SGE-E27 Event: “The Team is Flat” in Nanyang Poly

Yesterday evening, our team were down at Nanyang Polytechnic to engage a group of polytechnic students. Both Bjorn and myself did the talking and for the first time, we engaged a very challenging crowd. I thought that it might be useful to tell you more what we went through this time. This SG Entrepreneurs (SGE)-E27 jointly organized lecture circuit is the second of our free social outreach to junior colleges and polytechnics in Singapore.

Before we went for this event, we were “warned” that we would be engaging a very passive crowd. We did study our market. Of course, this was not new to us, because our education system did not advocate the culture of speaking up. We had about 100 students if I am not wrong in the LT. Here is something we admitted quite frankly: we did not manage to get the crowd to speak up until the end. A lot of means and ways were executed by Bjorn and I to get them to speak up. It is also difficult that the crowd was not used to be in a lecture where they were asked to contribute. So, for the first ten to fifteen minutes, we stumbled a bit.

After we realized that we could not get them to open up that much through a series of question, we needed to attempt our plan B. So, I started the first part of the talk by using only 8 slides this time round. All eight slides are simply summarized here:

1. Flatten the organization
2. United We Stand, Divided We Fall
3. Think Win-Win
4. Know Your Enemy
5. Strong Leadership
6. Brand, Brand and Brand
7. Innovation and not Imitation
8. Organization above self: Transition

For example, instead of telling them what strong leadership is, I ask them to tell me all the features of a bad leader is. In fact, they answered their own question in the end. As usual, I emphasize the four main ingredients of an enterprise: team, idea, business model and cash, and I convinced them that team is the most important among the four. After all, without a good team, a good idea can lead to waste, and you do not have people to trust to manage the cash and also execute the business model properly. In some sense, doing a business is not about learning financials and accounting as detailed in most courses on entrepreneurship. I agree that those skills are essential, but ultimately, doing a business is about managing relationships between people, like how you interact with your investors, collaborators, partners and most importantly, customers.

Why did I use these slides? The honest truth is that I wanted to try another method of presentation by putting the keywords in the slides. What I decided to do in the process, was to walk around the whole lecture theatre to ask them questions. As a matter of fact, the crowd was really quiet. My view was that they were interested but they did not want to speak up. After all, we were told that 50% of them had worked in real life. Luckily they did open up in the end, and after the talk, I spoke to some of them and learned about how entrepreneurial they were. They actually told me their life stories in working with their business mentors and how they can earn some money to earn their living. So, we felt that we did manage to do something.

True enough, I had to try something that I did not attempt before back here. There is a particular stunt which Professor Ken Morse in MIT like to pull off at the beginning of the talk. He ask for someone’s wallet. For a long time (almost a year), I have not tried this stunt not even on my own students in NUS. That is to ask someone for their wallet. Actually, I was quite lucky that the student actually gave me his wallet. The stunt is to establish that trust is important in business, and I asked him why he gave me his wallet. Of course, I am also prepared that if he did not give me his wallet, I will just say, “If you don’t trust a person, why would you give him or her your wallet?” I thought the funny part is when I ask Coen to tell his story, and I asked the crowd (out of 5 people) that who would work for him. He got at least 3 said who would work for him, one would not and one abstained.

Lastly, we have Bjorn to explain the philosophy in why we are doing that. By then they are really fired up and some of them started telling their perspectives and views to us. He told his story about his startup (that’s the first time I hear about it) and how his company that focussed on selling rock-climbing equipment to a specific market niche (which big markets could not tap into).

That was followed by the dinner. I actually enjoyed the refreshments after the talk because the students came and told me their story. I felt that I did not succeed in the way I thought it would be, but then again, even if I would fail to engage them in the first place, I would just take it as a lesson learnt. I am already looking forward to the next leg from here.

Acknowledgements: We thank Michael and Edmund from Nanyang Polytechnic for their invitation and hospitality.

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SGEntrepreneurs - (SGE)

Covering the Singapore and Southeast Asia entrepreneurship scene since 2005.

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