Nanyang MBA leadership seminar

I know: I said I wasn’t going to write any more MBA posts. Still, I keep on hoping that this time it will be OK, last night I attended an event organized by Nanyang Business School. It had been advertised by email some time ago; I hadn’t meant to go, especially as I normally have a martial arts class on Friday nights. In the event, a reminder email came to tell us that “Very limited seats were left” for “this event not to be missed”, which sounded promising, and as it happened I’ve been over-training lately and needed to give my knees a rest. So I went, and paid over my twenty bucks for admission…

The event was titled “Speed Up Your Career Evolution”. There were three speakers, in this order:

• Ms. Jill Lee, Senior Executive Vice-President and CFO, Siemens China;
• Mr. Paul Davies, Regional Business HR Manager, Hewlett Packard Asia;
• Mr. Leonard Yeow, Founder President and CEO, The Eximius Group Pte Ltd (the main speaker).

Now, I have to say: all three speakers were very good, and delivered very interesting and informative presentations that I enjoyed a lot. Leonard Yeow in particular was excellent, and very entertaining. His talk was the most relevant for me as an MBA alumnus; the other two were perhaps targeted more at current course participants. Putting the three together, it was worth going to the event, and the admission fee!

The turnout was OK for a Friday-night event; I didn’t do a headcount, but I would estimate that there between forty and fifty people there. The auditorium was only half full, though: “very limited seats remaining” was, let’s say, testing the boundaries of what that phrase might be expected to mean!

So if the speakers were very good, what made me unhappy about the evening? First of all, it was a little sad that an event with this quality of speaker was organised by the MBA Alumni Association, and not by the Careers Unit. Career support was weak throughout my time in the MBA, and a few things have happened since then to suggest that the school still hasn’t got its act together in this respect; perhaps that’s for another post, though.

The second, and main, reason came during the Q&A session at the end. One of the current participants, an Indian, was concerned about his job search. He described himself as having an IT background (in fact, by the sound of it, pretty deeply technical), and no real managerial experience. He’s applying for entry-level managerial jobs (including with Siemens and HP) and getting nowhere. What, he asked, could he do to help improve his applications?

The response from the participants was unanimous: forget it, no HR manager in their right mind would hire you for a managerial position if you have no experience, MBA or no MBA. They suggested trying to find an alternative entry path into an organisation and then, after a year or two, wangling that into a managerial role. After that, it would be possible to leave and begin a career path as a manager.

I was watching the panel, so I didn’t see the questioner’s face as the answer came, but I can imagine that this was not what he was hoping to hear. Going into a non-managerial post for a couple of years is not going to help him recoup the expense of his degree – and perhaps he could have tried this approach without needing the MBA at all… I can sympathize, because I was in a very similar position – a deep geek hoping to use the MBA to change career path, and I found this out the hard way as well: my job applications to the corporate world went nowhere.

Now, the panel’s response is totally realistic and reasonable, of course. The thing is, how did that participant get so far without knowing it? Like me, he almost certainly went through the MBA application process and interviews being open with the b-school about what he wanted to do – and wasn’t told that it wouldn’t work. Why not? I can think of a few answers to that, and I don’t like any of them.

In my case, I’m luckily pretty resilient. I already had experience of setting up and running my own business; plus, I had a lot of political experience, so I had more under my belt than just my IT work. On top of that, my applications to big-name companies were more to do with being caught up in the general MBA group-think; it wasn’t what I really wanted to do. (What do I really want to do? Heh, I’m working on it; maybe I’ll have more to say in the next few months on the topic!). But, in terms of my post-MBA career, I had to do it all myself; I don’t feel that I got much meaningful help from the B-School.

In any case, that student was the reason I left the evening with a bad taste in my mouth: how can he have committed two years of his life and the cost involved in an MBA without someone having told him as honestly as the panellists did last night that it wouldn’t work?

Migration patterns of white-collar jobs

I’ve been singing the praises of IBM recently, from a social technologies point of view, because of the way they’re using tools like Second Life and Xing. A lot of this is aimed at their growing workforce in China, and I guess India isn’t far behind.

Of course, there’s a downside: this is the migration of those jobs from the West, especially, the US, to cheaper developing economies. In IBM’s case, this has become very controversial following Bob Cringely’s series of articles on IBM’s LEAN process.  I took the time yesterday to read the comment thread on his previous article on the topic, and it’s very interesting from an MBA point of view.

Naturally, businesses seek to cut costs; this is natural. However, of course, you don’t do this if you have a good reason to go the other way and charge a premium. IBM seems to have been in the latter category: the huge amount of experience, domain-specific knowledge, and talent that the company could draw on gave excellent value for money even if the  price was higher. If these comments are representative, however, it seems that the current IBM management are cutting their most knowledgable (and most expensive) employees in order to cut costs, and replacing them with cheaper – because inexperienced – hires in developing economies such as Argentina, South Africa, and of course Asia.

This seems to be throwing the baby out with the bathwater: employee costs are reduced, but customer satisfaction is also plummeting, because the exit of specialised knowledge leads to longer problem resolution times. It seems many customers won’t be renewing their contracts – and at the same time, the remaining talent at IBM is overworked, demoralised, and looking for an exit. IF those comments are representative. If they are, then the future doesn’t look so rosy for Big Blue.

On a broader scope, though, this outsourcing of white-collar jobs is still gathering steam. A common complaint, and one that relates to the IBM comments, is that the Asian employees getting the new jobs are unable to think creatively, and can only do exactly what they are told to do – even if there are errors that they are expected to detect.  It’s something I’ve referred to before, and certainly applies even here in Singapore.

I’m talking about this because I’ve just been looking at old posts, and see that even in 2003 I was looking at this trend and wondering where I would fit in – and how I would react to it.  Taking the MBA was my response, of course.

As I think about this, I can perhaps see a niche evolving where  I could see an opportunity… got to start planning for the next few years…

The virtual is more real than we think (how real is money?)

I am not a computer gamer, nor do I play one on TV. I am a techie, though (or was until fairly recently) so games are on my radar, and I thought I had a reasonably good take on what’s happening. In recent weeks, I’ve had to do a lot of reading up on them for work, and gave a presentation on Thursday to a very diverse group of professionals, explaining to them how most of their professions can have an application in game design (much to their surprise). As a demonstration, and talking point, I showed them the famous Leeroy Jenkins machinima piece.

I’ve been doing a lot of exploring in Second Life as well, as you’ll have guessed from the spate of recent pieces about that. Thanks to Preetam’s directions, I found the virtual Singapore, which seems to be growing fairly quickly. Most of the people I’ve met there seem to be students (which here in Singapore means schoolkids rather than university-level as elsewhere), but I hope I’ll run into older people there at some point.

What’s got me thinking about this even more is finding a story in the WSJ on the rise of the QQ coin as a virtual currency in China. As the discussion about the story in Slashdot points out, most currencies are virtual anyway, since they’re no longer backed by reserves of precious metals. This was pointed out during my MBA finance courses as the dirty secret of the currency trade: although a currency may be ’sound’ based on economic and trade figures, intangible and irrational issues such as political events, rumours, or a simple lack of confidence can cause the currency’s value to crash, often with little warning. (This sort of thing is often done deliberately – George Soros, I’m looking at you!) In other words, a currency holds value only as long as traders believe in it.

This sort of process is happening now in China, with the sudden and unexpected rise of the QQ coin as an alternative microcurrency. Unless the Chinese government clamps down (which they inevitably must do) this is bound to develop in to a bubble, and a crash. Even so, one of the most interesting points of the article is that a virtual currency has occupied the economic niche that elsewhere is filled by credit cards. As a meme, I think that this means the genie is out of the bottle, and can’t be put back. Will this mean irreparable harm to the credit card in China? If young people (the only ones who will ever be affluent enough to be potential credit card users) are now attuned to using virtual money, who will meet that need? Will the credit card companies be able to change their model? Or will an indigenous Chinese or Hong Kong bank introduce a virtual currency and dominate the Chinese market? If China adopts “game money” instead of credit cards, what trends will that kick off in the rest of the world?

Of course, the QQ coin isn’t the only privately issued virtual currency to have a ‘real-world’ presence: Second Life’s Linden dollar also does, as one example. These game currencies are therefore just as real as Scottish bank notes or Hong Kong dollar notes, which are also privately issued. The difference with China, as always, is the number of people involved – and that as with other other technologies, China seems to be leapfrogging generations of financial tools, going straight from cash to e-cash, and bypassing cheques and credit cards.

It’ll be interesting to see where this goes. I’ll also point that in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash and The Diamond Age, the collapse of the traditional states, and the rise of elective, non-traditional dispersed nations is credited to the inability of states to control online transactions, and the subsequent erosion of their tax bases. With the growth in the value of trade in Linden and QQ dollars, governments will eventually seek to tax them – but since the participants are global and often untraceable, it’ll be interesting to see how this could be done. If the Chinese and US governments try to do this via the parent companies, there will be the inevitable temptation to reincorporate in the Caribbean, or some other haven; what then?

Cold War wisdom

I was rewatching The Fog of War last night. It’s a truly great documentary; I was first introduced to it by my ex-girlfriend, when her department (IDSS @ NTU) watched it, and I tagged along with her.

It’s my opinion that, with its emphasis on the need for accurate statistics and research, its coverage of different leadership styles, and its awareness of the moral consequences and externalities of our decisions, it should be required viewing for MBA students. However, professors and some fellow MBA students who did watch it couldn’t see what I meant. (Of course, MBA students often have a weak sense of morals and ethics).

Anyway, watching it again last night, I still think that the 11 lessons drawn from the film are worth quoting here:

1. Empathize with your enemy.
2. Rationality will not save us.
3. There’s something beyond one’s self.
4. Maximize efficiency.
5. Proportionality should be a guideline in war.
6. Get the data.
7. Belief and seeing are both often wrong.
8. Be prepared to reexamine your reasoning.
9. In order to do good, you may have to engage in evil.
10. Never say never.
11. You can’t change human nature.

I was also motivated to do more research on the other side – not from Vietnam, but the Soviets (the film of course covers the Cuban Missile Crisis). The quote from Nikita Krushchev about pulling on the knots of war showed that he had a command of imagery, so I wondered what else he might have had to say. Wikiquote has a number of quotations, and I think these are still worth bearing in mind (which is not to say that I necessarily agree with them!):

• “Politicians are the same the world over. They promise to build a bridge where there is no river”.
• “Call it what you will, incentives are what get people to work harder”.
• “Support by United States rulers is rather in the nature of the support that the rope gives to a hanged man”.
• “Life is short. Live it up”.
• “The press is our chief ideological weapon”.
• “Historians are the most powerful and dangerous members of any society. They must be watched carefully… They can spoil everything”.

Reasons not to intern

Hehehe, I’m still subscribed to the RSS feeds of Business Week’s MBA Diaries. I started reading these when I first started considering an MBA, way back in mid-2003, and kept on reading them during the course of my MBA experience. I guess they acted as a kind of control group, against which I could check my own progress. I never got round to unsubscribing, although I don’t read them very often these days. I just took a look though, and one of them really got my attention: Rachael Klein on why doing an internship while classes are ongoing is a really bad idea. I totally agree. My own internship spanned a break period and my final semester; it was great, really rewarding, during the holiday but it was a mistake to have let it carry on into term time. It definitely meant that I didn’t get the best experience during my exchange period at Tsinghua, and led to an enormous amount of stress and unpleasantness. Don’t do it unless you really know what you’re doing…

Additions to my library

I recently mentioned that Borders were offering a 40% discount to their email list subscribers. I bought a lot of books, but most of them are more relevant to my other blog, so I’ve talked about them there. However, in the same period I’ve also bought a number of books from the second-hand shops in the Bras Basah Complex, and the bargain books stack in Carrefour, so here’s the list:

• Someone comes to town, someone leaves town by Boing Boing editor Cory Doctorow. I was looking for something geeky, and eventually settled on this. It’s a very odd novel, the story of a man whose father is a mountain and mother is a washing machine, his struggles with his very odd siblings, and his romance with a girl with wings. It’s a neat parable of geek alienation, but I found the resolution of the main storyline to be ultimately unsatisfying. From Borders.
• The Diamond Age, by Neal Stephenson. A fantastic novel, with lots of themes that are currently very relevant to my life. I’m going to talk about this book in more detail in a future post. From Borders.
• The Many-Headed Hydra, by Linebaugh and Reider. A hefty book on the roots of the modern world, and the growth of the Atlantic trade and the Americas, seen from the viewpoint of the ordinary people who did the dirty work, and whose voice is rarely heard in histories. I haven’t read much of this yet; I plan to take it on holiday. From Borders.
• Samurai William, by Giles Milton. The true story of the English adventurer fictionalised in James Clavell’s Shogun. Set in a slightly earlier period than the Many Headed Hydra (William Adams, the central character, died in 1620 – the year the Mayflower sailed to America), it describes the early period of Northern European discovery of, and interaction with, Japan and Indochina. From Carrefour.
• The Play Ethic by Pat Kane. I’ve been reading his blog for a long time, but haven’t ever gotten around to reading this exploration of the need to re-evaluate our approach to work and personal motivation. Another one that I’ll be taking on holiday. From Carrefour.
• The Hacker Ethic by Himanen, Torvalds, and Castells. Another that I’ve been meaning to read for years but never got around to. From Carrefour.
• A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink. I have read, and written about, this one before, but I wanted to get a copy of my own; it will be useful once I start my new job. From Bras Basah.
  
• Genetically Yours, by Hwa A. Lim. A massively wide-ranging discussion of the life sciences industry, covering the science, innovation, marketing and management, amongst many other topics. Written by a Malaysian entrepreneur, this is one of the most detailed and informative books I’ve seen on the industry, and one that I’m surprised isn’t better known – bear in mind that I took a course on managing the Life Sciences during my MBA, plus another on the management of innovation. I wish I’d had this book then! This is another one that’s likely to be useful when I start my new job. From Bras Basah.

Added 29 Jan:

I forgot to add these to the list:

• Creativity by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Anybody who;s been involved in an activity they really enjoy has experienced the sensation of ‘flow’; I used to get absorbed in programming, for example. I often referenced Csikszentmihalyi’s concept while I was doing my MBA based on articles, but I haven’t actually read one of his own books. That will now change. From Bras Basah.
• The Path of Least Resistance: Learning to Become the Creative Force in Your Own Life, by Robert Fritz. Actually, this was just an impulse buy, but looks interesting. From Bras Basah.

Carded

As in, Green Carded. As in, I heard today that I have been approved for Permanent Resident status in Singapore. This means that I have the right to stay here fairly much indefinitely, move between jobs (or be promoted within my current company) without having to re-apply for an employment pass.

It’s a very big deal for me. When I first came to Singapore in 2001, I decided almost immediately that I wanted to live here. Ever since I moved here to work full-time in 2002, my right to live here has been tied to my job first of all, and then later to the duration of my MBA. There was always a looming expiry date, so I could never be really settled here.

I suppose there was never really any doubt but that I would get it – it’s pretty automatic for graduates from a Singaporean university, plus I have a work (and tax!) record here and lots of other qualifications and experience. Even so, my pessimistic nature wouldn’t let me stop stressing about it!
Now that I’m a PR, I can start to plan for the longer term, and confidently envision settling in Singapore. I have a base in Asia now. That’s good.

Straits Times on a vibrant society

I posted recently on creativity in Singapore, and how the changing economic needs of the global economy are driving social and policy change in Singapore. It’s easy as an outsider (even one who is very pro-Singapore) to feel uncomfortable writing anything that might be perceived as critical – even if, from a business perspective, it’s essential. So, I was glad to see the same thing being discussed in the Straits Times. The full article is online on Asia News Network; the bit that interests me, and which echoes my earlier post is:

Why go to Mars? Because it is there, because it is next, because that is what humanity has always done – ventured beyond the known. Now, Singapore’s research and development investment is not quite of the same category as going to Mars, but it is impelled by the same recognition: namely, a vibrant society must continuously break new ground to remain vibrant. In Singapore’s case, that effort is also impelled by the recognition that efficiency of organisation cannot remain its sole source of competitive advantage. It will long continue to distinguish Singapore from others, of course, but it is a fast-diminishing advantage. The systems the country has put in place, from an efficient infrastructure to the rule of law, are not unique, and they can, and will, be replicated elsewhere.