Alan’s Blog

The can’t sleep thing is finally hitting me. I find in the past 2 years many of my friends start to have problems getting to sleep. Now here I am, new to the club.

Many people and many questions spin in my head.

I had a talk with the GM of innovation center this afternoon. Let’s call him Mr.P. We talked about our view of the new boss of our business unit. Mr.P. said you gotta to have a direction when you are in charge. It’s good you have a vision and you fail. Rather than you have no idea and let guys under you run around and fail anyway.

I had a talk later in the day with some colleagues some of them are expats from Europe. I mentioned good products polarize people.  This was an idea I learned from Guy Kawasaki.

Good products polarize people. Does good people polarize other people around him? I used to overlook people with high ego (or arrogant people). Now I envy them. I realize when you are so confident in yourself and in the direction you are going, actually you’ve been polarized. You choose your own success. You surround yourself with other successful people or successful people to be. You are deserted by losers.  You feel lonely from time to time.  You could even fail. But who cares. Even Steve Jobs was fried once from the company he started with. He was a public failure at the time.  Issac Mao said he tends to invest in teams who have failed before rather than team with success. If you look at statistics the chance you will succeed this time is higher if you have failed than if you’ve succeeded in previous times because you learn from failures.  The founder of Cherry car company called Li Shufu once said please give me a chance to fail when he was asking the government to issue him license to start the company.

Guy Kawasaki said you gotta be careful of the bozos around you. Those are the people who tells you things can’t be done, shouldn’t be done and it isn’t necessary. Didn’t some one tell Google at early days that the world doesn’t need another search engine? Didn’t IBM say the world only needs 3 personal computers?

I will try to see who are the bozos around me and leave them ALONE.

It’s a busy day today. The recently hired general manager of my business unit visits China and gives us a town meeting. It took a bit longer than expected for round 200 employees to take a picture together with him. The town meeting turns out to be better than I expected. The major takeaway from the meeting is that I find out, surprisingly and believe it or not, great leaders (successful people) are believers. They all have something to believe in. It’s people, industry or certain technology that they believe. As for our general manager he spoke at length things he believes in. He believes in our CEO who hired him in the first place. He also believes that our company focusing too much in Europe and overlooked the opportunities in other places around the world. He believes restructuring doesn’t mean to cut back but to re-focus. I hope what he said it’s not just management talk. We will see how he walks his talk in the coming weeks. Once thing he promised he will be different from all his predecessors he mentioned was that he will make decisions quickly and he will rely on his people to make right decisions.

Bonus Picture: My crab rice:). I love cooking and I love innovative cuisines.