George Orwell’s Animal Farm springs immediately to mind. Look it up if you don’t know the story. What started out as a sort of odyssey towards a “new normal” for the animals lost its bearings and turned from the […]

States, organizations, large corporate entities, medium size companies, perhaps even smaller businesses, are all afflicted by an almost uncontrollable tropism towards exercising more and more control, enacting […]

“It’s ONLY an exercise! No need to get so serious about it!”
Heard that sort of thing before? Ever said it yourself? How do you respond if you hear such a phrase, or smell the same attitude in the air? I get […]

The Chinese character romanized as Tao or Dao means “The Way”. It came to my mind this morning and the phrase “Triggers And Overrides” appeared before me.
Triggers are of course basic, natural, archetypal […]

How do you respond to criticisms or to negative feedback? Or to challenges and “hard questions, for that matter? Do you slink away, disappear into the carpet, stutter apologies profusely and crawl away to lick […]

“Don’t work hard, work smart.”

“You have to work hard to get ahead.”

“Lazy people are more likely to become successful.”

“Multiple Streams of Income.”

“Make Money with No Money.”
Do those statements […]

This is a quote taken from Lao Zi, and he is of course the founder of the Taoist persuasion. There are a great many other quotes attributed to him, of course, and he is also known as the author, by and large, of […]

Yes, Singapore’s Foreign Worker Problem, which really isn’t a Foreign Worker Problem at all, but a Fallacy Of Entitlement Problem, and which happens to be our biggest FOE, the enemy of our continued success.
Yet […]

Many governments around the world are acting to protect jobs, to varying degrees of success, that I can see. Protecting jobs is laudable and necessary, especially in times like these, during a pandemic. When you […]

I saw this on LinkedIn’s “Today’s news and views” column just now. Does the farm industry need workers only now? Hasn’t there been a shortage of farm workers, just like healthcare workers, even from more […]

I was once asked to deliver a talk to some undergraduates on “How to Ace the Interview”. I told the person who asked me to do it that I don’t focus on “Acing the interview” but I focus on “Acing Yourself”. […]

I was passing someone talking on his cellphone and heard the phrase “…but I’m not an expert, so I’ll leave it to the experts…” Having some of my own business to mind, that’s all I remember hearing before I was […]

When we read books or attend courses or learn a thing or two from the sagely erudite, have you ever been confused by apparent contradictions from the same source? What about apparent contradictions from similar […]

Translators have always been in demand because there are many languages in the world, and we all desire to trade and raise our value, or riches, together. That is our espoused view. The truth is that we wish […]

Transcript, slightly edited.

I’m Elijah Lim. The poster that you saw at the beginning of this video is pretty typical of posters that have been going around for the longest time and which say things like […]

Everybody loves sales? We should all bargain for what we want to buy? How about waiting for next season’s sale? All of us love such things, or so we are told, or so we have been trained. Of course, no one wants […]

I saw something on an electronic billboard somewhere in the heart of Singapore that went something like “…he still apologized for being 15 minutes late even though I had keyed in the wrong pickup address…” […]

Some years ago, someone told me of a new way of teaching students at a certain establishment. There would be no textbooks and very few lectures. Students were to deliver presentations at the end of each day, and […]

I was reading about Brexit and Charles de Gaulle’s Last Laugh on Geopolitical Futures when this came to my mind. George Friedman talks extensively about the “crisis of the exporters” which basically says that the […]

Yes, with a question mark. Not being an American, I have never paid much attention to Black Friday. I never thought it would figure much in Singapore, but it apparently has to some degree. Today’s local newspaper […]