Commentary

Singapore is a truly international city. The island state attracts businesses, shows, and events like few other cities on earth. From a marketing point of view, if you keep your eyes open, there is something new to learn every day. Social media, branding, sales gimmicks—it all happens here. Inspiration can come from the strangest places.

As a financial speaker and author, I often heard my Singaporean friends tell me that "budgeting doesn't work! “The truth is that I am not much of a 'budgeter' myself?

The Current Reality

When Malcolm first joined his new company 3 months ago, he had regard this new position as a great opportunity to realise his full potential.  The company was well-known for launching highly entertaining and imaginative cartoons and stories that entertain audiences young and old globally.

In every country, football fans enjoy a good complain – and Singapore is no different! The usual excuses follow along the lines of: “Local players are not well football-educated”; “Foreigners are taking our places in the team”, “imported players are either too old or not good enough”; “Clubs are cutting budgets”. But few people focus on solutions and ways to make the current situation better.

Singapore is one of the most socially connected countries in the world. More people have smart phones and are on social media sites per capita than any other country in the world. This is an excellent opportunity to increase engagement and increase productivity amongst Singapore’s companies.

November spells tax time for Singapore companies. We examine six tax deductions not commonly understood by startups in Singapore.

Singapore has often been known as the food capital of Asia, and the range of cuisines we have in this little country is immensely diverse and vibrant. Needless to say, new restaurants and food concepts in Singapore pop up like pimples during teenage puberty; As do many restaurants close down in the same period.

“Just browse through some online images and find something funny to post. Hopefully people will follow us! Whatever we do, we can’t spend more than $50k on Social Media.”

Whether you like it or not, unemotional, highly rational, mechanistic and authoritarian leadership are a thing of the past. It is true that these traits might have worked over a decade ago when most corporations were structured on the hierarchical business model of rapid industrialization but those days are long gone.

A majority of professionals in Asia have left a role because there is a lack of clear career progression. This is according to a white paper by Robert Walters, a specialist professional recruitment consultancy. According to Channel Newsasia, this white paper aims to examine talent management issues that have a critical impact on business performance.

Having control (even the perception of it) is a funny thing. It makes us believe that we can influence events that are actually beyond our capacity. It’s quite similar to a placebo drug that gives you a sense of confidence over the outcome that, in reality, is outside your influence.   Anything that increases the perceived confidence on influencing outcomes of an event can make a person quite ‘attached’ to it. We experience this attachment in our everyday lives and keep such superstitions close to us. In the past, we have seen people wearing their favorite t-shirts to cheer for their football teams or the cautious ones who do not count money while gambling.

Who isn’t guilty of a swift ‘Alt + Tab’ keyboard manoeuvre after noticing the boss’ impending approach while you’re on Facebook? This image highlights two facts. The first being virtually everyone in the workplace indulges in social media activity. The second is that social media usage in the workplace is often associated with slacking off. But this perception is fast changing.

As a manager, you may completely baulk at the notion of having a pessimist on your team. But there is a breed of pessimist called Defensive Pessimists, who are able to transmute their penchant for pessimism into a strong suit and harness anxiety as motivation to deliver exceptional results.

It’s pretty easy to get massive viral PR in Singapore. Create a website that specialises in adultery. Bring it to Singapore. Let the politicians, facebook and public do the rest. Bang you have the No.1 “dating” site in Singapore.

The Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore has warned all government bodies, government-linked entities or anyone remotely related to the public sector to be on heightened alert for targeted cyber-attacks from the Anonymous collective. Here is some further information about this potential threat.