Archive for the ‘Business and Finance’ Category
30 Sep, 2008
U.S. Economic Bailout Fails?
The US$700 billion bailout failed, leading to the biggest drop in the U.S. financial market ever. It’s shocking, and deplorable how this might have happened.
26 Sep, 2008
Mixing Disciplines
I’m currently reading a book on innovation, called The Medici Effect by Frans Johansson. What I have read thus far has intrigued me and got me thinking like no book has for a long time.
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23 Sep, 2008
The Rise of Immigration
The rise of immigrants in Singapore has provoked many Singaporeans into thinking we’re being “invaded”. The same may be said about many developed countries that feel that they’re somehow superior, and that immigrants steal resources from their homeland. However, immigrants are not the only beneficiaries of their immigration: the host country itself stands to benefit.
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27 Aug, 2008
If You Can’t Beat Them…
If you can’t beat them, go around them.
I’d like to share another great passage from Jim Collin’s Good to Great, with regard to the difference between being competent at something, and being the best in the world in something:
[C]onsider the young person who gets straight A’s in high school calculus and scores high on the math part of the SAT, demonstrating a core competence at mathematics. Does this mean the person should become a mathematician? Not necessarily. Suppose now that this young person goes off to college, enrols in math courses, and continues to earn A’s, yet encounters people who are genetically encoded for math. As one such student said after this experience, “It would take me three hours to finish the final. Then there were those who finished the same final in thirty minutes and earned an A+. Their brains are just wired differently. I could be a very competent mathematician, but I soon realised I could never be one of the best.”
I recently saw a man (I forget his name) on TV, who held the record for most world records. And in that short segment about him, it showed him practising for his next world record attempt: to be the quickest person to roll an orange with his/her nose over a mile (or something like that). Look, he’s no Usain Bolt, but my money’s on him to break that speed record.
He found his niche. He found what he’s good at — so good, in fact, he’s officially listed as the best in the world.
Imagine then, if you did activity X well, and activity Y well, but individually you’d never be the best X-er or Y-er.
You could still be the best XYer.
19 Jul, 2008
Work-Life Balance
Work-life balance is something that many people in this modern age are looking for. The most obvious symptoms of lack of balance is when either performance at work suffers due to family commitments, or the family’s upset at all the time the individual spends at work.
Many employees tend to believe that the onus is on the organisation to provide sufficient “benefits” so as to provide the employee a balance between work and other commitments, such as shorter work weeks or working hours.
But many employees tend to ignore the fact that “work-life balance” is a relatively new concept, and historically the “balance” has always weighed in more favourably for “work”, especially for men.
I think that Jack Welch showed great insight when he wrote in this book Winning:
The fact is: work-life balance concerns are actually a luxury — “enjoyed” largely by people who are able to trade time for money and vice versa. You can bet your bottom dollar that the Korean grocer who just opened his shop in New York doesn’t worry about whether he has time to get to the gym, just as you can be absolutely certain that 99 percent of the entrepreneurs in China’s huge emerging competitive workforce don’t wring their hands about working late every night.