Above all else

Chinese New Year celebrations are a great time to pick up oral history, and this year was an especially investigative one! I'd always heard from my mother that my grandfather was an Anglophile, who had a keen mastery of the English language, and worked for the British colonial administration. But I'd also heard that he had come to Singapore from China. If so, then how did he speak and write English so well, and why did he like English culture so much, to the extent that he even gave English names to all my aunts and uncles, who are all named after various actors and actresses of the time, hence this collection of classic English names across the family - this was a real rarity in that time. It was time to find out. I spent most of my childhood living with my grandparents and aunts and uncles - first, in a leased space above a shophouse in Rangoon Road, and later, in a HDB flat (in what was then named Bedok *New* Town, wow how time has flown!). My parents, m...

  In the well-known book "Good to Great" by Jim Collins, the author makes reference to what he calls "Level 5 leadership", as an essential ingredient to long-term, next-level corporate success. Among other things, "Level 5" leaders are characterised by this: they internalise and take accountability when things go wrong, and they externalise and give credit to extrinsic factors and people when they encounter success. This seems contrary to a lot of advice that people get these days. Do good work, but make your work visible. Take credit, build your brand. The culture of the "hero CEO" is ever more in vogue, building on the legacy of Jack Welch in the 80s and 90s, Steve Jobs in the 2000s, and the likes of Elon Musk and Jensen Huang today. I don't disagree that creating visibility for one's work is helpful. But the underlying attitude and purpose matters. I once worked for someone who spent what seemed like endless amounts of t...

In a number of organisations, there's a practice of appointing a "staff assistant" to the CEO or other senior leader, where the intent is to provide exposure and development opportunities for the staff assistant, while hopefully being useful to the senior leader.  Examples in the Government include the role of Principal Private Secretary to the Prime Minister or senior cabinet leaders, or possibly the Justice's Law Clerks for the High Court judges. In the private sector, titles include staff assistant, and for more senior appointments, even Chief of Staff. Many years ago, I was working late in the office when I returned to my desk from a meeting. Some of the office lights had already been turned off, so it was a bit dim, and the office was quiet. When I got to my desk, I saw my boss' boss sitting in my chair! I half thought to myself - oh no. I'm gonna be fired. I wasn't fired. Phew. But she *was* asking me to leave. She asked me how I was, and then in cha...

Everyone in my family loves Disney stuff - songs, movies, theme parks... one year, we even bought annual passes to HK Disneyland ! The advent of budget airline travel made these adventures affordable, and the HK theme park has the shortest queues, so we squeezed in 3 trips in 12 months!  We love Disney movies as well, though there are definitely some misses. Despite its popularity, we don't like Frozen at all. Of the movies from the 2010s/20s, we like Moana (only the first one), Encanto , Zootopia , Wreck-it-Ralph , Big Hero 6 and Tangled . A super soundtrack helps a lot: Lin-Manuel Miranda 's work on the Moana and Encanto setlists is absolutely amazing, and as for Alan Menken 's " I See the Light " from Tangled, well, golly.  Anyway, Zootopia 2 is now out, and it's on the family list to watch sometime this end of year season! So of course we had to rewatch the original Zootopia first. The big song from Zootopia is of course Shakira 's very pop "...

Last week, I wrote about "normalising good", that is, setting the dial such that being a blessing to others is normalised; not reserved for Super-Saints, but done by Regular-Joes.  But we can do even more than normalise good. We can  regularise it - by which I mean, do good with a certain frequency. The best way to ensure frequency is to heed the call and meet needs as soon as we hear of it. This sounds simple, but is easier said than done. C.S. Lewis very astutely observed this in his satirical book, the Screwtape Letters, in which he imagines a senior demon teaching a junior demon: "There is going to be some benevolence, as well as some malice, in your patient's soul. The great thing is to direct the malice to his immediate neighbours whom he meets every day and to thrust his benevolence out to the remote circumference, to people he does not know. The malice thus becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary. Provided that those neighbours he meets eve...