Some very disturbing aspects of how NTUC treated the Amy Cheong case.

First of all, I was very disturbed and upset with what Amy Cheong said. As a former Assistant Director in NTUC-ARU myself, this case really hurt because I had to brace myself for questions which may come from Malay friends and colleagues who may ask me what she was like, etc.

Personally, this case should be closed, the mobs on the Internet got what they wanted, they should be happy. Today was a good day for racial harmony, all races united to condemn Amy's comments on FB.

But for current and former employees of NTUC, many concerns remain.

After Amy was sacked, I realised that this raises more questions about my former organization's practices.

Almost all employees in NTUC-ARU are encouraged to take up Union membership. In fact, I'm still a member. I pay $9 a month to be part of the Unions.

While most enjoy membership benefits in the form of link points, being a Union member entitles you to workplace representation.

If you follow the timeframe in which Amy posted her offensive comments and the time she was sacked in the news, this begs the questions of whether the Unions had a chance to step in to negotiate the terms of her punishment with NTUC management.

Kong Hee, Ng Boon Gay and even T T Durai had trials and a fair opportunity to defend themselves.

This looks like a bad case of a knee jerk reaction.

NTUC's ultimate role is to defend workers from their employers.

I was shocked and dismayed that there was no visible attempt to at least intercede on behalf of fair play. Amy may be wrong but can the punishment be lightened in light of her Union membership. More disturbingly, can a Union step aside because it was politically correct to do so ?

I can certainly imagine how this can be better managed:

a) Secretary General Lim Swee Say suspends Amy Cheong with immediate effect today.
b) NTUC does a thorough investigation with HR over two weeks, lets cool heads prevail and determines that this is an offence that warrants termination.
c) Staff Union of NTUC or SUN intercedes on Amy's behalf, General Secretary of the Union (currently an ethnic Malay lady ) declares that they are against racism but is is open to forgive the perpetrator. SUN lobbies to downgrade the punishment.
d) Amy gets demoted and volunteers 100 man-days of service to the Malay Community.
e) After serving time, Amy speaks of her experiences and how wrong and remorseful she was.
e) Everybody comes together to celebrate how well the affair was handled and how a crisis becomes a teachable moment for forgiveness and remorse.

While it's right to punish someone for racism,  the punishment must fit the crime and justice needs its due process. With authorities rushing to condemn a wrongdoing and pandering to mob rule, we should not forget that someone's livelihood has been permanently destroyed over a private comment in a facebook page. Should we even start going after members of the mob who used this opportunity to make some racist statements of their own ?

I could think of some political figures who have done much worse and was given way better treatment for it.

Price to pay for financial independence.

A message that will definitely go into my next book on Personal Finance is to list out the price to pay for financial independence. It gives the young reader an idea of what sacrifice must be made to become financial independent in their 30s, it also explains why many people in their 40s struggle so hard to pay bills and yet a minority will just cruise comfortably in their forties with hardly a gripe.

Let's start with something simple first :

a) Can you forgo consumption in your fabulous twenties.

To me this is the cheapest price to pay. Your twenties is the time you can take the most punishment from the corporate world with almost no dependents. You can take on 16 hour management consulting or investment banking jobs to accumulate your wealth. There is also little need to consume - gadgets get better with time anyway.

Most investment books just talk about about point (a). If it's that simple, there would be a lot more millionaires in Singapore today.

I think my book will go further than that :

b) Are you willing to be disagreeable and have people hate your guts for it ?

This is something many people are unwilling to do. An agreeable person can cruise along in life with little strife. Type B folks live longer and lower incidences of heart disease.

A disagreeable person, on the other hand, can tell a close relative to fuck off when they try to sell them a whole life insurance plan or their childhood friend to fuck themselves when they into MLM. A disagreeable person can bulldoze their way through work and get the lazy social loafers to complete their projects in time. Overtime, disagreeable executives do better in the corporate world and earn more throughout their lifetime.

c) Are you willing to delay major milestones like marriage and children and risk it never happening ?

Your wealth needs to compound early to make a difference to your quality of life in your forties, an early marriage is a huge financial burden in your twenties and children make it worse. This effect is even worse for women, who have a strong financial incentive to stay single as it increases their income even more.

As I still believe in family, but this is a heavy price to pay if you, like most people, do want to settle down eventually. Even as a man, you may find yourself unable to pro-create when you finally get financial independent if you insist on this limitation too much.

d) Can you cope with an existential vacuum in your forties ?

I am beginning to really understand that price to pay as I near my forties. One side-effect of reaching financial independence early and going through the practice is that it turns me into an ascetic that's not excited about many things.

Car don't really excite me as much as watching a sunset, and I only need a few gadgets to keep in touch with the financial markets. I read some books on marketing to men to see if I can spend my money on more things but all it does is turn me off consumption even more.

The only thing which makes me happy theses days are experiences and my relationships but I can't travel much with a toddler around the house. I can't eat well because it will ruin my blood sugar control.

This ironically makes retirement a very scary idea because I need to figure out how to maintain the "flow" I get in my current public service job.

Maybe one day, I will devote more time to philosophy and become a social entrepreneur. That time will come after I make my contribution to Government service and round up my career in Singapore.

Financial Independence is a battle for your very soul

Financial independence can be a nasty battle for your soul. A decision to get ahead at work may cause you to reframe your colleagues as rivals. Accumulation of more assets can cause you to delay building many meaningful relationships in life. And one day, after you have it all, you need to fight to make your life more meaningful before that inevitable exit.

I knew the price I paid, question is which decision will you take ?

The difference that makes the difference.

This article in an attempt to distil some of my personal experience into something useful for readers.

Since I was an undergraduate, I was never really able to excel in a core initiative. I'm going to share three experiences and then try to see if it's possible to turn them into teachable moments.

a) My stint in the Information Olympiad squad.

I spent a brief time training in Singapore's first squad that took part  in the Informatics Olympiad in 1992. In the selection phase, I was chosen not because I was good in programming but I was able to grasp the concept of a Graph algorithm and explain to the judge without knowing a god-damn thing about the augmented matrices that makes the algorithm work. Even my lecturer's in NJC was surprised I was chosen, because I always had the gift of the gab, my programming was good but not great.

Needless to say I was not chosen to actually represent Singapore, but I was able to participate in the training in NUS which was useful to my stint later as an Electrical engineering student.

b) My journey as an electrical engineering student.

I was slightly above average as an engineering student, I remember my final year as a pretty smooth year for me, I even managed to hit on some girls during that time. One class-mate commented that my most powerful advantage was my public speaking skills which I leveraged to get a string of As in all my communications modules and ultimately my final year project. Being in the Dean's list in semester 8 is traditionally hard because that's the time the hostelites stop drinking and start waking up the fact that they are close to graduation.

I was also able to get a decent ECA record which most engineers have problems doing, which paved way to being accepted in P&G when I graduated. ( P&G was into extroverted folks with a high openness to new experiences in those days. )

c) My work experiences

I spent most of my time in the working world scoring IT qualifications. It was crazy, some years I did 21 exams while holding a full-time job. What I observed is that my qualifications did not help me much, I was quite loyal to the MNCs I worked for and never could achieve good increments when I changed jobs. I explained my strategy to an fellow French student that I was buying a lot of call options on the IT industry. She felt I was being ridiculous. Now I agree with her since most of my options expired worthless.

Most of extra income came from my investments. These days about half of my take home pay is through dividends. My three years slogging for the CFA paid off in the size of my portfolio today. I did'nt even need to leave the IT industry in the end.

Moral of the Story


I think that something my generation failed to understand about success.

Very often, if you focus on one area of specialization, odds of you getting to the top 1% of your field is very hard. It's also very taxing for your sanity.

If you are able to find an alternative specialization and find a way to resolve your current life challenges, life will be a lot easier. My speaking skills in school help me out more than my ability in physics.

This is what I think is possible for most people :

a) You need to be good at your core specialization.

You still need to be competent at your core. If you are an engineer, you need to be able to do ok at your day job. It's a condition to be minimally employed.

b) Find something you like to do and be good at it in your spare time.

I realized that a secondary skill that is related to the following fields will always pay off and make you more useful to your company or business :

• Communications and Language
• Investing, finance or economics.
• Psychology or culture.

c) Develop your secondary speciality and use it to reinforce your core.

This suggestion is neither a appeal for specialization or generalization of skills. You need to cultivate a secondary skill and keep leveraging that skill to reinforce your core. This creates a something unique that only you can do well.

Next steps  

As my next career is in public service, odds are I will need to be able to find a new secondary skill to reinforce my core. I'm looking at the TESOL to reinforce my language skills so that I can write better papers at my job. Of course, getting to the level as an English instructor as a lot of other benefits as it strengthens my writing skills.

Megachurches rise because meritocracies are inadequate.

I don't want to talk about City Harvest or Kong Hee. The law would take care of him if he is found guilty.

Instead, I want to share some ideas about religious organizations and Singapore society.

a) A religion is a great complement to a meritocracy !

Religions are great institutions in a meritocracy.

Worshippers tithe part of their income, in effect, raising their own taxes. In return, disadvantaged fellows get some help and everyone gets to participate in activities which improve their well-being.

A megachurch, in effect, becomes a microcosm for self-selected citizens to choose a Socialist lifestyle without interfering in politics. In badly-run regimes, religions may be even more well organized than the government, so it's actually more worthwhile to support religion than the state. Case in point, you don't see a lot of megachurches flourish in socialist Europe, especially in Germany where Christians actually pay religious taxes.

b) It's not about the Gospel of Prosperity. It's about coping with failure, inadequacy and mediocrity.

If you accept this point, megachurch go-ers probably do not go to their church to be rich. They go there for fellowship, trading their financial currency for spiritual currency and well-being. Meritocracies are harsh, failures are attributed to the individual. In meritocracies, people need to come together to build socialist bubbles to not lose their sanity.

People convert because they are vulnerable and hurt. The family and state refuses to spend resources to provide any form of consolation. People generally don't intellectualize themselves to pick up a faith, you're either born to it, or suffered so much you turn to them for help.

Besides, it does'nt make sense for money-mad people to give up their salaries just because someone says so. And having written three books with the word Prosperity in it, I have yet to encounter a single worshipper. It can't be just about money.

Now if you agree with me, there may be consequence for all of us here in Singapore.

First, there will always be groups like our megachurches in Singapore while we make our beds with meritocracy, pragmatism and capitalism. CHC is only a hint of more to come. Hundreds more "entrepastors" will be waiting for their turn. Some will preach Christianity, others will appeal to the Buddhists, many will go MLM or Internet Marketing.

Second, this socialist bubble is vital to keep status quo for strong right winged governments.

We can do well if we take three steps :

 - Governance function for an organization must consist only of people of different faiths. This ensures that entity cannot trade spiritual currency with the people who do the governance. It also leverages on our multi-religious society. Churches should be scrutinized by Buddhists, Hindus and Muslims. Temples should be audited by Christians. Mutual respect with prudent governance.

- Forbid religious bodies from taking on donations from anyone below 21. Faith is no child's play. Forbidding donations will cause religious leaders from preying on young impressionable minds.

- Do not allow a church or following to exceed 10,000 in size. This is pragmatic, by keeping organizations small, we will prevent a situation where organizations use political force to swing opinion. WE got luck CHC has only a Cultural Mandate. One day, an organization will grow a Political Mandate instead.

A slave with two masters is a free man.

Some ideas have more power than others.

A statement very similar like the above can be found in the Bible Book of Matthews where worshippers are told that they cannot serve two masters and must choose between Money and God.

Closer to home, I was first exposed to this statement in my first job P&G. It was then, as part of corporate myth that the Father of Management Peter Drucker took one look at P&G's corporate structure and declared that a slave with two masters is a free man.

Drucker was concerned about the rise in popularity of matrix structures, where every resource had a solid line to an administrative manager and a horizontal dotted line to a functional manager or project manager. This allowed the resource to game one reporting manager against another.

Suppose the resource has job A and did not perform up to task, the resource can claim that his time was spent doing job B. This can be a logistical nightmare for managers, for each other manager a resource had to be shared with, some expectations need to be clearly spelled out with each counter-party. Give an organization time and it grows top heavy from the relentless load managers need to account for their resources.

This is the reason why as a manager, I am not a big fan of sharing resources.

Anyway, just last Friday, I had to leave slightly early to pick my daughter up and a colleague joked that I am leaving early because I am now a slave to two masters and therefore a free man. The reference was made because I'm serving my notice and have another job waiting for me.

Well he might be right but this turned out to be quite a teachable moment because I suddenly had an insight about investing and work.

I have a line of income from my job that my family can live on.

I have a line of income from my investments and real estate that my family can live on as well.

My capital gains this year alone, is about the same my annual income from my work.

Investor-employees, therefore are under the payroll of many masters at the same time.

If they choose wisely, they can be free men.

Of course, work is more than a paycheck for me, it's a place to build accomplishments and a great way to be engaged in meaningful activity.

About iron rice bowls and paper plates.

This is a short article. I have a discussion with a friend about careers today and we were talking about the differences between the public sector and private sector.

Now most folks from the private sector have a tendency to scoff at government or quasi-government bodies because of the impression that no work really gets done in these organizations, staff are jiak liao bee because they're protected by the iron rice bowl syndrome.

As someone who spent a decade in the private sector before deciding to look for more work life balance, I have a different perspective.

Public organizations and NGOs do a lot of back-breaking work. Results also take time to show itself  because of the intense amount of paperwork to push a proposal through. It's also important that decisions involving money are above-board and not compromised by a sexy IT sales manager, so a lot of pains have to be taken to provide a paper trail.  The other challenge is that it is a lot a harder to justify something without a simple ROI or IRR model that the private sector works by.

The other reality is that these organizations cannot hire and fire at will because of the political pressure from the electorate, so much work is required to outplace a non-productive worker, it's simply easier to tolerate them and give them work that provides less value add. Overtime, managers end up with a large contingent of such workers who cannot work for any other organization other than the ones they are stuck at.

Which brings me back to managing people in NGOs and government organizations.

While an iron rice-bowl may be the envy of the private sector. Never forget that we do not actually eat rice-bowls. We eat what's actually inside it.

If you have an iron rice bowl but report to a terrible manager, that's the equivalent of someone sprinkling dog food into your next meal. Your bowl will not break, but it's not exactly something that you want to eat for the rest of your career.

While a paper plate may not last many meals, a good careerist can always always walk around with some steak and foie gras on it. It the plate gets ruined, as it always happens because some kind of restructuring is just around the corner, just ensure that you know where to get the next paper plate.

A smart careerist can make do with an iron rice-bowl, ceramic plate or even a paper cup. The important thing is to manage your resume and experience, so that you will always have some caviar, champagne and foie gras to go with each party you attend to.

Singapore dollar - Bane of Online Entrepreneurs.

MAS is taking a policy of strengthening the Singapore dollar to fight inflation. This means that if you run a web business and earn in US dollars, you're very likely to experience a downwards swing in earnings if you convert it back to Singapore dollars.

This reflects one of the many uncertainties of running an online business.

At first, these so called entrepreneurs think that they can earn in USD and spend in SGD, the underestimate the power of Singaporeans who are more than happy to save for their future and strengthen their currency in the future.

 Of course, a smart online entrepreneur can do better if they bring geo-arbitrage to it's ultimate logical conclusion.

 It is definitely possible for a Singaporean with a savings of about $20,000 to settle down comfortably in a place like Thailand and pay minimal rent to see through their online businesses.

 Here's a dream combination if you are single and have weak family ties :

 a) Invest in SGD 

I can't emphasize enough that our low tax regime makes investing in SGD real estate assets an almost sure winner. Some REITs continue to yield over 8% and does not generate any taxes beyond the first 18% deducted at the company level.

b) Spend in MYR/THB

 Find a place to stay where the cost of living is about 40% less than Singapore. Johore Bahru and Phuket comes into mind but you need to blend in with the locals so that you will not be singled out by criminals.

c) Work and earn in Dubai or Aussie dollar. 

 IMHO, the best places to work should be friendly to foreigners and have a lot of natural resources such that the currency has a strong correlation with gold/oil.

So the best combination out there is probably some Malaysian Dude with a Singaporean PR who invests in the Singapore markets, works in an oil company and now stationed in Abi Dhabi and has a family in palatial mansion in Johore Bahru.