Harricharran was wrong

Jul 10, 2013 Letters

Dear Editor,
I don’t like writing letters when I am angry but sometimes in the interest of timing we must not let the good become a causality of the better.
There is a letter riddled with misconceptions written by one Neville Harricharran in Stabroek News’ Sunday paper captioned “Raj Singh needs managerial talent not expertise in the various sugar operations”. In it he criticises me and Mr. Sasenarine Singh by extrapolating the ridiculous theory that Raj Singh is Guyana’s equivalent to Lee Iacocca and Michael Bloomberg; that to be a CEO of a corporation you don’t have to have knowledge or personal working experience to function effectively in that industry.This is the profoundest stupidity I have ever heard! And I will use Harrichand’s own examples to demonstrate this.
Lee Iacocca, the Wikipediaencyclopaedia tells us, was an American businessman known for engineering the Ford Mustang and Ford Pinto cars. He then left Ford and went over to the almost bankrupt Chrysler motor corporation and turned it around in the 1980s in such a dramatic manner that it earned him the reputation of being the greatest U.S. CEO of all time.
As far as his other equally bad example of men who were great CEOs is concerned, Michael Bloomberg the $27 billion and the fourth richest man in America is concerned, Wikipedia had this to say, “In 1973, Bloomberg became a general partner at Salomon Brothers, a bulge-bracket Wall Street investment bank, where he headed equity trading and, later, systems development.
“In 1981, Salomon Brothers was bought and Bloomberg was laid off from the investment bank and given a $10 million severance package. Using this money, Bloomberg went on to set up a company named Innovative Market Systems. His business plan was based on the realization that Wall Street (and the financial community generally) was willing to pay for high quality business information, delivered as quickly as possible and in as many usable forms possible, via technology (e.g., graphs of highly specific trends). Nowhere do I find that Bloomberg amassed a $27 billion personal fortune by hiring every derelict fool and jackass he can find!”
This means that Harrichand’s most fundamental reason for comparing Iacocca and Bloomberg to Raj Singh is nonsense. Iacocca was an auto industry executive par excellence he did not work in the auto industry for a few years in some obscure position, as Raj Singh did according to Mr. Sasenarine Singh, leave it for 20 years and then return to it as executive chairman.
It is typical for these semi qualified semi-literate people like Harrichand to write what amounts to total diatribe for the consumption of the Guyanese people, and in doing so they insult them, since they are comparing cheese with chalk as if it is cheese with cheese, since they don’t understand the difference themselves.
I stand by what I said in my letter and I also support Mr Sasenarine Singh’s position in this matter, Raj Singh is not the man for this job, he is a political appointee and his knowledge of the industry is very superficial, he does not appreciate the fundamental problems of the corporation and what to do to address it, just like the rest of the political board at GuySuCo today and he will lead it to an even greater disaster than it is in now.
Tony Vieira

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