The dominance of obscenely wealthy and Godfather-like businessmen in Asia helps explain why the continent isn't enjoying more entrepreneurship, the benefits of growth aren't trickling down enough and long-term equity returns often aren't what they could be.

For high-society folks and wannabes in Asia, few honors seem to outrank being pictured among the magazine’s pages. Not surprisingly, most of the photos feature tycoons and business magnates and their well-coifed families, reported Bloomberg.com.
One wonders how many locals leafing through such glossies realize the extent to which these billionaires can control the fates of their economies--and not for the better.
While many of these business barons may not be familiar even to regular Wall Street Journal readers, their influence in Asia often seems godlike. Many have a direct line to national leaders, a jarring ability to trump the concerns of mere mortals and a knack for scoring government favors.
The extent to which many of them are lionized by local media is the subject of a timely book by Joe Studwell titled “Asian Godfathers“.
Part of Studwell’s thesis is that the greed, corruption and excess of Asia’s rich helped cause the meltdown. That’s not particularly new; nor is his contention that the tycoons have long been the beneficiaries rather than the catalysts of Asia’s growth.

Godfathers
Yet Studwell’s argument that Asia’s wealthiest people are stronger than ever and doing more to hold back the region’s potential than many investors appreciate is an important one.
“After the financial crisis in Southeast Asia, in state after state, taxpayers picked up the tab, tycoons picked up the pieces and life went on as before,“ Studwell wrote. “The lesson of the past decade has been that the relationship between political and economic elites in Southeast Asia is more enduring than almost anyone imagined.“
The dominance of obscenely wealthy businessmen in Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand helps explain why Asia isn’t enjoying more entrepreneurship, the benefits of growth aren’t trickling down enough and long-term equity returns often aren’t what they could be. As the business barons hold down local rivals, they undermine growth.

Rising Again
The super-rich remain on the ascendancy for two reasons. One, deregulation efforts have never really taken hold. Two, tycoons have tended to avoid export manufacturing industries because they abhor global competitiveness. They tend to prosper from monopolies, concessions and cartels in businesses including ports, telecommunications, real estate and gambling.
This arrangement explains why there has been no substantive progress in creating a common free market in services for the members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. The group remains a toothless tiger, lacking mechanisms for enforcing its own rulings in a region awash in vested interests. And that’s the way the godfathers like it.
Studwell’s well-received 2003 book “The China Dream“ debunked the myth that making money in Asia’s No. 2 economy was a cakewalk. His latest work reminds us that the editor-in-chief of China Economic Quarterly understands Asia well.
This isn’t the first time journalists have channeled “Godfather“ author Mario Puzo to explain Asia to the masses. In 2002, Indonesia’s Tempo magazine featured a cover depicting former President Suharto’s son, Tommy, as Don Corleone. The story detailed how Tommy was still running family businesses from a cushy prison cell while doing time for ordering the murder of a Supreme Court judge.

Untouchable
While the Suharto family is among those that Studwell analyzes, the author says his use of “Asian Godfathers“ is tongue-in-cheek. It’s not meant to allege criminality or that Asia’s wealthy people head organized-crime units. Studwell’s point is that another great myth has grown up around Southeast Asia’s tycoons, one that makes them appear equally mysterious and untouchable.
Among the personalities Studwell explores are Hong Kong property developer Li Ka-Shing, Macau casino mogul Stanley Ho, plantation owner Robert Kuok, Genting Bhd. founder Lim Goh Tong of Malaysia, Salim Group founder Liem Sioe Liong, businessman Bob Hasan of Indonesia, Far East Organization Chairman Ng Teng Fong of Singapore, tobacco magnate Lucio Tan of the Philippines and Thaksin Shinawatra of Thailand.
There’s a danger in labeling tycoons “godfathers.“ Yet Studwell makes an intriguing point about how economies such as South Korea and Taiwan took a different course than Asian peers and are better off for it. Both opted for Japan’s example of implementing land reforms and other policies to accelerate development.
One can quibble with whether Japan’s economy is shareholder-friendly or efficient. “It remains the only model to have taken a significant non-white country from poverty to developed-nation status,“ Studwell said.
Ten years on, the Asian crisis didn’t change the fundamental political-economic structure of the region, Studwell said. For that, hundreds of millions in East Asia may long pay the price.

International Islamic finance is no longer a niche market catering to Muslims only but is increasingly a mainstream component of the global banking system.

A great challenge for multinationals is learning how to build a productive global team. For global corporations, borderless world offers a glimpse of what’s to come. International success once meant having bodies and factories on the ground from Sao Paulo to Silicon Valley to Shanghai. Coordinating their activities was a deliberately planned effort handled by headquarters.
According to businessweek.com, the challenge now is to weld these vast, globally dispersed workforces into superfast, efficient organizations. Given the conflicting needs of multinational staff and the swiftly shifting nature of competition brought about by the Internet, that’s an almost impossible task. And getting workers to collaborate instantly--not tomorrow or next week, but now--requires nothing less than a management revolution.
Complicating matters is the fact that the very idea of a company is shifting away from a single outfit with full-time employees and a recognizable hierarchy. It is something much more fluid, with a classic corporation at the center of an ever-shifting network of suppliers and outsourcers, some of whom only join the team for the duration of a single project.
To adapt, multinationals are hiring sociologists to unlock the secrets of teamwork among colleagues who have never met. They’re arming staff with an arsenal of new tech tools to keep them perpetually connected. They include software that helps engineers co-develop 3D prototypes in virtual worlds and services that promote social networking and that track employees and outsiders who have the skills needed to nail a job. Corporations are investing lavishly in posh campuses, crafting leadership training centers, and offering thousands of online courses to develop pipelines of talent.
To function in this Age of Diffusion, businesses are rethinking traditional practices. In human resources, the era of standardized benefits and work requirements is vanishing. Instead, to keep prized talent, companies need to accommodate a wide range of cultural and generational idiosyncrasies.
In China, where personal relationships are paramount, employers have to tread carefully with hard-edged practices such as management reshuffles and 360-degree performance reviews. To keep valued Indian workers from jumping ship, companies are offering one-on-one career planning and reaching out to parents and spouses. Multinationals that viewed Eastern Europe as a terrific low-cost engineering shop are finding that if they don’t give the local scientists a crack at real innovation, they soon are coping with a brain drain.
The hard part for multinationals is getting people to work well together, especially given that day-and-night collaboration across the globe is growing.
Over the past decade many companies rushed to spread key functions, such as product development, to the far corners of the earth. The idea was to save time and money. But corporations are finding that running these new operations requires much more effort than connecting staff by phone and e-mail.
Training is essential to making staffers globally minded. Accenture (ACN), which spent $700 million on education last year, says its 38,000 consultants and most of its services workers take courses on collaborating with offshore colleagues. And each year, Accenture puts up to 400 of its most promising managers through a special leadership development program. They are assigned to groups that can include Irish, Chinese, Belgians, and Filipinos, and specialists in fields such as finance, marketing and technology.
Over 10 months, teams meet in different international locations. As part of the program, they pick a projectÑdeveloping a new Web page, say--and learn how to tap the company’s worldwide talent pool to complete it.
IBM aims to set itself apart with a spate of Web-based services that make it easier for its 360,000-member staff to “work as one virtual team,“ says Lab chief Chiu. Big Blue has launched what it calls an innovation portal, where any employee with a product idea can use online chat boxes to organize a team, line up resources, and gain access to market research.
Developers in IBM labs around the world then can collaborate on prototypes and testing. This way, enterprising staff can build a global team in as little as half an hour and cut the time to start a business from at least six months to around 30 days.
Since IBM introduced the portal, in early 2006, 93,000 workers have logged on, leading to 70 businesses and 10 new products.
Creating a seamless global workforce is hard. But certain multinationals are slowly figuring out how to do it.

Sixty years after India was freed from British colonial rule, the country’s economy is booming. But will the wealth be shared more equally in the future?
On the eve of independence India’s newly elected Prime Minister Jawarlahal Nehru made an impassioned and oft-quoted speech saying India had made a tryst with destiny.
At the time he was talking about India’s struggle to gain the right to govern itself and to make its own decisions about its future, be they political or economic.
According to BBC, it was an austere, simple time when idealism was at its height and the distribution of wealth was a priority. Today, it would seem that India has taken a slightly different route towards its destiny.
The India of today is vibrant, confident and ambitious--and not afraid to show it.
Fast life, fast city--money in Mumbai cannot be spent or made quickly enough.
And it is this dream that leads millions of migrants to the city every single day. They come here in packs, having heard legendary tales of Mumbai’s streets being paved with gold.
Traveling thousands of miles by train, many people leave behind their families, their friends and their desperate lives. Many end up in the one of the city’s numerous slums and struggling to survive by doing odd jobs on the street. The city they came to conquer ends up engulfing them.
But while life in the big city often falls short of expectations, thanks to the growth in the country’s economy there are new opportunities in some villages.
On the outskirts of India’s technology capital, Bangalore lies Bellary--an industrial town born out of a sleepy village. Bellary is home to one of India’s first rural outsourcing centers, run by Indian steel maker JSW Steel Limited.
The organization has started two small operations on its Bellary campus, hiring young women from nearby villages to work in their rural processing centers.
Here the girls spend their shifts punching in details of American patients’ dental records, typing in a language many of them have only recently learned, using a machine many had never seen or heard of before.
Growth in India’s economy has to make its way off the streets of Mumbai and Delhi and into all of India’s villages. Only when it does will it truly be here to stay--and the promise of independence will be met.