Unreal Blog

Here is an article defending (to some extent) the insane salary expectations of the elite bankers and traders. And quants. This piece will appear in my regular column in Wilmott Magazine.

Read the rest of "In Our Defense"

Newspaper column in Today on 2 Aug 2008.

We Singaporeans have a problem. We are graceless, they say. So we train ourselves to say the right magic words at the right times and to smile at random intervals. We still come across as a bit graceless at times.
We have to bite the bullet and face the music; we may be a bit on the rude side — when judged by the western norms of pasticky grace popularized by the media. But we don’t do too badly when judged by our own mixed bag of Asian cultures [...]

Read the rest of "Graceless Singaporean"

Newspaper column in Today on March 1, 2008.

We all want to be the boss. At least some of us want to be the big boss at some, hopefully not-too-distant, future. It is good to be the boss. However, it takes quite a bit to get there. It takes credentials, maturity, technical expertise, people skills, communication and articulation, not to mention charisma and connections. Even with all the superior qualities, being a boss is tough. Being a good boss is even tougher; it is a tricky balancing act. One tricky question is, how friendly can you get with your team? [...]

Read the rest of "How Friendly is too Friendly?"

How to turn around gracefully? Newspaper column in Today on 19 Jan 2008.

Elton John is right, sorry is the hardest word. It is hard to admit that one has been wrong. Harder still is to find a way forward, a way to correct one’s past mistakes. It often involves backtracking. [...]

Read the rest of "When the Going Gets Tough, Turn Around!"

On how to handle rumors at the work place. Newspaper column in Today on 27 Oct. 2007

[...] There is a city underground. Parallel to the world of corporate memos and communication meetings, this rumour city trades information, often generating it as needed. [...]

Read the rest of "Rumour Mills"

Newspaper column in Today on 29 Sept. 2007.

[...] Isn’t there a danger lurking behind our habit of demanding super specialized silos of knowledge? One obvious danger is the loss of synergy and potential innovation. A case in point — a particle physicist at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) faces the problem of accessing various files on different computers and networks. Being conversant in computing issues, the physicist devices a nice way of describing the file (or, as it is known now, the resource) and suddenly the first URL (Universal Resource Locator) is born. The rest is history — we have the World Wide Web, the Internet. Fifteen years later, you have e-commerce and YouTube! [...]

Read the rest of "Knowledge Silos"

Newspaper column in Today on 20 Oct. 2007.

How can we manage stress, given that it is unavoidable in our corporate existence? Common tactics against stress include exercise, yoga, meditation, breathing techniques, reprioritizing family etc. To add to this list, I have my own secret weapons to battle stress that I would like to share with you. These weapons may be too potent; so use them with care. [...]

Read the rest of "Stress and a Sense of Proportion"

Newspaper column in Today on 15 Sept. 2007.

[...] In high school, I used logarithm tables to work out results in physics and chemistry experiments. Calculators were not allowed. Though inconvenient, this practice honed my arithmetic skills — skills that calculators and spreadsheets have eroded by now. Similar erosion is taking place in our reading skills as well. We don’t read to retain information or knowledge any more. We search, scan, locate keywords, browse and bookmark. The Internet is doing to our reading habits what the calculator did to our arithmetic abilities. [...]

Read the rest of "Internet Reading"

Newspaper column in Today on 8 Aug, 2007.

Technical knowledge is not always a good for you in the modern workplace. Unless you are careful, others will take advantage of your expertise and dump their responsibilities on you. You may not mind it as long as they respect your expertise. But, they often hog the credit for your work and present their ability to evade work as people management skills. [...]

Read the rest of "To Know or Not To Know"

Newspaper column in Today, 8 Aug. 2007.

Stress is as much a part of our corporate careers as death is a fact of life. Still, it is best to keep the two (career and death) separate. This is the message that was lost on some hardworking young souls here who literally worked themselves to death. So do a lot of Japanese, if we are to believe the media. [...]

Read the rest of "Married to the Job — Till Death Do Us Part?"

Newspaper column in Today, 28 July 2007.

[...] The conversation between two tired minds usually lacks an essential ingredient — the listener. And a conversation without a listener is not much of a conversation at all. It is merely two monologues that will end up generating one more setback to whine about — spousal indifference. [...]

Read the rest of "Spousal Indifference — Do We Give a Damn?"

Newspaper column in Today on 21 July 2007 on talent shortage in Singapore.

Singapore needs foreign talent. This need is nothing to feel bad about. It is a statistical fact of life. For every top Singaporean in any field — be it science, medicine, finance, sports or whatever — we will find about 500 professionals of equal caliber in China and India. Not because we are 500 times less talented, just that they have 500 times more people. [...]

Read the rest of "How Much is Talent Worth?"

Newspaper column in Today on 14 July 2007.

We go through this ordeal every year when our bosses appraise our performance. Our career progression, bonus and salary depend on it. So we spend sleepless nights agonizing over it. In addition to the appraisal, we also get our key performance indicators or KPIs for next year. These are the commandments we have to live by for the rest of the year. The whole experience of it is so unpleasant that we say to ourselves that life as an employee sucks. [...]

Read the rest of "Performance Appraisal — Who Needs It?"

First newspaper column in Today, 7 July 2007 (07/07/07 ) on handling staff resignations.

Hold on to your pants, your key staff has just tendered his resignation — your worst nightmare as a manager! Once the dust settles and the panic subsides, you begin to ask yourself, what next? [..]

Read the rest of "Handling Goodbyes"

This concluding part of the philosophy of money (to appear as a column in the May issue of the Wilmott Magazine) shares my private disappointment that whatever I wrote up may not have been as original as I expected it to be. But the concept of money has been around for a long time now, so I should not dwell on it too much.

Read the rest of "Philosophy of Money – IV"

Having looked at the how of money in the last post, here is the why of money in this third post in the my mini-series. Why do we want it so bad?

Read the rest of "Philosophy of Money – III"

This second post of the mini series based on my upcoming column in the Wilmott Magazine looks at how people make money in a scalable fashion. It was posted earlier in this blog.

Read the rest of "Philosophy of Money – II"

Here is another mini series of posts based on an upcoming column of mine in the Wilmott Magazine to appear in their May issue. I have posted similar ideas here before, but this series will put them together, hopefully as a cohesive whole. This first post of the series looks at the unphysical nature of money.

Read the rest of "Philosophy of Money – I"

Is Bill Gates being disingenuous in his philanthropic efforts? Some people think so, and see the associated tax benefits as the true motivation. I prefer to see goodness of concrete actions, rather than speculate on possible motives. After all, who am I to cast the first stone? Haven’t I sinned? Haven’t you?

Read the rest of "Systems and People"

On Bill Gate’s philanthropic efforts. Giving credit where credit is due, though grudgingly.

Read the rest of "Latter-day Robin Hoods"