Singapore - Land of Attitude

SINGAPORE VISIT - Part 1
Much awaited singapore came to a flying start, after 3 hours delay of Indian Airlines flight.from hyderabad at 2 AM in the mrng. By the time I reached singapore it was 7 AM local time...... Big swanky Changi Airport will take any traveller by surprise. Enter the airport throught the skywalk.......the immigration area is as good as any Five star hotel lobby.. in one word MINDBLOWING. The airport with 3 terminals, has a lavish shopping mall with where u can buy everything under the sun at duty free rates. Passenger facilities.....gyms, massage parlours, internet surfing, TV viewing areas( read in different languages) all these free of cost. Every cuisine can be easily found in the airport. The Changi airport integrated system is so exhaustive, any info about the airport,flights planes arrivals/departures facilites,rules etc are readily available on the website. As member of Indian IT industry, I felt proud knowing that SATYAM computers developed the whole s/w for the airport operations..... three cheers for Indian IT success.
One step out of the airport, you will be greeted by huge bays for parking and wide spreads roads...mostly empty. I took the Mass Rapit Transit System to head home. This system similar to Delhi Metro is lifeline of singaporean public transport system. Swanky trains criss crossing singapore, excellent connectivity. All along the way we can see the oppulance of singapore.
A lot of emphasis must have been given to the way the city was developed. The total area is broken into constituencies. Each constituency( similar to our streets) has integrated facilities like - primary school/high school/college/ hospitals/ malls & malls. Each area is self sufficient, people dont need to go far to get anything. Malls the size of Central in blore/hyd are present in each street not one but two three.
All public transport and other major pay and use systems work in a system called EZlink. Each individual gets a ezlink card and he tops it up with some Dollar value, he only needs to swipe at time of entry and exit in train/bus/taxi/Mac Donalds outlets(yup its accepted even there). No jhanjat of buying tickets/ monthly passes. Even to refill your card, you have ATM lined up at all prominent points. In public transport there is no on to monitor whether people are paying for the services or not. Its expected that most of them are honest......... while I was using these services, i sensed there were so many ways to go scott free and not pay for the service.......had such system been prevalent in India, god save MRT/ SMRT systems.

Citizens ( 6 million on last count) follow LAW very diligently.....The law is ruthless with anyone who is caught. More than God fearing(did i tell you 15% of population has no religion- read atheist), people there are law fearing. I came across a news article during my stay, An american citizen was found in a vandalising incident. He was put to task and given punishment in singapore inspite of US Govt interfering for him.... Thats singapore soverignity for you.
A tiny nation which has nothing on its own. Singapore produces nothing, all goods are imported from different countries of the world, processed or re-exported. The economy depends heavily on exports refining imported goods, especially in manufacturing(28%) and electronic goods(TV/chips etc). Tourism accounts for 15% of economy. Visit to any of the major retail store - Fairprice/ John Little/ Carrefour/ Cold Storage will give you description of goods imported from different parts of the world. As per a statistic less than 20% of the population consume home made food. As most of the families have working couples packed/processed food is in big demand....... I was surprised to close to 6 varities of parata - plain/butter/onion/capsicum/ palak/ assorted varities in the stores.

Main shoppting district of singapore is Orchard Street/Clarke Road and few more places. One walk down this street and I already last the count of the international label I saw 10 minutes ago.......... This street is literally flooded with shopping malls and speciality stores................. Cosmetics and Jewellery stores rule the rooost......... one Saphire was on display for all Window shoppers like me :-) at Jee Loon Way Jewellers...... on single saphire costing Sing $ 18,324/-. At a conversion rate of $1 = Rs29 , best place not to take your wife to shopping ehhehehehehhhehe.....
One thing which I realized over period of 10 days is ATTITUDE of each citizen.... A tiny nation state with a population not even half average indian metro is the financial power house of South east Asia.
Few of my experience, I was on a city tour- the guide who was of malay decent, spoken typical.....Singlish ( Mix of english and singporean dilect). When he was showing us the singapore sports school, he said.. we are producting Gold Medalists for Beijing Olympics here. I wonder even if our top coaches say such statements in any sport.
This one took me by surprise, the government was trying to devise a policy to reduce the time taken for bill clearance for private contractors working on HDB projects to improve their WORKING CAPITAL MANAGEMENT and better CASH FLOWS. This was being discussed in the Parliament. When I further went through the news, current payment period for contractors is 15 days... the bill proposes to reduce it to 7 days..... Such things can't even be imagines in India.
This is the best which Indian beurocracy would want, but only the first part :-). Salaries of Government employees have to be raised by a whooping 56% from the next financial year onwards.......heavy debate in parliament. The reason PM has given is to sustain our economic growth we need strong/smart/efficient and HONEST civil servants and Ministers. To ensure we attract the best, we need to pay them on par with Private sector salaries in Sunrise industries........Superb way of getting things done.This explains why singapore is among the top ten cleanest from corruption in Transparency Index...........
One for MBA fundu...... I understand the concept of Vision(Kotler) - Big adacious blah blah something goal.
A retail store - FairPrice has this Vision - To be Singapore's Leading World-Class Retailer with a Heart. We wish to moderate the cost of living in Singapore through our cost effective Retail Operations. Few Facts about Singapore:
1. Rainfall supplies approximately 50% of Singapore's water needs :-)

2. Singapore does recruitment soldiers from Nepal ????? Gurkha Regiment again

3. The government is encouraging Singaporeans to have more children through the provision of financial incentives for the first to fourth child of each family. Total Births in 2006 - 37,600

4. All constructions in singapore are done by Housing Development Board -HDB

5. Salary of a civil servant in the grade similar to IAS officer is Sing $1.1 million per year. Spore PM earns Sing $3.4 million which is more than George Bush salary

6. Indians for 15% of the population

7. Foreign reserve of S$212 billion (US$139 billion).Area 699 sq. kms

8. Spore army gets trained in Malaysia/Taiwan/China/Australia/New Zealand. Except the mandatory Militry training for Men above 20 years every other training happens abroad.

9. Every year singapore men go to compulasory militry duties for 2 months. During this time the company you work for will pay half you salary and government the other half

10.Density of population is 6208/sq km.

11.Spore crime rate is very low... Biggest threat they face is hold your breath - Cycle theft...:-) The cost of installing GPS on cycle is more than the cycle cost so they are finding a better way to stop thefts.

12.Govt discourages you from using private transport like Cars. They have a heavy 300% tax on the base costs. Inspite of this you see many cars on road.

13.100000 taxi's operate and best part all of them are government controlled.

14.Govt owns each and every major business in singapore through its Govt Linked companies - Tamasek is the prominant one

15. Little India and China town are the only ethnic places in Spore.

16. Democractic nation with multi-party system, but only one party is in power for past 45 years. Country had only 3 PM's till date.

B-School Jargon saves the Day

Remember all the presentation n class lecture, where we made the Bull $hit bingo matrix……. Who completes the matrix faster with all the jargon we learnt in B school.

Last Thursday, I had a client visit in my office Sr. VP level who heads entire America ops.

She wanted to understand how things are happening on the floor and met with 7 of us from the delivery. She wanted to make notes on the issues n follow-up on them. When each one started speaking, they got into transactional level issues, which she was not interested in rather not able to connect, as expected she just shooo-off all the concerns team raised.

When my turn came, the MBA brat in me came to fore……… J. I asked her can I use the board, she gave me a good look n said ‘You May’

Picked up a marker n drew a small process flow from Business need to final delivery. Then hell broke loose.. I was at my best usage of jargon (didn’t use them for close to a year)

Business criticality of market forces for credit cards in USA,
Time to market which business wants,
Product/process viability of the offshore model we are pushing,
value add to business which we IT vendor is providing,
Knowledge management to ensure the domain knowledge is captured,
ROI on IT investment they are making,
opportunity loss if we don’t work together Client n vendor,
people mngt – cultural difference ( things like Indian’s ability to say NO to american’s when they pressurize to do more work) ,
lack of trust leading to Communication GAP( our pet theme in all case studies we did)

Post 10 minutes I was able make her take notes in her BLACK diary J.

MBA jargon saved the day for our team that day……………………… We learnt the jargon to be prepared for the Big show, it just happened I used the jargon in the big stage with the right people………….. BOARD level hahehehhehehheheh


Sundeep