Alexis Tung's Blog

Before doing a presentation, read up on books on arguments. Then, when preparing your presentation, go all out to make sure that your DO NOT structure your presentation in an argumentative fashion. You will only invite people to argue with you (unless that is your goal). It is so much harder to bring about a consensus when people are arguing than when they are not.

Posted in Business

What makes a good knowledge management system? One that, when a person needs to find out information about something to do his or her work more effectively, is able to search for it quickly and find the exact information he or she needs. This person won't need to go through other people to get the information he or she needs. Most of the input to update this information is automated.

To create this system, I figure that a good step would be to look at the business processes in the organization. What is the business process pertaining to each staff role? For instance, for a customer service personnel, what are his or her inputs to the business process? From there, figure out: what information does this person need? After getting all the information requirements from all the job roles, consolidate the requirements and determine how to deliver the information required. Always keep in mind to weigh the costs of getting the information in a certain way to its benefits.

Posted in Business

When, for instance, creating a marketing campaign, apart from structuring your marketing message to ask 'what's in it for me?' in terms of the customer, you will need to align your message to the target customer's self-identity. How does your customer see him or herself? What attributes would make them proud to be themselves? For instance, if you are selling design software to clothes designers, you might remember that they see themselves as creative, unique, one of a kind yet in touch with the needs of others. They might even see themselves as enlightened as to what fashion should be and what attitudes reflect this form of fashion. Knowing this might help with the design and planning of your software.

Posted in Business

A good employee is one who is able to create a mission out of a job. For some jobs, like rescue or social work, this is easy. But for the lowly ranked executive, this might be a bit hard. A person who creates a mission out of his or her job is one who cares about how his or her job will affect others and affect the big picture. However, there is a risk that by caring too much, the person would become too emotionally involved with his or her job.

I once had a job as a telemarketer where I injected myself personally. My mission was to break the records for number of successful calls I could make. However this led to stress as well as burnout. If I did not make the highest number of successful calls that day, I could take it personally. By injecting my self-esteem into the job, I let the job affect my self-esteem, whether positively or negatively. The good news was that I managed to break the record for the most number of successful calls. However, I quit the job in the end.  What I learned from this is that it is important to regulate how much I took the job personally. Pardon the cliche, but work life balance is important.

Posted in Business

Somehow, food is linked to morale. I remembered that one thing that I remembered about the Polytechnic I studied in (Nanyang Poly) was how good the food was. It cheered me up whenever I needed cheering up. If I were to work somewhere where the food variety is limited, and the quality sucks, I think that morale would be lower than what it could have been. On another note, one way to brighten up a dreary meeting would be to have some nice food present.

Posted in Business