Jyotiraditya Scindia, recently elected to Parliament, wants a more forward-looking India.

Youth Takes a Seat in Indian Parliament

“SEVENTY PERCENT of India’s population is younger than 35,” Jyotiraditya Scindia, MBA ’01, told Celebchat, a Web-based publication in India. “I think it’s time for us, i.e., the youth of India, to steer the nation into the next century.” Scindia, the youngest person in India to be elected to Parliament, is a member of the Congress party, which advocates a secular Indian government and is now in the minority. Scindia’s interest in politics developed when his father, who died in a plane crash last year, represented the same Gwalior-Guna region.

Who Can You Trust?

WITH THE BREAKDOWN OF the Oslo Accords in the Middle East and scandals in the U.S. Catholic Church and at Enron and Arthur Andersen, trust is taking a whipping, the New York Times said. Researchers told the newspaper that once trust is shattered between parties, it is extremely difficulty to rebuild, even if they must continue in their relationships.

On the business fallout, the paper sought out Professor Roderick Kramer, who said that the Enron scandal was “a major assault on people’s trust in financial institutions but also, importantly, in the institutions that are supposed to hold financial institutions accountable, such as Arthur Andersen. So that is a double assault. Even if we know that institutions aren’t fully trustworthy, we believe that we have a system in place that makes trust reasonable and prudent. That’s our defense against misplaced trust; it’s our Maginot Line. And that has been breached.”

On the positive side, polls have found that since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Americans profess more trust in a wide range of things from government and police to neighbors and people of other races.

KPMG’s O’Kelly in the Spotlight

KPMG’s 1,500 PARTNERS ratified the selection of Eugene O’Kelly, MBA ’77, as chairman and CEO in late April. O’Kelly, who joined the accounting firm in San Francisco before coming to the GSB, became managing partner of the Palo Alto office in 1988 and vice chairman of financial services in 1998. A spate of news stories appeared this spring about a meeting he held with Harvey Pitt, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Some Democratic lawmakers contend that Pitt, a Bush appointee, should not have met with O’Kelly, whose firm audits Xerox, which is undergoing an sec investigation.

West Meets East

A "POWERFUL new princeling has arrived on China’s information-technology scene,” the Far Eastern Economic Review reported last February. The princeling is none other than Zeng “Jeffrey” Zhijie, Sloan ’01. He is in charge of investments in China’s semiconductor and telecom sectors for the San Francisco-based venture capital firm Walden International.

“Princeling” is the term used in China to describe the children of powerful people in government. According to the Review, Zeng, the son of State Development Planning Commission minister Zeng Peiyan, is “in direct competition with the business interests of Jiang Mianheng,” who is the son of Chinese President Jiang Zemin.

In Sickness and in Health

DRESSED IN WHITE SATIN and displaying a thatch of chest hair, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, Class of ’81, was portrayed as a jilted bride on the cover of Red Herring recently under the tabloid headline “Broadband Left Me at the Altar!” The computer-altered photo, along with a similar one of Scott McNealy, MBA ’80 (see following story), in Business 2.0 raises the question: Are political cartoonists who have long specialized in parodying public figures going the way of the horse and buggy?

CEO Talk Radio

WATCH OUT, EXECUTIVES— a new addiction from Silicon Valley is spreading among you. Sun’s Scott McNealy, MBA ’80, is among those top executives who travel to a studio in San Francisco’s Marina district to host their own radio shows for employees. The typical format is for the CEO to interview guests, and McNealy recently landed the well-known retired GE executive Jack Welch for his show. In commenting on “Boss Radio,” the March issue of Business 2.0 featured a picture of McNealy with curly dark locks flowing over his shoulders—or was that Howard Stern?

The Meek Do Not Inherit the Earth

GETTING A LITTLE HUFFY during negotiations can pay off for people who are perceived as powerful, according to a report in Business 2.0 on research by assistant professor of organizational behavior Larissa Tiedens. Her research also has revealed that employers have a bias toward promoting employees who get mad occasionally. “I don’t think we’re cognizant of this,” Tiedens said. “We make inferences about people all the time, and we don’t always know where the information has come from.” For a more detailed report on Tiedens’ research on anger, see “There’s Power in Anger” in the May 2000 issue of Stanford Business.

God and Business

FOR YEARS WHEN HE WAS making good money in banking, Robert Richards, MBA ’64, says he “had this feeling that if I were really Christian, I’d abandon business and go be a missionary somewhere.” The former research economist for Weyerhaeuser, the Bank of Alaska, and two banks that he founded and then sold, decided in 1998 to enroll in a seminary, where he selected courses relating to his interest in capitalism. The result is a 500-page book published by Xulon Press called God and Business: Christianity’s Case for Capitalism. “People talk about a competitive free-market economy. Participation in that involves as much cooperation as it does competition,” Richards told the Mercer Island Reporter, a newspaper serving suburban Seattle, where he lives.

Steve Smith is beginning to feel as much at home in space as he does on Earth.

Veteran Spacewalker

AS ONE OF TWO crew members on a NASA mission to expand the international space station, Steve Smith, MBA ’87, took his sixth spacewalk in April. During his three earlier space flights, Smith logged 700 hours in space, including 35 hours of spacewalks. For photos, see the NASA Web site.

Are Good Grades a Health Hazard?

PUBLICLY AVAILABLE report cards for hospitals may not be a good idea, Business Week reported, because they may encourage hospitals to reject sick patients who are harder to treat and drag down performance scores.

The magazine cited research coauthored by associate professor Daniel Kessler that looked for changes in the practices of doctors and hospitals in New York and Pennsylvania after those states began to publish mortality rates for coronary bypass surgery.

They found that after reporting began, the hospitals were more likely to do bypass surgery on relatively healthy patients, and they saw some evidence that hospitals were less likely to accept sick patients for bypass surgery. The report cards also led to a rise in Medicare costs. One reason is that hospitals did bypasses on patients who were candidates for cheaper angioplasty surgery, a switch that didn’t improve outcomes.

Silicon Valley Shop Talk

“SILICON VALLEY HAS A metaphorical life of its own,” the Financial Times said in reporting on research coauthored by John Jost, associate professor of organizational behavior. “Inventive types are known as ‘idea hamsters.’ Software code not fit for public consumption but good enough for internal use is called ‘dogfood.’ The grueling period before software is shipped is the ‘death march.’ And everyone in the business lives on the ‘bleeding edge,’ Silicon Valley’s melodramatic version of the cutting edge.” Why do the terms relate to the body, animals, and death? The researchers say it might be that this is mostly an aggressive male culture and an industry in which most companies fail.

Merger Portends New HP Way

THE CONTROVERSIAL MERGER of Hewlett-Packard and Compaq brought with it much discussion of the legendary “HP Way,” a management philosophy that emphasized innovation, respect for individuals, teamwork, and loyalty.

Cultural change was inevitable for the company, human resources professor Charles O’Reilly told the Palo Alto Weekly. “HP developed a culture for engineers at a time when life cycles of products were longer. In the last decades, product life cycles became shorter and profits lower.” The consensus-oriented infrastructure was too slow for the current market, O’Reilly said.

Nevertheless, Joel Hyatt, lecturer in entrepreneurship, was quoted by Red Herring on the dangers of merging behemoth companies like HP and Compaq. “The larger the tech merger, the more it is bound to fail,” he said. “These deals can end up wrecking both companies.”

The Aloha Spirit

IF YOU ARE GOING to make a profit in a small community, you might try adopting management philosophies from the nonprofit sector, suggests Connie Lau, MBA ’79, the CEO of Hawaii’s third largest bank, American Savings. Noting that business can be “cutthroat,” Lau says that people in the nonprofit sector “don’t seem to have as much difficulty showing that they care about other people,” an important skill to have in an island community such as Hawaii.

Featured on the cover of Hawaii Business in February, Lau is the granddaughter of a houseboy to Hawaii’s first territorial governor. She earned a law degree from UC Hastings College of the Law, she says, because her father taught her that it was necessary for a Chinese American to “know your rights” in a Hawaii of limited opportunity.