Above all else

I was at a work offsite recently, and one of the warm-up exercises was to share what are our key relationships, why we come to work, and what we would like to get better at.  I've spent years in a weekly faith community setting with a small group of people, and my whole faith is built on the premise that *I am completely flawed and yet incredibly loved*. So I am quite used to sharing my faults with others, and how I'd like to get better, with no need to censor myself.  One of the things I shared at the offsite was - I've always wondered if I really fit in the group. It often feels like I need to learn how to put on a cloak of some sort so that I look and behave more like a corporate leader, and take on more of a slick, corporate persona (or as Barney Stinson would say, "SUIT UP!".  It was a great encouragement to hear from a few of my colleagues later on - yup, you *are* different from the rest of us. But that doesn't mean you don't *belong*. Your *differe...

I recently got an email telling me to turn up for a corporate photo shoot - you know, so that we have a headshot to put on websites, namecards, LinkedIn etc.  So the instructions were, pick two suits in different colours and shirt combinations, send them to our communications department, and they'll advise me on what makes sense (or not) for the shoot. I assume my comms colleagues thought this was simple enough. How hard can that be right? Unfortunately, they didn't account for me. I wrote back, "Guys. I have a problem." "I have one suit." "Black top, black pants." "Court. Meetings. Speaking engagements. Weddings. Funerals." "One suit." "How?" My comms colleague wrote back. "When is your birthday?"  Hahaha! So anyway, I turned up with my one black suit, they stuck an orange pocket square in the jacket for colour, and we went with it! ===== The episode reminded me of a recent devotion I wrote when I was readin...

Many organisations have mission statements, visions and taglines. These make up the corporate "dream". The best ones are often succinct. Apple's mission statement is "bringing the best user experience to its customers through its innovative hardware, software and services", which is nice and clear. But its tagline is even more memorable - "Think different". Sometimes, a little detail in a mission statement is needed to give clear direction. But punchy taglines often work best in practice, because it's what customers, and even more importantly, management and employees can remember and internalise. Otherwise it's just something to plaster on a wall or an annual report that no one actually practises. But if it's internalised... then the dream starts to take shape! For many years now, the informal motto of my team at work has simply been this - Make Others Succeed. We exist to support the overall business intent, helping the organisation get t...

Singapore has its commercial origins as an entrepot - a transhipment hub where stuff is brought in, traded, and then exported again. This was originally a quirk of geography, given its strategic location at the southern-most point of continental Asia, connecting East and West where the Straits of Malacca meet the South China Sea.  These days, Singapore's trading hub status is anchored by a skilled workforce, stable government, reliable physical and digital connectivity, and sensible laws. As an offshore centre for trading everything from currencies to commodities, Singapore faces an interesting (anti) competitive issue. Though we are an attractive trading venue, we are seldom a major producer or user of the traded item.  For example, Singapore is the third largest foreign exchange centre in the world, with average daily trading values of US$929b in April 2022 (Source: MAS). But only a small minority of it (just over 5%) is in Singapore dollars. The same is true for various ot...

Between 2006-2007, I worked on a joint venture project called the Joint Asian Derivatives Exchange (JADE), a US-Singapore attempt to get commodity futures trading going in rubber and crude palm oil.   That year was a difficult year. I had just moved to this new job, and the big project for me then was to coordinate and write the rules for this novel construct, where the contracts would be traded in the US but cleared in Singapore. I was completely unfamiliar with the financial industry and commodities industry, and lacked meaningful experience in writing business rules.  With what seemed like a thousand internal and external stakeholders, I was pushed around from pillar to post, all the while being yelled at by my boss and the regulators. I received reams of input and suggestions from banks, brokers, lawyers and colleagues, and I'd often read their inscrutable comments and wonder - am I stupid, or are they stupid? [Experience now tells me, looking back, that it was often ...

Derek Price was a scientist, active between the 1940s and 1970s, known for his work in "scientometrics", which is, broadly speaking, the science of measuring and analysing scientific literature.  He proposed a theory for the exponential growth of science - which today is mirrored in a few other theories, perhaps the best known of which is Moore's Law on the exponential growth of computing power. Fun fact, this passion was formed when Price was on a 3-year stint in Singapore at the Raffles College (today, the National University of Singapore) between 1948-1951. He was reading in the Raffles College library and noticed that, when placed in chronological order, the volumes of a scientific journal got thicker and thicker! Derek Price also formulated Price's Law, which is the proposition that a small group of people in a given group are responsible for most of the group's results e.g. that half of scientific literature is produced by the square root of the number of au...