A New Start

NY Times: On Day Care, Google Makes a Rare Fumble

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July 5, 2008

Talking Business

On Day Care, Google Makes a Rare Fumble

By JOE NOCERA

Two months ago, Google held a series of secret focus groups with employees who have children in Google's day care facilities. The purpose was to gauge their reaction to the company's plan to raise the amount it charged for in-house day care by 75 percent.

Parents who had been paying $1,425 a month for infant care would see their costs rise to nearly $2,500 — well above the market rate. For parents with toddlers and preschoolers, who were charged less, the price increases were equally eye-popping. Under the new plan, parents with two kids in Google day care would most likely see their annual day care bill grow to more than $57,000 from around $33,000.

At the first of the three focus groups, parents wept openly. As word leaked out about the company's plan, the Google parents began to fight back. They came up with ideas to save money, used the company's T.G.I.F. sessions — a weekly meeting for anyone who wanted to ask questions of Google's top executives — to plead their case, and conducted surveys showing that most parents with children in Google day care would have to leave Google's facilities and find less expensive child care.

Do you think you know how this story ends? You're probably guessing that because it involves "do no evil" Google, Fortune magazine's "Best Company to Work For" the past two years, this is a heart-warming tale of a good company reversing a dumb decision.

If only. Although Google is rolling back its price increase slightly and is phasing in the higher price over five quarters, the outline of the original decision remains largely unchanged. At a T.G.I.F. in June, the Google co-founder Sergey Brin said he had no sympathy for the parents, and that he was tired of "Googlers" who felt entitled to perks like "bottled water and M&Ms," according to several people in the meeting. (A Google spokesman denies that Mr. Brin made that comment.) On Monday, Google began the first phase of its new day care plan, letting go of the outside day care firm it had been using.

In recent months, Google has hit the first rough patch in its short, magical life as a public company. From November to April, Google's once high-flying stock dropped 44 percent, to $412 from $744. (It has since gained some of that back, closing on Thursday at $537.) It may be a stretch to equate the day care fiasco with the fall in Google's stock. But maybe not.

When a stock was rising as fast as Google's once was, it was easy to buy the view that there was something truly special about Google. But when the stock is falling, overlooked problems start to loom large. Having discovered that Google is not, in fact, the promised land, a number of Googlers have left recently to join start-ups, hotter companies like Facebook — and even Microsoft.

"There are many things about Google that are not great, and merit improvement," blogged Sergey Solyanik, who recently returned to Microsoft after a stint at Google. "There are plenty of silly politics, underperformance, inefficiencies and ineffectiveness, and things that are plain stupid." Starting, it would appear, with day care.

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Google first began offering day care three and a half years ago, and perhaps it is only coincidence that this occurred not long after a woman named Susan Wojcicki returned to the company from maternity leave. Ms. Wojcicki is a figure of significant stature at Google; hers was the garage that Mr. Brin and Google's other founder, Larry Page, rented while starting up Google. Today she is the company's vice president for product measurement, though as I discovered in talking to unhappy Google parents this week, not many Googlers seem to know what her exact duties entail. Everybody, however, knows that she's Mr. Brin's sister-in-law.

From the start, Ms. Wojcicki has been a passionate advocate for Google's day care efforts, though there is some dispute about how much decision-making authority she has. Parents who know her point out that the company's day care approach is very much aligned with her views; for its part, a Google spokesman insists that "these decisions were not made by her; they were made by the executive management team."

Google's first facility, called the Kinderplex, was run by the Childrens' Creative Learning Centers, or C.C.L.C., which, according to its Web site, offers "learning in a play-based, developmentally appropriate environment that incorporates a variety of activities and multicultural aspects in a thematic style." That sounds perfect for Silicon Valley, doesn't it? One of C.C.L.C.'s longtime Silicon Valley clients, Electronic Arts, sent me an e-mail statement telling me how happy it has been with C.C.L.C.'s services.

According to Google, there were numerous complains about C.C.L.C., but the Google parents I spoke to disagree. They say that at the Kinderplex, teacher-child ratios were low, teachers were first-rate, the facility was clean and upbeat, and the food — organic, naturally — was terrific.

But at least one parent wasn't happy: Ms. Wojcicki. She is a proponent of a preschool philosophy called Reggio Emilia, the hot kiddie philosophy of the moment, which stresses even small children's ability to chart their own learning paths.

A year after the Kinderplex opened, Google opened its second day care center, called the Woods, which Google ran itself. The Woods was an expensive undertaking; in terms of the square footage per child, the aesthetics of its toys, and the college degrees of its teachers, it put the Kinderplex to shame. It also used the Reggio Emilia philosophy.

With the Woods open, Google decided to upgrade the Kinderplex to match the salaries and the teacher-student ratios of the Woods. Google now had 200 day care spots — and such wonderful day care at that! — and was promoting this new perk as a recruiting tool. The company was growing like crazy — its work force now numbers 19,000 — its young employees were starting to have babies, and well, you can just picture what happened next. The wait list ballooned insanely, finally reaching over 700 people. New employees who arrived at Google thinking they were getting in-house day care were stunned to discover that it could take up to two years to land a coveted spot.

Meanwhile, someone at Google woke up one day and realized that the company was subsidizing each child to the tune of $37,000 a year — which nobody had noticed up until then — compared with the $12,000-a-year average subsidy of other big Silicon Valley companies like Cisco Systems and Oracle. Faced with this dilemma, Google decided that the way to solve the dual problems of a too-long wait list and a too-large subsidy was — are you sitting down for this? — to get rid of C.C.L.C. and make the Kinderplex more like the Woods! (Google says it was always planning to replace C.C.L.C.) Given that decision, the only possible way to reduce the subsidy was to raise prices through the roof.

If you are shaking your head at this point, that's because you lack the proper understanding of Google's culture. Having conquered the Internet, Google's executives tend to believe that they can do pretty much everything better than everybody else — even day care. When I spoke to Laszlo Bock, the company's vice president for "people operations" (a k a human relations), he told me that "what is really driving the cost is eliminating the two-year wait list while focusing on providing really high quality."

Google can't just have low teacher-child ratios — it has to have the lowest of anybody. Its teachers have to be the best. Its toys have to be the most advanced. If it costs a lot of money to provide the Greatest Day Care on Earth, well, that's life.

Plus, the high price of Google day care solves the waiting list problem. Indeed, getting the waiting list down was a huge priority for Google; the spokesman told me that forcing people to wait two years for day care was "inequitable." And maybe it is.

But parents who talked to me said that several times during the six-week-long day care brouhaha, Mr. Brin made comments indicating that he viewed the whole thing as a giant economics experiment. "This is a supply-and-demand issue," he told one group of parents — adding that Google needed to charge what the market would bear. (Through a Google spokesman, Mr. Brin denies making such a statement.) Given that Google has lots of pre-I.P.O. millionaires, it can clearly charge a lot.

Indeed, at one meeting, Ms. Wojcicki, a multimillionaire herself, told the parents that she planned to keep her own children in Google day care, despite the higher cost. "I've had firsthand experience with the great care provided by these centers and I want as many other parents as possible to have access to it," Ms. Wojcicki noted in an e-mail message.

Google has also started charging people several hundred dollars to stay on the waiting list; as a result the list has dropped to around 300 parents. By next fall, Google plans to open new facilities with another 300 places. See? No more waiting list.

Google, I should note, believes that it has handled the day care issue in a "Googly" way and object strongly to the criticism by the parents. The company points out that the prices are somewhat lower than originally planned, that it is expanding its day care operation, that its facilities will be state of the art and that it will be giving scholarships to parents who can't afford to keep their children in Google day care. (Although yet to release the details of the scholarship plan, the company says that employees will have to show proof of household income to qualify.)

But here's the real problem: providing day care isn't an economics experiment, nor should it be just another Google perk, alongside organic food and free M&Ms. Day care matters to people's lives in a way that few other perks do. There are many people in this country — including, I'll bet, many Googlers — who believe that employer-provided day care, at affordable prices, ought to be like health insurance, a benefit that every company provides as a matter of course. Yet as the technology blog Valleywag noted recently, Google doesn't even advertise day care as a benefit for its employees anymore. That's the real shame.

Google may be providing the greatest day care ever, but so what? It doesn't matter how good the day care is if only its wealthiest employees can afford to use it. If Google had really wanted to do something path-breaking about its day care crisis, it would have spent less time creating elitist day care centers and more time figuring out how to "scale" day care for everybody no matter what their salaries.

Instead, Google has shown that it thinks about day care the same way every other company does — as a luxury, not a benefit. Judging by what's transpired, that's what Google is fast becoming: just another company.

E-mail: nocera@nytimes.com

FT: The dangers of banality

Excerpt
The danger of banality is an insidious one. Banality weakens our intellectual, spiritual and ethical muscles, rendering us flabby thinkers, unable or unwilling to chew over the difficult matter of experience and make it part of us. The connection between the banality of evil and the evil of banality is the danger of a surrender of our human powers of discrimination. We always need to be discriminating, and we always need to be working on refining our powers of discrimination, or one day we might find we can no longer distinguish between a human being and a widget.

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The dangers of banality

By Harry Eyres

Published: June 28 2008 03:00 | Last updated: June 28 2008 03:00

Reporting on the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961, the political theorist Hannah Arendt coined the phrase "the banality of evil". Eichmann, responsible for the slaughter of millions of Jews, had the appearance and even the mentality of a petty bureaucrat or administrator, crunching numbers and logistics that could have concerned widgets but happened to involve the mass murder of human beings. The former employee of the Vacuum Oil Company was examined by a team of psychologists who pronounced him perfectly "normal" - "more normal at any rate than I am", as one of them said with black humour, "after having examined him".

When Arendt wrote, humanity was still reeling from the first total war in history, from the revelations of the Holocaust, the pitiful starvation of inmates at Belsen, the aftermath of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Evil loomed large and dramatic on the face of the planet, and it was something of a shock to find its incarnation in such commonplace, trite human beings as Eichmann and the thousands of others who were simply "obeying orders".

Evil has not disappeared from the planet in the intervening years, but in most of Europe and in North America it has retreated from the limelight. If finding banality was surprising for Arendt, it is now what we expect and what everywhere surrounds us. We might feel grateful for small mercies and rejoice that today's politicians do not stage Wagnerian rallies and line the streets with 100ft-high banners. We find it reassuring to hear commonplaces uttered and we watch television programmes that are engineered precisely for that purpose (anyone caught saying anything difficult or original gets short shrift from Big Brother ).

But I am beginning to wonder whether Arendt's formulation might not be reversed, and whether we should not concern ourselves more with the evil of banality. One petty example is sports commentary. At this time of year I turn couch potato for an hour or two each afternoon to watch tennis or listen to the cricket (I used to watch that, too, until it was sold down the river to Sky). Cricket in particular has produced its fair share of poetic commentary, from the burred Hampshire lyricism of John Arlott to the bone-dry crispness of Richie Benaud. But poetry, whimsy and originality are every day less in evidence.

Tennis commentators (apart from the admirable Frew MacMillan and the ever-more elusive John McEnroe) seem to be chosen for locker room bonhomie rather than any gift for language or analysis. Commenting on the tattooed quotation from Dostoevsky that the maverick Serbian Janko Tipsaverich sports on one arm, the ever-trite Andrew Castle joked to the equally uninspired John Lloyd: "Oh, he's intelligent too - that wasn't what we used to read, was it Lloydy?" The idea, it seems, whether you are a player or a commentator, is to be "one of the lads".

Test Match Special , one of the truly great English eccentric creations, the one sports programme that comes into its own when play is suspended during breaks for rain, has been steadily losing its unique flavour, reminiscent of the genteel English surrealism of the Ealing comedies. "There's really nothing to say," opined the New Zealand commentator Jeremy Coney recently - not a sentiment that could ever have passed the lips of the great Brian Johnston.

The most popular purveyor of classical music in the UK is Classic FM, the radio station that treats classical music as if it was chocolate - and not even good chocolate, but the kind of milky, sugary nothingness that should have been banned long ago by the EU. The early evening offering on Classic FM is called Smooth Classics , as if the music of Beethoven and Schubert should slip down the gullet like baby food.

So the effect of banal commentary, and banal thinking in general, is to turn everything into undifferentiated pap. What is banal is what has already been chewed over, a thousand times, by someone else, or thousands of others. What is wrong with that? In the 1950s, the Gestalt therapists Fritz Perls, Ralph Hefferline and Paul Goodman explored the connection between physical eating and spiritual nourishment: as adults, it turns out, just as we need to engage in an active process of selecting our food, biting, chewing and digesting, so "we need to be able to 'bite off' and 'chew' experience so as to extract its healthy nourishment . . . to the extent that you have cluttered your personality with gulped-down morsels of this and that, you have impaired your ability to think and act on your own."

The danger of banality is an insidious one. Banality weakens our intellectual, spiritual and ethical muscles, rendering us flabby thinkers, unable or unwilling to chew over the difficult matter of experience and make it part of us. The connection between the banality of evil and the evil of banality is the danger of a surrender of our human powers of discrimination. We always need to be discriminating, and we always need to be working on refining our powers of discrimination, or one day we might find we can no longer distinguish between a human being and a widget.

harry.eyres@ft.com

FT: The machine that spun the world around

The machine that spun the world around

By Michael Skapinker

Published: June 24 2008 03:00 | Last updated: June 24 2008 03:00

Publishers see world-changers everywhere. There is a book called Tea: The Drink That Changed the World . There is Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World and that paean to Japanese motor manufacturing The Machine That Changed the World .

Tucked away under a counter in your kitchen, or gurgling in your utility room, is another machine. It has barely altered its appearance, function or performance in nearly half a century, which is perhaps why no one has thought to publish The Washing Machine - Which Really Did Change the World.

The washing machine transformed our workplaces and our families. It freed women from their most time-consuming household task, allowing them to get out and work.

Historians attribute female liberation to several causes. There was women's experience running second world war production lines, a memory that survived the 1950s return to domesticity. There was the contraceptive pill. There was Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique , with its account of the suburban wife, lying beside her husband after a day of household tasks, too afraid to ask: "Is this all?"

Without the fully automatic washing machine, which appeared in suburban homes around the time of Friedan's book, it might well have been all.

In their paper "Engines of Liberation" , Jeremy Greenwood, Ananth Seshadri and Mehmet Yorukoglu recount that, after the second world war, the US Rural Electrification Authority timed a farmer's wife doing the washing by hand and then with an electric washer.

She took four hours to wash 38 pounds of laundry by hand. Doing the same load with an electric machine took 41 minutes. And this was when the machines were more primitive than today. For example, she would have had to use a separate contraption to wring the clothes.

While the machines have changed, the essential process of washing has not. Since ancient times, people have poured water on their clothes and agitated them to get the dirt out. In their article, "An Introduction to the Historical Developments of Laundry" , Mark Stalmans and Walter Guhl recount how the ancients used to beat their wet clothes on riverside stones.

In Elizabethan England, washdays took place only every two to three months, but were dramatic occasions. The laundry was soaked in large wooden tubs. "All available women and girls hitched up their dresses and stamped and danced on the wet clothes," Stalmans and Guhl say.

In the 19th century, clothes were stirred with a stick. Manually operated wooden containers followed, allowing the clothes-washer to agitate the clothes inside. In the early 20th century, electric machines emerged. In 1937, Bendix of the US introduced the first machine with a wash, rinse and spin action to remove the water.

In the 1960s, washing, rinsing and spinning machines became the norm, turning laundry into something to be done between returning from work and feeding the family.

And that is where the cycle stopped. The industry boasts of progress since: special washes for wool, settings for half-loads, microprocessors (a dubious advance - at least mechanical processors could be repaired) and machines that sense laundry weight. But the method remained the same: pushing water through clothes or clothes through water.

Indeed, in one respect washing machines have remained the most conservative of businesses: there is no global product. Europeans have largely relied on front-loaders; Americans prefer to load their laundry from the top.

There is no doubt which is better. Consumer Reports, the US consumer organisation, has struggled to find top-loaders that wash as well as front-loaders. (Front-loaders' tumbling motion gives a better result.) This year, Consumer Reports trumpeted the news that it had found a top-loader to match front-loaders' cleaning quality. But top-loaders still used more energy and water.

Not that front-loaders are easy on water. Waterwise, a campaigning organisation, conservatively estimates that British households use 474m litres of water to wash their clothes every day.

Could we change our laundry habits? Researchers at Leeds University have come up with a way of washing clothes that uses only a cup of water. The dirt is absorbed by plastic chips that tumble with the clothes, which emerge almost dry. They can be briefly hung or ironed, eliminating the need for tumble dryers. Xeros, the university spin-out that is commercialising the technology, says the chips last for at least 100 washes.

The researchers expect almost waterless machines to be produced next year. Good luck to them. Washing machines may have revolutionised our lives, but the association of water with cleaning is as old as laundry itself.

michael.skapinker@ft.com

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

what people around the world think of money

source: http://www.synovate.com/news/article/2008/04/survey-reveals-what-people-around-the-world-think-of-money.html#

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Why Zappos Pays New Employees to Quit—And You Should Too

http://discussionleader.hbsp.com/taylor/2008/05/wy_zappos_pays_new_employees_t.html

Why Zappos Pays New Employees to Quit—And You Should Too

I spend a lot of time visiting with companies and figuring out what ideas they represent and what lessons we can learn from them. I usually leave these visits underwhelmed. There are plenty of companies with a hot product, a hip style, or a fast-rising stock price that are, essentially, one-trick ponies—they deliver great short-term results, but they don’t stand for anything big or important for the long term.

.....

FT: In China, women wore the trousers

In China, women wore the trousers

Published: June 10 2008 03:00 | Last updated: June 10 2008 03:00

From Dr A.R.T. Kemasang.

Sir, It is correct that Yves Saint Laurent did not create the women's trouser suit (letter from James W. Beaumont, June 5). However, neither did London Transport.

Trouser-wearing among women was in fact started by Chinese women who, within China's rizicultural economy, occupied equal status with their male counterparts. Indeed, the most important task in riziculture - the planting of China's staff of life, rice - is traditionally women's preserve. Hence they used to wear the same working garb as their male counterparts.

Throughout sinaean ("Oriental") Asia up until at least the 1950s, the word for "a trouser-wearing woman" meant exclusively a Chinese woman. This is also why originally it was only in Chinese kung fu stories that we had female combatants as formidable as any of the men.

Not only does it all show that since ancient times women in China have always enjoyed a surprisingly equal status to men, it also proves what freedom trouser-wearing allows them.

A.R.T. Kemasang,
London SW15 2JE, UK

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

FT: In China diplomacy, Rudd shows the way to go

As diplomats scramble in search of ways to conduct this sort of conversation, a lot of attention is being paid to the speech Kevin Rudd, the new Australian prime minister, gave to students in Beijing two months ago. Mr Rudd famously charmed the Chinese when he addressed President Hu Jintao in Mandarin during his visit to Canberra last year, but he also did his masters thesis on a famous Chinese dissident who was jailed for advocating democracy in the late 1970s.

Mr Rudd used the speech to launch the idea of zhengyou , a seventh-century Chinese word for friendship. "A true friend is one who can be a zhengyou ," he said, which involves "the ability to engage in a direct, frank and ongoing dialogue about our fundamental interests and future vision." His Chinese audience lapped it up. All this may sound too clever, as if linguistic sleight-of-hand can somehow overcome deep disagreements. Yet by framing criticism in terms of Chinese tradition, Mr Rudd has established an interesting middle road between the quiet chat that gets ignored and standing on a soapbox to deliver lectures. Other governments are watching with interest.

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In China diplomacy, Rudd shows the way to go

By Geoff Dyer

Published: June 5 2008 03:00 | Last updated: June 5 2008 03:00

As I walked around Tiananmen Square yesterday evening, being photographed by the huge number of plain-clothes police, one point was clear: the June 4 anniversary of the 1989 massacre is still a highly sensitive moment in China. Yet it was only a few years ago that the anniversary was also a big diplomatic event. It is a measure of how effectively China has managed to alter the terms of discussions about its human rights record that yesterday's 19th anniversary passed off with only modest comment, even after all the questions that the unrest in Tibet has raised about the real nature of the country's political system.

Any leverage the US might have had has been compromised by Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo. And, as the Dalai Lama's tour through western Europe last month made clear, European governments have been tying themselves in knots over how to talk to China about human rights. Germany seemed to signal last year that it would take a firmer line when Chancellor Angela Merkel met the Dalai Lama in Berlin.

Yet when the Dalai Lama returned last month, the new stance disintegrated amid squabbling within the coalition. Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the foreign minister whose Social Democrats favour a less confrontational approach to China, very publicly declined to see the Tibetan visitor.

French policy has appeared even more erratic. After the unrest in Tibet began in March, President Nicolas Sarkozy appeared to suggest he might not come to the Olympics opening ceremony unless China changed tack. Yet when Carrefour and other French companies suffered a boycott by angry Chinese consumers, France sent over three different envoys in effect to kowtow to the Chinese. All of which was not enough for some people in China - the French foreign ministry said this week that the official tourism body in Beijing had instructed travel agents not to book packages to France this summer.

Every China expert will tell you that nothing can be gained by publicly berating the Chinese over sensitive issues. And there can be genuine business consequences to picking a fight with Beijing. Yet, whether they like it or not, western leaders need to find a way to talk publicly with China about human rights because the issue will not just go away. For a start, domestic politics will sometimes force their hand. Public opinion in a lot of western countries is cooling towards China, especially as many people begin to sense a new battle of ideas between western liberalism and China's results-based authoritarianism.

Good diplomacy also requires showing a bit of backbone. China may complain loudly at perceived slights but it will also quickly lose respect for anyone who appears to cave in quickly on issues of principle.

It is also part of forging a sustainable long-term relationship with China. The country craves the respect of being treated as an equal, but equals cannot keep walking on eggshells when the conversation turns to important differences of values.

Moreover, foreign governments probably have more leverage than they often imagine. Russia appears not to care very much about what foreigners think of its human rights situation, but anyone who has written articles about China or even tried to show a few documentaries in a film festival knows that the Chinese authorities will go to considerable lengths to try to mute -criticism.

As diplomats scramble in search of ways to conduct this sort of conversation, a lot of attention is being paid to the speech Kevin Rudd, the new Australian prime minister, gave to students in Beijing two months ago. Mr Rudd famously charmed the Chinese when he addressed President Hu Jintao in Mandarin during his visit to Canberra last year, but he also did his masters thesis on a famous Chinese dissident who was jailed for advocating democracy in the late 1970s.

Mr Rudd used the speech to launch the idea of zhengyou , a seventh-century Chinese word for friendship. "A true friend is one who can be a zhengyou ," he said, which involves "the ability to engage in a direct, frank and ongoing dialogue about our fundamental interests and future vision." His Chinese audience lapped it up. All this may sound too clever, as if linguistic sleight-of-hand can somehow overcome deep disagreements. Yet by framing criticism in terms of Chinese tradition, Mr Rudd has established an interesting middle road between the quiet chat that gets ignored and standing on a soapbox to deliver lectures. Other governments are watching with interest.

geoff.dyer@ft.com

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

FT: Sari nights and henna parties

Sari nights and henna parties

By Amy Yee

Published: May 17 2008 03:00 | Last updated: May 17 2008 03:00

On a recent spring afternoon the sound of hammers and saws drifted from my neighbour's house. This was not another example of the feverish construction that is changing the landscape of Delhi. Rather, it was part of a seasonal ritual that transforms homes all over India for the precious cool months of the year. The neighbours were preparing for a wedding.

Over the course of the day, carpenters built the frame for a tent and created a temporary foyer of white and red fabric. Trucks loaded with rolled carpets, bolts of cloth, bundles of flowers and assorted equipment pulled up and emptied their wares. In the evening guests were greeted by the bride's sisters dressed in colourful saris and throughout the night the sound of music and singing filled the air.

This is a common scene during India's wedding season, which lasts roughly from October to the end of May, before searing heat and monsoon rains set in. In recent months at houses on my street, and indeed all over India, tell-tale signs of weddings sprouted like spring flowers. An otherwise anonymous gate to one property on my street was strung with garlands of bright orange marigolds and dark green paan leaves. Another home was festooned with diaphanous fabric from its rooftops so it resembled a grand ship about to set sail.

Across cultures, marriage is one of life's most important rites of passage but in India it is a milestone for which middle-class families assiduously save for years, then go all out to host a marathon of parties and rituals leading up to the wedding.

As Indians become wealthier they are spending more to stage elaborate multi-day events leading up to the ceremony. India's $31bn wedding industry is growing at 25 per cent a year, according to a report in the Indian magazine The Week.

Today, a reception might be held at a hotel in order to accommodate hundreds of guests and the largest million-dollar weddings are held at venues such as country clubs that can accommodate thousands. But for many Indians, some part of the wedding festivities is still held at home.

"Home is where your memories are. You belong in that space," says Chiara Nath, who was married at her parents' home in New Delhi this spring. "The significance of every moment you spent at home before you leave becomes really poignant."

The mehndi , a party where the bride and female guests have their hands decorated with henna, is usually held at the home of the bride or her relatives. The sangeet , a party of singing and dancing that precedes the wedding, might also be held at home.

"One big reason to have the mehndi at home is to integrate the whole household into the wedding festivities. Relatives and friends gather to celebrate in a more intimate way," says Mohini Bhatia, whose sister Radhika got married in Delhi in March.

Yet even in family spaces the look and feel of Indian weddings is undergoing dramatic changes. For Hindu weddings, red and gold hues used to dominate the decor. The flower of choice was the marigold, an auspicious bloom typically used for religious offerings, strung into long garlands on the house.

But conventions are shifting. Rising incomes and greater awareness fostered by more travel have made many Indians more demanding and discerning. There are also more cross-regional marriages that might combine elements drawn from the different cultural traditions of the bride and groom.

In the past, weddings were organised by the bride's family. Now brides and bridegrooms can have more influence. Pastel shades and light fabrics might replace red and gold hues and heavy cloth. Themed celebrations might draw on different cultures and aesthetics. The ubiquitous marigold might be jettisoned for roses, orchids, lilies and gerbera daisies.

Amrish Pershad, a wedding planner who designed the sets for Mira Nair's 2002 film Monsoon Wedding , estimates wealthy upper middle-class Indians spend up to Rs600,000 (£7,300) on design and decor for a single event and as much as Rs2.5m-Rs3m (£30,500-£36,500) for all the expenses of one event, which might include food, drinks, music and service. The costs of the weddings of the wealthiest Indians could amount to the equivalent of millions of dollars, wedding planners say.

Preeti Singh, whose daughter married in Delhi this February, hired Pershad to help plan and co-ordinate six events, including the marriage ceremony. Five of them were held at her home in Delhi and her sister's farm - a sprawling estate complete with swimming pool on the outskirts of Delhi.

For a cocktail party at Singh's home metres of lime green and yellow fabric were draped from a second-floor balcony over the front yard to transform the house into a pastel cocoon. Pershad, originally a florist, covered the front gate with delicate roses and used hanging ivy and creepers to hide parts of the house from view. Instead of setting the residence ablaze with white lights, as per convention, he subtly interspersed strands of lights amid the ivy.

The farmhouse was the venue for the sangeet , which was themed around Buddha. Statues of the deity, paintings and candles were set up at the party, attended by 700 people who danced to Hindi pop music played by a disc jockey.

It was just one in a series of events in the week leading up to the wedding that transformed the farmhouse day after day, like a theatre set. The mehndi had an Indian "village" theme, where 350 guests ate, drank and mingled beneath large umbrellas made from old saris, "like in Mughal times", says Singh. "Vendors" gave guests bangles, hand-crafted shoes and hair ties as though a village mela (or "gathering" in Hindi) had been transported to Delhi. About 600 people attended the outdoor wedding reception, which had an "English" theme characterised by pink tablecloths, rose bouquets and a canopy draped in pink fabric.

Traditionally, the home of the bride's family would be open to visiting family members for about a week before the wedding but in return for access to an open house of eating, singing and celebration, relatives would take charge of organising food, decorations, flowers and other tasks. But times have changed. "Now no wedding goes without a wedding planner," says Singh. "In the old days you just had a caterer and the tent- wallah [wallah denotes a vocation in Hindi] would do the needful." Families used to cook for themselves. Now caterers are de rigueur and more exotic menus are in demand. "Now you have to have sushi, Chinese and continental food," adds Ms Singh. Pradeep Bedi, another Delhi-based wedding planner, says the marriage industry has gone through enormous changes in the past five years. "People are coming up with their own ideas. They are concerned about minute details now."

He attributes the shift in attitude to increased spending power of middle-class Indians, not to mention "Indian movies showing glamorous things".

Arab, Hollywood, Bollywood and a "crystal ball" are themes he has recently worked to produce. As expectations increase, so does the pressure to stage ever more opulent events. Although Singh says an impressive wedding means you've "said goodbye to [your daughter] in the best manner you could ever do", she also laments that they are becoming too commercialised.

But in another take on the tailoring of the modern Indian marriage celebration prompted by increasing affluence, Chiara Nath had a simple, elegant event at her parents' farmhouse on the outskirts of Delhi. Only 250 guests were at the sangeet and just 80 people attended the reception.

Nath said there was initially great resistance to the idea of such a small occasion from her parents. She was told she would offend a lot of people by restricting the guest list but Nath, a designer who lives in the coastal state of Goa, insisted on a pared-down event. "For me, none of that formality was necessary."

Her restrained aesthetics shocked Bedi, her wedding planner. She requested cream hues and gold accents for the reception tent, table cloths and chair covers. "Mr Bedi thought I was crazy," admitted Nath, explaining he thought the palette was too cold and drab, especially as white is the colour of funerals in India. "I said: 'It's OK. Less is more.' It was an exercise in patience," said Nath.

Ultimately, Bedi was converted to her vision. Weeks later he lauded the wedding as "subtle, simple and classy". And though the celebration was more restrained than most, the result was an intimate affair held at the bride's childhood home.

"I wanted it simple," said Nath. "I did what was most necessary to me."

Amy Yee is an FT correspondent in New Delhi

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

FT: Guest column: Japan’s eye for quality may not be equalled

 

 

Business of Luxury 2008

Guest column: Japan’s eye for quality may not be equalled

By Radha Chadha

Published: May 28 2008 03:50 | Last updated: May 28 2008 03:50

Japan has been the El Dorado for the luxury industry – the Japanese consumer accounts for 30 to 40 per cent of global revenues for leading luxury brands. It is also the number one in terms of penetration – for example, as many as 94 per cent of Tokyo women in their 20s own a Louis Vuitton piece.

With other countries in Asia now posting dramatic economic growth, the question is whether the Japan luxury story will be repeated. China, and eventually India, will develop into Japan-sized luxury markets, but there will be a significant qualitative difference. Japanese consumers are special in that they have always had a deep appreciation for the keener aspects of luxury. A sense of aesthetics, an understanding of craftsmanship, an eye for quality, a reverence for heritage, a thirst for detailed know-how are programmed into the Japanese DNA – it is as if the Japanese consumer was purpose-built for luxury.

The rest of Asia does not quite have the same finicky luxury gene. Nor, for that matter, does any other country in the world – even Louis Vuitton had to lift its quality standards for Japan. What was acceptable to the French consumer did not pass muster there.

The Spread of Luxury model is a helpful lens through which to examine what has happened in Japan and how it might be extrapolated to other Asian countries.

Japan has been through all the five stages – from a post-war economy in shambles (Stage 1: Subjugation); to rapid growth, when the masses shopped for white goods and a small elite bought Western luxury (Stage 2: Start of money); to the emergence of a moneyed middle class that liberally used luxury brands as status markers (Stage 3: Show off); to the late 1980s when the need to conform to the new norms helped luxury culture to spread (Stage 4: Fit in); to the current period where a discerning consumer finds herself locked into the habit (Stage 5: Way of life).

As economic growth puts more money into more hands in other Asian countries, the luxury culture will spread along similar lines. Hong Kong already has a sophisticated consumer base nudging towards the “way of life” stage. South Korea has developed at feverish pace to the “fit in” stage. China is at the “show off” stage – wealth has arrived to select segments of society and luxury brands have become the weapon of choice to display it.

In terms of population, China is like 10 Japans. Even when the first of these reaches the “way of life” stage, the other nine will be at different stages. Luxury brands will have to devise strategies to cater to consumers who range from the extremely sophisticated to the utterly uninitiated.

India is the other Asian giant. It is early days for the luxury industry there – western brands entered barely five years ago. The country is still largely at the “start of money” stage, where the elite are indulging in luxury brands. India does have some old money – royal families and industrial dynasties – but the real prize for the luxury industry is the new money that will be made by in coming years.

Revenues will certainly come, but will the Chinese and Indians eventually develop a Japan-like appreciation for the finer aspects of luxury? The answer lies in deep cultural roots, especially an evolved visual and aesthetic sense honed over centuries, as is the case with Japan.

Historically, the Chinese have a sophisticated culture, but Mao pressed the delete button on it so decisively that it may be difficult to reactivate. Indians, on the other hand, have maintained their rich traditions. Their appreciation of a finely woven benarasi sari or an intricately gold-embroidered wedding lehnga could well translate into an exacting eye for western luxury.

Mark Prendergrast, president of Tom Ford Japan, sums it up well: “Western brands are merely the ‘icing on the cake’ of a long-held tradition of luxury.”

Radha Chadha is author of ‘The Cult of the Luxury Brand’ and one of Asia’s leading consumer experts

NY Times: Resistance Is Futile

Source:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/25/arts/television/25schi.html?th=&emc=th&pagewanted=all

Excerpt:

Through all his games, his designs are marked by an accumulation of care and detail.

Given that its roster of characters includes not only Mario and Donkey Kong but also Princess Peach, Zelda, Bowser and Link, it’s easy to imagine that Mr. Miyamoto designs his games around those characters.

The truth is exactly the opposite. According to Mr. Miyamoto, gameplay systems and mechanics have always come first, while the characters are created and deployed in the service of the overall design. That means a focus on the seemingly prosaic basic elements of game design: movement, setting, goals to accomplish and obstacles to overcome.

“I feel that people like Mario and people like Link and the other characters we’ve created not for the characters themselves, but because the games they appear in are fun,” he said. “And because people enjoy playing those games first, they come to love the characters as well.”

Mr. Miyamoto’s work is evolving from a reliance on invented characters and fanciful, outlandish settings like Mario’s Mushroom Kingdom or Zelda’s mythical Hyrule. With games like Nintendogs (inspired by his pet Shetland sheepdog), Wii Sports, Wii Fit and coming next, Wii Music, Mr. Miyamoto is gravitating toward everyday hobbies: pets, bowling, yoga, Hula-Hoop, music. It is as if an artist who had mastered the abstract had finally moved into realism.

“I would say that over the last five years or so, the types of games I create has changed somewhat,” he said. “Whereas before I could kind of use my own imagination to create these worlds or create these games, I would say that over the last five years I’ve had more of a tendency to take interests or topics in my life and try to draw the entertainment out of that.”

It has proved the perfect strategy as Nintendo reaches out to nongamers who may not care to understand why this frantic plumber keeps jumping on top of turtles, or why that gallant fellow in green has to keep rescuing the same princess over and over. At this moment, when consumers crave the ability to shape and become a part of their entertainment, whether through MySpace or “American Idol,” the latest star in Nintendo’s stable of characters is you — or rather Mii, the whimsical avatar Wii users create of themselves.

“I see the Miis as the most recent character creation from Nintendo,” Mr. Miyamoto said. “What’s interesting is that regardless of the user’s age, if they’re looking at a Mii, it’s their Mii. Before, when you’re playing as another character, it’s more typical of more passive entertainment, and by creating a Mii you’re becoming more a part of the entertainment experience.”

==

Video Games

Resistance Is Futile

Michael Nagle for The New York Times

Shigeru Miyamoto illustrates the Wii Fit system, a new interactive physical fitness device from Nintendo.

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By SETH SCHIESEL

Published: May 25, 2008

IT’S O.K. to liken Shigeru Miyamoto to Walt Disney.

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Fitness for Every Body: O.K., Avatar, Work With Me (May 15, 2008)

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An image from Wii Fit.

Mario Super Sluggers for Wii.

Characters and a scene from Donkey Kong.

When Disney died in 1966, Mr. Miyamoto was a 14-year-old schoolteacher’s son living near Kyoto, Japan’s ancient capital. An aspiring cartoonist, he adored the classic Disney characters. When he wasn’t drawing, he made his own toys, carving wooden puppets with his grandfathers’ tools or devising a car race from a spare motor, string and tin cans.

Even as he has become the world’s most famous and influential video-game designer — the father of Donkey Kong, Mario, Zelda and, most recently, the Wii — Mr. Miyamoto still approaches his work like a humble craftsman, not as the celebrity he is to gamers around the world.

Perched on the end of a chair in a hotel suite a few dozen stories above Midtown Manhattan, the preternaturally cherubic 55-year-old Mr. Miyamoto radiated the contentment of someone who has always wanted to make fun. And he has. As the creative mastermind at Nintendo for almost three decades, Mr. Miyamoto has unleashed mass entertainment with a global breadth, cultural endurance and financial success unsurpassed since Disney’s fabled career.

In the West, chances are that Mr. Miyamoto would have started his own company a long time ago. He could have made billions and established himself as a staple of entertainment celebrity. Instead, despite being royalty at Nintendo and a cult figure, he almost comes across as just another salaryman (though a particularly creative and happy one) with a wife and two school-age children at home near Kyoto. He is not tabloid fodder, and he seems to maintain a relatively nondescript lifestyle.

“What’s important is that the people that I work with are also recognized and that it’s the Nintendo brand that goes forward and continues to become strong and popular,” he said by way of comparing Walt Disney’s role in the larger brand with his. “And if people are going to consider the Nintendo brand as being on the same level as the Disney brand, that’s very flattering and makes me happy to hear,” he added, through an interpreter. (He understands spoken English well but does not speak it beyond a few phrases, a twist of considerable amusement to him given that his father taught English.)

Mario, the mustached Italian plumber he created almost 30 years ago, has become by some measures the planet’s most recognized fictional character, rivaled only by Mickey Mouse. As the creator of the Donkey Kong, Mario and Zelda series (which have collectively sold more than 350 million copies) and the person who ultimately oversees every Nintendo game, Mr. Miyamoto may be personally responsible for the consumption of more billions of hours of human time than anyone around. In the Time 100 online poll conducted this spring, Mr. Miyamoto was voted the most influential person in the world.

But it isn’t just traditional gamers who are flocking to Mr. Miyamoto’s latest creation, the Wii. Eighteen months ago, just when video games were in danger of disappearing into the niche world of fetishists, Mr. Miyamoto and Satoru Iwata, Nintendo’s chief executive, practically reinvented the industry. (Mr. Miyamoto’s full title is senior managing director and general manager of Nintendo’s entertainment analysis and development division.) Their idea was revolutionary in its simplicity: rather than create a new generation of games that would titillate hard-core players, they developed the Wii as an easy-to-use, inexpensive diversion for families (with a particular appeal to women, an audience generally immune to the pull of traditional video games). So far the Wii has sold more than 25 million units, besting the competition from Sony and Microsoft.

In an effort to build on this success, last week Nintendo released its new Wii Fit system in North America, a device that hopes to make doing yoga in front of a television screen almost as much fun as driving, throwing, jumping or shooting in a traditional game. Though there were no hard sales figures available as of Tuesday, there were reports of stores across the country selling out of Wii Fit.

In a global media culture dominated by American faces, tastes and brands, video games are Japan’s most successful cultural export. And on the strength of the Wii and the DS hand-held game system, Nintendo has become one of the most valuable companies in Japan. With a net worth of around $8 billion, Nintendo’s former chairman, Hiroshi Yamauchi, is now the richest man in Japan, according to Forbes magazine. (Nintendo does not disclose Mr. Miyamoto’s compensation, but it appears that he has not joined the ranks of the superrich.)

“Without Miyamoto, Nintendo would be back making playing cards,” said Andy McNamara, editor in chief of Game Informer, the No. 1 game magazine, referring to Nintendo’s original business in 1889. “He probably inspires 99 percent of the developers out there today. You can even say there wouldn’t be video games today if it wasn’t for Miyamoto and Nintendo. He’s the granddad of all game developers, but the funny thing is that for all of his legacy, for all of the mainstay iconic characters he’s designed and created, he is still pushing the limits with things like Wii Fit.”

Mr. Miyamoto graduated from the Kanazawa College of Art in 1975 and joined Nintendo two years later as a staff artist. The original Donkey Kong was a prime force in gaming’s early surge of popularity, along with arcade classics like Space Invaders, Asteroids and Pac-Man.

He rose quickly at the company, and his name has been synonymous with Nintendo since the 1980s, when the original Mario Bros. games helped save the industry after the collapse of Atari, maker of the first broadly popular home console. When Atari failed amid a slew of unpopular games, Nintendo rekindled faith in home gaming systems; the Nintendo Entertainment System, released in the West in 1985, became the best-selling console of its era.

Since then Mr. Miyamoto has been directly involved in the production of at least 70 games, including recent hits like Mario Kart Wii, Super Smash Bros. Brawl, Super Mario Galaxy and The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. Mr. Miyamoto supervises about 400 people, including contractors, almost entirely in Japan. The popular new installments in classic game franchises have maintained his credibility among core gamers even as he has reached out to new audiences with mass-market products like the Wii.

Through all his games, his designs are marked by an accumulation of care and detail. There is nothing objective about why a goofy guy in blue overalls like Mario should appeal to so many, just as there is nothing objective in how Disney could have built a company on talking animals. Rather, the reason I stood in line at a pizzeria more than 20 years ago to play Super Mario Bros., the reason Mr. Miyamoto is almost a living god in the game world, is that his games have some ineffable lure that inspires you to drop just one more quarter (or, these days, to stay on the couch just one more hour).

Just as a film is not measured by the quality of its special effects, a game is not measured merely by its graphics. This concept is lost on many designers, but not on Mr. Miyamoto. And just as a film buff might prefer to watch an old black-and-white movie instead of, say, “Iron Man,” even Mr. Miyamoto’s earliest games hold up as worthy diversions. (The story of two men battling for the world record in Donkey Kong was made into a film, “The King of Kong,” last year.)

“There are very few people in the video game industry who have managed to succeed time after time at a world-class level, and Miyamoto-san is one of them,” Graham Hopper, a Disney veteran and executive vice president and general manager of Disney Interactive Studios, said in a telephone interview. “The level of creative success that he has achieved over a sustained period is probably unparalleled.”

Given that its roster of characters includes not only Mario and Donkey Kong but also Princess Peach, Zelda, Bowser and Link, it’s easy to imagine that Mr. Miyamoto designs his games around those characters.

The truth is exactly the opposite. According to Mr. Miyamoto, gameplay systems and mechanics have always come first, while the characters are created and deployed in the service of the overall design. That means a focus on the seemingly prosaic basic elements of game design: movement, setting, goals to accomplish and obstacles to overcome.

“I feel that people like Mario and people like Link and the other characters we’ve created not for the characters themselves, but because the games they appear in are fun,” he said. “And because people enjoy playing those games first, they come to love the characters as well.”

Mr. Miyamoto’s work is evolving from a reliance on invented characters and fanciful, outlandish settings like Mario’s Mushroom Kingdom or Zelda’s mythical Hyrule. With games like Nintendogs (inspired by his pet Shetland sheepdog), Wii Sports, Wii Fit and coming next, Wii Music, Mr. Miyamoto is gravitating toward everyday hobbies: pets, bowling, yoga, Hula-Hoop, music. It is as if an artist who had mastered the abstract had finally moved into realism.

“I would say that over the last five years or so, the types of games I create has changed somewhat,” he said. “Whereas before I could kind of use my own imagination to create these worlds or create these games, I would say that over the last five years I’ve had more of a tendency to take interests or topics in my life and try to draw the entertainment out of that.”

It has proved the perfect strategy as Nintendo reaches out to nongamers who may not care to understand why this frantic plumber keeps jumping on top of turtles, or why that gallant fellow in green has to keep rescuing the same princess over and over. At this moment, when consumers crave the ability to shape and become a part of their entertainment, whether through MySpace or “American Idol,” the latest star in Nintendo’s stable of characters is you — or rather Mii, the whimsical avatar Wii users create of themselves.

“I see the Miis as the most recent character creation from Nintendo,” Mr. Miyamoto said. “What’s interesting is that regardless of the user’s age, if they’re looking at a Mii, it’s their Mii. Before, when you’re playing as another character, it’s more typical of more passive entertainment, and by creating a Mii you’re becoming more a part of the entertainment experience.”

Nintendo is expected to release more details about Wii Music this summer, but the basic concept is that while popular music games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band allow players only to recreate canned tunes, Wii Music will try to enable users to capture the feelings of composition and improvisation.

Mr. Miyamoto grew up on Western music like the Beatles and the Lovin’ Spoonful. He plays piano and banjo and, as a bluegrass aficionado, immediately recognized the name of Ricky Skaggs when told over dinner in Manhattan that Mr. Skaggs was scheduled to perform in town in a few days. Mr. Miyamoto even joked about extending his stay to catch the show. (He didn’t.)

“We’re trying to create an experience where people are very simply able to get the feeling like maybe they’re creating music,” he said.

With a track record like his, it would be foolish to bet against him. When it comes to the Walt Disney of the digital generation, no one knows fun better.