Hong Kong island from TST
The view from TST, looking out at Hong Kong island. The ferry ride is about 5-10 mins. Hong Kong puts on a daily light show at 8pm each night, using spotlights and lasers set to music.
Strategic Small Business Ramblings
I am the CEO and co-founder of 808 Interactive, LLC. Aside from serving the needs of my clients, partners and employees, I'm also a Producer (Video Games, Web, Business Development) and Investor (Stocks, Options, Real Estate), living in Hawaii and occasionally in Kawasaki Japan. I have worked for companies like Sun Microsystems, LucasArts, and Konami Digital Entertainment.
www.808interactive.com
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Lamma Island at sunset
I took this shot from a seafood restaurant that overlooked the harbor. Lamma island is a small island off of Hong Kong, renowned for its great seafood and peaceful serenity. Its a very different experience taking a ferry here if you are used to the hustle and bustle of Hong Kong island, and its well worth the trip. The ferry ride costs about $2.60USD and takes about 20-30mins or so.
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Azureus Rising
My buddy from college days at the AAC in San Francisco has produced his own proof of concept, "Azureus Rising". He put a lot of hard work into this IP, and it turned out pretty damn awesome! check it out:
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"You have a good poker face, but you are showing me your hand"
Working in a foreign country has given me a unique opportunity to view various leadership styles. This is always a great opportunity to learn, compare and contrast. It always helps to observe other leaders to improve your own skills. Leadership is a lifelong pursuit, and growth in leadership often takes making mistakes, but an ever faster way to learn certain aspects of leadership, is to witness the mistakes of others.
At first, I often try to discern the paradigms of leaders I am studying, as it is the paradigm that will be at the root of most of their behavior and thus their results in the company, which often dictates the success of a project in the long run (or an entire company). During my trip I had witnessed the leadership styles of certain new employees that were brought into a company recently, and placed into leadership positions. One of them seemed like a nice guy, very personable and friendly, smiling often, and on the exterior, quite disarming. However, when it came to leadership, his preferred methods were to motivate with fear. He would tell people working under him to "do this, or else you'll be fired", or "we know the same people in this industry, dont mess things up for me, or else..."
Students of leadership will recall that there are two basic paradigms in leadership. Both involve service; service to others or service to self. I go more into detail about these paradigms in my post 2 Paradigms of a Leader. Service to others involves building people up, supplying them with the tools/skills they need to excel in their work and improve as individuals. Service to self, as the title implies, is extracting what you can from people, for your own personal goals and ambitions. There are varying levels of each, but these are the basic roots of a leader's methods. The most common methods of motivation are service with reward (in its many forms), fear, and guilt.
Out of all the methods of motivating his people, he chose to use fear on two occasions (that I know of). Considering he was new to the company, and just met these two employees working under him, this was fascinating. Actions speak volumes, louder than any words possibly could. So his actions completely cut through his friendly demeanor and false nice guy attitude. He had a great poker face, but his cards were crap, and everyone could see them.
Don't get me wrong, sometimes as a leader, you need to come down hard. Marine Drill Sergeants yell at their recruits all day long, and put them through rigorous brutal training routines that are difficult mentally and physically- the recruits are broken down. But the key here is, the intent. The drill sergeant is not, in actuality, self serving. His mission is to build up his people. His job is to take a group of strangers off of a bus, and build them up to be able to do things that most people in the world cant do. He is improving their skills and abilities, and the end result is they are better individuals. He may appear to be just tearing them down, but in reality, this is just a step towards building them up into something greater, and they become part of an even greater group.
A manager or a leader in a corporation is no different. If he does his job, he may be tough, but he is fair, and his primary goal is to build up his people, make them more effective, better individuals, both in and out of work, because these are the kinds of people you want working in your organization. People that can learn, grow, and improve. People that can answer the call when the going gets tough. People that will believe in you as a manager or a leader. People that function on skills, drive, trust and in creating win/win scenarios. By serving your people, and by building them up, you ensure that this happens. You ensure that their best interests are kept in mind, in return, they will do all that they can for you, they will trust you. You will have earned a loyalty from your people that no money in the world can buy, because you will have shown them leadership that is truly rare. The positive results are long lasting and can be carried forward, possibly the rest of their lives.
When you instill fear in your people, when your best foot forward is guilt or fear, you ensure the opposite. You are not building them up, you are ensuring that people think your interests are your first priority. They wont trust you, and you will have earned a loyalty that only money can buy (if at all). It is fleeting, fickle, and unreliable, because you will have shown them leadership that is all too common. Any gains you have will be short term, and may come with possible long term damage to your relationship with the individual, and possibly their relationship with the company.
But what do you do when your people ARE failing? this is obviously sometimes a problem. The "poor leadership" solution is to instill the fear, motivate them with a possible punishment right away, similar to the above methods described in the bad leader example. We know the results of this method, they are limited at best.
A better way is to examine your systems. See if there are any holes in your processes, and ask the individual if there is anything that is preventing them from doing their job. Is there anything YOU as a leader could be doing better? Is there anything you can teach them? Help them help themselves. Build them up. Work on improving them first. Go in with the attitude that "there are no bad teams, only bad leaders". Only when you have done all you can in this arena, you may then realize you have to move on from the individual, and with extreme prejudice. There is no need for fear or threats, you will have come to the conclusion that the individual cannot, or has no desire to, be improved. Fear will not help at this point, nor will guilt, they are not necessary. You can often set a date, or an ultimatum for improvement, but this is more of just a fact of life, and a formality, and is not needed as a threat at this point.
Of course, like anything in leadership, Good Leadership is easier said than done, its a lot of hard work, and you will make mistakes. But it pays to make sure you have the correct paradigm in the first place. You are not playing poker, and you have nothing to hide.
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Kowloon to Wanchai, Hong Kong night
Did a long panorama of Kowloon and decided to extend it out to Wanchai which is on the far right. On the far left is the new IFC tower that is still under construction. The total size of the pano came out to 8ft long. I still have to play with the exposure and colors a bit, but overall Im pretty happy with it. It took me hundreds of shots to create this one. (lots of throw aways to get it just right).
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