The IT giant is strategizing with governments from Saudi Arabia to South America on their technological futures—hoping to score mega-contracts

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Justin Wood

By Peter Burrows

King Abdullah Economic City, Saudi Arabia - Two limos hurtle through the desert north of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, at 110 miles per sixty minutes, blown at times into the slack lane by the winds approach off the nearby Red Sea. The delegation from networking giant Cisco Systems (CSCO), including Senior Vice-President Paul Mountford, is running late for a gala groundbreaking ceremony hosted through the Saudi king at one of the biggest construction projects on the planet. King Abdullah Economic City (KAEC) is chiefly sand dotted by cranes now. But by 2020 the Saudis expect 2 the public canaille to be living in a futuristic metropolis three times the greatness of Manhattan, with some of the greatest in quantity advanced technology money can buy. As the black Lexuses arrive, one traveler remarks on the frenzied pace, and Mountford laughs. “That was small matter,” he says.

Not with so much at stake. King Abdullah plans to build four brand-new cities and upgrade the country’s infrastructure at a cost of $600 billion over the coming years, and Mountford is chasing scores of similar projects in emerging markets around the terraqueous globe. This goes beyond China and India. Mountford’s mandate is to spigot the next tier of emerging nations, from Saudi Arabia and Russia to Brazil and Chile. It’s a sprawling group that Cisco, and companies like it in technology and before, is counting steady for much of its putting out. But as the financial crisis hammers many of these economies, Mountford will have to crowd to deliver.

The groundbreaking at KAEC makes limpid how hard Cisco is pushing. Its executives form the largest Western contingent by far, and, after the event, the association hosts the king in an adjoining tent for a proof of Cisco technology that allows a person elsewhere to appear on stage as a holographic image. All this before the joint concern has won a dime of business for its products.

Cisco isn’t uncorrupt selling technology. Mountford’s pitch is that Cisco, more than any other visitor, can help countries such as Saudi Arabia modernize their economies and become leaders in the Internet Age. The company argues that, by investing in the Internet infrastructure Cisco sells, these governments be possible to better school their citizens, improve health care, and boost national productivity. They may even esteem being able to create their own tech sectors, giving citizens the opportunity to become well-paid “knowledge” workers allied those in Bangalore or Guangdong, China. It’s the word of the Cisco Effect. “This is a chance for Cisco to [influence the world] on a much bigger scale,” says John T. Chambers, the joint concern’s chief executory. “It’s ready raising standards of living and creating large middle classes.”

One parallel is Bechtel. Just as the construction giant built dams, power plants, and airports highest century, Cisco believes it can build essential infrastructure for today. It sells everything from the million-dollar routers that not equivocal commerce from one side the Net to $300,000 videoconferencing systems instead of executive suites to set-top boxes beneficial to cable TV. But it does in greater numbers than peddle dress.: Cisco provides consulting services to help fashion of sovereignty officials figure out how best to use the Internet and pays for training centers to churn out the technicians to make such plans real. All told, the copartnership is investing billions in emerging markets in hopes of snaring future business. “Cisco is getting itself designed into the fabric of these countries’ economic plans, because Cisco is helping their leaders imagine the future,” says tech consultant Geoffrey Moore of TCG Advisors. “It’s thought leadership at a level I’ve never seen in advance of.”

Powerful Senate Republicans oppose a management bailout for automakers even if it means bankruptcy for General Motors

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By David Kiley

Democrats may have been the big victors on Election Day. But the Republicans still in charge in the White House and representing a possibly immovable minority in the Senate may keep the U.S. auto industry from getting the help it indispensably before Barack Obama is inaugurated as President in January.

To satisfy wary Republicans to go along with a rescue package, a House bill being crafted would give the government stock warrants, an righteousness venture in the automakers. It also has a provision that would put taxpayers at or near the head of the line for obligation repayment when the companies gain well.

Without at least $15 billion in loans, General Motors (GM), say insiders, could face bankruptcy nearest year. The total loan bale sought by Democrats for automakers and their suppliers could be for the reason that strong-flavored as $50 billion, a number floated by dint of. aides to President-elect Obama.

GM’sitting CEO G. Richard Wagoner Jr. said Thursday, Nov. 13, in an interview with Automotive News that he is willing to accept just about any condition on the loans he has heard expressed by political leaders. "Whether that’s haft warrants, restrictions on executive compensation and golden parachutes, we’ve said we’re very willing to take . those," Wagoner uttered. In announcing GM’s fifth straight quarterly loss last week (BusinessWeek.com, 11/7/08), Wagoner reported GM may run out of cash to operate before mid-2009.

Chrysler CEO Robert Nardelli said Thursday that he doubted his troop could continue to live without government loans. "It would be very difficult to make it through this unprecedented downturn" on the outside of help, he declared at a conference in Palm Desert, Calif. At the same time, said Nardelli, the automaker "cannot assume we are going to get financial assistance" and may have to close pair more assembly plants.

The House and Senate committees overseeing the financial-services industries have called hearings on Nov. 18-19 that will involve testimony from the CEOs of GM, Ford (F), and Chrysler, as well for the reason that other authorities from the auto industry. Last week, hearings were considered unnecessary. But there is such much mounting GOP inconsistency to auto industry loans that Representative Barney Frank (D-Mass.) and Senator Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), the chairmen of the House finance and Senate banking committees, particularly, changed course.

Questions forward account of the group are expected to focus on the following:

• How did GM get to the point of near-bankruptcy?

• What kinds of guarantees be able to you offer Congress that your companies will be viable after a in posse introduction of loans?

• How sure are you that you will be able to requite it back? How real is the threat of added than a the public jobs going away if GM files with regard to Chapter 11?

• Why are you so top-heavy in trucks and SUVs, when Toyota ™ and Honda (HMC) are not?

• How specifically will you use the liquidity?

To GM and Chrysler:

• Will you use the money in 2009 to help achieve a merger of your two companies? If so, why is it necessary?

• Will you commit to significant restrictions on charged with execution reparation as a state of these loans?

Applications for MBA programs are up, but job opportunities for second-year students in finance or consulting have turned wretched

By Alison Damast

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After nearly four years as a management consultant at in the same state firms being of the kind which Deloitte Consulting and Booz Allen Hamilton, Ari Perlman was itching to try his hand at investment banking. So this summer the 26-year-old MBA student at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business signed on with Lehman Brothers for an internship. Then all hell broke loose. With the economy unraveling and much of Wall Street in semblance on the brink of collapse, Lehman slashed bonuses for interns. And by the existence in this world Perlman returned to campus, the crew had filed for bankruptcy. Lehman’s last check for Perlman’s travel expenses? Bounced. An e-mail explained that a reinvigorated check would be in the mail. Eventually. “I haven’t heard anything from them since,” says Perlman, who’s now looking for a consulting job. “And frankly, I am not too hopeful.”

On the nation’s B-school campuses, hope used to spring eternal. No more. Students like Perlman are downsizing their expectations, rejiggering career plans, and settling in favor of less as the cascading effects of the global financial crisis start to be felt at MBA programs around the country. With companies pulling upper part on second-year recruiting and competition according to the scarcely any remaining finance jobs becoming fierce, students are entering what surely is the toughest MBA work at jobs market since the dot-com bust. “I call to mind next go astray is going to be very, very beset with difficulty,” says George G. Daly, dean of Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business. “This is terra incognita.”

Despite the gloomy outlook for stream students, applications to B-schools are steady the upswing, driven largely by applicants who require been laid off or are other causes hoping to ride out the recession. With to a greater degree applicants to choose from, admissions officers be possible to be pickier, making 2009 a difficult year to put on shore a slot at a meridian B-school. Meanwhile, professors and deans are attempting to make sensation of the financial crisis in the classroom, offering new electives and town-hall-style meetings on the meltdown, altering syllabi, and inscription new case studies based on recent market-churning events. Risk economy, until recently an disliked elective, is expected to become a in addition important part of many B-schools’ curriculums in three to five years, a run that Robert Meyer, co-director of the Risk Management & Decision Processes Center at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, calls “potentially transformational.”

For current students, though, the only concern is finding a job—and nowhere is that sleeping vision receding faster than on Wall Street. Brian Mirochnik, 26, an MBA scholar at the University of Rochester’sitting Simon Graduate School of Business, is facing that reality head-on as he looks for jobs in the investing. banking field. He didn’t receive a job offer from UBS (UBS) after his summer internship and now is scrambling to find a position, a search he fears could easily stretch into the put forth. “Banks are telling me they are going through their own layoffs and don’t know when they are going to disturb hiring once more,” says Mirochnik, who has given up on the big Wall Street firms and is looking exclusively at boutique investing. firms and mid-market banks. “A apportionment of the factors affecting my to come employment are just out of my hands.”

Second-year students such while Mirochnik to the end of job offers appear to be in the most precarious position. According to a survey by the umbrella group MBA Career Services Council, about 70% of the 77 schools surveyed aforesaid they apothegm a downturn in full-time recruiting opportunities in financial services in October. Meanwhile, about moiety of the schools said overall full-time job postings and on-campus recruiting this fall was either sand bank or down 5% during the same period, with some indicating it has fallen as a great quantity as 10%.

In the coming year, the job market for MBAs may begin to bear a striking similarity to the period following the dot-com bust when some banks and consulting firms rescinded or renegotiated job offers they had extended to second-year students. That hasn’t happened this time around—nevertheless.

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As gay-rights advocates continue demonstrating against the Mormon church, some saying it crossed a church-state line and should be stripped of its tax-exempt status, experts say the church was well within its rights to act in support of California’s gay-marriage anathematize, Proposition 8.

“Any religious group has as much freedom as they meagreness to argue in the place of or against these public-policy issues,” said Charles Haynes, a senior student by the First Amendment Center in Arlington, Va.

That said, there are rules churches must follow to retain their tax-exempt status: They cannot endorse or put in opposition individual candidates.

But what has upset manifold gay-rights advocates is the extent of the Mormon church’s support in the place of Proposition 8, which defines marriage as the union of common married man and one woman, and overrides a prevailing that a ban on gay nuptial rites was unconstitutional.

Top church leaders urged members in California to do all they could to support the proposition, and members gave millions.

Internal Revenue Service rules are grayer on how involved churches be able to be put on ballot measures, saying such activity is permitted in the way that long as it doesn’face to face form a “substantial part” of what the house of worship does.

The IRS determines on a case-by-case groundwork what constitutes “substantial part.” Haynes reported courts have suggested that a church is safe if it spends less amount than 5 percent of its resources on every issue.

It’s unlikely The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — the Mormon church — jeopardized its status, Haynes believes.

“The LDS church is huge,” he said. “This would have existence a very, very small part of what they do.”

Religion’s sway

Churches are granted tax exemption under the philosophy that they requite the public good, and for freedom of religion.

If the government taxed churches, more might hector about being audited for adage something the government didn’privately like, Haynes said. “The power to tax is the power to restrain.”

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NEW YORK — Stocks are falling as Wall Street gives back some of its gains from Thursday’s huge rally and investors refocus on their fears end for end the economy.

Some retrenchment is to be expected after such a big advance, when the Dow Jones industrials rallied more than 550 points. Investors are also digesting comments from Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke that the markets remain less than “severe strain.” Bernanke, oratory at conference in Germany, also left open the possibility of another interest fixed measure cut next month.

Meanwhile, the commonwealth has issued a sobering promulgate on October retail sales, and Abercrombie & Fitch Co. and JCPenney Co. are the latest retailers to provide bleak outlooks in front of the holiday shopping season.

The Dow is down 117 points at the 8,718 level. The greater indexes are the whole of down further than 1 percent.

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PORTLAND — A judge has ruled that you can, indeed, “let it everything hang finished” in Portland and dismissed indecent exposing. charges against a nude bicycle rider who did correct that.

In Portland, the pass sentence upon said, cycling naked has been anointed as a “well-established tradition” and understood as a cut of “hieroglyphical protest.”

Judge Jerome LaBarre said the city’s annual World Naked Bike Ride — in which as many as 1,200 people took part last June 14 — has helped cement riding in the made of buff as a form of aver against cars and dependence on fossil fuels.

LaBarre hereafter cleared Michael “Bobby” Hammond, 21, afterwards pair days of hearings.

Hammond ran afoul of the constabulary June 26, when he stripped down and hopped on his 10-speed in an effort, he says, to show that he alone was powering it.

Portland police, but, saw Hammond’s two-minute ride through the Alberta Arts District since a stunt, not free speech, and arrested him, citing a city code that states it’s illegal to expose genitalia in a public place in eye of members of the opposite sex.

A bystander recorded the episode, what one. was posted on the Web.

As Hammond pulled to a repression, police began to question him.

Hammond said he didn’t think he was doing anything wrong.

An officer told him to put on some pants or go to jail. “There are kids out there,” the officer reported.

“I just want to ride my bike,” Hammond says. “I’m wearing a helmet.”

The officer said that was nice, but that it was each pants or house of correction.