Silver Medal Winner (Company Culture) in the 2024 Axiom Business Book Awards
Post-pandemic, the whole world is being reset. With this unifying experience that challenges our identity, rules are broken; beliefs are corrected. Happiness and meaning in work and life are no longer optional. With success being redefined as we speak, what this means for leaders is they too, now need to reset their compasses urgently—for the real threat is obsolescence and irrelevance.
The time to act is now.
But with many management practices fading into irrelevance, how then, can leaders chart their paths in these complex and disruptive times?
While there is no one right way to lead and make an impact, for ‘right’ is subjective and contextual, the good news is that proven methods have been discovered—some of which will be shared in this book’s pages.
Leaders People Love features a host of accessible leadership lessons. Undergirded by a contemporary and relevant mindset, these strategies consistently yield excellent results and prove a point: becoming an effective and well-loved leader is possible if you know how.
Explore an authentic yet agile approach to discovering the best leader in you. Becoming a leader that people love to work with and for can, in turn, create meaningful workplaces where people love to come to collaborate, strive and succeed.
Little Drops: Cherished Children of Singapore’s Past is a compilation of biographies based on historical fact about the pain of separation and the lure of love, and how these themes constantly collide. These never-before-told stories chronicle how fourteen adoptees from the 1930s to the early 1970s in Singapore found a forever home when their own biological parents could not raise them. These stories recount the plight of families of that era; the strength of friendships and informal social networks; Singapore’s migrant heritage; how lives were thrown into turmoil during the Japanese Occupation; and the struggles individuals had borne during that period leading up to Singapore’s independence. Unfolding in these stories are the recurrent subthemes of poverty, superstition, how girl children were valued amongst the Chinese, how a family illness or death was culturally construed, and the magnanimous spirit of families taking in these abandoned children. What is most striking about many of these children is that they were sometimes not legally given away, seeming odd since children could be passed around so easily. And yet these children would almost always end up in safe, loving and caring homes of another culture. Grappling with who they are in terms of their ethnic identity is very much a common experience amongst all these adoptees. But rather than struggling between two cultural worlds, these adoptees almost always have a firm sense of longing and belonging to their families of adoption instead of their families of origin.
Sydney, 1966. Flower power is in full swing. The Cold War is at its height.
Somewhere in Kings Cross, Singapore’s former Chief Minister Lim Yew Hock is missing. Now the Malaysian High Commissioner to Australia, he had left his home in Canberra without a word of where he had gone.
Is he dead? During his reign as Chief Minister, he had cracked down hard on the Communists, and they will want to settle scores with him.
Is he in hiding from mounting debts? Lim is known for his punts on the horses on weekends.
Or is he mixed up in Cold War espionage? One of his ministers, Chew Swee Kee, was alleged to have received money from the CIA – and there’re rumours Lim had his share of it.
And how is a 19-year-old stripper, Sandra Nelson, Russian by birth, involved in this shady business? Is she Lim’s honey trap?
Private detective Dave Chen has to unravel these tangled knots of political intrigue and personal trauma – and confront his own demons.
Written in poetic form by Felix Cheong and wonderfully illustrated by Arif Rafhan, The Showgirl and the Minister is inspired by the real-life disappearance of Lim over ten days in 1966.
KATIE CHEN, 16, lives in the unremarkable suburb of Narre Warren in Australia with her somewhat reclusive Malaysian father. Coming to Australia when she was 5 and losing her mother at 7, she has always struggled with issues of identity.
One day, she goes back to Malaysia for her grandmother’s funeral and discovers that her mother – long-thought-dead – is alive. Set in a fictionalised Kuala Lumpur (KL), Katie struggles to reconnect with her mother whom she discovers is Malay.
Navigating KL’s underground music scene and the underlying tensions of a country she doesn’t understand, how far is Katie willing to go to find a place to belong?
Chris Lee had a cushy role. For a decade, he led the Asia Pacific division of Medtronic, a multibillion dollar business and one of the world’s largest manufacturers of medical devices, and consistently produced excellent business outcomes. Then, at fifty-six, he threw all of that away to start VentureBlick, an international fundraising platform matching healthcare startups and medical investors. Why did Lee do that?
Lee takes us through his journey as one of the youngest Asian leaders in an MNC (youngest director in Merck at age twenty-seven, youngest country manager at thirty, first Asia-Pacific leader reporting to Bayer HQ at thirty-nine), how he brought Asian leadership sensibilities into multiple global companies, and reveals why he believes it’s important for corporate leaders to adopt an Asian lens and think like a maverick.
Zola Tapp, a curious and impulsive teen, has been sent to stay with her oddball relatives in rural Malaysia while her parents try to sort out their deteriorating relationship in the UK. On a pre-dinner exploration of her aunt and uncle’s oil-palm plantation, Zola stumbles upon an injured boy. In a panic, she rushes to get help, but on return the body has vanished and the incident is blamed on her famed over-imagination. Zola then battles self-doubt and those out to deceive her as she sets out to discover what had happened to him. This starts a chain of events which results in her being drawn deeper into the Malaysian underworld and a sinister plot that tests her character and emotions to the extreme. Her healthy snarkiness towards vampires, zombies and the para-normal is also challenged when she meets Maya, an enchanting elfin demon with a secret past and mysterious abilities she must keep hidden from the rest of the world.
Zola forges a special bond with Maya and her aunt and uncle, whom she affectionately calls the Hamsters, to discover more about her own identity and the choices that define her. Together, they become enmeshed in a bitter fight to save the family estate from ruthless property developers, the heartless son of a triad leader and vicious thugs.
Let’s face it. Achieving what we set out to do can be one of life’s greatest challenges. From botched New Year’s resolutions to dreams and aspirations that never came to be, setbacks are a common albeit discouraging or disheartening occurrence in our lives. However, as many often say, the road to success is paved with failures. With the right knowledge and some inspiration, anyone can turn things around and savour success in a quicker and easier manner.
You Don’t Suck explores the realities of what it takes to achieve one’s goals and lead a more purposeful life. It introduces readers to three general phases in their journey to success—setting up, sustaining, and reflecting—and guides them through:
- timeless truths
- unconventional perspectives
- well-known studies
- light-hearted and serious examples
- personal and second-hand anecdotes
- practical approaches and advice
- simple wisdom for thought
In doing so, the book motivates readers to relearn the As to Zs of life, thereby renewing their mindset, recognizing their strength, and realizing their power of choice so they can see their ambitions through in their personal and professional pursuits.
The good news is that everyone is talking about ESG.
The bad news is that everyone is talking about ESG.
The cry for a more inclusive form of capitalism is growing. But the irony is we are using the same tools that caused the excesses of shareholder capitalism—incentives and regulations—to drive responsible behaviour.
Eighteenth-century economist Adam Smith propagated profit maximization as the incentive for businesses to create goods and services that society needs. He argued that free-market competition would ensure consumers get the best quality product at the cheapest price.
200 years later, Milton Friedman agreed in his seminal 1970 New York Times op-ed that the sole responsibility of business is to maximize profits ‘so long as it stays within the rules of the game’. Incentives coupled with some regulations were to henceforth safeguard societal interests.
Instead, incentives created bad behaviour. Regulations were routinely bypassed with intelligent loopholes. Despite this—to encourage sustainability today—we are again using incentives and regulations. That’s predominantly what the ESG framework focuses on. And what do we see? Rampant greenwashing and box-ticking.
To address today’s existential challenges, we need innovation of the highest order. Innovation can neither be legislated nor driven by extrinsic incentives alone. We need a values-driven revolution. We need steward leadership—the ability to create a win-win-win future for stakeholders, society, and the environment. ESG must upgrade to ESL, where the ‘L’ stands for Steward Leadership. In ESL, ‘G’ is a subset of ‘L’.
Sustainable Sustainability lays out a practical, step-by-step playbook for any commercial entity that wants to succeed at marrying profit and purpose.
https://www.sustainable-sustainability.com
What happens when one goes from obscurity to celebrity, overnight?
Thirty-year-old Arya Alvarez is a travel manager at Isle Z, a luxury travel company in Singapore where she creates bespoke trips for celebrities and influencers. Discretion is her specialty at work and personal life: few people know that she’s fled her home city, Manila, to get away from the scene of a devastating break-up.
When she travels to Svaneti, in the Republic of Georgia, Arya briefly encounters the mysterious Dave in a remote village high up the Caucasus mountains. Intrigued, she posts his photos on Instagram-which goes viral the very next day. Turns out, Dave is Davit Nadibaidze, a famous yet reclusive artist who’d retreated from the public five years ago and Arya is the first person to see him since he disappeared.
In less than 24 hours, Arya gains hundreds of thousands of followers. She’s deluged with invitations to talk shows, influencer parties, and celebrity junkets, all as her social media apps overflow with DMs, tags, and comments, both nice and nasty. Men are suddenly vying for her attention, including her ex, Jake.
Arya tries her best to step up, but she also struggles. What she really wants is to finally get over her painful break-up, find herself and a fresh start. But can she really, when she’s caught in this complex whirl of viral fame?
Every organisation has stories about women in the workplace that live on through constant retelling: ‘Women are too emotional’; ‘Women are not interested in a career’; and ‘We are hiring the best person for the job, regardless of gender’. We need to dispel these myths that undermine women and are keeping them on a lesser footing. Here are the tools for doing just that.
Based on thorough research and made highly relevant through dozens of anecdotes from hundreds of hours of interviews, Narratives: The Stories That Hold Women Back At Work will shatter ongoing workplace gender myths. Mette Johansson, in this book, provides context and different perspectives to dispel these myths and offer women-and men-the powerful arguments and tools they need to counteract them and ensure a fairer and more competitive workplace-and a better business overall.
Written in a highly entertaining way, Narratives challenges us to take different perspectives in the gender equity debate.
