Travels in the Riel World

As the global financial system tries to right itself after staggering to the brink of collapse, one banking sector finds itself in somewhat better shape than most of the world. That would be the Islamic banking system, which credits its steadiness to practices that are unique to Islamic finance, such as banning interest and shying away from excessive debt and risk. The Washington Post has a story on the topic:

As big Western financial institutions have teetered one after the other in the crisis of recent weeks, another financial sector is gaining new confidence: Islamic banking.

Proponents of the ancient practice, which looks to sharia law for guidance and bans interest and trading in debt, have been promoting Islamic finance as a cure for the global financial meltdown.

This week, Kuwait’s commerce minister, Ahmad Baqer, was quoted as saying that the global crisis will prompt more countries to use Islamic principles in running their economies. U.S. Deputy Treasury Secretary Robert M. Kimmet, visiting Jiddah, said experts at his agency have been learning the features of Islamic banking.

Though the trillion-dollar Islamic banking industry faces challenges with the slump in real estate and stock prices, advocates say the system has built-in protection from the kind of runaway collapse that has afflicted so many institutions. For one thing, the use of financial instruments such as derivatives, blamed for the downfall of banking, insurance and investment giants, is banned. So is excessive risk-taking.

“The beauty of Islamic banking and the reason it can be used as a replacement for the current market is that you only promise what you own. Islamic banks are not protected if the economy goes down — they suffer — but you don’t lose your shirt,” said Majed al-Refaie, who heads Bahrain-based Unicorn Investment Bank.

The theological underpinning of Islamic banking is scripture that declares that collection of interest is a form of usury, which is banned in Islam. In the modern world, that translates into an attitude toward money that is different from that found in the West: Money cannot just sit and generate more money. To grow, it must be invested in productive enterprises.

“In Islamic finance you cannot make money out of thin air,” said Amr al-Faisal, a board member of Dar al-Mal al-Islami, a holding company that owns several Islamic banks and financial institutions. “Our dealings have to be tied to actual economic activity, like an asset or a service. You cannot make money off of money. You have to have a building that was actually purchased, a service actually rendered, or a good that was actually sold.”

No, it’s not the KFC you were probably expecting. Although it’s close. In Afghanistan, Kentucky Fried Chicken has been transformed into Kabul Fried Chicken by an Afghan expatriate who has returned to his home country with his sights set on an emerging market for fast foods. Time magazine has the story.

As the sun sets in Kabul and the wail of the muezzin issuing from loudspeakers mounted on minarets calls the faithful to evening prayer, the fryer at KFC is being fired up for the evening rush. But Kabul Fried Chicken has little in common with the U.S. chain whose initials it copied: The chairs are a little too high for the tables, and the delights depicted in photographs mounted on the walls — big milkshakes, braised ribs, lattes — are conspicuously absent from the menu. The fare on offer is more egalitarian. Kebabs, pizza and, of course, fried chicken.

Kabul Fried Chicken is, if he is to be believed, the brainchild of Mirwais Abuldrahizmi, who long ago observed that the young people of the Muslim world like to express their cosmopolitan yearnings through their consumption habits. And returnee Afghans, like himself, bring with them visions from exile of girls without headscarves, shopping malls as social hubs, and the rituals of fast food…

Mirwais is not the only Afghan pretender to the Colonel Sanders mantle in Kabul. Another is Jamshed, who uses only one name, and runs one of three rival KFCs…He claims that after being told by the (real) KFC regional HQ in Lahore, Pakistan, that opening a franchise in Kabul would cost him a few hundred thousand dollars, he opted to go the pirate route. He claims to have bought the U.S.-based KFC’s secret fried chicken recipe on the black market for $1,200, although obviously that claim can’t be verified. “You can get anything at the bazaar in Pakistan,” he says.

Normally, a knock-off of a global company would have to deal with legal issues of intellectual property rights. But this is Afghanistan. As the story notes:

Imitation … is endemic to Afghanistan’s business environment. “We’re an underdeveloped country,” Mirwais says. “So we can’t come up with our own ideas.”

It sometimes seems as if there is no end to the type of work that can be outsourced these days. Businesses have been outsourcing labor for years, and individuals have figured out how to outsource personal tasks, nursing home care and even pregnancies. Now comes word of the latest work that is being outsourced - legal research. Time Magazine has the story.

Mark Alexander, a Dallas attorney, says he’s ethically obligated to do what’s best for his clients, “and that includes saving them money.” So when one of them asks him to research a securities-fraud topic, for example, or breach of contract, he doesn’t even think about applying his $395 hourly rate. Instead, he calls Atlas Legal Research, an outsourcing company based in Irving, Texas, that uses lawyers in India to provide the service for $60 per hr. “When a client pays me a $25,000 retainer and I can save them money, I will do so,” says Alexander. Handing off the work to a $225-per-hr. junior associate is not an option. “They don’t even know where to stand in the courtroom,” he says.

While the Americans learn, well-trained lawyers in secure offices in Mumbai (formerly Bombay), Bangalore and Gurgaon (outside Delhi), who typically earn $6,000 to $30,000 annually, do legal grunt work…The considerable savings is perhaps one reason Forrester Research, based in Cambridge, Mass., has projected the offshoring of 29,000 legal jobs by the end of the year and as many as 79,000 by 2015.

Perhaps we should call it Outsourcing 2.0, as it’s being described as the next logical step in outsourcing, from lower skill to higher skill jobs. There is obviously a limit, though, as to how much of this work can be done from abroad, which at the moment is limited to legal reseach and document review.

It’s part of India’s inevitable move up the corporate food chain, from lower-value business process outsourcing–like call centers–to knowledge process outsourcing (KPO). The latter category encompasses higher-skilled jobs, such as engineering and medicine, and relies on the KPOs to behave more like branch offices of U.S. companies.

ValueNotes, a business-research firm based in Pune, India, says a subset of KPO called legal process outsourcing (LPO) has grown revenues 49% from 2006, to $218 million last year. The figure will nearly triple, to $640 million, by 2010, it says…

TransUnion, in Chicago, has successfully outsourced legal work for four years, according to general counsel John W. Blenke. “Every law firm is really an outsourcer. One lawyer usually can’t do it all,” he says. Indian attorneys are currently reviewing more than a million litigation e-mails for the company, which costs less than $10 per hr., he says. He would pay $60 to $85 per hr. to a U.S.-based legal-staffing company for the job.

Blenke says he’s cautious, however, about the work he outsources. “You can only do it with a few things. It has to be an area that you know well, so you can build processes around that,” he says.

There was an article in the NY Times this week about the challenges and the allure of doing business in emerging markets around the globe. Or, more accurately, “emerging emerging markets.” Buried within the story was a fascinating account of just how business gets transacted in some cultures.

First, the overview of these markets:

Forget Hong Kong, Beijing, Moscow and Mumbai. Intrepid bankers, investors and hedge fund managers are journeying to farther corners to do deals…

Many of the new investment targets are mineral- or oil-rich nations, like Ghana, where high commodity prices are spurring domestic economic growth, the political framework is solid or stabilizing, and doors are opening to foreign investment. Others, like Vietnam, are adopting capitalism and creating industries. Most of these places have large young populations that are moving from rural economies into cities, eager for cellphones and cars.

Some investors and deal-makers call them “frontier” markets, but there are plenty of other names for these nations. A Merrill Lynch analyst refers to them as “emerging emerging” markets, while Goldman Sachs focuses on the N-11, or Next 11, developing countries.

And, for our purpose of understanding cultures, here is a description of a business meeting in Saudi Arabia in which the actual business was transacted at the very last moment - literally on the way out the door, and only after the necessary relationship-building was accomplished.

Bassam Yammine, a managing director and co-chief executive of the Middle East at Credit Suisse, recently took a colleague from the bank’s London office to see a client in Saudi Arabia. He noticed his guest’s discomfort when, 40 minutes into the meeting, Mr. Yammine, a 40-year-old Lebanese banker, and the client were still chatting about politics and the weather. His colleague shot him a panicked look when everyone got up to leave, still not having mentioned business deals. Halfway out the door, Mr. Yammine turned around, quickly discussed the deal and he and his colleague left the meeting with a check.

“In this part of the world, that’s how you do business,” said Mr. Yammine, who spends his time in Riyadh or Dubai and traveling the region. “Relationships are an important factor in clients’ decisions.”

For more of an understanding of the work culture of this region of the world, check out Margaret Nydell’s book, Understanding Arabs.

A Los Angeles McDonald’s has given itself a face lift. And — in deference to the fast-growing Asian population of the area — the restaurant was redesigned with the help of feng shui consultants, according to this story.

On a busy commercial strip in this Los Angeles-area community is a quiet place where the walls are dabbed with red, the booths form a semicircle — perfect for a palaver with a paramour — and two waterfalls flow silently.

It is not a new cafe heralding gentrification, but rather a McDonald’s, newly renovated with the consultation of experts in feng shui, the Chinese practice of creating harmonious surroundings…

The design clearly reflects the owners’ desire, shared by many purveyors of fast food, to keep customers in their establishments as long as possible. The goal is opposite that of fast-food restaurants of yore, whose greatest wish was high customer turnover.

To that new end, the remodeled store also has a “McCafe” — essentially an outlet for McDonald’s coffee sold at Starbucks prices — a flat-screen television and soft cushioned chairs, all intended to encourage lingering.

But the use of feng shui experts and the multiple Asian touches — a vase at the entry filled with bamboo, and red accents galore, among other things — are also nods to the ever-expanding Asian population here in eastern Los Angeles County, where streets with Spanish names are peppered with stores bearing Chinese-lettered signs and where one of the largest Buddhist temples in the nation makes its home.

There was just a three-part series about Russia in the Christian Science Monitor. It focused on the young people who are part of what has been dubbed the “Putin Generation” - those who have come of age in a Russia that is more stable and prosperous, but still tightly-controlled politically and beset by corruption in business.

The whole series is worth a read, but there were some interesting cultural points in the second article, which focused on a young woman who has struggled to establish herself as a new business owner. The story points out the opportunities of the new Russia, but also the country’s inability so far to break free of some of the stifling practices of the past. An excerpt:

Yulia Barabasheva never wanted to have her own beauty salon…But with a dream of securing a steadier income and starting a family, she opened her unmarked brown metal door to the public in April last year.

It took the help of her husband, Igor Barabashev, a businessman, to get $180,000 in start-up loans and complete a six-month slog through Russia’s formidable bureaucracy to obtain a license. Now, she and her staff of 14 take clients up to 12 hours a day, seven days a week, giving them thinner eyebrows or 5-inch nails.

At 25, Barabasheva is politically unengaged, like many of her “Putin generation.” But she enjoys a rising prosperity, which Russians typically chalk up to President Vladimir Putin. Serving that new wealth has opened the door to opportunities that would have been unheard of for average Russians just a decade ago. But even as Mr. Putin’s Russia allows ever greater numbers of people, like Barabasheva, to move up the economic ladder, it demands a scrappy persistence to battle red tape and corruption while trying to get ahead…

That shift toward broader prosperity, especially in Moscow, has been dramatic. In his first five years in office, Putin brought the poverty rate of his countrymen down to about 16 percent, according to the World Bank…Official figures put the middle class at about 20 percent of the population…

But the backstage of business in Putin’s Russia is much messier, according to Barabasheva and other entrepreneurs. “The state structure is quite complicated, quite corrupted, and it requires a lot of financial investment and emotional investment,” she says.

In a recent speech, Putin acknowledged such challenges. “To this day, it’s impossible to start a business within months,” he said, laying out his vision for Russia through 2020. “You have to go to every office with a bribe: firefighters, hospital orderlies, gynecologists, you name it. It’s just a nightmare.”

The economic advances that have been made during the past decade or so in India are beginning to change the country in ways that reach beyond bank accounts and consumer goods. India’s younger generations, for example, have developed high expectations for their careers and are even beginning to question centuries-old social values. Business Week reports on the changes:

For Ravikiran M.S…security and stability simply aren’t enough. The 24-year-old programmer is brimming with ambition. He rides a motorbike to work and hopes to buy a car. And he expects quick promotions, dreaming of becoming a CEO. “I want the posh life,” he declares.

Ravikiran is typical of India’s in-a-hurry younger generation. With the tech-services boom, the country’s college grads are coming of age in a time of economic optimism, and unlike their parents and grandparents, this group has vibrant job prospects and high hopes. The challenge for companies is to harness their energy while reining in inflated expectations… “It’s a very different generation,” says S. Gopalakrishnan, chief executive of Indian tech giant Infosys Technologies. “They want immediate rewards.” …

The challenge for companies is to address both the desires and frustrations of the younger generation. These become abundantly evident in the cafés and bars of Bangalore. As the city has developed into India’s Silicon Valley, it also has become the country’s bar-hopping capital.

“We need capitalism with a human face,” says P.B. Devaiah, a 20-year-old industrial engineering major at a local college. Sitting with friends at Java City, a crowded coffee shop, he complains that much of the programming in India is the equivalent of sweatshop labor, where new hires are expected to spend as much as 12 hours a day writing code. “We’re being used as machines,” Devaiah says.

When the conversation turns to social issues, India’s young people are likely to erupt in grousing about arranged marriage, the caste system, and interactions with Westerners…One of the biggest concerns is the changing role of women. The tech industry was once almost exclusively male, but by last year about 35% of employees were women…

Veena Parashuram is one of this new generation of Indian women. The 26-year-old engineer grew up in a village so primitive that she never used a spoon, fork, or napkin until she went away to boarding school at age 10. When a teacher told her girls could become anything they wanted, “my mind opened up,” she says.

Although her parents wanted her to submit to an arranged marriage and settle in their village, she went to engineering school in Bangalore and the Netherlands, where she met a German man. The couple married to ease the difficulties of getting work permits, but Parashuram says “the concept of marriage is pretty weird.” While she’s planning a traditional Indian wedding, she says, she doesn’t “like to follow rules that were set down hundreds of years ago.”

Did anyone see Newsweek’s recent “What’s Next” issue? It included a multi-story feature about the rise of China as a superpower and some of the ways in which the country is evolving.

From the cover story by Fareed Zakaria, here is a dramatic overview of just how fast China is growing these days:

Lawrence Summers has recently pointed out that during the Industrial Revolution the average European’s living standards rose about 50 percent over the course of his lifetime (then about 40 years). In Asia, principally China, he calculates, the average person’s living standards are set to rise by 10,000 percent in one lifetime! The scale and pace of growth in China has been staggering, utterly unprecedented in history—and it has produced equally staggering change. In two decades China has experienced the same degree of industrialization, urbanization and social transformation as Europe did in two centuries.

Recall what China looked like only 30 years ago. It was a devastated country, one of the world’s poorest, with a totalitarian state. It was just emerging from Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, which had destroyed universities, schools and factories, all to revitalize the revolution. Since then 400 million people have been lifted out of poverty in China—about 75 percent of the world’s total poverty reduction over the last century.

And here are two opposing views of whether a Chinese-U.S. conflict is inevitable in the coming decades:

Some scholars and policy intellectuals (and a few generals in the Pentagon) look at the rise of China and see the seeds of inevitable great-power conflict and perhaps even war. Look at history, they say. When a new power rises it inevitably disturbs the balance of power, unsettles the international order and seeks a place in the sun. This makes it bump up against the established great power of the day (that would be us). So, Sino-U.S. conflict is inevitable.

But some great powers have been like Nazi Germany and others like modern-day Germany and Japan…In another Foreign Affairs essay, Princeton’s John Ikenberry makes the crucially important point that the current world order is extremely conducive to China’s peaceful rise. That order, he argues, is integrated, rule-based, with wide and deep foundations—and there are massive economic benefits for China to work within this system. Meanwhile, nuclear weapons make it suicidal to risk a great-power war. “Today’s Western order, in short, is hard to overturn and easy to join,” writes Ikenberry.

That’s the title of an interesting article that appeared recently in the Boston Globe. It focuses on some of the success stories coming out of Africa, despite the poverty, hunger and corruption that still plagues much of the continent.

This fall the United Nations announced that Sub-Saharan Africa is the region of the world least likely to meet any of the UN’s so-called Millennium Challenge Goals for reducing poverty, disease, hunger, and illiteracy…According to the World Health Organization, over the past year, 960,000 people, mostly children, died of malaria on the continent, and 1.6 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa died of AIDS. It’s a disconsolately familiar story.

But it’s not the whole story. By many standards, Africa is doing better than it has in decades. The number of democratically elected governments has risen sharply in the past decade, and the number of violent conflicts has dropped. African economies, and African businesses, are starting to show impressive results, and not just by the diminished standards the rest of the world reserves for its poorest continent…Last month, the World Bank reported that average GDP growth in Sub-Saharan Africa has averaged 5.4 percent over the last decade, better than the United States, with some countries poised for dramatic expansion.

“For the first time in a long time, you have the potential that a handful of countries could break from the pack and become leopards, cheetahs, or whatever the African equivalent of an Asian Tiger would be,” says John Page, the World Bank’s chief Africa economist.

What are some these success stories? The story provides a few examples:

Entrepreneurs in Ghana, Kenya, and Senegal are opening call centers and document-processing facilities to service the developed world. Mills in Madagascar and Lesotho, aided by favorable terms of trade, are making textiles for the US market. Stock markets in Kenya, Tanzania, and Ghana, while minuscule by Western standards, are booming. And earlier this fall, global banking giants Citigroup and UBS helped Ghana raise $750 million on the international bond market, the first sub-Saharan government bond offering outside South Africa in 30 years.

It all suggests that much of Africa, after decades of sclerosis and strife, may have turned a corner. Economists believe that several African countries have made the sort of fundamental changes in governance and economic management that could buttress them against swings in commodity prices and the other global economic shocks that in the past have been so devastating.

That’s the argument Fareed Zakaria makes in a recent Newsweek column, and he presents a strong case that government policies designed to deter unwelcome visitors are instead causing millions of legitimate businesspeople and tourists to stay away.

According to the Commerce Department, the United States is the only major country in the world to which travel has declined in the midst of a global tourism boom. And this is not about Arabs or Muslims. The number of Japanese visiting the United States declined from 5 million in 2000 to 3.6 million last year. The numbers have begun to increase, but by 2010 they’re still projected to be 19 percent below 2000 levels. During this same span (2000–2010), global tourism is expected to grow by 44 percent.

The most striking statistic involves tourists from Great Britain. These are people from America’s closest ally, the overwhelming majority of them white Anglos with names like Smith and Jones. For Brits, the United States these days is Filene’s Basement. The pound is worth $2, a 47 percent increase in six years. And yet, between 2000 and 2006, the number of Britons visiting America declined by 11 percent. In that same period British travel to India went up 102 percent, to New Zealand 106 percent, to Turkey 82 percent and to the Caribbean 31 percent. If you’re wondering why, read the polls or any travelogue on a British Web site. They are filled with horror stories about the inconvenience and indignity of traveling to America.

For many, the trials begin even before they arrive. In a world of expedited travel, getting a visa to enter the United States has become a laborious process. It takes, on average, 69 days in Mumbai, 65 days in São Paolo and 44 days in Shanghai  simply to process a request. It’s no wonder that quick business trips to America are a thing of the past. Business travel to the United States declined by 10 percent between 2004 and 2005 (the most recent data available), while similar travel to Europe increased by 8 percent.

The idea of outsourcing is no longer new, and most people take for granted the fact that many manufacturing and service jobs are now being done from abroad. But the outsourcing industry has added a new wrinkle in recent years - that of outsourcing personal tasks. Yes, one can now find a math tutor, a researcher or even a personal assistant abroad, and particularly in India. Two recent stories in the NY Times discussed the topic.

An excerpt from the first article:

Adrianne Yamaki, a 32-year-old management consultant in New York, travels constantly and logs 80-hour workweeks. So to eke out more time for herself, she routinely farms out the administrative chores of her life — making travel arrangements, hair appointments and restaurant reservations and buying theater tickets — to a personal assistant service, in India.

Kenneth Tham, a high school sophomore in Arcadia, Calif., strives to improve his grades and scores on standardized tests. Most afternoons, he is tutored remotely by an instructor speaking to him on a voice-over-Internet headset while he sits at his personal computer going over lessons on the screen. The tutor is in India…

The first wave of slicing up services work and sending it abroad has been all about business operations. Computer programming, call centers, product design and back-office jobs like accounting and billing have to some degree migrated abroad, mainly to India. The Internet, of course, makes it possible, while lower wages in developing nations make outsourcing attractive to corporate America.

The second wave, according to some entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and offshoring veterans, will be the globalization of consumer services. People like Ms. Yamaki and Mr. Tham, they predict, are the early customers in a market that will one day include millions of households in the United States and other nations.

They foresee an array of potential services beyond tutoring and personal assistance like health and nutrition coaching, personal tax and legal advice, help with hobbies and cooking, learning new languages and skills and more. Such services, they say, will be offered for affordable monthly fees or piecework rates.

And from the second story:

In the latest twist on the information-age truism that technology is making the world even smaller, entrepreneurs in India are trying to build a new market for the offshore services they offer: helping small businesses cope with even the most mundane day-to-day tasks.

Thanks to Indian companies like Brickwork India and GetFriday, even sole proprietors can have personal assistants to conduct research, monitor the Web, make appointments and even give them a wake-up call and tell them to get some exercise — all for as little as $15 an hour.

A woman in New Jersey who works for a health care company used the new services to investigate trends in pharmaceutical marketing. An entrepreneur in Toronto used them to build his Web site. A Web designer in Louisiana has them search for images he can use. A builder in Tennessee uses them to get statistical reports on vacant lots before he buys them.

The world of the business expatriate is not what it was a decade or two ago. The destinations are different, the cultural challenges have changed, and new business skills are needed for success abroad. That’s the opinion, at least, of this interesting article in Time magazine, which focuses especially on executives who work in China and India.

The expat gig used to be a cushy one for U.S. executives of a certain level: jet into Tokyo or Paris, tuck family into American schools and clubs, slide into fully established local office as the bigwig from headquarters. It was more of an exotic detour for loyal lifetimers than a slingshot into directorship for the young and ambitious–but who cared?

Somewhere, perhaps in Tokyo or Paris, that old-timey expatriate still sips his midday martini at the foreigners’ club. But in the rough-and-tumble markets of China and India, a new generation of expats–they prefer “global executives,” thank you–haven’t yet had a chance to sign up for membership. They’re too busy chasing local talent, adapting to a wildly different culture and riding phenomenal growth in markets vital to their companies’ futures…

The U.S. expat population has leaped over the past five years, according to experts, in large part because of growing delegations to China and India. And yet the two emerging giants remain famously tough for Western executives to navigate. In a 2006 survey by GMAC Global Relocation Services, they are cited among the three most difficult locations for expats (the third is Russia). Corporations are learning that these 21st century markets require a new kind of expat.

What are some of the cultural and business challenges now faced by expat executives in these Asian nations?

The right leader in China and India, for many companies, is someone with the drive and creativity to manage what often feels like a start-up. The highest hurdle is usually building a local workforce from the ground up in savagely competitive labor markets…

In India, Leonhardt has to wage a full-court recruiting press. Candidates might receive dozens of offers, accept them all–then simply show up at the one that’s most appealing. Leonhardt estimates that as many as 3 in 10 accepted hires are no-shows on the first day of work. “It’s pretty frustrating, as you can imagine,” he says.

Employers there thus use what’s called a keep-warm strategy, in which newly approved hires are plied with informational packets, calls from executives and even small gifts for their parents … before their first day of work. Appealing to workers’ filial loyalty is so critical in India that some employers fly parents to headquarters for visits, and at least one is said to offer parents free Internet service. Target competes by offering health insurance to workers’ parents.

Once a team is in place, expat bosses often have to reinvent themselves as managers. Lin Chase, 44, arrived in Bangalore in January 2006 to head Accenture’s research and development lab. “I come from a culture where people love a plan,” she says. “The plan is God.” Not in India. She would step away from meetings confident that a plan was in place and wait for its execution. And wait. And wait. “It happened so many times that finally I changed my whole style,” says Chase. “I talk to my team every day, ask them how it’s going. I spend a huge proportion of time chasing people for commitments they made to me, but now I see it less as chasing than as a relationship.”

There is a business story in Newsweek magazine that is an interesting read - it sheds some light both on the workplace culture of Google and on the need for corporations today to employ individuals who understand globalization and other cultures. The article focuses on a unique training program that Google has devised for some of its brightest young hires.

There are no computers in the tiny village of Raagihalli, located 30 miles outside Bangalore, India. Overseas visitors seldom venture down the unpaved roads that lead to the 70 or so threadbare huts surrounded by fields vulnerable to the trampling of elephants. So it is fair to say that cultures clashed with the arrival of the Googlers—young masters and mistresses of the Internet, armed with stratospheric SAT scores, computer-science degrees from top universities and some of the most coveted jobs of their generation.

This past summer a group of 18 Google associate product managers (APMs) were circling the globe on a training trip, seeing firsthand the humble, unwired ways of life experienced by billions—including the vast majority of Indians who are more familiar with crop fields than search fields.

…the APM program, which seeks brilliant kids and slots them directly into important jobs—no experience necessary. Surprisingly, Google trains these young execs, knowing many will leave for other jobs in just a few years. Halfway through the two-year program, the APMs travel to foreign Google offices to network with fellow employees, learn about regional markets and soak up local culture.

The story follows the APMs on a 16-day visit to four cities in four countries - Tokyo, Japan; Beijing, China; Bangalore, India, and Tel Aviv, Israel.

Now that Argentina has followed Chile in electing a woman president, some observers are wondering if this portends a new era of female political power in South America.

Here in the land of machismo, where leaders were long supposed to conform to the standard of the strong-armed military man in epaulettes, a rising wave of leaders is working on a new 21st-century cliche: la presidenta.

The movement started at South America’s southern tip, where Chile elected Michelle Bachelet president last year. Argentina followed this week, choosing first lady Cristina Fernández de Kirchner as its first elected female president…

The gender-specific rallying cry now seems poised to spread north. In Paraguay, outgoing President Nicanor Duarte is backing former education minister Blanca Ovelar as his replacement in next year’s presidential election. And in Brazil, many political observers say that President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva seems to be grooming his chief of staff and former energy minister — a woman named Dilma Rousseff — to carry his party’s torch when his term ends in 2010…

But the possibility that she could become one has South Americans confronting a prospect that just a few years ago would have seemed utterly impossible: a continent where the majority of the population is led by women.

Interestingly, though, while South American women are achieving success in the political arena, they have not been quite as successful in the business world.

According to the World Economic Forum’s ranking of 116 countries in terms of gender gaps, opportunities for women in South America still lagged behind those of women in many other parts of the world in 2006. Argentina ranked 42nd in terms of equal opportunities for women, Paraguay 65th, Brazil 68th and Chile 79th, according to the survey.

But in terms of political empowerment for women, Argentina jumped to 23rd on the list, ahead of the United States and Canada.

Although the United States has long been regarded as a land of opportunity for immigrants from around the world who wanted a different life for themselves and their families, it seems there is increasing competition for that title. And the competition isn’t just coming from the likes of Canada or Australia, but from China. That’s the message in an interesting article that ran this week in the Washington Post.

For more than three years, Khaled Rasheed and his family spent the nights huddled in fear as bombs exploded near their home in Baghdad. Like generations of would-be emigrants before him, he dreamed of a better life elsewhere. But where?

Finding a place that was safe was Rasheed’s top priority, but openness to Islam and bright business prospects were also important.

It wasn’t long before he settled on a place that had everything he was looking for: China.

For a growing number of the world’s emigrants, China — not the United States — is the land where opportunities are endless, individual enterprise is rewarded and tolerance is universal.

“In China, life is good for us. For the first time in a long time, my whole family is very happy,” said Rasheed, 50, who in February moved with his wife and five children to Yiwu, a trading city about four hours south of Shanghai.

It’s a lofty goal, but Rwanda has begun taking steps that it hopes will lead the country to become a high tech hub for Africa — the “Singapore of Africa,” as some have suggested. The Christian Science Monitor has the story.

Sometime in the next two years, nearly every school in Rwanda from distant mountain villages to swelling urban areas will be hooked up to the Internet. And it won’t be some crummy dial-up service. It will be high-speed broadband, carried by fiber-optic cables.

The fact that Rwanda is closing in on this goal without having the massive oil wealth of Angola or Sudan, the diamonds of Congo or South Africa, or even the copper of nearby Zambia is a testimony to the power of imagination. And Rwanda imagines that one day, it will be the information technology center of Africa.

“In 2000, we decided to transform the country from agricultural subsistence to a knowledge-based economy,” says Albert Butare, Rwanda’s minister of state for energy and communications. With two fiber-optic rings around Kigali, and cable being laid across the country, Rwanda is well on its way to being wired. “Once we’ve reached the towns of each sector, it’s like you’ve covered the whole country. In another two years, we should be there.”

Rwanda’ goals have attracted both support and criticism.

Government officials and business leaders see high-tech as the best way to lift one of the world’s least-developed countries into a better position to compete globally. Local human rights activists fret that Rwanda’s money could be better spent on things like drinking water and electricity.

Countries like Rwanda, which rank among the world’s least developed countries (LDCs), don’t easily become high-tech hubs. Sixty percent of Rwandans live below the poverty line, defined by the UN as an income of less than a dollar a day. According to a 2005 study by the Australian National University, LDCs make up 10 percent of the world’s population and represent only 0.13 percent of the world’s Internet users.

Yet, there are hopeful signs. Nearly 70 percent of Rwanda’s adults can read and write. This fact, combined with Rwanda’s dense population, almost all of whom speak the same language, Kinyarwanda, make the country a much better place for establishing an Internet hub than Rwanda’s resource-rich, ethnically diverse, and less-educated neighbors.