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 Today, I was given some feedback about my aggressive communication methods. I admit I can appear to be blunt, but that's how I like others to treat me too. I guess the Golden Rule of "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" doesn't quite work when my preferences are different from the norm.  As I reflect on this, I thought about my personality traits vs. some others. One of the personality psychology traits that I have always scored low on is Agreeableness, and it correlates negatively with Conflict Avoidance. Whenever I see conflict, I tend to surface it to talk about it instead of letting it fade as people's mood fluctuates away from it. Unfortunately, people (including my wife actually) get hurt and ignores me anyway. So not only the conflict doesn't get resolved, but people also look for other means to cope with it. Sometimes that involves talking behind my back about my behaviours. In the end, I achieve the opposite of my intentions.  I'm ...

 My dad often says we should leave emotions out of business. Anger, sadness and fear often lead us into poor choices in life and we often regret but only too late. But what if we're able to sense these incoming emotions, can we put them to good use instead?  As a meditator, I've become better and better at recognising my own emotions. At the very least, I know when I am happy or sad about a situation. Acknowledgement is a good first step, and the next step is to express it as productively as possible. We may have witnessed or participated in many unproductive forms of expression. For example, we sometimes raise our voices or slam doors or tables. Sometimes it can be something more subtle, like rolling our eyes or sighing loudly. These will often lead to a chain reaction around the people you're with and cascade these negative emotions throughout your organisation like a dominos effect.  Instead, we should try first expressing our emotions verbally. Literally tell people a...

 As a kid at school, I'm always looking for shortcuts to my homework. The epitome of my achievement was when I was Form 2, we were given mundane homework on literally copying literature from books into our workbook. Teachers always give an excuse of, "you'll remember better if you write it down."  Well, I never really found out if that worked for me because as soon as I realised that the teacher wasn't reading what she marked. I was copying every other word from the book, effectively cutting down my time doing it by half, but still getting good marks for my homework.  Throughout my career, I am still always asking myself. What's the purpose here? What's the best way to achieve that purpose? How might we do it efficiently? I see some people in perpetual busyness blindly following instructions to do their work without asking these questions. Why?  Maybe they've been beaten into obedience throughout their life. The topic of our education system comes into...

  When I tell people I cycle, this is the bike I cycle on. It is not some fancy thousand-dollar road or off-road hobby bike, it is a RM 400 foldable bike that is used for transportation.  I've learned how to ride a bike since I was 5 years old. I distinctly remember the first time I was cycling on my own two wheels. It was my old Filipino maid, Che Che Odette who pushed me forward with words of encouragement, and off I went - whhrrrrilll for about 20 meters in a semi-circle - before crashing into the railings of a longkang. I don't remember crying but that memory ends there. 30 years later, bicycles have been a huge part of my life. When I planned on what property to buy when I could finally afford one, I chose a place where I could cycle to my future workplace - and now I am living my minimal carbon emission life.  "What if it rains?" "Malaysian roads so dangerous ler!" These are some of the common things I'd hear when I tell people I cycle to work. Lit...

 I often hear people trying to give others advice by starting with, "If I were you..." Maybe we should first ask, "If you were me, what would you do?"

  Seven years ago when looking to buy a property, I had two criteria: It has to be close to my family business It has to have public transport Fast forward seven years, I now cycle to work. During my first few trips, I had many difficulties - one of which involved a pack of dogs that lived close to my condo. I was barked, chased, and quite close to being bitten as I raced off dangerously along the road. After a few close encounters, I decided to do something about it. I wasn't going to halt my quest of minimising my carbon footprint just because of a few dogs that were being unreasonably territorial. So one day, I bought a bag of dog food and brought it along with my ride. This time, I parked my bike further away from the area where the dogs were and walked cautiously into their area. I thought maybe my bike was a bit intimidating, so I left it where the dogs couldn't see it. As I walked up to the dogs, they lifted their heads and watched my movements. As I approached closer an...

  Recently, I've been dealing with a lot of people problems at an operational level. Any crisis, mistake or simple process inefficiency can be attributed to a lack of communication between individuals and teams.  I've begun to run quick 5-minute activities to facilitate communications between people and teams. I call it a conversation about "I-Don't-Know-What-I-Don't-Know". The objective here is to make each party realise that they each have a piece of information that others may need but don't know about. In turn, others have information they need that they simply have to ask for in order to obtain.  Here are the steps: Gather two to five parties (parties can be either individuals or teams).  Start by asking one party to declare what they know they know about.  For example: Sales team declares that last month Customer A ordered RM 10k worth of Product A. Then ask them to declare what they know they don't know about.  For example: If Customer A continu...

  One of the first things I did when I joined my family business was to clear my workplace. As I rotated through the different departments, I cleared all the old catalogues, previous employees’ discarded belongings, and other misplaced storage items. One morning, as I was moving out a pile of junk, I noticed a very old table plant. I asked whose it was and nobody seemed to know. This plant was alive and well, so I changed my question to, “Who’s taking care of this?” A colleague, BT, said she had noticed the plant on her first day of work a few years ago and decided to just start watering it and caring for it. That piqued my curiosity and I prodded further, “Why are you taking care of something that doesn’t belong to you?”  “I saw it withering and just started watering it,” she replied. I thought to myself, it wasn’t the job of this employee to water and care for this plant. Yet, when she saw something withering in front of her, she automatically started caring for it. These ar...

  Growing up, my parents drilled into me what it takes to be successful - hard work, hard work, hard work. My father always said, “without discipline, you can’t achieve anything in life.” (He was a disciplinary teacher back in his teaching days). As I built my career around being a consultant, I noticed that there was more to success than hard work. My dad previously worked in very reputable organisations like Toyota, BMW and UMW. He learned a great deal about the Toyota way, fortified with great people-managing skills developed when he designed a training program for all Toyota workshop managers in Malaysia. It wasn’t just his hard-working character that got him to where he was, it was also his management skills. After learning about that, I started asking around among my consultant seniors, and realised that they all had some management training on top of their basic hard-working values. One of my mentors - who was the ex-general manager of my family business - placed heavy empha...

  I wasn’t always like this. I remember a time where I was carefree, I did not quite have ambition and just took life as easy as possible. The tipping point was when I met my best friend in high school, AL. He was a smooth talker, he was really smart, and most of all, he had ambition. We were actively participating in as many student societies as possible to boost up our co-curricular activity scores. In addition to that, he influenced me to run for positions in ALL of them. We had key positions or played key roles in the prefectorial board, LEO club, boy scouts, etc. and those experiences built the foundation for who I am today. From the age of 15-17, I learned about in-group out-group dynamics. I had my successes and failures of building a name for myself as the cool kid. I learned about the politics of wrestling for influence and popularity. I learned about challenging authority. And most of all, I learned to hunger for power.  That might sound dark but these experiences se...