Above all else

The sun comes up; it's a new day dawning It's time to sing your song again Whatever may pass And whatever lies before me Let me be singing when the evening comes Bless the Lord O my soul, O my soul! Worship His Holy Name Sing like never before O my soul! Worship Your Holy Name...

I was at the 2013 G12 Conference "Breath of Life" last weekend, and as usual, many great speakers were invited to attend, and we had thousands of people from Singapore and many other countries in attendance.  There was one particular speaker who had a church of several hundred, much smaller than many of the other speakers' churches.  I remember thinking, as he spoke, that in comparison to the other speakers, his ideas seemed rather "small-scale" and more suited for running a good cell group rather than a big church.  Mundane things like, be welcoming and relevant to visitors.  It was also clear that, unlike the other speakers, he was not a full-time pastor, and had a secular day job.  This further added to his "regular guy" persona, with merely "regular guy" observations and ideas. I confess that at the end of his session, I was not especially impressed.  He was just another guy, maybe like me, holding a job, with a family, and trying t...

My core function at work is to get people to do the right thing.  Experience shows that writing rules, regulations and standard operating procedures is important, but doesn't get you the desired result in the end - people will find loopholes and go astray if they don't buy in.  So, what's truly essential is what is known as "tone from the top" and "organizational culture" to do the right thing.  Leaders, and their people, have got to want to do the right thing.  All the rules, regulations and procedures in the world won't help otherwise. This principle applies to life in general too.  I have always thought of myself as a logical, somewhat non-empathetic person.  I've been even proud of this - living life based on principle, doing the right thing, even if I don't like it, simply because it is the right thing to do (though even in this I still struggle!).  But all this time, I've always recognized that even as I choose to do the right...

A rousing anthem for life!

I'm sitting at home now because my ankle is in a huge cast.  Too many years of basketball and sprained ankles have finally done the job!  I had put off the surgery for months, partly hoping that my ankle would get better by itself, but primarily because of prevailing work and NS commitments.  After the operation, the doctor told me my ankle ligaments looked like coconut shaving!  It seems I shouldn't have been able to walk properly, but in fact I've even continued to run occasionally.  That probably made the ankle worse, though I didn't realize it then. You'd think being at home is a nice break.  But being stuck at home is not a nice feeling at all.  I can't move around, can't help my family with chores and homework (which completely understandably makes them grumpy) and the cast is hot and stuffy.  I still work from home, but again, colleagues naturally expect me to be back in the office and are, again, understandably grumpy with having ...

I just finished reading "When Genius Failed", which is the story of the spectacular collapse of Long Term Capital Management in the late 90s.  LTCM was a hedge fund which famously lost billions and collapsed within a few months, and caused financial mayhem along the way.  I found two things disturbing in the aftermath: One, you would have thought the leaders of the financial industry who were responsible for rescuing LTCM in 1998 would have learned the hard lessons of excessive borrowing (leverage) and the potential for the sudden disappearance of buyers/sellers from the market (liquidity).  But the names involved in the LTCM rescue were largely the same characters in charge when the global financial crisis struck just 10 years later - Jimmy Cayne (Bear Stearns, which collapsed), Dick Fuld (Lehman, which also collapsed), Jon Corzine (then-Goldman, later MF Global, which has collapsed), John Thain (then-Goldman, later Merrill which nearly collapsed and had to be ...