Books I would like to finish reading within the next couple of months

Here are some books I'm reading and hope to finish

Mind Set!

Crossing The Chasm

Fooled By Randomness

I have a bunch of books I haven't completed from last year...Hope to finish reading them up sometime soon...Will publish that list sometime. Here are some I can recall...

The Tipping Point

How Would You Move Mount Fuji

Here are impactful books I read last year

The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari

The Rules Of Work & The Rules Of Life (I didn't complete them , but read most of the sections/points)

The Secret (The Video is a must watch)

Blue Ocean Strategies (haven't completed this either... LOL)

Democracy 101

Here's a Citizen's viewpoint on what our MPs should know about democracy. I'm interlacing it with recent happenings to draw a comparison with the Malaysian way of doing things.

1. Executive, Legislative and Judiciary should be separated. Full Stop. There's no two ways about it. Any investigation into the Judiciary should not be deliberated on by the Executive but by an Independent Committee. So the Cabinet should not be making a decision on whether a Royal Commission should be formed. When there is an obvious judicial crisis, it should be formed, that's it! Let's not even go to the last big one in 1988 which the government refuses to re investigate.
   
2. An Election Commission should be totally independent of the Executive. So the EC should not rely on the goodwill of the PM to allow independent observers for counting of postal votes. The EC Chairman himself made such a statement.
   
3. The government of the day has no business changing the Constitution at will. That's why we call it the Constitution. It was written by our founding fathers as a social contract and I'm sure they looked ahead into the future when agreeing on the clauses. Why would you want to change it? Even if you want to change it, there should be a referendum first.
4. An MP is a representative of the public. If he chooses to go against his political allies or his party's stand because he needs to stand up for the people he's representing, nobody has the right to discipline him. We are not asking for a flock of sheep in the parliament, we're looking for intelligence here.
5. People have the right to assemble peacefully. The police has no business shooting teargas and chemical laced water at them just to silence the brave. Obviously something is wrong with the system if things have to escalate to the level of tens of thousands of people gathering in the streets. Make no mistake there are hundreds of thousands more if not millions silently supporting the brave ones who chose to gather on the streets. I assure you if they were allowed to proceed peacefully, things would have turned out really different.
   
6. We Malaysians are adults. This is an era of globalism. Doing things behind closed doors is exactly what got us into this trouble in the first place. Isn't it about time we opened up the system and allowed transparency. There should be some things that are state secrets no doubt but how contracts are awarded and how the government choose to respond to events of public interest (among other things) is not.
7. ISA and EO(Emergency Ordinance) are outdated (read: undemocratic) and should be repealed. Please refer to point 6. Come on folks. Open up and do things transparently.
8. If a political party or any other organization is to remain relevant to it's stakeholders, it should look into the interest of the stakeholders. Otherwise the party or organization has no business making claims that it's the only organization for the stakeholders.

I'll end here, I have said enough and I believe items I have outlined in the list above are nothing new.

In Pursuit of Greatness

What is greatness? To me it means etching your name in history through contribution to your community, your country or to the planet. That is the purpose of life...to have your life mean something to others, to contribute towards the greater good, to be remembered fondly by others after passing on.

Life is hardly about one upmanship, chasing after wealth or power. To me wealth or power should be a byproduct of greatness, not the other way around.

Obviously not all of us can be Gandhi or Abraham Lincoln, so we will need to have the right scale of greatness. We will have to find our very own personal greatness road map.

It would be great to share your life story with your grandchildren someday (if they would like to listen). And I'm sure they would want to listen to your story if you lived a great life.

It would be really sad if in your deathbed, you realize that you squandered your life on passing clouds and never aimed for greatness.

I wonder what passes through the minds of people who cheated and lied to acquire wealth and power at the point of death, those who complicated their life over fleeting pleasures...Would they repent or would they think it was all worth it?

Personally I would rather let out a satisfied sigh over a great life before passing on. Perhaps we Malaysians need to look for some modern role models whom we should look up to....Richard Branson, Tony Fernandez, Nelson Mandela, etc.

Freedom Of Speech

I must start off by saying I salute the Malaysians who attended the BERSIH rally and saw it through. Despite all the pressure from the government and the police, tens of thousands (it seemed to me) gathered , braving the rain and the police blockade.

What does Freedom Of Speech mean? To me it means we as citizens have the right to bubble up our concerns to whatever level we deem necessary. If we feel our concerns can only be handled by the Agong, so be it.

As a democratic nation we as citizens have the right to gather and raise our concerns. Especially if the concerns relate to our democratic fundamentals and if our requests are reasonable.

Since it's a peaceful gathering, why do the powers that be feel so uncomfortable with it. As long as public or private property is not damaged. As long as there's no injury caused to anyone by members of the gathering. I would say by definition it's a peaceful gathering.

Why the worry over a little dissent. We can't all have the same opinion or be on the same side, can we? I believe it's due to the comfort zone of Malaysian's not questioning authority. It's been a long held belief that Malaysians will question the government only and if only their rice bowl is impacted.

What makes politicians so afraid of people voicing their views. This seems to be feared by politicians everywhere including in the show Boston Legal last night. :)

To me it's a sign that we as a country are maturing. There must be room to look at the other side of the coin. And it looks like we Malaysians are finally starting to see the flip side of the coin...after 50 years of independence. To me that's a good sign as any.

On 'Cari Makan' and 'Tidak Apa'

Here are some thoughts that I have about two attitudes that we Malaysian have across the board generally speaking. These are the oft quoted ‘Cari Makan’ and ‘Tidak Apa’ attitudes. Undoubtedly, these are attitudes we will need to get rid of to be competitive in the globalization era.

We are no longer competing with ourselves; we are competing with the emerging countries in Asia and Eastern Europe and the developed world for the investment dollars. Whatever business or business model we choose to go into, whatever skills we choose to grow; there will be competition somewhere out there in this world. The competition is getting better at what they do…This is a fact of life.

Now of all times, we need to jettison the ‘Cari Makan’ and ‘Tidak Apa’ attitude.

No this is not another ‘The Sky Is Falling!’ Blog, it’s a dose of reality. We in Malaysia have plenty of smart people and skilled people. They are as good as the best of their peers in any part of the world. The problem is the good people :-

1. choose to put up with mediocrity

2. are lacking in communication skills

My understanding of 'Cari Makan' is ‘Making Money to Eat’. To me ultimately it means ‘To Survive’ mentality i.e. work for the paycheck. This concept might have been okay for the post colonial days. However its way too dated to be relevant today.

Sadly, even today for the typical Malaysian on the street, as long as he/she can ‘cari makan’, he/she will tolerate almost anything. Which leads me, to the ‘Tidak Apa’ (not my problem or don’t care) attitude. To me this attitude is really tolerance for mediocrity gone overboard.

We really need to change our work-style to be more proactive/self-empowering. It doesn’t matter whether the mediocrity is from the top or the bottom…we need to stop putting up with it

Metaphorically speaking, when the ball is thrown to us we need to catch it and keep running with it and then keep communicating with the rest of the team on the next move.

This might sound preachy but the first three things we need to improve on as Malaysians is

1. asking for more work

2. communicating status

3. asking questions...even dumb ones (better to ask dumb questions then to screw-up)

Happy working…