Do Not Let Your Innerlight Snuffed Out

To the frustrated,

You may have difficulty waking up in the morning and wondered what lies ahead. Everything seems bleak and no one in the world seems to care. I know, I have been through it and I am going through it. There are thoughts of regrets, remorse, revenge, self pity and even suicide. You know what? Those feelings are normal.

Take a deep breath and start breathing. Pay attention to your breathing. Fill your lung with air and let it out gently by emptying your lung. You are still alive. Take stock of what you have, write down five things that you are grateful for. Think and thank the people who has helped you in the past.

Are you drinking? Cut those out now. You do not need any form of alcohol. Alcohol affects your thinking and your sleep. You need to think clearly and sleep well. What is over is over. You cannot change the past, you cannot predict the future. Now is the most important time. Think about what is the outcome that you want to achieve. Do not wish. If you wish for something, you are expecting someone else to do the heavy lifting for you. At this point in your life, you have to take charge and figure out what to do. Set a goal, look at the goal and write down your options and action items.

Write down your options. Finished? Write down some more.  Finished? Write down even more. Go through the list. Some are down right bad ideas, cross those off. Filter through the ideas and short list the best ones. Is it done? No, not really.

Find a mentor, find someone whom you can trust and give you an honest feedback. Talk to this person, discuss the issues and talk about your ideas. Do not expect the person to give you any action items. No. You have to take ownership of your action items. At best the mentor can only tell you what is their opinion and assign a timeline for your action items.

During this period, make sure you eat well, sleep well, stay active and spending enough time with your love ones. No TV, no idle surfing the net and no gossip. Clinch every moment you have and work on your goal. Review your action items and talk to your mention as you progress.

Will things get better? Of course not! You will encounter more frustrations and set backs as you move towards your goal. Failure is because you have tried. Frustration is because you are doing something different. Keep going and keep moving.

What if you do not have the sufficient knowledge or resource to make things happen? Read and reach out into the internet. Chances are your problems is nothing new, someone must have encountered it. Read and learn as much as possible. People can bring you down and take away your possessions. However, they cannot take away what you know. To be competitive, you just need to know a little bit more than your competitor.

The hard truth about life, all these will come to an end. Nothing stays forever. Sorrow and setback will come to an end, so is happiness too. Hang on there and stay strong.

Kind regards,
Simon.

Do You Know Your Business Partner?

Before you answer the question, re-read the title of the blog again. Your quality of your business is only as good as your supplier. I have already mentioned this in my previous writeup.The quality of your business partner is also important. Some readers might roll their eyes and say this is a no brainer. Yes! It is a no brainer, but the risk of business partner messing up is very real.

Few days ago, I got a call from client whom we worked on a restaurant project. The client asked me to help him to secure a supply of cooking gas for his restaurant. In Malaysia, cooking gas comes in giant canisters. It seems that he could not count on his chef to have the cooking gas delivered to the restaurant! This client was traveling as such he was not able to monitor the delivery.

What I did was straight forward, I called the chef making sure he is in the restaurant to take the delivery, call the supplier to arrange the delivery. I do not make any money out from this incident but there are some lessons can be learned.

The client should have been able to make delivery arrangements with the supplier before he travels. Cooking gas is the lifeline for any restaurant. It is also the single point of failure to the business should the restaurant runs out of cooking gas. Incident such as this is good for my business to built up the relationship with the client and supplier, but it is not healthy for the client when the business lifeline is out of their control.

I find it hard to accept the fact that chef is not capable in reaching out to the supplier. As a chef he should have ultimate control over the kitchen. The chef's conviction towards the restaurant is now being questioned. There is just no excuse for the chef on not following up on important issues such as ensuring the supplier of cooking gas. With a business partner who is not motivated, other business partner has to work harder to fill the deficit. In the long run, the business partnership will ultimately tear itself apart.

Starting a business and sharing the same dream is very easy. The willingness is to wake up from the dream and make things into reality is difficult. Choose your business partners carefully. If it not working out, shut it down.

Watch Your Suppliers

Recently, my business suffered from a string of complains with one of our cabinets. Through a series of investigation and conversation, we learned that the complains tend to focus on the same company that supplies the cabinet.

We selected this supplier was based upon its willingness to experiment and learn. Our investigation shows that they are only able to do small scale project. As the project scope increases, their resources are stretched to the point where they are not able to maintain consistency with the product qualities.

Being the contractor, we could have taken the easy way out by cutting off this supplier.  Rather we have decided to continue working with this supplier with smaller scale project and probably other products. Before taking any drastic actions, we have to ask ourselves why we pick this supplier from the first place. If the supplier are able to hold on to the value where we first selected them, we believe in second chance. Moreover, we all make mistakes. If both of us can learn from it, it only strengthen our working relationship and improve we can offer to our customers.

To many, they may not agree to what we are doing now. Especially in a business environment where perceived to be no loyalties and honor. As for now, we are not willing to cut him lose, unless not yet.

We want to:

• Grow together with the supplier. Come up with the best product that we can offer, at the most reasonable price. 
• Leverage from the supplier's expertise and network.
• Built a portfolio of good suppliers where we are able to quickly gather resources and take action should any good opportunity arises.

The quality of work/ services that you can provide to your customer has a direct correlation with the supplier's quality. Therefore, hang on to your suppliers and treat them with care.

Cleaning Up The To-Read List

I love reading. The source of materials that I read comes from webpages, books, newspapers, and magazines. Normally I would read digital books and webpages from my Samsung Galaxy Note 2 phone. The screen size is just perfect to carry around and read while waiting. Whenever I come across webpages that I wanted to save for later reading, I would use the Evernote tool to save the webpage for later reading.

One of my biggest challenge is sorting out my reading materials. Around the house and my office desk, I have all kinds of half and to read materials. The same goes to my digital reading materials as well. As I accumulate more reading materials, it has become overwhelming. I see books and magazines everywhere and I would get distracted by some other reading materials as I am just reading through whatever that was in my palm.

I have spend the weekend trying to get myself back in order and free up some space in the house. The first thing that I did was to put all my reading materials into one location in the house. In this case, that would be my study room. I have to fight the temptation to procrastinate the clean up whenever I pick up something that catches my interest at that time. Without any thoughts I just want to pile all the notes, books, magazines and newspaper clipping into one area.

With all the reading materials laying in one central location. I look at my short term and long term goals. The goals will be the basis of how I should sort out the reading materials. For example, I have given up hope on learning how to code. Those programming books goes straight to the donation bin. I am still trying to aim to be certified as a PMP practitioner. Those materials will stay and pile together. For those really long term goals such as learning French, I would put those aside on the "maybe" pile. During the sorting process, I have to be ruthless. Whatever reading materials which I have not touch for more than a year, it is lightly that I will not need it again. Those goes into the donation bin. During clean up, I have found old prints that the ink has stuck the papers together already.

After shredding a bag full of papers and stashed two boxes of books and magazines. My reading list now is more manageable. My short term goal reading materials will be sitting next to my desk, while my long term goal reading materials are kept in the bookshelf. The "maybe" books will be in the storeroom.

The idea is to keep all the books in their respective locations. I will not simply put my books around the house. Whenever I need a break from the book, it has to go back to the same place where I took it. When I finish with the reading materials, I would either consider to be filed, shredded or given away. By doing so, this helps me to keep the house in order as well as making sure I get the necessary reading done and not get distracted.

If I have better ways to manage your reading materials, do share! Remember though, books can only give you knowledge and not wisdom.

Decluterring

The last two weeks, my house is being renovated. The plan was to tear down the whole kitchen and put in another one. The rest of my apartment will then get a new coat of paint. The last time that my house did anything this major was 10 years ago. As the renovation progress, I would need to move furniture around and put stuffs away to make way for the workers to do their job. It only begin to dawn to me that I actually have accumulated a lot of stuffs through the years. Camera bags alone, I have counted four! One brand new backpack and a brand new computer notebook bag. There were also files and notes that I have collected for "future reference" that has never arise. As such, I have taken the opportunity to declutter my life. First I separate my stuffs based on its functions. For examples, books and notes will be piled together. Bags will be piled together etc. I do it one room at a time. In each pile I will go through one item at a time. I ask myself when is the last time I have used or needed that item. If is more than 12 months ago, chances are I will not be needing it anymore. It either goes into the donation pile or to sell pile. By just going through that activity, I have thrown away most of my old notes and gave some of my stuffs away.The exercise is not easy at all. I have to ask myself this question whether do I really need it. Or I just keeping it for nostalgic reasons or creating a false sense of security. If the item is hardly ever used, chances are it is not needed anymore. For the stuffs that I need, I will separate it into three categories. The ones that I use regularly, use at least once every three months, every six months and finally every 12 months. The more frequent ones will be kept in a more handy area, while the ones that are lesser used will be kept in storage. I have to be honest, chances are the ones that are kept in storage will ended staying there for a long time until I decide to clean it out again... Another tip which I think is great to have is the One In One Out policy. For every item that we buy or bring into the house, I should also dispose something from the house. If this does not reduce the clutter, at least it maintains the clutter does not get worst. We actually have more things that we actually need. Clean out your stuffs today! Believe me, the energy within the room is better and whole house breath better too.

An Hour with Jim Collins

I am a fan of Jim Collins. My first book was Good to Great. Now I am reading Great by Choice. If you want to spent the next hour learning something. Check out the four videos below.

 

  

A Thought About Employee Empowerment

Over the weekend, I took my family to visit a newly opened theme park. One of the rides that we were waiting had a problem and has to be shut down. At that point of time, we have already waited for at least 40 minutes in the line.

I started to notice problems when other park visitors are walking against the line leaving the ride area. The family have to hear the news about the breakdown of the ride through other park visitors. At that time, no announcement was made nor any park attendants were to be seen. By the time, an announcement was made. The announcement was made over the blaring Christmas music where I can hardly make out what was being said.

At the moment of that crisis, the theme park does not have any leadership at the local level to take charge of the situation. In any business and organization, empowering employee to take charge in an usual situation is very important. Imagine, if the situation is not a breakdown but a small fire. It would have caused a stampede. In a production line, if there is any problem employees are expected to resolve the problem while making reports or suggestions to the local leadership.

The management should be able to nurture employees to show initiative and willing to take charge. One of the main root cause of the unwillingness is the fear of failure and getting into trouble. Problems are not like wine, it does not get any better through time. Employees are expected to take charge and solve the problem as soon as possible. Whether the initiative is success or not, employees should be given the credit for trying.

As organizations are getting flatter and less hierarchy. It is important for employees to have a sense of belonging and understand the amount of influence they have towards the company. Gone are the days of lets wait for instruction. If it is the right thing to do, employee should go ahead and do it.