BEYOND SG

Happy New Year

George wishes Harold and all readers of BeyondSg good health and every
happiness in the New Year!

(Posted via email)
Harold Fock
Sent from my BlackBerry Wireless Handheld

"Dum" Competition

"Dum" or checkers is an under-rated game.  In fact, it is played all over Singapore, mostly by older folks.  Some betting on the side makes it more interesting. Somehow it has not received the same recognition as western chess, chinese chess, bridge or mahjong (the so-called 'intellectual'games).  In my division, dum is always played near VariNice coffeeshop at Bedok Reservoir and at Hougang Central near the Malay barber shop.  This year, I got the shop committee to organise a dum competition.  Notices were put up all over Singapore making it a kind of national competition, the first ever, I was told.

 

I witnessed the last two games played last Sunday at Hougang Central.   The champion, Loh Chin Lock, played them brilliantly.  He is from Sengkang, an odd job labourer.  The game would begin in a grinding way with both players pushing pieces forward carefully.  This was followed by a few exchanges freeing up space.  Then, when no one expected anything, Mr Loh would make a series of breathtaking moves which devastated the opponent.  Mr Loh has the reputation of being the best dum player in Singapore, so fearsome that other players avoided playing with him in the earlier rounds.  The prize money was $500.

 

I hope we would give dum more attention.  It is fun and easily accessible to young and old.  My shop committee intends to hold another 'national' competiton next year with better prizes.

 

George Yeo

 

 

 

Avatar

James Cameron's Avatar raises movie-making to a level not seen before.
Watching the 2D version at Tampines Mall this afternoon, I felt transported
into a different world of fantasy.  While the storyline  was interesting
and suited to current concerns about the global environment, it was by
itself unremarkable.  What made the movie spellbinding  was the CGI
technology.  At the speed technology is advancing, one wonders what movies
will be like 10 years from now.

I left the cinema uplifted.  But also fascinated by the ability of the
human mind to invent and imagine.

George Yeo

Season's Greetings

George Yeo
Harold Fock
Sent from my BlackBerry Wireless Handheld

Visit to Xiamen

I joined some 65 grassroots leaders and their family members on a 5-day
vacation in Southern Fujian recently, covering Xiamen, Zhangzhou, Anxi,
Nan'an and Quanzhou.  Singapore's links to this part of China are profound.
Most of the Hokkiens in Singapore originally came from regions like Xiamen,
Quanzhou, Tong'an , Nan'an, Zhangzhou, Yongchun, Jinmen and Anxi.  Much of
our culture, language and cuisine is derived from the Min Nan region of
Fujian, including the syntax of Singlish.

Tan Kah Kee and his son-in-law, Lee Kong Chian,  left a lasting legacy in
Fujian.  Jimei Xuecun, Xiamen University and Guangqian Xuecun showed the
importance they placed on the cultivation of young minds.  Frustrated by
China's persistent inability to modernize, they invested their hopes in the
education of the next generation.  All this was part of May 4th and the New
Culture Movement which revolutionized Chinese education and culture not
just in China but also in Southeast Asia.  Both Tan Kah Kee and Lee Kong
Chian also did a lot for education in Singapore.  It is right and fitting
that one of our new MRT stations should be named after Tan Kah Kee.  On
Gulangyu, which was the foreign settlement where 13 consulates were
located, there is a house by the sea built by the British Colony of
Singapore in 1910 to which junior British officers were first posted to
learn Hokkien before being sent to Singapore.

We are steadily recovering that part of our legacy and setting them in a
proper historical context.  Singapore's nationalism went through twists and
turns during and after the Second World War.  The nationalist spirit
initially pulled us in different directions to China, Indonesia, Malaysia,
India, Sri Lanka and Yemen.  It took many years and much internal struggle
before we developed our own nationalism which was able to bring
Singaporeans of different ethnic and religious groups together.

In a new age of globalisation, all the old links are being revived.  So
long as we retain a strong Singaporean spirit, our ancestral and cultural
connections to China, Southeast Asia, South Asia, the Middle East and other
parts of the world help us thrive as a hub between north and south, east
and west.  The Singaporean tapestry is intricately woven from beautiful
threads of different strengths and colours.

 

How is my Lightbulb?

This is an extract of my new book that I am currently writing:

We go to schools, B-schools and Econs 101 classes and we are taught that the firm's purpose is to maximise profit. But let's drill down one level - what is the employee's purpose? We go to work being told that our career paths will be taken care of (esp. during recruitment talks), we will be trained and upgraded and all that synergistic "we are one family" mantra. Trust me, you will sit in the employee's tables and the bosses and spouses will sit in the VIP tables with the directors, clients and bankers.

One way to simplify our view of corporates and employees' needs is to think of a battery and a lightbulb. Like the movie Matrix, if you imagine a person as a battery, everything makes sense.

Think for a moment. A person's aim in life is to maximise charge. Charge is defined as salary, energy, happiness and all that 'utils benefits. Call it total resource. You come to office and the office environment discharges or drains you. But you get charged by learning new skills and get further re-charged at the end of the month when the long-awaited paycheck comes.

If you are in a great job with a great future, you earn a net charge.

If you are in a bad job, you get net discharge during the tenure of your work there. 

As management or entrepreneurs, you think differently:

By getting more powerfully charged (hardworking and bright) batteries to work with you, the bulb shines brighter.

As the saying goes, you dont need to be bright, you just need to find bright people to work for you.

In MNC, you should see things this way:

First rule of Corporate Life is:

How can I maximise my charge?

Second rule of Corporate Life is:

Who is looking at my lightbulb?

The third rule of Corporate Life is:

Who can I discharge to maximize my lightbulb?

Last rule in Corporate Life:

How long can i make the bulb last before the bosses realize i am pretty dim or when I run out of battery?

For older employees and exhausted ones, their batteries can't be re-charged  and there is very little use, so it becomes harder and more challenging for them to find jobs. It is easy to move retirement age higher but the challenge is always changing the mindset of employers to appreciate experience and age. The ugly truth is they seldom do. 

So if the world is flat as explained by Thomas Friedman and you have China and India masses after your job, and a younger and cheaper workforce waiting to replace you - what can you do NOW?

This is the decision the schools never bother to teach you.

What kind of battery or lightbulb do you want to be? 

Do you want to spend your whole life constantly being charged up (study, new  courses, learn as you go, MBA, be an apprentice etc) and then get discharged until the battery is dead and is carelessly and ruthlessly discarded?

Or do you plan to be a discharger and plan rows and rows of poor batteries to be drained by you (suck the marrow  out of life..but someone else ) and shine bright as sunlight at the expense of others?

Or do you want to be the kind of charger/discharger that make sure all your batteries under your watch will leave you with net postive charge. That's a cool sustainable green model too :-) These are my heroes. I like to think such leaders and bosses live happily ever after.

If you want to do any of the above, you must start thinking about building the infrastructure to discharge other batteries and your own on DAY ONE of  your working life. You need to figure out how bight yout bulb should shine. At someone's expense or you are some renewable energy that add value to this planet?

One more thing as Steve Jobs is fond of saying..

And remember the parallel and series circuit you learn in primary school science? Parallel batteries arrangement will make the light dimmer but if one battery goes off, the bulb still stays on. The series arrangement gives you a brightlight but if any one of the battery is dead, the bulb goes dead.

Do you want to have multiple income streams that keeps you going and going?

Answer: Sell property, multi-layered marketing, run a home business while working for someone.

Do you want to work for a single income stream where there is little room for mistakes but the initial returns is 'bright and promising" until you become discarded batteries?

Answer:Focus all your energy in your single job and build a stunning career.

Those who ask themselves such questions and willing to strive for answers to these questions, i believe, will have a longer, more fulfilling lifespan. Those who dont think - you will just get drained at some point and be discarded like old batteries.

(These are the outlines of my book titled "How is my Lightbulk".)

Harold Fock

 

Weapons of Mass Imagination

Last Sunday, I took my daughter to her fencing class. I always thought a little controlled violence is good for kids. When we were young, we created our own weapons of domestic destruction- the broomstick, the feather dusters, the long rulers became our weapons of choice in our eternal battles between good and evil (more like between schoolwork and play.) I remembered watching an old Shaw movie in which the evil Manchurian army had this hand-held flying saucer ("Blood Flying Saucer Beheaders") which could decapitate the heads of heroic Chinese fighting for freedom. And I spent days trying to build such a device. I did not know it can't be done. Physics would have explained that it is virtually impossible to throw a flying pot-like device, land on someone's head and with a twist of the connecting wire (like a fishing line), the jagged saws inside the device would do its ugly work better than the French guillotine. Using thick gsm paper (I was very lucky as my dad worked in the printing firms and I had access to incomplete encyclopedia, global fashion magazines, Japanese swimwear calendars (don't ask), all sorts of amazing publications and paper of course.) I prototyped the serrated edges but I could not figure out how the mechanism really work in "real life".

When I was older, I saw Star Wars. It was the Avatar or Lord of the Rings for the Gen-V (if Gen X is for those born in the 80s, 70s will be Gen-W and those in the 60s will be V haha). Everything that looks remotely cylindrical becomes the Jedi weapon. I knew a little bit of science by then and I gotten smarter. Since light travels, you can't really build a lightsaber. You can build a laser gun or laser blaster (the one carried by Han Solo) but a lightsaber requires some alien technologies that can stop light at a short distance. The Japanese animators in the 80s solved the problem. In their version, Captain Future faced enemies using a fixed-length stick in which one end projects the beam of energy, the other end is a sort of reflector that reflects laser beams back to the source which reflects back. I am no particle physicist but that somehow looks right for a practical lightsaber.

If you watch youtube, there are so many home-made lightsaber battles. They use computer software to paint their broomsticks and some even made full-length films in full Star Wars uniforms paying homage to George Lucas' wonderful creativity. I may be wrong but I am a bit disappointed that no Singaporean school kids have filmed some crazy lightsaber battles. Sure, hiring some animation consultants to do claymation and getting the prime minister to showcase your school project clip is cool. But I hope to see more wacky and uber-cool animations and film from young Singaporeans. Move away from cute cute animals and all that "We Are Singapore" stuff. That's been done. Royston's classic video against a particularly obnoxious censorship board civil servant (at least that's how the movie portrayed her haha) comes to mind. It is daring, naughty and nice. I am sure and I hope, there are many more kickass made-in-singapore content out there.

Back to fencing. My friend Eric's children are ranked fencers (there must be some junior league) and actually underwent professional fencing training in China. He beamed with pride and joy whenever we talked about kids fencing. The fencing school training our kids is called "Z" - it trains adults too. I met one of the "Z" founders and he told me it is a joy converting his hobby into a successful business. Why backstab your colleagues when you can thrust your rapier into their chest..and do it again and again! :-) They even host competitions for kids and their dads to fight it out.. And the kids usually beat their dads hands down. No surprise there!

But I am a nostalgic geek. I still think there is lots of romance and fun role-playing Luke Skywalker, Vader and the Louis Chia's sword fighting heroes. So encourage your kids and yourself to play and fight a few harmless battles.

Harold Fock
Sent from my BlackBerry Wireless Handheld

How to win in the 21st Century - make your kids Discon-Net

I am a blackberry addict. I am connected to the net. I am in touch with my customers, clients, business partners, shareholders, directors, auditors, lawyers, merchant bankers and friends 24-7. That sounds cool but I don't think so. Firstly, only the poor need to work. Secondly, I am born pre-Internet, which means I live in a time when there is no jacking in. I live in a time when there is no sms, no cellphone, no google, no i-chat, no facebook, no Starhub TV recorder, no iPod.. In short, no endless distractions. This means I have, by a simple fluke, was lucky to be born in a time when I am allowed to read books, to appreciate words, to love poems and to be astounded by mathematics and to worship the romance of science.

I had dinner with Dr Alec, a russia-born, Red-Amy trained entrepreneur and he told me it was almost a crime back then in Russia if you don't do well in Mathematics. The teachers don't teach you the formula. You had to figure it out. You had to explain in Russian why a triangle has interior angles that equal 180 degrees. You had to walk the same path as what the great mathematicians did and then they explained the formula. All these requires time and concentration. You can't figure out the beauty of so many things if your ears are plugged into the iPod, your fingers busy texting your friends, your eyes glued to the screen in which some mindless Facebook game asked you to fertilize some virtual land so that you are ranked Supremo Farmer.

This is the challenge all educators and for that matter, all humans with net access have to face. How to jack out and experience the world as it is. How to mess up with a real human being and say sorry? How to smell a scammer out to con your investments? How to defend your rights if some bully truly trespasses against you and believe me, in the 21st Century, you don't offer the other cheek. How to connect, contract and collaborate? And it is not click, click, click and type a "hehe" and you get away winning. That happens in the virtual battlefield but the arena of life requires guts, sweat, blood, grit, focus and lots of help from mentors, friends and colleagues. And a bit of luck!

Another thing about avoiding distraction is you need to spend X hours of your life to master something. I think it was Malcolm Gladwell who spoke about the minimum 10,000 hours (correct me if inaccurate) before you can be deemed competent at something. That's like 4-5 years duration, assuming you spend 5-6 hours a day mastering that particular skill set. Imagine your kids' are master of facebook and mega-ultra Lord in World of Warcraft. And they will look cool flipping out their shiny Macbooks at Starbucks... Trust me, they WON'T own a chain of Starbucks in the future, or invent a new cloud computing technology...you will be lucky if they don't ask for money to hang out at their 30s.

So start jacking out today and make your children Discon-Net. Oh yes.. And this is my perfect excuse why I have been out of sync in my facebook :-) I rest my case.

And I invented this word "Discon-Net". You saw it here first. Go out and live a productive real life!

Harold Fock
Sent from my BlackBerry Wireless Handheld

Why Apple Mac may rule the world?

As I type, I am installing a Linksys wireless router. A wireless routers is like a broadband (internet access) distributor- it distributes the broadband via wired lines (LAN cable) and wirelessly. This ought to be a painless exercise because the technology is around for years.

But no- companies like Linksys and Microsoft can still mess things up. Instead of a simple installation, it takes 20 minutes to download the updates, run the software and just when you thought the torture is over, the computer informs you that .NET 3.5 framework needed to be installed and it will take a blindingly fast time of 10-20 minutes!!!

Had this been a Mac installation- I would have started working by now instead of installing software. Among my nerd friends, they all are, we have this endless debates about the merits between using a Mac versus a PC. How come the Mac get it right all the time? How come a Mac engineer wakes up every morning and plans to make users' experience better? Is it all about Steve Jobs? How come a PC must be needlessly complicated and technically painful? Do they feel bad when they add another checkbox or another incomprehensible feature to the bloated software?

But the market has a way of punishing stupidity and useless complexity, we buy more Mac and dump more PCs.

I have been using PCs all these years but let's do the decent thing in our computing life - buy a Mac.

Harold Fock
Sent from my BlackBerry Wireless Handheld

James Cameron's AVATAR

James Cameron's Avatar is only so so and that is- if u define so so as "oh my god this can't be so phenomenally awesome that it blows my brains" type of so so. It is nearly a perfect movie. It is not the movie with deep philosophical stuff (those pretentious arty movies).. It is a mega immersive "winter" planetbuster movie that represents what imagination, creativity and action combine at its pinnacle can do. It will set the new benchmark of grand movie making - an art lost by too many digital effects these days and that is the paradox because this movie is all about digital effects. And it has a nice anti-war message, perhaps echoing what the ugly iraq war is really about and a green earth message underneath the digital veneer. It will be the defining movie not of 2009 but the 21st Century (for now). It must be watched in 3D. I can't recommend it enough.

Check out www.wired.com on how James Cameron created his imaginary world from scratch.

Harold Fock
Sent from my BlackBerry Wireless Handheld