The Kodak Moment – A management case study

The Kodak Moment was once the triumph of Kodak Eastman Color, one of the top successful corporations of the US and the world. It was successively used and identified with Kodak and every photographer knew what a Kodak Moment meant. Today the Kodak Moment is history. It is instead used as a case study in business schools to tell the story of how a very successful company failed to acknowledge all the signs of its impending fall, ignoring the challenges and kept marching arrogantly forward, alone, when the forces of the competition are going against to put an end to what it is doing.

Kodak Eastman Color had seen all the signs of its downfall but chose to ignore them, denied their existence, tried to sweep them under the carpet, and pretended that all was well. Well, all was not well. When things were wrong, they were wrong.

Are there Kodak Moment in our midst, when all the signs are bad, pointing in one direction, the end? And the people responsible, like the top management of Kodak, chose to ignore, to look the other way, to do more silly things thinking that the problem would go away? The problems did not go away, Kodak went away, together with its top management. Kodak Eastman Color is now history when it once controlled 90% of the photography film industry.

We have a glaring Kodak Moment in the stock market. Everything is going wrong. All the bad signs are there. All the wrong things being done to wreck the stock market like the CDOs in the subprime crisis. And those responsible are ignoring them like Kodak, not wanting to know, turning to look another way, and tried very hard to do more silly things, hoping everything would turn out well or for as long as they could hold before the roof fell on them.

The fall of Lehman Bros during the subprime crisis was also another great example of a Kodak Moment. They just did not want to know what were going wrong. By not acknowledging them, by not talking about them, there was no problem at all. But Murphy’s Law would come back to kick them real hard, that what can go wrong, or already went wrong, would fall apart below their feet.

Is Singapore playing Santa Claus again?

Temasek was reported to have set up panel of advisers for the Americas and Europe with the biggest names that money can buy. In the ST on 17 June, it reported, ‘The Temasek Americas Advisory Panel(TAAP), …has seven members, including PepsiCo chairman and chief executive  Indra Nooyi, Honeywell Internation chairman and CEO David Cote, and former US treasury secretary Timothy Geithner,…former DuPont chairman and CEO Ellen Kullman, online education platform  Coursera CEO Richard Levin, Mr Ronald Sugar, former chairman and CEO of defence giant Northrop Grumman, and former chairman and CEO of agribusiness Bunge, Mr Alberto Weisser.

The report also said Temasek had set up an European Advisory Panel in January but did not name the panelists, presumably also high powered who’s who in Europe.  Temasek has big investments in these continents and needed good advices that money can buy. And these eminent people would not serve for free and would definitely be paid handsomely. I am presuming of course. They may be doing charity for Temasek by asking for peanuts and being in the Panels would be a great honour itself that is more rewarding in non monetary terms. It is more likely and realistic that such high powered people would not spare their precious time for free. The big question is how much?

How many of such Panels have been set up world wide and hopefully the returns are worth it. A better panel to pay for would be membership to the illuminati if money can buy membership to this cloak and dagger mysterious organization.

Has Singapore become a better and economically more sound in the management of its economy and hundreds of billions of dollars of investments? Or Singapore is still throwing money at anything that moves? How many of the failed bankers and financial professionals made redundant after the subprime and world financial crisis have landed here and given lucrative jobs, with Singapore being the Santa Claus in another form? The number of academics flooding the academic and non academic institutions in Singapore and the money paid to them is no small change. What is the return or benefit to Singapore for spending so much of the public’s money on such academics? Are they worth the money spent? Or they are just like hobbies to be collected to boost one’s ego, that we have so many trophies to wave around?

Would be good if this is discussed in Parliament, to conduct an audit and to assess if it is money well spent? Does Singapore have a bottomless pit of gold that we can just keep sharing with the rest of the world just to feel good?

Singapore is getting to become a very exciting fine city

Parking fees going up in December or HDB will lose $100m yearly despite a report that the two agencies, URA and HDB ‘earning a total of $667 million from their carparks in their latest financials for 2014/15. This piece of information is in the mypaper on 5 Jul.

Now why the fear mongering that HDB is going to lose $100m yearly? Maybe the $667m were mostly made by URA and not HDB. Maybe HDB’s share of the $667 was negligible or miserable and easily wiped out by the increasing cost of managing and maintaining carparks.  Actually HDB’s share was $595m and URA’s was $62m, total added up $657m, $10m missing from the $667m.

The report also said HDB’s operating cost was $700m. Can it then be concluded that the total revenue for carpark operation was $700m + $595m or $1,295m? And HDB claimed that it would lose $100m if the fees or revenue did not go up. What does this mean? Operating cost will increase so much to wipe out the revenue of $1,295m and ended with a loss of $100m? So the total operating cost will be $1,395m, tiok boh? I not accountant or finance expert, can only make simple deduction.

HDB operates 2,000 carparks and recently installed electronic pricing equipment and system that cost $150,000 each to save on manpower cost and to be more efficient in collecting more money. This works out to $300 m in initial capital expenditure. Then the savings from carpark attendance walking the car parks would be transferred to hiring more technicians and software engineers to maintain the $300m system. Not sure the savings from terminating all the carpark attendants would be enough to pay for the technicians and engineers. Very likely not that is why HDB is talking about losing $100m a year with the new equipment and system.

And who should pay for this capital expenditure and new hires, the carpark users? Did the carpark users have a say whether to invest in this costly equipment that would raise the cost of carpark management? No, the HDB decides what is good for them (or for the HDB?) and how much they should pay for the equipment. Great thinking and great philosophy!

And this is not enough. There is a forum writer, a Francis Cheng Choon Fei, who wrote to the Today paper that increasing carpark fees without increasing parking fines is not an efficient way to manage car population. I am not going to ask if he is a car owner with a deep pocket or someone that could not afford to own a car, so increasing fines does not affect his pocket, but I think many Singaporeans would agree with him. Singaporeans just love to pay fines and the bigger the fines the finer would be their lives.

I hope the govt would accept this ground up suggestion and raise all kinds of parking fines and car related fines to make this a finer city. We not only have to pay for the most expensive cars, but car related fines. Our parking fees are still not high enough compare to the price of car ownership. Let’s go for it, increase all the carpark fees and fines.

My eye balls are rolling because this kind of suggestions is music to the ears of the people that believe in nothing wrong with collecting more money.

PS. Happy Hari Raya Aidilfitri to our Muslim citizens. Or is it Happy Hari Raya Puasa? I saw that in Channel News Asia.

Productivity of the Ang Mo Kio TB cluster

Results from the screening of 225 people living in the same block of the 6 TB patients in Ang Mo Kio have produced 2 possible active TB cases and 45 with latent TB. These work out to be a 1 percent positive and 22 percent latent hits. The latent cases are reported to be not infectious and would not spread the disease until they turn positive. The Ministry also reported that normally 90 per cent of latent TB, ie 45, would not develop TB in their life time. So only 4 would likely contact TB eventually. All are now being treated for positive and latent TB.

The causes on how they contacted the TB have not been determined but likely, and must be due to some contact with the TB patients. All have been reported to have no direct contact with the 6. Then how could they possibly get into close contact or proximity with the 6? One likely possibility must be the lifts, in instances when one of the 6 was using the lift and the unaware went in after them.

The other higher possibility areas must be the trains or the offices they were working in. But these are unlikely the case for those screened positive in this exercise. But this does not rule out the 2 positive cases spreading in the trains or in their offices, or the 6 that may have travelled in trains and their work areas.

So far never heard of screenings in the work areas of the affected TB patients. It is almost impossible to screen commuters who happened to take the same trains.  Would the Ministry attempt to screen those working in the same offices, using the same toilet cubicles or pantry?

This is not the end of the Ang Mo Kio cluster and the people that may be affected or infected through other means of contact could be out there. We are so lucky that there is no widespread of TB in the island when the jam packed trains are so conducive contraptions for the spread of communicable diseases like TB and what else.

IS attacks now more targeted

According to Rita Katz, the director of the SITE intelligence group, there is a big change in the tactics of IS coming out from the latest attack in Bangladesh. IS used to adopt a kill all tactic, a kind of indiscriminate killing that can be expected from mindless people, regardless of who the victims were, just kill and create havoc, terror and fear. The order to its operators in Europe was to go out and kill ‘anyone and everyone’.  The order given to the terrorists in Bangladesh was ‘to kill a white foreigner at random.’

Reports coming out from the Bangladesh attack said the terrorists separated the locals from the foreigners before hacking them to death, sparing the locals. The IS and Al Qaeda were at loggerheads on the tactics to kill at random or only kill the non Muslims. Al Qaeda has been attacking the IS tactics especially in the triple suicide bombing in Istanbul. To quote the NYT report reproduced in the Today paper on 4 Jul, this was what the Al Qaeda twittered. ‘The Turkish people are Muslims & their blood is sacred. A true Mujahid would give his life for them, not massacre them….’

The earlier tactic of wanton attack had let to Muslims and Muslim countries being the target. And it would be tough to explain to their fighters and supporters should their families and homes be hit. They were making enemies of everyone, indiscriminately and wildly. This change in IS tactics would have very serious implications on who they would attack and what kind of establishments or targets would be hit.

The Bangladesh attack was an attack on foreigners and foreign establishments. The NYT report said, ‘The bakery is in what expatriates affectionately call the “Tri State” area of Dhaka…that are popular with foreigners. It was founded to provide expatriates with the comfort foods they missed, including American bagels and cream cheese.’

With this new development, would IS attacks be more predictable, attacking foreigners or establishments of foreigners or their enemies instead of hitting at anything anywhere? How would this relate to the safety or high risk areas or establishments here in our little island?  Would Muslim countries like Malaysia and Indonesia be safer, be spared from IS and Al Qaeda attacks or if it so happened, would be against the so called, ‘nationals from Crusader nations in Bangladesh’?

Singapore is not really a Muslim state but has a substantial Muslim population and a bigger presence of ‘nationals from Crusader nations’.  How would this play out and how would our anti terrorist organizations respond to this tactical change? Would the Puchong bombing in Malaysia be a sign of things to come in the Asean countries? Our intelligence and security agencies would now be under pressure to monitor closely the numerous establishments, particularly the ‘sinful’ types in the Clark Quay, Boat Quay and Mohammed Sultan areas. What about MacDonald and Kentucky, the comfort food providers?