Gary Teh

Mavericks are by definition unorthodox or independent-minded people [source:wikipedia]

In my opinion they are a scarcity forming a 20% of the total population.

Today on the way home, I recalled one of the first conversations I had with Johnson years ago. It happened in the car on the way to a restaurant along Bukit Timah Road when he popped me this question “what do you do with Mavericks if you are building a business system?”

“Use them?” I replied.

“No! Wrong. You fire them.” was his reply. “A business system is like any other machine, for a machine to work the way it should, each and every part within the machine should function in the manner that its been designed to be. Mavericks should never be deployed within such machines. Their existance in such machines whilst increases the potential profitability by a 100%, increases your risk by a 100% as well. Managers are different. Though they might not increase potential profitability substantially, they are predictable. If deploying them in a system consistantly generates an increased profitability of 10% on a yearly basis, so be it. Investors that park money in your business are not gamblers, what they are looking for is consistant rates of returns on investment. A business is a system that generates a consistant in flow of cash over time. For an operation to conform to the definition of being a business, the operation must first be well defined and predictable.”

I was young then and being rather rebellious, I considered myself a maverick. While I remembered his advice, I could not find real application to it.

In retrospection now, while attempting to draft up the business plan of my web consulting company, the wisedom of his words dawned on me. The backfiring I experienced recently attempting to delegate an entire project to a maverick did help with my learning of this lesson.

Yesterday, during lunch, we had roasted duck from the stall. Both my parents were commenting that today’s duck was better than usual. My dad further said that if only the quality of the duck was as good everyday, then business will be really good.

That was when this conversation between me and my dad started. Why is it that the quality of hamburgers produced in McDonalds, an international food chain, remain so consistant across geography and time, whilst the quality of ducks roasted in just one single factory vary so much on a day to day basis? Dad stated the quality of the duck roasting has a high reliance on the quality of work by the master chef.

As the conversation soon turned to my talk about the former Johnson Duck franchise in Singapore. My dad further recounted his experience with one of the staff he employed in his stall whom he treated really well, but whom ended up stealing from him. Mom further added to the conversation by stating this employee was not the first setback he experienced. There were many others before this employee. The most common case was that they leave as soon as they mastered his craft and became instead his competitor. These happened during the days when he was still roasting duck himself. My dad eventually gave up on expanding his business after experiencing multiple of such set backs. He concluded that finding capable people for the job is really based on kharmic cause and effect, something beyond his control.

This was when I shifted my focus back to Mcdonalds again. I stated to him my total disagreement. If one of the essential factors contributing to the success of a business is the need for capable people and finding capable people for the job is based on kharmic cause and effect, something beyond the control of man, then multi national giants like Mcdonalds, KFCs and Subways should not have even came into existance in the first place. I further argued stating I do not see any elites working in the Mcdonald’s restaurant I visited. In fact, most of the people working in these restaurants are semi retired people, just happy enough to get a job and an hourly salary that is close to minimum wage. Mcdonalds is in fact a business system built with zero reliance on mavericks.

I recall suddenly one of the key things taught during my days in NUS doing my technoprenuership minor then, something which David KK Kwan mentioned the other day. “Is the core activity within a business Art or Craft?”

Businesses that tend towards Art have a high reliance on mavericks, since the nature of the business has a high level of ambiguity involved. Attempting to maintain the quality and integrity of the output while scaling up the volume of such a business type will be difficult due to extensive reliance on mavericks. This is if it is possible at all to find and retain enough mavericks from the job market.

Businesses that tend towards craft have low reliance on mavericks, since a craft is essentially an activity based on a formula or recipe and all participants who follow the same directions end up with roughly the same results every time. Scaling up a craft based business will not concurrently compromise quality and integrity of output. Due to the low reliance on mavericks, human resources to fill up positions in this business system are easily available.

I started analyzing the problem that has been plaguing my dad for most parts of his career and that one similar instance I had encountered a short while ago. This time I used Robert Kiyosaki’s framework of the E/S/B/I

E – employee

S – self employed

B – Business owner

I – investors

The problem both me and my dad faced belongs to the S quadrant in Robert Kiyosaki’s framework. A self employed person in his attempt to scale up his business inevitably creates another self employed person. Ironically instead of successfully scaling up his business, he instead creates for himself another competitor in the long run. His business never scales up as a result. Instead he becomes the system. The day he stops working is the day, he stops making money.

As I verbally brought my train of thought to its logic conclusion, realization dawned on both me and my dad. “Yeah you are right son” he stated.

“Dad you spent your life time before realizing this, I learned from your experience came to this realization myself today having committed this error only once.”

“Good son, keep on pushing it. This is the true business way.”

Mmmm.. I nodded in agreement.

At the back of my mind, I was glad I had not wasted too much time training another possible self employed type.

In conclusion, all the operations aspects of the new business model must be so refined, nothing is left to art and everything depended on craft. I will no longer waste my time training mavericks into self employed. The requirements of a stable business model dictates that it should continue to function properly even in the absence of mavericks.

Ultilization of mavericks should thus only be restricted to the ideation phase of a new business venture creation. Furthermore for these mavericks to even be of use to an ideation phase of a new business venture creation they must be domain experts in fields related to the new business venture creation. When the new business venture is launched, these mavericks will not be allowed involvement in the operation aspects of the business venture unless they are themselves shareholder of the venture. In the event they have no shareholder stake in the venture, they will be only engaged periodically as external consultants.

Contrary to general perception that learning actually stops once a person graduates from the university, over the course of the past three years, I realized learning for me actually intensified as I departed further and further away from the path that was set in the system for people like me and around me. A safe and secured path that is well defined as it is travelled upon.

This departure was first born as a possible notion and alternative in my mind. As years went by it grew into a belief, later a perception, thereafter an attitude, and finally a natural disposition. This translated into its external counter part a tendency towards a certain life style. It is the life style that I am living right this moment today.

The fact that I was no longer restricted by the rigid curriculums imposed by school systems to produce workers ready to fill up job positions in our societal system, and the fact that I drop out from the natural path of search for a secured job and opt instead to take an uncharted path, meant I was free to explore all matter of subjects and topics.

Quite alot of these topics will never be taught in school. There are two main reasons. Firstly, it is not be economically viable to craft up a curriculum to officially teach these lessons. Secondly, due to the very nature of certain topics, learning is impossible without experiencing it first hand.

Knowlegdge on the first group of topics can be gleaned off books and most lately the internet.  Knowledge on the second group of topics comes through a four step process, observation, contemplation, recognition and lastly acquisition.

While I do often spend time observing and there after contemplating, the recognition stage is to me a pretty tough one. This is most especially when I do not know what I do not know. However the fact that the path I am pursuing goes not in a circle, makes it is inevitable my journey brings me to realms hitherto unexplored and meet people from backgrounds I would have otherwise little chance of encoutering much less interact with.

It is precisely these random people I meet during my journey that point out my blind spots to me, done so during the course of coversations.

So in essence, what I know today is either gleaned from books, recognized and thereafter acquired or crowd sourced.

The crowd sourcing of knowledge can in fact be further intensified through what I call a master mind group. When I was young kid and watching cartoons, I had the initial understanding that a master mind was a person. Later through Lawrence and thereafter Napolean Hill, I came to the understanding that a master mind is in fact not just a person but a group of people pooling their physical resources and brain power towards the achievement of a common goal be it physical or meta physical.

The master mind as a concept is not in fact a new one, Johnson once said during one of our dinners together that said the warlords and leaders in China during the fuedal age see cultivation of personal virtue as extermely important. Such virtue in combindation with material wealth attracts around themselves men of talent. This group of men together form the mastermind group.

During military campaigns, battles are won or lost precisely due to the strength of the mastermind group which directly affect the quality of the tactics developed for war fare.

Liu Bei by his virtue attracted and acquired Guan Yu, Zhang Fei and Zhao Yun capable generals in war and thereafter Zhuge Liang a strategist capable of military deploying, thereafter generals Huang Zhong and Ma Chao. This formed the core and foundation of the Liu Bei’s mastermind group and enabled him to setup the Western Shu dynasty.

Emperor Tan Taizong in his attempt to strenghten his empire retained the service of Chancellors Wang Gui and Wei Zheng. Frequent debates between Wang Gui and Wei Zheng as well as honest critique on the emperor himself provided valuable critical insights which lead to the setup of a dynastic system that remain solid and firm for the next 500 years.

While reading this new book on the internal functioning of the Boston Consulting Group, I was not in fact surprised such a practise was adopted as well.

I have over the course of the past few years in my path been part of a few master mind groups. I am starting to have the belief that in order grow this current business I am working on to the kind of scale, it is important to start forming a master mind around the core of this business.

My binary testing result shows that there exist a critical threshold on the frequency of automated postings in Twitter which demarcates user perception on a piece of information between spamming and insignificant useful information.

Applying the Law of Entrophy to this equation, we define each hour non-activity in terms of no tweet as  a 0, and each hour of activity in terms of one tweet as a 1. Our objective is to determine the minimum amount of 0s to preced a 1, before that 1 can be perceived as a significant piece of useful information and thus not a spam.

The first configuration with the pattern 001 resulted in an average follower acquisition rate of +1/week. The current rate with the patter 00000000000000000000001 (23×0 + 1×1) resulted in an increase in average follower acquisition rate of +5/day.

I will leave this second pattern for the next two weeks before reducing a 0 from the pattern. Thereafter I will measure the average follower acquisition rate.

After yesterday evening’s session with David and Gabriel, I adopted David and Gabriel’s methodology and started crafting up my own business plan too. Thus far I am already 9 pages into the document. This document when finally completed will cover all aspects of my business operations down to the finest details. Major components of this document will include company mission, marketing, sales, operations, finance, human resourcing, accounting and directions for future expansion.

I have managed to uncover quite a few forms of which format I will need to draft and redraft clearly. This will ease the delegation of specific processes within this business model out to the eventual employees that will be engaged to fulfil the various task as well as communications between employees. Also I have managed to identify specific areas of hiccups that will happen within the various processes within this business model and have already crafted counter measures to alleviate these problems.

As I progress further along in the developement of this business plan, I will be able to gain clarity on all aspects of the business. If done correctly and properly, the final picture that will be painted in the financial section will give me a clear picture of the financing requiring for the daily operation of this business model, the feasible rate of growth possible and last but not the least the ROI. The document should also provide me with a clear picture of the configurations I will need in each project team (which I will term a cell) as well as the fixed cost in sustaining a cell.

Already in the first 9 pages of my documents, I could clearly identify specific portions of my business process that could be consolidated into a clear concrete role for an employee to be delegated to a human resource located off shore.

The way I see it, the more I am able to document in details the processes that will occur within my business model, the more predictability and less ambiguity there will be. This is translate into less difficulty when it comes to the task of work delegation by me to my future employees.

From Johnson, the 3 important elements of success are as follows:

1. Critical Thinking
   • the ability to intellectually discern the thin fine line between factors that do and do not contribute to and success and failure of a plan. (A point illustrated clearly in the book the Outliers and partially in the book the Black Swan)
2. People Management Skills
   • The ability to provide clarity of direction and motivation to men on a mission towards obtaining a common goal.
3. Salesmanship
   • the ability to identify, through correspondance, the pains felt by a business, communicate the nature of the problem that is causing the pain to the business owner and provide a feasible solution to the rectify the cause of the problem.

From David during his talk with Gabriel, he said something important which was stressed by Robert Kiyosaki himself. It was the need to create a business system when attempting to start a business and not in the process become part of the system itself.

David provided further elaboration on this rule by stating he maintains a folder which documents his entire business model and all processes down to the finest detail. In essence, this allows him to truly turn his business into a self sustaining socio system which frees him up from its daily running.

Another important insight gained is the importance of segregating the execution phase from the planning phase. What I will need to do from here on is to continue working on my business plan document which I personally refer to as my company’s Standard Operating Procedure.

Gabriel during his two exercises, one with me and the other with another participant emphasizes the need to put heart and soul behind actions. What he forgot to mention was that, while attempting to get us to carry out certain actions to illustrate the importance of heart and soul, he also showed us the proper technique required to carry out the certain action so as to achieve in a high success rate.

David emphasized the need to avoid being overbearing (arrogant), stubborn and ignorant traits exhibited by business owners that are often caught in the cycle of busyness instead of being true business owners. It is also important to maintain a humble, open minded disposition. Wisedom is something that is strongly emphasized but nothing was mentioned about the methods of obtaining wisedom. Taking an intuitive leap, I am of the opinion that wisedom is a by product that accumulates through the constant application of humility and open mindedness in our everyday life.

The both of them mentioned 4 important questions which has often been posed to us by Venture Capitalist during our Start Up Singapore competition and by our lecturers during our Technopreneurship class in NUS.

1. Can an idea be born
2. Can an idea make money
3. How long is the expected life expectancy of an idea
4. Why am I the person to carry out the idea.

To question 4 David did provide his own answer to why he is a business coach.

1. He is both left brained and right brained. The way his brain works allows him to consider problems from both angles. (This coincided with my discussion with Pasha two weeks ago on the importance of divergence and convergent intelligence )

In my own business plan, I will attempt to answer this 4 questions as well.

Unknowingly, I have recently acquired for myself a strange hobby. I have started feeling each individual venue within Singapore boring. However the island as a whole seem still a some what interesting and scenic place.  Hence while it is excruciating to take in each individual spot within Singapore by itself, taking in the whole of Singapore at once still seems pleasant. As such, it is quite often I hop on to random public buses behind my house and sit in the front seats of these buses from one end of the island to the other. I would read a book during such occasions. Occasionally I would lift my eyes off these books to enjoy the passing scenery or when the passengers around me get to rowdy.

This afternoon during my reading session on board bus 196, I had the most surreal feeling. I felt as though I past through 4 different worlds during the ride.

The first world found within the book which I happened to be reading at the moment by Catherine Lim called “Miss Seetoh in the world”. This world was intermittenly disrupted by the two other worlds which past through my physical side one after the other.

The protagonist in the first world was a woman named Miss Seetoh a fictional female character living at the threshold hold between the Singapore governed by the traditional values handed down from our fore father’s country and the new values constantly being imported by our media and the government. Catherine was being satirically critical of the current reigning Singapore government in this piece of work. This was expressed in Miss Seetoh’s words, thoughts and actions.

The family from the second world soon came and occupied the seat beside mine. Their rowdiness successfully disrupted my experience of the first world. I hence put aside the world of Miss Seetoh and plunged fully into this world of the family and studied them as I would any character in a narrative story.

First and foremost, I felt really annoyed by the voice of this boy who must be on the brink of puberty. As with all boys on the brink of puberty, myself not an exception, his voice was broken in a manner that made him sound like a total transvestite. I recalled myself then, due to my impatience at my lack of ability to fully control my voice faculties, loathing to speak during this period of my life when the voice box was unstable and my voice broke often.

There was something I found really intriguing during this episode between the kid and the father. The father was trying to cajoule the kid into accepting his way of thinking while the boy was simply not interested in the least but was nevertheless read like an open book by his dad. Strangely, during my younger days, I got myself in and out all sorts of trouble behind my parents’ back never once letting them in this life I have on the outside except on a few occasions when things got somewhat out of hand, aka me returning bloody or with a grade marked in red. Why was the boy allowed neither freedom of thought  nor freedom of action. 😛

The boy and his family soon left to be replaced by a western couple. Contrary to popular believe these guys are rich, I am starting to form the opinion lately, it is precisely due to their inability to make a proper living back at home that they are here in Asia seeking to etch out a living in foreign lands. They too soon left the bus.

In thier place now came these two women in their late twenties perhaps. Definitely single from the lack of adornments on their fingers. They fit nicely into the class called the metropolitans. One of them was recounting her time in New Jersy and her close shave with death. She was there at the airport on the exact same day one of the planes involved in the September 11 incident departed for its deadly cruise. Their conversation was intermittenly spiced with some elements of Singlish. She further recounted that some of her holiday trips were failures from the start despite having everything planned out nicely. The feel to them were wrong. She further revealed that her trips lasted on the average 5 days. I never had such problems with my personal trips since most of them last for months with nothing planned out. 😛

Then an idea popped into my head just when I was about to get out of the bus. If the information age does correspond with the zodiac age of aquarius and the true coming to age of aquarius starts on 2012, then the current monoliths of Facebook and Google, the so called icons of the information age are less icons than forebears. If such is the case, then I should be expecting to see more information age monoliths coming into the scene past 2012. The premise of such monoliths will be determined by the fundamental changes in our social fabric. Intuition thus drew my inner eye to seek out an alternate world less powered by oil and nuclear energy than something else. One of the key links between our current world and this alternate world my inner eye sees is a technology hitherto that makes possible the transfer of energy through medium that is no solid.

This afternoon while sitting in Labrador park reading for the 4th time Robert Kiyosaki’s book “Rich Dad, Poor Dad”, a signification truth suddenly dawned upon me. This flash of insight happened when I was staring at the waves in front of me thinking about happened the night before.

I spent most of the afternoon before with Embre, helping her sort out her company’s computer needs. We had dinner after that and parted our ways. I was reading the same book in the train on the way home  when Ada stepped out from my past memories into the present and sat right beside me.

To the Ada now, I was no more than a mere stranger, she had no recollections of me as a person. I choose to  remained in this shroud of anonymity and studied her as I did so many years age when she buried her tear strewn face in my lap lamenting how cruel life was to her with her first losing her beloved brother to a traffic accident and then losing her extremely wealthy boy friend due to her own stubbornness. In the midst of her crying back then she would occasionally lash out at the person beside as an injured wild animal would. I did what I could to console her. It was emotionally draining for me sitting beside her those late nights. After her bouts of tears, I would return her to her door steps, while I, being the broke student that I was, would spend the next 3 hours walking home to Clementi from Boon Lay.

I had this inkling since our start that we will never make it together, however for some unknown reasons I stayed put. Till this day, I do not know if such an act of mine was out of sympathy, affection, loyalty, obligation or pride? My release from this chain came the night she went to bed with another man. Ironically he was gay. Thank the lord and amen to that, I excused myself from her presence and moved along in my path. I felt much pain initially but over time, the usual sense of lightness and relief returned.

It was strange now sitting beside her in the train. I felt like a ghost. Or maybe she was the ghost. Some of her nails were chipped, her hair now showed a few more strands of white. Nothing much about her has changed since the day we parted.

Staring at the waves thoughts of Ada soon left my mind, followed by thoughts of a few others whom I had very similar encounters with, quite a few of them pretty recent…

Finally, the voice of Robert himself spoke to me. What he said could be found in a paragraph from page 42 of this book I was holding in front of me.

Paraphrased “Life is the best teacher of all. But unlike lecturers in school, most of the time, life does not talk to you. It just sort of pushes you around. Each push is life saying ‘wake up, there is something I want you to learn.’ ”

I finally realized there was a lesson to be learned here. This time I knew what it was I needed to learn.

Everyone has their own path and I should restrict my aid to any person to just words of advice as Robert’s rich dad did on Robert during his time of trial. Committing money, resource, time and effort towards bringing them to a path I wish for them is futile. Such will only delay me in the pursuit of my own path and serve them no purpose in their pursuit of their own, if not detract them from their own.

Let Life be their teacher and they make their own decisions for better or for worst. Henceforth situations which require my commitment of money, resource, time or effort will  be tightly coupled with a strong profit motif and stay strictly business. So it is, I have finally understood and accepted the principal past down from dad to son and I finally free of the chains of this false sense of obligation.

Today while corresponding with Embre over the email this idea occurred to me. It is an idea which I thought would be useful for myself if I put it down into writings for future references.

Based on my understanding, the degree to which a product or service type is unique (the proximity of it to the apex of creativity and art) determines the general price at which the product or service will be procured.

Case One

A simple 5 pages web design is a commodity and will hence have problem fetching a price more than 10k, whereas a mission critical system that forms the core of the a company’s operations will unlikely be sold for anything less than 10K (in fact a company will start having doubts if that item is sold for less)

Case Two
A mass produced casio watch is a commodity and hence will have problems fetching a price more than $100, whereas a new hand crafted Rolex time piece (art) will unlikely be sold for anything less than $5000.

Case Three

A mass produced retail clothing item is a commodity and will hence have a problem fetching a high price, whereas a limited edition designer clothing item will likely fetch at least a 100 times the price of its commodity substitute.

As technology improves and more power is placed in the hands of the individual, more and more items will be commodified, however due to this newly formed based of commodities, the newly formed economic environment will make possible the support of more unique items ( that is one step closer to being an art piece than the commodity). However due to the fact that our state is in a constant flux, these items will over time be commodified.

Central to Darwin’s theory of evolution is the phrase “survival of the fittest” the essence of which means the better a species is able to fit into its surrounding environment the higher the chance for its survival. If we consider these tools that we see made available in the market as an external manifestation of the human specie’s attempt to better fit into our environment, we should observe that the speed at which the human specie evolve has been accelerating through the ages with the information age being the most rapid amongst them all:

Prehistoric age
Stone age
Bronze age
Iron age
Agrarian age
Industrial age
Electronic age
Information age

A further thought on the three cases I highlighted previously just occurred to me.  It might be possible that the more creative product alternative comes in built with ability to solve more problems than the generic product.

Case One

Increased productivity of company operations

Case Two

Guaranteed  ability to perform in more extreme environments such as outer space, the Artic north and the Antartic south.

Case Three

Ability to stay comfortable in more extreme environments such as outer space, the Artic north and the Antartic South. Another speculative use, though one which is highly questionable, is the ability to differentiate one relatively unmarked human from another in terms of technical expertise and access to resource. However due to the inherent inaccuracy caused by the human ego, the variance between what one does and how one dresses is subjected. A common example would be a person who has resource that allows him access to a $100,000 worth clothing item, decided to opt for a $10 clothing instead, while an idiot who aspires to look like the rich get himself into a debt of $100,000 for that relatively useless piece of clothing item instead of opting for the more practical $10.

In an age whereby more and more people proclaims that religion is no longer relevant, I counter propose that religion, more specifically defined as the link between us (who are relative) and the Great Spirit (that which is absolute) has became more important in this increasing rate of evolutionary flux.

I further propose that materialism, more specifically defined as the egotism of equating our personal identity to our profession and sometimes what we own (an ideological legacy from the agrarian & industrial age), as a very dangerous approach to this state of evolutionary flux.

With the rapid rate of evolution happening within the human species, the rate of which new professions are created and existing professions become destroyed becomes faster. As such the rate at which resource is accessible to an individual human varies more across time in the information age as compared to the industrial or agrarian age. Ownership of items that consumes a constant rate of resource over time thus becomes infeasible if the rate of resource consumption is exceedingly huge.

The act of fixating on a dying profession or on an infeasible item ownership, both impractical, is an external manifestation of an ego that does not fit to the environment and hence lowers the chances of the being’s survival in the long run.

In essence the mind is a miniature reflection of the great spirit that is around us. A good example is the ability of our mind to freely time travel (the forth dimension on top of the three dimensional world we see around us). I am speculating on the possibility of applying the ideas of quantum physiques to the link between the mind and the great spirit. There has been multiple literature (Carl Gustav Jung’s included) that states the existence of a link between our subconscious mind and the collective mind(the great spirit). Hence it can be speculated that by discarding all fixations that occur in our conscious mind, there is a possibility of allowing the free follow of thoughts from our subconscious mind to our conscious mind. If the first item of my hypothesis is true (that our subconscious mind has a valid link to the great spirit), we would in essence be aspired to the absolute and hence achieve a higher rate of survival.

Now that my great friend Pasha and the team from Russia has taken over majority of the day to day running of  our company, my mental resources has been freed up. I could thus focus more of my attention on sales and marketing. One of the first things I keenly felt was the law of scarcity and the idea of competitive advantage.

Simplistically modeled, the time and effort of Pasha and team is what we term resource. This particular group of resource is very effective when applied on solving problems of a technological nature, most especially on complex technological problems. This resource is less effective when applied in the solving of other problems, for example cooking rice. To get maximum effective when it comes to the problem of cooking rice, it is advisable instead to engage the help of a housewife. In other words, a unit of Pasha’s time will generate 100 items of technology or 1 bowl of rice, while the same unit of a housewife’s time will generate 1 line of workable codes or 100 bowls of rice.

The philosophy of my operation is to generate maximum value for our society. Since Pasha has a competitive advantage in producing codes and a house wife has a competitive advantage in producing rice, Pasha should concentrate on producing technology while the house wife on cooking rice. This in a nut shell is what is called competitive advantage. It would be stupid of me to deploy Pasha and team to cook rice and the house wife to do programming. It would mean an overall drop in value that society in general could enjoy.

The laws governing economics can never be bent or broken, they are very real. To have continued access to a certain pool of resource, be it the type used that  solves complex technical problems or the type that cooks rice, we need to maintain it with another kind of resource called money. Failure to generate money in worst case scenario would result in health issues on Pasha and team since there is no more money for rice, hence no more resource to solve complex problem, or in the latter example would mean no more rice to eat since the house wife runs off with another man. Squandering or inefficient utilization of resources would result in the depletion of such resources in the short run and a lack of it in the long run. This ties closely with the idea of competitive advantage. If Pasha and team focus on solving complex technological problems, they will generate more value for society than they would cooking rice. Thus they would get more monetary resource for the upkeeping of their health doing programming. If the housewife focus on cooking rice instead of solving complex technolgical problems, she will generate more value for society than she would solving technological problems. Thus she would get more monetary resources for the upkeeping of her health cooking rice.

Everyone have some kind of problems. Due to the law of scarcity, everyone has limited amount of the resource called money however much they claim to have it. It is everyone’s desire to solve their problem with as little as possible the use of their limited resources. It is everyone’s dream to have their problems solved without the utilization of their own resources. However we live in a real world where the law of scarcity is very true. It is naive to believe one can gain something from nothing.

There are only a few cases I can think of which proves contrary, they are:

1. By act of God (only God can bend the iron clad rules of economics. However to ensure against end of the world, chaos and the collapse of the system he built, God does not do this. He instead resorts to the manipulation of the very rules he created which often means he gets his hands tied as well.)
2. If one lies and cheat (this is a short lived tactic, what goes around comes around)
3. One thinks one is indeed getting what one wants but is however having this mistaken believe (which is usually the case, hence all the scandals)

As mentioned the above three tactics are either exceptionally rare or short lived.

To sustain this pool of resource, I thus see the job of the sales and marketing personal as one who seeks out target audiences with a certain set of technologically based problems. Next I see myself as a function which which fulfills two very important roles in this value chain.

1. Reducing as much as possible the required resources from  clients
2. Ensuring continued availability and prolonged life span of Pasha and team by utilizing their time and effort on problem sets with the closest fit to their capabilities.

It is unrealistic to engage Pasha and team to solve a problem with no renumeration of the resource called money. Something cannot come from nothing. Pasha and teams still needs rice to eat. However it is hard to convince a client to part with his resource so as to exchange for a solution. To solve the deadlock, it is important to next introduce the concept of pain.

The degree to which a client feels pain at not having a solution is the degree to which he is willing to part with his current resource for a solution to the pain. To fulfill role 1 and 2 concurrently, I came up with another rule:

1. Pasha and team’s time are most efficiently used when employed on problems which there has not yet been a solution for and is extremely painful to the client if not solved

An  assumption and  also a third role for myself:

Assumption :

There are already solutions to a sub set of problems that is causing pain to the client

Role :

Find the cheapest solution with the closest fit to the problem that is causing extreme pain to a client at the same time utilizing Pasha and teamonly when absolutely necessary.

These set of rules when applied by the role that I assume allows for some really interesting possibility.

Profit maximization scenario:

Offer the same service that other vendors are offering but with less cost incurred.

Market penetration scenario:

Offer the same service that other vendors are offering but at a cheaper price and with less cost incurred.

Value Maximization scenario:

offer the best possible service to all clients at the cheapest possible price and the lowest possible cost.

In accordance to my guiding philosophy, we are currently operating in value maximization mode. Already signs are showing that competitors are not able to produce the same results at the price we are offering. While Pasha and team is not overloaded with work, the cost of production is kept low. This move is  in accordance with the philosophy of Kaizen (muri, muda, mura)

Muri (unreasonable) happens if Pasha and team is expected to fulfill the entire requirement set at the price offered to the client. This would mean Pasha and team being under compensated for the value they generated to society, in worst case scenario being unable to sustain themselves.

Mura (uneveness) happens if the results of operations are inconsistant. While we already do have a well defined operating process in place, we are still constantly incorporating new practises into the value chain to further even out our work

Muda (wastefulness) happens if the time and effort of Pasha and team is utilized for solving problems that has already been solved by someone else on the web. This is avoided by the adoption and non-charging of freely available plugins from the web that fulfills the requirement subset of clients.

Such a strategy when applied in the long run would mean a lean and effficient operation model that imposes the least amount of pain on all involved in the entire value chain while generating the maximum possible value for our society.

Taking a step back one might say I am simply being the middle man that does not add value to the value chain. Such is not true. Let examine this in terms of competitive advantage again.

We simplistically model this again. Pash and team being highly specialized in technical work generates 100 technological items, 100 existing technological mapping to customer needs or 50 sales per unit time while me being the jack of all trades generates 90 technological items per unit time, 100 existing technological mapping to customer needs or 65 sales per unit time. My existence in the value chain frees Pasha and team up to generate the maximum amount of technological items possible, since I took charge of the technological mapping to customers needs and the sales. In essence, the amount of value I generate in the value chain is a function of the three components:

1. The amount of money the customer saves
2. The amount of time Pasha and team saves
3. The extra amount of money Pasha and team makes with the time saved due to more effective allocation of their time and effort

In general everyone resents the middle man who contributes nothing but leaches much from the value chain. It is impossible to get something for nothing in the long run. Information being so efficient nowadays makes the non value addding middle man redundant really fast. However due to the way this operation has been structured, both the client, Pasha and team will require my presence in the value chain.

Thinking further, I am now considering the possibility of retaining a specialist who has a competitive advantage in closing sales. Ideally, he or she should be one who can generate 50 technological items, 50 existing technological mapping to customer needs or 100 sales per unit time. Such a specialist would be a nice fit to the team.

This afternoon while I was putting together the final pieces of Poise.sg, I was suddenly inflicted by a bout of self doubt. Not wanting this negative pyschological state to affect the quality of my work, I decided to take a break for the day and instead do some skate boarding.

While on my skate boarding travelling up Bukit Timah road, I meditated upon this phenomena. Strange, I thought I should have been beyond this physchological weakness by now. Nevertheless, since this phase of self doubt rared its head as it did, it was good to dig further into it and understand the cause.

It suddenly rained when I arrived on the opposite of the road from Ngee Ang Polytechnic. I decided to seek shelter under the bus stop to wait out the down pour. The shelter was in fact not much of a shelter. As the wind blew more rain water my way, I was starting to feel really drench.

It was refreshing. Mother nature, my favourite girl, understood my needs and gave me some spiritual cleansing. She never fails always to remind me how insignificant I am compared to the rest of the universe. From this point of view, any failures I might encouter is not really a failure at all.  It is but a mere speck of dust in this entire cosmic universe easily swiped away. It was then I suddenly remembered this other travelling companion of mine, Death.

With my inner eye I took a glance behind me. Sure enough, there he was just a few steps behind me, busy toying around with his scythe. This trick he does with his scythe must be a new one. I have never seen him play with it that way before. His face as usual was hidden under the hood. He think he looks cool and mysterious that. Once in a while, with his hood drawn too far down over his face such that it blocks his line of sight, he bumps into the lamp post. Most from the world of living would fear him for the duties God ordains he carry out, I do find him to be quite an entertaining a companion for the road though. His humour is always somewhat ironic.

He must have noticed me looking his way, for he finally stopped the bazzaire twirling of his scythe.

“Is something the matter?” he asked genuinely curious. The sunlight glinted dangerous on the sharp edges of his scythe.

“No but yes. I am contemplating the reason for this self-doubt which unknowingly crept into my psyche this afternoon.”

“Oh I see. Your time is not up  yet, so it is nothing to worry about. Must be Lucifer playing some tricks on you with his cosmic mist. ”

“Damned! You caught me red handed! ”

I turned my inner eye to the source of the voice and saw old man red. Two horns were sticking out from his fore head and a long goatie growing from his chin.

“See… I told you so.” Death stated non-chalant and went back to toying around with his scythe again.

“Thank you my friend. ” Good man Death is always so reliable when it comes to pointing the way to the absolute when one becomes momentarily distracted all the cosmic flux, not that Lucifer always curious about new knowledge and always experimenting to find more uses for the cosmic mist around us helped.

“And Lucifer my friend, you with the two horns, I am running short of time. You almost nearly got me distracted there for a moment. Enough with the cosmic powder experimental of yours now, I have got things to do.”

“Alrite, ” he replied somewhat subdued, for the time being at least, and once again took his place to my left. Death, as usual happily playing with his scythe took his position on my right. We continued along my path. Mother nature had her duties to perform and bid us farewell till we meet again.

This cosmic mist that Lucifer so much likes to play with seems somewhat dangerous. I think quite a few from the world of the living have in fact took the images portrayed in these mist as real. In the process, they gave up their dreams and surrendered their souls to something that was not even real. This non-sense is utterly crazy.