Singapore: Parents upset over PSLE book-burning ‘celebration’

Parents upset over PSLE book-burning ‘celebration’

Tuesday, October 8, 2013 – 12:37

Edvantage

SINGAPORE – A photo showing parents and their kids celebrating the end of the Primary School Leaving Examinations (PSLE) by burning their textbooks has triggered an intense debate online. A reader notified the Shin Min Daily News to the photo circulating on Facebook. According to the reader, the book-burning celebration happened after the exams ended last Wednesday. The photo shows a group of 10 adults and children gathered around a raging fire contained in a metal bin. Torn pages and pieces of paper could be seen strewn around the area. Read more of this post

Dilbert’s creator Scott Adams: How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life; Everything you want out of life is in that bubbling vat of failure. The trick is to get the good stuff out.

How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life Hardcover

by Scott Adams  (Author)

Everything you want out of life is in that bubbling vat of failure. The trick is to get the good stuff out.
Scott Adams has likely failed at more things than anyone you’ve ever met or anyone you’ve even heard of. So how did he go from hapless office worker and serial failure to the creator of Dilbert, one of the world’s most famous syndicated comic strips, in just a few years? In How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, Adams shares the strategy he has used since he was a teen to invite failure in, embrace it, then pick its pocket. No career guide can offer advice that works for everyone. As Adams explains, your best bet is to study the ways of others who made it big and try to glean some tricks and strategies that make sense for you. Adams pulls back the covers on his own unusual life and shares how he turned one failure after another into something good and lasting. Adams reveals that he’s failed at just about everything he’s tried, including his corporate career, his inventions, his investments, and his two restaurants. But there’s a lot to learn from his personal story, and a lot of humor along the way. Adams discovered some unlikely truths that helped to propel him forward. For instance:

• Goals are for losers. Systems are for winners.

• “Passion” is bull. What you need is personal energy.

• A combination of mediocre skills can make you surprisingly valuable.

• You can manage your odds in a way that makes you look lucky to others.

Adams hopes you can laugh at his failures while discovering some unique and helpful ideas on your own path to personal victory. As he writes:

“This is a story of one person’s unlikely success within the context of scores of embarrassing failures. Was my eventual success primarily a result of talent, luck, hard work, or an accidental just-right balance of each? All I know for sure is that I pursued a conscious strategy of managing my opportunities in a way that would make it easier for luck to find me.” Read more of this post

‘Passion Is BS’ And Other Life Advice From Dilbert Creator Scott Adams

‘Passion Is BS’ And Other Life Advice From Dilbert Creator Scott Adams

JENNA GOUDREAU OCT. 7, 2013, 2:27 PM 3,959 3

Despite being a world-famous cartoonist and best-selling author, Scott Adams maintains that he’s failed at just about everything he’s ever tried. But the trick is, only one thing has to work. The creator of Dilbert, the first syndicated comic that focused on the workplace, details his unlikely path to success in an upcoming book “How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big.” In it, he describes his stalled corporate career, a string of failed business ventures, and his first rejections as a cartoonist. But through those failures, he discovered what it takes to eventually find success. (Hint: It isnot passion.) Adams sat down with Business Insider to discuss his new book and the best advice he ever got. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

Business Insider: You seem to think it’s possible to fail your way to success. How does that work?

Scott Adams: You can’t control luck directly, but you can move from a game with bad odds to a game with good odds. The world is like a reverse casino. In a casino, if you gamble long enough, you’re certainly going to lose. But in the real world, where the only thing you’re gambling is, say, your time or your embarrassment, then the more stuff you do, the more you give luck a chance to find you. If you do one thing and stop, you didn’t give luck a chance to find you. You only need one thing to work. Read more of this post

Common nonsense: Commoditised best practice and why we’re getting ‘the basics’ of business wrong

James Thomson Editor

Common nonsense: Commoditised best practice and why we’re getting ‘the basics’ of business wrong

Published 08 October 2013 07:48, Updated 08 October 2013 13:24

Dr Jules Goddard says many of the practices of “managerialism” date back to 19th-century efforts to get farm workers producing in factories. How many times have you heard a leader – of a business or a sporting team – talk about doing “the basics” right. But what if the way we define “the basics” is all wrong? That’s the question raised by Dr Jules Goddard, a fellow of London Business School who recently visited the Australian Graduate School of Management as its Unilever Distinguished Scholar. Goddard is the co-author of a book calledUncommon Sense, Common Nonsense, which questions whether some of the tenets of Business 101 – such as cost-efficiency, operational excellence and competitive benchmarking – promote a sort of herd thinking that does not make for great leaders or great businesses. He provides the example of the idea of “best practice” which can be heard in boardrooms of all shapes and sizes. As he points out, the idea itself is a little silly. “Every firm in an industry defines best practice in an industry in the same way. But markets do not reward commodities.” Read more of this post

Uncommon Sense, Common Nonsense: Why some organisations consistently outperform others

Uncommon Sense, Common Nonsense: Why some organisations consistently outperform others [Kindle Edition]

Jules Goddard (Author), Tony Eccles (Author)

Publication Date: May 3, 2012

This is a book for managers who know that their organisations are stuck in a mindset that thrives on fashionable business theories that are no more than folk wisdom, and whose so-called strategies that are little more than banal wish lists.It puts forward the notion that the application of uncommon sense – thinking or acting differently from other organisations in a way that makes unusual sense – is the secret to competitive success. For those who want to succeed and stand out from the herd this book is a beacon of uncommon sense and a timely antidote to managerial humbug. Read more of this post

Here’s why everything Malcolm Gladwell writes is so compelling

Here’s why everything Malcolm Gladwell writes is so compelling

By Adam Grant October 7, 2013

This originally appeared on LinkedIn. You can follow Adam Grant here.

I used to dread going to parties. I stood around struggling with small talk, waiting for an opening to debate about big ideas. That changed 13 years ago, the day I read The Tipping Point. Suddenly, everyone wanted to talk about Malcolm Gladwell’s ideas, and I felt right at home. He made social science cool in watercooler chatter, spawning an entire genre of books that blend stories and studies to explain how the world works. He carried me through a decade of dinner parties with Blink and Outliers. With last week’s release of David and Goliath, I’ll be set for a while. Read more of this post

Why so many powerful people think rules are for someone else; People in positions of power tend to think they are entitled to break society’s rules

Fiona Smith Columnist

Why so many powerful people think rules are for someone else

People in positions of power tend to think they are entitled to break society’s rules.

Published 07 October 2013 11:58, Updated 08 October 2013 07:12

The airwaves and social media are throbbing with outrage about politicians claiming allowances for private trips and businesses using bribes to win valuable work. This is the kind of behaviour that most people know they would never get away with – even if they wanted to. What makes it worse, in the mind of the average person, is that the people being exposed are already so privileged and powerful. Tony Abbott can easily afford to fly to Wangaratta for the wedding of a colleague, why would he charge the taxpayer $1094.64 for the trip? Sydney Morning Herald columnist Peter Fitzsimons made a good point over the weekend, when writing about Attorney-General George Brandis charging the taxpayers for the cost of a trip to a radio host’s wedding. Read more of this post

How to handle a major fail

How to handle a major fail

October 8, 2013

Christine Long

So you’ve stuffed up – now what?

Mistakes: we all make them. What really matters is what happens next. If handled well, a cock-up can actually be an opportunity to get closer to a customer. When Ben Crowley, managing director of Bulk Nutrients started his supplements company, he didn’t want cheap to mean nasty. If you can contact the person to let them know that there’s been a problem before they even get a chance for it to come up on their radar, you will have happier customers.  “My philosophy from the start has always been that while our prices are extremely competitive, cheap pricing does not have to mean a compromise on service.” So if an order goes pear-shaped, as it did recently, the company swings into rapid response mode. Read more of this post

The danger of a rush of power to the head; There are numerous perils when business leaders allow autocratic tendencies to take over

October 7, 2013 4:14 pm

The danger of a rush of power to the head

By Andrew Hill

There are numerous perils when business leaders allow autocratic tendencies to take over

Silvio Berlusconi and Jack Ma do not have much in common. The 77-year-old Italian politician is at the end of his leadership path; at 49, the Chinese founder of ecommerce group Alibaba may be barely halfway along it. Yet both have tested, or are testing, the limits of autocracy. One has determinedly clung to power over nearly 20 years in Italian politics; the other is trying to embed control of Alibaba through a core “partnership” of shareholding senior executives after the Chinese company’s public listing. My message to Mr Ma: be careful what you wish for. Read more of this post

How Good Management Stifles Breakthrough Innovation

How Good Management Stifles Breakthrough Innovation

by Markus Lorenz  |   8:00 AM October 7, 2013

We hear a lot these days about how big companies fail to innovate, but the truth is more complicated. A lot of companies excel at developing better products, yet these improvements are incremental. They’re not the breakthrough offerings that can jump-start growth and profitability. And companies’ success at cranking out these enhancements hampers them from getting better at the radical projects. If you closely analyze unsuccessful attempts at developing breakthrough products, perhaps the most common trouble you find is not one of the usual suspects, such as lack of top-management commitment. Instead, you’ll see that efficiency-minded project managers are inadvertently discouraging the explorations – and therefore the learning – that make radical ideas practical. Read more of this post

Entrepreneur, Fire Thyself

Entrepreneur, Fire Thyself

by Kerrie MacPherson  |   2:00 PM October 7, 2013

When entrepreneurs first start their businesses, they are usually involved in everything: running operations, keeping the books, and making sales calls. But as a company grows, one of the smartest things an owner can do is to fire herself from role after role. Letting go of anything critical to business outcomes is a challenge, but successful entrepreneurs have all learned to replace themselves – and serial entrepreneurs even develop it as a skill. Why be in a hurry to hand off important work? By building a team to handle operational responsibilities, entrepreneurs can find more time to focus on strategic priorities and even bigger goals. Read more of this post

Public speaking, private fears; As giving a good talk becomes more important, experts offer advice on coping with stage fright

October 7, 2013 4:34 pm

Public speaking, private fears

By Rhymer Rigby

The comedian Jerry Seinfeld once joked about a study that suggested people’s number one fear was public speaking: “Go to a funeral, you’re better off in the casket than doing the eulogy.” There is no shortage of research suggesting that the fear of public speaking – otherwise known as glossophobia – enjoys a prominent place in most hierarchies of dread. “It is significantly outside the average person’s comfort zone,” says Michael Crom, chief learning officer of Dale Carnegie Training. “You need to be prepared for anything.” He recalls giving a talk to a medical conference: “I was the last speaker. It was late and the person before me ran over and they were starting to shut things down. So I suddenly had no PowerPoint or visuals.” Read more of this post

Business Models for an Era of Innovation Glut

Business Models for an Era of Innovation Glut

by Alistair Davidson | Oct 7, 2013

It seems that innovation today goes to the company that simply says that its product or service is “innovative.” The real problem for the client or consumer, is that each supposedly new innovation has a “me too” look. As this author writes, knowing your market and differentiating sharply on value will enable your product or service to stand out in the crowd. He describes the steps to take in this article

Some research on innovation that succeeds suggests two particularly important insights: First, the single largest predictor of new product success offers a differentiated high-value product/service. Second, the single largest predictor of new product failure is inadequate market research and customer knowledge. (Cooper, Robert: Winning at New Products, Basic Books, Fourth Edition, 2011)  Read more of this post