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Simon
says about-turn; silicon Valley says ''Oh yeah?'' If this sounds
like business as usual in the 'land of the free', or in the land
of the e-revolution, stop right there. George Anders, an editor
at Fast Company, could change your mind about the Valley's famed
chutzpah with this engaging but erratically-worded account of the
2001 struggle (not ''crusade'') that Carly Fiorina, chief of Hewlett-Packard
(hp), ''the outsider'', found herself leading against the claimants
of Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard's legacy.
Anders does a vivid job of character build-up.
That too, without getting over-awed by the garage startup tale of
hp, a 1937 creation of 'tough love' Dave, who bent oscillators out
of shape in fury and served people steak on picnics, and 'passionate'
Bill, who used post-war idealism to foster a 'contribution' culture
of hierarchy-free informality. This was 'The hp Way', defiantly
oblivious to Wall Street. Profit? Merely a means to an end. ''The
objective that makes all other objectives possible,'' in Dave's
words.
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Perfect Enough
By George Anders
Portfolio
PP: 248
Price: Rs 1,240.02
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Yet, by the time Carly was brought in (mid-1999),
hp had turned into a boring professionally-run manufacturer of grey
boxes (PCs and printers mainly), internet-lost and bumbling. Hints
of maverick hp-man Dick Hackborn's mentorship save Carly an embarrassingly
hagiographic portrayal. But she still gets catapulted into reader
mindspace as a heroic figure-by her Antigone-like passion, medieval
history degree, birdfeeding home-life, love of jazz and zest for
high drama. ''Our balls are as big as anyone's,'' she once told
an audience, flinging off her suit jacket to reveal a socks-stuffed
bulge. This is the lady from AT&T who foresaw PCs as tools for
a communication revolution. Just the person, you'd imagine, to revive
hp's spirit of innovation. ''This is the workshop of radicals,''
she said in her first corporate ad, featuring the old garage, ''The
original startup will act like one again. Watch!''
Some cheered. Others cringed. Carly first ran
into resistance while trying to restructure the multi-division hp
to reflect market realities (front end to engage customers and back
end to invent stuff). But for all her garage-cosiness, this was
still ''Bill and Dave's company''-transfixed by The hp Way and suspicious
of intrusion. Rather than get squashed by the irony, on Tuesday
the 4th of September 2001, the 'usurper' took the biggest shot of
her life-proposing a merger with Compaq. The hp stock crashed. Once
Walter Hewlett, Bill's son, staged a revolt, the deal and she looked
done for. Give up? No way! The campaign-nay, the agony and ecstacy-to
win the shareholder vote for the deal forms the book's adrenalin-pumped
climax. Carly managed to cast it broadly as a nostalgia-versus-vision
battle, and swiped victory. But she still had to appeal-emotionally-to
the original iconoclasm that made Bill and Dave the legends they
were.
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The (un)Common Sense Of Advertising
By Sanjay Tiwari
Response Books
PP: 322
Price: Rs 380
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Proof that ex-admen
are not all spoof-masters. The uncola-like title sure isn't spoofy.
This is a starter's guide for the ''uninitiated'', written by an
ex-suit who worked on Santro's launch at Saatchi and now runs Pegs
& Holes as an ad recruiter. The book's Darwinian justification
of the natural role of advertising is nice, and the mate-seeking
analogy is used extendedly-for ads that are ''noticeable, relevant,
distinctive, identifiable, persuasive, memorable and believable''.
This information will be selectively processed... so let's go by
the first two criteria. The step-ladder charts for 'higher benefit'
insights (ask 'so what?' at each step) do stand out. Coffee stimulates--so
what? Liril refreshes--so what? But the charts go no further. Also,
the suit in Tiwari overplays the 'self-image' role of advertising,
ceding emotional needs to product attributes.
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Hiding In Plain Sight
By Eric Cole
Wiley & Sons
PP: 334
Price: Rs 1,739.50
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Given
the growing hacker menace, this covert communication manual ought
to find takers in India. It deals with both cryptography, which
is about scrambling messages, and steganography, which is about
concealing them (the Greeks started it off by tattooing shaven heads).
Hi-tech forms of both are rampant on the internet. Of the 500 images
that Cole randomly downloaded from eBay, over 150 had data hidden
in them. So too on chat-boards; people don't always say what they
mean, nor mean what they say.
The bad guys are at it, and Cole wants the
good guys to wisen up. ''I do not know of any companies that are
using stego as part of their corporate communication scheme,'' he
writes, ''But I do know of several organisations that are using
stego against those corporations.'' The rest of the book is for
code junkies..
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Face Value
By Debashis Basu
KenSource
PP: 366
Price: Rs 595
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Shareholder value
in india, groans former business journalist Debashis Basu, has suffered
''sporadic and confused'' discussion, at best. This 366-pager attempts
to set the record straight. First, by calling shareholder value
the only legitimate purpose for a company's existence, and then
by looking at its destruction and creation from a stockmarket perspective.
Family-run firms, PSUs, mutual funds and other
market cap-destroyers are slammed hard, while HLL is held up as
a paragon of shareholder sensitivity (faster capital rotation, higher
OPM, pat, EPS, roe). The AV Birla group's acquisition of apparel
brands is scoffed at, and Tata's 'corporate brand' talk is dismissed
as self-deluding ''drivel''. But before going back to those beans...
is number-chasing the big determinant of success-or market leadership?
Investor-orientation-or customer-orientation? Ask HLL.
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