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NigComSat-1R Three Year Insuarnce Will Cost About N540m

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The insurance for the NigComSat 1R that will be launched later this year by NigComSat will cost around N540m. This figure covers the insurance for the first three years after launch, according to the office of the chief budget officer, Nigeria.

 

Of course, without insurance the possibility after the failure of NigComSat would not have been possible. So, we got this right and it is the right thing to also ensure the next one. Of course, no one is wishing for the satellite to fail.

 

There are many benefits associated with satellite operations and Nigeria cannot afford not to play a leading role there. Some of these benefits include:

  • efficient transportation  system in the sea and air
  • national security readiness. Of course, we must not be like Pakistan that was sleeping when Americans entered their country and took away Osama.
  • telecommunication. cheap and dead cheap broadband access
  • solid broadcasting operations

 

We still think that this new satellite must have some local contents. Even if it means to ask a local Nigerian company to cast the iron for its mounting. This process must be used to build capacity and nurture SMEs in the nation. Local content policy must be part of this business and Nigeria must insist that it happens. As NigComSat goes into the negotiation table, it must remember that it could help nurture small electronics  companies in the nation through small contracts. That way this will be win win for the nation.

 

Nigeria is learning and the tragedies of NigComSat 1 must not dampen the spirit of the nation and NigComSat. Rather, we must learn from it and get better. Satellites fail all the time. Some notable examples are:

 

– PanAmSat, 2004

– Intelsat, 2011

– Hotbird 3, 2006

– MTSAT 1R, 2006 (recoverred)

– Climate change monitor satellite, 2007?

 

So, we are not alone. We need to get this one right and good enough that it is going to be insured. Tekedia commends the team at NigComSat for getting quick to getting this new satellite after the initial failure.

 

[News Flash] Telkom Breaks The Visafone Acquisition of Multilinks

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Mobility Nigeria reports that the the litigation from Helios Towers insisting that Telkom honors its agreement to rent its cellphone towers for ten years has broken the acquisition of Multilinks by Visafone.

 

CyberSchuulNews reports that Telkom South Africa has said it will withdraw all funding from Multilinks in Nigeria since its attempt to sell the ailing firm to Visafone has been lost to litigation. Helios Towers had raised charges that the South African firm walked away from a ten-year rental agreement in nigeria after only three years.

 

Telkom bought 75% into multilinks for $280million in 2007 and paid up the balance of $130 million in 2009. The South African firm was unable to turn the fortunes of Multilinks around, and put it up for sale.

 

The Helios charge has ended Visafone’s move to acquire the ailing pioneer CDMA operator in Nigeria.

 

 

Microsoft Loses Nearly $300m Patent Case Over Word Tool

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Microsoft lost a battle to a small Canadian company on a patent.  It has lost its final appeal against a judgment ruling that it  pays a small Canadian company nearly $300m to settle a patent dispute.  The United States Supreme Court said Microsoft must pay following rulings by lower courts that it had infringed a patent on a technology linked to the Microsoft Word, a widely used  word-processing program.

 

Microsoft’s troubles with i4i extend back to August 2009, when the federal judge in the U.S. District Court in Eastern Texas ordered that all copies of Word 2003 and 2007 be removed from retail channels within 90 days. Microsoft’s attorneys managed to argue a delay, only to have the U.S. Court of Appeals uphold the verdict four months later.

 

A Toronto-based company called i4i first sued Microsoft four years ago, arguing that it owned the technology behind a tool on the popular software.  Microsoft now only sells versions of the word-processing software that do not contain the technology.

 

Too good for the company, Microsoft might have acquired them with less than $300m. But now, they exist and have a badge of defeating the monstrous behemoth that Bill Gates built.

 

Signs of Decline – American Senator Said Robotic Research Is “Wasteful”

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While Nigerian scientists cannot get money for research, the U.S. agency, National Science Foundation, responsible for shaping US science policy is accused by a US Senator that it is wasteful in a robotic research.

 

In a recent report, Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma takes aim at the National Science Foundation, the premier source of funding for science and engineering in the United States, raising questions about the agency’s management and priorities. In one section of the report, Coburn criticizes the NSF for squandering “millions of dollars on wasteful projects,” including three that involve robots.  “A dollar lost to mismanagement, fraud, inefficiency, or a dumb project is a dollar that could have advanced scientific discovery,” the report says.

 

Do not read any meaning into this. He is a politician and they are trying to score points here. Yet, one thing is certain, there are many lawyers ruling America that one will ask if they understand what is happening in the world. Without a robot, the nuclear disaster in Japan will not have any chance of being abated. The BP Oil spill will still be spilling crude. It is only robot that can do those dangerous things. Sometimes, researchers wander and get lost, but that is the fun. Not all turns out to be great but they learn. For a Senator to say that NSF is wasteful, it is simply telling you that America could be in decline. Save the money, no science, and let us go hunting. Then after few years, cry over when Chinese are taking over the world.

Number of Dropout CEOs Ties Number of CEOs From Any University in S&P 500 – You Need New Ideas, Not Certificates

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(the concluding part of our management philosophy piece)

Firms need to measure and guide people to achieve, but it does not mean that you have to pile theories endlessly in courses on them. Those theories are structured based on a monolithic understanding of management. That happens to be the problem. It assumes that those concepts are great but it prevents freedom to innovative management.

 

The world has become much fragmentized and leadership evolution points to disparity in concept. You cannot have creative disruption of firms under most of our management theories because it is based on preservation and nurture. That capacity to carefully destroy and invent a firm is not that prominent in these programs both in schools and firms. We like the status quo but technology will not support us here.

 

Recall that some of the best companies on earth are not managed by these management czars. Apple ranks among the best in innovation. Yet, Jobs rarely finished school. Oracle’s Ellison, Microsoft’s Gates, Dell’s Dell, are other examples.

 

So instead of wasting time much time on offsite management training, firms should spend time on giving potential future captains responsibilities and measure them under a practical mentoring system. And how you decide who gets chosen must be broad and untangled because the same metric that worked for turbine business may not be best for a social business. Arguably, there is need for order and management must provide that through organic practical process that does not disconnect from responsibilities.

 

There is need for mutability in management. We have to destroy to recreate it today. Wall Street will hire all the top MBA students and yet will get messed up. The problem is the education is focusing on concepts and structures and few of the students have opportunities to be free in thinking. Coupled with the fact that the tools they use to evaluate their performances are obsolete, we come to see firms collapse under these management systems. Why not? MBA is about building; rarely teach disruptive mutation of firms. In reality, firms are supposed to grow and grow. But when growth stops, understanding how to transmute becomes a challenge.

 

I am not writing about M&A, I am talking about carefully destroying firms so as to re-invent them. It is mutation where a better firm emerges internally and organically. I call it Intelligent Mutability Management because you do not allow it to become a process that is not under control.

 

They praise icons like Jack Welsh of GE because he was firing 10% of bottom performers. Unfortunately, I will not be happy to hire people I will fire. Why not hire those that are good so you have no need to fire. There is nothing good in spending less time during hiring and then wait to fire. I will hail the boss who does not fire the bottom 10% of staff because he does not have under-performers. Remember these have been introduced as management constructs in American capitalism where firms hire and fire anyhow to shareholders’ delights.

 

We have a system where firms fail to understand that a staff makes bottom 10% in a department does not mean it cannot make best 10% in another department. But we fire staff to appease shareholders when firing could have been seen as poor management.

 

The same applies to when firms hire entrepreneurial minded staff who wants to get things done than waste time on protocols. They lose the human content and you fire them. After five years, their firms become your main competitors.

 

This is exactly what happens throughout the life of Steve Jobs where he was fired in his firm because his mindset was different to the executives. But they brought him back and he engineered Apple into a renaissance. The management that examines the traits is flawed because they missed them.

 

My concern is the system that measures those traits is flawed because man can find more than 35 traits for management and/or leadership. But in most cases, the human resources department use only the most important they think which may not be that important. GE measures five growth traits: external focus, clear thinking, imagination, inclusiveness and expertise. That seems very balanced. But I will add entrepreneurial, not for GE but for those smaller firms. If you miss that energy, you will be bought over in months.

 

So the big question is this? Does management education give bloated ego that makes common sense wasted sense? Read the Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering, New York University, Nassim Taleb, the author of Black Swam: “Humans can be extremely rational in ordinary circumstances. The minute you give them MBA, though, they start using these forecasts and these financial tools in ways that contradict their own behavior”

 

To conclude this piece, May 23, 2010 edition of Bloomberg Businessweek reported S&P 500 CEOs as per undergraduate alma mater; the result has those that attended School of Hard Knocks (euphemism for dropouts) tied at 12 CEOs with University of California. Harvard has 11 and Princeton 8 CEOs. This means that life struggles produce more CEOs than any of the top universities in the US, except University of California (clusters of schools though).

 

The world needs a new management philosophy which I am calling Intelligent Mutability Management (IMM). It is what will help the world, private and public, to understand that we can rebuild by destroying. Holding on to the past when the future is here creates a resistance that deprives the world growth and innovation. If we can understand how to intelligently and carefully allow some old era industries to collapse in order to make way for new ones, we will navigate out of our present economic crises better. A philosophy that looks at strength in learning how to destroy to succeed is what will help. We need intelligent mutability in managing the global affairs.