Journal of “Finance for the Operationals” Seminar on Oct 2011

I just finish the 3rd re-run of the above seminar in Hong Kong Federation of Industries on Oct 28, 2011.  I thought it is successful because almost all the participants give a full mark to the appraisal of the speaker and the content.  However, it is not good enough because there is only 16 enrollments, almost the same as the 2nd re-run.  The course will be deemed as failure and will not be re-run.  Profitability is always the key to justify survival.  Personally speaking, when I was working on the course materials, I really enjoy the process.  It contains most of my values and vision in organization management, particularly the flyer.  As usual, the training institution has trimmed the lengthy flyer to 2 paragraphs.  Before the original essay is thrown to memorial trash and buried in oblivion, I put it in my blog trash first.  I am sorry that it is in Chinese.

“要走得快，独自行；要走得远，聚众行。”
(原文: If you want to go fast, walk alone; if you want to go far, walk together”)

一般制造企业，从传统过渡至现代营运模式，技术不会是最大难题，系统也不会是障碍，员工的能力聚合往往是决胜的关键；单一员工或单一部门的超前表现，短时间上似有突飞猛进的效果；但长远而言，并不见得能带领整个团队同步迈进，反之更会引起内部矛盾，​​耗费更多资源。言则要如何一起走才能走得远？

现代企业竞争，不单要懂得专，也要懂得广; 要懂得在原有的核心业务上给予客户增值服务，也要懂与上游供应商聚合以取得更优势的成本效应；作为企业员工，面对的竞争绝不比企业本身为少，要生存要发展，要懂得与企业内部上游供应商及下游客户聚合(即其他功能部门)，为自己增值，也为企业增值。组织社会学上有『门与桥』的说法，每个人(部门)有一道门，需要不计其数的桥连接每道门以打破隔膜，加强沟通，促进发展。

既然在企业一切发生的，最终会反映在损益表上，而盈利是企业营运最终​​目标，各职能部门能对财务掌握一定知识，不但可增加企业融和，提高员工成本意识，使运作更有效率，部门间更能发挥互补作用，搭建不同的桥，为企业作出更有效的营运决策。

再者，有效的营运决策在乎于资讯共享，而资讯共享建基于施与受；这是聚合的基础，交换的动力；财务部以提供即时有效的财务资讯服务于各功能部门，各功能部门又以业绩资讯或政策配合以回报财务部，以达致双赢局面及部门间自我调节的机制。

本课程以管理/财务会计为经，以组织社会学理论为玮，如交换(exchange)、聚合(collaboration)、互动(interaction)、组织化(institutionalization)，再辅以约束理论(theory of constraint) ，一则灌输学员实用的管理/财务会计知识，如何套用会计基本准则于部门费用控制、资产有效管理、成本精细核算，二则透过组织行为理论讲解、实践例子及讲者丰富的职场经验，以增加学员企业内部管理能力。

How many lurkers are around?

Everyone needs to earn a living.  But we can choose our own way to survive.  Inside an organization,

1. One can be a quiet person and work according to instructions.
2. One can be aggressive and challenge any incorrectness in order to attain power and benefit.
3. One can be focus of the group and do anything that draw attention of people.
4. One can be defensive, cynical and against anything that is challenging the orthodox or threatening its interest.
5. One can be lurking and remaining negligible until the situation permits her/him to rise up.

What is the majority out of the above within an organization?  The first?  Yes but superficially.  I would say the last one. 2 & 3 are risky.  4 would be regarded as conservative and resistant to change.  5 is smart initially.  However, when the right situation never emerge, it will become the first category.

How many lurkers are around?  Many.  It is because there is very few people make the situation emerge and the lurkers are accustomed to lurking.  However, having been a leader, I found it a great joy of turning a lurker to an aggressive but conservative peer.  Do you agree?

We know more than we can do

“We believe more than we can prove, and know more than we can say.”  — Michael Polanyi

Recently, my brain is stuck with hundred thousands lines of VBA code because I am doing 4 projects concurrently.  I found that whenever I am occupied with programming work, I cannot spare to any conceptual thinking.  This is fatal.  I spot out this weakness when I was giving the seminar of internal control on Sep in HKPC.  For the first hour of presentation, I could not speak smoothly.  It took me around 30 minutes to warm up myself, many thanks to my partner; he stepped in to my presentation and give me a break to refresh.  Luckily, I did not disappoint my audience and earn quite a lot of applause.  I came across the same situation at the time I did many conceptual work while I would be awkward with systematic work.  However, when I unload the conceptual work and shift to system work, I found that I can bring out something new.  It holds true on the contrary, unloading system work, I can figure out something creative when shifting to conceptual work.  It seems that there is some magic power from doing change.  But it does not mean daily swap of system work and conceptual work.

Carl Jung said because of the existence of day and night, the world becomes meaningful.

Tao(Lao Tzu) said when one thing develops to its extreme, it starts to deteriorate.

Triz described that there is not so much real innovation, but contradiction could lead to surprise.

The folk knowledge tells that creativity is something minor among majority in the initial stage while the original creativity will be nothing when the minority becomes major.

According to Sigmund Freud, we have countless image stored in our subconscious and we need to rely on external events to elicit them.

Human beings can never be satisfied and any state of satisfaction will only stay for short period of time.  The only barrier is inertia.

The above seem to tell the something related.

Enjoy our weakness and get ready to harvest

I like to deal with youngster and share with them the knowledge and working experience I am proud of.  I will try my best and keep patient to explain in detail if possible, of course, not to do it within a day, maybe a year.  Then I will stay there to harvest. 

What to get?  I know myself, my strength and my weakness.  It is something real but people would not tell.  When I was young, I got many advise from my teachers, my managers, my mentor and everyone senior than me.  I learnt a lot from them.  However, I had the impulse to surpass them; it is a great joy to surpass those had ever been above us.  I had ever won a job while my ex-manager was one of the competitors.  To my relief, he was willing to be my referee in that job opportunity.  This was the last and most important thing I learnt from him.  There always exist people that are stronger than us.  I am also defeated by a number of people over the past few years, who have ever been junior than me.  Reality.  But whether the reality becomes crude depends on whether we repair our weakness.  This is the great lesson which only come across with the loser.  When I work more, I got to know how little I know, how much to learn and unlearn.  In addition, I come to realize that the better way to repair our weakness is to train up the youngster and let them tell me what I did wrong so that I can fix it before it becomes a fatal error.  For this reason, I am eager to look around and sort out people with the same vision as me.  To my delight, I found quite a few.

Over the past 12 months, I shifted to Supply Chain field by leveraging my know-how in Excel model construction.  I do 2 jobs concurrently.  One is with the bottle manufacturer and the other is the button manufacturer.  I am very puzzled with quite a lot of bugs when doing the Excel/VBA codes.  Many thanks to Alice & Zhang (button manufacturer), they help me fix so many bugs and save me proliferation of time.  Great!  In return, I tell them more of what I know and they return by sharing their knowledge to me.  A fruitful exchange!  They are young and passionate.  It is joyful to work with people who share the same passion, values and attitude but different thinking.  Any bug they found from my solution becomes a stimulus to them.  Honestly speaking, I do appreciate their attitude, particularly, Alice, she also helps me fix some bug in the new production scheduling model.  Excellent!

Feeling as information

I learn the above term from studying a book: Social Psychology of Consumer Behavior.  People are not rational enough when they are making decision.  We may take in our feeling as a factor in decision making, particular when we are shopping.  However, I found that feeling as information is quite common when we are judging people.  I have the following bias.

1. Good looking people won’t stay long in manufacturing environment
2. What makes a person looking great is her eye.  It can tell if her owner can think intelligently.
3. A plain smile is nothing unless it is at the right spot of time on communication.  It is a kind of feedback, an impressive feeling which could convince the teller that the audience understands.
4. Not good at talking(presentation) is not a weakness, capacity at listening does matter.  But how to identify it?  The eye contact.
5. Ground work knowledge is a key element which could impress me.
6. Passion in learning is everything.  It is better expressed by raising the right questions.
7. A humble tone is a way to draw attention of the speaker to tell more.
8. Giving direct and straightforward comment can help shorten communication time and improve future harmonization among people if the speaker can swallow any positive and negative comment.
9. I like to respect people with good working result no matter how they get along with me.
10. Front line worker/staff are deemed the respect of all walk of life within an organization.  I dislike any person who disdain the frontline worker/staff.
11. I appreciate the process of changing the mindset of people by the manager with all he might, particularly the manager does not exercise power, but demonstrate patience and perseverance.
12. If a manager is criticized by different departments, she/he is requested to explain but not necessarily to resolve it.  However, if she/he cannot accept critique, this is a problem instead.

I like to use the above feeling as information to judge a person.

A joke: we focus on people?!

The story began with a job interview with the executives of a local Chinese company.

By the end of June, the Supply Chain consultancy was completed for the phase I.  There was no sign of extension at that time.  I started to look for other opportunities.  On late July, I got 2 interviews.  One was in southern China (a local Chinese company) and the other was in the North (a medium size US company).  In China, there is a slogan from the government: Work for the sake of the people.  However, I only work for the sake of the people currency (RMB).  For this reason, I preferred the former: earning the world strongest currency – RMB at least could minimize foreign exchange risk.

The first interview was with the top guy of the company.  Bravo!  I could do my best to impress him and get the offer.  Paradoxically, I was impressed  by sitting alone for 1 hour before I could see the top guy, who is a little bit younger than me.  No surprising.  All the entrepreneurs must have their own traits.  I could learn something from them.  The interview was an interactive meeting.  We sat and stood, talked and charted, shared (our experience) and voiced (our own conviction), but he smoked a cigar and I drank a glass of water.  Well, it was 1.5 hour passed.  I was confident that I would get the position though it was normal to have at least 1 competitor – an unknown lady.  However, in China, men usually get some advantage by working in manufacturing environment.  I should be no exception.

A second interview was after around a week.  Maybe it is their custom to have waiting before meeting.  This time, it was 1.5 hours.  The longer I waited, the longer we talked.  It ended up with 2 hours.  I successfully impressed my interviewer and even gave her my own bookmark.  I liked reading to an extent that I printed my own bookmark.  In this bookmark, it prints the slogan of the website: “Concentration enables Proficiency.  Empowerment enables Growth” on one side while the other side print the website address of this blog.  During the 2 hours meeting, I made use of the techniques of storytelling, package my skillset, values, experience, success and failure in different stories.  From her eye contact, I was sure what I had to do was to find an apartment close to the office.  I was told that the decision would be made within 1 week.  Great!

According to conventional wisdom, patience is a virtue.  I accept.  2 weeks passed.  I tried to accept that there would be an exception for a lady surpass a man in manufacturing environment with equal qualification.  Luckily, the rule keeps working.  But I got the proof when I just landed Northern China for a next day interview.  Anyway, as I mentioned to the headhunter, the Chinese company was my priority.

It was a sunny day when I reached the office third time.  I intended to conclude the terms of employment within an hour and would celebrate with my family.  Nevertheless, it took me 7 hours of waiting before I could talk to the Executives about the employment though there were 2 peers conversation in between killing 3 hours.  It was really disguising.  I started to suspect the sincerity of the prospective employer.  I reached their office at 11am and met him at 6pm after all.  The executive finally quoted 3 requirements: responsibility, commitment and workaholic(!).  My response was the first 2 were unanimous while the 3rd was a matter of interpretation.  Provided I could resolve the problem, I do not need to be a workaholic.  Actually, my brain is always working.  Can I be qualified as workaholic?  Anyway, he offered me the position with a sentence to me before he left: Stock options & salary are all not issue if I could promise the above 3 things.  Bingo!  My mind congratulated.  The next turn was the finance executive and the HR.

To call a spade, I was shocked when I read the option plan.  It is almost a billion RMB provided they can go public!  My instinct threw me the wet blanket.  I started to sense that things would not come so easy!  The finance executive presented me a completely different picture when talking about the monthly figure.  If I took it, it would go back to the pay level of 7 years ago!  I wondered why they asked me to come when they knew my expectation from the headhunter and my CV.  Furthermore, I was requested to come on board within 2 weeks while I need to find the apartment and do the house moving at all.  Unacceptable!  Unless I failed many times of interview should I yield to the reality.  Well, they were busy at that night before we could make any black and write of offer.  I left their office at 7:30pm.  It was a long day.

Needless to say, I did not go because it is not my will to work in a company without treating people as human capital.  Though the executives emphasized that they urgently needed somebody with finance background together with strong manufacturing experience, their so-called emphasis only remained at mouth, not action.  It is more or less an impressive experience.  It is a disproof of treating people as capital – saying one thing but doing another.  I cannot fit to this kind of organization culture in a strict sense.  Well, after 1 week, the existing Supply Chain project called me back and the rest is history in my career.

Equilibrium = Balance of interest

When I study psychoanalytic psychology, I learn a principle as follows:

1. The mind of human beings is never in a stable state for long.
2. When there is imbalance, the subject will try to get it back to balance, e.g. getting thirsty will get water to drink; working tired will need to rest and reward
3. However, the state of balance will not stay long.  A staff getting promotion and pay increase will only be happy for a limited period of time, then she will try to get more promotion and more return.  By all means, she need to justify it by performance.  Her manager promote her because of her past outstanding performance will request different skillset in the new position.  For the first months, it is fine to wait and see.  But afterwards, if her performance could not justify for it, the manager will feel discontent and the imbalance of feeling take place.  The manager will either warn her for improvement or replace her.
4. The above cycle will continue as long as the incumbents are in place.

The stellar principles of Social Exchange Theory is also principles of balance.  If what I get is not equal or above what I pay, the feeling of imbalance will take effect.  Withdrawal or fight for balance will ensue.  It is a negative direction of collaboration.

When I am giving the seminar of “How to build internal control system in manufacturing environment”, I always declare that the first and foremost work to do is to balance the interest of all walks of life within an organization.  Otherwise, collaboration is only a slogan.