PAP moved swiftly on Faishal case, but string of indiscretions could chip away at party's reputation: Analysts
With the Cabinet now short of two office holders, analysts say the case could speed up Prime Minister Lawrence Wong's plans for a reshuffle.
I am a bit baffled by the opinions in this article. I didn't even feel like Faishal needed to resign and he could have been given a warning and a chance.
There are so many dozens of PAP members in parliament and in the cabinet, surely we cannot expect all of them to not err. When they make mistakes that are unacceptable, they were removed from office.
I think clearly the system is working and I am glad it is though I find it is a bit too moralistic and strict personally.
2/3 Lawyers Are Mentally Unwell - The Law Society Report, An Interesting Read
The Anthro-LawSoc Legal Profession Sustainability Study, commissioned by The Law Society of Singapore and conducted by people insights company Anthro, draws on 31 in-depth interviews totalling 38 hours, with former judges, legal academics, practitioners across firm types, and lawyers who have left, alongside a survey of 855 practising and former lawyers. It pairs statistical modelling with thematic analysis of what lawyers said in their own words, so that each headline finding rests on both numbers and lived experience.
The study was prompted by the late Mr Adrian Tan, President of the Law Society until 2023, who warned in his 2022 Opening of the Legal Year address of a "perfect storm" facing young lawyers as record numbers left while fewer entered the profession. In 2021, 538 lawyers did not renew their practising certificates, a 30 per cent rise on the year before. The problem of attrition in Singapore’s legal sector is decades old.
This study perked the interest of the management scientist in me. Clearly this is a rigorous report akin to the sort I would do myself when I worked in management research. 4 painstaking years, 31 interpretivist interviews, a whopping 855 surveys with lawyers and some sort of grounded theory building which utilises inductive reasoning and coding to flesh out themes.
I later discovered that the founder of Anthro Issac Lim is in fact trained in the social sciences via a DPhil from Oxford and an MS in Management Science. No wonder this research is so rigorous, very few research firms in industry conduct their research in such a rigorous and scientific manner, most are quite shaky and lack rigour.
The study said the issue stems not from individual failings, but from structural and cultural conditions that may have remained unchanged fo
Channel News Asia also reported on this. Two key charts from their article follow below.
The findings that struck me the most was that roughly 2/3 lawyers reported mild to severe depression and anxiety and are mentally unwell to the extent it impacts their daily function. That is a whopping 66% of lawyers who are mentally unwell.
The Straits Times also hosted a discussion with 2 lawyers and they described a toxic culture that permeates the industry including routine verbal abuses, shouting, throwing of files, staplers and verbal insults.
The lawyers described a culture of 'we suffered, this is how it is, so we continue it'. The senior lawyer is especially and appreciably honest and insightful in this discussion. I was half expecting the usual 'work hard, don't complain, people have tempers, this is working life, don't be a strawberry, maybe you are the problem' spiel but the senior lawyer was very on point with many things.
Personally, I have always treated my subordinates nicely and I think all of them (perhaps except 2 out of dozens) who reported to me directly over the years would agree.
I think our younger generations are educated and smart enough to improve on such behaviour, which exists in all companies in Singapore. These behaviour are counterproductive and harms productivity, morale and mental well being.
Kudos to the Anthro, the lawyers and the mainstream media for being honest and speaking truthfully.
Societies and organisations are ever changing and often they take 1 step forward and half a step back but slowly norms are changing. I just hope to avoid working with the less progressive ones personally because they are an affront to basic adult maturity and intelligence.
I just came across this interesting research in the Journal of Business Venturing. In a nutshell, the authors propose that entrepreneurs’ poor mental health may lead to dysfunctional leadership that generates organizational trauma, ultimately leading to firm-wide miasma that can hurt a venture’s ability to function. They also theorise the moderating roles that venture newness/smallness and a board of directors or top management team can have on these effects.
I have encountered difficult founders over the years whose behaviour fell outside of social and workplace norms.
I remember a founder who greets me by yelling vulgarities at me (totally unprovoked!) regularly to an acquaintance who tells me he is a marketer himself and then proceeds to do SEO audits by googling 3 generic short tail terms he likes himself and yells at his agency whenever he sees their rankings fall (for those unfamiliar with digital marketing, we usually use SEMrush or the Google Search Console to audit hundreds of keywords properly, we do not manually search for 2 or 3 preferred terms) to another acquaintance who seems to believe all gossips without even fact checking.
Many startups have top management teams that are friends or family members of the founder, so while they can help to moderate firm-wide miasma, they too exist and leave at the pleasure of the founder.
However, there has been some research that shows founder led companies that do make it into the S&P500 outperform the rest, they crux being they need to become publicly listed and enter the SnP500 first, in reality, there is a strong selection bias i.e. only the top maybe 0.000000001% of founders are compared against professional CEOs.
Companies with their founder present performed twice as well as their peers in the S&P 500 over the past decade.
For one thing, they generate more and better patents.
Generally, for many smaller founder led companies, the founders do manage through an interplay of emotions ranging from greed to fear to optimism.
I have seen cases where founders lost everything and had to declare bankruptcy to cases where the business muddles through, not doing badly enough to fail but not doing well enough for the founder to earn an income equivalent to salaried employment.
To my mind, entrepreneurship is a highly risky endeavour and most startups fail. One should not attempt it unless one has decent capital and an appetite for risk. Even then, one should experiment and do research and not dive in without any experience, data or dipping the toes usually.
Unsurprisingly, research shows most successful entrepreneurs are in their 40s. Anecdotally, these are usually experienced middle-age professionals who understand what they are doing well and they bring deep experience, expertise and networks to their startups.
I haven't been really impressed with the use cases of AI in the field of marketing...until now.
This just came out a few months ago but it is impressive to have agents in Claude doing market research, campaign strategist, content creator, creative designer and data analyst work in harmony.
You definitely still need senior marketers to go through the output and revise and edit but this is quite useful, especially as they refine it further.
As agentic AI develops further, I foresee they will help to increase productivity of marketers globally.
Stuff such as OpenClaw is already out there. They just need to refine and make it more mature and we could conceivably have agents for most human white collar jobs in the new few years, able to use the mouse on the desktop to do tasks just like an entry level accounts/finance/legal/secretarial/BD/marketing executive can.
I still recall in around 2023 Google was still advising not to use AI content for blogs for SEO value. It is like the LLMs and generative AI have exploded and once out of the box cannot be put back inside again.
Digital marketers have always embraced change, I remember the days of black hat SEO and most major Google and Facebook updates. This is no different. We should embrace technological progress, as they eventually raise productivity and human standards of living.
These 2 years will be the years marketing teams get used to marketing agents. Actually, many companies are still struggling with digitisation 1.0, they are still struggling with their CRMs, datalakes, Microsoft Automate, WFH or even working without wearing business pants, etc, so this will be a further shock to many more traditionally minded marketers and TMT managers.
Singaporean Graduates With Harvard PhD After Getting Rejected By Local Universities
He said in his speech at Harvard that his school in Singapore discouraged him from studying biology due to poor grades, despite his interest
Singapore used to have this really flawed educational policy of allowing only 25-30% of each cohort into public universities. This policy was in place until the 2010s from what I recall.
The explanations given ranged from 'if everyone went to university, a degree would be useless' to 'our economy does not need so many university graduates'.
The government has changed course in the 2010s and now a much larger percentage of each cohort goes to university.
This has handicapped many Singaporeans of the older generations. This shortsighted policy also ignored the fact that Singapore was already a knowledge based economy back then and it was easy to see that high value services jobs would dominate the economy.
A bachelors degree just confers broad general knowledge in a particular area. Education is about learning knowledge and skills for life and to practise a profession. Everyone who is motivated deserves a chance to gain knowledge he or she is interested in. This is also in the interests of the country.
SpaceX IPO - $1.75 trillion to 2 trillion valuation
I didn't read the S-1 but just a cursory look at their numbers and business tells me it is way overpriced in terms of all the basic multiples from P/S, balance sheet, P/E, PEG, etc. This is despite all its competitive advantages in terms of technology, dynamic capabilities and even arguably synergistic effects between its products and services.
What is unique is there seems to be no price discovery process for this IPO. As usual we have the bears and the bulls with their theses.
Even the most bullish person I have listened to, Chamath, makes a case that is so long term and that needs so many things to go right just to justify a $2 trillion valuation. The fundamentals need years to catch up with this valuation. This reminds me of all the Tesla bulls.
This is really just a meme stock IPO for retail. Few serious investors of size is going to buy this IPO, or at least a take their full positions at this IPO.
I think the narrative that connects AI to job loss for many of the CEOs that are doing it, it is just too lazy - Jensen Huang
The narrative that connects AI to job loss is "too lazy", Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang told CNA on Monday (May 25). He added that it
Huang said some executives were blaming layoffs on AI "to sound smart."
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang criticized CEOs who blamed artificial intelligence for layoffs, calling the narrative "lazy." "I think the narrative that connects AI to job loss for many of the CEOs that are doing it, it is just too lazy," Huang told Singapore broadcaster Channel NewsAsia in an interview on Monday."AI has just arrived. How is it possible they're already losing jobs?" he asked.
Huang said it "doesn't make any sense" for companies to link layoffs to AI before generative AI tools became widely useful in the workplace."How is it possible that AI became productive and useful only six months ago, and they were somehow laying people off two years ago because of AI?" Huang told CNA in Taiwan.
Huang said some executives were blaming layoffs on AI "to sound smart.""I really hate that," he said.
Buyout fund manager Advent is exploring a sale of Singapore-based The Learning Lab, Singapore after two failed attempts earlier.
Rippledot Capital has been appointed the sell-side advisor.
Interesting news.
$400m USD is about $510m SGD. If we apply a generous P/S of 10 and a P/E of 20 for valuation, we are looking at annual revenue of $51m and net profit of $25m, assuming they have close to 100% ownership.
I recall reports of them failing to sell at $677m SGD previously, so I guess they have decided to reduce the multiples to try to clear the market, i.e. they have high intentions of selling and exiting the business.
Would you pay $510m for a tuition business with $25m net profit and maybe 10% YoY growth today?
That is 5% ROI, lower than the SPY and only slightly higher than the current 10Y treasury yield at 4.3%. Not me personally, even if this is one of the category's market leaders we are talking about with substantial brand equity and somewhat VRIN competitive advantages (but very possible for a well-resourced competitor to emulate) including tangible and intangible assets such as their best-in-market curriculum, curriculum and teaching staff, large number of existing students and networks, etc.
How One Of Singapore's Top 20 Richest Billionaire And His 2 Children Went Bankrupt - Lim Oon Kuin
It is sad to read this. Lim Oon Kuin and his 2 children declared bankruptcy and it seems like he has a high chance of dying in prison.
It is a classic case of taking on too much risk. Lim Oon Kuin bet the house and went long on oil futures during Covid. The futures famously turned negative which resulted in a lot of margin calls from brokers. I personally know an acquaintance who also lost huge sums from this unfortunate event. Many were surprised and asked 'How can the price of an asset turn negative?'. For futures, they can.
Lim Oon Kuin basically got margin called by his banks and decided to cook the books.
Many people say that Covid was a black swan event but if such black swan events happen almost routinely every decade or two to financial markets then how can they be really black swans?
'Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises' by Charles Kindleberger and 'This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly' by Reinhart and Rogoff are classics on macro crises and panics.
The 84-year-old was found ‘disoriented’ with breathing difficulties, says his son Read more at The Business Times.
The founder of Hin Leong, Lim Oon Kuin, has fallen on his sword, revealing he hid more than US$800 million in losses speculating in oil futu
Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises : Aliber, Robert Z., Kindleberger, Charles P., McCauley, Robert N.: Amazon.sg: Bo
This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly : Reinhart, Carmen M., Rogoff, Kenneth S.: Amazon.sg: Books
One of the most important decisions companies make is whom they name manager. Yet Gallup research suggests they usually get it wrong -- cost
Key Points:
Companies fail to choose the candidate with the right talent for the job 82% of the time, Gallup finds.
Bad managers cost businesses billions of dollars each year, and having too many of them can bring down a company.
Managers account for at least 70% of variance in employee engagement scores across business units, Gallup estimates. This variation is in turn responsible for severely low worldwide employee engagement. Gallup reported in two large-scale studies in 2012 that only 30% of U.S. employees are engaged at work, and a staggeringly low 13% worldwide are engaged. Worse, over the past 12 years, these low numbers have barely budged, meaning that the vast majority of employees worldwide are failing to develop and contribute at work.
Conventional selection processes are a big contributor to inefficiency in management practices; they apply little science or research to find the right person for the managerial role. When Gallup asked U.S. managers why they believed they were hired for their current role, they commonly cited their success in a previous non-managerial role or their tenure in their company or field.
Very few people can pull off all five of these requirements of good management. Most managers end up with team members who, at best, are indifferent toward their work -- or, at worst, are hell-bent on spreading their negativity to colleagues and customers. However, when companies can increase their number of talented managers and double the rate of engaged employees, they achieve, on average, 147% higher earnings per share than their competition.
Reimaging Government From The Ground Up - Li Hong Yi
I think Hong Yi makes some very good points. He talks about how managers have limited attention and can get overwhelmed when too many things are placed on their plate.
The attention based view is a known and mainstream logic among management experts.
However, I don't fully agree that is a problem in most government organisations due to delegation and scoping of work.
For example, the CEO tells the CTO to create a new website. The CEO will leave everything to the CTO and his team. The CEO may take a look and leave some comments for the CTO but that's it.
I think the issue he faces is more of his engineering teams going into many different organisations and making apps for them and getting the apps approved. It is perhaps more of an innovation, structural and authority issue which I think GovTech has solved quite well so far by being an inhouse WOG consulting and development arm.
3 Changes To Resolve Over 50% Of Workplace Conflicts
Some of my observations over the years.
Don't throw your temper, exercise patience
Don't throw your temper, especially at the first instance. Be patient, communicate and always give someone at least 2 chances to explain first. The second chance can be days after the initial chance to give the person time to think and prepare properly.
People who throw their tempers at the slightest things are bad managers and colleagues.
Don't make a minor issue into a major one
Good managers resolve major issues and set up checks and balances to prevent them from happening.
Bad managers and colleagues do the reverse, they make minor issues into major ones and are unable to prioritise (i.e. everything is important and a priority). They lack courage to speak truth to power.
Always hear all sides to a story
Never listen to one sided stories, always get all parties into the same room and listen to all sides and be fair. This minimises misunderstandings and reduces rumours spreading.
Complainants do not have the right to keep their complaints secret from the accused, the accused person always has a natural justice right to know the details and to respond (under the Employment Act 'Due Inquiry' must be given for all investigations into possible misconduct). Apply confidentiality to others who are not involved or to whistleblowing cases where the organisation's reputation is at risk due to a possible major crime.
Walgreens Has A Cult ‘Peelable’ Candy, Courtesy Of A TikTok Craze
It’s tiny, squishy, chewy, shaped like a cute baby mango and GenZers have gone crazy over it. Walgreen’s can’t keep it in stock.
“The interactivity of it is really cool and it’s what makes the peelable candy really fun,” said Marty Esarte, vice president of Walgreens’ owned brands, in an interview with CNN. “It also creates a discussion point: Is the outer layer better than the inner gummy or are they better together or separate?”
Esarte admits that he didn’t expect the squishy treat to become a viral hit. “Literally in about four to five days after we launched it, we sold through nearly all of the product,” he said. “If we had expected that to happen, we probably would have had more.”
For Nice Gummies, Tiktok is a good channel. Most audiences are technically in the consideration stage (everyone except perhaps diabetics or certain groups can eat gummies and are thinking of eating constantly) and if the video successfully calls them to action, they can simply buy the gummies at Walgreens later (no locational constraints mostly).
Videos of third parties (influencers) trying out the gummies and reviewing them is much more persuasive and authentic than the brand itself boasting that the candy is good (too 'corporate').
Having a video go viral and selling out is the dream of many small business owners. For professional marketers, we know that it is impossible to make this happen with certainty, what we can do is to maximise the chances by having a stream of good organic content, using good hashtags, descriptions, integrating with other channels, creating synergy with paid amplification, working with suitable influencers, etc. But luck and having a good product plays a big role as well. For more predictability in conversions, that is where paid amplification comes in.
For B2B, higher priced and more niche items, for example refrigerators and tuition classes, organic Tiktok may not work as well in of driving conversions as most FYP audiences may not be 'in market'. Organic Tiktok may serve largely to boost awareness and recall but not drive conversions, although it can also assist conversions as one of the later touches' channels with earlier touches' channels amplifying to 'in market' audiences.
Property Lim Brothers To Introduce Code Of Conduct
Co-founder Adrian Lim said that morale among agents was affected from the fallout.
My view on this PLB news may be a bit controversial but I regard this as a personal thing and not a public one.
In fact, it is probably the norm in most SMEs in Singapore that the TMT comprises people who have close relationships with the owner.
The owner of a private company has the right to appoint anyone he wants to his csuite, be it his son, his mistresses (notably Stanley Ho), his friends or someone else.
Is this the best possible way to run a company? Probably not but who is anyone to tell an owner how to run his own company?
The changes seem to be very reactionary to me and mostly an attempt at retaining staff and reducing bad press.
I remember in 2021, Facebook rebranded as Meta. Just after the Covid pandemic, Mark Zuckerberg was very bullish on Virtual Reality, which he declared would be the future of Facebook.
"Over time, I hope that we are seen as a metaverse company and I want to anchor our work and our identity on what we're building towards" Mark Zuckerberg
"Imagine, for example, how useful it could be to wear glasses that give you virtual directions in your line of sight, or immediate translations of street signs in foreign languages. Or even make it possible for you to have a conversation with someone who is thousands of miles away as a three-dimensional hologram in your living room instead of a head and shoulders on a flat screen. And, as I will go on to explain in more detail, the potential societal benefits — particularly in education and healthcare — are vast, from helping med students practice surgical techniques to bringing school lessons to life in new and exciting ways" Nick Clegg
The social media giant says the new name will better encompass what it does.
The metaverse is a logical evolution. It’s the next generation of the internet — a more immersive, 3D experience.
There was no real data, even experimental ones, to back his opinion and 'vision'. VR was not widely used by most people and the technology was not mature. However, Mark Zuckerberg was so enthusiastic about it he renamed his company and repeatedly spoke about it.
Fast forward to 2026, 5 years later, revenue from VR is around $2b annually and losses have increased to $19b annually (about 25% of Meta's entire net profit). A lot of those costs are in engineers salaries and Meta should be able to re-deploy the engineers elsewhere to work on other products, in other words, they are quite dynamic. Meta possesses 'dynamic capabilities'.
Meta went rather big on VR spending up to $20b annually, they did not just experiment with a smaller budget. VR is still immature and has not gained inroads into the mass market. However, Meta glasses is a bright spot and are seeing increasing sales in 2025 and has sold up to 7 million sets.
In 2025, Meta seems to have switched its focus to AI, just like every major tech company.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is on a mission for his company to be the first to reach so-called artificial superintelligence — generally conside
VR is still sputtering and still seems far from mass market adoption. The number of early adopters is also small.
For a new technology to gain mass market adoption, the usual strategic process is for price to fall low enough and for the technology to be useful and good enough to attract mass market personas. A lot of work also has to be done in terms of marketing or in the unique case of Tesla, earned media amplification, to create awareness and to persuade different personas to try it.
Will VR become mass market one day and will Meta ever be able to turn a profit on its VR business? No one knows, including Mark Zuckerberg.
With the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran in its seventh day, President Trump says the aim is to bring Iran back from the brink of destruction and "
As the Iran war continues, I am reminded that even war, which is one of the most labour intensive activity, is now largely a competition of technology and military science.
As Iran fires its drones and missiles, America's friends such as Israel and Kuwait are shooting them down with layers of air defences. To someone like myself who is not a military expert, it is quite amazing the precision at which these equipment operate.
The Hollywood films depicting WW2 scenes of soldiers charging to their deaths and commanders spurring them with motivational speeches is not the reality today.
F22s take out the main air defences, F35s and B2s take out the remaining threats and B1s, F15s, F16s, B52s and drones carry out precision strikes after air superiority has been established.
Even during WW2, a group of physicists working on the Manhattan Project created the nuclear bomb which then triumphed over every weapon and army on earth, ending WW2.
If the nuclear bomb had been invented by Germany, we would be living in a very different world today.
