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. […]
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! […]
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. […]
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. […]
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. […]
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. […]
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. […]
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. […]
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. […]
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? [..]
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.
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?