10.14.07
Change Host
Would anyone guess that I have changed host?
Certainly easier than shifting homes!
08.19.07
Credit Bubble
Many may not understand the impact behind the recent fall-out on the sub-prime loan but it is a classical bubble case. Bubbles are best understood as objects that take up volume and continue to do so until they burst. Before they burst, everybody think it will keep growing and continue to need more real estate, i.e., volume. Once they bursts, nobody realizes how much volume it had taken up because these bubbles were hidden deep below. Overtime, the bubbles with impact the layer above and subsequently, it would reach a point that the structure collapses and everybody realized what is happening.
In this case of sub-prime loan, we are giving people money that they are unlikely to pay back. This easy credit creates a situation of over-supply (in this case of houses) against a somewhat artificial or more appropriately, hollow demand. When this demands disappears, the supply chain collapses. The funny part about economy dependency is that when you give people easy money, the money circulates around for all kinds of unrelated things like sport players’ transfers fee, mergers and acquisition, stock markets investments, etc. Once the easy money flow disappears, the rest of the unrelated things are impacted. Fortunately, in some cases, the value is huge but not substantially huge until it kills off everything else, so the impact diminishes as it propagate down these unrelated economic activities. Unfortunately, in some cases, it gets blown out of proportion. It is not so long ago that we were all killed by money being paid for 3G licenses across the globe.
I will not be surprised if this current spate of bad news about the subprime loan fall-out eventually impact the sports’ transfer market. The key here is not on the locality of the fallout but the actual value of the fallout. Given that central banks are putting tens of billions to fill in the cashflow gap, you do get the feeling this is of the same magnitude as the 3G fallout. As such, it is not hard to imagine a worldwide recession being felt in the next one to two years, especially after China, who has been the last bastion of strong economy, loses it immunity when the Olympics begin!
Saigon
I recently went Saigon. It is a bustling city destined to make a mark in the next 10 to 15 years. The French influence is clearly still felt, especially around the culture and food. Like any other developing city, there is too much pollution and poorly governed traffic, all the more so under earlier French influence and relatively cheap influx of motorcycles.
Vietnam on the whole as a reasonably large population but it is overshadowed due to the global interest in the two mammoths in Asia, China and India. Having said that, due to its more manageable size and distribution in population, it could still sneakily catch up with the two big players. Definitely a country with much potential.. I cannot help but think that socialist model mixed with international collaboration is the faster mode of development compared to laissez-faire democracy for developing countries.
04.20.07
Past and future learning
Sometimes, I get the feeling that there is nothing left to learn, but each year, despite being in a relatively poorer environment, there is something new to learn. In the start up, I learn about perceived fairness and the not so glamorous side of running a business. It made me understand better what the work contract is about. I also learnt that my technical skills have not gone away but in fact, have grown more powerful when integrated with the corporate skills I acquired.
In the year spent with the pharmaceutical company, I have clearly identified my strength in gathering business requirements. I have gone into a completely new domain and understand the needs better than some of the people who have been in the business for a long time. A large part of it is due to the in-depth understanding of the domain, developed through easy access to domain knowledge (from internet), learning broader domain knowledge beyond the work scope and building relationships with people who are willing to impart the knowledge.
I also get to know my weaknesses and preferences better, which can also be considered as another form of learning. I cannot work in an environment where open discussion is suppressed. I produce my best work under a good boss (but the good bosses have a tendency to be too open and soft in pushing certain points across). I always have this feeling I am unfairly treated in terms of human resource issues, e.g., office space, pay, etc. I still do not know the right things to communicate to senior executives.
In terms of future learning, I need to start working on higher level skills like wielding my intuition more effectively and confidently and to be able to regulate my emotions. On the former, I realized my intuition is usually right but I do not have the conviction to insist on my gut feel. There is this tendency on wanting to do some things. On the latter, I tend to get frustrated too easily and have this tendency on wanting to even things up. I need to be able to discard the frustration and begin each day with a fresh page. In times of elation, I need to be able to control my excitement over unqualified successes. On the other hand, it also does not mean that I have to think negatively constantly to avoid disappointments. I must be able to control the mental states of anger, happiness and sadness more effectively. With a well-balanced emotion and powerful intuition, I should be able to reach to the next level in terms of problem-solving capabilities.
03.25.07
On being the best
I just saw a master seasoner seasoning mackerel on TV. It is impressive that he can grab 20g of salt each time with his bare hands. He demonstrated by grabbing salt and scattering it onto 3 electronic weighing scales. On the first attempt, he was off by 2g on one of the scale. In the second attempt, he managed to “weigh” 20g consistently on the 3 scales. In practice, he is able to salt the mackerel with such consistency 10 at a time in 2 seconds flat. That is what we call a true master.
It reminds me of what I set out to be. I have to strive on being the best in the line I am in. Being the best currently means to be able to make impossible projects finish in record cost and time covering the most scope and attaining the highest quality. Only when I am able to do that consistently for all projects would I be able to call myself a true master.
Unlike operational work, project work is not repetitive and hence, to be able to see patterns across projects is challenging. To be able to master this, I need to work on impossible projects. To work on impossible projects, I first need to show to people that I can do the simple projects well. In addition, I need to be doing projects across multiple domains to be able to comprehend different types of projects and understanding the patterns. So far in my career, I have a fair bit of switches from research to technical to people management, from pharmaceutical to products to projects and from supply chain to regulatory to financial accounting.
Some of the hard projects I have seen as one or more of the following characteristics:
- Same data coming from different sources
- Processes driven by legacy and regulation that nobody really know absolutely about
- Organization structure mismatches
- Strong resistance from key business stakeholders
01.02.07
On investments philosophy
I have recently cashed in some investments of over 5 years. I am sitting on some paper loss still. For the cash-in portion, I am mostly ahead.
I had a few misconceptions to my trading style. Basically, I follow a buy-and-hold strategy. In general, the strategy worked well, but the money allocation did not. If I had equally distributed my investments, I would have done better. I had most money in two stocks. One is doing okay and the other is down at least 70%. As a result, over the 5 years compound, even with discounted shares, I am only up about 2% per year. Good thing is that I did not lose that much of money but the bad thing is that 5 years have gone and I am pretty much where I started. From a timing perspective, I could not have done better, I started buying as the market loses steam and sold as the share market is hitting new peaks (and I only did 2% CAGR). The first misconception is the lack of money management/risk control. I subscribed to the Buffett-Fischer school of selecting very good stocks but the only problem is that I realized that given my time spent and the information available, there is no way I can be so accurate in picking the right stocks. As such, I need to adopt a money/risk management approach to buying stocks. More concretely, I need to be more distributed in my purchase. Putting it in two baskets is clearly not enough. I need more baskets. Having said that, I am still not a big fan of diversification and I still believe in picking a small pool and making sure this small pool do well as a whole.
Second, timing is of certain importance. For example, my global internet unit trust has lost money since my initial purchase and the fund was introduced after the internet stocks have gone down. Therefore, it looks risky buying at a high or when the trend is moving down, because using the buy-and-hold strategy, it will take a long time to reach the break-even point. If I would to do this again, I would rather buy as it is going up, rather than going down. And I should persists my buying over down period rather than stop (because I had to get married and spend money elsewhere!).
Third, what worked well was my money market fund. Sure, the returns are most likely to be described as pathetic, but the fact that I saved $100 a month for 5 years resulted in a $7k savings. Imagine, if i have saved $200, the savings would be $14k and if I have saved $500, it would be $35K. For that matter, this investment worked so well that I am really better off saving a large pool of money in this type of money market fund and invest the money when the market is really doing bad, or as it is picking up from a bad spell.
10.26.06
Premium Services
I have paid a lot on money on premium services. These people are in a market flooded with a lot of similar offerings, but somehow they are able to charge a premium and yet, still maintain a healthy stream of customers.
They have these characteristics
1. Their offering is entirely unique.
The offering may be generic but what they give as add-on is totally unique. You go back to them because you like that unique combination and you have no choice, because you cannot go to the generic provider and achieve the same outcome.
2. They make painful things painless.
Premium dentists come to mind on this one but in general, if you have something that is hard to do, or painful to do, these people can make the process entirely painless.
3. They make complex things simple.
In the same way as the above point, they make a lot of seemingly complex task or organization, amazingly simple and straightforward.
4. They give you beyond top-of-the-class service.
So for example, you know the best in hotel is Ritz Carlton, but these people simply blow the best-in-class into bits, by giving you services that is far and beyond of what you expect of a best-in-class service.
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10.05.06
My job interests
I tend to take the adaptive attitude towards job and the dollar value is a big factor in making some of these decisions.
On the other hand, after these few years of working, I learn more about my strengths and weaknesses, as well as my job interest.
One of my strengths is my scientific and engineering mind. I have downplayed this area of expertise over the years partly because I was never given a proper function to excel in this area and also the opportunities are fewer with the emergence of India and China brainpower. Still, I still have the technical-knowhows and I should look for a job that a normal person have trouble comprehending the technical aspects of things.
One of the buzzwords of my worklife have been value and to a certain extent, I really believe in bringing value to people. I am thus not a good project manager in completing projects, but I think I would be a good requirement analyst who will listen and understand the problem.  Afterall, without understanding the problem, it will be hard to solve a problem and most people are lost in this first part of the game.
Another area of interest is negotiation, policticking (yeah baby!), and brokering “deals”. Carrying the listening to an extreme, it becomes a case of trying to read people’s mind and their logic models, and then to either do what they want or think of ways to alter their mindset. As such, much crazy as it is, IÂ quite often enjoy this aspect of corporate life.
My weaknesses has to be indecisiveness and some form of meritocracy driven superiority complex. As such, I cannot work for incompetent people and I cannot work in very time-sensitive operations where decision have to be made always at a split second.
So, there you have it.
A380 delays
There is this lead engineer and business champion somewhere in the team, who stood up and said that the project is going to be delayed. Sure, there may have been bad design to begin with, but kudos to those who stood up.
On an engineering note, a project that is delayed is likely to get further delayed or reach a state where it is not launched at all. Something must be inherent wrong with the design and for a project of such huge undertaking, it is understandable because it is impossible to predict all possible outcomes.
09.28.06
Less is more
Bday wk.
Sleep Less, Eat Less, Think Less,
 (Can’t help it… that is 1 less than more)