(Geneva, Switzerland) Making a positive impact - that’s what drives me…

I set myself three main goals this semester. I admit that I frequently feel I am not achieving enough, and a large part of that stems from having too many ambitious goals that I seek to chase simultaneously. I hope that outlining my goals will convince me that I am doing enough. My goals are:

1. Mobilize student partnership to reorient Wharton towards West Philadelphia and social entrepreneurship
2. Succeed at my three year project to make North Korea accept me as an exchange student (preferably at Kim Il Sung University – the other universities are just too un-proletarian)
3. Get a banking job in London, and learn more about the Middle East.

My campaign to get social entrepreneurship introduced meaningfully in Wharton is coming along well, thanks to the efforts of the amazingly supportive network of student leaders I gathered and work with. We have a strategy in place, and our conversations with faculty have been fruitful. All that is left is the big townhall meet with the student body we will hold in November to democratize our deliberations and to galvanize support for our work. A lot of research goes into defining social enterprise and the student learning outcomes we wish to see from such a program, which in turn defines how the program should look like. Student interest is being surveyed too, and with all this information, we hope to have faculty approve the new program/concentration even before it is brought up to the university senate. It is a highly political process, but I believe the experienced partners we brought on can help us navigate the system.

As for project 2, I have been interested in Korean culture and issues since I first saw the Channel News Asia broadcast of a North Korean soldier citing how one of their soldiers can defend against 10 000 US troops. This was three years ago, and although I fervently followed North Korean developments since then, I never succeeded at finding information on how I could do an exchange there. I managed to visit Pyongyang over the summer, and through some contacts made, there is now some momentum that might see me getting the academic exchange I dream off. I realized that a lot of projects start out this way: you plan and prepare for it for years but nothing happens. But that preparation is not in vain, as when the right circumstances fall into place, fortune favors the prepared mind.

Project 3 stems from a conversation with my former boss, Manu Bhaskaran, about where I should work. I realized the diverse markets handled from London, spanning both developed and developing areas, best suits my skill sets. I am also becoming more interested in the Middle East. To this end, I met with a schoolmate whose father is the Minister of Finance of Bahrain, to learn more about the region. It was fascinating hearing her talk about Bahrain’s privatization efforts, Middle Eastern politics and culture, and the role of women in their society. The Gulf States are undergoing a dramatic transformation in their economies. Using oil money, they have begun reinventing themselves along the lines of the Asian tigers, and it will be exciting to watch how these wrenching changes unfold. We also discussed Islamic finance, and my friend pointed me towards Gulf Financial House, one of the leading banks in this area, as an institution to watch.

I know where I am going…it makes me happier and productive.

Through the Penn Program for Democracy, Citizenship and Constitutionalism, which I am part of, we had an interesting discussion with Saskia Sassen after lunch. The depth of her critical analysis was amazing, and how she painstakingly deconstructs every word we use and discarded the historical baggage behind each of them made me more aware of how language constrains or enables thought on a topic.

One analytical process she introduced was to view our work in abstraction, allowing us to see the meaning behind reality. She pointed out that such abstraction is more susceptible to interpretation as compared to empirical research. However, she observed that empirical research also involves interpretation: when we collect statistics, and define a unit , we are already interpreting our subject. When we measure economic growth, we are giving a definition that has multiple and controversial interpretations.

She mentioned that her research lies in the “penumbra produced by master categories.” She noted that “immigrants” is such a master category. It describes not just a person, but a status, a process, a threat or opportunity…That is why it inspires so much debate and controversy. It is important to deconstruct this term and look at the process behind it. Is the Iraqi immigrant created when he leaves the country, or does he become one when the war happens in his country, or when a decision was made to launch this war? Master categories obscure this process.

She also looked at labor migration, and observed that “low-wage” migrants in global cities are poorly looked upon because of their definition. If we viewed them as critical to system maintenance, as a vital part of the infrastructure, this upgrades their status and changes the debate.

Another of my article on Harmonious Society and Corporate Citizenship has been published in CSR China. The thesis is similar to my other article published in Asia CSR (a different publication).

In other news, my financial aid application at Penn was rejected. Nothing surprising there. I am still upset that it took them so long to make this decision. They did not even bother to inform me that they had made a decision and I had to call them several times to get the response. I will not get aid because I did not apply for it during the application process, and cannot do so now as an international student. Going through Student Financial Services here is a Kafkaesque experience, although I am sure it is very different for domestic students.

What are some possible next steps? I could continue lobbying for aid, and stand a decent change of getting it, but this will come with some terms and conditions that I might not want to accept. Another option is to transfer to another institution with a better endowment and greater generosity for international students. I could also probably drop the Huntsman Program and go single-degree Wharton, which will allow me to graduate in as little as two semesters.

Given all the possibilities, I intend to take next semester off as it is the optimal choice regardless of which path I choose to go down. I could study Korean (although Seoul is expensive), learn more about Latin America and the Middle East, and visit Singapore. I will need to work all this out, but its liberating now that some decision branches have been cut off.

This is the cover for our presentation for the intermediate Korean language class I am taking. I am presenting on Korea’s marriage culture, which I talked about previously (here). Its one of the nicer slide covers I did recently (I love powerpoint art) as it shows that

1. less is more
2. changing designs can be refreshing
3. moving out of square designs and being creative with orientation makes picture more dynamic

(Shanghai, China) China’s future lies behind these doors…

China’s 17th party congress has begun and it will be interesting to see the new Chinese leadership that emerges. My friend sends me the following analysis on the proceedings and I am not revealing his name unless he wants me to. [minor editing on my part]

Good to hear that you are following the party congress in China. I am not surprised at the recent reshuffles in the standing committee. I think, as the articles you sent me suggested, the two new entrants, Xi Jingping and Li Keqiang, are both highly qualified politicians and it would be interesting in seeing their chemistry when both of them emerge as the President and the Premier five years down the road.

There is something very intriguing that this Bloomberg article failed to cover probably because their sources in China are not well connected enough. A very reliable source indicated that Xi Jingping who is from the status quo is likely to assume the President. This reconciles the two opposing factions within the Communist party. The populist faction, ‘headed’ by Hu Jintao, favored Li Keqiang for the presidency. The elitist faction, headed by the previous president Jiang Zeming and the party elders, favors Li Yuanchao. They reached a compromise by pushing Xi Jiping to the frontline, and Hu had to concede and place Li Keqiang as future premier.

Hu favors Li Keqiang because Li Keqiang is a pro-business conservative. He is also committed to ensuring income and welfare equality based on his previous career track in Henan and Liaoning province. This is the doctrine of ’scientific social development outlook’ that Hu champions and wants to implant in the Chinese communist indoctrination as his political legacy.

This is far from end game. As Zeng and other Elitist faction members step down and relinquish their power, and the populist faction gain more grounds in the next five years, Xi Jiping and Li Keqiang’s fortune may well reverse.

The fate of Bo Xilai would be worth noting as well. There has been rumors that he would be purged from the ministry of commerce for violations of party rules and sent to a distant regions such as ChongQing to assume local chief governor. But he is a protege of Jiang Zeming who would try everything to maintain Bo in power.

(Turfan, China) Love and marriage, they go together like a horse and carriage?

Through conversations with some Korean friends, I learnt a little about Korean marriage practices. As the family is an the foundation of social structure in Korea, marriage is of utmost significance, and the decision is made not just by the individuals involved, but jointly by the entire family. Especially for those from rich families (of which most Koreans at Penn are), the process is long, complicated and demanding.

The process begins early with the Korean equivalent of finishing schools. Daughters take golf lessons or tea-making to mold them into ideal partners. An Ivy League education is a great accessory. A prestigious education helps as they mix in the right circles, and the Korean boyfriends they meet at such institutions are inevitably from equally rich and status-endowed families. Equipped with the right qualities, the official search process can now begin.

Parents draw up a list of suitable suitors for their daughters, and dinners are arranged for the prospective couples to meet. Drawing up this list of suitors is demanding: family backgrounds are investigated to determine if their status would match. Education, wealth, criminal records, political positions, and extraordinary talents are fair game for judging a prospective. This research extends not just to the suitor, but to his entire family. It is a marriage of families, not just of individuals. The process is reminiscent of applying to the Ivy League, which is why these places are such good matching grounds.

Korea has an insular culture, and there is a strong pressure for girls to marry Koreans. Koreans marrying East Asians are frowned upon but still possible. Koreans marrying Caucasians or Indians is frowned upon further. However, just as a poor SAT score can be made up for by exceptional talent in applying to an Ivy, so can race be mitigated by having other strengths (this is of course not limited to Koreans, but is common to most cultures). Running a conjoint analysis (jokingly) with friends, I get the following results:

White guy from Penn – Fail Marriage Test
Asian guy from Penn – Waitlisted
Korean guy from Penn – Pass Marriage Test

White guy from Harvard – Pass Marriage Test (maybe waitlisted)
Asian guy from Harvard – Pass Marriage Test
Korean guy from Harvard – Super-Pass Marriage Test

Update from a source:

koreans are way more obsessed with Med school.
it’s Med >>>>> Law school>(=)Business School
koreans have a tendency to worship doctors. it goes like,
Kgirl1: hey, i know this guy from Seoul National.
Kgirl2: yea, whatever, i saw his picture. Not my type.
Kgirl1: um, he’s pre-med.
Kgirl2: REALLY??!!?!!? you have GOT to introduce me to him!!!!!


An update two years on…click here for Part 2

(Shanghai, China) Everything is harmonious now?

Prof Hsieh, a brilliant philosopher at the Legal Studies Department at Wharton, returned briefly from his sabbatical at Harvard to give a lecture on CSR to staff at Penn. I chanced upon his lecture and sat in briefly hoping that his knowledge could catalyze my research with the Legal Studies Chair Thomas Dunfee. This research effort has been particularly enriching and challenging for me, as I have always been an empirical/ public policy research type, and had never taken such an introspective and philosophical research path.

Prof Hsieh views CSR as a corporate strategy as a failure. He draws on trust theory: if someone trusts us, we gain benefits from having this trust. However, if we do things specifically to gain the benefits of trust, we are unable to gain the trust. This paradox extends to CSR as a strategy. If we implement a CSR strategy with the specific aim of achieving better corporate results, we build a consumer backlash as people see the CSR-based actions as insincere. We already observe this in the “greenwashing” or “bluewashing” that people attach to some corporate actions.

My view is that the theory of economic signals can be applied here. A signal is effective only if it is costly. A company that spends $10 000 on advertising to tell us they are a premier firm is probably seen poorly compared against a company that spends $10 million. This is of course an over-simplification. What would this mean if applied to CSR? Companies that spend a lot on “wasteful” CSR, such as socially oriented actions in areas that do not touch their value chains or their target markets, would benefit more from CSR’s halo. Merck’s investment in tackling river blindness is an example of this: by providing drugs to Africa, which it has almost no markets in, Merck actually generated very positive publicity for itself in the US because it seemed to have nothing to gain from that action.

This in turn creates a paradox. If many companies know that this is how CSR can work as a corporate strategy, and do this to gain the benefits of CSR association, this strategy will lose its effectiveness. I believe that whether this happens is contingent on whether we reach a tipping point where this action becomes widespread and less believable, and also on game-theoretic outcomes of consumer-company interactions.

(Hong Kong, China) How cities develop?

When I was in Switzerland in May for a conference, I met a Japanese student who studied urban studies in Tokyo. He gave me some insight into how the popular modes of transportation interact with city planning to give different urban designs.

One distinct difference between US and Asian cities lies in how cities in Philadelphia and New York have orderly grid systems while Asian cities is a confusing tangle of roads. This affects how we think about location and directions: in America, people will tell you the streets and you would meet your friends at intersections. In Asia, you navigate using landmarks, and subway stops are common meeting points. You seldom remember road names in Asia, and it would be futile to tell a stranger in Hong Kong to go to Mo Gao street or some other variation to find you.

My Japanese friend pointed out that Asian cities develop around their public system. A locality is often defined by concentric circles around a subway station. The area close to a subway station is the most expensive, and developing in circles would be the most efficient way of capturing all the land closest to the subway. Walking from Harajuku stop to Shibuya stop in Tokyo, I observed that after a certain distance, the type of shops and clientele would change rapidly as I stepped into “another circle.” In US cities, the unit of geography is the city block. As automobiles are the primary transportation means, public transport plays a less important role in defining how the city develops, allowing for a more orderly grid system.

There is a rising trend of investment protectionism. Governments from India to Germany have imposed or are considering restrictions on foreign purchases of assets in their country. In the US, attempts by DP World, a port operator owned by the Dubai government, to buy US oil giant Unocal Corp. was abandoned amidst an uproar over national-security interests. Both India and Germany are considering national-security screening processes for proposed foreign investments.

Accompanying this fear is the rise of government-controlled investment funds. These funds are perceived as proxies for their governments subject to state interests that go beyond earning the highest return on capital. Assets under these funds have grown dramatically thanks to high energy prices which have swelled the coffers of the Middle East, and trade imbalances that have allowed Asian countries to accumulate massive foreign reserves. These funds are estimated to manage assets worth US$1.6 trillion. Equally disconcerting to countries in the West is that many of these funds originate in Asia and are managed by governments often considered autocratic and opaque.

What are the driving characteristics of this hostility towards state-owned investment funds? After all, we cannot expect the same degree of opposition if CalPERS was to acquire a British or European firm. The backlash against state-owned investment funds acquiring in foreign markets, and more broadly state-owned entities doing so, is a function of the degree of the national interests believed to be embedded in the state-owned investment fund, the nature of the investment, and the political context in which this interests take place.

The degree of national interests is closely related to how a state-owned investment fund is operated and organized. One determinant of this is whether the fund is organized such that it is directly responsible to its citizens, or if it is directly responsible to an intermediary such as the state. This is in turn a function of how transparent such funds are with their performance, their investments, and their management. Funds that are less transparent are more insulated from citizen pressure for higher investment returns, and are more likely to be perceived as serving a broader political objective of the state.

While both Temasek, the fund that manages the retirement savings of Singapore, and CalPERS are responsible for state pensions, Temasek did not publish its annual returns on investments until 2004. Furthermore, Temasek is run by Ho Ching, wife of the Singaporean Prime Minister, and selection is done by the government in a closed process. Thus, when Temasek bought Shin Corporation from deposed Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, the new Thai government and people sought to punish the Singapore state for Temasek’s involvement, seeing it as a foreign intrusion into Thai politics. On the flipside, Chinese investments in Blackstone (and its accompanying investment) is not seen with the same hostility as DP Worlds buying into American ports. While the size of the stake is a consideration, it could also be that Blackstone is an intermediary that is at the same time publicly owned, relatively transparent, and thus subject to more market pressures than political pressures.

The nature of the investment and the political context are closely related issues that also affect how activities by state-owned investment funds are perceived. Whereas the investment activities of Temasek in China and to a lesser extent in the USA have attracted little attention, those by DP Worlds and CNOOC have drawn massive regulatory scrutiny. The first part of this story was that purchases by DP Worlds and CNOOC are seen, rightly or wrongly, as investments into assets associated with national security or energy security. Such investments are more likely to draw public attention, and this works in conjunction with the specific political context. While Singapore is seen as a strategic partner of the USA, China is seen as a strategic competitor, and Dubai is seen as an occasionally unreliable ally. These three factors work in combination to determine the degree of hostility such investment funds face in making foreign acquisitions.

Indeed insurance is a man’s best friend. Not only now families can save their seats due to life insurance, day to day life has become easier since car insurance goes with it. Families can sigh their relief’s as they do not have to see their houses crumble to accidents since home insurance is now available too.

(Beijing, China) The consumer’s paradise - just because some of us come out on the better end of the economic curve does not mean we should abuse that power and shirk our collective responsibilities.

dropped by the Huntsman Program office yesterday as Michael Dee, former Managing Director of Morgan Stanley and regional head of the Houston office, wanted to give a talk to Huntsman students. He sits on the Huntsman external advisory board, and is now heavily involved in non-profit education work since retirement. I really admire Michael’s passion for non-profit work, especially his belief in a collective responsibility that we have for all segments of society.

Michael spent many years in Singapore’s Morgan Stanley office as regional CEO and was involved in the education reforms of Singapore. His involvement happened when Tharman Shanmugaratnam left the Monetary Authority of Singapore to head the Ministry of Education. Tharman asked Michael what Singapore could do better to increase creativity and entrepreneurship. Michael also sat on the board of the Singapore Management University and the Economic Development Board of Singapore. His public service was recognized when the Singapore government made him an honorary business representative of Singapore in Houston when he left the country.

In discussing public education systems, Michael points out how American schools are failing its people because it cannot keep politics out of it. He favors national standards because state control over the schooling system subjects education to capture by political interests. He cites how Texas lowered its testing requirements in order to give George Bush a positive record when running for the presidency. On the other hand, he criticizes the public education systems that currently exist: he argues that the French education system is elitist. The top business and political leaders all come from the same school, with less room for outsiders in the system.

I appreciate Michael Dee’s belief in the collective responsibility of individuals. We were discussing taxes, and Michael (as a Republican) believes that higher taxes are necessary. Michael believes in fiscal responsibility. He also believes that we have an ethical obligation to take care of the poor. He points out why people are so against higher taxes: the ones sitting in the room discussing this with him are not the ones out there suffering from the dilapidated schools. Until we have lived through that experience, it is easy for us to say no to higher taxes since we have been beneficiaries of the status quo.