“I Used that to My Advantage – Them Being Big and Me Being Who I am” – Mike Tyson

 

One of my favourite characters in my life is a girl called Zen, or Fleshball. Zen was, for a long time, Singapore’s proudest prostitute. She survived on the streets on Geylang and wasn’t shy about out it. This was particularly true when it came to former cops. Most girls who work in the business are weary of being spotted by ex-cops. Zen, would approach them and exclaim, “you look familiar – I know you.”

One of the best things about Zen is that God looks aren’t her strong point. At one stage, she was so fat that she waddled instead of walked. There’s something almost baby like about her. Yet, despite that, she remains super confident than better educated, better looking professional middle class women have been intimidated by her. My ex-girlfriend, who happened to be from Raffles Girls School (RGS), NUS School of Architecture and was the former head of marketing for Haymarket Publications in Beijing and Shanghai, actually got visibly jealous of her or as Zen said “Slimmer than me – but still jealous of me – never mind, I’ll teach her how to use make up.”  

I bring up the topic of Zen because of all the people I know, she’s the one person who remains a middle finger to the established order and established thinking, which is precisely what Singapore needs. I’ve argued that whilst Singapore is on paper, ticking along nicely, cracks are starting to appear in the system. Our government, which ranks as one of the least corrupt in the world, has seen a corruption scandal at ministerial level, something which no one would ever have imagined. You got to ask yourself – “what’s going on?”

The answer is simple – we grew so addicted to the playbook of the 1960s that we forgot that the world was actually changing and old paradigms are becoming less relevant. In a twist to “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” story, nobody is allowed to point out that the magnificent gowns are less so and that the emperor is going to be stark raving nude.

Take our great “tiger” economy. We are officially one of four nations that went from swamp to wealth in a generation. In the case of Singapore, the government argued that this was only possible because the government controlled everything. Instead of a public and private sector, Singapore has a government owned and government-controlled sector.

Anyone else in between the government owned and government controlled got crushed as being a nuisance. I think of our media scene, where SPH, the government-controlled owner of the print and MediaCorp, the government-owned, owner of the broadcast could actually get the government to remonopolise the media based on the argument that Singapore was “Too small for competition.” They got so cozy that they’d spend their time arguing over whether readership was better than viewership without realizing that the paying audiences were losing interest in both and advertisers noticed.

So, instead of making the monopoly players wake up to reality and face competition from smaller online players giving the market what it wanted, our pro-business government decided to bailout the big players and cripple the smaller players with laws like POFMA.

The business scene has followed the maxim of “God on the side of Big Battalions.” Instead of ensuring underdogs don’t get crushed, the system actively goes out of its way to make life difficult for anyone with the audacity to challenge the established players. Hence, super scale scholars get more. People like Zen are not expected to survive until election time. The fact that someone like Zen has the audacity to survive is an act of giving the middle finger to a system that sees underdogs as an inconvenience.

So, what can people who are not part of the established order do to survive? The standard answer is that you lie down and be grateful for the crumbs. But what happens to when you the establishment does not want to give you crumbs?

Again, I don’t have any real answers. However, I got interested in a YouTube video when someone made the point to Mike Tyson, former world heavyweight champion, who he beat bigger men. His point was that he used the fact that he wasn’t the bigger guy to his advantage:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmJJK7Ac4Fk

 

 Think about it, Mr. Tyson wasn’t the biggest guy in the ring but he was the most devastating. He terrified larger men and the fights were often over before they started. How did he do it?

There’s something that our entrepreneurs need to take note of in the domestic market. Big players can be beaten and quite often, their biggest strength is their biggest weakness (the fact that they are the big player). Look at the media industry as an example. Both SPH and MediaCorp had the backing of the government and resources. Yet, this became a handicap as viewers and readers wanted something that didn’t seem like a government mouth rag. Like Mr. Tyson, the online media in Singapore has used the fact that its not big to its advantage. Entrepreneurs and small business owners should take note.