What Price,Reputation?

When a misprinted fare—Fiji for $51—got snapped up by hundreds of travelers, Travelocity CEO Michelle Peluso had to decide whether to honor the fare at a cost of almost $2 million or run the risk of damaging the company’s customer-friendly branding campaign .

Read about what I believe was an excellent example of customer-centred leadership in this case titled “What Price Reputation?” in BusinessWeek.

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Where Do Your Visitors Come From?

Saw some very colourful maps in some blogs showing visitors to the site from different parts of the world.

Further exploration led me to try to install a hit counter map from ClustrMaps on this page. How this works needs to be seen.

No, I am not doubting ClustrMaps, only my ability to do all that was necessary to get it on my page!!

The service is free for light users like me. Light users being those with under 2500 visitors daily. I am told the counter stores cumulative totals up to many hundreds of thousands of visitors.

Will my page ever have so many?

Earnings Abroad To Be Taxed

One of the drivers of the tech driven boom in India has been the earnings of Indian IT professionals while on assignments abroad.

India’s IT employees will have to pay tax on earnings from overseas assignments as per the Authority of Advance Rulings (AAR). A report in the Times of India quotes AAR as saying that there is no escape from paying tax on amounts earned during stints abroad with the employer’s foreign affiliates.

The gist of the ruling in the case of an Infosys employee is that tax on income earned during the deputation abroad has to be paid either in India or in the country in which the deputed employee was working.

IT ( Income Tax not Information Technology in this case!) officials said;”If the company is subject to Indian tax laws, the employee will have to pay taxes in India even if the income was earned overseas and the manager has claimed NRI (non-resident Indian) status by virtue of having spent the stipulated number of days outside the country.”

India: Top Talent Destination

My friend James Abraham, partner and director of the Boston Consulting Group in India says
” India is top most on the list of preferred destinations for countries facing an internal talent crunch situation”.

Times of India reports that World Inc. is looking up to India for talent. Bernard Salt, the Melbourne-based partner of KPMG says the Indian workforce is witnessing a 100-year peak. The talent pool is described as being vast, skilled up to international standards and the most sought after by Western countries.

Advantage India is reflected in the Indian economy growing at 9-10% in comparison with a growth of 1-2 % in the saturated West.

Accenture announced plans to have about 35,000 employees in India as against 30,000 in the US. IBM is expected to have about 70,000 employees in India, more than 50 % of its headcount of 130,000 in the US.