China may grow below 7%; Spying run amok; Challenge of having a unified corporate strategy; When companies suffer from 'presenteeism'; An 85-year-old cleaning up India politics

1 China may grow below 7% (BBC) China's finance minister has hinted that economic growth may fall far below 7% in the second half of the year. Speaking in Washington, Lou Jiwei thought growth for 2013 as a whole would be 7%, but said that even this may not be the "bottom line". Mr Lou's comments highlight how rapidly the country is slowing down, as Beijing seeks to rein in a construction boom.

Mr Lou said he expected growth for the first half of this year to come in at just under 7.7%, implying that he believes growth will slow to just above 6% in the second half. Until last year, China had grown at an average rate of 10% a year for over three decades. Throughout that period, the country has never underperformed the government's growth target, which have typically been much higher than 7.5%.

The newly-installed government of President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang is intent on rebalancing the economy away from reliance on investment, construction, heavy industries and exports, and towards consumer spending by China's growing middle class. But the transition is expected to be difficult. Consumer spending is starting from a small share of the economy - just a third of total spending, compared with 50%-70% in Western countries.

2 Spying run amok (Eric S Margolis in Khaleej Times) America’s giant security bureaucracy is out of control. We know that electronic spying has completely run amok when tiny Luxembourg’s prime minister, Jean-Claude Juncker, just resigned over a nasty scandal involving his nation’s tiny intelligence service.

Recent revelations of massive, ultra-intrusive US electronic spying in Europe by fugitive National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden have ignited a firestorm of outrage — and hypocrisy — across the European Union. Two points to keep in mind.  First, dear old Uncle Sam indeed spies on everybody and everyone. Now we learn that even our personal computers, cell phones and keyboards are bugged.  It’s clear that surveillance technology has far outdistanced the restraints of law or good government. The giant security bureaucracy is out of control.

Second, Europe’s politicians are loudly denouncing the US for spying on their people.  But Britain, Germany, Italy, Holland, Spain and Belgium signed secret pacts with the US decades ago allowing NSA and CIA to spy on their citizens, and to share intelligence with Washington.   The largest NSA listening post in Europe is inside NATO HQ at Brussels. 

Bureaucrats and politicians hate whistleblowers. Not so much because these brave, public-spirited people reveal deep dark secrets of state, but because they cause sharp political embarrassment and identify all sorts of dirty business concealed from voters.   That’s why lynchings are planned for both US Army whistleblower Bradley Manning and Ed Snowdon. The real “national security” issue involved here is the security of  hypocritical politicians and career bureaucrats.

3 Challenge of having a unified corporate strategy (Adam Bryant in The New York Times) In announcing its reorganization, Microsoft provided a stark reminder of a leadership challenge that all chief executives face: How do you get everyone to think in terms of “Us” — we’re all on the same team — rather than thinking of colleagues in other divisions as “Them”?

So what should leaders do? A few tips have emerged from my interviews. At the heart of that is taking down the walls so people can collaborate more freely, so that we can leverage all of a company. We now ask people to pick their heads up out of their project work or their division focus and look across the whole company. Also, simplify the scoreboard. A big part of a leader’s job is to establish a simple set of performance metrics so that everyone in the company can feel as if they’re part of a broader team, and can understand how the work they do contributes to the broader goals. Chief executives have to choose those metrics carefully because, as the saying goes, what gets measured gets managed.

There’s a reason that so many companies hold regular all-hands meetings (and with technology, it’s possible to do them in large and sprawling companies now). Again, it’s about tribal behavior. You have to bring everybody together and speak to everyone as a group for people to identify themselves with the broadest group. Leaders then have to take their simple plan and hammer it home, again and again, even if they feel like everybody has heard it before a hundred times. 

Steve Ballmer’s challenge as the chief executive of Microsoft is not unlike the challenge that it faces with technology: how to take something very complicated — be it a software program or a sprawling organizational chart — and make it simple to operate. This may be the toughest task of his career.

4 When companies suffer from ‘presenteeism’ (Stefan Stern in The Guardian) Economists continue to wrestle with a labour market paradox: high levels of employment producing virtually no growth at all. Part of the answer must lie in so-called "presenteeism": the low productivity of people who are physically present at work but who, for a variety of reasons, are not contributing all that they could. For many people today, work really isn't working.

Perhaps a radically different approach is needed. What would you say to the idea of unlimited holidays? That's right – the same principle as an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet, only with days off work in unlimited supply rather than noodles and chicken wings. Preposterous, you may say. But for a number of companies letting staff know that they can take as much holiday as they like has proved successful.

Netflix, the video-streaming business, and Evernote, an online note-taking and storage company, have both been operating an "unlimited leave" policy for some time. Far from the system being abused, both companies report that the take-up of holiday is steady and not excessive. The bottom line is: it doesn't matter where you sit. It's what you do that counts. And when the job's done, have a break.

5 An 85-year-old cleaning up India politics (Joanna Sugden & Preetika Rana in The Wall Street Journal) In 2005, Lily Thomas, an 85-year-old human-rights lawyer who trained in Chennai, started a legal battle to oust politicians convicted while in office and to bar those with pending criminal charges from contesting elections. On Wednesday she got victory in the case, a result that has significant ramifications for politics in India.

National Election Watch, a non-government organization campaigning for electoral reform, says 162 lawmakers in the Lok Sabha, India’s lower house of Parliament, face criminal charges.  In the last national election in 2009, around 15% of candidates had pending criminal convictions, National Election Watch figures show.

Ms. Thomas, who has been practicing law for almost six decades, was fighting against a clause in the Representation of the People Act, which had allowed sitting members of Parliament to remain in office even after being convicted of crimes, while they appealed against their conviction. The Supreme Court this week found that the clause violated India’s Constitution.

It ruled that state and national lawmakers convicted of an offense would from now on be automatically removed from office even if they appealed their conviction. It also barred those with pending criminal cases from contesting elections. The decision was reinforced by another Supreme Court ruling, published Thursday, which banned those in police custody or on remand in jail from contesting elections at the national and local level.