from theguardian.co.uk It is understood that a deal between Tata and Ford over the sale of two of the best known names in British car making was concluded last night after months of painstaking negotiations. The companies have been in detailed negotiations for almost three months after Tata emerged as the leading bidder, ahead of rivals One Equity, a private equity concern, and automotive group Mahindra and Mahindra. Ford has not commented on the detailed financial performances of the two marques. Land Rover has clocked up record sales in each of the last three years and is estimated to have made about $1bn in the last financial year, while Jaguar is understood to have curbed earlier losses. Sources close to the talks have indicated that negotiations have been protracted, not because of haggling over the price, but because of the need to negotiate supply contracts under which Ford would continue to provide engines for both marques. Tata, which owns the Anglo-Dutch steel maker Corus, and Tetley Tea, is the bidder favoured by the trade unions, but they will be looking for assurances over investment, plant and job security. At the Geneva motor show this month, Tata's head, Ratan Tata, said he planned to keep "the image, touch and feel", of the two marques. "There is no reason to tinker with the brands. Our challenge is to make them grow." Under Tata, Jaguar and Land Rover are expected to stick to existing business plans for the next few years, with the headquarters operation remaining in Britain. info@goliveideas4.com >> http://www.goliveideas4.com
Saturday, 5 April 2008
CORPORATE GOVERNANCE in CHINA and INDIA (III of III)
BUSINESSWEEK
How do companies of the two countries compare when it comes to corruption?
Here, I am not positive on India at all. Transparency International puts out these indices, and India and China are both close to the bottom of that list. China does a little bit better than India. In China, there is corruption, but it is constructive corruption. You, as a bureaucrat, get to be corrupt but only after you generate some value for society. You get a piece of it. In India, there is corruption but it's not constructive. You're not fostering new bridges or highways. It's just shuffling stuff back and forth. I don't think we've cracked that in India at all. I'm very sorry about that.
In the final analysis, does it matter that Indian companies, on the whole, have an edge over the Chinese in reaching international standards of governance? The Chinese have huge capital at their disposal because of their $1.5 trillion in foreign exchange reserves. Couldn't they still be fearsome competitors?
I think that's right. Corporate governance matters because you want to reassure the providers of inputs—whether it's time and talent, or ideas, or capital—that their rights will be respected and they will get a return on it. But if you're already sitting on hundreds of billions of dollars of capital, and you don't need to reassure anybody else because you already have your capital, why have good corporate governance?
The reason the Chinese feel less pressured to do something about it is not because they don't know how to do it—far from it, they have the best technical help from Hong Kong and other places. It's because they make a reasoned judgment that it's not worth their while. Holstein is an independent business journalist and author in New York info@goliveideas4.com >> http://www.goliveideas4.com
CORPORATE GOVERNANCE in CHINA and INDIA (II of III)
Indian companies with global ambitions are better governed than their Chinese counterparts, a Harvard professor says. But in competition, it may not matter
Are companies in India and China making progress in developing talent in the same way that Western multinationals do?
They're both making progress. But Indian companies are significantly further along, partly because India never had a Cultural Revolution as China did, which wiped out much of the business class. It had a residue of corporations already in existence. Some companies are 100 or 150 years old and they have an established way of doing things.
Where are the Chinese when it comes to managing multiculturally?
Utterly zero. It's hard to blame them because there's a language barrier also. You may remember the acquisition of a German company, Schneider, by TCL in 2002, which was based in Shenzhen. It was a disaster. Then they followed that disaster with a bigger disaster in 2004, by buying assets from Thomson (TMS) in France, which they also destroyed. A lot of the internal tensions were about language and cultural barriers, and questions like, Can a Frenchman report to a Chinese? And what if the French guy makes more than the Chinese guy? Holstein is an independent business journalist and author in New York. info@goliveideas4.com >> http://www.goliveideas4.com
CORPORATE GOVERNANCE in CHINA and INDIA (I of III)
Indian companies with global ambitions are better governed than their Chinese counterparts, a Harvard professor says. But in competition, it may not matter
Indian companies aspiring to become world-spanning multinationals demonstrate better corporate governance than their Chinese rivals, says Tarun Khanna, a professor at Harvard Business School and author of a new book, Billions of Entrepreneurs: How China and India Are Reshaping Their Future and Yours. But Chinese companies may not need world-class governance to emerge as fierce competitors, says Khanna. Here are edited excerpts from a recent conversation:
Much as their societies and political systems are different, are Indian and Chinese companies complete opposites when it comes to corporate governance?
Absolutely. Indian companies are so much better governed. India is sort of a noisier version of the U.S. system, which is that you have to be accountable to shareholders and all the other stakeholders. The principles are the same, but the information acquisition is a little bit more problematic in India compared to the U.S. It's not so easy to figure out everything you need to. But there's a very vibrant, credible business media. No opinion is forbidden to be expressed. Information is noisy and unbiased—no one is willfully distorting the truth.
China is the opposite—it's noise-free but biased. You get a clean story but the story isn't always right. There are views that cannot be expressed.
Which country has more independent boards of directors?
In India, there is a spectrum of companies, such as Infosys (INFY), which on some dimensions is better governed than companies in the West in terms of how quickly it discloses things and how quickly it complies with Nasdaq norms. At the other end of the spectrum you have companies that are still the fiefdoms of families, many of which are badly governed. But even those companies are accountable to the market. Market pressures will force them to clean up their act to some extent. The equity markets function so well that it's hard to believe you could be a continuous violator of norms of good governance and still have access to the equity markets.
And what about China?
None of that matters in China because the financial markets still don't work in the sense that we think of them working in the U.S. In China, all stock prices move together. They move up on a given day or they move down. There is no company-specific information embodied in the stock price. You can't possibly decide that a company is good or bad because the market isn't working in that sense. What you see is aggregate enthusiasm, or lack thereof, for China Inc. The market is not putting pressure on managers to behave in ways that approximate corporate governance in the West.
Do the Chinese have boards with independent directors?
There are many boards that are beginning to look like Western boards—some independent directors. For sure, there is an internal struggle on the boards in which the newcomers are trying to educate and coax the older guard to begin to adhere to some norms. In my book, I talk about the attempted Chinese takeover of Unocal. Two things were interesting. One is the naïveté and inexperience that the Chinese displayed on cross-border mergers and acquisitions. But when it came to an acquisition of a stake in Rio Tinto (RTP) recently, they were much, much smarter. You know there is something positive happening—the internal dynamic of the board is moving in the right direction.
That said, most of the boards are still answering to the Communist Party. The question arises, "What happens when there is a conflict of interest between an outside shareholder and the Party?" I suspect the Party wins.
Is there any political interference on Indian boards?
Not in the private sector. No more than there would be in the U.S. In the state-owned enterprises, yes, there would be political influence. Holstein is an independent business journalist and author in New York. info@goliveideas4.com >> http://www.goliveideas4.com
Can People Regenerate Body Parts? (V of V)
Now, as we watch a salamander grow back an arm, we are no longer quite as mystified by how it happens. Soon humans might be able to harness this truly awesome ability ourselves, replacing damaged and diseased body parts at will, perhaps indefinitely. Studies of deep wounds have shown that at least two populations of fibroblasts invade an injury during healing. Some of these cells are fibroblasts that reside in the dermis, and the others are derived from circulating fibroblastlike stem cells. Both types are attracted to the wound by signals from immune cells that have also rushed to the scene. Once in the wound, the fibroblasts migrate and proliferate, eventually producing and modifying the extracellular matrix of the area. This early process is not that dissimilar to the regeneration response in a salamander wound, but the mammalian fibroblasts produce an excessive amount of matrix that becomes abnormally cross-linked as the scar tissue matures. In contrast, salamander fibroblasts stop producing matrix once the normal architecture has been restored. An exception to this pattern in mammals does exist, however. Wounds in fetal skin heal without forming scars—yielding perfect skin regeneration and indicating that the switch to a fibrotic response arises with the developmental maturation of the skin. Although this difference could reflect a change in the biology of the fibroblasts, it is more likely a result of altered signaling from the extracellular wound environment modulating the behavior of the fibroblasts, which in turn suggests that therapeutically modifying those signals could change the healing response. At the same time, the fact that limb amputations during fetal stages of development do not result in regeneration of the limb reminds us that scar-free wound healing is likely to be necessary but not sufficient for regeneration. To advance our understanding of what it will take to induce limb regeneration in people, we are continuing our work with mice. Our research group has already described a natural blastema in a mouse amputation injury, and our goal within the next year is to induce a blastema where it would not normally occur. Like the accessory-limb experiments in salamanders, this achievement would establish the minimal requirements for blastema formation. We hope that this line of investigation will also reveal whether, as we suspect, the blastema itself provides critical signaling that prevents fibrosis in the wound site. If we succeed in generating a blastema in a mammal, the next big hurdle for us would be coaxing the site of a digit amputation to regenerate the entire digit. The complexity of that task is many times greater than regenerating a simple digit tip because a whole digit includes joints, which are among the most complicated skeletal structures formed in the body during embryonic development. Developmental biologists are still trying to understand how joints are made naturally, so building a regenerated mouse digit, joints and all, would be a major milestone in the regeneration field. We hope to reach it in the next few years, and after that, the prospect of regenerating an entire mouse paw, and then an arm, will not seem so remote. Indeed, when we consider all that we have learned about wound healing and regeneration from studies in various animal models, the surprising conclusion is that we may be only a decade or two away from a day when we can regenerate human body parts. The striking contrast between the behavior of fibroblasts in directing the regeneration response in salamanders versus the fibrotic response leading to scarring in mammals suggests that the road to successful regeneration is lined with these cells. Equally encouraging is the recent discovery by Howard Y. Chang and John L. Rinn of Stanford University that adult human fibroblasts, like salamander fibroblasts, retain a memory of the spatial coordinate system used to establish the body plan early in the embryo’s development. Given that such positional information is re-quired for regeneration in salamanders, its existence in human fibroblasts enhances the feasibility of tapping into and activating developmental programs necessary for regeneration. Now, as we watch a salamander grow back an arm, we are no longer quite as mystified by how it happens. Soon humans might be able to harness this truly awesome ability ourselves, replacing damaged and diseased body parts at will, perhaps indefinitely. info@goliveideas4.com >> http://www.goliveideas4.com
Can People Regenerate Body Parts? (IV of V)
One of the most encouraging signs that human limb regeneration is a feasible goal is the fact that our fingertips already have an intrinsic ability to regenerate.
This observation was made first in young children more than 30 years ago, but since then similar findings have been reported in teenagers and even adults. Fostering regeneration in a fingertip amputation injury is apparently as simple as cleaning the wound and covering it with a simple dressing. If allowed to heal naturally, the fingertip restores its contour, fingerprint and sensation and undergoes a varying degree of lengthening. The success of this conservative treatment of fingertip amputation injuries has been documented in medical journals thousands of times.
Interestingly, the alternative protocol for such injuries typically included operating to suture a skin flap over the amputation wound, a “treatment” that we now know will inhibit regeneration even in the salamander because it interferes with formation of the wound epidermis. The profound message in these reports is that human beings have inherent regenerative capabilities that, sadly, have been suppressed by some of our own traditional medical practices. It is not easy to study how natural human fingertip regeneration works because we cannot go around amputating fingers to do experiments, but the same response has been demonstrated in both juvenile and adult mice by several researchers.
In recent years two of us (Muneoka and Han) have been studying the mouse digit-tip regeneration response in more detail. We have determined that a wound epidermis does form after digit-tip amputation, but it covers the regenerating wound much more slowly than occurs in the salamander. We have also shown that during digit-tip regeneration, important embryonic genes are active in a population of undifferentiated, proliferating cells at the wound site, indicating that they are blastema cells. And indirect evidence suggests that they are derived from fibroblasts residing in the interstitial connective tissues and in bone marrow.
To explore the roles of specific genes and growth factors during the mouse-digit regeneration response, we developed a tissue culture that serves as a model for fetal mouse-digit regeneration. With it, we found that if we experimentally depleted a growth factor called bone morphogenetic protein 4 (BMP4) from the fetal amputation wound, we inhibited regeneration. In addition, we have shown that a mutant mouse lacking a gene called Msx1 is unable to regenerate its digit tips. In the fetal digit tip, Msx1 is critical to the production of BMP4, and we were able to restore the regeneration response by adding BMP4 to the wound in the Msx1-deficient mouse, confirming BMP4’s necessity for regeneration.
Studies by Cory Abate-Shen and her colleagues at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School have also demonstrated that the protein encoded by Msx1 inhibits differentiation in a variety of cell types during embryonic development. That link to the control of differentiation suggests that the protein plays a role in the regeneration response by causing cells to dedifferentiate. Although Msx1 is not active during the early dedifferentiation stages of salamander limb regeneration, its sister gene Msx2 is one of the first genes reactivated during regeneration and very likely serves a similar function.
The idea of regenerating a human limb may still seem more like fantasy than a plausible possibility, but with insights such as those we have been describing, we can evaluate in a logical stepwise manner how it might happen. An amputated human limb results in a large and complex wound surface that transects a number of different tissues, including epidermis, dermis and interstitial connective tissue, adipose tissue, muscle, bone, nerve and vasculature. Looking at those different tissue types individually, we find that most of them are actually very capable of regenerating after a small-scale injury.
In fact, the one tissue type within a limb that lacks regenerative ability is the dermis, which is composed of a heterogeneous population of cells, many of which are fibroblasts—the same cells that play such a pivotal role in the salamander regeneration response. After an injury in humans and other mammals, these cells undergo a process called fibrosis that “heals” wounds by depositing an unorganized network of extracellular matrix material, which ultimately forms scar tissue.
The most striking difference between regeneration in the salamander and regenerative failure in mammals is that mammalian fibroblasts form scars and salamander fibroblasts do not. That fibrotic response in mammals not only hampers regeneration but can be a very serious medical problem unto itself, one that permanently and progressively harms the functioning of many organs, such as the liver and heart, in the aftermath of injury or disease. info@goliveideas4.com >> http://www.goliveideas4.com
Can People Regenerate Body Parts? (III of V)
We knew that the epidermis is derived from one of three layers of primitive cells within an early developing embryo, the ectoderm, which is also well known to provide signals that control the outgrowth of limbs from limb buds on the embryo. Ectoderm cells gather in the bud to form an apical ectodermal ridge (AER), which transiently produces chemical signals that guide the migration and proliferation of the underlying limb bud cells. Although some of the critical signals from the epidermis have not yet been identified, members of the family of fibroblast growth factors (FGFs) are involved. The AER produces a number of FGFs that stimulate the underlying cells of the limb bud to produce other FGFs, fueling a feedback circuit of signaling between the AER and limb bud cells that is essential for the outgrowth of a limb. A similar feedback circuit spurred by the AEC is thought to function in the same way during limb regeneration, and Hiroyuki Ide of Tohoku University in Japan discovered that the progressive loss of regenerative ability in frog tadpoles is associated with a failure to activate the FGF circuit. By treating older nonregenerating tadpole limbs with FGF10, he was able to jump-start this signaling circuit and stimulate partial regeneration of amputated limbs. The excitement this result inspired was tempered, however, by the fact that the induced regenerates were abnormal, consisting of irregularly placed limb parts, which raises the important issue of how regeneration is controlled so that all the appropriate anatomical structures that are lost when the limb is amputated are accurately replaced. It turns out that the other primary cellular players, the fibroblasts, carry out this function. Recall from the minimalist accessory-limb experiments that the presence of fibroblasts per se was not sufficient for regeneration because fibroblasts are present at the simple wound site that does not make a new limb. It was the fibroblasts from the opposite side of the limb that proved essential. That discovery illustrates the importance of cellular position in triggering a regeneration response. In an embryo, the sequence of events in limb development always begins with formation of the base of the limb (the shoulder or hip) and is followed by progressive building of more distal structures until the process terminates with the making of fingers or toes. In salamander regeneration, on the other hand (or foot), the site of amputation can be anywhere along the length of the limb and regardless of where the wound is located, only those parts of the limb that were amputated regrow. This variable response indicates that cells at the amputation wound edge must “know” where they are in relation to the entire limb. Such positional information is what controls the cellular and molecular processes leading to the perfect replacement of the missing limb parts, and it is encoded in the activity of various genes. Examining which genes are at work during these processes helps to reveal the mechanisms controlling this stage of regeneration. Although a large number of genes are involved during embryonic development in educating cells about their position in the limb, the activity of a gene family called Hox is critical. In most animals, cells in the developing limb bud use the positional code provided by Hox genes to form a limb, but then they “forget” where they came from as they differentiate into more specialized tissues later on. In contrast, fibroblasts in the adult salamander limb maintain a memory of this information system and can reaccess the positional Hox code in the process of limb regeneration. During regeneration the fibroblasts bring this information with them as they migrate across the wound to initiate blastema formation, and once in the blastema, cells are able to “talk” to one another to assess the extent of the injury. The content of this crosstalk is still largely a mystery, but we do know that one outcome of the conversation is that the regenerating limb first establishes its boundaries, including the outline of the hand or foot, so that cells can use their positional information to fill in the missing parts between the amputation plane and the fingers or toes. Because muscle and bone make up the bulk of a limb, we are also interested in understanding where the raw material for those tissues originates and what mechanisms control their formation. When the regenerative response is initiated, one of the key early events involves a poorly understood process called dedifferentiation. The term is typically used to describe a cell’s reversion from a mature specialized state to a more primitive, embryonic state, which makes it capable of multiplying and serving as a progenitor of one or more tissue types. In the field of regeneration, the word was first used by early scientists who observed under the microscope that the salamander stump tissues, particularly the muscle, appeared to break down and give rise to proliferative cells that formed the blastema. We now know that those muscle-associated cells are derived from stem cells that normally reside in the muscle tissue and not from dedifferentiation of muscle. Whether or not dedifferentiation is actually happening in the case of every tissue type within a regenerating limb has yet to be proved, although it is clear that a variation of this theme does occur during regeneration. Fibroblasts that enter the blastema and become primitive blastemal cells have the ability to differentiate into skeletal tissues (bone and cartilage) as well as to redifferentiate into the fibroblasts that will form the interstitial meshwork of the new limb, for instance. Returning to another of the central cellular players in blastema formation, the epidermal cells, we can also pinpoint moments in the regeneration process when it seems these cells are making a transition to a more embryonic state. A number of genes active in the embryonic ectoderm are critical for limb development, including Fgf8 and Wnt7a, but as the ectoderm of the embryo differentiates to form the multilayered epidermis of the adult, these genes are turned off. During regeneration in the adult, the epidermal cells that migrate across the amputation wound and establish a wound epidermis initially begin to display gene activity, such as production of wound-healing keratin proteins, that is not specifically related to regeneration. Later the wound epidermal cells activate Fgf8 and Wnt7a, the two important developmental genes. For practical purposes, then, the essential definition of dedifferentiation—as it pertains to the epidermis and other cell types—is the specific reactivation of essential developmental genes. Thus, our studies of salamanders are revealing that the regeneration process can be divided into pivotal stages, beginning with the wound-healing response, followed by the formation of a blastema by cells that revert to some degree to an embryonic state, and finally, the initiation of a developmental program to build the new limb. As we move toward the challenge of inducing limb regeneration in humans, we rely on these insights to guide our efforts. Indeed, the hardest things to discover in science are those that do not already occur, and limb regeneration in humans fits snugly into this category, although that does not mean humans have no natural regenerative capacity. info@goliveideas4.com >> http://www.goliveideas4.com
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