Not often I read something from the Guardian I disagree at so many levels, but this is something else. This just fails to accept how the system works here in Malaysia and instead brings voice to create a deep mistrust with the King, and the larger issue of democratic practice in Malaysia.
Let me break it down -
1. The King
The situation of a reigning PM resigning (sorry - couldn't resist) in a backdrop of a realigning coalition was unprecedented and was a test of the robustness of the constitutional monarchy that the Brits exported to us. (Note: Yes you Brit yobs, thanks but on second thoughts.. why were you here in the first place?) It wasn't like Tun M was resigning and passing it to the present ruling coalition, it was a ruling coalition that was getting replaced with the expectation that Tun M was to continue as the leader of the new coalition, and he was resigning. The question then becomes - who is in charge and who has the majority support of the elected reps?
That was the question for the King to determine, and in the face of it, he did just that in a situation without historical precedence.
The fact that some parliamentarian displayed behaviours that were chameleonic, dishonest, opportunistic and corrupt (so, what's new where - US & Trump? UK & BoJo?) by saying to the King that they were supporting Person 1 and changing their choice at the drop of a hat after that meeting complicated things.
The Guardian piece failed to clarify this important piece.
2. Anwar
It sounded like the piece wanted the world to side with Anwar (again) as seemingly democratic principles were abandoned. Lest it be spun, let it be remembered in the heat of the (battle) situation, Anwar offered himself as a candidate. He was nowhere close to getting majority support, and in an embarassing about-face when it was clear he was losing, offered Tun M the candidature to lead the (Anwar's/his!) coalition when Tun M was no longer getting the support of his own party (ie party-less!).
Is the Guardian piece promoting democratic practices or a mouthpiece for Anwar?
3. Tun M
Yes, badly misjudged and miscalculated the support that he was getting as the events were unravelling beyond control. But you could see the logic in what he was doing. Yet it wasn't enough to surmount the decades of animosity and mistrust, and it ended with that internal bickering allowing a dark horse contended to steal the game.
4. UMNO and Muhyiddin
In the end, this is still a fragile coalition. What is not evident is how much of the hard-won democratic space will be retained or if there will be the walking back of the racial patriarchy and patronage culture that is so toxic. How is the mistrust caused by racial polarisation and class divide going to be bridged? Muhyiddin deserves to be given a chance. If not, the Malaysian democratic practice that is in place, and one that the King has demonstrated the robustness of, will show the present ruling coalition out the door sooner rather than later.
1. I am now at the cusp of pulling the trigger, and for now at least, it is more certain than I have ever been before. The only restraint would be the financial needs for education for the three remaining ones. 2. If I were to conduct a Situation Analysis, the following would emerge:
from a PPA, a company in troubled waters to grow further - capital contraints et al
my own position, while influential still, is subordinated to higher powers and still seen as working level. Commensurate pay is not achievable and ceiling is real.
the influence I can wield, from a strategy making and a HRD point of view, is diminished in my position. I'm also not sure if I want to expend enough energy to drag the whole company out of it.
from a POA perspective, I have established my credentials. The fact the company does not value me only adds to the angst. There are various opportunities to pursue.
3. Which brings me to the only realistic solution - ie FLEXIT. (hahah)
From a DA view, stay/go/stay&fight are the only valid options. The 3rd, while still valid, is probably going to go through some serious emotional wringer and turmoil trying to put my points across to pekak-badak.
The learning point when dealing with people like this is that while political manipulations can be admirable in some ways, it has to be accompanied with a genuine heart-felt, emotional connection to advance people. Otherwise, we are dealing with soulless robots.
The balanced point of view is the loss of income generation, although the safety net can help in short-term.
4. So what then? Some various revenue generating options emerge.
For the first 3 months (while in tender mode)
freelancing on training
aquaponic
self-development - and pursue post-grad research although this should be done only if it helps with the revenue-generating objective
Anneige consulting on business development - high-tech Grabba model, SME value creation plans - strategy, HRD, institution building - education model etc
develop healthcare specialised business models - bridge to market, HSCI-QB3 connections,
also to figure out involvement in cybersecurity
involvement in disruptive tech - IoT - work with UTP.
Also to send out CVs -
MD positions
recruiters
energy companies
acquintances in energy business
And to accept part-time/freelancing retainer work
learning points on investments
strategy making and sector update
L&T work
5. All involves disciplined use of time and resources. GTD will be needed more than ever before.
...requires you to build this power base of recognisable expert-level knowledge and to also have within you the moral compass to determine the wisest course of action. You miss out on any of those points, you lose the right to express yourself in the full view of an unforgiving audience, and having each word and syllable being captured and replayed out in minute detail as it is frozen in the abyss of time and the internet.
Sometimes despite the nice, warm sunny day we can still make out storm clouds gathering and the sense of gratefulness and pleasantry is immediately tinged with a little bit of trepidation and anxiety. Such is the wheel of life that you are both at the top and the bottom at the same time! The ability to balance both, separate out the strands and finally emerge knowing clearly where you stand is important.
At the moment, the trepidation lies with the people of power and authority surrounding me - the bigoted mind of you are not worthy as compared to my Pikachu who comes from this esteemed bank and billionaire family heritage, the short-sighted politician with the fixed view on everything that is rectified the next time someone points out that how wrong it is, the dogmatic intellectual who is always correct (and always wrong too) because he argues both ends of the spectrum at the same time, the manipulative leader - who unable to articulate his thoughts and is too insecure and views his time as too precious to take people through his own thought process but argues his position piecemeal until after a long, exhausting process ends up as the completed 400-peice jigsaw he intended in the first place, the seemingly secure, sophisticated urbanite who will not admit to his upbringing and is too jaded to stand up to his position, the clever technocrat who is intent to keep his hands clean of all unnecessary burden from the lower-caste society he is brought on to heal and bring to civilised world.
So, where does that leave me?
I suppose how I carry myself changes. Being facetious when senior is more fun. I think not being taken seriously does put me on edge.
Better fashion sense, better seriousness and bringing issues and agenda that pushes the envelope. Showing better conviction. Making sure I have the right charisma to convince.
The habits of the wealthiest mirror the supposed ‘pathologies’ of the
poor. But while those in poverty are called lazy, the rich are dubbed
bon vivants
We don’t hear much about laziness, drug addiction or promiscuity among
the wealthiest members of society because most billionaires go to great
lengths to seek privacy.
Illustration: Sonny Ross
If nearly a decade interviewing the wealth managers
for the 1% taught me anything, it is that the ultra-rich and the
ultra-poor have a lot more in common than stereotypes might lead you to
believe.
In conversation, wealth managers kept coming back to the flamboyant
vices of their clients. It was quite unexpected, in the course of
discussing tax avoidance, to hear professional service providers say
things like:
“I’ve told my colleagues: ‘If I ever become like some of our clients,
shoot me.’ Because they are really immoral people – too much time on
their hands, and all the money means they have no limits. I was actually
told by one client not to bring my wife on a trip to Monaco unless I
wanted to see her get hit on by 10 guys. The local sport, he said, was
picking up other men’s wives.”
The clients of this Geneva-based wealth manager also “believe that
they are descended from the pharaohs, and that they were destined to
inherit the earth”.
If a poor person voiced such beliefs, he or she might well be
institutionalized; for those who work with the wealthy, however, such
“eccentricities” are all in a day’s work. Indeed, an underappreciated
irony of accelerating economic inequality has been the way it has
exposed behaviors among the ultra-rich that mirror the supposed
“pathologies” of the ultra-poor.
In fact, one of the London-based wealth managers I interviewed said
that a willingness to accept with equanimity behavior that would be
considered outrageous in others was an informal job requirement.
Clients, he said, specifically chose wealth managers not just on
technical competence, but on their ability to remain unscandalized by
the private lives of the ultra-rich: “They [the clients] have to pick
someone they want to know everything about them: about Mother’s lesbian
affairs, Brother’s drug addiction, the spurned lovers bursting into the
room.” Many of these clients are not employed and live off family
largesse, but no one calls them lazy.
As Lane and Harburg put it in the libretto of the musical Finian’s Rainbow:
When a rich man doesn’t want to work
He’s a bon vivant, yes, he’s a bon vivant
But when a poor man doesn’t want to work
He’s a loafer, he’s a lounger
He’s a lazy good for nothing, he’s a jerk
When the wealthy are revealed to be drug addicts, philanderers, or work-shy, the response is – at most – a frisson of tabloid-level curiosity, followed by a collective shrug.
Behaviors
indulged in the rich are not just condemned in the poor, but used as a
justification to punish them, denying them access to resources that keep
them alive, such as healthcare and food assistance. Discussion of
poverty has become almost impossible without moral outrage directed at lazy “welfare queens”, “crackheads” and other drug addicts, and the “promiscuous poor” (a phrase that has cropped up again and again in discussions of public benefits over more than a century).
These disparate perceptions aren’t just evidence of hypocrisy; they
are literally a matter of life and death. In the US, the widespread
belief that the poor are simply lazy
has led many states to impose work requirements on aid recipients –even
those who have been medically classified as disabled. Limiting aid
programs in this way has been shown to shorten recipients’ lives: rather than the intended consequence of pushing recipients into paid employment, the restrictions have simply left them without access to medical care or a sufficient food supply. Thus, in one of the richest counties in America, a boy living in poverty died of a toothache; there were no protests, and nothing changed.
Meanwhile, the “billionaire” in the White House starts his days at 11am – the rest of the morning is coyly termed “executive time” – and is known for his frequent holidays. “Nice work if you can get it,” quipped an opinion piece in the Washington Post.
We don’t hear much about laziness, drug addiction or promiscuity
among the wealthiest members of society because – unlike Trump – most
billionaires are not public figures and go to great lengths to seek
privacy. Thus the motto of one London-based wealth management firm: “I want to be invisible.”
This company, like many other service providers to the ultra-rich,
specializes in preserving secrecy for clients. The wealthy people I
studied not only had wealth managers but often dedicated staff members
who killed negative stories about them in the media and kept their names off the Forbes “rich list”.
Many even present themselves as homeless – for tax purposes – despite
owning multiple residences. For the ultra-rich, having no fixed
residence provides major legal and financial advantages; this is
exemplified by the case of the wealthy businessman who acquired eight different nationalities in order to avoid taxes on his fortune, and by the UK native I interviewed in his Dubai apartment building:
“I am not tax resident anywhere. The tax man says ‘show me a utility
bill’, and the only utility bill I can present is for the house I own in
Thailand, and it’s in a language that the European authorities aren’t
familiar with. With all the mobility going on in the world,
international marriages, governments can’t keep up with people.”
Meanwhile, the poor can end up being “resident nowhere” because no
one will allow them to stay in one place for very long; as the
sociologist Cristobal Young has shown, the majority of migrants are poor people. In addition, the poor are routinely evicted from housing on the slightest pretext, frequently driving them into homeless shelters – which are in turn forced to move when local homeowners engage in nimby (not in my back yard) protests. Even the design of public spaces is increasingly organized to deny the poor a place to alight, however temporarily.
It is as if the right to move around, to take up space, and to direct
your own life as you see fit have become luxury goods, available to
those who can pay instead of being human rights. For the rich, deviance
from social norms is nearly consequence-free, to the point where
outright criminality is tolerated: witness the collective shrug that
greeted revelations of massive intergenerational tax fraud in the Trump family.
For the poor, however, even the most minor deviance from others’ expectations – like buying ice cream or soft drinks
with food stamps – results in stigmatization, limits on their autonomy,
and deprivation of basic human needs. This makes life far more nasty,
brutish and short for those on the lowest rungs of the socio-economic
ladder, creating a chasm of more than 20 years in life expectancy between rich and poor. This appears to some as a fully justified consequence of “personal responsibility” – the poor deserveto die because of their moral failings.
So
while the behavior of the ultra-rich gets an ever-widening scope of
social leeway, the lives of the poor are foreshortened in every sense.
Once upon a time, they were urged to eat cake; now the cake earns them a
public scolding.
A few observations as a starting point for Situation Analysis
VC Model
The VC model is extremely challenging. The business model itself - relying on LP investment capital to help manage risk into investment in early-stage companies to cover for OPEX, will be under pressure as more LPs will question the need to do so. Within the current ambit of making financial sector less opaque and costs are fully paid for, the need for VCs to return money and perform the challenge of returning VC stage returns to LPs will be overwhelming. This may still be a slow burn development given that this model is only now seeing replication throughout the world after over 40 years of iteration in Silicon Valley, but I do think the model itself is under threat.
Performing VC type returns is hard. It is so because the reliance on private valuation means that if you are not part of the club at the onset, you are the laggards who will enter the fray at subsequent financing rounds where the pricing is higher, albeit with lessened risk. Entering the club is not impossible, but VCs intending to do so will need to display the requisite amount of chutzpah to do so, and to be fully backed when the bet fails. At that point, it is a bet to get to the higher returns by investing in earlier stage companies.
The other alternative is to enter into a derisked form of investment, later stage, lower valuation, derisked pathway to commercialisation and a potential liquidity event. This entails mainly under-the-radar type opportunities, typically again shown by longstanding partners, perhaps European or China, outside of the US.
The need to have long-standing, good, well-connected, trustworthy and excellent partners is essential.
Withoiut that chutzpah, teh VC may be a boring place to be in.
Accelarator / Incubator Model
To fund early-stage opportunities requires a different skillset.
It's not trying to understand a new tech, or a tech platform, and how it can be better than the existing standard of care or gold sfandard. When looking at a specific drug functionality, it could be easier as it has a single hurdle at the consumer/commercialisation end to overcome. Not to say the journey there is easy as regulatory, technology and product development barriers are substantial. But as comparison, the evaluation for an early-stage opportunity is goign to be excruciatingly difficult and is more prognosticating on tech use and predicting how the world will unfold in the intervening horizon.
What is easier to manage would be a shorter horizon investment. But for early-stage investments characteristics of small investment amount may be foregone. So, the ideal early-stage investment is one with short horizon and small amount ie pre-commercialisation at most, and small investment for marketing/commercialisation or the ability to compress timeline to a liquidity event by having a regulatory mark.
In a Malaysian/regional/emerging market context, a licensing type opportunity startup that has the ability to get into distribution phase for the regional market is ideal. In shirt, it's a business building incubator. The networks are different and it's more of supply-chain disruption or enabling procurement of innovative products on QC/TQM principles.
Building for growth is also another viable outcome. Scaling up markets.
Identifying segments of interest is key - small scall investments into platform tech is essential - AI/ML applications is one such application.
