What are the purposes of your job and your company?

First I would like to express my apology for not updating my blog at least once a month. Though I have not written anything on my blog for more than two months (while being away from Hong Kong and busy with many different activities), I do have many new realizations about myself, life and the world that I would like to share with you.  Life is in fact interesting.

Recently, I have attended a six days executive seminar at a cruise, regarding the subject on “Leadership and Purposes” with lots of inspiring ideas from the speakers.  Success and prosperity can always be found from any company having positive purposes to be shared by the employees and customers under competent leadership.  It’s also applied to the individual success whether one is motivated from his own purposes in life and knows how to make things go right towards the accomplishment of his purposes.

Have you ever asked yourself about the purposes of your life?  You can also ask the same question to your friends, associates, colleagues, and family members to help you getting to know them better.

We may have different responses: “Well, I have never thought about it”, or “I really don’t know”, or “Just follow what other people are doing.”, or simply, “Buying a property”, “Security in life”, “Making a lot of money”,   etc… You may find only a few people could clearly state their purposes in life right away.   You can also watch their emotional responses towards their purposes. Are they excited about them? Are they bored about them? Do they feel grief as if they have almost lost their purposes? You can imagine the level of one’s motivation by examining his purposes in life; and his emotional response towards his purposes.  Those who are more excited about their purposes have a higher chance of success.  It will be interesting to find out the survey results with questions on the purposes and related emotional response of the majority of Hong Kong People; which can give us insights to determine the rate of our success and prosperity.

Now, let’s take a look of the purposes of the majority of companies in Hong Kong?   Profitability and viability are always expected to make the company stay in the market.   What does it really motivate any company to exist and continue to grow?  However, mission statement with visions or purposes are not always published or clearly stated in any public company documents of Hong Kong companies.   It may be a good research topic to find out how the corporate purposes of Hong Kong companies are related with their success.

For example, on the company brochure of Sun Hung Kai Property Company, a listed company in Hong Kong,  said “ The Group believes in “Building Homes with Heart’ and has grown with Hong Kong over the decades offering ideal residences for people. The company is also committed to corporate social responsibility; taking an active role in charity and environmental protection. It will continue aspiring to new heights with its well-established brand and contributing to better living in Hong Kong by building quality homes.” We have witnessed the quality homes built by this company and it’s also a preferred property developer when considering buying any property in Hong Kong.  So from what the company has produced, we can see that there is an alignment of its purposes and products.

70% of our time is related with work.  If one’s purposes are in alignment with the purposes of the company one is working for, you can imagine that he’s motivated and happy in what he’s doing.  Otherwise, one may feel unmotivated with unhappiness.

If you wish, you may review your own purposes of life, the purposes of your job and your company to see whether they’re in agreement in some regards, that can help to uplift your morale to build a better future of yourself, your company and the community at large.

So let’s build a better future of Hong Kong together!

How do we channel the resentment of “anti-rich” in our community?

Economies do go through cycles of “ups” and “downs” whether they truly reflect the actual production or they’re arbitrarily monitored with speculation and inflated assets.  Whoever know better how to play the game could possibly be less the adverse effect of any dramatic changes in the rules of the game and any burst of asset price bubbles.

With the inflated prices of property assets just two years after the 2008 financial tsunami,  many Hong Kong people have complained the difficulties of owning property in Hong Kong, especially those generations born in 80s and 90s with less equity than older generation. The discrepancy between the rich and the poor is getting larger that getting a fair playing ground for everyone is apparently unavailable.

From the "Asia-Pacific Wealth Report 2010" released by Merrill Lynch Global Wealth Management and Capgemini, the number of Hong Kong people with liquid asset of US$1 million or above is 76,000 as of Dec 2009.  In other words, it is only about 1% of the population of Hong Kong that could be classified as “rich people”.  Ironically, according to the research of Hong Kong Council of Social Services, the number of poor people grew more than 60,000 in just half years to reach 18.1% of the total population (1.26 million people) as of June 2010. The definition of poverty applied to those families which have household income less than half of the median household income of Hong Kong.  How to solve the discrepancy between the rich and the poor people has now become the top concern of the government.

Growing resentment of the unfair rules of games geared towards rich people (仇商仇富情緒) is getting more ground in Hong Kong recently, especially as perceived and voiced a lot more by media and internet channels, though we do not have the actual figure of people of Hong Kong with clear and expressed resentment emotion against “rich people” by any objective collection of opinion.

In fact, the term of “anti-rich” is too general  as whoever have expressed the resentment of “anti-rich” may not resent themselves being rich, but because of the stops or barriers they have perceived to prevent them from being rich to have the same  status, reward and benefit like those rich people. Rather it is truer to say that Hong Kong has always been a materialistic cosmopolitan to encourage people making a lot of money on their own in our history, that if any resentment is more resulted from not making one's life the way one wants.

Human emotion and reaction is a very interesting subject. If one knows very well, one can easily monitor and control the emotions of others towards certain direction. (please click here for more information of the subject if you would like.)

Whenever anyone is in the emotional tone of “resentment”, they tend to respond better to a little bit, higher emotional state of “antagonism”. The media is very smart by channeling the resentment emotion towards the apparent enemies: rich business people and creating “antagonistic” emotional state.  Yet, they’re not constructive emotions, but mis-emotions that could destroy the harmony within oneself and our community.

But who is the actual enemy of one’s state of condition?  The state of one’s mind and emotion determine one’s state of condition.  One will not accomplish anything if attacking only "apparency" but not the "actuality".

The call and responsibility to improve the conditions always lie on able people in any community and it’s no exception in Hong Kong.  The more able people we have, the better the living environment we have. Yet, it also requires that each of us:  the rich, the poor, and the government to help each other in providing better game fields with better rules of game. The rich people need to make money with exchange in abundance with quality products and service by doing business ethically. The poor people also need to work hard to make their own contribution to our community and soon they can improve and change their conditions themselves. The government needs to provide fair rules of games, opportunity and effective  legal systems for the rich and the poor to participate and needed help to those for minimum level of survival and protection and in cases of any emergency.  In other words, each person should take up his own responsibility no matter what role or condition one’s in and that's how the prosperity of any economy depends on.

It’s time for us to raise our emotional tone to be more “constructive” than “destructive” by taking our own responsibilities, then we will have a better life for all of us in living Hong Kong.

Are you happily living in Hong Kong?

According to the recent survey report released by the New Economics Foundation of London, I was quite surprised to see the happiness index as ranked the “84th” for the Hong Kong People, but the “6th” for the people living in Colombia. Colombia had been infamous for its high crime rate and street drugs production in the past but probably after the recent change in the mainstream to ask for solution of unhappiness, for example, the policemen started to distribute the booklet of the way to happiness to the people, and life is not the same in Colombia.

Regardless how valid of its survey result depending on its survey poll and identification of happiness factors for its index, one need not to doubt further but simply looking ourselves and people around us to find the actual reality of our happiness. How happy are we as Hong Kong people? How is the happiness index ranked the “84th” for Hong Kong People related to you as an executive, or a husband or wife, or as a parent?

Though we have witnessed an increasing rate of illegal drugs taking and selling sex to earn money among the high school students in Hong Kong recently, we have no real solution to help them to distinguish right from wrong, and the means and ways to happiness.

Look at the current curriculum of our school system, there’s basically no school time allocated for some basic “ drugs education”, “moral education” or “how to improve your life or condition” courses, etc. In other words, there is no life education but only on academic subjects with the sole study purpose in getting good examination grades results.

Whether one can happily live one’s life very much depends on his ability to survive, ability to reason, ability to arrange life and the environment, ability to see the true factors in a situation and resolve problems of living, ability to accept and execute responsibility, so that life can be enjoyed towards the accomplishment of the goals and purposes of one’s life.

But if you look at our current school system, do we offer education towards the direction in increasing the abilities of survival of our students? If not, how can we expect them to know how to say “ no” to drugs, and “no” to any acts that are harmful to themselves and others. Instead, they use destructive methods with the hope that they could make them happier, but in fact leading them with more problems and unhappiness.

How can we raise our happiness index for Hong Kong people? It’s time for us to rehabilitate our abilities as well as the abilities of others including our next generation to make our life happier.

Life goes on....with “swine flu” around

Life goes on ... with “swine flu” around, “sudden acid attack from the sky”, “murder of an innocent 3 years old kid”, “export of US national debts to the world”, etc.

If we really look around, one can easily find tragedies, unfairness, sufferings, irrationalities, etc to tell us our reality or actual experience is far from ideal or perfect.

One can escape by having one's own fantasy in one's own world regardless whether it can come to the reality to be shared by others.

One can agree by getting himself down to the same or worse level of social irrationalities

One can also fight and change the reality to a better world with better civilization including fighting his own irrationalities though one may not know how.

One cannot go sane or rational by himself alone if everyone around him are insane or irrational. Honestly, it is a tough world to live even for an all-times perfect and sane person.

Even one day if someone could dream up perfect technologies to help all of us getting out of the traps, the way leading to the implementation of such perfect technologies would definitely hit lots of stops and barriers as put forward by our current mass of imperfect people; and therefore many of us would not even try to look and work this out. People tend to be "faults finding" as it is always easier than making things go right or towards the state of perfection.

What choice do we have?

If you somehow believe that there should be ideal state of man, ideal state of community, and ideal state of the world, stop complaining and do whatever you can do to improve or better it. By doing this, it may make you feel that you are a little bit off from the traps and slightly move yourself towards some kind of freedom.

Yet, we need some kind of better methods and technologies to help us to do so. We better look, learn, evaluate and do it right. Don't listen but look. Even if we have good technologies, it also depends on how good we can implement to achieve the desired results.

Can we count on others to do so? How about first asking yourself to count on "you"? Your future depends on “you”.

Do we have enough drug education that we have a “Drug Free Hong Kong”?

Recently we have two Hong Kong artists got arrested in Japan because of the illegal possession of street drugs with the subsequent verification of having taking such drug. It did arouse a lot of negative impact especially they could set a very bad example to their fans and young people in Hong Kong.

I wonder whether we have enough drug education in Hong Kong that why young people could think that it’s a fashion or whatever reasons to be on drug ; that is far more attempting than any harms they may have received. For those who said “no” to drug for many years could not understand why other people could be so stupid to harm themselves by taking such illegal drugs.

There could be many reasons why they chose on drug, possibly they may have some prior problems or upsets that they could not confront or solve so to use “drugs” as a means in not confronting, etc.. but probably they do not know “drugs” could bring more problems and upsets as a snowball that could destroy their lives eventually.

While the authorities should by all means make the illegal drugs out of the market that the "criminals" cannot have any channels to pass the drug to the public, it is also much more important to educate our young people on the subject extensively and continuously.

It should be included as part of the school curriculum for the subject of “drugs”. Any student who has finished a drug education course should attest that he or she will choose “no drugs” in his or her life. A thorough education with one's own recognition of the subject can bring a self-determined decision to say "no" to drug. Education is far more effective than any other preventive or legal means to build a “Drug Free Hong Kong”.

For the materials one can use in drug education either in school or any youth community, please check this out at http://www.drugfreeworld.org, where they can also provide booklet in traditional Chinese.

I know you will share with my mission to have a “Drug Free Hong Kong”, and so let’s do more in our drug education.

PR: wait... I: wait... L: wait... LD: wait... I: wait... wait... I: wait... L: wait... C: wait... SD: wait...

What are the purposes of our education in Hong Kong? Being schooled or educated?

To survive through our educational system in Hong Kong is not an easy task for everyone, especially if the stress is to train “memory experts” with “endless tests and examinations” rather than educate the students with the purposes of the subjects that they can understand, evaluate, learn and use them in life with their own self-determinism.

If you ask anyone what the purposes of education are in Hong Kong, you may not be surprised that many people cannot give you the proper definition and purposes of education. Instead you will most likely get many similar answers like the reasons going to school are to prepare oneself to get a better job and earn a better living.

It’s nothing wrong to get a better job or earn a better living, but how can we achieve this? Can we achieve by training someone as a “memory expert” without duplication, understanding, power of choice of the received data, and knowing how to use it to achieve results in life? Our education is more geared toward “one way inflow of data to the students “ that one cannot easily challenge whether the text is correct or not, but all what one needs to know is how to relate the text to the examination questions. We can easily witness the failure of many graduates of good grade students in applying what they have learnt from school into life, and conclude that the talent of this generation is not so good as our earlier generation. But what has gone wrong?

In addition to our conventional school system, we have many other supporting businesses around the subject of so called “Education” that in fact they are "School Technologies', for example, how we prepare our kids for interviews for better school so to have a smooth school runway from kindergarden to university; where we should live to get a better school district; whom we need to connect so to help our kids studying smoothly in school; which tutoring schools we should send our kids to improve their memories to get good exam results; how we fill up our kid's time with activities that would help him to look good on his resume, etc, all kind of ramifications which are geared towards good examination grades without any inspection what exactly we need to have and do in educating our next generation with real results.

Our culture is held together by how well we can educate our own people including whether we can educate valuable subjects that are useful, and whether they are taught in a way that the individual and the society see the purposes and the need of them, so to have a roadmap how to achieve the purpose by our education.

So it is time to ask:
1) What are the purposes of our education?
2) When studying any subject, do we have any purpose of doing this subject? What kind of results do we expect in acquiring and applying the subject in life?
3) How does the subject we study relate to ourselves and others? Is it valuable?
4) How can we evaluate the information on the subject to know the importance, relevancy, application and have our own opinion on the subject?
5) Do we have any effective study method (rather than memorizing method) to help us to achieve the above and know how to learn anything in life as one wishes?

I have been educated in both school systems in Hong Kong and the United States. I see that there is a lack of effective education and study methods thoroughly taught in our school systems. Most of the time, we simply jump in receiving the teachings of the subject without first consulting the above questions for ourselves and from our teachers; with the assumption that we instinctively know how to study and if any improvement is needed in this system, it will be the effort on raising one’s abilities in receiving or memorizing the data of the subject.

We are self-determined beings. For any information we receive today, especially in this new era of information age, our self-determinism is very much required in the evaluation of the information so we can use valuable information to achieve the goals or purposes of the subject to the extent of our own goals and purposes in life; and from which we can possibly have a prospering culture of our own.

Can we monitor to prevent any bad thing from happening in Hong Kong?

Honestly, we know we are working with a lot of ramdomity in life. In business, we are dealing with changes in the economic environment, changes of needs and wants of customers, technology changes that any executive needs to be “a tough tiger” to steer the company to be able to win for the survival of the business. For other demands of life, like our family, our community, our social and political environment, we are always facing constant challenges that perfect solution is not always handy in all various circumstances.

In due course, some bad things may happen to ourselves and others beyond our expectation or our prior knowledge or solution on the subject concerned.

However, one thing I notice that whenever any bad things happened in our community no matter within our government or in our social or business sector (while we may be still in shock of receiving such bad news), most of the time our first response or the first question we will ask in Hong Kong is: "why is there no one or no organization monitor this to prevent it from happening?" or simply directly accuse any related personnel or organization of his failure to monitor to cause the catastrophe; as if the victim himself had assigned his own personal responsibility or function to monitor his own activities to someone else who needed to be responsible for what had happened to him.

It is easier to criticize someone else for the failure of his monitoring job. But before we could make such criticism, don’t you think we also fail to monitor the person to be criticized so he can do a better monitoring job that no tragedy of any kind could possibly happen in the first place. Here, I don’t mean the person to be criticized has no responsibility of any kind but there could be something more than that.

It seems like that if we could find someone who is able to monitor, inspect all the outpoints in all various circumstances, able to know the tragedy before it happen, could take action to do something about it and save us from any tragedy, then we will live in a perfect community without any crime, injustice and insanity. Such personnel is therefore doing the proper job of "monitoring".

But is it the right question to open the door for the solution of our problems? In other words, is it the “right why” on why bad thing happened? If this is the “right why”, then we should be able to appoint a perfect person or organization that can do a perfect monitoring job all the time. Otherwise, we are still not able to prevent any bad things from happening if we cannot find such personnel or organization.

So what is the solution in preventing any bad thing from happening to us?

The solutions can be simply by increasing the intelligence of each individual being, improving the sanity of each individual being so he or she can act and decide rationally and raising his or her own abilities to monitor his own activities and others.

Without building the basics of each individual being but depending on a super star or a single perfect person or organization, we are still far away from improving our community by preventing any bad things from happening.

The solution is therefore to raise your own abilities and help others to raise their abilities.

Abilities is the solution to prevent any bad things from happening. Our community counts on the abilities of each of us, but not solely on a single person. With abilities from each of us, we have better observation, decide and act better for the greatest good to the greatest number of people concerned that will definitely reduce our chance of getting tragedy or failure. As such, the future of Hong Kong will be full of hope.