Is the PM LHL a gullible person?

[metalmickey]

Re: Japs Not Strong In IT

Our academics are not well rewarded. They are treated as high class technicians in Singapore ? The exodus must be huge. Some became sales people instead.

I don't know why Japanese aren't interested in computers except robots.

The rest of you, sorry for the digression. Many of these so-called dropouts dropped out from great schools. Larry Ellison dropped out from U of Illinois, a good school. Michael Dell dropped out from U of Texas Austin, also a good school. Point is not so much whether they dropped out. Of course dropping out was the right decision for them in the end. But they dropped out not because they were failing classes. They dropped out because they decided to pursue dreams that did not require them to have a degree.

I think it's not only that our academics are not well rewarded. By and large, our engineers are not well rewarded. We ahve a system where people just want to fuck the engineers by pushing them out of the door by replacing them with cheaper PMETs from India and Philippines. We don't put a large premium on innovation. I think Japan had a large premium on innovation, but for some reason their innovation culture disappeared. Their work culture was not good - people worked hard, but they discouraged you from speaking your mind, or saying what you really believed. Everybody became yes men. I believe it is that yes man culture which screwed up Japan. Cost of land became so high as to discourage start-ups from forming. (Sounds familiar, Singapore?)

After that, the big company became dinosaurs. All the big Japanese brands of yesteryear got wiped out because their costs became too high. Your Sony, your Sharp, your Olympus.

Don't look at the CEO or those few people at the top. They will teach you nothing. Look instead at the general system, at what's happening on the middle management level. Obviously the CEO's job is very important, because he makes a lot of the decisions and he shapes the culture of the company. But if his company is in a place where the people are not good at innovation, then it doesn't matter how brilliant he is. Steve Jobs is not really a tech guy. He's a designer guy and he's lucky because he's in a part of the world where there are plenty of great engineers, and he can make good use of them. Don't look at the individuals. Look at the system.

 

[Conqueror]

Re: Japs Not Strong In IT

But they dropped out not because they were failing classes. They dropped out because they decided to pursue dreams that did not require them to have a degree.

I think it's not only that our academics are not well rewarded. By and large, our engineers are not well rewarded. We ahve a system where people just want to fuck the engineers by pushing them out of the door by replacing them with cheaper PMETs from India and Philippines. We don't put a large premium on innovation.

Our Mr. Sim's Creative Technology is also sailing in the doldrum. It seems like Lum's Hyflux is the only hope left. We have too many small family biz companies that have bad 'corporate' values and cultures.

Engineers are not rewarded because these bosses viewed them as cost centres. The sales people contributed to a company's success thru' sales. Many wholesalers aren't manufacturers but they all doing well with a well oiled sales teams and marketing efforts. So, engineers are like technicians which they are no diff from the after sales department ie. customer support. :(

Sony is killing itself because of its unsuccessful innovations. Sony has lost its lucky star.

Here is your Zhu Hou Ren as Mr. Sim Wong Hoo.


[video=youtube;ahgnNZ4HYkU]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahgnNZ4HYkU[/video]

 

[Conqueror]

Re: Japs Not Strong In IT

I think Japan had a large premium on innovation, but for some reason their innovation culture disappeared. Their work culture was not good - people worked hard, but they discouraged you from speaking your mind, or saying what you really believed. Everybody became yes men. I believe it is that yes man culture which screwed up Japan. Cost of land became so high as to discourage start-ups from forming. (Sounds familiar, Singapore?)

The Japanese are shy people who will not want to "rock the boat". The culture of the Samurai about loyalty and hierarchy ? Perhaps, the chaos that you see in their new gen is the results of the jaded gen who want to dismiss the old fashioned and rigid way of doing things in Japan.

Expectations will deteriote with time if inflations are not checked. No one can survive an ever escalating cost of living, not just the cost of running the biz.

 

[metalmickey]

Re: Japs Not Strong In IT

The Japanese are shy people who will not want to "rock the boat". The culture of the Samurai about loyalty and hierarchy ? Perhaps, the chaos that you see in their new gen is the results of the jaded gen who want to dismiss the old fashioned and rigid way of doing things in Japan.

Expectations will deteriote with time if inflations are not checked. No one can survive an ever escalating cost of living, not just the cost of running the biz.

Ironically I think we must learn from the Japanese. The Japanese have managed to cope with zero growth for 20 years and their society has not been fucked upside down. In 1990 they had too much inflation. Then next 20 years was a correction, and there was a lot of deflation - a period during which prices are returning to normal. They managed this without making too many people suffer. That is OK. Of course there are other problems like Japan losing its edge in electronics and consumer goods. But they also have success stories in the gaming and entertainment industries, and Toyota is still going strong.

The Japanese are so wedded to the past that they are still using fax machines instead of email. That is truly fucked up.

 

[Conqueror]

Re: Japs Not Strong In IT

After that, the big company became dinosaurs. All the big Japanese brands of yesteryear got wiped out because their costs became too high. Your Sony, your Sharp, your Olympus.

Every empires have their due dates. There's no one empire that can last a thousand years. One dies, and another will replace it. Time is ever changing. Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Greece, Italy, Mongolia, etc. had their heydays. Now, Korea is replacing Japan as the pop culture of the millenium year.

This one below is the pic of Nebuchadnezzar's dream. Like Daniel, I interpret dreams too.

 

[metalmickey]

Re: Japs Not Strong In IT

Our Mr. Sim's Creative Technology is also sailing in the doldrum. It seems like Lum's Hyflux is the only hope left. We have too many small family biz companies that have bad 'corporate' values and cultures.

Engineers are not rewarded because these bosses viewed them as cost centres. The sales people contributed to a company's success thru' sales. Many wholesalers aren't manufacturers but they all doing well with a well oiled sales teams and marketing efforts. So, engineers are like technicians which they are no diff from the after sales department ie. customer support. :(

Sony is killing itself because of its unsuccessful innovations. Sony has lost its lucky star.

Sim Wong Hoo lost because he lost to Apple. Let's be fair to Sim Wong Hoo. Everybody loses to Steve Jobs. He's up against the best product designer in the world. He is not as visionary as Steve Jobs because nobody is. Great companies don't last forever. Apple fell from grace before and it will do so again because it doesn't have a next great product.

Steve Jobs before he died had this to say about the system which elevates salesmen over the engineers.

http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/470040-i-have-my-own-theory-about-why-decline-happens-at

So your theory about how salesmen are valued more than engineers in Singapore is especially disturbing. The culture in Singapore is that you make money through exploitation, not through innovation. That's not the right way to make money.

 

[metalmickey]

Re: Japs Not Strong In IT

Every empires have their due dates. There's no one empire that can last a thousand years. One dies, and another will replace it. Time is ever changing. Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Greece, Italy, Mongolia, etc. had their heydays. Now, Korea is replacing Japan as the pop culture of the millenium year.

This one below is the pic of Nebuchadnezzar's dream. Like Daniel, I interpret dreams too.

Yes, but some empires are especially enduring. You realise that America has a fantastic record for innovation.

Invented the light bulb
Invented the power grid
Invented the automobile
Invented the airplane
Invented mass production
Invented the phonograph
Sent a man to the moon
Invented the personal computer
Invented the internet
Invented email
Invented the cloud

The big strength of America is its openness. It is especially resilient because anybody can replace anybody at the top. If the system is rotting, you can tell the old leader to fuck off, and put somebody there that will correct things. IBM was a dying company but is OK today. Apple was a dying company but is OK today. Ford and Chrysler are pretty screwed now, but I think they'll recover.

There is a guy from China who started a company in America and he gave a talk in my engineering school. He said that he was deciding between starting a company in the US and a company in China. He chose the US. Why? In the US your competitors buy you out. In China, your competitors crush you. So where do you think you should start a company? The issue is the system. If you reward positive and good behaviour, you will get more of it, and you will be rewarded with more innovation.

China has never been short of good people. But the issue is how they treat their best people. To understand that is to understand its history in the 20th century. Whether they can truly catch up with the US will depend on this now. Now, they are advancing very fast because of their sheer size and their determination. But to take the last step towards being a truly great innovation power will depend on whether they manage to build a good system.

 

[Conqueror]

Sim Lamented About Mktg Budget ?

Sim Wong Hoo lost because he lost to Apple. Let's be fair to Sim Wong Hoo. Everybody loses to Steve Jobs.

So your theory about how salesmen are valued more than engineers in Singapore is especially disturbing. The culture in Singapore is that you make money through exploitation, not through innovation. That's not the right way to make money.

I thought Sim lamented that he did not have that knid of money to do marketing. I don't think so. Were his previous products (ie. MP3 players) ugly ?

A friend of mine mentioned that HP products need not have good products but they do have great after sales service.

 

[Conqueror]

Re: Japs Not Strong In IT

The big strength of America is its openness. It is especially resilient because anybody can replace anybody at the top. If the system is rotting, you can tell the old leader to fuck off, and put somebody there that will correct things. IBM was a dying company but is OK today. Apple was a dying company but is OK today. Ford and Chrysler are pretty screwed now, but I think they'll recover.

If you reward positive and good behaviour, you will get more of it, and you will be rewarded with more innovation.

Capitalism is the mainstay of USA. But, Capitalism has to be reined to ensure that the majority who depended on it will also survive or benefit from the system.

I do hope there is more Singaporeans stepping out to do more than just enjoying being cooped up in their comfort zone.

But, is this what we are now looking at ? Another exodus ? OMG ! :*: Not like a gypsy again ! Is this what we want ? :( JB ?


[video=youtube;yMUyz8AdfbU]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMUyz8AdfbU[/video]

 

[metalmickey]

Re: Sim Lamented About Mktg Budget ?

I thought Sim lamented that he did not have that knid of money to do marketing. I don't think so. Were his previous products (ie. MP3 players) ugly ?

A friend of mine mentioned that HP products need not have good products but they do have great after sales service.

I think you are making the same mistake as Sim Wong Hoo. Did you really think that this is about MP3 player vs MP3 player?

Apple has:
1. an MP3 player, the iPod, with a beautiful user design, click wheel and everything.
2. the iTunes interface, which allows the user to sync the iPod with the music collection on the computer seamlessly.
3. the iTunes store, which allows people to buy whatever they want online. Which means that Steve Jobs managed to meet all the bosses of all the record companies in order to make this happen.
4. seamless integration with all the other products in the Apple catalog.

Creative has:
1. an MP3 player.

So when you use the word "product" you have to think more deeply what is meant by "product". In your other example, the HP "product" is actually not just the thing you get when you engage HP, but also the after sales service. Which means that the ASS is part of the real "product".

There are two things we want. We want a thriving entrepreneural scene, and we want there to be good wealth distribution. You can say all you want about people not wanting to "step out of their comfort zone". But as mentioned earlier - what happens in business when you don't succeed? In the US, people pat you on the back and say, "it's alright, you've tried your best". Over here, they might just call you a loser or treat you like shit. So whose fault is this - the people who don't step out, or the people who treat you like shit?

 

[watchman8]

Re: Maybe The Very Good Few

Bill Gates and Zuckerberg were dropouts from Harvard. As in they did well enough in school to get into Harvard (note: anybody who gets into Harvard is either a top student or a child of a Harvard alumnus), and then they dropped out of Harvard. It is not as though they didn't do well in school. Page and Brin were PhD students from Stanford - and getting into a PhD program in Stanford is harder than getting into Harvard. Yes it's fair to say all four of these were academic people. But it's also fair to say - Facebook was invented in Harvard, and Google was invented in Stanford (it was the PhD thesis that Page and Brin were working on). Bill Gates studied computers at Harvard, and he also met Steve Ballmer at Harvard.

I don't want to speak up for LHL, so let's leave it at that.

USA was exploring deep and wide on IT - where were they doing that? In the universities. But the thing is - our NUS and NTU are supposed to be great universities, but what have they produced?

And I also don't want to say that academics suck at practical stuff, especially when you think about the number of professors who have started businesses. All the technology you use today came out of universities. Computer (ENIAC at U of Pennsylvania) email (Berkeley), operating systems (UNIX I think was from Bell labs), internet (UCLA and DARPA), world wide web (CERN), browser (U of Illinois).

The problem is not academics. The problem is the ability to translate academics into real results. I don't think that academics are that impractical. It's just that we only notice the people with great academic results but lousy practical skills. Or maybe Singaporeans have this tendency to regard academic people with suspicion.

Agree. These USA CEOs are dropouts not because they suck in studies, but because during their undergrad days, their start up ventures looked promising, hence they quitted studies.

For Singapore case, I think we have the local talents, just that they were mostly locked into govt scholarships and not allowed to quit. Hence they simply channelled their time to studies and enjoying life. Any private thoughts of doing a start up is quickly vanquished.

 

[Simbian]

Re: Maybe The Very Good Few

*Shrug* Humans are quite easy to fool when you know what are their biases, blind spots, etc. To be honest, LHL reminds me of a senior executive who inherit an organisation where the most of the managers want to report nice things and the pool from where he can appoint new people from consists of the same kind of people (people who want to be nice guys) who have been sitting around doing alot of "high level" stuff for many years.

It took a sobering financial year (GE2011 onwards) to shake things up and allow LHL to shake things up. The organisation is "in transition" but to be honest, it seems that the changes are piecemeal and nothing is going to happen as long as he does not wield an axe to the sacred cows in the byzantine power structure that his predecessors created.

This is nothing new per se. Most of the organisations I have worked in which has matured to some extent will usually ossify and some parts will become day-to-day, very mundane operations. The usual line of thought is to create separate offices to tackle handling new challenges. By the way, if you notice something about Apple, Whole Foods, et al, this is not what happens in a company which continues to thrive. The new insight nowadays is that it is the day to day things that you do are actually what allows your staff to gain experience, awareness into processes, technical insights, etc to allow them to come up with actual solutions which work.

 

[metalmickey]

Re: Maybe The Very Good Few

LHL strikes me as being a person who doesn't have as firm a grasp of power. I don't know whether he's willing or able to make the big changes that Singapore needs. For the longest time, the "prime minister" of Singapore was a 3 headed (father / son / holy Goh) nexus. I think that things were better during the days of (LKY / GKS) 2 headed monster.

When Steve Jobs came in for the second time, he looked at the Apple product line and he axed most of the products, and concentrated everything on a few main items. He was a guy who - when a product was almost finished, would tell his guys to start something over from scratch if it wasn't perfect. He understood the product on a very deep level, from the top all the way to the details. Maybe not the finest details, but pretty close.

I see LKY as being something similar: LKY was not afraid to do big things. He and Steve Jobs are quite similar. Their early lives were not exactly impoverished, but they grew up to be tough dictators, not afraid of being assholes. LKY had a big vision for a small country. His projects were big: Jurong, HDB, PSA, Changi Airport, SAF, SIA. Being a dictator takes balls, because if you don't do a good job, your asshole behaviour will bite you in the ass. People only tolerate dictators when they're doing a good job.

LHL, in contrast, went for the shiny new toys. That funky Alexander ridge / Mt Faber thing. That funky Gardens by the Bay / MBS / IR thing. That funky foreign talent thing. Biotech. Fusionopolis. $1B to spend on welfare for the poor is a waste of money. So naturally you use it to renovate Bishan park. LKY and his cohort planted foundations. LHL and his cohort built castles in the air. Temasek and GIC - is the purpose of these organisations to ensure the long term financial security of Singapore, or to fritter it away?

Sometimes I wonder what it would mean for them to step away from this "castles in the air" mentality and get back to plain old nation building. Maybe the bureaucratic por lampar culture is to blame, and in a way shielding LHL away from reality.

I want to give credit where it is due. The real watershed event in Southeast Asia was the Asian Financial Crisis. I thought that Singapore would be fucked after that. I thought everybody would lose their jobs. To my surprise, it wasn't fucked. But we pay in many other ways that are only starting to get apparent now. In a certain sense, we are not ossified, because things simply had to change. Singapore cannot run its economy like it did in 1990. The reinvention was necessary. But the question was how it was done. It was done recklessly, with little regard for cohesiveness in society. Singapore was run like a corporation and it alienated a lot of its own people in the process. Yes, many other countries also became corporatised and similarly the wealth gap in those countries also opened up. But LKY's generation did things their way and pioneered a unique brand of nation building. What we should expect from his son is nothing less.

In a sense, LHL does not have a choice but to make his changes piecemeal. But with good planning, you can have a series of piecemeal initiatives that when put together amount to a big change in the system and produce a positive result. He cannot be a dictator like his father was because firstly people are not going to tolerate it anymore, and secondly, times have changed and there are many more stakeholders in the landscape than back then when Singapore was third world and the State was the only stakeholder. Tough job for him but too bad.

 

[mojoe]

Re: Maybe The Very Good Few

the trust of the people is lost under LHL leadership; it is not irreparable but passage of time is needed; by then LHL ability to lead may be so overwhelmed by events that his leadership will be questioned by the inner circle; the legacy of the PAP will be the administrative service; whether the people helming this is self serving will be the determinant of our future success; it is not a constant; any newly emerging powers to be, will have to ensure that it remains corrupt free and that self interest is nullified

 

[Bhumipon]

........ get screwed and have to say sorry later and also said he could have done better?

LHL had proven time and again that he is not just gullible but also insincere and incompetent.

 

[Conqueror]

Need Verticle Integration

Apple has:
1. an MP3 player, the iPod, with a beautiful user design, click wheel and everything.
2. the iTunes interface, which allows the user to sync the iPod with the music collection on the computer seamlessly.
3. the iTunes store, which allows people to buy whatever they want online. Which means that Steve Jobs managed to meet all the bosses of all the record companies in order to make this happen.
4. seamless integration with all the other products in the Apple catalog.

Creative has:
1. an MP3 player.

You are referring to "Horizontal Integration" ?


Horizontal integration simply means a strategy to increase your market share by taking over a similar company. This take over / merger / buyout can be done in the same geography or probably in other countries to increase your reach.

Examples of Horizontal Integration are many and available in plenty. Especially in case of the technology industry, where mergers and acquisitions happen in order to increase the reach of an entity.

As per me an apt example of Horizontal Integration will be YouTube, which was taken over my Google primarily because it had a strong and loyal user base. (There was no rocket science in technology used at Youtube which Google couldn’t have done without taking over, but yes to increase the viewers was definitely as complex without the takeover.)

 

[Conqueror]

Re: Maybe The Very Good Few

*Shrug* Humans are quite easy to fool when you know what are their biases, blind spots, etc.

The new insight nowadays is that it is the day to day things that you do are actually what allows your staff to gain experience, awareness into processes, technical insights, etc to allow them to come up with actual solutions which work.

Never assume that you have the best idea. Always ask for some thoughts. You will never know things of the other side or dimension unless you are willing to step into it with the guy who wants to show it to you.

 

[metalmickey]

Re: Need Verticle Integration

You are referring to "Horizontal Integration" ?

Creative vs Apple is not horizontal integration vs vertical integration.
Creative vs Apple is no integration vs vertical integration.

What Apple does is never called horizontal integration. They're the vertical integrators, creating a seamless product from start to finish.

Creative has no integration at all.

Second thing: the first product is always vertically integrated. Like Apple was the first major PC, and it was vertically integrated. Then a horizontally integrated landscape emerges when different people imitate different parts of the system. But I don't think creative was ever a part of this horizontal integration. There were no music stores that had special links to him. Most probably the MP3s played on Creative products were all pirated stuff, for all you know. He just didn't have the big picture.