Yes JC, good point, but comparisons with the British East India Company are probably a bit of a long bow, fine upstanding gentlemen and business model...
However I did enjoy reading "The Scandal of Empire" , a lot more than watching some recent films
http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674027244
....
"Many have told of the East India Company’s extraordinary excesses in eighteenth-century India, of the plunder that made its directors fabulously wealthy and able to buy British land and titles, but this is only a fraction of the story. When one of these men—Warren Hastings—was put on trial by Edmund Burke, it brought the Company’s exploits to the attention of the public. Through the trial and after, the British government transformed public understanding of the Company’s corrupt actions by creating an image of a vulnerable India that needed British assistance. Intrusive behavior was recast as a civilizing mission. In this fascinating, and devastating, account of the scandal that laid the foundation of the British Empire,
Nicholas Dirks explains how this substitution of imperial authority for Company rule helped erase the dirty origins of empire and justify the British presence in India.
The Scandal of Empire reveals that the conquests and exploitations of the East India Company were critical to England’s development in the eighteenth century and beyond. We see how mercantile trade was inextricably linked with imperial venture and scandalous excess and how these three things provided the ideological basis for far-flung British expansion. In this powerfully written and trenchant critique, Dirks shows how the empire projected its own scandalous behavior onto India itself. By returning to the moment when the scandal of empire became acceptable we gain a new understanding of the modern culture of the colonizer and the colonized and the manifold implications for Britain, India, and the world."
and DeBeers, yes, well probably a better comparison, we SHOULD all recall that in 1888, they set two audacious goals:
1) Monopolize diamond prices. They succeeded by creating De Beers Consolidated Mines, Ltd. and taking full ownership and control of the world diamond trade. While they stockpiled diamonds and sold them strategically to control price, De Beers Chairman
Sir Ernest Oppenheimer cultivated a network of wholesalers all over the world.
2) Stabilize the market. To succeed here, De Beers would have to figure out a way to control both supply
and demand for diamonds worldwide. For this, they would need to find an ad agency.
What was the action plan. Find an ad agency to sell some ideas! Today you can get pollies at half the price, LOL. When De Beers began looking for an ad agency, the global economy was suffering and Europe was under threat of war. Their challenge was to figure out which country or countries had the most potential to support a growing diamond market, and then to hire an agency to implement a marketing campaign in those countries. Because of Europe's preoccupation with the oncoming war, the U.S. was chosen -- even though the total number of diamonds in the U.S. had declined
by nearly 50% since the end of World War I.
De Beers hired Philadelphia ad agency N.W. Ayer in 1938, and the rest is history...
But of course history is littered with those who cannot learn from the past...and Corporate history is no better. We all have forgot the views of Adam Smith on the Corporate entity...
"
“The directors of such companies … being the managers rather of other people’s money rather than of their own, it cannot well be expected that they should watch over it with the same anxious vigilance with which [they would] watch over their own,” he wrote. “Negligence and profusion, therefore, must always prevail, more or less, in the management of the affairs of such a company.”
In other words, managers are invariably prone to waste. They will gold-plate their office equipment and cut out early for their kids’ music recitals. And what about stockholder fraud, such a large source of angst among modern governance critics? Smith felt that the possibility of theft existed in every area of commercial life, yet commerce thrived. “Negligence and profusion,” what economists now call “agency costs,” were different; they were, and are, an inherent result of the separation of ownership and management.
Smith was well aware of the benefits of corporations, including their ability to concentrate large amounts of money into capital-intensive undertakings. But he thought that the costs of agency would always be too high. He believed that those costs scaled up with the business, as that was the experience of his day. Therefore, the bigger a business got, the worse the waste. He frankly didn’t see any way around it, even if the corporation had monopoly privileges."
So mistakes just keep on being made...only the name of the Corporation changes...names of directors and mngt as well of course ...
off to the races this weekend, surer ROI !!!
(20min delay)