My Facebook friend James Norris asks:
How many of you Singaporean changemakers are on track to create global social impact before you hit 30?
His question set me thinking.

It took me until I was about 40 to realize that it’s not really my place to change the world, unless it wants to be changed. I realize now that I wrote a ‘script’ for myself as someone who set out to change other people and the world and that was not helpful.

It wasn’t ill-intentioned and some good things came out of it (like the charity I co-founded) but I came to realize that this script was not a firm foundation for a good life.

Psychotherapy has helped me realize how many individuals, organizations and even governments lock themselves into endless psychological games when they try to change the world by rescuing. For example, I believe that most Arts funding organizations place themselves in the role of fairy godmother and, in doing so, make artists into victims, perpetuating the unhelpful myth that the artist must suffer. There’s a horrible irony in that.

On a day to day level in my work with entrepreneurs, I sometimes meet social-entrepreneurs-without-a-cause. They like the dynamism of the word entrepreneur but they feel guilty about making a profit, and they set up a dichotomy in their head where the two are mutually exclusive. Somehow putting the word social in front makes being an entrepreneur more acceptable to them (“I’m not doing this for ME you know – I’m doing it for YOU – little people!”)

These folk could be great entrepreneurs (and do social good, and stand on their own two feet and stop expecting someone to foot the bill) if they only got rid of their hangup about profit. So I always tell them to call it a surplus instead and let them know they can plough that surplus back into social causes if they want. But for many the logic of that is just too simple … because it’s not about logic … it’s about a script they have cast themselves in as the Knight in Shining Armour.

These are well-intentioned people who, through luck or design, don’t really need to earn a living. Lacking such a fundamental drive in life they endlessly seek out damsels in distress who need rescuing from dragons, underdogs who are being oppressed and causes that need to be championed.

My point is that they are never happy, even when they help deserving people because someone addicted to rescuing needs forever to find (or create) victims. Inadvertently, these help-addicts become like vampires, sucking the self-esteem out of the victims upon which they prey.

None of which is to say that there aren’t some great social entrepreneurs who understand all the above instinctively. I am honoured to call Melissa Clark-Reynolds a friend. Her virtual eco-world for kids Minimonos is a textbook example of how to get this stuff right.

And of course sometimes people (like my 4 year old son) aren’t capable of looking after themselves. It’s my job as a parent to rescue him from harm (ideally, before it happens). Likewise if I see someone knocked over by a bus, I feel an obligation as a humanist to help.

But by and large I have come to believe more and more strongly in the starting point for Transactional Analysis, which is that:

• We are all fundamentally OK.
• Virtually all of us have the capacity to make choices for ourselves
• We can change those choices through life as we grow.

In conclusion, it is a wonderful thing to help other people but only if they ask for help. Each of us makes decisions that impact the world every day. If we start with humble ambitions, do what we can to live a good life that does not harm others, and make life as good as we can for the people who want our influence, we will all be OK.

So often we forget to ask the questions that are obviously important when they’re written down.

• What could I do to make you feel more loved?
• What could I do to make you feel more respected?
• What could I do to make you feel more understood?
• What could I do to make you more secure?
• What can I do to make you feel more confident in our future direction?
• What attribute would you like me to develop?
• What attribute would you like me to help you develop?
• What achievement in my life would bring you greatest joy?
• What mutual goal would you like to see us accomplish?
• Optional – Have I overlooked any question you would like for me to ask?

I do remember two things: stage fright as I spoke over a PA system for the first time, and how everyone helping out seemed to have their own agenda.

Thirty plus years and many audiences later, I no longer feel the stage fright. Yet the challenge of bringing a group of volunteers together for a common cause remains.

It’s different in the companies I’ve had a hand in starting. Employees join with an expectation that a leader will at least set a clear direction, even if nobody reacts that well to simply being ordered around. There’s a clarity of purpose in a commercial enterprise. When confusion abounds about mission statements, values and suchlike, you do at least know that making money is important because, otherwise, you go bust. Death is pre-programmed. You’ve got to  sustain life by selling something, to someone, at a profit.

The charities, voluntary groups and social enterprises I’ve been involved with are far more complex. Some of them, especially the public sector agencies I work with, have no inbuilt death-through-failure mechanism and that can turn them into the scariest kind of zombie if they are not working. Set up to achieve cultural or social objectives, they may be very business-like, yet they are very definitely not businesses.

Ends and Means

No wonder that it’s easy for people setting up and working in such organisations to confuse ends and means. Imagine that the desired end for which a charity is set up is to help the disadvantaged. Ordinary employees are hired to work for the charity and are paid out of donations: donors would righly expect that their money is spent primarily to benefit the disadvantaged, not the employees. In other words, the employees are the means and not the end of the exercise.

They have rights – for sure – but being clear about what is fair  is easier said than done when an organisation is run by folk strongly motivated, for all the right reasons, by caring. For example: if an employee is off work sick, long term, and statutory obligations to paid leave have been fulfilled, should donations be spent on supporting that employee, even if doing so burns up cash that was actually donated to achieve quite another end? There’s a conflict between the culture of a charity and the need to be business-like.

It gets even harder if paid employees working for a charity are recruited partly from the very pool of people intended to be the prime beneficiaries of the charity. Straightaway there’s a confusion about who’s an employee or who’s a beneficiary. The ends have become the means … and that’s all before we start talking about the assets of the organisation. No wonder it’s taking a while for the concept of a social enterprise to shake out.

Bringing a diverse group together

I don’t pretend to have a magic formula for a successful social enterprise or the human resource dilemmas of a charity. But I was delighted this week to come across a list of very practical advice that seems to me to apply across a great swathe of voluntary organisations. Some context …

I recently got involved with the Singapore Humanism Meetup Group. We don’t have the complication of dealing with money, assets and beneficiaries, but our group involves plenty that is hard to pin down in the realm of life, the universe and everything. We face the same challenge I first met at age nine:

How we can come together as a group when we have such diverse agendas?

Many of the answers to that question lie in the following list of advice penned by Mike Werner, Past President of the American Humanist Association. He kindly gave me permission to reproduce his wisdom below.

I’ll do that without further comment other than to suggest that, if you are trying to run (say) a Cat’s Protection League, a Ban the New Airport Runway Campaign, or an Investor’s Circle, you simply replace the word Humanism in what follows with the appropriate phrase. I guarantee that 99% will hold for your organisation too, whether you meet in real life or run your community online in the virtual world of cyberspace.

Some Things That Work In Building a Humanist Chapter

1. Keep the chapter broad based respecting all “styles” of humanism; rationalistic / experiential, theoretical / activist, solitary / communitarian, and intellectual / commonsense etc.
2. Have very good programs that challenge people, not just tell them how “right” they are and feed their egos. Do “graduate school” Humanism, not just Humanism 101.
3. Keep a balance of speakers of styles, age and gender.
4. Keep a balance of subject matter between a) the inner life; b) the inter-relational; c) the social dimensions. Programs should be intentionally split between the three dimensions.
5. Have programs that start on time and end on time with a social (unlimited time) afterward. The social time afterwords is the most important.
6. People will leave a group if they don’t make six friends in six months.
7. People want to be greeted the first time. Ask who is new each time and acknowledge them.
8. The group must ultimately “do” something.
9. Build an intentional community.
10. Internet links and organizational links are very important.
11. Rotate people on the board and committees.
12. Keep some gender and age balance on the board.
13. Commitment comes with involvement; personally ask people to do jobs and they will become committed to the group.
14. Studies show that 50% of volunteers in an organization will let you down. Count on it and don’t be surprised, disappointed, angry or unprepared.
15. Personally ask people to come to meetings. You can double attendance in that way.
16. We attract many asocial personalities and they should not be allowed to destroy the group. We are trying to build an effective nurturing community, not a warehouse for toxic personalities. Do not tolerate behavior that is dominating, ugly, unnecessarily argumentative or rude.
17. Have a moderator assigned to every meeting.
18. Ultimately some fundamentalist will join the group to either monitor or even disrupt us. Handle it wisely and humanely.
19. Have a Darwin Day dinner as a big affair with a meal and special speaker.
20. Have a picnic.
21. Have a Christmas season affair that is clearly “feel good.”
22. Operate as a community by having committees on program, internet, social, activist, and membership. Do not put everything on one person.
23. Have meeting rooms that are light and cheery, not dark and gloomy.
24. Have meeting rooms sized so that they are filed to between 60 to 75% capacity.
25. When having small group meetings keep the size between 5 to 15 people with an optimum size of eight.
26. Align with local and regional groups as serves our purpose. Do not let ideological purity keep us from working with others helpful to our goals. Be politically savvy. We can work with Catholic groups on poverty issues and the new fundamentalist group movement that is ecologically concerned.
27. Appoint a spokesperson carefully. Many groups have shot themselves in the foot where someone said really dumb things to the media or gave a negative image.
28. We want to be on the “A” list of media sources.
29. We want the Humanist magazine in the local libraries.
30. Support those like minded groups such as the Unitarian Church, the Gay and Lesbian alliance, Sierra club, ACLU etc without getting hung up on ideological purity issues. When they come under attack we should be the first to support them. What comes round goes round and they will remember. They are one of our greatest sources of members.
31. Build a positive humanism; do not get bogged down on old arguments why God doesn’t exist and how bad everyone else is. It may make us feel good for a while, but people ultimately weary of it and it saps us of energy.
32. Use our powers of supportive intelligence as much as our powers of critical intelligence particularly with our own members.
33. Continually reflect on how we may be only supporting our own style of humanism and how to meet the needs of all.
34. Continually ask ourselves how attractive we are to all people coming in the door.
35. Speak to a whole positive Humanist way of life and do not let ourselves be defined by other religious groups. Speak to the heart and the mind. We have a great story to tell, so tell it as intelligently, clearly, evocatively and as positively as possible. Remember Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Who you are speaks so loudly I can’t hear what you say.”

The original Scholastica was a Catholic Saint. Born c480CE, her Italian parents must have liked the name, even if it sounds like an educational publisher today. Which gave me an idea: Sponsored Parenting.

Have you ever sat on a budget airline and been faced for a couple of hours with an advert on the back of the seat in front of you? The same experience is becoming more and more common in public toilets, where desperate advertisers rely on the captivity of their audience to wipe their unwanted messages across our faces.

Toilet doors and aircraft seating have become media channels. They join bus-shelters, poster sites and TV as places that can be rented by anyone with a message, some cash and a few Mad Men creatives to run a campaign.

We may not like being bombarded with all these messages (7,000 per day, according to one estimate) and they may not be that effective (even the father of modern advertising, John Wanamaker, said “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half”). Yet the ads go on and on.

The argument is that promotion in all its many forms marries two complementary needs: the needs of someone with a message and some money with the needs of the public for some benefit such as toilets, bus shelters or overpaid football teams.

All this makes me wonder if we are missing a trick. In an age of rising education costs, when an increasing number of people in the developed world are choosing not to have children at all, how can we sustain the social contract that makes parenting financially possible? Will childless folk forever be willing to pay taxes to support child-rearing and education? A recent blog article asked:

If everyone at work is asked to stay late, and a parent says they have to get their kid from daycare, is that excuse more valid than if a non-parent says they need to let their dog out?

It seems we are moving into an era when children are viewed by some as a rather troublesome type of pet. Tolerated, at best, but deep down some are starting to believe that kids are a lifestyle choice for the self-indulgent. At worst, the next generation are, by analogy, little more than a urinal cake, fit only to be sprinkled with advertising for unhealthy products and services while they can’t avoid the shower.

I predict that pressure will mount for parents to stop choosing baby names on the basis of sentimental whim but instead to make the responsible, long-term decision to think of it as a revenue opportunity.

You want kids – you make it pay.

So why not call your child Scholastica, if a brand with that name is willing to stump up the cash to pay for her education? Think how many times the brand will be mentioned, every day, throughout her life. And just like the poster on the back of the toilet door, she and the people she lives and works with won’t be able to get away from it.

In the near future, children’s names will become media channels, like any other. A small box equipped with voice-recognition technology and a 3G data link will record and report back to the brand each time it is mentioned. The school satchel will need an extra pocket to accommodate flyers for special offers and the child will be incentivised to distribute them on a commission basis. The marketing mantra Live Your Brand will become a way of life.

Liz, Max and I had fun in the Botanic Gardens today. We were joined by a friend with her 2 year old son and baby, on a weekend while her husband is away. I greatly enjoyed seeing our friend and bouncing little Scarlet, who is just five weeks old. She’s so tiny, perfect and alert, interested in all around her. I guess she’s just a week or so away from managing her first smile. Yet it was wonderful to be able to hand her back.

How quickly we forget. Once again I saw all the equipment that a young baby needs and experienced through her Mum the logistic restrictions that being a parent of a very young child entails. It made me realise how much easier life has become now that my son is 4, that we only have one child, and that we have help at home. The experience also gave me an idea for an analogy.

You know how budget airlines leave you feeling at the mercy of someone else’s priorities, squashed into spaces you wouldn’t normally choose, only able to get food and drink of a limited selection when it suits someone else not you?

You know how the flights are always delayed due to weather, overambitious turnaround schedules, or maintenance put off until it absolutely has to be done?

You know how you find yourself spending time in some tiny regional airport that you didn’t really choose to be in? How the ground transport doesn’t seem to work that well with all the suitcases you are carrying? How there’s no refund and no going back possible?

That’s how it feels to have a young baby. If you are first-timers, the initial 100 days is the most intense, as you learn a set of new skills. You block out all the things you can no longer do and concentrate on the job at hand. Then you have roughly another 900 days before your life starts coming back.

As a parent, you choose to make the journey, so you can’t really complain and you can’t escape the consequences of your actions. Exhausted by never-ending jetlag, you chat to your fellow long-suffering passengers, because the friends you would once have chosen to be with aren’t sharing the journey with you.

The little things start to mean a lot. Suddenly a random act of kindness from someone who’s been there before moves you to tears. A person on the same path becomes a best friend, though on the face of it you have little in common and would otherwise never have met.

The people you left behind are harder to talk with because they just haven’t ever been here. You ask yourself if trying to tell them would do them any good, even when they start to think about setting out in your footsteps.

So when prospective first-time Mums and Dads ask you:

What’s it like?

… all you can do is repeat what you were told in the same situation:

All I can say is that life will never be the same again.

If you’ve never been a parent, you might imagine that clearing up the poop and vomit is a real challenge. Maybe it is for some but most parents I talk to say it’s the loss of freedom – that sense of being trammelled – that is most challenging. You go from living in the fast lane to a slow crawl. For a thousand days.

I love my son and he’s so much more fun to be with now. In all honesty, I didn’t enjoy living day-in, day-out with a young baby and I wouldn’t want to repeat the experience. Frankly, at the time, if I’d had the option to turn back the clock I would have done so immediately.

I know that some will be shocked to read that written by a parent but I do believe if I’d known more at the time I would have been better able to cope. So I wanted to share it. In fact I promised myself that one day, when I’m ready, I will write about it. I’m going to wait for the five year mark before trying to describe that thousand-day journey and if what I have written strikes a chord for any reader, I’d love to hear from you about how you made it work.

Meanwhile, holding little Scarlet today reminded me that holding things together as a parent is a huge exercise in managing your own expectations. It’s about being grateful for- and making the most of every positive experience, not dwelling on the frustrations. Learning that lesson from my son has made me so much happier in life generally.

I am teaching him left and right, how to read numbers and letters, and I try to answer his questions about where pee comes from and why flies can dangle on the ceiling but he can’t. Meanwhile, he’s taught me something really valuable in life.

I’ll try to remember that when I take a budget flight to KL tomorrow …

In 2002, I and my co-founders at Pembridge Partners were asked to get involved in public-subsidised interventions to help economic regeneration across the UK. For folk used to the relatively straightforward priorities of running individual businesses, the move from thinking about micro-economics to the big macro-economic picture was truly mind-boggling.

In amongst some excellent and highly effective programmes tackling complex situations, we were stunned to meet folk whose full-time job was to encourage sustainable enterprise but who had never actually run a business. I lost track of the number of times I heard statements like:

My job is to spend public money.

Wince doesn’t begin to express the pain that a professional angel investor risking his own cash feels hearing words like those applied to hard-earned tax revenues that could have been spent on building roads, schools and hospitals. Visceral intensity of feeling is the main reason why I haven’t yet summoned up the rational energy to write about the experience.

Now I don’t need to. Isenberg has done a better job than I ever could tackling all the main issues. Anyone with an interest in this field who doesn’t have time to read his original article would be well advised to give the summary from consultant and coach David Straker a skim.

I met David through his habit of sharing an astonishing treasure trove of free content on change management, creativity and innovation. Check out his sites and you will see why they collectively receive over a million pageviews every month.

Dave pulled out some surprising points from How to Start an Entrepreneurial Revolution as follows:

• In the global ‘Ease of Doing Business’ country measures, Rwanda recently leapt up the rankings (143rd to 67th).
• And per capita GDP has almost quadrupled since 1995.
• Economic studies from around the globe consistently link entrepreneurship, particularly the fast growth variety, with rapid job creation, GDP growth, and long-term productivity increases.
• Other countries are similarly prospering, from Chile to Iceland.
• Many governments get it wrong, often by trying to emulate cultures which are very unlike their own.

Helpfully, Isenberg puts forward Nine Prescriptions for Creating an Entrepreneurship Ecosystem:

1. Stop Emulating Silicon Valley

• Even SV couldn’t become itself if it started again. It evolved.
• It has has a massive knowledge infrastructure driving it.
• It attracts entrepreneurs rather than creating them all.

2. Shape the Ecosystem Around Local Conditions

• Look to leverage geography, climate, natural resources. eg. Fish in Chile and coffee in Rwanda.
• Understand the keys of local culture.
• Resource poverty can make people inventive (eg. Israel and Iceland).

3. Engage the Private Sector from the Start

• Start with a candid conversation with representatives.
• If you can’t find people locally, look overseas to ex-pats.
• Design in self-liquidation, allowing investors to buy out government.

4. Favour the High Potentials

• Don’t fritter it all away on endless bottom-of-the-pyramid ventures.
• Focus first on ambitious, growth-oriented entrepreneurs who address large potential markets.
• This has a better overall effect, eg. on international reputation.

5. Get a Big Win on the Board

• Just one can have a surprisingly stimulating effect.
• It inspires the public and imitators.
• Success of others reduces the fear of risks.

6. Tackle Cultural Change Head-On

• Particularly in taking business risks, borrowing, etc.
• Ireland and Chile changed attitudes in less than a generation.

7. Stress the Roots

• Don’t offer easy seed money.
• New ventures must be exposed early to the rigors of the market.
• “In fact, the hardships of resource-scarce, even hostile environments often promote entrepreneurial resourcefulness.

8. Don’t Overengineer Clusters; Help Them Grow Organically

• Michael Porter popularised these and they have been pushed globally.
• But government programmes have largely failed.
• Porter himself said “Government.should reinforce and build on existing and emerging clusters rather than attempt to create entirely new ones.”
• Governments should remain sector neutral and unleash rather than try to harness people’s entrepreneurial energies.
• Watch which way entrepreneurs are going, then ‘pave the footpath’.

9. Reform Legal, Bureaucratic, and Regulatory Frameworks

• Regulation stifles.
• Some entrepreneurs do it anyway, then use wealth to lobby for reform.
• Helpful law includes allowing entrepreneurs to quickly start over, decriminalizing bankruptcy, shielding shareholders from creditors, simplifying tax, strong auditing.
• It also helps to shift workers’ unemployment protection from making termination difficult to providing support for the unemployed.

Finally, Isenberg provides some indicators of a strong entrepreneurship ecosystem:

• Public leaders are strong advocates of entrepreneurship
• Governments create institutions that support entrepreneurs … overseas liasons, research institutes, public-private fora, etc.
• Governments remove legal hindrances to business growth.
• Local culture of tolerating mistakes, honourable failure, risk-taking and contrarian thinking.
• Entrepreneurship seen as a worthy occupation.
• Success stories that inspire new entrepreneurs.
• Enough people who know how to build and manage companies.
• Sufficient investors who also mentor and support.
• Non-profit organisations that help small businesses.
• Local customers who will give advice and be financially flexible.
• People who will work for a share of the future success.
• Clubs for entrepreneurs and wannabes.
• Concentrations of high-growth and high-potential ventures.
• Clustered near universities, think tanks, standards bodies, consultants and professional bodies.
• Public intrastructure with roads, transport, hotels, comms, etc.
• Education on business, finance, etc.

Isenberg has blogged about reaction and follow-up to his article.

She studied at the Thorne Academy of Dramatic Art and Dancing, London, where Dame Alicia Markova was also a student.

She was called Ethel Amy Slaiter and the unusual spelling of her family name has helped me trace her history.

Ethel was invited to a tennis party in the early 1920s by my grandfather’s mother, who was apparently horrified when her son fell in love with her. Sadly, Ethel and her mother-in-law never got along. I never had the chance to meet either of them but the photos clearly show the contrast between a strarchy Victorian matron and a young lady from a new century and a different social class.

Ethel was born in 1900 and tragically died at the age of 33 after ten happy years of marriage, leaving behind three young children. Living in an age when we expect medical science to be able to heal most things, it’s hard to imagine the pain her family must have felt. She had six brothers and sisters and only two of them outlived their parents.

Big thanks to my Auntie Heather for digging out these pictures and loads more that I have put online. Unfortunately I don’t have permission to share the material many people have donated there with the whole world so let me know if you would like to take a peek.

It’s been ten years since I last made a TV show. Go back another decade and I was just starting out. I remember every detail of my first day at the BBC, from the polished brass of the stair-rails to the tea-lady who visited us twice daily with her tottering trolley piled high with biscuits and buns. Where is she now?

Nation shall speak peace unto Nation was the motto of my new employer. It dates from the the paleo-era of broadcasting, long before peer-to-peer networks, YouTube and blogging. The one thing I miss about film-making is pulling out old cans from the archive, so indulge me for a moment:

This was media with a megaphone. Wireless waves were made by wise, bearded chaps chuffing on pipes as they tended transmitter valves the size of postboxes. Announcers were expected to wear evening dress. Gentlemen of the engineering department wore white coats covering their tweed jackets with leather elbow-patches. That was just the way it was, old boy.

What mattered was that every man knew his place. And of course they were mostly men. It was taken for granted that the grand order involved us, dear listener, talking at you. If you felt strongly, you could write a letter responding to what you had heard but the chances of it being published were pretty slim. If you were lucky, you might get a patronising postcard saying:

Thank you for your comments, which have been passed to the Producer.

How things have changed.

Or have they? The BBC’s home is still Broadcasting House and it still looks like a 1930s battleship. Somehow, after visiting IBC, it seems an appropriate visual image for the whole belt-and-braces, robust culture of broadcast engineering.

By all means laugh at the white coats worn by the pioneers of early broadcast television. Then spare a thought for the generations who are going to laugh at your assumptions about the way media has to be. We too will look just as quaint in a few years time. If anyone’s watching, that is. Which is my point.

Red button kids

Just recently, a friend’s six year old son discovered that he had to wait until the next episode of his favourite TV show was broadcast. His comment?

How crap is that!

His mother was horrified that the lad had picked up the word ‘crap’ from somewhere. Everyone in the broadcast industry, especially channel owners, should be horrified that his generation was born into a world with a red button to press for what they want, now. They think TV is OK, but it’s also kind of vanilla. Being made to wait? Well that’s just lame.

These are the people who will soon be paying your salary, ladies and gents. Or not. Your call.

Faced with falling broadcast ad revenues and viewers who have many other things to do with their time, I’m going to risk causing offence by suggesting that Battleship Broadcast can’t just keep steaming ahead. Passing through choppy waters on a prayer that normal service will be resumed as soon as possible just isn’t an option for the mid-term and beyond.

What Caught My Eye

IBC matters because it’s a precious chance for 1,300 companies and 45,000 visitors to take a collective long hard look down the media value chain. My contribution was tiny.

What Caught My Eye is a conference session intended to offer a left-field personal view of the show. It’s an excuse to unchain the inner geek, gawk at all the flashing lights and best of all you get to press lots of buttons. If engineers ever got the chance to revamp Christmas, IBC is what it would look like. A host of heavenly toys for boys of all ages.

Polecam: click image to run video

My first impression was how much seemed familiar since I worked with this kind of kit every day. Cameras still have a lens on one end and a burly bloke on the other. You still feed them with videotape, mostly, and you still need a tripod if you want to avoid shooting wobblyscope. Unless you’re lucky enough to have a Polecam lightweight crane, that is. Polecam’s Managing Director, Steve Hewitt, put it through its paces for me. But hang on – what’s that iPod Touch doing stuck on the end?

Dedotec: click image to run video

My impression is that today’s film-makers get less time, smaller crews and less money to try and generate the same standard of shows I worked on. So anything that saves weight and effort is a real boon.

I particularly recall how lighting always seemed to take forever. You definitely needed a hairy-arsed sparks to cart the kit around when he wasn’t reminding you that his contract entitled him to double his hourly rate after 10pm. With lightweight kit you’ll be wrapped well before that happens, says Tamer Avci, General Manager at Dedotec.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose

It’s all good, practical stuff, but where are the Big Ideas?

Heads up: in the last decade, broadband has gone everywhere. 500 million people have signed up to Facebook. 6.5 billion apps have been downloaded to a product that didn’t previously exist: the iPhone.

So how has all this touched the lives of the folk who attend IBC?

A quick show of hands revealed that less than five of the eighty or so folk who’d come to the session were bloggers. Only two tweeted, though about half were Facebook regulars.

It’s not my place to tell you how to spend your leisure time, guys, but many of the audiences I speak with would say you are missing out. A new generation has put social media at the heart of its life and is now looking for something quite different from you. If the companies who exhibit at IBC don’t provide it, someone else will. In fact, they already are. They’re coming to eat your lunch.

IMHO, equipment suppliers that don’t want to go hungry need to take a long hard look at who ultimately pays the bills. Why? Because broadcast technology is a bit like cat food. The people who buy it don’t eat what comes out of the tin.

Viewers are the cats in this analogy. We all know how hard it is to herd them but that wasn’t a problem when they could either go hungry or accept being spoonfed by broadcasters.

That was 50 years ago. Now, viewers have a choice and, unlike pussy, they ultimately hold the purse strings.

INFORM, EDUCATE, ENTERTAIN

This is what I was trained to do at the BBC. Me talk. You listen. Broadcasting one to many. I’m kind of ashamed of the way I hogged that megaphone now.

Sure, when I was learning my craft there were a few old hippies who made community programmes but we didn’t honestly think they weren’t real film-makers. They messed around with consumer camcorders. Where were the big crews, big bits of kit and flashing lights? Who’d want to watch amateur home movies and bad knock-offs of other people’s copyright material anyway?

Well, millions of us, apparently. I and all the arrogant pro film-makers like me were wrong by about $1.65 billion, which his what Google paid for YouTube.

Ten years ago, I thought I bought a bargain when I spent $70,000 on a non linear online edit system. Now that comes free with every new PC or Mac. Everyone’s a film-maker. Kids learn how to do it before they leave school and, if they upload something striking today, a million people around the world could be talking about it by lunchtime tomorrow.

Hang on … that’s my audience … was my audience. The folk who used to watch my stuff have turned their heads away and broadcasters no longer control the screen in the home. Worse, consumers are learning how to cut out the ads and they don’t expect to pay for content. I’ve written before about the way media now gets distributed in Asia, where I now live.

A new manifesto for the media

If we want to re-engage with the folk who ultimately pay for everything that glitters and twinkles at IBC, I think we need a new mission. We still need technology that informs, educates and entertains but people are also asking …

• Make us aware … help us navigate so we know what’s on
• Make us care … enough that we’re prepared to pay
• Help us share … so we feel engaged, active and in control

That’s my manifesto. For a vision of how it is already coming together in real products and services, take a look at Flipboard:

Flipboard works because your friends act as a filter for all the stuff you probably would enjoy watching. They feel good sharing their recommendations with you and you get to acknowledge their kind intentions, reinforcing a social bond.

I couldn’t find Flipboard at IBC and I found myself wondering why?

Note to IBC: Next year, abduct the Flipboard guys and everyone who smells like them. Render them to IBC and make everyone watch, Taliban-style, while you tie them up on the stage. Subject them to re-runs of I Love Lucy until they start spilling their secrets. We need people like this inside the tent aiming out. If they’re outside aiming in, we are all going to get hosed.

Above all, I think the broadcast industry needs to listen to the different ways folk like Flipboard go about creating their products. Remember, Flipboard runs on a platform (the iPad) which was only launched six months ago. No long, tedious technical committee meetings to define standards, or set-piece battles between big-gun battleships arguing how manufacturers are going to carve up the Next Big Thing in the consumer electronics market. These guys just did it. It is not a prototype. You can download it, right now, for free.

Making us aware of what’s relevant

Flipboard’s success highlights the failure of existing technologies to help us find our way around all the content that’s out there. It makes what was a chore fun because it adds a social dimension to it.

I saw plenty of people at IBC trying to sell Electronic Programme Guide (EPGs) technology but many seemed to be missing the point. I was particularly struck by how many companies were peddling proprietary EPGs for places like hotels, with the aim of locking viewers inside a “walled garden” in order to milk their wallets.

Is that really the way to go?

It feels more like antisocial behaviour than social media to me. Anyway, I don’t have to take it: I can switch on my laptop and get what I want outside your walled garden over WiFi. Block or throttle my bandwidth and I won’t stay in your hotel again. And you really expect me to to learn to drive your user interface just for one night in a hotel room?

TV Genius: Click image to run video

Don’t get me wrong: I think there’s plenty of opportunity to build new kinds of navigation around TV shows. For example, I loved TiVo’s recommendation engine when I first got one, so I was intrigued to see that Tom Weiss, Founder & CTO at TV Genius had something that at first sight looks a bit like TiVo. It learns from what you watch and recommends more of the same But it turned out there was a whole extra layer allowing users to share recommendations through social networks. Way to go Tom

Following the recommendations theme, I found myself in IBC’s New Technology Campus. The small booths there had some fascinating early stage ideas that might just blossom quicker than you might imagine. Note to IBC: more of this, please.

Notube: Click image to run video

Dr Lora Aroyo is Technical Co-ordinator for a collaborative project called Notube. The consortium she’s part of is exploring how future recommendation engines could do more than watching your viewing habits and showing you more of the same. They could also look at what you write about in your social media presence online and use that to recommend stuff that you haven’t tried before. Best of all, you could carry that profile of what you like with you to wherever you go, and have your interests pop up on whichever screen your nearby.

Get that right and you’re starting to provide the kind of convenience that music lovers now take for granted online. It’s the kind of convenience that is also starting to get people paying for services built around music once again. Sure, you can download a dodgy copy for free but if a legitimate one costs less than a dollar and it’s easy to find, why bother? In the case of music, convenience makes us care and that’s why we validate the value iTunes offers by spending real money through it.

Making us care enough to pay

The traditional way that the TV industry has kept us spending is to release new technologies that force us to upgrate our TV sets. From black and white to colour, stereo sound, teletext, widescreen, HiDef … even in my lifetime I could easily have forked out for six generations of TV sets if I’d had the money.

The inescapable message of IBC this year was that 3D is The Next Big Thing. Question is – do we care enough to spend money on both the sets and enhanced content? There’s already some evidence that 3D films are losing their appeal. Anyway, didn’t we try 3D and say No Thanks numerous times last millenium?

If there’s no new demand for this technology, it had better be so compelling and convenient that it creates that demand. So much demand that audiences will pay a premium for all the extra content production costs involved.

I came to IBC with an open mind on 3D. I saw demos of applications covering sport and big-scale live performance events like rock concerts. 3D brought a fantastic sense of being present and sharing the moment. I can quite imagine 3D adding to the kind of closed-circuit relay-to-movie-theatre special environments that some opera companies and orchestras are now exploring.

Even so there’s a lot of basic stuff we haven’t worked out yet, even at the level of the basic visual grammar of directing 3D. For example, watching a U2 concert on a large screen, I found dissolves from closeups to wide shots really don’t work in stereo vision. There’s a very confusing moment half way through when you don’t know what you’re looking at and your eyes go screwy.

Brainstorm: Click image to run video

On which note … Ricardo Montesa, CEO at Brainstorm was very open about the experimental nature of the integration his company is trying to make between real world stereoscopic imagery and CGI. Apparently a surprising number of the audience actually don’t see 3D when they stick on the glasses and a majority of people start to feel nauseous watching it after a while, as I did. All credit to Ricardo and his colleagues for pioneering this stuff.

So now i’m going to put my investor hat on. You’re telling me you want me to back a technology that doesn’t work for everyone and which makes a surprising number of them puke? And even if you get past those small challenges, is this really a mass-market proposition?

The first rule of business I teach young entrepreneurs is to understand the real benefits of what they are selling. If they’re offering a nice to have proposition, as opposed to something that’s a must have, warning bells start to ring. Put more crudely: investors are less attracted to people trying to peddle vitamin pills and candy and much more drawn to someone who can offer to fix real headaches or offer crack.

So taking it back to basics: if we want ordinary people to pay we need to understand that they actually value about TV. Unlike us geeks, most folk don’t actually want new technology. They want an experience delivered by content. Technology is just a means to an end. They want to be told great stories. Amazingly, to me anyway, it seems that technology is starting to help with that.

Story Metadata: Click image to run video

Simon Phillips is CEO of Tools of Directing and he’s taking a radical approach to try to analyse stories and make them more emotionally impactful. Working with the UK Director’s Guild, he’s developed a way to make stories machine-readable. Yes, your PC might soon enjoy a good yarn. More to the point, Simon’s ideas could empower new kinds of analytic insights that make rational decision possible, where previously storytelling seemed like a dark art. That matters if you are trying to decide whether or not to pull a primetime drama costing millions from the schedules.

My hunch is that there’s some way before machines can truly reflect the emotion in a story but Simon’s work looks like a radical new approach that’s attracting some serious interest. And of course attracting interest is what media’s always been partly about.

Helping us share

I love the way that technology sometimes really surprises me and my personal award for the most eye-catching product at IBC this year goes to a young team from a company called VeriCorder.

Vericorder: Click image to run video

Sales Engineer Nick Wynja is from Canada. At just 21, working with friends, his company has come up with a complete shooting and editing solution for video journalists using an iPhone. Consumer and professional versions are already available and over 10,000 people have downloaded the $9.99 app to date. One of them has even shot and cut a whole drama using it.

Being able to shoot and edit video on a pocketable device is a great way to open up the experience of film-making, as well as sharing what you shoot. But my final selection for What Caught My Eye was a technology at the other end of the pipeline: it helps share the experience of viewing.

Multitouch: Click image to run video

Hannu Anttila is VP Sales at MultiTouch. It’s like a giant iPhone, allowing many people to interact in a tactile way with a pool of content at the same time. For the moment they’re targeting commercial customers like museums but I can easily see this transforming into a consumer proposition over the next few years as prices for the hardware fall. Who knows, it could even create a new kind of family viewing experience, the 3rd millenium equivalent of the kind of evenings I spent as a kid growing up with steam TV 1.0.

My Wish List

It was a real privilege to be able to enjoy IBC. I left the session this morning with wish-list for the future and I’ll be interested to see if future technology addresses those points of making us aware, making us care and helping us share.

I have a hunch that doing so is partly about stopping thinking so much about the supply side of the whole business. It means thinking less about what you would like to do as a broadcaster or equipment supplier and instead looking harder at what viewers want from media products and services.

Perhaps it’s also a change of culture. Sure, we need technical standards to make sure the basic infrastructure works but we need to welcome mavericks to have fun with it. Think Silicon Valley, not Grass Valley. Less CapEx and Nation Speaking Truth Unto Nation. More ordinary people engaged with stories and each other, through a happy anarchy of media technologies.

Much as my heart loves the flashing lights, my head tells me the future of broadcast is probably not about the vast arrays of physical capital, OB trucks and heavyweight studio rigs that I could have seen any year at IBC since it started. It’s all happening on some kid’s iPhone nowadays.

A huge thank-you to David Dawson-Pick for inviting me along and for producing the session, to Rob our cameraman, Eugene our editor and the technical and management teams at RAI and IBC. Last but not least, thank you to talented intern and PA Alison Rogers. Her generation of media professionals are going to have to plot a course for their careers through an exciting but fuzzy media landscape. Somehow, I don’t think she’ll be doing it in a battleship.

Mohammed Rafee likes to surf the web when he’s waiting for passengers, so he figured it would be fun to share his 3G connection with people while he’s driving. They can recharge their phones, make free VOIP calls using his webcam and even print documents too.

Next month marks the fourth anniversary of an invitation from Singapore’s Media Development Authority to mentor media businesses here. Accepting that invitation changed my life and led me to bring my family to this fascinating island. Three colleagues thinking of setting up businesses in Singapore have all asked me what I have learned from my experience this week, so I made a list of what I’d do differently if I had 20-20 hindsight.

I’m a firm believer that, when things go well in life, you learn little. The tough times have provided most learning for me setting up an independent business in Singapore. So instead of making a list of ten things that have worked out, I’m going to list the things I’d do differently were I arriving again.

What follows is an incomplete work-in-progress by a newcomer to Singapore. I don’t for a minute claim that I can adequately sum up the country that I’ve chosen to make home in a few short sentences. If you’re local, please comment and correct me, accepting that I write in good faith.

1. Get a local partner

My first mistake was that I didn’t seek out local people for the initial team I put together here. There is so much depth to the culture that local insight is essential on many levels. Singaporeans all know someone who was at school with a friend, or they did National Service with someone, who knows someone that you need to contact. The bonds that NS forges are recognised as one of the strongest arguments put forward to continue it here.

Interconnection is one of Singapore’s social strengths and, lacking those connections, it’s easy to get left out from opportunities, not through active discrimination but simply because it will be assumed that you know what’s going on through one of the informal networks.

It’s natural for westerners to be drawn to other westerners  when they first arrive. However, just because someone’s been in Asia for years and perhaps even married someone born here, that doesn’t mean they know how to get anything done. There’s a harsh but true colonial-era expression summed up by the acronym FILTH (Failed in London, try HongKong) which still applies. Westerners come to Asia for many reasons … one of which is that they don’t fit in back home. Beware.

2. Commit

When I started out, I imagined that by being here for, say, one week in four, we could keep costs down and still be part of what is going on. That just doesn’t work. People invite you to events with just a few days notice and, unless you turn up and do the networking, you don’t get connected.

It’s not just a matter of logistics and short notice. It’s about showing commitment and giving face to new friends. When you are asked at the start of every initial meeting:

How long have you been in Singapore?

…  the question really being asked is:

How long are you staying?

… and it helps to answer that explicitly. It takes energy to build a relationship of trust anywhere. Locals and experienced expats in Singapore will put more energy into something that is likely to last, just like anywhere else.

3. Join the club … no not that club

I personally haven’t found it necessary to join one of the expensive clubs, some of which are still quite stuffy. Jackets and ties are rarely worn in Singapore yet the underlying culture of business remains traditional. The sense of being part of things still matters.

As everywhere, people want to know who they are dealing with. This island has a history of people coming and going and trying to make a quick buck since 1819.  Carpetbaggers are welcome to spend their money in Singapore, but the community won’t buy from them.

In particular, government agencies are acutely sensitive to the risk of foreigners taking public subsidies and then disappearing off with them. It has happened, so it helps immensely to create confidence with officials if you present your proposals as a genuine collaboration with local people who are physically alongside you at meetings.

I didn’t fully internalise the message that regular face to face meetings really matter when I first arrived. Singaporeans love networking and it is relatively easy to get introduced to whoever you would like to see – at least once. Strangely, the country is such a common stopover destination that it can also actually be easier to meet hard-to-reach westerners here than when they are at home.

On that front, looking back, I could have made contact earlier with UK Trade and Investment, who represent British business here. They often act as a clearing house for all the Brits coming and going and, together with their diplomatic colleagues, can make lateral introductions to whoever you need to meet. Many countries have something similar here, with New Zealand Trade and Enterprise one of the most active.

Were I coming to Singapore again I’d also make much more use of the numerous trade associations where people in particular sectors congregate to explore common interests, even if they might compete in other areas of their working lives. Become a committee member of one of these organisations and you have a plausible reason to contact anyone you want to reach.

I could attend several work-related events every night if I wanted to. It’s not just because Singaporeans like meeting new friends and contacts. Having business partners who feel like they are a consistent part of the same group is a very traditional way of gaining confidence that someone will be honest with you. It’s a small island and word gets around quickly.

On which subject … trade associations are also often the channels through which government agencies informally explore ideas and canvas informal opinion. They are neutral and talking with them doesn’t run the risk of being accused of giving special access in the way that opening discussion with individual companies might.

4. Government really is hands-on

It took me a while to realise how profoundly interconnected business and government are here.

Singaporean government agencies are rightly concerned that businesses should be independent and that they do not become semi-detached organs of the public sector living from one subsidised project to another. That is a hard balance to achieve on a small, highly-interconnected island, a strength of which is its ability to direct strong policy from the centre.

The hands-on nature of government makes it easy to inadvertently run across someone’s plan, or to leave out people who could help make your own plan move forward. Were I arriving again, I would create more opportunities to discuss my ideas informally one-on-one with civil servants. I would do more of what we did to launch JFDI.asia, where we published our plans openly and invited comment, making it clear that we did not want to duplicate what was already being done and instead would prefer to partner with organisations that shared our values.

Of course, you can’t make an omelette without cracking eggs and (mixing my metaphors) you are bound to step on a few toes when you start to dance. Here, as everywhere, there are folk who seek to build private empires. They don’t want to build win-win solutions and won’t collaborate. However, a surprising number of people and organisations are very open to collaboration if you listen to their priorities first and only then politely explain how your ideas complement rather than threaten them. The best way of all to strike a deal is for such an organisation to discover what you are already doing and decide it wants to jump on your bandwagon.

5. Understand the Agenda

Dwarfed by neighbours with much larger populations and access to natural resources that Singapore does not have, folk here still jokingly refer to the island as the Red Dot. It’s a hangover from colonial times when British colonies around the world were often coloured red on maps. Looking at the whole world, Singapore appeared as a tiny red dot on the end of the much larger Malay Peninsula.

Thanks to land reclamation, Singapore is now about 10% bigger than it used to be, with ambitions to add about the same again. But if you drew a map based on finance rather than land, this country would have a much larger footprint.

Singapore is driven by business. It is rightly proud of being one of the safest places to keep your wealth, or strike a contract, across the region. You can expect to get paid here, which is not true everywhere else in South East Asia. That reputation is of paramount importance to the country and the big no-no for anyone associated with Singapore is tarnishing the brand.

In that sense, thinking of Singapore as a company building a brand, rather than the country that it really is, sometimes helps to make sense of it. The Switzerland of South East Asia is a phrase that’s often used to describe Singapore but that doesn’t capture everyone’s focus on commerce.

My wife is a professional designer and, when we first arrived, she wanted to join a life-drawing class to keep her drawing skills in practice. Asking around, it seemed that such classes are quite hard to find here. Was that because of concerns about nudity, we wondered? A Singaporean friend joked that if it was sold as life-drawing to improve your foreign-exchange trading skills, there’d be a queue a mile long. But if it was about art, what was the point?

It was only a joke. Singapore does not lack culture if you search for it. A school ethos where only potential lawyers, doctors and engineers had status, and creative kids were labelled as losers, is officially passé. There are excellent museums, a new School of the Arts and world class touring performances live on the Esplanade every night. It’s just that the bottom line here is almost always financial: art for art’s sake is not valued. Art that pays its way (and preferably makes a profit) most definitely is.

6. Price and Privilege

I hadn’t understood just how sensitive Singaporeans are to price when I first arrived. I could adapt an old British saying to sum up the traditional way of doing business is:

Look after the cents and the dollars will look after themselves.

As a philosophy, it has a lot to commend it. It has served generations of traditional family firms very well on an island of traders who bought low and sold high, got in to deals and then got out of them relatively quickly.

A friend with American roots likes to say that what made his ancestors in the US great at business was a combination of tactical Jewish deal-making skills, coupled with the German gene for strategy and long-term planning. Despite the long term vision of government here, the style of everyday business in Singapore is still very much the former. Singaporeans love to do deals, particularly if there’s a bargain to be had.

Yet that doesn’t begin to capture how pricing really works here. I was recently surprised to hear from someone giving me a $10 haircut that her colleague had just bought a $10,000 watch. It is not uncommon for young women living in public housing to spend $3,500 on a designer-brand handbag. The national hobby may be window shopping (aircon in the mall is free) but the prestige stores in malls like Ion Orchard appear to be doing real trade.

The general rule seems to be that people will pay good money for a good product when the benefit is tangible, or linked to privilege and aspiration. However, when they are buying something they can’t see or touch, my impression is that Singaporeans seem to find it harder to assess the quality and value in what they are buying, unless that value is signalled to them by government endorsement or a high-status brand.

That is a particular issue around soft-skill services like consulting. There is a cultural aversion to paying for ideas, expertise and consultants of all kinds. Given Singapore’s desire to build a Knowledge Economy based on Intellectual Property, to complement its pre-eminence in shipping, oil and financial services, that may present an interesting conundrum in the future as local firms need to start selling soft-skill services to the world.

7. National Service is mandatory

Fresh off the plane, I mistook polite initial meetings and invitations to participate in industry events for interest in buying when, in fact, they were a way for me to share expertise on an unpaid basis. Expats sometimes grumble about it but it’s really not a cynical ploy aimed at milking foreigners. Local business people too joke about all the unpaid work they do sitting on committees and the like, calling it National Service.

That is exactly what it is and new arrivals are expected to do it too, to show they are part of the national project. Taxes may be low here but there is a higher non-billable-time overhead here than I expected. The good news is that it’s an enjoyable way to get to know people.

8. Give good Face

Soon after I arrived in Singapore, I was asked by someone I had barely met to hear his pitch for a social enterprise. He invited a senior friend from a ministry to the meeting. Having explained that I mentored growing enterprises and invested in them, I listened to his pitch and gave him the positive but direct feedback that I would have done back home.

Big mistake. He hasn’t spoken to me since and the embarrassment I inadvertently caused was apparently discussed at ministerial level.

I now understand that the man in question had assumed that I was an esteemed foreign expert who was going to praise and validate his plan in front of a government official with the power to fund it. In complete contrast, I had assumed he wanted pragmatic feedback on where the weak points lay and how to mitigate them. Instead of giving him face, as he had hoped, I had done the exact opposite and made him lose it in an important meeting. Ouch.

Face is a deeply confusing issue for westerners and I believe the only way to learn to deal with it is to put your foot in it once or twice, hoping you don’t do too much damage along the way. The best explanations I have read link the eastern concept of face to the western concept of dignity. Writers like Sarah Rosenburg suggest that its roots lie in the shame-based culture of the East, as opposed to the guilt-based culture of the West.

In practical terms, a friend who has lived here for 25 years explained it this way to me: if you are alone with a taxi driver, you can be as rude as you like to him. However, if another passenger is with you, you should avoid making the taxi driver lose face in front of your companion, firstly because your companion may assume that you would be willing to make them lose face too, and secondly because you lose face if you lose your cool with someone in public.

First meetings with organisations can often be quite formal, in my experience, with several people present. These are occasions for presenting credentials and establishing common interests. Direct messages and questions are best addressed verbally, one-on-one and face to face in an informal setting.

I have learned to listen and ask privately in advance of meetings involving more than one person what the real agenda is and never to make assumptions. One of the most helpful questions I have been taught is to ask, politely:

What do you want from me?

It can be fascinating to hold a meeting with a Singaporean friend and ask him or her afterwards to give a breakdown on who gained or lost face. There is sometimes a whole level of discussion that a westerner can miss.

As an expert paid to advise, a particularly difficult situation I have met is giving honest feedback when the person sitting opposite you is just plain factually wrong. If I simply come out and contradict someone in front of colleagues, however politely, I make him or her lose face.

There are some key phrases I have learned to listen out for through which Singaporeans sometimes use to get around issues of face, the most frequent of which are:

Ah, actually …

It might be better …

Let’s KIV that
(Keep In View – ie put it on the back burner)

If you hear phrases like these in a conversation, tread carefully.

It is also worth bearing in mind that face applies to institutions and nations as well as individuals. Sometimes it is politic for an official body to issue an announcement of a grand collaboration, for example, when there is remarkably little substance behind it. To western ears it sounds like a commitment to action when in fact the objective is to give face by articulating an aspiration. The intention to follow through into action may not always be so clear.

Finally, face can be the reason you don’t get a reply to messages. Writers such as Malcolm Gladwell have pointed out that westerners see the onus for making sure that a message gets through lies with the sender. If you don’t seem to be being heard, you say it again, only louder. That can sound brash and insensitive to folk from the east, where traditionally the onus is on the receiver of information.

It can be difficult in these days of spam filtering to know whether emails have got through or not, someone is simply to busy to reply or if they are trying to help you save face. For example, a person to whom you have written with a request may well assume that you would prefer them to say nothing rather than to cause a loss of face to you if they say no. Faced with silence or apparent unwillingness to give a straight answer, it can be better to let the matter drop or to address the issue privately in person.

9. Make the connection

Many westerners’ relationship to Singapore appears to follow a pattern something like this:

1. Attraction to an exciting fusion of exotic cultures, made remarkably accessible through widespread use of English language.
2. Desire to participate, trade and live/work here but also apprehension about costs and so a decision to be here part-time.
3. A realisation that it takes more than a part-time commitment to do business, followed by either exit or full commitment. Cutting the umbilical cord with home is a very significant moment.
4. A honeymoon period exploring Singapore after first arrival, enjoying the safety and convenience of the place and making reassuring discoveries that critical services like education and health are often better than back home when you actually need them.
5. A crunch moment a few months in, when the realisation comes that beneath the urbane surface the culture here is different in some profound ways. This is the time when a trailing spouse may force an early exit, if you have brought one here without thinking through his or her role fully.
6. A decision to either start connecting to local life, or a retreat into a highly expensive expat ghetto lifestyle. The former involves an internal decision that life is just different here, not better or worse than wherever you came from, and the latter quite often involves a lot of whingeing about the things that aren’t exactly like home.

Were I coming to Singapore again I would be more explicitly aware of those phases of cultural adaptation. Being so, I could pace myself more evenly with regards to the emotional energy required and I would have had a better sense of the progress I was making.

If you have read this far you will probably understand that both my wife and I made the decision to connect to local life fairly early. Our son, who was two and a half when we arrived, found it easiest to settle in.

Arriving in Singapore as a tourist or as a business traveller hoping to set up shop, it is very easy to see only the squeaky clean surface of this fascinating country. It’s efficient but can also seem rather sterile. Indeed, if you try to do business without taking time to scratch beneath that surface your efforts may well fail to take root. But start digging, connect and our experience is that there is a great depth of warmth and genuine welcome here.

Eighteen months into full-time life in Singapore we are still finding our way. We are eternally grateful to the many local friends who have eased our path and kindly explained the many misunderstandings that have occurred. Of course we have learned most through those misunderstandings and one of the most helpful questions I now ask myself when a situation frustrates me is “What have I done to you to make me so angry with you?” So often the frustration actually stems from assumptions which we have no right to make in someone else’s culture.

10. And a bunch of other things …

There have been a million other learning points but I can’t recommend Neil Humphreys’ entertaining book Notes from an Even Smaller Island highly enough as a starting point. Neil is a British lad from Watford who came to Singapore to teach English. He writes frankly and with affection about Singapore in a way that makes locals roar with laughter.

If you are curious about the dialect of English spoken by many local people, you might want to read the Coxford Singlish Dictionary. Wikipedia has a more sober explanation of this distinct and recognised creole language.

The official starting point for incoming businesses is the Economic Development Board, whose staff are very good at helping companies to navigate the complex local infrastructure. For independent individuals coming to Singapore, Contact Singapore is the place to begin.

Sgentrepreneurs.com and e27 are local independent blog communities for digital entrepreneurs, while expatsingapore and singaporeexpats have information about practical issues like finding a place to live. Hackerspace.sg is a community-run shared workspace and hang-out that welcomes anyone looking for a hot desk and new friends with an interest in technology.

Finally, I compiled some grunge videos for entrepreneurs visiting on a trade mission during 2o09 which a wide range people have told me they find helpful. The best one to start with might be a chat I recorded with my good friend Danesh Daryanani who is a local writer and entrepreneur:

I put some general notes on practical aspects of living here into this short video:

There’s also much longer video which was broadcast live to a conference in the UK sharing the views of some local entrepreneurs. I had to split it into four parts to post it on YouTube:

The views put forward in this article are my own but I would particularly like to thank John Bittleston and Eliza Quek at Terrific Mentors, Marc Nicholson, Jacinta and James Chadwick, Zheng Huifen, Chewlin Kay, Lester Kok, Danesh Daryanani, Meng Wong, Mark Chong, Hidayah Hassan-Le Néel, Lim HongZhuang, Rob Skinner and James Chan for helping me make sense of my time in Singapore.