Commentary

Let me ask you 3 questions. Please be truthful with your answers because I won’t be there to hear them.

If you, and virtually everyone you know, is on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest or other social media sites I bet at some point or other you may have toyed with the idea of getting rid of your ‘old-fashioned’, non-social media website right and focusing all your time and energy on one or more of these sites. You might try and convince yourself by saying ‘I spend 90% of my time on Facebook these days and almost none updating my own website. So closing it down makes sense, right? Wrong! “Although it may seem counter-intuitive, if you’re in business the more time you spend using social media sites to connect and engage with clients and others the more important it is to have an up-to-date, easy to navigate dot-sg or dot-com type website of your own to support your social media activities” says reputation expert and author Hannah Samuel.

This is a question that most leaders ponder over, and in the search for the perfect answer to what that ultimate leadership approach and style might look like, many probably realise that this is not as easy as they had imagined.

A very experienced editor of a weekly news magazine once told me over dinner, "You can't make writers. They either have a knack for it or they don't but you can improve the good ones."

There’s a little bit of an oddball crowd out there in Singapore—the type that considers moving to Johor Bahru.

“He who asks a question is a fool for five minutes; he who does not ask a question remains a fool forever,” so says a famous Chinese proverb.

When American parents drop off their children at primary school, the parting words are usually “have fun” rather than “work hard”, and until the internet boom created teenage millionaires out of non-athletic nerds. The most admired students in high schools are the football captains and cheerleaders. When a high school senior chooses which colleges to apply to, he/she often asks about the party scene rather than academic standards. The Ivy League colleges would admit sportsmen, movie starlets and children of politicians with mediocre transcripts and SAT scores, in order to add “diversity” to its student population. One President of Yale University, Bart Giamatti, resigned to become the US Baseball Commissioner.

A major challenge to international arbitration is the perception by corporate and in-house counsel that this process has grown to be time-consuming and costly. A recent survey by the Corporate Counsel International Arbitration Group (“CCIAG survey”) found overwhelming agreement with 100% of the respondents agreeing that it took too long (56% of respondents strongly agree) and cost too much (69% of respondents strongly agree).

Fundamentally the business of business is simple!

No doubt having a job pays the bills and if it is well-paid, buys that dream condo, car and holidays abroad. You may compete with a better MBA or show off relevant work experience, but in your chase for a better paid job, have you taken everything into consideration? Can you stomach the politics of the new organisation where bosses play ’stab the other person to get ahead’ games which includes lower ranking staff like you, or war with other departments, staking out turfs in open plan offices, all affecting your daily well-being? Do you just love the creative aspects of your job but hate the selling and negotiating bits that came with the higher salary and abusive clients? Are you a whizz at dreaming up complex ‘what if‘ scenarios but hopeless at solving day to day problems which somehow makes up most of your current strategic planning job? Does selling banking or insurance products to old aunties make you wince, knowing that a nice chunk of it goes to line your annual bonus? Do you wish you are out there helping to make a better world for others who need help instead of trying to meet monthly profit forecasts for your publicly listed company? Or did you simply sign up with a media company, find yourself a supervisor in production and now dread going to work but don’t know why? People in wrong jobs throw in the towel No matter if you have just joined the workforce, has worked for several years, or experiencing mid career crisis, or on your way to a silver handshake, people in ‘wrong’ jobs eventually throw in the towel. How long before is just a matter of tolerance thresholds? As a career counselor who spent the last 20 years talking to job seekers and corporate executives from a wide variety of backgrounds and job types, I find that an inherent satisfaction and happiness with the work one does and one’s work environment determines how long a person stays in a job. Much more than whether the job will pay more. Doing work you like matters a lot I think of the 35+ chartered accountant who left his father’s firm as he could no more face the drudgery of monthly P & L statements; the young graduate who left a prestigious international bank much to the chagrin of her cohort who envied her job because she could bear to make the nice old aunties lose money (she also missed out on the Lehman’s debacle); the 50’s CEO who left a 25 year career in the middle of a recession because his heart was in teaching and writing: or the hardened 62 year old expat oil trader trading up a huge top dog salary only after two years, to be a nature tour guide because “each day, you walk through the door, lying through your teeth and you leave lying through your teeth.” One of the most poignant instances happened during a work-life training session of 25 male engineers in a high stress 24/7 environment when one admitted that he leaves his daily ‘easygoing attitude’ at work, taking out the day’s stress on his wife and son through violent outbursts. Like athletes training for the elusive gold, your eight hour or longer workday should fulfill and balance your relationships with the world around you in a way money cannot. Is this work you would happily do, day in, day out, making additional sacrifices willingly when called for? If some aspects of a job fill you with dread, it’s time to think again. Such tasks have a way of becoming the be-all of a particular job. The key question about right fit is: ‘Would you look forward to going to work each day?’

Singapore as a transport hub will benefit hugely from a massive change in the Asian supply chain. It is going to be more ‘compact’. Goods will increasingly be transported inside Asia and to a nearer customer rather than long distance/globally.

Sales professionals are always in demand across many industries in Singapore. However, many employers find it challenging to find the right sales professional to join their company. The immediate and palpable challenges that most employers face is the limited talent pool combined with high turnover rates.

In a competitive market like Singapore, many businesses are struggling to market their products or services among others. With a limited budget, many business owners might perceive branding as a good-to-have or only for companies that are cash rich.

Many a business leader will understand that knowledge is a critical asset of an organization and its ability to drive its business strategies. This has become increasingly so with a greater emphasis on innovation and creativity for companies to build and sustain leadership in the market as well as communities it operates in. This is not only in the services sector, but is pervasive in all business sectors including manufacturing and supply chain. The common denominator is the institutional knowledge that each organization creates differentiation and each leverages on them to sustain their competitiveness. Thus, ability harnessing and institutionalization of this knowledge is a critical organizational competence that companies must have in order to sustain their competitive edge. This body of knowledge has an increasingly longer time horizon. New knowledge is derived from and built on existing core knowledge and thereafter becomes an addition to that core knowledge. An example of this is the privatization of the British Rail network where many of the “old” engineers who had long worked with and maintained the track system were allowed to leave the newly privatized companies who took over the tracks and systems. One of the key contributing factors to the accidents that arose thereafter was the loss of institutional (or core) knowledge of the complex track system that was built over time. In the Singapore context, it may have been that SMRT increased its focus on the monetization of its assets over the critical technical and engineering aspects in its business strategies.

CPF stands for Central Provident Fund. As one of the numerous acronyms used in Singapore, CPF is among the best known internationally. (You could compare by searching on Google with others like GIC, DBS, PIE, SIA - I think the big winners for search engine prominence are HDB and NUS; NTU produces National Taiwan University first and MAS Malaysian Airlines first; PSC/GLC do not even come close).

I couldn’t stop watching the Olympics especially the Men’s Badminton Finals between Lee Chong Wei of Malaysia and Lin Dan of China on Sunday night. It was riveting right to the very end. I don’t find myself rooting for any particular country or person but I’m always in awe of the athletes and how they’ve made it that far.