Uncle Sam

Obama looks set to take the White House, if we go by all the stats and polls that have been churned out recently. But will race ultimately be the deciding factor? Is America ready for a non-white President? The key question is clearly whether the American electorate has evolved and come far enough to see beyond color and vote with rationale, not emo. With the economy and that silly fluffy mama Palin sinking the Republican ship, the Democrats certainly have the upper hand. The election has already been lost by Bush and his 8 years of disastrous rule. If McCain prevails ultimately, it will certainly be a sad day for America and the rest of the world. For America, because in times of crisis, they no longer look to hope and change, prefering to stick to their insular ways, the us/them thinking applied to white/non-white Americans as well. And sad for the world too: we wake up to 4 more years of Bush.

It's time

Action leads to renewed vigour. When push comes to shove, moving forward is the only way leading to change and hopefully improvement.

Closure

It's amazing how people never really make the effort to close anything properly. Close a conversation, close an email correspondence, close a deal even, where there is money at stake. Why not? It just shows how short-sighted one can be, when one doesn't bother to make the effort to ensure future contact and interaction can be picked up again, especially when you really need to do it for your own benefit sometime down the road. Leaving things hanging, or "some things are best left unsaid" kind of thinking will never get you anywhere, because first, "things", whatever they may be, do not mean the same to everyone all the time. So if you want to pick up from where you'd left off, you don't even know what to pick up and from where. As for "some things are best left unsaid", it just smacks of a lazy, cannot-be-bothered and often cowardly attitude, doesn't it? Cowardly because some times, we just want to avoid all possiblities for confrontation/conflict, even though those "possibilities" are often imagined. So, better to quietly melt away and hope everything is ok, lah. Yeah, just hope.

Great People Decisions

Picked this up cos it's written by an Egon Zehnder guy. The beginning was a bit boring, as he droned on about why companies need to hire right. Maybe useful in helping to convince organisations that still do not believe that having the right people on board is crucial to business performance (do such organisations still exist? I pity them cos then they are or will soon be light years behind competition.) The book picked up the pace midway through and there are some interesting insights offered. Helps that he likes to use stats to beef up his analysis, probably due to his engineering background. I mean the guy even came up with some mathematical formula for spotting the "perfect" candidate. But for me, the numbers and strange shapes in the formula don't make the link to reality. These however do.

37% rule: after screening through the first 37 candidates, pick out the best one (B),then from the 38th candidate onwards, select the first one that is better than B. That person will be the one. This probably works for a large pol of candidates, maybe middle management and below. He suggested a 1 in 12 rule for more senior management hires, where the pool is likely to be much smaller.

Facts, first things first: i/v questions should all be geared to gather facts or behaviors from the candidate. The focus should be on concrete actions, events etc that underscore his personality/competency. And competency requirements should be defined in behavioral terms.

Truly understand a candidate's motivations.

Bias: First impressions last and it's not always a good thing. Falsify your own initial hypothesis. Unfortunately, humans are wired to seek out evidence to confirm their own thinking while shutting out warning signals.

For more senior hires: he conducted some surveys and ranked the various combinations that contribute to a successful hire (one that has moved up the ladder 3-5 years after he was hired)

1. Experience + EQ

2. EQ+IQ

3. Experience + IQ (lowest: in fact a candidate with low EQ is highly correlated to failure)

Thinking Big Picture & Confidence

One of the most critical elements to success in life, be in career, family, love, is the ability to think strategically, which by definition implies not just having the big picture but also grasping the fine details, being able to look at the picture from different angles, pulling it closer or further for review and analysis and making meaningful connections among different elements that constitute the picture. Clearly not everyone possess this quality and I think the level of confidence of an individual plays an important causal role. Because a lack of confidence plays up the fear element, where the tendency to view oneself as smaller, usually in terms of ability, as compared to peers and societal benchmarks, perceived or otherwise, produces some level of anxiety in the individual. And when anxiety kicks in, it tends to cloud one's mind and affect the ability to think in an analytical/logical and coherent way, which is pre-requisite to having that big picture in view. So what do all these mean at the end of the day? Build confidence, first things first.

Stick out your tongue

I cannot tell the difference between fact and fantasy in this book and I loathe to think these were real-life events. Ma Jian's writing, ever so provocative and harsh in a deadpan sort of way, makes it worse: there were times I felt almost nauseous.

Seth Godin II

I must say this guy hits the right spot most of the time. He has some interesting ideas and puts them across effectively. This advice could be pretty radical to many of us who have done presentations which essentially means reading off the slides. "words belong in memos. Powerpoint is for ideas. If you have bullets, please, please, please only use one word in each bullet. Two if you have to. Three never."

And I agree with this totally:

"Short! Do you really need an hour for the presentation? Twenty minutes? Most of the time, the right answer is, "ten." Ten minutes of breathtaking big ideas with big pictures and big type and few words and scary thoughts and startling insights. And then, and then, spend the rest of your time just talking to me. Interacting. Answering questions. Leading a discussion."

- sethgodin.typepad.com

Not knowing

It really gets to me when I discover blind spots that I fail to cover. Really nothing gets to me more than not knowing, when I think I am supposed to know. The "argh" feeling can be so great that I can be consumed in anger for a while. Anger directed at myself mostly. The last question I want to ask myself is always: why didn't I think of that in the first place? The bloody gap is so bloody obvious, how come you can zoom by and not even notice it? Ok, that's really harsh on myself but I'd rather be harsh than slack off. It's always shape up or get shipped out. Once is enough, and I'd better not overlook something similar again.

Grad School

Been thinking about going back to school for a while now and after going through my options, it appears that getting an MBA is the best way to go ahead. When people ask me why an MBA, I tell them it's about increasing my market value, exposure and gaining knowledge, in that order. The next question is then which school? That is also quite straight-forward: the best program out there! But the scene is highly competitive and costs prohibitive, especially for the top US and EU schools. Mainly because of the funding issue, I was looking through some of the top business schools in Japan and whether there are good programs, preferably conducted fully or partially in English, which I could have a shot at with hopefully the financial backing of MEXT. Hitotsubashi's MBA program looks extremely attractive after looking through its faculty, who are either DBA/PhD holders of top US business schools in the likes of Harvard and Wharton, or alumni of McKinsey and BCG. The prospect of securing funding and the fact that the course is conducted entirely in English aside, spending 2 full years in Japan will allow me to brush up my Japanese language level, which has fallen to a dismally low level. Reading and listening probably can muster a pass but speaking and writing, especially the latter, well let's just say that whatever that comes out has become terribly mangled. So what are the cons? There are risks and opportunity costs for sure: (1) taking 2 years away from work: where will I stand after I return to work? (2) Can I get really get into management consulting, which is the overall objective, broadly speaking (cos I am not completely sure yet if I'd like to and can do the job)? (3) I'd better make sure that I have no financial commitments that will tie me down back here. But all in, I'd say the pros for me to go ahead and give it a shot are more weighty. Application for 2009 has began but that for MEXT has closed. So I'd probably have to apply next year for 2010.


Check out if the program is eligible for MEXT scholarship - Jp Embassy.
Bone up on the school's program, publications, faculty members' research areas.
Got to do more reading in terms of business knowledge.
Re-take GMAT - that can be next yr.
Make sure I have 2 referees: got to ask for help again.
If I get in in 2010, I'd be 30 when I start the course, which means 32 when I graduate.

The Dip

An interesting little book produced by Seth Godin, who piqued my interest with his blog and reported personality quirks. This book is probably the only one to be found on the shelves of the self-improvement section, while the rest of his writings, which help bolster his reputation as a marketing guru, are displayed prominently at the business section. Taking a leaf from TIME's classification, this is worth a skim. Godin comes across as clearly intelligent and creative in this writing.

What he advocates is really simple (like all self-proclaimed gurus do): focus your energies on something that you have the talent for, stick it out when the going gets tough and the rest of take care of itself. The rest meaning success, money or fame. But the critical part is determining what you are really good at and that requires one to be completely honest with himself. As usual, all these are easier said than done but really the underlying principle is simple. How else can people like Godin make so much money by articulating simple things in a clear and "oh this makes so much sense" way? Really the greatest talent in people like Godin is to strip things down to their fundamentals and put them across in an engaging way.

"Persistent people are able to visualise the idea of light at the end of the tunnel when others can't see it. At the same time, the smartest people are realistic about not imagining the light when there isn't any."

He quotes from another: "You're the happiest if you play it as it comes and maximise what you're doing at the time. And do the very best job at whatever you're given to do. The rest will take care of itself."

Moneyed Men

I wonder who this book actually targets. The authors claim that this helps marketers understand the psyche of the nouveau riche and that there is a need for market segmentation to cater to the different needs of various types of wealthy personalities. Erm, market segmentation, as a business concept, has been around for more than a decade. The authors also noted in the introduction that this book helps to address the numerous "misconceptions" about these moneyed guys that the general public (i.e. the rest of us slaving away for a decent living) harbour. So maybe they were hoping that these wealthy guys would shell out some loose change to purchase the book in return for their effort to redress these "misconceptions", whatever they define them to be.

But as with all other things, there is always some stuff worth picking up and logging down as future reference:

Those who make it (i.e. rake it the moolah) generally possess the following attributes: analytic savvy, extreme forms of business literacy, a capacity for teamwork, the ability to "manage up" and a special facility for sales.

They are also possess optimism, a problem-solving approach, the ability to analyze both the drivers of success and errors, confidence, which translates into risk-taking, and a sincere concern for others.