Tag Archives: management

Inspire, Trust, and Do Business!

Interaction plays an important part in our lives. We interact with friends, colleagues, strangers and family members. Each interaction creates good and bad feelings in us and, most importantly, each interaction has social or business impact on us.

Since it is important to interact, how can we make each interaction efficient in our social and business lives?

We human beings are strange and unique creatures and we like to interact with people that we like. We always try to find common points with the people with whom we interact. Finding a common point is a good ice breaker when you meet a stranger.

Through my life experience, I have found that I like to interact with people that I get inspired by. A person that pushes me to think differently and helps to enhance my vision always manages to gain priority in my life. Interestingly, when I look back and think, I chose my friends and my best colleagues through this inspiration channel.

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How can you inspire a person?

You may use your status in the community, such as the CEO of XXX, or your financial strength, such as being one of the thousand richest in the world, but this is not really influential in the long term. Given that status in the community and financial strength can be lost in a day, they are not really a permanent inspirational asset in a human being.

Is it a coincidence that many rich people are left alone when they suddenly become poor? Or that a retired Prime Minister or a high level business executive starts living an ordinary life?

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I believe that a permanently inspirational character exists when you have a vision and continual viable ideas that you can share with people. I don’t mean that you have to be a scientist or an innovator; most importantly you have to have a strong ability to make good observations of people, understand developments in economics and politics or other types of social sciences, and implement these new ideas into people’s lives while taking into consideration the history and other aspects of your counterparty.

Easily said. But once you have all these skills, you are a candidate for a good leader, a mentor and a friend for everyone. I believe that acquiring these skills requires a tremendous amount of energy and motivation and a desire to update yourself constantly. A lot of people want to achieve this, but since it is long journey, many of us turn back while we are still quite close to the start.

When you inspire people, it is much easier to build trust. You don’t really have to work on building trust, since a person inspired by you will be much open to listening more to you and will be more willing to spend time with you.

And once the trust is built, it is very easy to do business with those people.

Instead of inspiring and building trust, if you want to jump to a conclusion (in business), it is very likely that you will fail. Even if you don’t, it will not be a very long term relationship.

A good leader or mentor should be able to inspire their subordinates with their vision and way of living—otherwise that leader is just an ordinary leader, and most likely he will be left alone once he gives up his status in the community. And a good friend should be able to show you new ways of looking at things while having a good time.

A lot of people are advising that you split your social and business circles, which I strongly oppose. Conversely, combine your social and business circles!

It will definitely create more synergy, as one plus one sometimes does not equal two. In addition, doing business within your social circle is a good test to see how much your friends are inspired by you.

All the best from Singapore.

Sukru Haskan
Twitter:@sukru_haskan

Tell me your CODE HALOS!

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The world is changing rapidly and we have been living two types of lives for some time now; physical and digital.

Our physical lives are simple and also complicated. Simple because we follow our basic needs and wants such as sleeping and drinking. These are our instincts. Complicated because we interact with many individuals during our lives and we have motivations, emotions and egos.

Our digital lives are complicated and also simple. Complicated because it is new and many of us are not really aware of it. Simple because everything is accessible, trackable and fast.

Our digital lives are becoming important as they start overcoming our physical lives and this transformation has a huge impact not only on human beings but also on the corporate world.

What are your Code Halos?

In our digital lives like our physical lives, we are leaving traces behind us.

These traces in the digital world are our CODE HALOS! It is the meaningful version of BIG DATA!

Since human brain is programmed to forget, we simply forget things but computers DO NOT!

So Code Halos are our digital lives’ track record that is analyzed and made ready for us to make our lives easier.

Nowadays Code Halos are being used by many companies such as Amazon, Google and Facebook. It is the DNA of what you like, who you like and what inspires you.

Thanks to Google Analytics, even I am tracking your behavior on this blog…. e.g: How many minutes you spend on each page, which countries and cities you are from, your keyboard default language, etc.

This valuable information will determine my future articles to get more traction from you.

Whilst these are all happening at full throttle, there are people resisting change.

So what will happen to those status quo keepers? 

  1. If it is a person, they will be unemployed.
    Just like what happened to blue collars in late 1900s, digital world will get many people out of the workforce. The difference is; it will hit white collar employees this time. 
  2. If it is a company, it will simply not survive.
    Companies that are not building their own clients’ code halos are losing out today. Just like Kodak, Nokia or CompuServe did…

Like anything, Code Halos also bring its own challenges. Recently Ashley Madison clients’ data has been stolen and very private information is now public and most recently a HIV clinic in the UK released its list of their patients by mistake. Data safety and using it for genuine purposes is crucial.

As a banker, I am aware that banking will also change completely. It has already started with retail banking initially and it will follow with other segments of banking slowly.

There will be no need for physical branches. This will create huge opportunities for every bank and internet companies that are allowed to collect deposit/give loans to compete in geographically large countries such as India, Australia and Russia.

Alibaba has started collecting deposits in China and Apple has introduced Apple Pay to facilitate payments. You do not really have to be genius to predict that these companies may kick some banks and financial intermediaries like Visa and Mastercard out of the game in the coming years.

We all have revenue production pressures and results do not always come very quickly. Patience and willingness to adapt will be the key factors that will determine if traditional banks and financial intermediaries will stay in this game.

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Book recommendation: This article is largely inspired after reading the book, Code Halos written by Malcolm Frank, Paul Roehrig and Ben Pring.

Best from Singapore,
Sukru Haskan
Twitter: @sukru_haskan