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Clancy's
live on the net Clancy's will
become the first ever restaurant and pub in Sri Lanka to launch
its very own website. Geoffrey Fernando, the Director and founder
owner of Clancy's said: "We always put our customers first
and we want to keep them informed about what we are doing, what
better way to do it than through our website, they can get information
about all our live events and even make reservations on line. Our
customers are busy people and this way the information is available
at their fingertips." Designed, developed
and powered by Eureka Online Pvt. Ltd, this interactive website
gives up to date information about the latest events and promotions
as well as menus. In addition an on line booking service membership
subscription is available and to celebrate the launch prizes are
being offered to the first 20 on line subscribers. Clancy's have been entertaining Colombo with their unique blend of European cuisine and Sri Lankan hospitality since 2000. Its flamboyant live music events all week long have also helped make it one of Colombo's favorite and most talked about nightspots. Gas
Auto Lanka files for damages However, about
the same time GAL's sister company Laugfs said it had signed a Memorandum
of Understanding with the Ceylon Petroleum Corporation to purchase
its supply of LPG for domestic cylinders. Due to a problem with
the slow stabilization of its domestic LPG demand, the company had
made temporary arrangements to use the same for industrial purposes
also. At present, this problem has been overcome as demand has exceeded
this quantity and Laugfs is reportedly importing its additional
requirement. The enjoining
order that was invoked on January 24 was suspended a few days later.
During this period 11 auto gas stations of GAL had to shut down
their operation. The four companies withdrew their lawsuits on May
21 and the cases were dismissed with legal costs. Gas Auto Lanka
(Pvt) Ltd, a member of the Laugfs group of companies operates the
largest network of auto gas dispensing stations in the island. Fallen
idols The vehemence
of today's reaction against business leaders is partly a reflection
of how far their companies' shares have fallen, and also of the
extent of their personal greed. But it is also a reaction against
the worship heaped on them in the 1990s. Revolutions devour their
children, and the impact of new technology and the bull market on
business was little short of a revolution. Now for the devouring. Enron the
catalyst Disillusionment
often follows when first-time investors are seduced en masse to
a stockmarket, as they were in the late 1990s. It happened in Britain
in the 1980s, when privatisation set out to show that equities need
not be just for toffs. Naive investors then chose to follow stars
- such as Anita Roddick of Body Shop and Asil Nadir of Polly Peck
- without looking too closely at the numbers. Then, as now, it often
ended in tears. Polly Peck, for example, went spectacularly bust. This time the
catalyst was Enron. Few understood its accounts. But they trusted
Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling when they said that their company
was in a totally new Internet game, a game that was going to lead
to undreamed-of riches. Likewise, they loved and trusted tough Mr.
Welch when he produced uncannily smooth earnings growth at GE, the
company Americans most admire. Once started,
this process is self-perpetuating. Stars become chief executives,
not the other way round. "If you were making a movie and said
'Get me a CEO' to the casting director, he'd give you Michael Armstrong,"
wrote Jeffrey Garten, the dean of the Yale School of Management,
in his book, "The Mind of the CE0". Mr. Armstrong had
a "vision" to take an old telecom company, in the shape
of AT&T, to the heart of the new-economy revolution. The vision
destroyed $140 billion of shareholder value and brought AT&T
to its knees, a feat that few from central casting could ever hope
to achieve. Americans are
not alone in turning against their former heroes. Europe is at it
too. Jean-Marie Messier, the chauffeur's grandson who turned a French
utility into Vivendi Universal, a global media empire, was once
adored for having planted the French flag near the summit of Hollywood. But recently
he was heckled at the company's four-hour annual meeting and is
now fighting for his business life. Lousy results, much publicised
infighting nd a 40% fall in the share price this year have turned
investors against him. Yet nowhere
raises their corporate heroes as high as America; and nowhere are
they knocked down so low. The hero worship has this time been vastly
encouraged by the growth of new media. A new breed of television
channel devoted to business and finance - CNBC, Bloomberg and CNN
Money-needed faces to put on their screens. And there were new business
magazines with covers to fill. "Mugs sell mags" is a tenet
of cover designers, and the likes of Jack Welch, Jeff Bezos, Larry
Ellison and even Bernie Ebbers were favourite fillers. One piece
of research actually found a correlation between the number of times
that chief executives appeared on magazine covers and the excessive
amount they had paid for their acquisitions. Call it the cost of
hubris. It took Enron's
demise to shatter completely investors' illusion that backing the
jockeys was a good idea. The greed and deceit of its bosses have
tarred everybody. Mr. Welch is now widely portrayed not as a star
chief executive but as an ageing philanderer; business journalists
in America yearn to be the first to reveal the accounting tricks
that made GE's earnings levitate for so long. A call to
account When undue
attention is focused on a single figure, undue effort is devoted
to manipulating it. Finally, there needs to be a return to the practice
whereby accounts (always to some extent subjective) are judged "fair"
by an independent and trustworthy outsider. Academics and
consultants are trying to prove that modest, unassuming folk are
the ideal chief executives for the 21st century. But big business
today has too much in common with show business. When there are
no stars, they tend to be created. By all means
tear the statues down, but don't destroy them. The faces can be
rechiselled next time round. |
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