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C'est une reprise de la semaine dernière avec quelques rajouts...

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THE REGULARS: Summary
A) Le texte plus abordable de la semaine/Scholastic News: Happy Birthday, Rovers [Les véhicules-sondes sur Mars fêtent leur premier anniversaire.
B) CNN/Global Office: Ancient and modern management [Alexandre le Grand, un modèle pour les PDG d'aujourd'hui ?
C) Car Talk/The Puzzler: A Rope and Two Telephone Poles [Un casse-tête. On ne triche pas !]
D) The Miami Herald/Dave Barry's Year in Review [HUMOUR ! Le regard de Dave Barry sur l'année 2004. Ici, le mois de MARS.]

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B*) CNN/Global Office: Overtime costs UK works $43bn [Les heures supp non payées coûtent cher aux salariés britanniques.]
http://edition.cnn.com/2005/BUSINESS/01/06/overtime.uk/index.html
Overtime costs UK workers $43bn

Friday, January 7, 2005 Posted: 1147 GMT (1947 HKT)

LONDON, England -- Many workers in the UK may have been lucky enough to bank a Christmas bonus last month, but new figures suggest most of them may still be out of pocket. According to figures released this week, British employees did unpaid overtime worth as much as $43 billion last year.

The Trade Union Congress (TUC), which conducted the research, said that each employee who performed an average number of extra hours should have received an extra $8,700 if paid at their normal hourly rate. Or, to put it another way, if they had done all their unpaid overtime at the start of the year, they would have worked for free until February 25.

The TUC said that London workers suffered the worst deal with more than 700,000 people putting in average of 7.9 unpaid hours a week -- almost a complete extra day at the office every week. Had they been paid for the extra time, the average London worker would have picked up more than $13,000 on top of their regular annual wage.

The average number of unpaid hours for the UK as a whole was 7.3 hours.

Long hours can contribute to stress, poor health and relationship problems, and few managers would argue that tired, burnt-out staff are good for business. But TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber warned that the UK, which already has the some of the longest work hours in Europe, had become an overtime culture, in which companies were increasingly reliant on workers exceeding their contracted hours.

"We're not saying that we should turn into a nation of clock-watchers. Most people do not mind putting in some extra time when there's a crisis or an unexpected rush. But too many workplaces have come to depend on very long hours. They get taken for granted and staff have to do even more if there is an unexpected rush," said Barber.

"Worst of all is that many long hours workplaces are inefficient and unproductive. People are putting in long hours to make up for poor organization and planning in the workplace. It also puts employer complaints of the costs of benefits such as pensions or time off for new parents into perspective. Employers have been cutting back on pensions even as their staff put in longer hours."

To draw attention to the issue, the TUC has declared February 25 "Work Your Proper Hours Day," when it is urging staff to stick to their contracted hours to remind their bosses how much they depend on their extra efforts. "Take a proper lunch break, not just a sandwich at your desk, and leave on time, to enjoy your own time on Friday evening," it says. "Why not get together with friends working nearby, and go for a coffee, a pint, or take in a show? You deserve it! This is one day in the year for your boss to appreciate your efforts, and for you to appreciate yourself."

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2*) The Economist: The software-development industry [Il est de plus en plus de difficile de concevoir des logiciels.]

http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=3423238
The software-development industry: Managing complexity
Nov 25th 2004

Most software projects fail to meet their goals. Can this be fixed by giving developers better tools?

ON SEPTEMBER 14th, the radios in an air-traffic control centre in Palmdale, California shut down, grounding hundreds of flights in southern California and Nevada, and leading to five mid-air encounters between aircraft unable to talk to the ground controllers. Disaster was averted because aircraft managed to communicate with more distant back-up facilities. But why did Palmdale's radios fail? A glitch in the software running the system meant the computers had to be re-booted every 30 days, and somebody forgot to do so. But software running a mission-critical system should not have to be restarted every month. The culprit: poor design.

At least Palmdale's software worked some of the time. The same cannot be said of an $4 billion write-off that America's Internal Revenue Service (IRS) had to swallow when a multi-year effort to overhaul its computer system failed completely in 1997. And such problems are confined neither to governments nor to America. A £456m ($844m) project for Britain's Child Support Agency came in over a year late, and has failed to deliver payments to more than half of eligible applicants.

As software has become more and more pervasive in business and government, and more complicated, the impact of poor software design has been steadily growing. A study earlier this year by the Standish Group, a technology consultancy, estimated that 30% of all software projects are cancelled, nearly half come in over budget, 60% are considered failures by the organisations that initiated them, and nine out of ten come in late. A 2002 study by America's National Institute of Standards (NIST), a government research body, found that software errors cost the American economy $59.5 billion annually. Worldwide, it would be safe to multiply this figure by a factor of two. So who is to blame for such systematic incompetence?

Cost overruns and delays are common in numerous industries—few large infrastructure projects, for instance, are completed either on time or on budget. But it is peculiar to software that billions of dollars can be spent only for nothing useful to result. At a very basic level, it is the fault of the software engineers who are writing the programs, and of their bosses. Even companies that specialise in software development suffer from delays and overruns. An obvious example is Microsoft: its “Longhorn”, the long-heralded successor to its Windows XP operating system, was originally scheduled for launch this year. Longhorn is now not expected before mid-2006, and many of its key features have been put off until 2007.

The prevalence of such failures can be explained by one startling weakness: the tools available to software developers. As software projects have become more and more complicated, it has become impossible for even the most talented team of programmers to keep track of the millions of lines of “code” required. As long ago as the 1980s the industry began to rely heavily on software-development applications—basically, software that helps write software, for example by creating reusable modules that form part of broader processes. The problem is that these have simply not been up to the task. As a report in May by Forrester Research, another consultancy, succinctly put it: “Corporate software development is broken.”

Dale Fuller, the boss of Borland, a software-development company, agrees. He also thinks he can fix the problem of weak tools. So does John Swainson, long in charge of software development at IBM and now bound for the top job at Computer Associates. John Montgomery, who runs such things for Microsoft, does not think the situation is quite so bad. However, he believes Microsoft has what it takes to “commoditise common problems” and so enable average software developers to write above-average programs. And a bevy of smaller companies offers solutions as well. The challenge facing all of these companies is how to create tools that are reliable, yet capable of dealing with millions of lines of code and requirements that can shift, sometimes alarmingly, during a project's lifetime.

The importance of the software-development sector to business as a whole is huge. It is also an increasingly substantial business in itself (see chart). And, as Mr Montgomery points out, although selling software-development applications is profitable for Microsoft, it is also a way of winning new business. Better development tools mean more software is written for Windows, which in turn means more people are likely to use the operating system. Ditto for rivals—one reason IBM is making a big push to support development in various flavours of Unix (including in the “open source” version—ie, software code that is non-proprietary and ostensibly free to anyone—Linux). Unix is a long-established operating system that remains the biggest threat to Windows.

Three main trends are shaping the future of software development and giving hope to those who oversee big software projects. The first is awareness of the need to pay greater attention to the lifecycle of a piece of software, from the initial setting of requirements to ongoing implementation. The second trend is towards automating the testing of software. The NIST study estimates that $22.2 billion (more than one-third) of the cost of software failures could be eliminated simply by improved testing. The third trend is the emergence of open-source code, something embraced even by Microsoft, which is often seen by its many critics as the would-be nemesis of the open-source movement.

The five-step program

There are five steps involved in creating a piece of software: enumerating the requirements; designing the program; actually writing the code; testing it; and then deploying it. Traditionally and naturally enough, this was seen as a sequential process. However, Mr Swainson points out that by the time an organisation gets around to deploying a piece of software, its requirements have often already changed. This, he says, means that an “iterative” model, in which an organisation continually cycles through the five phases, makes more sense than the traditional “waterfall” which puts them in sequence.

Although the consensus among software-development providers is that iterative models are the way forward, a note of caution is in order. A paper by Phillip Laplante and Colin Neill of Penn State University in the February issue of ACM Queue, a scholarly journal, claims that, in practice, the waterfall remains by far the most popular model. It may be that real change is lagging behind developers' marketing literature, or that the iterative approach is more style than substance.

Borland, though, is betting its business on the success of the iterative model. In September it announced “Software Delivery Optimisation”, an approach that seeks to bring together all five bits of the development cycle, along with the people who are constantly making decisions about the project. At the heart of the system is management software called Themis (the Greek goddess of order), planned for release in the first half of 2005. Themis will have a module that turns models automatically into programming code. When code is written, it will instantly update the requirements input by the business developers. Mr Fuller says that this will transcend even the iterative model because the iteration will be so fast as to be seamless. As soon as a portion of the code is completed, it will be tested. As soon as requirements change, programmers will instantly change course.

If that sounds a bit utopian, it is by no means unique. In October, IBM announced its newest package, called “Atlantic”, which is poised to compete with Themis. Atlantic is based both around IBM's own products and those of Rational, a company bought by IBM in December 2002 for $2.1 billion. Not to be left out, Microsoft will release a similar product called Visual Studio 2005 sometime in the first half of next year. The rhetoric of this rush of entrants into the marketplace is almost indistinguishable.

This is partially due to the fact that, although they are competitors, and fierce ones at that, they are also collaborators. Mr Montgomery points out several bits of development software—WS-Routing, for instance (which handles network routing) and WS-Security (you guessed it, security)—that were developed jointly by IBM and Microsoft. Both firms trumpet that their development software is used by an impressive percentage of the world's largest companies, and both support the same basic standards, such as XML (a language for exchanging data on the web) and other web protocols.

Indeed, so-called web services—programs that are meant to run on the web and be accessed by many computers remotely—are the primary battleground for the next generation of software-development applications. The business case rests on the view that almost anything can be done over the web. This is particularly true for the most common, commodity-type applications where most of the available revenues appear to be.

Tick this box

One snag is that, so far, web services have turned out to be much harder to deliver than their champions had hoped. Consider the example of a relatively simple challenge: enrolling 6m Americans living abroad who wanted to use the internet to cast their votes in the recent elections. America's Defence Department, which has responsibility for helping expats to vote, decided to launch a pilot program for 100,000 people, and even came up with an acronym: SERVE, or Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment. In February, after $22m had already been spent, the project was abandoned. The software was judged to be too unreliable.

The various efforts to prevent the occurrence of such disasters—IBM's web-services platform is called WebSphere, and Microsoft's suite of development tools for web services is known as .NET—have more similarities than differences. IBM tends to favour Java as its native programming language, while Microsoft prefers C#, a language it developed itself. However, both firms' platforms support other languages. Borland claims that, being neutral, it does a better job, but marketing seems to be as important as technology when it comes to winning market share.

That is why Mr Montgomery emphasises Microsoft's efforts to create an “ecosystem” of developers. He says that the company has spent, over the years, hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars investing in the Microsoft Developer Network. This is certainly a busy website—some 3m developers a month visit to exchange programs and ideas, Mr Montgomery says. Indeed, some of the developers come up with products that compete directly with elements of .NET.

What's more, Mr Montgomery says that the tools made by companies such as Component 1 and Infragistics are better than Microsoft's own, and that this is something Microsoft encourages. The small fry make millions of dollars by staying one step ahead of Microsoft, but the giant benefits because its overall ecosystem is strengthened.

If software development in general is somewhat fragmented, in the area of software testing there is one clear market leader: Mercury Interactive, a company based in Mountain View, California. Other companies, especially IBM, are trying to make inroads into testing, and Mercury itself is trying to expand into other areas, particularly through an initiative called “Business Technology Optimisation” (yes, the initiatives all start to sound rather similar). That aims to do the kind of system-level integration at which companies such as Borland have traditionally been best. However, industry watchers say there is real promise in efforts to refine the testing process.

There are two sorts of software testing. The first, unit testing, tests a very small subroutine to see that it does what it should. The second, functional testing, is actually trying to use the software. Unit testing is far more straightforward—it is easier to test if a brick will crumble than if an entire structure is sound. Functional testing, on the other hand, is tricky—how is one to know if the software is fully tested? However, according to Mercury, about 60% of the necessary functional testing can be automated—things like repeatedly entering data. And automation allows the developers to explore a far larger number of test cases than would be possible by hand, in far less time. The gains are even greater when software is revised—old automated tests can often be re-used, whereas manual testers would have to start from scratch.

The benefits of this approach are amplified by the transition to the iterative approach—testing is much more effective if its results can be easily re-integrated into the software. Indeed, there is a symbiosis here: the faster testing made possible by automation is easing the transition from the waterfall model to an iterative one. Hence the interest from IBM and Microsoft.

An open-source solution?

The third big industry trend is arguably the most promising of them all. As Mr Montgomery points out, there are two ways of thinking about open-source software development. The first is to see it as a business model, and the second is to understand it as a development process. Microsoft, he says, makes a large amount of source code available under a so-called shared-source licence, which grants users downstream a limited set of rights to modify and use the code.

For purists, this is not enough. However, Mr Montgomery says it suffices to build the sort of community Microsoft wants, while retaining its ability to make a profit. (For instance, people are allowed to take the code, modify it and sell it, but only if it will be used on a Microsoft operating system.) IBM uses a similarly restrictive licence, but it has built its platform on top of Eclipse, a purer open-source framework for building integrated development environments.

However, other companies, such as CollabNet, a firm based in Brisbane, California, are using a less restrictive licence, along the lines of what is traditionally thought of as open source, with only one exception—the licence allows for commercial use. Brian Behlendorf, founder and chief technology officer of CollabNet, says that the open-source ethos allows programmers, particularly those collaborating from different locations, to work together more efficiently. He contends that the freedom to tinker with and improve tools essentially without restriction is the best route to efficiency. Mr Behlendorf was a pioneer in the development of the well-known Apache open-source web server, so his views come as little surprise. Less predictably, they are shared by businesses not usually thought of as being open-source enthusiasts.

For instance, CollabNet signed a deal earlier this month with Barclays Global Investors (BGI), a large asset manager, to provide it with development tools for the next three years. Mr Behlendorf points out that software-development companies, like software companies themselves, are moving towards a model of selling services rather than products. The tools that CollabNet uses are almost all open-source, but by paying “rent”, clients get the benefits of the company's expertise. It seems to work. BGI reports that since it first started using CollabNet two years ago, the time it takes to complete a project has halved.

The three big industry trends—lifecycle management, testing and open source—come together in a movement known as “agile” programming. This approach to software development was codified in a meeting in February 2001 in Utah when a group of programmers declared its allegiance to doing things quickly, using common sense and simplicity. The canonical example of what they are trying to avoid was a 1980s program called CONFIRM. Funded by a consortium of hotels, airlines and rental-car companies, it was meant to be a comprehensive travel-reservation system. After three and a half years and $125m, it was cancelled.

The main principle of agile programming is that developers must talk to each other often, and that they must talk to the business people setting requirements equally often. Combine this with a short time-scale—ideally agile proponents seek to deliver a working bit of software every few weeks—and you have an accelerated, informal version of the iterative model. This means that no project can go on for years and produce nothing—a fatally flawed project will be caught sooner.

Gartner, a consultancy, estimates that agile programming will have a substantial impact on high-priority projects. Nonetheless, pessimists argue that the problems plaguing software development are so fundamental that none of the many innovations being pursued today will really make a difference. In mitigation, software engineering is still an immature discipline. It is just possible that the techniques now being pursued by Microsoft, IBM and their growing army of competitors will lead to a future where failure is an exception rather than the rule.

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2**) International Herald Tribune: Writing clear English [Les entreprises américaines renvoient leurs salariés à l'école pour apprendre à écrire convenablement un anglais déformé par l'e-mail et les SMS.]

http://www.iht.com/articles/2004/12/08/business/email.html

Challenge for office: Writing clear English
By Sam Dillon The New York Times
Thursday, December 9, 2004

Deficit found as e-mail replaces phone

BLOOMINGTON, Illinois Craig Hogan, a former university professor who heads an online school for business writing here, received an e-mail message recently from a prospective student. "i need help," said the message, which was devoid of punctuation. "i am writing a essay on writing i work for this company and my boss want me to help improve the workers writing skills can yall help me with some information thank you"

Hogan receives hundreds of e-mails monthly from managers and executives seeking to improve their writing or their workers' writing each month. He says the number has surged as e-mail has replaced the phone for much workplace communication. Millions of employees must write more frequently on the job than previously. And many are making a hash of it. "E-mail is a party to which English teachers have not been invited," Hogan said. "It has companies tearing their hair out."

A recent survey of 120 American corporations reached a similar conclusion. The study, by the National Commission on Writing, a panel established by the College Board, concluded that a third of employees in major U.S. companies wrote poorly and that businesses were spending as much as $3.1 billion annually on remedial training. The College Board is a U.S. organization that helps students going to college.

The problem with writing shows up not only in e-mail but also in reports and other texts, the commission said. "The more electronic and global we get, the less important the spoken word has become, and in e-mail clarity is critical," said Sean Phillips, recruitment director at Applera, a California company that makes equipment for life science research, where most employees have advanced degrees. "Considering how highly educated our people are, many can't write clearly in their day-to-day work."

"It's not that companies want to hire Tolstoy," said Susan Traiman, a director at the Business Roundtable, an association of leading chief executives whose corporations were surveyed in the study. "But they need people who can write clearly, and many employees and applicants fall short of that standard."

Millions of inscrutable e-mail messages are clogging corporate computers by setting off requests for clarification, and many of the requests, in turn, are also chaotically written, resulting in whole cycles of confusion.

For example, an e-mail from a systems analyst to her supervisor at a high-tech corporation in Palo Alto, California, said, "I updated the Status report for the four discrepancies Lennie forward us via e-mail (they in Barry file).. to make sure my logic was correct It seems we provide Murray with incorrect information ... However after verifying controls on JBL - JBL has the indicator as B ???? - I wanted to make sure with the recent changes - I processed today - before Murray make the changes again on the mainframe to 'C'." That message persuaded the analyst's employers that she needed remedial training.

Some $2.9 billion of the $3.1 billion the National Commission on Writing estimates that corporations spend each year on remedial training goes to help current employees, with the rest spent on new hires. An entire education industry has developed to offer remedial writing instruction to adults, with hundreds of public and private universities, for-profit schools and freelance teachers offering evening classes as well as workshops, video and online courses in business and technical writing.

Kathy Keenan, a former legal proofreader who teaches business writing at the University of California Extension in Santa Cruz said she sought to dissuade students from sending business messages in the crude shorthand they learned to tap out on their pagers as teenagers. "hI KATHY i am sending u the assignmnet again," one student wrote to her recently. "i had sent you the assignment earlier but i didnt get a respond. If u get this assgnment could u please respon. thanking u for ur cooperation."

Most of her students are midcareer professionals in high-tech industries, Keenan said.

Even chief executives need writing help, Roger Peterson, a freelance writer in Rocklin, California, who frequently coaches executives, said. "Many of these guys write in inflated language that desperately needs a laxative," Peterson said, and not a few are defensive. "They're in denial, and who's going to argue with the boss?"

But some realize their shortcomings and pay Peterson to help them improve. Don Morrison, a former auditor at Deloitte & Touche who has built a successful consulting business, is among them. "I was too wordy," Morrison said. "I liked long, convoluted passages rather than simple four-word sentences. And I had a predilection for underlining words and throwing in multiple exclamation points. "Finally Roger threatened to rip the exclamation key off my keyboard."

Exclamation points were an issue when Linda Landis Andrews, who teaches at the University of Illinois at Chicago, led a workshop in May for midcareer executives at an automotive corporation in the Midwest. Their exasperated supervisor had insisted that the men improve their writing.

"I get a memo from them and cannot figure out what they're trying to say," the supervisor wrote Andrews. When at her request the executives produced letters they had written to a supplier who had failed to deliver parts on time, she was horrified to see that tone-deaf writing had turned a minor business snarl into a corporate confrontation moving toward litigation. "They had allowed a hostile tone to creep into the letters," she said. "They didn't seem to understand that those letters were just toxic."

"People think that throwing multiple exclamation points into a business letter will make their point forcefully," Andrews said. "I tell them they're allowed two exclamation points in their whole life."

Hogan, who founded his online Business Writing Center a decade ago after years of teaching composition at Illinois State University, says that the use of multiple exclamation points and other nonstandard punctuation like the ":-)" symbol are fine for personal e-mail but that companies have erred by allowing experimental writing devices to flood into business writing. "E-mail has just erupted like a weed, and instead of considering what to say when they write, people now just let thoughts drool out onto the screen," Hogan said. "It has companies at their wits' end."

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4*) BBC News: US military pondered love not war [Un laboratoire militaire US avait réfléchi sur des armes chimiques non-fatales plutôt innovantes, dont une au pouvoir aphrodisiaque qui inciterait les soldats ennemis à engager dans des actes sexuels entre eux.]
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4174519.stm
US military pondered love not war


The US military investigated building a "gay bomb", which would make enemy soldiers "sexually irresistible" to each other, government papers say. Other weapons that never saw the light of day include one to make soldiers obvious by their bad breath. The US defence department considered various non-lethal chemicals meant to disrupt enemy discipline and morale.

The 1994 plans were for a six-year project costing $7.5m, but they were never pursued. The US Air Force Wright Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio, sought Pentagon funding for research into what it called "harassing, annoying and 'bad guy'-identifying chemicals".

The plans were obtained under the US Freedom of Information by the Sunshine Project, a group which monitors research into chemical and biological weapons.

'Who? Me?'

The plan for a so-called "love bomb" envisaged an aphrodisiac chemical that would provoke widespread homosexual behaviour among troops, causing what the military called a "distasteful but completely non-lethal" blow to morale.

Scientists also reportedly considered a "sting me/attack me" chemical weapon to attract swarms of enraged wasps or angry rats towards enemy troops.

A substance to make the skin unbearably sensitive to sunlight was also pondered.

Another idea was to develop a chemical causing "severe and lasting halitosis", so that enemy forces would be obvious even when they tried to blend in with civilians.

In a variation on that idea, researchers pondered a "Who? Me?" bomb, which would simulate flatulence in enemy ranks. Indeed, a "Who? Me?" device had been under consideration since 1945, the government papers say.

However, researchers concluded that the premise for such a device was fatally flawed because "people in many areas of the world do not find faecal odour offensive, since they smell it on a regular basis".

Captain Dan McSweeney of the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate at the Pentagon said the defence department receives "literally hundreds" of project ideas, but that "none of the systems described in that [1994] proposal have been developed".

He told the BBC: "It's important to point out that only those proposals which are deemed appropriate, based on stringent human effects, legal, and international treaty reviews are considered for development or acquisition."

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A) Le texte plus abordable de la semaine/Scholastic News: Happy Birthday, Rovers [Les véhicules-sondes sur Mars fêtent leur premier anniversaire.]
http://teacher.scholastic.com/scholasticnews/news/article_thu.asp

Happy Birthday, Rovers
Steven Ehrenberg

A pair of wheeled robots just celebrated their one-year anniversary on Mars. A year ago Tuesday, Opportunity joined its twin rover Spirit to roam the surface of the red planet.

"This whole mission has surpassed all of our expectations," said Steven Squyres, the lead investigator for the mission. The entire rover team, including Squyres, threw a party for the six-wheeled robots on Monday night.

Meeting the Neighbor

For such a successful mission, it had a rocky start. The pair of wheeled robots were originally scheduled for only a 90-day mission. They were knocked around space by solar flares and a Martian dust storm before they even landed, and Opportunity was plagued with software problems.

But the solar-powered rovers landed safely, and their visit has brought a treasure trove of new information about Earth's neighbor. Soon after its arrival, Opportunity found proof that the crater where it landed had once been underwater.

Most recently, Opportunity stumbled across a meteorite, or a hunk of rock or metal from space. The bubbly, basketball-sized object was the first meteorite found on another planet. Scientists plan to study it to learn about the Martian breeze. Do strong winds sweep sand over other meteorites? Or do gales peel away the planet's surface, revealing more giant rocks? The meteorite, which was uncovered, may offer clues.

Looking Ahead

The rovers will soon be joined by a new spacecraft. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is scheduled to launch on August 10, carrying new cameras and measurement tools. While the rovers have explored small patches of the surface in detail, the Orbiter will map much more of the planet.

In the meantime, the rovers will continue to explore Mars.

"So here we are, a year later, and both rovers are still going strong," said Rob Manning, the head of the rovers' Entry, Descent, and Landing team. "They could die tomorrow, a month from now, a year from now . . . whatever happens, it has been a fantastic journey for these two rovers."

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B) CNN/Global Office: Ancient and modern management [Alexandre le Grand, un modèle pour les PDG d'aujourd'hui ?]
http://edition.cnn.com/2005/BUSINESS/01/18/alexander.guru/index.html
Ancient and modern management

Tuesday, January 18, 2005 Posted: 1620 GMT (0020 HKT)

(CNN) -- The short, spectacular life of Alexander the Great has always been Hollywood material. By the time of his death aged just 32 in 323BC the Macedonia-born Alexander had conquered the ancient world, extending his empire across one million square miles from Greece to India.

In his latest screen incarnation, Alexander, played by Colin Farrell in the eponymous Oliver Stone-directed epic, is portrayed as the greatest warrior in history.

But many business experts believe the lessons of Alexander's career have as much relevance for boardroom as battlefield strategists. According to Partha Bose, author of "Alexander the Great's Art of Strategy", modern executives can learn from Alexander's campaigns in three key areas. "It fundamentally boils down to three things: it is where you want to compete, when and how you want to enter or exit that market and how do you want to go about competing when you are in that market," says Bose. "Those are fundamentally the three key strategic issues and again when you take a look at Alexander the Great's history you find that he was pretty much the first ever general to systematically think through those three key issues. "Strategy is only as good as the organization's ability to execute it. Here again, there are lessons from ancient times."

One modern manager who has drawn inspiration from Alexander's campaigns is Federal Express founder and CEO Fred Smith. "Primary was his organizational skills," says Smith. "He organized his army in a way that had never been done. That organization allowed him to play to his strengths, minimize his weaknesses and prevail over opponents who were much larger."

In Oliver Stone's cinematic portrait, Alexander's greatest achievement comes at the Battle of Gaugamela where his 50,000-strong Macedonian army defeats the forces of the Persian king Darius, five times its size. Stone believes Alexander's tactical flexibility and willingness to delegate authority gave him a decisive military advantage. "He had great instincts in battle," Stone told CNN. "He was very fluid, always changing as the battle developed. He was quick to react. Alexander was a great believer in teamwork and he delegated authority beautifully. "The Persians could not move without central approval. It was all governed by Darius in the center. Alexander went for the head. He knew that if he killed Darius he would kill the snake."

Bose agrees that delegation and instinct were central to Alexander's thinking. "We see him trusting a nine-year-old shepherd boy, and getting this shepherd boy to lead the entire army over the Uxion mountains in Persia," he says. "There are many other situations where he would put his trust just like that in whoever it was he encountered. But a sign of great leadership is that great leaders know whom to trust and do put their faith in lots and lots of people."

But for all Alexander's improvisational abilities on the battlefield, his achievements were also a consequence of careful preparation and forward thinking. "We know that there was significant rehearsal and planning," says Stone. "They even had markers, they drew marbles of the enemy, they drew carved statues and they made battle plans like they do at West Point today."

In war, Alexander could be a brutal and cunning opponent. Yet his empire was founded on a respect for local cultures and a belief that peace and internal stability could only exist through prosperity. "All throughout his life you see Alexander going out of his way to embrace other cultures, and the cultures that he did invade saw that he wasn't trying to impose on them his way of doing things," says Bose. "What was happening was that the local culture and the Greek culture would melt together in ways that even the people who were conquered found quite interesting and innovative. The Nestles, the Unilevers or the Procter and Gambles of the world have been able to succeed across the globe because none of them imposed a system on the nations they were going into that came from their origins. They all worked out something that was in line with the local cultures and local tastes, and that is what globalization is all about. So there are really a lot of great leaders and part of their greatness lies in being able to adapt themselves to the local cultures."

Smith, who describes Alexander as "the first truly global thinker," says Federal Express have tried to emulate that approach when moving into new markets. "We have to deal with different cultures, attitudes, different people. Doing that is part of our company's success," he says. "I think Alexander was the first person who did that successfully. He didn't just capture and enslave them. He was enormously successful in putting together a truly global empire."

-- CNN's Robyn Curnow contributed to this report.

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D) The Miami Herald/Dave Barry's Year in Review [HUMOUR ! Le regard de Dave Barry sur l'année 2004. Ici, le mois de mars.]
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/living/
columnists/dave_barry/10496338.htm?1c

Speaking of fighters, in MARCH John Kerry sews up the Democratic nomination with primary victories in California, Florida, Illinois, Canada, France, Germany and Sweden. Kerry's closest rival, John Edwards, drops out of the race, but Dennis Kucinich stays in, saying that he intends to keep his idealistic grass-roots campaign going until either all U.S. troops leave Iraq, or Dennis finds a girlfriend.

In other political news, Russian president Vladimir Putin easily wins re-election, despite exit polls indicating the winner was Howard Dean.

There is finally some positive news from Iraq, where negotiators reach agreement on an interim constitution, which guarantees that, for the first time ever, Iraq will be governed by a duly elected council of nervous men in armored cars going 80 mph.

In domestic news, U.S. gasoline prices reach record levels when, in what economists describe as a freak coincidence, two drivers attempt to refuel their Humvees on the same day.

On the legal front, a federal jury convicts Martha Stewart on four counts of needing to be taken down a peg. In what many legal experts call an unduly harsh punishment, a federal judge sentences Stewart to be the topic of 17 consecutive weeks of Jay Leno jokes.

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THIS WEEK'S TEXTS

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1) Columbia Tribune: President's gesture was insult to some [Dans un exemple des difficultés de communication interculturelle, un geste fait par la famille Bush lors de la parade d'investiture est perçu comme injurieux ailleurs dans le monde.]

http://www.columbiatribune.com/2005/Jan/20050123News011.asp
Sign is misinterpreted: President’s gesture was insult to some.

Knight Ridder Newspapers
Published Sunday, January 23, 2005

FORT WORTH, Texas - President George W. Bush, who’s had difficulty holding alliances together at times, might have inadvertently ruffled feathers overseas by flashing a "Hook ’em Horns" sign during last week’s inaugural parade. Bush and the rest of the first family raised their right hands in the traditional "Horns" salute - customary among University of Texas Longhorns - as the school’s band marched in front of the presidential reviewing stand Thursday.

But in Norway and some other parts of the world, a nearly identical hand gesture is considered an insult or, worse, a sign of the devil. In Mediterranean countries, it implies a man is a cuckold, the victim of an unfaithful wife. In parts of Africa, it’s used as a curse, and in many European countries, it’s used to ward off "the evil eye." In Russia, it’s a symbol for so-called New Russians, the newly rich, arrogant and poorly educated.

It means "bull--" in sign language. This elicited a surprised giggle from the first lady’s press secretary, Gordon Johndroe of Fort Worth, Texas, himself a University of Texas grad. When told its meaning by the New York Daily News, Johndroe said, "Texans have been known to BS every once in a while."

A headline in the Norwegian Internet newspaper Nettavisen expressed outrage at the first family’s collective gesture last week, saying "Shock greeting from Bush daughter" above a photo of Bush’s daughter Jenna, smiling and waving the sign, The Associated Press reported.

The originator of the "Hook ’em, Horns" sign said he doesn’t see what all the fuss is about. "I think ‘silly’ would be a very kind word for it," said H.K. Pitts, 73, who was a University of Texas student in 1955 when he came up with the hand signal. "It’s much to do about nothing," said Pitts, who went on to teach history at Texas A&M University-Kingsville. "I wouldn’t think many Norwegians up there watch Longhorn football. So I’m not concerned about it that much, to tell you the truth."

Chris Plonsky, women’s athletic director at the University of Texas-Austin, defended the hand gesture: "It is sort of a symbol that is unifying. You know you’re around a Longhorn when you see that symbol," she said.

Some Europeans don’t see it that way. Catherine "Cat" Osterman, a Longhorn athlete, found that out in Greece when she pitched for the U.S. softball team, which won a gold medal last year during the Olympic Games in Athens. Plonsky said Osterman drew some "adverse" reactions from athletes from other countries when she flashed the "Hook ’em" hand signal.

The sign has been around at the University of Texas for more than a half-century. It’s only been a symbol for heavy-metal rockers since the early ’70s. Pitts, who lives in College Station, said he and a fellow student were killing time in his 1951 Ford sedan outside a drive-in restaurant when he made the shape of horns with his right hand. He suggested it could become a Longhorn tradition, just like the "gig ’em" hand sign for A&M. Pitts said he passed the idea on to Harley Clark, head University of Texas cheerleader at the time, and said Clark introduced it at a Longhorn pep rally in preparation for a football game in Austin against Texas Christian University. Now a retired state district judge living in Dripping Springs, Texas, Clark, 69, advised against using the gesture in Italy but called Norway’s reaction to Bush’s "Hook ’em" gesture "preposterous." "I wonder what they think the Aggies’ thumbs-up-in-the-air sign means," he said.

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