Dear Colleagues,

Welcome to Week 4. I want to thank the P4 teachers for bringing the boys out to the Zoo and Kampong Glam last week. I also want to thank the P5 teachers for bringing the boys to the NE Show. My congratulations also to the Basketball teachers for your faith and dedication to the CCA and for bringing the boys to new heights! 

As part of our effort to grow the leadership effectiveness of the middle management team, I will be launching a leadership feedback survey this week. The KPs have nominated a broad range of staff to provide feedback, and in order to have enough perspectives, I would need to trouble each staff to provide feedback to 2-4 different KPs whom you should have some working knowledge of. You will be receiving a hardcopy notice with the instructions and codes, and I hope that you will take some time to give your feedback and provide inputs on how we can improve. 

This week we will be having Racial Harmony Day. I used to think it was ironic that we had to set aside a day to remind us to be harmonious, but certainly, in these times of great polarisation and diversity of opinions, I realise that it is very fragile and we must do everything in our power to preserve it, especially by choosing to see the good in others who might be different from us. So, do take the time to speak to the boys and share our own personal stories about happy encounters with people who are different from us. Here's a short story to ponder:

On a rainy night on New Year's eve, a lonely little girl was saddened by the disagreements amongt her family members. Little girl sadly said, "It's Chinese New Year's Eve, but it's been raining all day long. New Year is coming but everyone is not in a good mood. Brother insists on buying a new motorcycle, and Dad, Mom, and Brother are quarreling about it again."

Dad said to Brother, "Can't you use the old motorcycle? You only know how to spend money!"

Mom also said to Brother, "The economy is bad, why don't you just use the old one?"

Brother angrily said, "The old motorcycle breaks down all the time, you can use it! I won't!"

"It's your fault. You have spoiled him!", Dad said to Mom.

Little girl asked herself, "It's New Year, but why is everyone unhappy?".

"Kitty, can you tell me how to make everyone happy for the New Year?", asked the little girl of her cat.

Then, outside the window, the little girl saw four old men coming, "Dad, Mom, look! Brother, come and see!" Mom said to the old men, "Ah, it's raining so heavily, Sirs, please come in for shelter!"

Old man #1 said, "Haha, thank you for your kindness, Madam. But we have a rule, only one of the four of us can come in. Who do you wish to invite in?" The four old men then introduced themselves one by one.

Old man #2 : "I am Wealth."

Old man #3 : "I am Success."

Old man #4 : "I am Well-being."

Old man #1 said with a laugh, "Haha, everyone calls me Harmony."

Dad said to the four old men, "Surely we should invite in Wealth, then we can have a comfortable life!"

Brother said, "No, no, choose Success! I want my family to be proud of me!"

Mom said, "Wait a moment! I think Well-being is the most important!"

Dad exclaimed, "Wealth!"

Brother exclaimed, "Success!"

Mom exclaimed, "Well-being!"

Little girl said to her mother, "Mom, Mom, What is harmony? Why don't you invite in Harmony?"

Dad said, "Yes, you're right! Why don't we invite Harmony in? New Year is here, we should be harmonious. Let's invite Harmony in then!"

Seeing that all of the four old men came in together, father said, "Eh? I thought you said only one of you can come in. Why did all of you come in?"

Old man #1 replied,"Haha, we have another rule. If Harmony enters, Well-being, Success and Wealth will follow."

Little girl happily said, "Now I understand. To be happy is to be in harmony."

Here's our quote for the week:

Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in getting up every time we do. 

~ Confucius

Have a great week ahead!

Credere et Servire!  

Keep Believing and Serving,

Timothy Goh

By:     Edwin

Relevant Levels:   -

Date and Time of Event:   -

Information Details: 

Dear everyone,

Many of us begin with a plan, then we map out every step of the plan, and then we either adhere to it strictly  or make adjustments to reach the destination.

When we observe our boys not attentive or registering, we make adjustments during the lesson itself, tactically on the battlefield so to speak. We then further adjust subsequent lessons to factor in these new 'data points' from the lesson. What we do is an adept just-in-time on-the-job tweaking, with a constancy of purpose towards the outcomes. 

A frame of thinking encapsulates this - Ready-Fire-Aim. The Ready-Fire-Aim describes a continuous adjustment towards accuracy with latest incoming data, a better process description than the traditional Ready-Aim-Fire. 

Candidly, perhaps we teachers are already the fore-runners of Ready-Fire-Aim, as we constantly adjust and readjust our lesson 'live' during the lesson itself and after, in response to the cues from our students.

Below is an interesting article about Ready-Fire-Aim. It is about startups, and in a way when we work academically and pastorally with our classes and students, each is a startup journey in a way, for each student and each class is unique. Hope we enjoy the article and also be refreshed with inspirations and borrowings from this different industry.

Many Cheers,

Edwin

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kevinready/2012/08/16/ready-fire-aim/

ENTREPRENEURS

Kevin ReadyFormer Contributor

Aug 16, 2012,09:46am EDT

Now we aim after we fire. It works better.

It has long been a truism that to hit a target, you first get “Ready,” then you “Aim,” then you “Fire.”  What I have found in the world of startups is that if you shoot first, and aim later, there can be many practical benefits. This means that if you start building your product before you know exactly what it is supposed to be, and you do this in a way that gets you customer feedback at low cost, you can get to your goal faster, more accurately, and in less time. My engineering team calls this “Ready-Fire-Aim,” at least in part because my name is “Ready” and I push this principle so hard.

The primary benefit  of this approach is a shortened and less expensive timeline from “Not Knowing” to “Smarter” about your product and your market. It prompts you to get moving and start work immediately, without being paralyzed in the analytic stage. You are also forced to produce a feedback mechanism (the “Aim” part) that will provide guidance for your project. In my experience, this feedback mechanism is usually a test regime that will put the offering in front of people online and measure their response. For product features on an existing business, this is a performance test that compares various web page presentations against one another. For new products, this could be a nice-looking dummy page for a potential offering, or simply an Adwords campaign that you measure for performance.

As “Ready-Fire-Aim” suggests, you will decide what target you are trying hit using the best guess available at the time you start. This is your hypothesis: “I believe THAT group of people will respond THIS way if we build SUCH a product or feature.”

You immediately start building, and you vigorously collect feed­back while doing so. The comparison to artillery is informative: Old-school battleships would come equipped with big guns on their decks. To hit a target, they would turn the turret towards the target, set the elevation and select how many barrels of powder to put behind the projectile. So as far as aiming goes, they are done at this point. The gun will be fired and will either hit the target or miss. This can be problematic if the target is moving in unpredictable ways. The first shot will often be nothing more than a targeting aid, to be followed by a second shot or third shot, which will be required to home in on the target. This wastes time and gunpowder, but it was the best that any Navy could do at the time.

More recently, guided munitions solve this dilemma. A projectile is fired in the general direction of the target. Feedback (usually a laser, GPS, or RADAR) allows constant adjustment of the path in flight. Even if the target moves, so long as the feedback loop is intact, you will arrive at the intended destination.

Projects to introduce new products can operate like this. My approach, which has worked very, very well, is to build something small and quick, gain feedback, and repeat. This cycle continues until we have a product that works.

Just to be clear: I NEVER have a complete specification before getting started. Firing first and aiming later gets you to market fast, which is critical for small businesses—especially if your first guidance was close to the mark.

This speedy approach also helps you to validate the market early. You can get out there and start learning and get engaged in the market quickly and adjust (and even get out) quickly if need be. Ready-Fire-Aim is particularly appropriate for consumer-facing web busi­nesses, as there are lots of potential users (lots of good feedback) and relatively low costs associated with development.

An example:

A partner company I worked with was planning to spend well over $2m on a new text search feature on their homepage. They had jumped right into a full spec design of the product and spent a lot of the money up front. They were committed to building it, and it was scheduled to take up to a year to implement. My suggestion was that they should have built a text search box on a new version of their homepage, while directing just 1% of their home page visits to that dummy text box for a period of a week or so. If users tried to use the text box it would simply respond that “This feature is coming soon” and direct customers back to the existing site paradigm of selecting products from a list. This way they could quickly and cheaply test the base proposition that “customers want to do text search on our site” (which had never been offered before).

Total cost: A week of time, and a few hundred dollars of customer traffic.

Benefit: Invaluable guidance from the market about their huge bet on text search.

Note well: Ready-Fire-Aim is not always appropriate! The capacity to play this quick strategy decreases as the number of potential customers decreases. If you are aiming to sell software to enterprise clients (IBM, GE, etc), then you had better have a very well-targeted product and a clear story of how it works and why it is valuable to the customer before you deploy or package your offering. Packaged, physical products and consumer goods that have long lead time and a physical delivery cycle are the same way—do your market validation and research before you build!

Got a product to develop? Get away from the drawing board quickly, and out into the market. That is where the intelligence you need is waiting to help you develop a product that people want.

Kevin Ready is a serial entrepreneur, business leader, and author of the book Startup: An Insider’s Guide to Launching and Running a Business.