Singapore PM Lee: Strengthen system that let you succeed

PM Lee: Strengthen system that let you succeed

MESSAGE TO STUDENTS: Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong and the principal of CHIJ St Nicholas Girls’ School, Mrs Tan Wai Lan, at the 80th anniversary of the school on Monday. The Chinese characters “yin shui si yuan” on the easel is a Chinese saying meaning “know where you come from”.

Friday, November 22, 2013 – 07:30

The New Paper

Schools, especially those with students who have done well, should imbue them with the spirit of service, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said on Monday. Mr Lee was speaking at an event marking the 80th anniversary of the CHIJ St Nicholas Girls’ School. He said that while the students may have succeeded through talent and hard work, they also had to realise that this is possible because they live in a society with a meritocratic system that rewards them for their abilities and develops them to their potential, one that cheers those who succeed instead of cutting them down. Read more of this post

Hierarchy Is Overrated

Hierarchy Is Overrated

by Tim Kastelle  |   2:00 PM November 20, 2013

Maybe you’ve heard the old cliché – if you’ve got “too many chiefs,” your initiative will fail. Every time I hear it, I wonder, “Why can’t everyone be a chief?” For instance, the Second Chance Programme is a group that raises money to help reduce homelessness among women here in Southeast Queensland.  It’s achieved impressive results since being founded in 2001, and is run by a committee of about ten people. In the early days, a management consultant used the familiar chiefs/Indians line to predict they’d fail. This kind of thinking assumes: You need a hierarchy to succeed. The people that do the work are of lower status than those that decide what work to do. Organizations that don’t follow the norms are likely to fail. I think that all of these ideas are wrong.  Second Chance has certainly been very successful with their flat, non-hierarchical structure.  They have achieved a great deal, while keeping their overhead close to $0.  If the structure of the management committee was a problem, they would have failed by now. But maybe this kind of structure only works for not-for-profits? Nope.  About 20% of the world’s websites are now on the WordPress platform – making it one of the most important internet companies.  And yet, Automattic, the firm behind WordPress, only employs a couple hundred people, who all work remotely, with a highly autonomous flat management structure.  GitHub is another highly successful firm with a similar structure. Read more of this post

Old hands steered by the young: The CEO of Tesco is among the veterans using reverse mentors to bridge a generation gap

November 20, 2013 4:24 pm

Old hands steered by the young

By Emma Jacobs

Every month, Tesco chief executive Philip Clarke meets 28-year-old Paul Wilkinson for a mentoring session. In this time Mr Wilkinson, who works in the British supermarket’s technology research and development division, teaches his boss everything he knows. For this is not the traditional professional development practice in which a young, junior employee is given career advice by a senior manager. Instead, the roles are reversed. Read more of this post

Morpher’s Flat-Folding Bike Helmet

Morpher’s Flat-Folding Bike Helmet

By Karen Epper Hoffman November 21, 2013

Innovator: Jeff Woolf, OBE
Age: 54
Title: Managing director of London-based Morpher Helmet

Form and function: A half-pound helmet that can fold up into a block measuring 6.5 inches by 12.9 inches by 1.9 inches, compact enough to fit into a bag or briefcase.

Here’s The 5-Sentence Personal Essay That Helped JFK Get Into Harvard

Here’s The 5-Sentence Personal Essay That Helped JFK Get Into Harvard

PETER JACOBS NOV. 20, 2013, 1:19 PM 49,634 53

Without a doubt, John F. Kennedy is one of Harvard University’s most accomplished and impressive graduates. However, the former POTUS was not the best applicant when he decided he wanted to take up residence in Cambridge, Mass. He had poor grades from high school, and while he had spent two months at Princeton University before leaving due to an illness, even his own father called him “careless.” In anticipation of the 50th anniversary of JFK’s assassination, The Washington Post has highlighted many of his school records, including a handwritten Harvard application. You can check out the digitized originals at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. As part of the Harvard application — which at the time was a mere three pages — students were asked to give a “careful answer” to the question “Why do you wish to come to Harvard?” Here’s what a young JFK had to say:

The reasons that I have for wishing to go to Harvard are several. I feel that Harvard can give me a better background and a better liberal education than any other university. I have always wanted to go there, as I have felt that it is not just another college, but is a university with something definite to offer. Then too, I would like to go to the same college as my father. To be a “Harvard man” is an enviable distinction, and one that I sincerely hope I shall attain.

April 23, 1935
John F. Kennedy

From the JFK library, here’s the original:

German “luxury bishop” settles with court over 1st class flight-to-poverty case

German “luxury bishop” settles with court over 1st class flight-to-poverty case

Mon, Nov 18 2013

BERLIN (Reuters) – A German court has dropped for the time being an investigation into a Roman Catholic prelate known as the “luxury bishop” over accusations he lied under oath about taking a first-class flight to visit poverty projects in India. State prosecutors had sought to have Bishop Franz-Peter Tebartz-van Elst of Limburg fined for making false affidavits about the flight, but the court accepted a 20,000-euro settlement. Read more of this post

From physician to Web entrepreneur of online medical portal DocDoc

From physician to Web entrepreneur

SINGAPORE — As someone used to plying 20-hour shifts in a highly stressful hospital environment, Dr Dawn Soo was no stranger to hard work. But it was not until she made the transition from physician to entrepreneur that she truly understood the concept.

BY FRANCIS KAN –

4 HOURS 33 MIN AGO

SINGAPORE — As someone used to plying 20-hour shifts in a highly stressful hospital environment, Dr Dawn Soo was no stranger to hard work. But it was not until she made the transition from physician to entrepreneur that she truly understood the concept. “Your brain never (really) stops working. Starting a company from scratch is like having a baby — you don’t have time for anything else,” said the 30-year-old, one of five co-founders of DocDoc, an online medical portal. Read more of this post

Cineworld founder started off by testing auditorium seats

November 20, 2013 6:14 pm

Cineworld founder started off by testing auditorium seats

By Robert Cookson

Steve Wiener, the New York-born cinephile who built the UK’s biggest cinema chain, started his career as an usher. Mr Wiener was studying at the University of Miami in 1970 when he took a part-time job at a cinema in Coral Gables, Florida. One of his first duties was to sit and rock in every chair in a 900-seat auditorium to check that they had been installed correctly. After graduating, he quickly worked his way up through the ranks of the US cinema industry. In 1991 he moved to the UK to become managing director of Warner Bros Europe – his first trip outside the US. Read more of this post

Alli Webb, a former hairstylist, built Drybar, a 32-store chain of salons that offer $40 blowouts. She says repeat clients are one of the keys to sustaining the business, as women pursue an affordable luxury

Hair Chain Drybar Finds Niche in Affordable Luxury

Co-Founder Says Repeat Clients Provide the Lift to Sustain Business on $40 Blowouts

CAITLIN HUSTON

Nov. 20, 2013 8:37 p.m. ET

Drybar entrepreneur Alli Webb: ‘We’ve changed behavior, which is really amazing and humbling…. We are kind of like the fabric of people’s lives.’ Annie Tritt for The Wall Street Journal

Alli Webb started a door-to-door hairstyling business in 2008 as a way to get out of her house and take a break from rearing her two kids. The former hairstylist saw the need for a service that focused on providing affordable, high-quality blowouts—in which a client’s hair is washed and blow-dried into a style, without being colored or cut. The business spread through word-of-mouth, and Ms. Webb soon found herself unable to keep up with demand. Her side project turned into a company with a projected $40 million in revenue this year. Read more of this post

Sequel The Hunger Games: Catching Fire seen to get most of revenue from overseas

Updated: Thursday November 21, 2013 MYT 9:42:23 AM

Sequel The Hunger Games: Catching Fire seen to get most of revenue from overseas

LOS ANGELES  When the sequel “The Hunger Games: Catching Fire” debuts worldwide on Friday, industry analysts believe the movie from studio Lions Gate Entertainment  will set international box offices ablaze in a bigger way than the first film. The original “Hunger Games” movie in 2012 became a smash hit with strong sales in the United Statesand Canada, but pulled in less than half of its box office grosses in overseas markets, a modest foreign take by blockbuster standards. Today’s biggest Hollywood movies often earn 50 to 70 percent of their revenue overseas. Read more of this post

Singapore-sized iceberg threatens global shipping

Singapore-sized iceberg threatens global shipping

LONDON — An iceberg estimated to be about the size of Singapore has broken off from Antarctica and could threaten shipping, NASA’s Earth Observatory announced on Nov 15.

BY –

14 MIN 19 SEC AGO

LONDON — An iceberg estimated to be about the size of Singapore has broken off from Antarctica and could threaten shipping, NASA’s Earth Observatory announced on Nov 15. The news sparked off tracking efforts by UK researchers, who were given a £50,000 (S$101,000) emergency grant to fund a six-month project predicting the movements of the 700 square km giant block of ice and possible environmental impacts. The team will track the progress of the iceberg through satellite data, reported The Daily Telegraph. Read more of this post

The author of The Lean Startup is thinking big about the challenges facing companies in an economy driven by innovation

November 12, 2013 / Winter 2013 / Issue 73

Why Eric Ries Likes Management

The author of The Lean Startup is thinking big about the challenges facing companies in an economy driven by innovation.

by Paul Michelman

Most of us think of entrepreneurship as the antithesis of traditional management, especially when it comes to the stars of the digital economy, like, say, Eric Ries. But Ries, who is known for extolling the virtues of rapid-fire innovation—he coined the term minimum viable product to describe his methodology for getting new products (sometimes barely functioning prototypes) into the hands of customers as early as possible—views things in a different light. Entrepreneurship is not an opposing force to “serious” management, he says, but its own distinct, and complementary, variety of it. Read more of this post

What Inexperienced Leaders Get Wrong (Hint: Management)

What Inexperienced Leaders Get Wrong (Hint: Management)

by Rosabeth Moss Kanter  |   8:00 AM November 21, 2013

There are an awful lot of leaders in trouble these days. Not just those under attack for ethical lapses, accounting problems, or excessive compensation – retired college presidents are the latest to join corporate executives in the latter category. The trouble I’m referring to is getting new ideas implemented and brought to scale. The leaders range from entrepreneurs with great ideas but a flaw preventing expansion (Tesla?) to new CEOs with a vision their stakeholders won’t rally behind that won’t guarantee results anyway. Read more of this post