Is there any strategy?

It was amazing, when I read the news in November last year that Emirates have placed an order for an additional 50 Boeing 777-300 ER" planes, in addition to 20 Boeing 777-300ER as an option. This order was the single largest dollar-value order in Boeing's history.

According to emirates Group chairman ‘Emirates is financially strong enough to fund the purchase of new aircraft as part of ongoing expansion plans by one of the world’s fastest growing airlines. Emirates made net profits of Dh827 million in the first half of 2011, confirming its status as ‘one of the fastest growing carriers’.

In the current recession scenario when many airline companies are in either loss or debt what’s made Emirates so different from other airlines?

People in Beijing - richer or poorer?

I chose to fly back home during the Christmas period mainly because of my mother's severe back pain. It is an old problem that has bothered her for a few years, yet it gets worsen recently. My mother is a tenacious woman. She does not believe in surgery. A friend of our family recommended traditional Chinese massage as an alternative and thus we found her a reputable hospital in Beijing, well-known for its massage techniques and recovery treatments.

For this reason, I need to go to the hospital every Monday and Friday to make an appointment for her. Guess when I woke up? 4.30 am! The hospital sells "numbers" to patients on a first come first serve basis. Its official opening time is 8am. Since there are so many patients and limited medical resources, most "ordinary people" - if you are not as ‘important’ as those government officials or as rich as those celebrities - would have to join a long queue, about 200 people, in the cold winter mornings enduring the temperature hitting below -10 degree Celsius. Believe or not, online booking and telephone booking are totally out of question.

The glass ceiling and MBA’s

During my time working for the Centre for Women’s Enterprise (CWE) at the University of Bedfordshire I frequently had to consider whether the services we provided were accessible to women with childcare responsibilities. This included ensuring that the CWE services were offered during school hours to ensure women with children were able to participate and on occasions, providing a crèche to enable mothers with pre-school children to benefit from business support services.

Will the boat sink the water?

I don’t have the temperament to do a PhD but if there is a me in a parallel universe who is patient, meticulous and detailed she’ll be doing a dissertation on protest and political unrest in rural China.  So even in this universe I’m interested that a protest in a village in Guangdong province is now making international headlines.

Wukan villagers claim that the local government confiscated land for development. This is in one of the wealthiest provinces in the whole of China so the gains from development are enormous. This is not an isolated incident. Skimming off the gains from the sale of land is one of many temptations to poorly paid local government officials and one of the main aggravations to farmers.

China and me

I’m sitting in front of a photograph which shouted China to me before I even looked at the caption.  It’s not the Great Wall or people doing tai chi in a public park, not a Terracotta Warrior or the Water Cube, not the exuberant skyline of Pudong which has sprung from nothing since the 1990’s to be Shanghai’s financial and commercial centre.

What I’m looking at is a close-up of a block of flats and it was The Independent’s picture of the day recently.  It’s a close-up in the sense that you can’t see the ground, the top or either side of the block.  You can clearly see clothes drying at the windows.  Nevertheless, it is distant enough to see 12 floors and probably six apartments on each floor.

The world after email is on its way

It’s clear from the habits of our undergraduates that young people have moved on from email, or have never adopted it in the first place. Teenagers think that email is middle aged and, of course, they cannot conceive of a world without email, instant messaging (IM) or mobile phones at all.

Now the hi-tech services company Atos has announced that it is phasing out email over the next 18 months. Email will go the way of the smoke signal, letter, telex and fax. According to The Independent, Atos will be moving to other tools, including IM, wikis and social networking, including a business-based social networking service called Yammer. The idea is partly to reduce the time spent on useless emails – spam, marketing emails, emails copied to everyone just to cover backs, etc. It is a disruptive, intrusive, demanding medium. Most us aren’t much better at ignoring incoming mail than we at ignoring a ringing phone.

To Google, or not to Google?

I received an email today requesting some information on time differences between the different countries our MBA operates in, to which my reaction was ‘couldn’t Google answer this question?’

After reflecting about this, I started to think about how we go about getting information these days and the effect this has on our interactions with one another.