M.Y. Lessons Learnt

Just finished a conference from China and could not help but think … the future leaders are there. Those young conference goers were so bright, so upbeat and so eager to learn new things. Two interesting observations:

• Their English are hard to understand because of the heavy accents and strange pronounciation - it means they have little exposure of English language in TV, radio and movies.
• On the other hand, their English grammer and sentence structure are perfect - it means they read / study a lot of English books to sharpen their language skill.

Interesting …

So what is a good hotel experience ? From a hotel costed me US$ 500 a night ?

I spent 5 nights in that expensive, luxury hotel in Paris city center … and I had 5 breakfasts in 5 mornings … and guess what ?

The staff there asked me 5 times the room number … talk about good hotel experience.

I came across the following line from a newspaper web site, a line for the reporters … and I think it applies to us as well:

We face obstacles as we pursue stories, as we plan our careers, as we pursue our dream jobs. The obstacles are real. They frustrate us. They challenge us. They hold us back. They delay us from reaching our goals. But by the time we’re done, we have to make the obstacle part of the war story of our success, not the excuse for our failure.

So shall we trust online weather report ?

I checked the Paris weather site, SkyNews site, and CNN site - before and during the trip … all reported cloudy, showers and rainy days. But see what I got …

So I was stuck in Paris, CDG airport. Luckily, I managed to get a seat of another flight and all I needed was to find ways to kill the 5 hours wait. First thing came to mind, of course was to send email to Copenhagen to postpone the meeting …

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I checked the details of the e-Ticket (Hometown - Paris - Copenhagen) and asked myself many times before the trip - “Can I really make the connection in 50 minutes in CDG airport ?” …

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Just came back from a trip with a mind recharged but the body discharged … it was just a very tiring trip. Anyway some thoughts from the trip …

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I think we all had the same experience - no matter where we traveled, we kept comparing the other countries / cities with our city. And same in my trip, I kept thinking why the “systems” in Copenhagen and Paris are so inefficient … their airports, subways, restaurants etc. etc.

That questions kept popping in my mind and then one day in Paris I asked myself another question - is our city a better city then Copenhagen and Paris … even though we are doing things “a lot more efficient” ?

The answer is of course NO. Then I reckon doing things efficiently are good, but not great anymore. I mean, that’s no good by just keep doing the old things (even though in a super efficient way) any more. We need to do things in a new way …

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Then I found all sort of interesting things around me. The subway display panel in Copenhagen is a lot advance than in HK. Even the toilet design is a lot clever than I saw anywhere (even though it was designed _40_ years ago).

And the ticketing kiosks in Paris have only three user interface elements - Yes button, No button and a “scroll bar” - there is no mouse pad, no keyboard, no touch screen. But it does everything you found in our subway’s ticketing kiosks - including support of multi-language, multi-products and multi-payment methods.

All these “Think outside the box” designs are so good that it blend into the city’s culture seamlessly - you don’t even know they exist unless you take a very close eyes to those.

And I think that’s what we need - Doing things efficiently and differently. That shall be our goal to compete in this volatile market.

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Things change quickly and I learnt the following lines from my friend couple of weeks ago.

If you are a wind-surfer professional,

• that’s no use to master the skill of forecasting the wind direction.
• what more important is to master the skill of maneuver the sail and the board when the wind changes.

Indeed, wind (like business scenario) changes all the time, that’s no point to forecast how, when and where it changes; but we all shall focus ourselves in learning the skill on handling the changes itself.

Finally finished the revamp of three web sites and I used three different web tools to do the job. One is a Blog tool, one is a CMS and one is a Wiki tool. So first question, why three different tools ?

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All a sudden there is a lot of talks about the Web 2.0 - i.e. Gmail, Google Map, Flickr, Del.icio.us, Technorati, Wikipedia etc. etc. They all use commonplace technologies such as AJAX, RIA, Wiki, Blog, tagging etc. etc.

But what exactly we are heading to ?
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Couple of years ago, in the first MBA class I ever attended. The first complete sentence from the cool-looking professor was “Create Value !!”. It puzzled everybody in the class but then he raised a question …. Let’s say If every month we have HK$ 3000 spare, will we:

• buy something we like ?
• save it in the bank to earn 2% interest a year (no risk) ?
• buy some stocks to earn ? % of interest (at a risk, but high risk high return) ?
• loan it to a friend to earn ? % of interest (at a risk, you know, it depends on your definition of “friend”) ?
• hire someone (say a student) to make money for us, with an aim to have more than 2% of profit (at a risk, and how we can make money for sure ?) ?

I think most of us will pick the first three methods. However, our shareholders picked the last method. Reason ? Because they believed we can create value a lot more than saving the money in the bank or even loan it to other organizations …

So … are we creating value for ourselves, our customers and our shareholders ? Think thru it … if your answer is YES, good and keep up the good works - and create more value. If your answer is NO or “I’m not sure”, then we have to discuss …

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Recently there is a lot of news about the so-called Web 2.0 - i.e. the Gmail, Google map, Flickr, Del.icio.us, Technorati, Wikipedia etc. etc.. They all use technology like wiki, blog, tagging, AJAX, RIA, SOA etc. etc. and I’ve introduced them to you all for months. Anyhow …

Did you come across any cool sites / internet-services that you think that will change the world (at least your own) ? If yes, let us know … we welcome any new ideas (whether they can be implemented or not).

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Liverpool is our boss’ favorite soccer team and it did many many wonders in the past. One thing that you may or may not know is the “Liverpool Club Song” was written 60 years ago and sung by many many singers and classes (it is the standard song for graduation classes in USA). The name is “You’ll never walk alone” and here is the lyric …

http://family.maltanet.net/hawk/html/Songs

Walk on, walk on, with hope in your heart, and you’ll never walk alone…