Commentary

Singapore has a reputation for being one of the cleanest, safest and most efficient cities in the world. What if you could reduce the amount of time you spend looking for things and become more productive? What if making small changes by learning better organisation saved you time and money, and reduced stress levels?

A year ago I made the switch from a corporate slave to an entrepreneur. Suddenly I went from a constrained work environment to being my own boss. Although this sounds great, it’s actually fairly difficult and takes an immense amount of discipline.

It’s difficult to make a profitable movie on the tiny Singapore market. How do you sell beyond the little red dot?

Singapore Airlines (SIA) launched its new advertising campaign recently. Given SIA’s stature as one of the top homegrown brands, it attracted lot of comments in the local media.

In the information age today, many employees are increasingly becoming self-employed. After working in their parent company for a period of time, they may strike out a business either on their own or with a group of friends.

As Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong highlighted in his National Day Rally 2013 speech, “Education is a big concern for parents and students because it plays a big role in shaping one’s potential and opportunities in Singapore.”

The tech world is forever looking for competitor ‘killers’ - iPad/iPhone killers, cable TV killers, YouTube killers...you name it and someone is trying to kill it. Google vs. IBM (for a while) and Apple vs. Samsung - least the lawyers are getting paid. It’s a war out there.

Service excellence is the buzzword these days and companiesin Singapore relentlessly seek ways to raise their customer service levels, believing this to be the key to better marketplace outcomes. But is this sufficient?

If you think that professionalisation is all that is critical to the success of your family business, think again.

In 1997, a ground breaking McKinsey study exposed the "war for talent" as a strategic business challenge and a critical driver of corporate performance. Then, when the dot-com bubble burst and the economy cooled, many assumed the war for talent was over. It's not.

The influx of foreign talents into Singapore labour market has always been one of my top concerns. I believe the majority of our local PMEs (Professionals, Managers & Executives) view foreign talents as taking away their career opportunities in Singapore. Hence I jumped at the invitation for a Dialogue Session On Labour Market Testing and National Jobs Data Bank with Mr Patrick Tay, Director, NTUC Professional, Managers and Executives Alignment Unit (PME Unit).

Income inequality in Singapore is one of the highest in the developed world, which has recently raised concerns about the cost of living amongst other economic issues. While Singapore might rank as one of the most productive economies in the world on a GDP per capita basis, this doesn’t translate into happiness or perceived success for Singaporeans.

In our work life, we are all too busy striving to achieve our KPIs and do good our responsibilities. Naturally, you would expect to taste success for the hard work you paid off. In real life, it may not be just a simple case of ‘you reap what you sow’. In the journey of attaining the desired outcome, setbacks and rejections somehow inevitably attempt to block our path towards success.

 

For years now both locals and expatriates of Singapore have been sending funds into Australia to take advantage of higher interest rates paid on deposits relative to what can be earned in Singapore. Nobody can blame them for this or even be surprised given the 3.5 – 4.5% interest payable that is possible within Australia, but what else must these investors be considering when it comes to making this investment.

Some of us may have read BBC’s twitter feed early Wednesday morning on our way to work and had a shock. The news report was on yet another malicious attack by a Syrian group, but this was a domain name hijack and the victim was The New York Times. In January 2012, the Russian embassy in Singapore found their website attacked similarly by Syrian hackers.The NewsOn 27 August 2013, Syrian Electronic Army (SEA), a group loyal to Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad, successfully hacked into an Australian registrar’s system to alter DNS zone records of the domain addresses NYTimes.com, HuffingtonPost.co.uk and Twitter.com. Insodoing, they managed to alter WHOIS information to reflect themselves as public owners of these domain addresses, changed the nameservers to those of a Syrian Electronic Army server and re-directed genuine website visitors and tweeters to phishing sites of their choice.