samedi, décembre 17, 2011 Crisis Communications CorpComms lessons for SMRT from me Before I head into this, I'm prefacing it with: thank you SMRT, for 24 years of generally smooth MRT rides. I'm sorry you're having a quarter-life crisis right now, but rest assured that your customer-base has no one else to turn to for MRT rides, thanks to your monopoly. And we get right into it: Corporate Crisis Communications Lessons for SMRT from me: (1) Get your CEO on social media NOW Then make sure you get someone who knows how to use it to man it for her. Ms SPH's the only one with authority enough to speak for the company, so any utterance from her should carry the weight of the company, and should trump all other rumours etc. This way, people have a focal point for news, and the papers will have something to quote. YES there will be people who will flame, but be a classy girl, ignore the haters for now - you've got a fire to put out! (2) Don't think you can keep office hours during a crisis! http://twitpic.com/7uc0za --> office hours FAIL and http://www.smrt.com.sg/ --> HAPPY WEBSITE FAIL. Get that happy photograph off the front page. When CNN was responding to news updates on 9/11, they wiped their ENTIRE SITE clean of any other news and HTML coded the index page to ensure that they had timely news up online for anyone in the world to view. While train shutdowns aren't on the same scale, for SMRT it was the equivalent, and CorpComms should respond accordingly! (3) Set up trust systems that allow your staff to respond PROMPTLY, even if they don't have full info Many, many people would have been happier had SMRT acknowledged the problem earlier, which could have been managed with a twitter feed along the lines of "we are investigating, we'll have more info soon" - and if SMRT had kept that twitter feed updated every 5 mins with updates, it would have been the PR coup of the year. This is a huge issue for Singaporean firms; we don't trust our people enough (and to be honest, many times there's a reason why). But in order to build a robust, dynamic organisation, you have to start somewhere, and a trusted company spokesperson HAS to be let off the leash to respond promptly; we've seen how brittle SMRT's communication systems is. (4) Say sorry, mean it, show it. Ms. SPH's apology was heartfelt, and calls for her to resign are ridiculous; I'd much rather she fix the issues since she should know them! SMRT does need to apologise for the crazy breakdown in a huge way; I'd say accede to the calls to give one free day of public transport via MRT and buses before the year's out would be a very, very nice gesture of goodwill. Libellés : current affairs, singapore [Crisis Communications CorpComms lessons for SMRT from me] |
samedi, août 28, 2010 Free Speech: Whose Right Is It? When is free speech not free speech? When one side is perceived as the underdog, poor and persecuted. With all the brouhaha surrounding the death penalty in Singapore, I am fairly certain that anyone who stands up and speak out in support of the death penalty on principle, would be condemned by these vocal public (they are not the "general public"). Why is our right to living in a drug-free and crime-free country less than someone else's life - someone who willingly and wilfully committed a crime, as defined by Singapore law? We are famous/notorious for a reason - and yet drug runners persist in breaking our law. I do not dispute that it is a hard law. It is a cold law. It is a law which brooks no argument, and which has no wiggle room. It doesn't matter if you're a drug lord or if you're "just" a runner - you were caught, and Lady Justice is blind. I treasure life. I love living and breathing and enjoying the earth God gave. I love my family too. I love my future family, my children unborn, my nephews and nieces, my friends and loved ones. For their sake, may I support this absolute zero-tolerance deterrent? It's really simple - you break the rules, and you get punished. Conceptually, how is that so hard to understand? Why should we bow to international pressure when I live in a democratic country, and my country is exercising its sovereign right to choose how we punish crimes as defined by us? We are hardly North Korea (don't confuse the issues). Libellés : current affairs, singapore [Free Speech: Whose Right Is It?] |
dimanche, juillet 18, 2010  I'm not sure how this will add to my online experience, but hey, anything that looks like it could add another dimension to the "virtual" 2D experience that is web surfing - like the 3D desktop I wrote about at my work blog - makes for interesting reading.Plus - hardwarezone has nothing on Wired. Libellés : current affairs, technology [Is 3D cool or what?] |
mercredi, janvier 27, 2010  Maybe it's time to be humble, and recognise in a holistic manner, that we can't have our cake and eat it too. A man reaps what he sows, and old policies to limit population growth - implemented at a time when such a policy was needed - continue to take their toll on mindsets and paradigms that people hold. Less marriages, more divorce, less children, more immigrants. Three are fact, one is policy. But reality doesn't mean we give up the fight against the earlier; doesn't mean that we open the floodgates to the latter. We just need to come to the problem with humility, and recognise that as a country, we can't do everything. Support marriage and help families have children, and you'll lose productivity as more women leave the workforce - but family-friendly practices are an investment in our country for the long run. More needs to be done yesterday, or we will continue to live in the shadow of the stop-at-two legacy that was left to us. One key thing which stands out to me as I chat with my friends, especially newly-married friends about marriage and children, is that they want children - definitely, the majority of married Singaporeans want children. But money is an issue - houses, cars, help - these all come at some kind of cost, be it time, energy, sacrifice, career advancement. And for the moment, with opportunity costs abounding at every turn (missing out on that promotion, on that work trip, on the savings from living with your parents, on the freedom of flying off on holiday with your partner hassle-free) - these non-monetary costs are far, far too high to put off for the sake of children. The central problem facing the government is its too-pragmatic approach towards children. Perhaps because the policy is informed by the Singaporean technocrat drive towards efficiency, efficacy, and economics, any child-family plan is always underpinned with the mentality that this is economically good for you, so why don't you do this? This is why the baby bonus failed. This is why paternal benefits are still crap. This is why women still continue to be laid off once they're pregnant. This is why the SDU continues to be known as the single, desperate and ugly club - despite its rebranding exercise. I once asked an older friend why he had his kids, knowing that he wasn't in a financially great position. He said - well, at the core of it, you've got to see that having children isn't about economics and finances at all - it's about God's command in the bible to "be fruitful and multiply." Other friends who are not religious also echoed similar imperatives which were divorced from any economic/pragmatic approach. Biological imperative, spreading one's DNA, "because kids are so cute!", "who is going to take care of me when I am older?" were some other reasons - all not particularly economic, some more self-serving than others - but not once did I hear anything about "$10,000 education fund leh" or "baby bonus!" If anything, the puny baby bonus is continually scoffed at for its miniscule amount - "not enough to even pay for diapers leh!" one friend laughed. So how now? I'd say that we have to drop the pragmatic impulse, and push the balanced-family-life agenda. At the moment, far too many people see - only too clearly - the cost of having children, and not the intangible social benefits. Only a forward looking policy, which forgoes the short-term economic gains for the long-term social reward of having a committed populace, will bring Singapore's population policy into the future. If not, we'll continue to miss the forest for the trees. Libellés : current affairs, singapore, writing [Birth rate still dipping] |
jeudi, décembre 24, 2009  Am I the only one who sees these two separated at birth? Libellés : current affairs, humour [Twins!] |
vendredi, juin 19, 2009 Celest Chong:"If you want to be pretty, you cannot be lazy."(as read in Straits Times' URBAN 19 Jun 2009) Oh dear. Libellés : current affairs, humour [Quotable Quote] |
mardi, mai 12, 2009  (Warning: highly inflammatory)The AWARE issue just made me so angry that I shouted at someone in the office for trying to pin conservative values on all christians. Just because an anti-abortion, anti-gay message is coming from someone, does NOT necc. make it a Christian value - I was very angry at this conflation made because these bunch of idiotic women from COOS decided to take matters into their own hands. The church ALREADY has a platform - legal, moral, and God-driven - to preach our message of hope - it is the church. The fact of the matter is that the church in Singapore has generally FAILED to preach these hard messages - that life is sacred and begins at conception, that homosexuality is NOT supported by the church - so these sincerely wrong women decided to take matters into their own hands. These women should have done something other than to circumvent and take over something which is in the world - it's just engaging Satan on his own turf. If they are truly watchers of the Women's movement in Singapore - of which I have been an active observer of - they would have known that there are other things going on in AWARE - not just gay issues. If they were more involved with civil society in Singapore, as I am, then they would realise the metatexual issue at stake here, which is a statement on Singapore's civil society - the gay community (or GLBT/LGBT community) is very hard pressed to find a space to rally in Singapore, and therefore has to squeeze itself into the dialogue through spaces such as those provided by AWARE. Technically, because AWARE is a women's organisation, it should only champion lesbians - if it champions them at all. However, because lesbians and gays are related, there is issue-affinity there - then come along the bisexuals and the transexuals. GBLT is not a single-issue button - you press one, you get four minorities in with your cause. It is AWARE's fault for NOT realising that they should have refused to engage so much with lesbians because it would have meant taking on the collective baggage of ALL minority groups. We cannot delude ourselves into thinking that Christians are "neutral". This is the kind of thinking that confuses us. The ground that we stand on is never neutral. If we think it's neutral, we get sucked into this idea that our "conservative" stance is one which is held by most of society. While this is true in conservative Singapore, "most of society" is changing/degenerating fast. John 15: 18 "If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first. 19 If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you. 20 Remember the words I spoke to you: 'No servant is greater than his master.'[b] If they persecuted me, they will persecute you also. To think of ourselves as neutral is to take away the warning that Christ gave us: Matthew 10:16 "I am sending you out like sheep among wolves. Therefore be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves." --> Jesus to the disciples as he sent them out into the world. I find it irritating that Christians go out into the world, profess a Christian belief, and then get surprised and act so hurt when the world jumps on them for their beliefs. Have we been lulled so much into this myth of "tolerance" that we think that the "liberal left" doesn't have an agenda to push? That the "liberals" are really, all that liberal in the first place? Anyone who doesn't accept homosexuality and "liberal" values are persecuted by the sword! And they want to point a finger at us for the crusades? It's human nature to fear the thing we do not understand, and by extension, destroy it. Look at poor Miss USA (or whatever it was; Carrie Prejean?) She said she didn't support gay marriage, and now her whole family is receiving death threats. See these women who stood up (however wrongly) for "conservative family values"? Got publicly crucified by 3000 women at Suntec. Standing on the side of Christianity is NOT neutral ground. I wish Christians would stop looking so surprised when the world doesn't understand. In the wake of the AWARE saga, how should the church and Christians respond? My goodness, is that even a question? Study the bible, study WHY you're a Christian, and then get more involved with Christ and His work on earth - increase your bible literacy, work harder at Matt 28! Engagement with the world is through our lives, and unless your lives point to Christ, it's just (as Eccl says) meaningless stuff. I really didn't mean to go into a ten-paragraph rant on this issue, but everytime I think/talk about this AWARE issue, it makes me very (1) annoyed at COOS and (2) at these women, (3) and by extension, the church, for not giving women like these a platform to use their energy for Godly work instead of creating a mess. If COOS is patting these women on their back and congratulating them for changing Singapore MOE/AWARE history, I don't know what kind of church they are. Libellés : christian, church, current affairs, singapore [Christians and AWARE] |
samedi, mai 02, 2009  "I think the vice president misrepresented what the vice president wanted to say," said White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs.White House adjusts Biden's swine flu advice Officials seek to undo the damage after the vice president goes his own way, saying he'd tell family members to avoid planes, trains and other enclosed spaces. [By Mark Silva and Christi Parsons, May 1, 2009, Los Angeles Times] I think the vice president said exactly what the vice president wanted to say. Staying on message can suck. Libellés : current affairs, humour, politics [Come again?] |
mercredi, avril 15, 2009 Filing taxes this year is just like finding a good date  Filing taxes online this year is like finding a good date in Singapore: hard to get started, getting ditched halfway through the process, and ultimately, an exercise in futility. Libellés : current affairs, humour, singapore [Filing taxes this year is just like finding a good date] |
samedi, mars 14, 2009 Aiyoh, enough miniaturisation!  Okay, we get it. It's small. It's very small. It's cute. You already have the lion's share of the market (selling Apples too, mind), so you better have a jolly good reason why you've taken a good thing and made it, well, for people with very, very small hands.What this is about: the new iPod Shuffle, which is so small, it's really rather stupid. If I throw this into my bag, it's going to get lost and never found in the dark abyss of stuff that I carry with me. It's got the usual no-LCD screen, but now it gets robots inside the iPod to SPEAK the song name, artiste and whatever information for you. Which means, of course, that you better have had tagged your songs correctly. What's very evil about this player - its controls are on the headphones. Which means you can't use your absolutely-fab Sennheiser or Bose or Phillips or whatever-brand headphones with this 4GB device. But then again, if you're using one of those, you're probably a big enough audiophile that you won't even be bothering with this 4GB upstart. It's ridiculous that we're so lazy we don't really want the controls either, we just want to wink to change songs. Enough! Work on something else for a change! Like how to get some more ozone into the ozone layer! Libellés : current affairs, technology [Aiyoh, enough miniaturisation!] |
mardi, novembre 11, 2008 Phoenix Mars Lander: "Triumph" (then nothing...)  01010100 01110010 01101001 01110101 01101101 01110000 01101000That was the last transmission before the Lander went dark. Dust storms on Mars had apparently obscured the solar panels so much that the batteries were running low on juice. Looks like they completely ran out. The message is intriguing: it reads: "Triumph". Are aliens taking us on a ride? I know NASA's always been controversial in politics, with funding issues and ROIs being debated all the time, but you can't put a dollar value on exploration and excitement of this sort! Phoenix launched on 4 Aug 2007 and touched down 25 May 2008 (long trip!). Its initial mission life was supposedly only three months (till August 2008), but it was been working overtime before being thwarted by seasonal changes on the Red Planet. Libellés : current affairs, technology, travel [Phoenix Mars Lander: "Triumph" (then nothing...)] |
mercredi, octobre 29, 2008 I say this: vote Paris Hilton for President While I love Britney and hopes she gets all her shit together soon, I am really in awe of Paris Hilton - no, really.Only she could have turned a politico's comment into a run for Presidency. I think she should run. We all definitely need to learn how to build a brand wearing high-heeled shoes1. Libellés : current affairs, politics [I say this: vote Paris Hilton for President] |
dimanche, octobre 19, 2008 Thin - If It Takes Dying to Get There, So Be it Imagine attempting suicide after eating two slices of pizza. Photographer Lauren Greenfield chronicled the struggles of women fighting for their lives inside a top U.S. eating disorder clinic. The result is Thin, a book and HBO documentary which first aired Nov. 14 2006. more info at: http://www.thindocumentary.comLibellés : current affairs, thinking [Thin - If It Takes Dying to Get There, So Be it] |
mercredi, septembre 24, 2008  Is it just me, or does it feel like Palin's cramming for the exams in October? She just got her passport, and then now she's on a crash course to become an international affairs expert. In the UN. In New York (so no overseas stamp on her new passport.)I'm not pro-Obama (mainly, he's too idealistic), I just think that the Republican ticket has lost its mind. If McCain dies in office (high possibility), a runner-up to the Miss Alaska is going to run the country. Libellés : current affairs, politics, thinking [Palin: Cramming for the Exams] |
dimanche, septembre 21, 2008  ... and the meltdown continues, with the US set to give out up to USD$1 trillion - yes, that's with a T - in buying out the horrific sub-prime market.The price has been steep for all of us - there is a stake which was lost by my family - and the carnage on Wall Street does NOT seem to be letting up any time soon. However, I think the larger question has not been answered yet: where did all the money go? Where is the cash? In the words of Jerry Maguire: show me the money! Who's holding on to it? Go think. The answer will arrive in the fullness of time. Libellés : current affairs, thinking [Money Market Bustup] |
jeudi, septembre 18, 2008 Premature outrage over Palin running the government on Yahoo! email account  While I laud the furor of alarm and consternation which is erupting over the Palin email invasion of privacy, I think it's extremely naive to start pointing fingers at Palin, or the Bush administration (much as I detest it), or the Republicans, or anyone else for that matter, for using a public web-based email for work purposes. Why? For the simple reason because government email and computer accounts are often technologically inferior to the other available free email providers, such as yahoo, hotmail and gmail. Which civil servant here has NEVER come across a problem of insufficient storage space in their government mailboxes? (Come on, own up.)In addition, sometimes even just getting the damned account up and running takes a week or two - or more. You've got forms to fill out in triplicate, and yet your boss wants you to get the programme up and running like, yesterday, so you have absolutely no choice - you formulate that email using your personal email account (or like me, you create a new work email account), and start running your office from there. This is not a Singapore-centric statement; I've worked for an American government-linked agency before, and had to spend an agonising 2 weeks in email limbo as I waited for Washington to get back to me on the status of my email account application. In the meantime, I used my gmail account to get my work done. And to add a feather to this wonderful cap of government account woes, sometimes - as in the case of the government service here in Singapore - you can't access your email account from home because it's an intranet account. I really do understand the arguments under the FOIA, I really do. I also firmly believe that governance should be transparent in all their dealings. And I also understand the problems of running a government from, say, a gmail account. There are a multitude of legal issues that implicate and dominate this area of discussion. But cut the girl some slack. Sometimes the government needs a little help from the private sector. Libellés : current affairs, issues, politics, thinking [Premature outrage over Palin running the government on Yahoo! email account] |
jeudi, septembre 11, 2008 Recreating the Big Bang: Old News So apparently we've/CERN's managed to successfully smash to protons together, after spending $3.8 billion flinging them 17 miles round and round and round somewhere in Switzerland.Yay. Now what? "Now that the beam has been successfully tested in clockwise direction, CERN plans to send it counterclockwise."  Gee whiz! No kidding! COUNTER-clockwise! You could knock me over with a feather."Eventually two beams will be fired in opposite directions with the aim of recreating conditions a split second after the big bang, which scientists theorize was the massive explosion that created the universe." You put your left hand in, you put your left hand out, you put your left hand in, and you shake it all about... no? And we're also building a good camera that's fast enough to capture this "split second" right? (Might be a picture of God.) Oh, and of COURSE, because what's life without a little penis envy, Fermi (another geek lab in Illinois) claims to have beat them in this "race" - but with "Omega b baryon, a cousin of the proton". Of course, nobody understands this gobbledegook, so they took pains to explain it to us neaderthals: "Omega b bayon is a distant cousin of the proton and neutron from which the universe is made... along with electrons...Protons and neutrons are the lightest elements in the baryon family, but Omega b is six times heavier than a proton." Source: Associated Press, 10 Sept 2008, Largest particle collider conducts successful test http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5g5nGPtmoUVIJDgehVJ_snD6vDA6gD933R4B80 EE Times, 11 Sept 2008, Particle race: US lab tops CERN, http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=210601016 Libellés : current affairs, humour, issues [Recreating the Big Bang: Old News] |
samedi, juillet 19, 2008 Took a walk down Little India today... .jpg) ... to get my eyebrows threaded, but I wound up buying a 2ndhand Dell 19" LCD monitor for my mother instead.It was a very interesting experience, buying from this shop (shown on the left) - it almost felt like they didn't really want my business. I had to ask them for everything, and I didn't really know if I was disturbing them or not. My mother surmises that they're actually a wholesaler, and I was basically being an annoying pest who wanted to buy only one LCD. My argument against that was - they never said that they were a wholesaler, and they did ask if I was looking for and LCD, and they did entertain me... so I'm going to chalk it up to a whole different culture of buying and selling instead. I also took a walk down to the hotel that used to be my house with my grandmother, before the government repossessed it. It's now called Madras Hotel, on Madras Street. Yep, for those in our audience who don't know, I spent most of my first 4 years in Little India. Here are some photos of my old apartment today: .jpg) Not too bad a day to spend my birthday: remembering where I came from, sort of. Libellés : current affairs, travel [Took a walk down Little India today...] |
jeudi, avril 03, 2008 Beijing 2010: The Games Politico  While the spirit of the games might be sportsmanship, the Beijing 2008 games looks set to be one of the most politically-charged events in the event's history.Even before bidding started, rumours of China's possible participation already stirred much controversy, which only escalated once the the country won the bid to host the Olympic Games this year. Today, with China's heavy-handed reactions towards Tibet, and its support of Sudan, many playmakers are lobbying their heads of states to avoid attending the games' opening ceremony. This is going to play out over the next couple of days, without a resolution till the last minute. While I guess at who's coming and who's not, it's such a pity that the games can't be just that - games. It's bad enough with the dope-testing and the unsportsman-like behaviour from the athletes themselves, but having this as yet another political minefield is the double-glazing on the curry-puff: too much effort for something that doesn't really amount to much, in the grander scale of things. Libellés : current affairs, thinking [Beijing 2010: The Games Politico] |
mercredi, février 20, 2008 Many Rs make... I have no idea what Reduce, reuse, recycle.That was the mantra the Green For Life frog extolled when he spoke to us from his green lily pad. The poster on the noticeboards were forever proclaiming the virtues of the 3Rs, but like any typical response to environmentalism, schools never cut down on their use of paper, and especially never in innovative ways, such as cancelling school exams or homework blitzes. Recently, an exhibition noted that the philosophy has now been expanded to encompass nine Rs (in no order of merit):
utterubbish was recommended to me by an architect friend who was sure that I would love the practical side of construction and design. Part of the Singapore Design Festival 2007, it was a large exhibition held in the City Hall building (the one that overlooks the Padang, where everyone goes to take graduation photos for some reason.) Loads of good, and not-so-good stuff there.  A chair made from cardboard, stuck together in a row.  Like the sign says - it's a makeshift cardboard toilet, designed for disaster areas and park rangers. .jpg) I have NO idea. This just looked stylistically interesting. Strangely enough, it reminds me of Predator - where Arnie was fighting Predator, and they got stuck in the meat-packing district, and all this beef was hanging up obscuring them from each other - as well as providing an excellent location for a fight. .jpg) Yet another excellent idea - malleable cement! Also for disaster areas. It's called "CC" - something concrete, I think. This post is mainly for posterity's sake. Libellés : art, current affairs [Many Rs make... I have no idea what] |
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