Curry – The Best After Pub Food and the Restoration of the Great in Great Britain

 

My British friends may not have much to be cheerful about these days. Ever since the United Kingdom (UK) voted to leave the European Union (EU) in 2016, the British have been struck by a never-ending cycle of political crisis, which in turn has hit the economy hard and caused people to suffer. If you want an example of how far the UK has fallen – look the currency, which once had the proud place of being the most expensive in the G7. Back in my school days, it was 2.5 to 3 SGD to 1 GPB. Today, that rate stands at about 1.6 – 1.7 SGD to 1 GBP.

I guess you could say that part of the reason for the fall is the fact that Asia has become more prominent economically. However, there is no denying that the UK is going through a rough spell of sorts. I grew up in the UK in the 1990s. There was a recession then and nobody talked about choosing to go hungry or freezing. By contrast, this was the chatter as the UK entered winter.

The picture looks bleak and now that the UK has left the EU and lost its greatest asset (the strategic location of being the easiest place to enter the European market), its hard to see how things can get better.

While things look bleak, I do believe that there is a bit of hope for the UK. That hope lies in the fact that the UK has become a very successful melting pot of people from various cultures and today, the UK is blessed with a King who has spent a lifetime promoting interfaith dialogue, its first ever Prime Minister of Asian decent and most recently Scotland got its first ever Muslim as First  Minister in the shape of Humza Yousaf.

Let’s start with the King. Whilst Charles III didn’t make himself popular as Prince of Wales and in his divorce from his first wife, the popular Princes Diana, he has, by all accounts been a very passionate king for the people. Charles has been the champion of causes like looking after the inner cities and the environment and promoting inter-faith dialogue. He has made it a point to visit mosque and gurdwaras thus making it known that as King, he believes that he regards ethnic minorities as equally British as his traditional base of White Anglo-Saxon Christians.

Whilst race relations in the UK are by no means perfect (Brexit being a prime example), the country has at the very least a symbolic figurehead who fights hard to keep people together rather than fanning the flames of division.

The second cause for optimism is the fact that in the space of a year, the country has seen two prominent political offices go to people of South Asian Decent. The joke on the internet is that a Prime Minister of Indian decent and a Scottish First Minister of Pakistani decent arguing over the partition of the UK is Karma.

 

 The Rishi and Humza Show – Karma of 1947 or a Sign of Hope? Copyright the Scottish Daily Express

It would be undoubtedly ironic is the UK were to be broken up and that break up be negotiated by someone of India and Pakistani decent. However, if that were to happen it would be because the Scottish National Party (SNP), which Mr. Yousof now leads managed to make a case to the Scottish people that they’re better off outside the UK. This is something the SNP has been calling for since its foundation in 1934. The fact that Mr. Yousof is of Pakistani decent has nothing to do with it.

The second point is that race and religion actually played a minimal role in the headlines during the elevation of Mr. Sunak to the Prime Ministership of the UK and to an extent the Mr. Yousof’s elevation to First Minister. Mr. Sunak’s elevation to Prime Minister seemed to cause more excitement with the Indian diaspora than it did within the UK. In Mr. Sunak’s case, the English commentator had to remind the Indian TV station interviewing him that Mr Sunak was becoming Prime Minister of the UK and not India.

Why is this good? It is good because it’s a sign that race and religion have lost their potency in British Politics. Sure, there are those who would not vote for someone because of their skin colour or religion. However, the parties that both Mr. Sunak and Mr. Yousof come from believe that these people in the minority and both men are being judged on their ability to win votes. In the case of Mr. Sunak, it’s been especially clear. It’s been mentioned that he’s the first ever Prime Minister of Asian descent. However, other than that the focus has been on successes like the Windsor Agreement or failures like being ticked off by the police for letting his dog run in the park. Mr. Sunak has displayed a level of competence which neither of his predecessors had.

So, what does this mean? Well, the fact that race and religion have played in miniscule role in the rise of Mr. Sunak and Mr. Yousof should encourage people of different backgrounds that they can succeed if they work hard. The Asian (specifically the South Asians that were expelled from Africa) community in the UK have been loyal citizens who have paid back the protection of the crown many times over with their hard work and business savvy and it would good karma if the UK’s salvation came from people of South Asian descent.   

Called to the Principal’s Office

 

Singapore has a new hero. His name is Chew Shou Zi and he is the 40-year-old CEO of TickTok, one of the most popular social networks in the world.

Mr. Chew is in many ways like the rest of Singapore’s high flyers. He went to good schools (Hwa Chong and University College, London topped of with an MBA from Harvard University), served his National Service properly (Went through Officer Cadet School) and at this point, the most interesting thing about Mr. Chew is the fact that he actually succeeded in places beyond the ecosystem of Singapore Government Linked Companies (Goldman Sachs, Xiaomi and ByteDance).

However, while Mr. Chew is undoubtedly the ideal Singapore “good boy,” the thing that has made him an overnight sensation is his testimony before the US Congress. Mr. Chew was grilled by members of the US Congress over a period of four and a half hours. In that time, Mr. Chew managed to do what no US politician in the last half century has managed to do – he united Republicans and Democrats in their efforts to crucify him and the company he runs.

I will leave comments on the US Congress grilling of Mr. Chew to intelligent people. I will even leave comments on Mr. Chew’s performance for another discussion. All I will do is to leave a link to snippet of his testimony:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPZA98whQGI

 

 What I will say is that I suspect that Mr. Chew has become a hero in Asia and more specifically in Singapore because he’s done something that virtually none of our “elite” have ever done – he’s faced a firing squad willingly. He did not send his PR director or lawyers into the room. A man in his position would have known that the people questioning him were bound to be against him and yet he chose to face the music himself. The fact that he kept his cool throughout what can only be described as a grilling has won him a few fans.

In those four and half hours, Mr. Chew has shown Singapore’s leaders, both past, present and future that one of the most vital parts of being a leader is being able to deal with hostility. Its easy to deal with people who are programmed for to agree with everything you say because of who you are. It’s another story when you have to face people who are against you for the mere fact that you are who you are.

If you look the self-help industry, you will notice that just about every “guru” makes the point that you only get “growth” when you leave your comfort zone. There’s a reason for this – it’s true. When you are in a comfortable place surrounded by people who like you, there’s no reason for you to up your game to become better. However, when you are in a hostile environment, you are forced to “up” your proverbial game in order to survive and if you survive long enough, you may actually earn the respect of those who were initially against you.

Unfortunately, this is a lesson that has been lost of Singapore’s leadership. You see this when you handle media relations. Whilst Singapore’s main stream media is known for being differential to Singapore’s political masters, you still get civil servants who are weary of journalist with a “negative history” towards their organization. My encounter with that phrase comes from my last agency job, where I was told by the client, which was a statutory board to drop pitching an interview with a very senior journalist because of his “negative history” with the said statutory board.

The unwillingness of people in positions of wealth and power to face questions reached comical proportions when the then CEO of Singapore Press Holdings (I stress that this is a company that is a media company), Mr. Ng Yat Chung proceeded to take “umbrage” at a reporter’s question at a press conference (which given that SPH was at the time listed, this would have been a question that the stock exchange would have insisted the CEO be prepared for).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUxYOwMEGz0

 

The unwillingness to answer basic questions by the people in positions of power is a cultural problem. It is a sign that people are probably more interested in the perks of the office they hold rather than in doing the job that they’re supposed to do. Jobs like CEO, CE or even Minister requires one to be constantly thinking and adapting and you can only do that if you have some form of “challenge.” So, when you are unwilling to answer the most basic of questions from people who are paid specifically to ask questions, it’s probably a sign that you got confused and thought CEO was spelt GOD.

However, when you are willing to face hostility, you actually have to become sharper. One of the best examples of how someone used the “hostile” interview is the theological scholar Raeza Azlan, who went on Fox News and ended up showing up his interviewer as being a small-minded slug:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFgjTF-sIKY

 

Another example of someone who utilizes a hostile environment is US transport secretary Pete Buttigeig, who regularly appears on Fox News, a channel that has never been known to treat openly gay men, holding left of centre political views too kindly. It seems that the strategy to talk to people on a “hostile” platform has worked:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQAuuVBFi6I

 

The basic truth remains – you get growth when you leave your comfort zone and are willing to deal with people who are intrinsically against you. You become a fossil when you refuse to answer basic questions.

By being willing to go into the proverbial lion’s den, Mr. Chew has shown that Singapore has talents if only the powers that be were willing to encourage those talents to develop.

Honest Brokers aren’t Necessarily Nice – And One Should Leave Baggage at the Door

 

One of the brighter to things to come out in today’s world news has been the “peace-deal” between Saudi Arabia and Iran. The two nations had broken off diplomatic relations in2016 when the Saudi’s executed a prominent Shia Cleric, Nimr-Al Nimr and the Saudi Embassy in Tehran got torched. The two regional powers had been in something of a “conflict” backing opposing sides in the regions many conflicts.

So, the sudden rapprochement between the two was big news. What was particularly note worthy was no much the rapprochement but the broker, which in this case was the People’s Republic of China (China). In just about every news story on the topic, the focus has been on the meaning of China’s role as a broker of this deal. Everyone has been talking about “Why China” was the broker and what does this all mean for the USA, which has been the dominant power in the region.

Funnily enough, one of the best answers to this came from an interview on France 24 with Prince Turki-bin Faisal-Al Saud (Prince Turki), the former Director General of Al Mukhabarat Al A'amah, or intelligence services. Prince Turki made the point that nobody wants to mention – namely the fact that only China could have brokered this deal because China remains the only honest broker between Iran and Saudi Arabia. His Royal Highness made the point that the USA and Europeans were compromised in favour of the Saudis and they didn’t have the “trust” of the Iranians to get them to the negotiating table. The interview can be found at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19momP1bCy8

 

 This interview was in many ways a master class on how to give interviews. It was as if the interviewer wanted him to condemn the deal. At times it seemed he was desperate to get the Prince to say that the deal would fail because the Iranians were inherently untrustworthy.  The Prince refused to fall for it and when his previous statements were thrown at him, he made the point that what he thought as an individual was very different from what the Saudi Government was doing. The point that Prince Turki was calmy trying to stress was that whatever he thought was not important, what was important was that a conflict was coming to an end and people would be better off.

It's often tempting to see the world in black or white. It becomes easier to understand the world when there is a ready-made villain and a ready-made hero. This is very clear in American foreign policy, where the USA has always cast itself as the good guy against the host of bad guys. This was easy when there was a Soviet Union. Then, when the Soviet Union collapsed, there was Saddam Hussain, whom everyone joked that if he didn’t exist, the State Department would have to invent him.

However, more often than not, the world isn’t black and white and the good guys are not necessarily good and the bad guys are not necessarily bad. There are times when one can get trapped into one’s self-created narrative. Take the Israeli-Palestinian issue as an example. The American and widder Western narrative (which is often prevalent in Singapore) is that Israel is the plucky nation trying to survive against a group of Arabs who are driven by an irrational hatred for Jews.

This is not the actual picture. There’s a bit more “grey” and as someone is a devoted fan of Israeli dramas like Fauda, even the Israeli’s are open about the fact that they’re role in the Palestinian conflict is far from saintly. To negotiate a solution is simple – find out what each side wants and work out a compromise. Unfortunately, it can’t happen when the “brokers,” which in this case is the USA is so caught up in the idea of one side being good and the other being irrationally bad.

The same has been true of Iran, where American and by extension the West has been caught up with the idea that the Mullahs in Iran are mortal enemies of anything decent and must therefore be eradicated – hence a policy of backing anyone who is against Iran.

So, the Prince has a point. The West is compromised in this situation and cannot be an honest broker. China on the other hand can. China has a good working relationship with both Saudi Arabia and Iran. As far as China is concerned, it just wants both sides to keep the oil following. It doesn’t have “baggage” when it comes to either party.

This is not to say that China’s Communist Party is Saintly. China’s Communist government does horrible things in places like Xinjiang and Tibet. The Chinese Communist party has shown itself to be exceedingly ruthless and nasty.

However, being a saint is not necessarily a good quality in diplomacy. What China is, is clear about what it wants and less emotional in its policies. Hence, as the prince said – China can do things. In the Middle East, it does not get involved in “Clash of Civilisations,” or who owns various bits of real estate. The Chinese are not nice people trying to help the oppressed. However, they are keen to buy oil and they will do what they need to do to keep the oil flowing. Hence, they want Saudi Arabia and Iran working together to keep the oil flowing.

Sometimes, the most important thing to consider is baggage. Parties with less baggage can do things that the parties that are bogged down with baggage simply cannot.

You Got to Have Debt

 

Copyright – Entreprenuer.com

Reading about the recent take over of Credit Suisse by UBS and the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (“SVB”) brought back memories to the time when I was doing some work for GE Commercial Finance (“GECF”), which was in the business of trade credit financing, which is better known as factoring.

GECF were clear that their main customers were SME’s. It was, on paper, a very viable partnership. GECF was part of the GE empire, and it argued that it understood the needs of business (specifically manufacturing) and helped finance other business from that view. GECF also argued that it didn’t just sell financial products but also provided knowledge of best practices based on its experiences (GE, was at the time consistently ranked as one of the best run companies in the world)

There were however, some cultural clashes between GECF with its roots in the USA and our local, predominantly Chinese-run, SMEs. This was summed up by GECF’s commercial director who told me, “We check their books – there’s no debt – you got to have debt to do business.” If my former father-in-law was anything to go by, traditional Chinese businessmen detest debt. His biggest issue with me when I took the PPO out against his daughter, was that made it look like he owed people money.

When I look back at this moment, I realise that there is a clear difference in culture. In the American system, debt is part and parcel of the game of doing business. It should be no surprise to anyone that America, which remains the favourite place for the world’s entrepreneurs, has also been the birthplace of the most creative forms of financing and American bankruptcy laws were at one stage considered among the more lenient in the developed world.

The rational behind this, is fairly simple. If you want your business to make a big mark, you to expand quickly and this would require capital, which more often than not would be at a quantum beyond your current turnover. Hence, an entire industry was born to take care of this need.

American bankruptcy laws were, to extent, based on the premise that one might have run into a spell of bad luck and should not be condemned for it. Back when the Old Rogue first entered my life, he would consistently point out that one could be making money but then run into a spate of bad luck or make a bad decision. Bankruptcy was designed to help you get through that period rather than to punish you.

By contrast, the local SMEs in Singapore and the widder Southeast Asian region came from a different culture. Small businesses struggled to get loans from banks, which more often than not, were pushed to loan to politically connected competitors. The only funding available to traditional SMEs was through informal channels, and while legal contracts regarding loans were opaque, there were informal understandings to ensure that the said loans for repaid.

Furthermore, an SME business in the region didn’t just face financial risk. With the exception of Singapore, Southeast Asia’s SME sector has been dominated by the ethnic Chinese minority, which has, as the 1997 riots in Indonesia showed, been part of the wrong end of angry mobs. Hence, you operate in such circumstances, you do so with the understanding that a business failure is not just a financial failure but potentially deadly for you and your family.

If doing business in America is about getting a passion to market and getting rich, doing business in Southeast Asia was the most part all about having enough money so that you would always have a survival route in case your homeland turned nasty. You avoided things like unnecessary debt because it could cost your business and by extension you.

In a way, both sides have a point. Southeast Asia’s SMEs generally don’t expand beyond the region. Local businesses play things close to their chest.

However, as the collapse of the various American banks has shown, there is also the other extreme. While America remains the place where minnows like Apple and Microsoft grew into trillion-dollar whales, there have been several periods where things went overboard. Lenders got greedy and thought the basic laws of economics didn’t exist and businesses made marketing gimmicks to attract venture capital instead of producing a product or service. Hence, when crashes came, they really crashed.

So, one has to find the equilibrium. Yes, one should aim to grow one’s business. Sometimes it is necessary to take on debt. Reality is that bills do need to get paid even when customers take their own time (trust me, I’ve seen it happen in the construction industry).  

However, one does need to understand that loans need to be repaid and that there needs to be a delivery of sorts. Markets do go south as much as they do go north. We should not, as a society reward greed when things go wrong. If you don’t punish greed, you allow people to get away with the same mistake and that has never benefited anyone other than to live the definition of insanity of doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

The Despair of the World’s Best Airport

 

I’ve just arrived back in Singapore. You could say I should have a great feeling of relief of being back in civilisation, after week in what is to all intents and purposes a third-world country. That feeling should have been overwhelmingly strong as it took me around two hours to reach the boarding gate at Noi Bai International in Hanoi and entering Singapore a breeze (after filling out the SG Arrival card, entry into the country is happily automated) in comparison to what I had been through on the Vietnamese side.

There were wonderful signs of being “home.” The most obvious was water fountains at the airport. I was no longer dependent on bottled water to quench my thirst and of course, everything was a language I could communicate in.

However, I didn’t feel an overwhelming sense of joy to be back home. In fact, what I felt was an overwhelming sense of despair and I had to fight back the feeling of wanting to start sobbing on the spot. You see, the reason is simple, I had gone from a cranky airport in what is still a communist country that a sense of dynamism to a glamorous façade that seems to be hiding something that is not quite right.

Let’s make no mistake here. There is no comparison in terms of the facilities between Noi Bai International and Changi Airport. Nobody goes to Noi Bai to anything other than to get into and off planes. Changi on the other hand is a destination in its own right.

However, if you look at things through the lenses of the food scene, the difference is quite startling. I found the only two Burger King outlets between Hai Phong and Hanoi inside Noi Bai International. As mentioned in a previous posting, Burger King and its cousin, MacDonald’s couldn’t conquer the Vietnamese market. People were attached to their Pho and Ban Mi served along the roadside. It came faster, tastier and healthier than what the international chains could provide and seeing the world’s second largest joint stuck at the airport gives you a sense of satisfaction of watching a bully get humiliated by a guy half his size.

 

 

 While Noi Bai did not provide me with a great experience (it's not the place you want to walk around), it fits nicely into what I see as a narrative of a place that has some hope. Sure, things are not always smooth or pretty but people are finding a way of going about things. 

Changi was sadly different. It's a beautiful looking place but unfortunately, it seems to a beautiful shell hiding a sick interior.  

First thing you that you notice is that the cleaners are inevitably old. I guess it didn’t really affect me during the years of the pandemic but then, when you step out of Singapore and back again, you notice it. Then, you ask yourself if that’s your fate. I mean, we have a spanking new, state-of-the-art airport, which is the envy of the world and yet the people who are doing the hard work to keep this wonderful place ticking over, are the people who should be enjoying what it has to offer.

I do get that some old people like to keep working because it helps keep them active and the pennies they earn help them out in old age. At 48, I’ve encountered my fair share of ageism and I do make a point that those of us over 45 are employable too. However, when every cleaner you run into happens to be over 65, it’s got to send signals out you that something is very wrong here. You have to ask – who exactly are we building these great facilities for?

Then, I wanted to get a meal and so I thought I would stop by the food court in Terminal 4, which for the record is the newest and swankiest part of the world’s best airport. When I left for Vietnam a week ago, this was the sight I was treated to – everything down to the toilet was magnificent.

 

 However, coming back was a different story. The food court only had a few stalls. Many looked like they had been abandoned for some time:

 

  Even branded stalls like Old Street Ba Ku Te and Paris Baguette looked like they had been closed for a while and nobody was doing anything about it.

 

 

 Now, if there’s a business that is always healthy in Singapore, it’s the food stalls and the only time you see the food stalls closing is either when the place they’re in is a toxic dump where there are hazard signs blocking people from entering.

However, we’re not talking about a toxic dump. We’re talking about the world’s best airport and we make so much noise about how “food” as embodied by our food stalls are an existential part of who we are. Its what we want to show to the world in the place where the world gathers. It makes no sense to me that food stalls are being shut in this place.

The airport will always have business. There are always people in the airport. If rents are high, its because this is “hot” location. It’s the type of place where the you’d expect lots of people fighting to take the slots that are there.

When you see these empty stalls in the airport food court, you can’t help but feel something is wrong. It’s like being in a shinny shell that sicks on the inside and what feeling is enough to make you want to sob on end due to the despair of what you’ve walked into. That’s not what you should feel when you step into what has been consistently the world’s best airport in the world’s shiniest nation.  

When Small Guys Win

 It’s my last full day in Vietnam and I thought I would try and touch on an observation. There are very few fast-food outlets here. In the week I have been in Haiphong, which is officially the third largest city in Vietnam, I have seen all of one Pizza Hut, one Starbucks and one KFC. This is strange because in just about every part of the world you go to, you will find the presence of international food chains featuring very prominently.

I am old enough to remember when McDonald’s opened in places like Moscow, Beijing and New Delhi. They were instant hits in those markets. In Moscow, it was the celebration of the end of the Cold War. In Beijing and Delhi, it was the arrival of prosperity. McDonalds and its cousins have not just conquered the world but played a role in shaping the world as we know it.

Yet, somehow, Vietnam has remained relatively untouched by international fast food. It’s like an anomaly. Walk along the streets and you find that every hole on and in the streets has been turned into a food joint, serving anything from noodles to sandwiches but you will struggle to find a fast food joint. The inability of international chains to penetrate the local market has baffled the global business community, which has grown so used to the power of international brands and their image of “modern (read Western)” lifestyle conquering all before them. Just look at the following link from CNBC:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9pthhpd7So

I am not against multinational fast-food chains. McDonalds and Burger King breakfast were part of my youth. I have fond memories of hash browns from both chains and once in a while, I do crave fries. I also love KFC and do take both the original and spicy flavours.

However, I haven’t been to a fast food joint and spent my own money in sometime. My eureka moment came during the pandemic when I realized that my neighbourhood kopitiam economic rice uncle was feeding me something tastier, healthier and cheaper than the fast-food joints. Yet, despite that, he wasn’t getting much love from the locals. Call it a case of you can take your client out to McDonalds but you can’t to the local economic rice.

It's something I’ve realized as a microenterprise. You can do the job better, faster and cheaper than your multinational competitors but they’re still going to get the love. I think of the one time I got a chance to pitch for a quasi-government job. It took someone who was born elsewhere sitting on the board to push for me to get the chance to pitch. The chairman of this quasi-government organization started of with “Don’t you see being a one-man show as a weakness?”

I am not against multinationals per se. I did work for the likes of GE Commercial Finance and 3M and you when you are in their proximity, you quickly realise that they are where they are for a reason. From a national development point of view, they play a vital role in helping a nation rise by providing capital, know-how and jobs to the local economy. As a matter of disclosure, I had very comfortable childhood as an “expat” kid in Europe because my stepfather was a senior person in a multinational advertising agency.

However, its frustrating when the people in the local market you are operating in are prejudiced against you because you don’t have a brand name from London or New York backing you up. To use the food analogy – McDonalds is where you want to be not the local kopitiam. So, I celebrate being in a place where people would rather support the street side vendor like this one:

 

 Serving a simple bowl of tasty noodles like this, instead of being in the standardized fast-food joint.

 

 In a way, the CNBC clip earlier in this piece, does touch upon a fundamental point. A big brand name does not necessarily mean that you are going to get big brand delivery and there are somethings that the small guy can do which the big guy cannot, due to being big.

Take speed as an example. Fast food is called fast because you’re supposed to get it in a matter of minutes. What the fast-food joints found in Vietnam was the fact that they were not able to deliver a burger to the customer as the local pho shop you could deliver a bowl of noodles.

Then there’s an issue of what you see is what you get. As a matter of disclosure, my dad shot plenty of McDonald’s commercials in his time. The burgers in pictures look juicy. The burger you get is more often than not, well not so juicy. The bowl of noodles is less well hyped but what you get is often exceedingly tasty:

 

 You might argue that I am being unfair to compare burgers with pho. Both are not the same. So, let’s look at coffee, which one might assume is pretty similar wherever you go. The world’s largest coffee chain, Starbucks has struggled to conquer Vietnam, a country with a strong coffee culture:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llwyY4BDbfc

The reasons that have held Starbucks back in Vietnam are similar to the reasons why the burger chains haven’t conquered the market.

Take the central premise of Starbucks – namely the premise that it provides you with a great place to chill over a cup of coffee. The local Phuc Long offers exactly the same thing. For the record, Starbucks was founded in 1971 whilst Phuc Long was founded in 1968, so you can’t claim that Phuc Long is a cheap Vietnamese rip-off of Starbucks.

 

 Local chains do have one advantage that the multinationals don’t have – namely the understanding of the local market and local flavours. McDonalds and Burger King also struggled in the Philippines when they went up against Jollibee, which has since gone international along with the Pinoy diaspora.

In Vietnam, the local chains like Highland Coffee and Bac Viet Coffee are well suited to deal with local taste. One of my favourite discoveries has been coffee flavoured with coconut milk.

 

 Then, there’s the fact that the non-chains offer good coffee and a great place to chill. My morning cup of coffee is down the road from my hotel room. For 20,000 VND (US 84 cents) I get a good cup of coffee and a place to chill. The best part of this place is that it’s a micro-enterprise, with the shop front being downstairs and the owner living on top of the shop.

 

 

There is no doubt that multinationals offer great benefits to any given economy. We live in a world where you do need to compete at world standards rather than local standards. However, it doesn’t mean that multinationals are automatically better than their local SME or micro-enterprise competitors. There are things that the small guy can do that stun the big guy. Governments should woo foreign investment but it should never be at the expense of the SME or micro-enterprises. If anything, they should be encouraging micro-enterprises. Would you rather have a population that gets crushed by foreigners or would you rather have a population that knows how to earn a living off the people you bring in?

Street Carts

 You could call it a stoke of good fortune, but after bashing out a piece on how people on Vietnam’s streets were setting up street stalls to get by, I ended up having to become a patron of the streets. It was a case of my host not feeling well enough to take me out and so I needed to look for my own dinner.

I didn’t really want to go to a place where I had to explain a lot of things in a language I clearly don’t speak. However, the first guy I managed to find a guy who was serving what appeared to be an omelet sandwich, that looked quite appealing. So, gave it try and found that it was amazing. So, I had another one. It wasn’t an omelet in that the outer layer was not an egg but a form of rice paper, which is quite common in the local cuisine.

I guess you could say, for want of a business lesson, is that you should always be selling something fairly unique and the product experience should be enjoyable:

 

 Still felt that I needed something else and found another street cart run by a young lady. There must have been something about my looks, which indicated I was a tourist who doesn’t speak Vietnamese and so she showed that she spoke Mandarin. Managed to order from her cart. Had a sandwich and an ice lemon tea. I guess if there’s a business lesson, it should be the ability to learn another language other than your own because you never know who is going to buy from you.

This cart was strategically placed in front of one of the many karaoke bars in the city, which seem to cater to many Korean tourist. The girls from the bar were sitting outside yelling in Korean to any of the Koreans who would be walking by. The Koreans are the second largest investors in Vietnam (funnily enough, after Singapore) and their presence is enough for K-drama to take up a significant amount of airtime and for there to be plenty of Korean restaurants.

 

There seemed to be a relationship of sorts going on between the cart operator and the staff of the karaoke lounge. The staff turned out to be customers of the cart and you could say that the adage of “location-location-location” even extended to a mobile street cart.

 

Ended the evening at a bar near the hotel and made friends with a German tourist who had lived in Malaysia for a few years. Its amazing what little treasures you can find when you walk the ground.  

Sell or Die

 I’m now in Vietnam for a short trip and I am being reminded of the time that my day job boss made a remark about how I only got a “serious” job at 38. He exclaimed “I don’t know how you survived before that.”

I bring this topic up because, while Vietnam has made great strides economically, it’s still an obviously poor place and I’ve encountered all of two people begging (that’s from three days of this trip and three other weekly trips in the last decade). For the most part, the place is filled with micro-enterprises where someone turns a hole in a building into a shop selling something or other.

 

 These guys are the answer to how I survived before I got a serious job. They are also what you call the unknown reason as to why people become entrepreneurs. For me, I ended up as a “free-lance entrepreneur” because I didn’t have a choice. I had to do something to put money in the pocket. I had burnt out and crashed after my first job in a fly-by-night agency, which worked me the most ridiculous hours. It didn’t help that the girl I was with at the time decided that my job was her jealous competitor and would either call up crying or stalk me in the office. The average lifespan of someone in my job was three weeks (including the two week notice period) and I somehow managed to last four-months.

However, when I went to look for other jobs, people didn’t see me as someone with four and half months of experience. They saw me as someone who quit too easily and given that there was a recession in 2001 and the advertising and PR industry had been hit, I wasn’t exactly anyone’s favourite choice to get hired.

A friend from university days then suggested that rather than look for someone to pay me a salary, I might as well go straight to the source of the money – the client. I remember my first client being a Holistic Living festival. Made all of $400 from the job and then I picked up a client called Tempur, who made the most expensive but the most interesting sleep materials.

I spent slightly over a decade freelancing. I did have spells in agencies but somehow got myself fired after four months. I did try to teach and ended up resigning because I dreaded the bureaucracy involved (I am allergic to “committee meetings” and I can say with some pride that I never have been and never will be involved with committees again). Somehow, I managed to last a decade with no agency experience in an industry that only “respects” industry experience.

One of the most fundamental questions that I was consistently asked during that period was “why can’t you get a proper job?” If I think back, I guess my answer was simple – no one wants to hire me (at the time I had a very patchy work history) and so I have no choice but to hire myself.

Now, I failed to build anything resembling a business. However, I will make the point that the path of entrepreneurship isn’t a conscious choice. There are a few too many self-help books telling you that you are either an employee or an entrepreneur. Then, you live in Singapore, you get a government that believes that entrepreneurship is nothing more than a fancy word to show that you’re trendy and I do get the feel that the government tends to see entrepreneurship something it can offer the citizens as an alternative career.

Truth be told, entrepreneurship is not for everyone. Too many people talk about it as the only way to get rich but ignore the fact that most of the journey an entrepreneur makes is long, hard work and the opposite of financially rewarding. Not everyone is cut out for that.

However, that being said, there may not be a choice for an increasing number of us. The tech lay offs should be a very good indicator for many of us that the concept of a steady job isn’t so steady anymore.

It’s even if worse if you happen to be over 45 and some bureaucrat in the accounts department in New York or London sees you as a costs to the CEO’s bonus. You can get culled and unfortunately, we live in a world where the HR department is not going to look at your “loyalty” or “skills and experience” but what you’re costing the company. An increasing number of HR departments look at a guy with skills and the fresh graduate with no skills and figure out that its cheaper to hire the fresh graduate and train him or her with the skills than to keep the old timer.

So, an increasing number of us have to understand that we’re not going to have income security. We need to understand that we have to have something to sell regardless of our employment status. It’s as simple as sell or die.

Governments talk about economic growth. Individuals need to talk about survival. Sure, at certain stages you may get a hand out. However, that won’t last forever. Always look for something to sell.

When you’re in entrepreneurship mode, you stop looking at defending your turf and look for various angles to get something from a situation. For example, if you lose out on a job, do you sit there and complain about how unfair life is or do you find a way of getting something from the guy who got the job?

An increasing number of working professionals will need to understand that they have to think like the food vendors on Vietnamese streets. Governments and corporations from elsewhere will not rescue you. The only choice is to always have something to sell or die.

The Nature of Progress

 Call it a freaky coincidence if you like but I happened to run into one of Mr. Calvin Cheng’s sayings around the time of the anniversary of Exercise Swift Lion, which took the life of a dear friend and one of his men in Wairau, New Zealand back in 1997, when the barrel of the 155mm Gun Howitzer he was commanding exploded, killing him and the layer instantly.

Mr. Cheng, being the “interesting” character that he is, decided to add fuel onto the fire of a very real and contentious issue – namely the ability or rather that grim reality that most of us are simply going to have to work till the day we die.

 

 Why do I say that it was coincidence for Mr. Cheng’s words to strike at a time when the guys in my national service batch remember an incident that cut down one of our own? I believe Mr. Cheng actually has a point. Let’s not talk about retirement – the very concept of longevity should be a privilege and not a right. If nature had a way, we’d all have died of a disease or been picked off by a predator. Ancient societies revered old (which was defined as anyone over 40) because they had done what they were not supposed to – they survived despite the odds.

However, what nature intended and what is natural are two different things. Back in the cave ages, I’d be revered for making it to 48. Today, I’m wondering how I am going to spend the rest of the 40 plus years I may have left. Short of a freak accident, I’m probably going to see the decline of my body and mind and somehow, what little I have left in my bank is going to have to last.

Believe it or not – this is progress. Some of the best brains in history have struggled to find ways to ensure that we are able to live as long as we can. The only predators that humans face these days are other humans and most diseases can be cured. Just look at how quickly it got us to find the vaccine for Covid.

There are even silver linings in the historically low fertility rates that developed countries are seeing. There’s a reason why people are not having babies like they used to. Women, or the people who actually carry the babies are discovering other things that give them fulfilment and although people are not having babies, the ones that do get born are almost certain to see adulthood and to live well into their old age.

Longevity is no longer a sign that you have learnt the secret art of defying nature. Today, its understood that people who live relatively prosperous and stable societies will live to see their 80^th birthday.

Given that we’ve turned longevity into a normal thing, it should go without saying that we also need to find solutions for the side effects. Retirement is one of them. Sure, at one time, the concept of retirement may have been privilege because it meant that you had defied the odds to live despite nature. Now, the situation has changed (or at least it has since the Bronze Age). Living a long life is part of the natural order and having the means to live that said life should also be part of the natural order of things.

Whilst Mr. Cheng may have secret fantasies of living in the Jurassic Age, I believe most of us would rather not. We, as a race, have made great strides and should continue to look forward to greater progress. Mr. Cheng should keep his fantasies of the Jurassic Age to himself.

Strange Dreams

 Something unusual happened today. I actually put on proper pants and a new shirt to go to work. Boss told me that we were meeting an important prospect and I needed to dress up. So, instead of the usual jeans and black t-shirt, it was pants, shirt and jacket.

 

I once dreamed of going to work like this all day

Having to “dress up” was a surreal experience. I remember my student days when I actually dreamed about working in a profession that needed me to the suited up. I was quite specific in my ambitions back then. Wanted to be an assistant vice-president at Citibank by the time I reached 30. Wanted to be married to a Chinese General’s daughter (or at least someone who looked like Joan Chen in the Last Emperor) and have a load of kids who would be fluent in Mandarin and Cantonese (I communicate in both very badly and am Chinese illiterate) as well as English.

Well, I achieved part of my goal. I am now well over 30 and its very clear that I’m not about to work in a bank or any high flying corporate job. If anything, I try to down play things. Yes, I had a few glorious moments but these things are well in the past. Sure, I haven’t achieved anything I am particularly proud of since 2014 when I joined office-land. My greatest achievement working in office land has been to avoid doing violence to its residents and burning paper files, which seem to be generated for the sake of it. When I go for client meetings, I make it a point to let people know that the boss is the clever one, whilst I am merely a carrier of boxes.

One might ask why I’ve developed a preference for doing the muscle work and a paranoia of having to do “clerk” work in my late forties. Part of the reason. I guess, is simple. I’ve reached the age where I can accept certain things are not for me and to be at ease with it. My priority is now peace of mind.

Sure, I will probably need to work to the day I die and so I will need a job of sorts. However, I don’t want things that will screw up my wellbeing and to stay active. The doctors have made it clear that after nearly four-decades of too much food, booze and exercise that daily exercise for the rest of my life is no longer negotiable.

So, I volunteer for the task that require me to do lots of walking and staying active because non-exercise thermogenesis (NEAT) is one of the best ways to keep the heart pumping. I avoid being in the office and doing paper work because I don’t need the drama associated with them.

It’s not that I don’t like dressing up. I will, especially when I still get invites to diplomatic functions or attend court as part of my day job. There are certain places that do need to be respected with your personal dressing. Don’t get me wrong, I would love to fly first class or even private jet and stay in presidential suites. However, that’s just a nice experience. The real joy is spending time learning about a new place or simply being with loved ones.

I enjoy the things money can buy but I don’t believe it’s essential to sell your soul to someone else’s ideal. I don’t need to be a uniform to say that I work in a certain job that gives me a certain status just like I proudly lost my degree certificate because I don’t need a piece of paper to tell you I’m educated – that should be clear from what little manners I have.

The future at 50 looks different from 20. At 50, you know that the future comes soon enough and you got to prepare for it. I’m trying to be healthy because I’m going to need to generate an income till the day I die, so I got to be healthy to do that. I’m also going to need clarity and simplicity of expectation. There’s no point killing yourself to impress people who wouldn’t bat an eyelid the moment your coffin hits the crematorium.