almost always full.

Likewise in the telecommunications sector – the Bahraini company Batelco has purchased a 49 per cent stake in STel, a pre-paid mobile network operator also with a footprint in Bihar.

“The successful completion of this deal supports our growth and expansion strategy in wireless and broadband markets and boosts Batelco’s long-term plans to diversify our geographical footprint and dramatically increase our scale,” said Peter Kaliaropoulos, the Batelco chief executive.

Despite these few bright spots, as well as an improvement in the economic management of the state under Shri Nistish Kumar, Bihar’s present chief minister, most investors have stayed away. Dealing with the government and authorities is filled with uncertainty. Too many bureaucrats are looking for their 10 per cent. Some may also be convicted criminals and they and their hired muscle are not the kind of people you’d want to cross in a business transaction.

Basic infrastructure such as electricity is vastly deficient. The question most citizens outside Patna ask is not how long the electricity will be off for, but how long it will be on. Temperature in the summer hits 34°C and in the winter drops to 10°C, so the lack of dependable power is a huge problem for residents as well as struggling businesses.

The complete absence of a workable road infrastructure means even short journeys can take hours and accidents are commonplace. As my driver commented: “Sir, if you can drive in Patna at an off-peak time, you can drive in any major world capital at a peak time.”

So, despite there being organic demand from a bustling population, I’m not expecting businesses in the Middle East to go rushing into Bihar any time soon. If, however, there are any brave enough with a long-term investment horizon in mind, then rest assured there are 103 million Biharis eagerly waiting to give you their custom.

One of the pleasures of dealing with a small entrepreneurial business is the energy and enthusiasm that one encounters, particularly from its founders.

The passion on display and the work ethic they maintain is often missing at larger, more staid organisations. Among the challenges faced by small businesses is how to maintain that energy and enthusiasm as they expand in scale, scope, resource and geographic horizons.

And today the opportunity to scale up and become a global company comes knocking on the door of these small enterprises early in their growth cycle. Forces that drive small businesses to create global networks of customers, suppliers and even employees include the cheap availability of communications technology through the internet and services such as Skype.

Communicating globally at low cost was once the preserve of IT directors at large organisations who maintained complicated telecommunications infrastructures such as X.25 networks. For a globally dispersed organisation this was a considerable operating expense and required specialist teams of engineers to interface with the telecoms companies that owned these networks.

Travelling around Delhi this week and the towns that ring it such as Noida and Gurgaon, one sees the imprint left by large global organisations that have outsourced many of their functions to a more than willing and competitive skilled Indian workforce.

Surprisingly, upon closer inspection one also comes across many small enterprises not based in India that have taken the bold step of setting up operations in India and outsourcing work there. The well-documented story of yesteryear has been of the large western organisation servicing call centres and business processes from India. Today one sees their smaller counterparts also treading the same path.

One such small organisation based in the US is G-Biosciences. Dr Aftab Alam, its founder and chief executive, runs this biotech company with 50 employees. A serial entrepreneur and inventor based in St Louis, Missouri, he decided to move half of his operations for channel and business development to India in 2006. His company supplies chemical kits to research firms in the biosciences industry, and one of his most profitable business lines is private labelling for the larger companies in his sector.

Dr Alam is also the inventor of the world’s first walk-through child safety gate, which he patented and licenced back in 1984. The success he achieved allowed him to start his current biotech venture.

He also happens to be my uncle, and I am intrigued that he decided to bring work back to India, our mutual country of origin. The question which puzzles me is why would a small business from St Louis want to set up in Delhi, other than the fact that its founder is originally an Indian national? There is, after all, a huge time difference between the US and India as well as a significant disparity in business culture. As we all know, Americans are very direct and tell you as it is; whereas in Indian business culture nobody likes to say “no”, for fear of losing face and disappointing the inquirer.

“Despite the cultural differences businesses face when they set up in India there is still a huge competitive cost advantage,” says Dr Alam. “It’s like the Gold Rush, everyone wants to be here and then work out what they need to do once they arrive.”

However, he warns that small to medium enterprises entering the Indian market must recalibrate their expectations, because what they thought would take them one year will probably take two. “We only do our low-tech work in India,” he says, “whereas the high-tech innovative work is still done in the US because we can be sure to maintain quality and professionalism.”

G-Biosciences was able to capitalise on its founder’s Indian origins to enter the local market. But this is not a factor that is available to most. What then?

Fortunately the process of helping small firms outsource or build a networked employee base across the world in places such as India has now been made simpler by the British firm Quickstart Global, among others. It makes the process of finding employees who form part of the networked organisation around the world easier. Such companies source and take care of incorporating and setting up offices overseas for primarily small business owners. This was not something they could previously afford to do because of the associated cost and risk.

One of Quckstart’s clients is Monumental Games, which makes video games such as Moto GP and Football Superstars. Based in Britain, it used Quickstart’s services to hire games developers in India, who can now take part in video conferencing via Skype. These employees are based in Pune, but they are managed from Nottingham in the UK.

Large organisations that have used India as an outsource location have done so for business areas they deem as non-core, such as call centres. Small companies are following suit, with low-tech or low value work outsourced to India, while high-value thinking remains with the founders at the core, since that is where the energy and enthusiasm resides.

It is often said small organisations are more innovative. Yet to bring about significant change, large organisations must also innovate.

The trouble, as the US President Barack Obama found out last week at the American mid-term elections, is if you try to innovate on a large scale people feel threatened.

One of the issues that irked Republicans and brought out their vote was the president’s healthcare reform bill. The bill was passed by Congress in March but all Republicans had voted against it. The bill was based on three principles: reducing the cost of health care; providing greater access; and improving the quality.

Cost, access, quality – three variables that sit comfortably in any innovator’s mind. But the voters who went to the polls last week weren’t having it. They refused to accept the idea of “big government” telling them what to do, despite healthcare provision being such a “big problem” in the US.

Any chief executive of a large organisation who tries to infuse innovation faces the same dilemma. Large organisations struggle with innovation because they are structured for efficiency. To be efficient, large organisations make every task repeatable and predictable.

But innovation is the opposite mindset of efficiency because it is non-routine and unpredictable. That is why, when innovation takes place within a large organisation, people feel threatened, and the more vociferous among them fight back.

However, organisations that don’t innovate will disappear. The executives at Google understand this and are known to encourage staff to spend 20 per cent of their working hours on “pet” projects. The expectation is that this will lead to innovative ideas.

And let’s face it, organisations generate lots of ideas. It’s the implementation at which they struggle. Thomas Edison, the founder of General Electric, famously said: “Innovation is 1 per cent inspiration and 99 per cent perspiration.” In his view, implementation of the idea was the major effort.

Some organisations create a separate executive team to execute; one not hampered by any bureaucracy. This “skunk-works” approach was pioneered by Lockheed Martin for their advanced development programmes.

In 1997 HTC, a little-known Taiwanese firm, made personal digital assistants (PDAs) for other companies through a “white label” business model. It produced the popular iPAQ for Compaq, which commissioned HTC as an original design manufacturer (ODM), in charge of engineering and design.

The iPAQ was the first colour-screen PDA that ran on the Microsoft Windows’ CE platform and was an immediate hit with business professionals, with sales orders reaching 200,000 units a month, almost seven times HTC’s expectations.

In 2002, HTC made the XDA for the European mobile operator O2. It was one of the first Windows-based smartphones.

HTC was operating in two distinct segments. It was an ODM for the likes of Compaq, where it did not get involved in sales, marketing, or inventory management. And it was operating as a designer of mobile phones for operators such as T-Mobile, Orange and Vodafone.

Both of these business models functioned well, and by 2006 HTC shipped more than 70 per cent of the world’s Windows Mobile smartphones.

But HTC recognised the landscape was changing. Apple, RIM, Palm, Nokia and Google were now defining the shape of the market, and every major vendor had launched an applications store or related services that stuck with customers. HTC did not have an end-customer facing brand; no one knew who they were.

Its executives took the courageous decision to brand and sell handsets under its own name. This was a high-risk strategy because it would need to directly take on inventory, marketing and support, and warranty risks. Plus, there was the fear among HTC executives that mobile operators and device brands would now see them as a competitor. HTC’s share price halved as investors expressed anxiety with the new business model.

Rather than entering the market with a “me-too” offering, HTC began engineering a next-generation phone that would set it apart from the rest of the field. It worked on an innovative touch-screen interface.

Little did they know that Apple was about to unveil the iPhone, all ready to go with its own touch-screen technology. Rather than panicking, HTC finished its own HTC Touch product and shipped it three weeks before the iPhone hit the market.

Immediately, it became known as the “other iPhone” and more than 3 million Touch phones were sold worldwide in 11 months, about half of iPhone sales in the same period. Suddenly, people were talking about Apple and HTC in the same breath. It was a major coup for HTC, a company that previously had no brand position with end customers. No amount of advertising could have bought that position.

The executives at HTC took a “bet my company” approach to innovation and it worked. Critically, they defined the problem space, conceived the idea and implemented it.

Some big socio-economic problems require big-government intervention. Last week, many voted against healthcare reform. They saw it as a threat.

The Obama administration, like any organisation facing entrenched positions, has two options: capitulate, or as Edison would have recommended, keep perspiring until the job is done.

If you are an aficionado of Apple computers, then is this a great time or what?

Loyal customers have witnessed the launch of eye-popping consumer and crossover business products such as the iPod, iPhone and iPad.

Private and institutional investors in Apple have seen the stock price rise in the past 10 years from US$9 a share to more than $300. Either way, Apple is hot property.

It’s a brand we’ve fallen in love with, personifying artistry and engineering in a magnificent prism of spectral creativity.

Apple rewrote the meaning associated with portable music. Before the iPod, companies focused on performance improvements of their MP3 players by simply adding more gigabytes to the devices.

The companies playing in this category used newer digital audio encoding technologies but the product meaning remained the same – to enable a portable musical experience.

Apple didn’t try to compete by offering more gigabytes, it forged a new meaning: the seamless creation of personalised music.

The iTunes store allowed customers to buy music legally. No more Napster hangover. The iTunes software application enabled the simple management of this personalised music. The iPod was then the device that carried the personalised music about.

Fundamentally, it was an entirely new business model that made it simple for customers to buy music, compile it and listen to it. And we all snapped it up.

Apple quickly followed the iPod with the iPhone and more recently the iPad. The company today has great brand equity, a strong cash position and is being egged on by the analyst community to go make some serious acquisitions.

We’re so infatuated with Apple we fondly forget that it makes the iPhone 4G for an estimated $6.54 (Dh24) in China (1), which is about 1.1 per cent of its retail price.

We’d rather pay handsomely through the nose so that Apple retains profit margins above 60 per cent and the analyst community keeps asking for more. I think the word “mug” rather than the image of a fresh fruit comes to mind.

So is there anything that we the customers should really be worried about, since we don’t seem concerned about the 98.9 per cent mark up in price?

Well, Apple did fall from fourth to ninth in the Greenpeace Guide to Greener Electronics rankings (2). Greenpeace said the company did not provide clarity on their use of organo-chlorine and bromine compounds, or the future phasing out of its use of toxic chemicals. But these factors are unlikely to stir many consumers into a boycott.

Is there nothing else? Well, there was the report released by the Hong Kong based non-profit organisation, Students & Scholars Against Corporate Misbehaviour (SACOM) two weeks ago (3), titled “Workers as Machines: Military Management in Foxconn.”

Foxconn Technology Group is the world’s leading maker of electronics. It has a workforce of more than 900,000 in China. It is also makes the Apple iPhone and iPad, and is a supplier to Nokia, HP, Dell, Sony, Sony Ericsson and Motorola

The investigative report examined the working conditions at the Foxconn factories in Shenzhen and Hangzhou. You may remember these locations as the places where 13 Foxconn workers killed themselves between January and August this year. All of them were between the ages of 17 and 25, and most jumped out of factory windows, with one slitting his wrist.

The report blames profit maximisation for taking away the dignity of the workers and says: “Foxconn is not the only one to be blamed, but it is the most typical factory run by a management methodology that boosts productivity through the degradation of workers into dehumanised machines.”

Foxconn’s response to the suicides was for its chief executive, Terry Gou Tai Ming, to suggest the workers committed suicide to obtain compensation from the company for their families. Apple is singled out in the report because of the pressure many workers endured when producing the first generation of the iPad, such as this testimony from an engineer at the integrated digital product business group of Foxconn in Shenzhen:

“We produced the first-generation iPad. We were busy throughout a six-month period and had to work on Sundays. We only had a rest day every 13 days. And there was no overtime premium for weekends. Working for 12 hours a day really made me exhausted.”

Among the other militaristic tendencies of Foxconn the report details were: workers were disciplined if they spend too much time in the bathroom; “absolute obedience” was required; failure to meet quotas resulted in public humiliation; workers not returning to dormitories by11.30pm had to “volunteer” for janitorial services; and workers were beaten and harassed by the Foxconn security guards.

As to what the report recommends: “SACOM urges concerned organisations, consumers, investors, and the government to join the workers to pressure electronic factories to deliver decent working conditions in the electronics industry.”

Apple and its chief executive, Steve Jobs, have declined to comment on this latest SACOM report, though earlier this year Mr Jobs did say: “Apple does one of the best jobs of any company understanding the working conditions of our supply chain.” Whatever that means.

Mr Jobs, this is not a good enough answer. As Apple’s customers, and those of the other brands mentioned, we should not be blind to these flagrant abuses of workers’ rights in the pursuit of profit and personal satisfaction in consumption.

References:

1. This is the estimated cost of labour: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/technology/iphone-maker-faces-new-criticism-over-china-labour-practices/article1753051/ Market research from iSuppli indicates that the total cost of an iPhone is $187.51 http://www.isuppli.com/Teardowns-Manufacturing-and-Pricing/News/Pages/iPhone-4-Carries-Bill-of-Materials-of-187-51-According-to-iSuppli.aspx
2. “Guide to Greener Electronics” http://www.greenpeace.org/international/campaigns/toxics/electronics/how-the-companies-line-up/
3. “Workers As Machines: Military Management in Foxconn” http://www.sacom.hk/archives/740

You see a middle-aged guy cruising on a Harley-Davidson motorcycle down Jumeirah Beach Road on a weekend and what’s your first impression?

You wouldn’t be wrong if you thought he was a forty-something successful corporate type. The bike’s mythology today belongs to these well-to-do, would-be iconoclasts. Yet this story is forged more by accident than design.

The Harley narrative has been told in countless management journals as a classic business turnaround that goes something like this: the company restored product quality by fixing, among other things, the bike’s notoriously leaky engine.

Then they got close to the customer through HOG (Harley Owners Group) days where company executives rode bikes with the customers, and then relayed their findings back to the manufacturing floor to suggest improvements.

Therefore, product quality and customer intimacy saved the day, and since the 1990s the company has consistently outpaced stock market indices.

This is one reason why so many companies have tried to copy the Harley formula for success. Few have succeeded.

The reason, according to Professor Douglas Holt of Oxford University, in his well-researched book How Brands Become Icons, is that the Harley story as it’s been told by the company and business journals just doesn’t add up.

In fact, the company had very little to do with its market position today. Rather, certain cultural texts (newspapers, films, magazines, articles, political speeches, newsworthy events) built the myth of the Harley and hence its market position.

Post-Second World War, the Harley myth was about the outlaw. War veterans joined city kids to form a countercultural scene centred on biking. The ethos of the motorcycle clubs was a libertarian life, physical domination, manhood, toughness, tribal allegiances and surviving danger as a frontiersman.

Three cultural texts stitched Harley to this outlaw myth. In 1947, Life magazine ran a piece on the damage done to a small town in California by a motorcycle club, where boozed-up bikers rioted and disrupted the town. They were riding Harleys. It sent shock waves through middle-class American society.

Then, the movie The Wild One developed the myth. In it, Marlon Brando leads a hooligan biker gang into a small town. The fathers of the town fight back and send his biker gang packing. Brando rides a Harley*.

And throughout this period, there are stories about the Hells Angels, pillaging small towns in the US. The Angels predominately ride Harleys.

According to Prof Holt, the Harley myth, without any involvement from the company, was then repackaged from the myth of the outlaw to that of the gunfighter. Where the outlaw was undesirable, the gunfighter was necessary to bring toughness to society.

Two cultural texts stitched Harley to the gunfighter. First, in 1969 at Altamont, California, The Rolling Stones played a gig where they hired the Hells Angels to protect them. The Angels parked their choppers between the Stones and the 300,000 fans. The Stones were late, the crowd was restless, a man pulled a gun on an Angel, and the bikers knifed the man to death.

In the media frenzy that followed, the impression given was that the Angels fought the hippies to maintain order. Conservative politicians such as president Richard Nixon felt the hippies symbolised instability (civil rights and peace movements) and so distorted the minds of the young. So the Hells Angels, although violent, were also patriotic and conservative because they were defending the nation’s historic values.

The Angels staged counter-demonstrations at anti-war rallies and rallied around the US flag. The Harley-Davidson Motor Company at this time added the stars and stripes to its logo.

Second, the film Easy Rider depicted solo bikers moving through the frontier, which was filled with hippies, drugs and unfamiliar lingo. The film “portrayed bikers as lay philosophers of the frontier”, and spoke of how large, city-based institutions stripped men of their masculinity. So Harley’s myth was repackaged. It was now a steward of the country’s traditional masculinity, the gunfighter.

To bring us up to date, Harley was repackaged from the gunfighter to becoming the icon of the wealthy man of action.

In the 1980s, the US president Ronald Reagan wove a myth around America’s historic gunfighter. He routinely evoked Sylvester Stallone’s John Rambo character, and John Wayne and others to illustrate his point.

One of Reagan’s key allies, Malcolm Forbes of Forbes magazine, and his buddies would routinely fly off to politically sensitive locations such as Afghanistan, ride their Harleys, and then present the local authorities with a gift – a Harley. These Harley riders were championing capitalism and liberty in the face of a socialist, in this case Soviet, threat.

In 1983, Reagan aided Harley-Davidson by imposing a 49.4 per cent tariff against imported heavyweight motorcycles. Previously, it had been 4.4 per cent.

Harley, in Reagan’s rhetoric, had been wronged by America’s foes (the Japanese) and so the nation had to get behind the company.

But Harley needed to enlist the aid of wealthy men, not the rural, working-class guys. With the help of Mr Forbes they managed it, and in 1987 he and the Harley chief executive Vaughn Beals led a ride of 20 Harleys from the American Stock Exchange to the New York bourse, where a Harley was parked on the trading floor for the day.

Then in 1991, the ultimate action man, Arnold Schwarzenegger, signed on as the star in Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Much of the film took place on the back of a Harley.

Harley connected men with Reagan’s frontier call. Men who could afford it flocked to the bikes, causing one-year waiting lists. The company has not looked back since.

So next time you see a well-to-do guy on a Harley, remember it could easily have been an Indian or a Triumph. Some companies just accidentally end up successful.

* Correction – Brando was riding a Triumph, but some of his gang were on Harley’s.

The lore of Star Trek postulates the existence in space of an Alpha quadrant, home to the United Federation of Planets – called simply “the Federation”.  There is also, among three others, a Delta quadrant dominated by villainous cybernetic humanoid drones, the Borg, whose raison d’etre is to acquire new species and assimilate them into the Borg collective. Prior to acquisition, the target species are candidly told “resistance is futile”.

These two fictional quadrants are an extremely accurate pop-culture metaphor for the telecommunications industry – the Alpha quadrant – and the IT industry – the Delta quadrant.

Now, before you think I may have lost my marbles during teleportation and you set your phasers to “stun”, allow me to take you where no columnist has taken you before. My Vulcan-inspired logic to this hypothesis goes something like this:

The telecoms operators, like the federation of planets in the alpha quadrant, have for decades had cordial arrangements with one another to enable the voice and data traffic they carry for their customers to cross over into other operators’ networks. Whether these networks are in the domestic (national) sphere or whether they are international, the voice and data will originate at point A and be delivered to point B with 99.99 per cent certainty. This arrangement is referred to as “interconnect” by the telecoms industry and all the operators have specific departments and, in some cases, divisions responsible for dealing with the technical and commercial arrangements to “make it so”.

This interconnect arrangement had led to a healthy status quo; as long as customers are being offered the services they want at the right price points and quality there is really no need to change the order of things.

Occasionally, the telecoms operators decide to undertake bouts of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) activity. It’s rare but it does happen, as currently demonstrated by the interest Etisalat is showing in acquiring Zain, and the previous acquisition by Bharti of Zain’s assets in Africa. The motivations for one telecoms operator to acquire another are many but from an operational perspective they broadly fall under the following: to create a shared network infrastructure, whether that be for fixed, mobile, broadband or satellite services; the combined entity thus avoids interconnect costs between the respective networks and, more crucially, has access to a wider base of customers on the combined database; this in turn allows marketing to develop specific campaigns for these customers and so on.

The operator may also opt for the formation of a shared services architecture, whereby the core systems such as billing are converged across the combined entity.

Generally, most of this makes sense and is driven by achieving economies of scale and scope. Where the telecoms company executives keep the interests of their employees, customers and then shareholders front and centre, the M&A should succeed in the long term. If, however the M&A is being driven by investment bankers and brokers, who are more interested in talking up the deal to earn a hefty management fee, then it’s a bad call to make.

That’s the alpha quadrant: relatively stable; a place to work together for the common good.

Let’s beam ourselves into the delta quadrant, where giant predatory IT firms such as Oracle and Microsoft routinely acquire and assimilate smaller technology companies in a manner that would make even the Borg blush.

Since its audacious acquisition of PeopleSoft in 2005, Oracle has consumed a further 44 companies including major software application vendors such as Siebel Systems and Hyperion, middleware providers such as BEA Systems and server and storage vendors such as Sun Microsystems. Apparently, Oracle is now considering assimilating semiconductor companies into its collective.

Employees in the acquired entity must put aside their culture and heritage and comply with the Oracle collective, or be asked to leave. There are a number of stories about disgruntled staff and executives put in this situation. Recently, the co-creator of the Java programming language James Gosling made his announcement to leave Sun Microsystems a few months after Oracle acquired it. He did not state his reasons for his resignation on April 2 but cryptically put out the following comment on his blog a week later: “Just about anything I could say [about my reasons] that would be accurate and honest would do more harm than good.”

Whether customers actually benefit from having a reduction in choice, particularly when many of the acquired companies would have preferred to have remained standalone enterprises, is highly debatable. What Oracle, like the Borg, has successfully done is to create a homogenous hive, which adds to its technological distinctiveness by assimilating other companies, individuals and technology into a central controlling collective.

Oracle is just one company; others in the IT sector have similarly voracious appetites to acquire and assimilate. At this rate, there won’t be many IT service providers for enterprises to choose from. Surely that can’t be a good thing for business?

Perhaps even more troubling is that the past few years have seen the two worlds of telecoms and IT, or the people of the Federation and those of the Borg collective, colliding. The entry of Google into the voice market to compete with telecoms operators, or in the UAE the launch by du last week of a social networking portal for the region to take on Facebook, are just two of many skirmishes under way.

Which quadrant will, as Mr Spock would say, “live long and prosper” is up for grabs. But if the lore of Star Trek is anything to go by, hope that engineer Scotty is standing by to “beam you up” when the battle engages and there’s enough power left in the dilithium crystals to get us all out of the blast zone in time.

It is estimated that about 30 per cent of all energy used in commercial buildings is wasted, partly as a result of the materials used in construction.

The buildings materials industry is not one that immediately springs to mind when we think about innovation. It may be because the brightest and best brains of the past few generations have been applying their intellect in the worlds of finance and technology. Yet the construction industry is important – the built environment in which we work and live is responsible for 50 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide.

One company that is applying new “disruptive technology” to the construction materials industry to reduce emissions is Serious Materials, based in Sunnyvale, California. It is re-engineering common building products that use or lose the most energy. The company is upgrading all 6,500 dual-pane windows in the Empire State Building in New York by reusing the existing glass to create a more efficient material. The process is expected to result in a 38 per cent reduction in energy use and will pay for itself within three years.

This innovative approach to problem solving seemed sorely lacking at last week’s Cityscape Global construction sector exhibition held in Dubai. Trying to have an up-beat discussion with the sales representatives on the stands was, for me, analogous to attending a wake for the commercial property sector. There is a tremendous glut of vacant commercial property on the market today in Dubai, with plenty more to come. The question is what can be done about it?

I’ve heard a number of options. One radical solution doing the rounds is to knock down all of the empty, unwanted or incomplete commercial towers. This way the supply can be tightly controlled. Any developers or investors stuck in such a project could be given compensation by the master developer. Or, more realistically, they could move to a mature commercial area.

There have also been comments about the establishment of a central planning body to co-ordinate the work of the 16 free zones within Dubai. This body would have strategic oversight of all commercial property and be afforded the choice to make executive decisions that benefit the city overall.

To me, these and other ideas all deserve to be heard by the respective decision makers. However, they are not the kind of decisions civic leaders can make over night. They need to assess, ponder, consult and reflect, before deciding and that means we might be at Cityscape Global next year by the time any decisions are made.

Policymakers are also conscious of the heavily reduced tenanting cost of commercial office space, which means Dubai is once more financially attractive for organisations looking to set up in the Middle East or deciding where to base their staff. Coupled with the fall in residential prices, the city has been reclaimed as a mid-market proposition, which is a positive development since the mass of the market is always to be found in the middle.

Landlords bemoaning their bad luck at having built or invested in commercial office space only to find it untenanted, can also do their part to make Dubai a more attractive proposition. The convention over the past decade has been to hand over commercial office space as “shell and core” to the prospective tenant. This means the building would have its core structure, a vertical transport system (lifts, escalators) as well as the shell – the facade of the building.

However, the “in-fills”, such as floors, ceilings, finishes and interior decoration are not provided to the commercial tenant.

In the 1990s landlords in the UAE would generally rent out finished commercial office buildings, with all in-fills completed. The change came about because of the need to accommodate ICT (information communications technology) infrastructure such as cable trays, patch panels, switches and the like. But today, much of this ICT infrastructure is either wireless or standardised and unless the tenant is setting up something akin to a dealing floor of a stock exchange, their requirements can be fulfilled with a more generic infrastructure.

So, if landlords reestablish the previous convention of providing their tenants with a finished commercial office space as opposed to shell and core it may encourage more companies to occupy such space. Remember, the cost of fitting out commercial office space can be more than a couple of years of rent on the property itself, so if it’s already been done for the tenant then it makes the property exceptionally attractive.

A business acquaintance of mine was recently won over by a landlord who made just this proposal. The businessman is moving out of his old office space in a more cramped part of town to a new, fully in-filled commercial space in a mixed-use area.

Whether other landlords decide to be so innovative and follow suit, is a matter for them. But even a little innovation that spurs the market is better than none.

Love, beauty, honour, truth, justice. Aren’t these some of the core values that we aspire to attain at times in our lives? They are universal beliefs that tie us together which we, as parents, wish to impart upon our children.

These values transcend geographic boundaries, cultures and languages. Wherever we are in the world, we recognise them when we come across them; they are intrinsic elements of what it means to be human. Yet we don’t speak about these values in the one place where we spend most of our lives: the office.

When was the last time you heard a manager motivate a team by speaking about love, or someone tell you how inspired you made them feel by the way you stood up for the truth no matter the consequences. Never? That sounds about right. Either the manager would be seen as a bit of a quack or you would be labelled as a troublemaker. Why is it that as individuals we aspire to these values, but as a collective working group we forget?

The answer probably has something to do with that fact that the organisations we work for, particularly if they are in the private sector, have become decoupled from the very societies in which they operate. This is particularly true of multinational firms and finance companies, where management is so removed from its customers that it sees them as numbers in a spreadsheet and corporate social responsibility as a line item in the public relations budget.

There is, as the London Business School professor Gary Hamel puts it, a hole in the soul of business, and the past few years have highlighted this.

There are two things we can do about this issue: either ignore it and hope the problem goes away, or try and create a new business language and discourse based on social justice; one that creates social value as well as generating profit.

Thankfully, there are pockets of entrepreneurs who place a great deal of emphasis on social value. These social entrepreneurs have decided that they would rather not have unbridled profit as their mantra, but instead look to see how their enterprises can improve the well-being of society.

Opponents of this approach brush it off as nonsense – it is a woolly idea drummed up by a bunch of left-leaning do-gooders who weren’t smart enough to get into their first choice of career where they could earn hefty bonuses.

Until the well-documented success of micro-finance as championed by the Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus, the founder of Grameen Bank, there weren’t enough high-profile social entrepreneurial success stories. There are now. An array of projects are taking root in many parts of the world, which are creating a platform for like minded entrepreneurs.

Take Benetech, which uses technology and a not-for-profit operating model to create social value in three distinct areas. It provides technology solutions for the blind by way of audio book readers; it provides software for human rights groups and helps them to relay information through state-controlled firewalls; and provides environmental organisations with critical software to help restore the natural ecosystem in their communities.

All three technology solutions are areas where no venture capitalist would invest. For a venture capitalist, there is not enough scale and the margins are too low. But for Benetech, the business model works, as they operate as a not-for-profit. Remember that a not-for-profit does not mean that the organisation cannot hire the best people or pay a competitive market wage. It can. But these people are tasked with creating social value as opposed to maximising shareholder profit. In return, the community benefits from their enterprise and economic well-being – which is arguably greater than the sum of its parts – is generated.

Similarly, Samasource, a Silicon Valley-based firm, is using the internet to provide micro-work for women in refugee camps in Africa and Asia. Refugees undertake micro-work tasks such as data entry, book digitisation, audio transcription and video captioning. Samasource generates income and the women who would otherwise be unable to access a decent job earn a regular wage in a low-income locality.

During this period of renewed focus on entrepreneurship in the region, let us create a space for the rise of the social entrepreneur. In doing so, we can encourage them to place love, beauty, honour, truth and justice at the front and centre of what they do.

Thousands of business incubators have been set up around the world, mainly by governments and universities, which is probably one reason that they do not succeed in creating viable entrepreneurial businesses.

At least half of the incubators have traditionally been in the US, with the rest in Europe and Asia. In recent years, we have seen an emergence of business incubation projects in the MENA region, all trying to do something to help entrepreneurs.

The problem is that most of these facilities, wherever they are in the world, are administered and run by government officials and university academics. If someone chooses the path of public-sector work or academia, this implies in itself that the person is more cautious and risk-averse. Don’t get me wrong. There is nothing wrong with caution. Not everyone is born to follow the SAS motto, “Who dares wins.”

In fact, we want our government officials and academics to be cautious. Imagine what would happen if they started behaving like bankers; we would end up with toxic government regulation and subprime degrees – credentials with no value. No, I think we want our government officials and academics to be cautious, people who are a safe pair of hands and a little boring.

But running an incubator for entrepreneurs is all about understanding and dealing with risk in a fast-paced, pressure-cooker environment. Entrepreneurs can’t afford to be cautious. They have to leap first and work out where they’ve landed once they get there. The mentality of an entrepreneur is to break through comfort zones and not read the safety instructions. This is the antithesis of what government officials and university academics do.

Successfully holding down a government job or an academic post is highly correlated with not failing. Not having a black spot on the report card. Failure is not an option. But failure is part and parcel of entrepreneurial success. The most successful incubation environment in the world, Silicon Valley, is built on the failure of past attempts.

Typically, business incubation centres pride and market themselves on services such as business incorporation, high-speed internet access, outsourced computing hardware and software, networking opportunities, legal assistance, reprographics and training. Most also give a good sales pitch about providing entrepreneurs with access to finance and offering a high-energy working environment. But very few deliver, especially on the former.

So why are government officials and university academics running and administering business incubators? Would it not be more sensible to let entrepreneurs run them?

Why not hand them over to the people who can create a buzz and crank up the energy, build the excitement of the chase and offer rewards for closing that all-important first deal?

One business incubator in the US that has taken this approach is the Plug and Play Tech Centre, which originated in Palo Alto, California. It has been the incubation centre for the likes of Google, Logitech and PayPal. It is less than a quarter of a mile from Stanford University and two miles from Sand Hill Road, where super-sharp venture capitalists are based.

Plug and Play provides all of the basics in terms of the facility management and infrastructure, but critically, it also creates a great networking environment for entrepreneurs to bounce around ideas and generate business with one another. Additionally, the incubator gives access to venture capital. The centre is run by the entrepreneurial brothers Saeed and Rahim Amidi. Their father moved to Silicon Valley from Iran and set up a successful rug business, which attracted venture capitalists and dot-com millionaires wanting to furnish their newly acquired luxury homes with high-end Persian rugs.

Plug and Play has built strong ties directly with university students. The company targets bright students graduating from Stanford, encouraging them to bring their ideas to Plug and Play for incubation. The venture capitalists also know they are dealing directly with these budding entrepreneurs who have been groomed with the right business jargon and sales pitch by Plug and Play. So it works for all parties.

There is no fear of failure or rejection; it happens all the time. The entrepreneurs just dust themselves off and get on with the next pitch with another angel investor or venture capitalist.

Unfortunately, when incubation projects are run by government officials and university academics, bureaucracy and identity politics wash away any spark of entrepreneurial energy that did exist.

It is worth watching an episode of the highly rated BBC series Dragons Den to get a feel for the kind of grilling that venture capitalists dish out to aspiring entrepreneurs. The entrepreneurs approaching the five Dragons (the venture capitalists) for investment have three minutes to make an impression. If they can’t, they’re out. It’s a brutal environment. Not one that a government official or academic is used to.

Last week, Vince Cable, the UK coalition government’s business secretary, made a scathing attack on the “murky” world of high finance in his speech at the Liberal Democrats conference in Liverpool.

He admonished the “spivs and gamblers” in the City of London; accusing them of many things including their reckless approach to mergers and acquisitions. “Why should good companies be destroyed by short-term investors looking for a speculative killing, while their accomplices in the City make fat fees?” he asked.

In his opinion and that of many business school professors, mergers and acquisitions rarely benefit anyone other than the investment bankers earning hefty management fees on the deal.

What they generally do is create a larger organisation that, in turn, throws up another management dilemma: how it is to be managed. The acquiring entity, whether it was hostile or not in its takeover, will usually take one of two approaches: either centralise decision making or take a decentralised view.

Both, if not administered correctly, can lead to very painful outcomes. There are plenty of recent examples where the larger combined entity simply failed: AOL-Time Warner; Daimler-Chrysler; and Amlak-Tamweel are just a few names that trip off the tongue.

And when you speak to staff in the entity that has been gobbled up by a larger predator there is a general disquiet, almost a pervading sensation that they are now merely cog’s in a larger machine. It’s a sentiment that a friend of mine, who recently went through a technological company merger, expressed when he said all decision making had been taken away from his firm and the finance guys from the acquirer’s side were now calling the shots and had no idea how to manage an entrepreneurial business.

The world of literature has depicted what can happen when the rulers or the acquirers manage by remote control the ruled or the acquired. Frank Kafka’s dark and disturbing unfinished 1926 novel The Castle is a fine example. In the book people are remotely managed by superiors who give orders without truly understanding what their employees are doing; and the employees simply follow the rules because that is what the ruling hierarchy demands. Sound familiar?

In it the protagonist “K” is a land surveyor employed by The Castle, an entity that has no idea what he does and nor does it really care. He tries to meet the decision makers and highlight the value of his work. All his advances are blocked. In the end he is told in a letter from The Castle: “The surveying work which you have carried out thus far has my recognition … Do not slacken your efforts! Bring your work to a successful conclusion. Any interruption would displease me … I shall not forget you.”

Unfortunately, like the acquired employee, he is forgotten and his work is meaningless. Companies that acquire are often driven by a compulsive physiological and psychological need for centralisation, control and order. The accountants and administrators instal generic dashboards, key performance indicators and other turn-table metrics to get a grip of the situation on the ground in the acquired company, without first garnering a deeper understanding of the business.

Often this is driven by the need to report quarterly earnings back to the stock market and meet the expectations of analysts. Any deviation from which may result in a dip in the stock price. The compounding effect on the organisation is that entrepreneurship and creativity is killed off. It’s why entrepreneurs like Sir Richard Branson de-list their companies – he had no elbow room to manoeuvre.

Centralisation of decision making is akin to installing an all-watching eye at the top of the all-encompassing organisational pyramid. The flip side is decentralisation. And large organisations go through periods of oscillation where they flirt with decentralisation before resorting back to direct control from the top. They struggle with the concept of decentralisation because it creates a more entrepreneurial and creative environment, which in itself adds an element of entrepreneurial disorder, for which they cannot codify, compute or create a meaningful metric.

However, the approach need not be mutually exclusive. That is centralise or decentralise. Rather, the criteria should be how are decisions better made? The economist E F Schumacher alluded to this is his 1973 book Small is Beautiful when he referred to the principle of subsidiary function.

If decisions are better made lower down the organisational structure then let them get on with it and keep a watchful distance. If, however, through discourse and reasoned argument, those further up the organisation can demonstrate that they will be better at making decisions, then and only then, should they be given the ability to do so. Hence, according to Schumacher “the burden of proof lies always on those who want to deprive a lower level of its function and thereby its freedom and responsibility”. Remember, being higher up does not make a manager wiser or more effective.

So if centralisation is the eye at the top of the pyramid and decentralisation is like the market stall in a bazaar, then perhaps we need to create a different metaphor with which large organisations can work.

For Schumacher, the most appropriate metaphor was of a man holding a large number of balloons. Each balloon had its own buoyancy and lift. The man did not stand over them trying to bring them under control. Rather he stood below them holding the strings firmly in his hand. And so every balloon symbolically represented its own administrative unit as well as entrepreneurial unit. This twinning of administration and entrepreneurship served both the needs of hierarchy (order and control) and the needs of the market (entrepreneurship).

Stand in any public thoroughfare and you will notice at least half the business people present are surfing online. They are with you in body but not in mind.  Plugged into their mobile phone and smart devices, they are uploading a post on a social networking site, chatting with friends in forums, responding to e-mails and, on the rare occasion, doing some work for their organisations.

The next time you happen to find yourself in a public space frequented by fellow workers try to observe what they are doing online. If like me, curiosity gets the better of you, go up and politely ask them. I sometimes do. I guarantee at least seven times out of 10 it won’t have anything to do with their work.

The time we spend online is going north; whether at work, home or on the move. But how are we occupying ourselves online, where do we go in the virtual world and what do we do?

After all, our time is precious, particularly during office hours. And whenever we run into colleagues or acquaintances they all seem to be suffering from time famine. There is a gnawing pressure to balance home and work commitments, which is why inquiring about our online destinations is an important question.

Research from Nielsen shows social networking occupies 22 per cent of our online time and it’s increasing each year. It is twice as much time as gaming, which eats up 10 per cent. E-mail takes up 8 per cent, searches 3 per cent and classifieds and auctions 2 per cent.

Research from the UK company Online Measurement confirms this and shows social networking occupied 7 per cent of online user’s time in 2007 but this year takes up 25 per cent.

Many businesses, especially large ones, have seized on this as an opportunity to set up social media platforms to market products and sell to their customers.

The business case to do so seems straight forward: a quarter of people’s time online is spent in social networking sites, so if a company wants to influence them it needs to be there; online marketing is relatively cheaper than offline so there is a low cost of entry; and the audience is global. So enormous reach at minimal cost is attainable.

However, should organisations that don’t have a social media presence, such as a site on Facebook or posts on Twitter, set one up? And, critically, should they try to build a huge base of followers who they can influence?

It’s certainly a question puzzling many executives and marketers today. Unfortunately, the jury will probably be out on this one for years to come but the initial findings have thrown up a few obstacles for the social media bandwagon.

Firstly, empirical evidence suggests that when users are in social networks they aren’t interested in being sold to. The Harvard Business School professor Mikolaj Jan Piskorski studied the web logs of a number of social networking sites and discovered 70 per cent of the time was spent viewing pictures and profiles, especially other people’s. Within this, the largest behaviour profile was of men looking at pictures of women they didn’t know, followed by men looking at pictures of women they did know. In other words, users were not spending time in places where companies could market to them.

Professor Piskorski did, however, demonstrate that some business networking sites, such as LinkedIn, were useful in terms of checking up on the background of people users were about to meet, hire or do a deal with. However, the use of LinkedIn compared with other social networking applications and sites is minimal.

Secondly, statistical modelling shows a large online following, through sites such as Twitter or Facebook, does not mean the company has any influence on these followers. Research undertaken by Meeyoung Cha from the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems in Germany and published by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence demonstrated that more followers does not correlate to more influence.

Her broad study looked at 52 million Twitter accounts from which she made her observations. “Our claim is that follower count is not sufficient to capture the influence of a user (… the ability of a user to sway the opinions of … followers). It only shows how popular the user is (… the size of [the] audience). But, as we showed in our paper, re-tweets and mentions, which measure the audience responsiveness to a user’s tweets, do not correlate strongly with number of followers,” she says.

To influence users Ms Cha suggests organisations try to create more responsiveness from their followers. Mass media is a great way of getting a popular topic across to followers but small businesses and opinion formers are better off advocating a more niche topic, which is where the majority of businesses are represented.

For an organisation about to start its journey into social networking, or one that has forayed into it without much impact, the conclusions to be drawn are, unfortunately, quite crude.

To make friends online and influence people, have pictures of great-looking people to represent your company – that should solicit the desired response from your customer base. Otherwise, don’t bother.

Last week some Pakistani banker friends of mine described their country as a basket case. Over the years, their country has become a lost cause, they said.

It cannot feed its people, safeguard its borders, manage its finances or provide a secure environment for people to live in. The situation has been festering for some time, but the catastrophic floods of recent weeks and the sheer inability of the authorities to deal with them have propelled the matter to a global stage. It’s something that many causal observers have known for some time. The country is appallingly run.

Yet when I meet Pakistani friends in Dubai, many in senior positions in the finance sector, it is seasoned professionals that I come across. The same rings true when one takes a trip to the City of London and many other financial districts around the world. The mind boggles at the combined intellectual and financial capital of this talented diaspora. But this pool of talent and resources chooses to remain safely outside the country.

So what will it take for professional Pakistanis to invest in their country?

One friend of mine, a successful entrepreneur in the UK, went back to Pakistan a few years ago, encouraged by the promises made by the previous administration.

His euphoria at setting up a home and business in his native country proved short-lived, when he and his family were robbed at gunpoint in their house. He packed up, resettled in Dubai and now has a flourishing business here. For him the situation is simple: guarantee my safety and I will invest.

Another friend, who was based in Silicon Valley, gave up a senior consulting position a few years ago to set up an IT consultancy in Pakistan. After two years of coming up against a brick wall of bureaucracy and corruption at every level, he too packed up, resettling in Bahrain where his knowledge is put to good use.

Unfortunately, stories such as these are commonplace. It’s hard to find a Pakistani professional living abroad who doesn’t know someone who has fallen foul of this nostalgia trap.

But UAE companies such as Emaar Properties and Etisalat have made some investments in Pakistan, with Emaar currently building a development in the capital, Islamabad, and another in the port city of Karachi. There is organic demand through a growing population. The demographics are not far off Pakistan’s neighbour India, which is booming.

In 2005, Etisalat bought shares in PTCL, Pakistan’s largest telecommunications operator with a mobile subscriber base of more than 15.5 million users as well as a fixed and broadband base. These are two examples of UAE companies investing in Pakistan. But back in the 1970s and 1980s it was the other way around, with Pakistani organisations investing in the UAE.

One of the leaders was Pakistan International Airlines (PIA). Today, it is a byword for atrocious management and lack of customer service, but at one time it was a world leader. In 1960 it was the first Asian airline to use a jet aircraft in the shape of the Boeing 707. PIA still holds the fastest flight time between London and Karachi, which was completed in 6 hours and 43 minutes in 1962.

Unfortunately, today there are few if any Pakistani corporations whose names trip off the tongue. And there are fewer professional Pakistanis willing to invest in their country of origin.

It’s in stark contrast to the experience of the Indian professional diaspora. For example, 30 per cent of all Silicon Valley companies incorporated in the past 20 years are run and owned by Indian or Chinese businessmen. And these businessmen have made sizeable investments in their native countries with lasting success.

At a charity fundraiser in Dubai last week for Pakistan’s flood victims, the mood was one of giving. But would the businessmen there invest in Pakistan? The answers ranged from “only if there was a merger with India” to “it’s a global conspiracy against us, and our cricketers are innocent”.

The majority coalesced around the importance of establishing law and order through a civilian administration and ending corruption.

Other nations from Brazil to Turkey have walked this path, and seen foreign direct investment and remittances from nationals overseas rise as confidence has returned.

Whether the same will hold true of Pakistan is a challenge for the administration. If it fails to improve matters, then the voters who formed into feudal blocks at the last election must look to alternatives, across sectarian lines.

Until then it’s difficult to see professional Pakistanis taking out any investment options on their country.

Any entrepreneur will testify that two of the greatest barriers to success are regulation and access to resources.

Regulation tends to be about the cost of doing business as determined by government policy. Access to resources will in most cases be related to finance and how to attract it.

The first is a barrier that the majority of governments have tried to lower in recent times: the cost of trade licenses, business incorporation certificates, employee visas and the like have been reduced.

The second is a thornier issue that in the UAE still represents a major challenge for entrepreneurs: banks and other lending institutions are reluctant to lend to entrepreneurs, and although there is a growing private-equity sector lending to small and medium-size enterprises, it still cannot satisfy the ambition of entrepreneurs in the local market.

But to this list I propose to add a third barrier to success: the problems that have resulted from the myopia of local property developers.

Entrepreneurship, particularly involving small and medium-size businesses, which represent by far the largest source of employment in the UAE, is almost unilaterally recognised as vital to speed up the recovery of any economy after a recession.

The agility and innovation of this segment are rarely found in large corporations, bar a few exceptions such as Apple. Even the technology company’s competitors say its workers have the minds of engineers and the hearts of artists. So ensuring that small and medium enterprises are flourishing is a priority for all who are concerned about the overall health of the commercial sector.

Yet even a cursory tour of some of the major master developments shows that developers have ignored the needs of small and medium enterprises.

For example, a drive through a half-completed project such as Business Bay in Dubai reveals that the high-rise towers built in this development have been constructed to serve major corporations, whose staff sit locked away in their towers. They may enjoy panoramic views, but they are isolated from real commerce and trade taking place at the ground level.

This type of contemporary commercial master development is an obstruction for entrepreneurs, as it hinders creativity and innovation. By its very nature, entrepreneurial success requires a built environment that resembles the traditional souq or the European equivalent of the village green.

Traditionally, these places allowed merchants and others to meet their customers, suppliers and business partners. They were places to build relationships informally and develop insight, to advocate opinions, hear from others and formulate new ideas, and to understand the market and learn from those with experience.

The result was a community of energetic, innovative individuals in which all, whether big or small in their trading capacity, flourished.

In contrast, today’s commercial built environments, with high-rise towers artificially stitched into the fabric of the city, foster disparate and isolated individuals. Office workers in these high-rises are often impoverished by a lack of contact with those outside their organisations.

These employees are programmed to be more comfortable in online social networking communities than real ones. They live their days within office cubicles, departing momentarily for lunch before being condemned once more to their solitary existence.

It is common for office workers in high-rise towers not to even know their neighbours on the same floor. They will see them every day in the elevator but rarely say anything to them beyond asking on which floor they would like the lift to stop. These built commercial environments do not create spaces where people can network with others.

There is an enormous amount of academic research indicating that in residential communities, a built environment that does not provide safe spaces for community members to interact, and green, traffic-free areas for relaxation, will be full of lonely and unhealthy people stifled by a lack of opportunity.

And the same rings true of commercial property. That is why we should be building environments that help entrepreneurs from small and medium enterprises flourish. In just about every instance, the environments will be low-rise settings. Dubai’s incredibly successful technology and knowledge parks, such as Internet City, Media City and Knowledge Village, are testament to this.

These low-rise environments have a mix of commercial, leisure, food and beverage and retail, and they have plenty of green space. They are vibrant entrepreneurial settings abuzz with energy and, most important, a sense of community.

Because these low-rise environments have created a sense of community, they remain tenanted for much longer, which in the long term works to the developers advantage. Tenants by contrast have easy access to amenities and plenty of open spaces to meet, talk, network and exchange thoughts and ideas. This is an ideal setting for entrepreneurs.

It is time the development community recognised this and ended its fascination with constructing towers. To benefit from the success of entrepreneurs in small and medium enterprises, developers must design communities that thrive at ground level, which is where the spirit of the souq and the village green resides. Think small, and low-rise, to create a big success.

A friend of mine has recently structured a US$100 million (Dh367.2m) film fund to finance slasher/horror movies. The fund is forecasting solid returns for this genre, which is always in demand.  I put it to him that there were many parallels between bad managers and the villains that stalk the slasher genre. Both are fundamentally concerned with cutting things up.

But beyond that crude parallel, I’ve come across a lot of really awful managers who would easily fit into the personality of the slasher character.

If you’re unfortunate enough to be managed by one of these nasty pieces of work then you need to watch your front, back and every other area, because this sort of manager will stick the proverbial knife in when you least expect it.

Here is a list we put together of managers to be very afraid of.

First off we have the type of manager personified by Patrick Bateman in the movie American Psycho (2000). This kind of boss tends to charm and have a high sense of self-worth.

They’re accepted by the higher executive echelons, partly because they possess and flaunt the trappings of material wealth. They’ll wear the suit that should be worn, strap on the watch that costs more than your annual salary and drive the car they would happily kill for.

Yet scratch just below the surface and you’ll discover them to be narcissists; insecure and envious. They’ll spend most of their day in Machiavellian office politics and secretly sketch insidious cartoons depicting how they intend to bump off their nearest rivals for the promotion they’ve had their eyes on.

Then we have the manager who resembles John Ryder in The Hitcher (1986). This type of boss has a naturally flamboyant sheen to their personality, often enjoying high-octane games and sports in which they can demonstrate their competitive streak and rip opponents to pieces.

To them management is like war and you’ll often hear them saying how they need to beat competitors into submission and throw the first punch.

But underneath that playful exterior there is a demented and cruel individual who enjoys setting psychological minefields, first and foremost for their own staff to navigate through.

As an employee you need to prove that you’re tough enough to be able to work with them.

Less “charming” than the previous two is the Virginia Wainwright-type of manager. She’s the teenage killer in Happy Birthday to Me (1981). She makes up for her lack of charisma by the meticulous way in which she plans her grand schemes.

This type of manager is an original thinker and is cunning and intelligent. All the while, when you think they’re not up to much, they’re plotting their victory party, which they’d like all of their victims to attend. Forced adulation from their employees keeps them going.

Then there is the manager who’s spent their life in someone else’s shadow; always playing second fiddle to another. You can find a lot of these types in family-run businesses where hereditary right supersedes meritocracy. This is the Norman Bates in Psycho (1960) manager.

They have an underdeveloped personality and spend their time failing to please another – usually mummy or daddy – so much that they become irrationally obsessive towards that person. It’s best to avoid this type of manager when you’re at an office away-day, particularly if there’s an overnight stay at a roadside motel.

I think it’s safe – perhaps that’s not the right word – to move to the next type of manager. The one who lulls their staff into a false sense of security by putting on the mask of a clown, making employees feel at ease with their jokes.

Don’t get caught up with their apparent wit because underneath the mask sits Pennywise, the cruel killer clown from Stephen King’s It (1990). Famously, he tells his victims that in the end they all float – and he wasn’t referring to stock market valuations.

The final type of manager is the one who loves creating a mess wherever they’ve been by leaving an indelible mark. They’re the silent but deadly types who creep up on your shoulder when you’re least expecting it. They’ve been secretly watching you all along and you didn’t even know it. You’ll never get a proper quarterly appraisal from this type of boss because they only have one objective – to undermine your position.

For this type, I think a batch of villains come to mind including Leatherface from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1976), Michael Myers in Halloween (1978) and, of course, Freddy Krueger, the dream demon in A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984).

Having painted such a morbid and grim picture of managers today, any one of whom might by your boss, let’s round off by turning the tables.

Enter, Carrie White, the chief protagonist from Carrie (1976). She starts the movie as the victim, much like the harassed employee. She is brutalised and humiliated by fellow students and even by her own mother.

With nowhere to turn and a telekinesis rage burning inside her, she spills out of control and goes supernova. She becomes the villain in a near-operatic ending. Because she’s been the underdog you end up siding with Carrie in a naive kind of way but only until you regain control of your senses and tut-tut about how wrong her revenge and retribution was.

My advice on this last one: move on from your boss before you find yourself becoming a Carrie White employee and take to watching some nice children’s fantasy starting with Mary Poppins (1964), who will serve as a better role model for what a manager should be – practically perfect in every way.

The modern game of football, especially in the Premier League, is riddled with change. But we football fans don’t particularly like change.

We pick our football clubs at some early, impressionable age when we can’t tell the difference between half-time and extra time, and remain loyal to our teams till death do us part.

I mean, have you ever heard of an Inter Milan fan deserting to AC Milan, or a Liverpool supporter becoming a Manchester United devotee? It would be treason, if such a thing existed in the footballing world.

But despite the fealty and trueness we show to our clubs year on year, the clubs themselves go through a bout of transubstantiation. They change their form and character from one thing to another.

For example a new team sponsor signs up and suddenly the old name on the kit has gone. The name of the new sponsor, perhaps one we’d never heard of, is emblazoned on our players’ chests as they trot out of the tunnel. Do the fans get a choice? No, we don’t. So one day there’s a family-friendly name on our shirts, which we’re proud to wear at father-and-son matches. The next day the sponsor has been changed and there is a gambling company we’d rather our kids really didn’t know about.

The fans also don’t get a choice about who owns the club. Boardroom control can change with shares swapping hands and management decisions being made, to which the fans are not privy.

If more football clubs were owned by the fans, through, say, a trust structure, of course the situation would be entirely different. But, alas, only a few German and Spanish teams have managed to replicate this model with commercial and tournament success. The Premier League, which has the highest number of global aficionados, has no examples of this ownership structure. But on the positive side, a change of ownership heralds the promise of a fresh injection of cash for players, stadium and the club in general. So it’s not altogether a bad thing.

And, finally, we all have to suffer the indignity of seeing a workmanlike manager who speaks his mind and wears the team’s colours on his sleeve ejected by an uncaring chairman. Fans of Aston Villa Football Club must be feeling this way as they lick their wounds after a 6-0 thrashing by Newcastle United. Aston Villa’s competent, straight-talking Martin O’Neill was apparently pushed out of the job of manager by the chairman against the consensus of the fans.

So as football fans, the changes affecting our clubs can be many – sponsors, owners and manager. And what can we do about it. Nothing.

The people with whom long-suffering football fans have the greatest affinity are buyers of off-the-plan property who purchased their units with a view to living in them. I’m not referring to the speculators who logjammed the market in the freehold frenzy but the genuine homebuyers who transacted with the intention of creating homes for themselves. There are many of these people, and they can be found at post-mortem sessions concerning every property bubble that went pop – from Miami to Dubai.

Their plight is similar to that of football fans but with more skin in the game. At some impressionable point in their lives, they were swayed into buying off-the-plan property because of any number of factors – friends’ recommendations perhaps, the skill of salespeople or a property developer’s razzmatazz product launch. Partly with head but more with heart they chose to buy their dream homes, to be with till death did them part.

But somewhere along the way, things changed. The sponsor or brand behind the project ceased to back the scheme, so the project that had been previously endorsed by an A-list celebrity from yesteryear was now not only off-the-plan but off-the-map. The development was reduced to a stack of unused glossy marketing brochures that had never left their Teflon packaging. All other evidence of the sponsor or brand name had disappeared entirely.

Then the property buyer found out that the owners of the development had also changed. Because of a nefarious plot or quite simply a lack of cash in some cases, the people the buyers thought they were dealing with were no longer around. Some had skipped the country and left the employees and customers in a situation akin to a football club not paying its players their wages on time but expecting them to turn up and perform on the weekend: a story to which the troubled fans of Portsmouth FC will attest.

And finally they discovered the management team that had been doing something about fixing the problem no longer existed and had been replaced by a new bunch who didn’t talk to customers, and if you wanted to meet them, the only place you might stand a chance was at the arbitration centre.

Still, despite their plight today, genuine buyers of off-the-plan property should find some solace in the ignominy that supporters of Liverpool FC have had to endure. Being the most successful club in England has not spared Liverpool a change of sponsor, owner and manager.

But then, changing from longtime sponsor Carlsberg to the prudent Standard Chartered Bank can’t be a bad thing. Trying to offload the current owners, Messrs Gillett and Hicks, is a welcome fillip for the club’s fans. And the introduction of the experienced Roy Hodgson as the manager has once again promised stability and growth at Anfield.

I suppose it helps that the team’s celebrated anthem is You’ll Never Walk Alone, a sentiment that has been all too absent among property developers, buyers and everyone else involved in the industry in these times of prodigious change.