Soccer lessons for office manager

Although I am not a big fan or having any keen interest in FIFA World Cup or any international soccer match ( maybe I should start myself with golf instead ), senior office management might think that the Cup fever will be best spent telling employees to shut down the TV links and concentrate back on their office work.

However, there is more to learn from the cup tournament and about organising teamwork and motivating individuals to excel in their challenging tasks given to them and to meet tight time schedule like in the soccer match, to score as many goals against their opponents within the play time.

Raising morale and engaging employees are priorities in the current economy and if football offers one lesson, is the importance of good managers for motivating individuals and delivering team performance.

That may seem obvious, but it is a lesson business has yet to fully absorb. Why else would companies continue to promote excellent functional performers to higher management positions, regardless of their suitability for the particular senior role?

Why companies continue to reward managers for their own individual performance, rather than that of their team?

Some lessons from the soccer pitch:

Management, a full-time job-

There is no relationship whatsoever between functional expertise and managerial ability. Jose Mourinho tried playing football as a young man, but soon realised his shortcomings. Now at Real Madrid, he has achieved outstanding success as a coach. If he’d been similarly inadequate as a graduate salesman or marketer, his employment would have been hastily terminated and his company denied the commercial impact of his very considerable managerial ability.

Talent is contextual-

Coaching a team at the World Cup is akin to leading a short-term, say a rig construction project, staffed by disparate and often unacquainted individuals from various nationals, in first place, and from different project or production departments. The coach has little time to work out how to extract the maximum potential from their charges. That means aligning people with roles, and possibly location. At the World Cup, you may see appalling performances from players who consistently excel for their club teams when fulfilling very different duties. Talent is meaningless unless it’s deployed in its most fitting context.

Managers adapt their style to individuals-

Coaches need to quickly gauge the people they’re working with. Man-management is about adjusting your style to suit the player. Interviews with those who played under Brian Clough, arguably the greatest ever English manager, reveal conflicting narratives. Some say Clough was avuncular and caring, others that he was an intimidating tyrant. Neither was true — he had just simply worked out how to press the buttons of very different characters and getting things work out against the competing team.

Managers promote self-belief-

If we look at our own careers as employees, most of us will say that the most productive and enjoyable period has been when we worked for a manager who had the confidence to push us to our limit. Arsene Wenger, Arsenal’s manager, summarised the galvanising effect this relationship has: “All great successes, all great lives, have involved the coincidence of aptitude, talent, but also the luck of meeting people who have believed in you. At some point in your life, you need someone who will tap you on your shoulder and say, ‘I believe in you’.”

Company leaders might tone down the language a bit, but if they want to promote loyalty and genuinely see their teams succeed, they’ll take a leaf from the soccer rulebook and maybe we have lesser of a hard time with our rig building team at our best yard we now have.

Entrepreneurship secret recipe

If only entrepreneurship were like a secret sauce, people would copy the recipe and reapply it each time they need a dose of it in their newly minted business plans. Unfortunately for most would-be entrepreneurs, this is not the case.

Two speakers with links to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) came close when they shared insights and highlights of the so-called 'MIT approach' at a recent forum co-hosted by SMU's Institute of Innovation and Entrepreneurship.

Mr Kivel is currently CEO of TheraGenetics, a London-based company working on commercialisation of diagnostic tests to improve the treatment of disorders such as schizophrenia, depression and Alzheimer's. A serial life science commercialisation veteran, Mr Kivel oversaw the successful acquisition of MolecularWare, an MIT spin-off which he led as CEO from 2001 to 2004.

Mr Califano, on the other hand, manages the operation of the SMART (Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research & Technology) Innovation Centre in Singapore. He founded and held senior positions in many companies in the United States and Asia, including a stint as consulting director of Bio*One Capital Pte Ltd, the biomedical investment arm of Singapore's Economic Development Board. He was also the CEO of Johns Hopkins Singapore and The Johns Hopkins-NUH International Medical Centre.

For both men, a key issue in any informed debate over entrepreneurship is whether it is replicable. In other words, given the same mix of factors, will there be an equal response in terms of number of commercial successes? And if not, is the whole project of trying to teach entrepreneurship simply an exercise in despair?

Risk without failure?

Access to early funding and advice is critical for new entrepreneurs. Finding and tapping into the VC (venture capital) and angel investor communities is absolutely critical.

VCs who have invested their money and are keen to see it multiply will see that they continue to engage with the start-up and help see it succeed. To guard their own interests, the typical venture capitalist will not allow you to fall into a living death situation since that would threaten their own investment.

We're capturing people from each department who would never have thought of starting their own business, noting that these now include life sciences, engineering, computing and even social sciences grads apart from the usual finance and business admin people.

Entrepreneurship involves people with integrity, leadership, a bias to action and ability to attract talent. The theme, 'it takes a village', is echoed at MIT where entrepreneurship is widely practised among the community of interested parties that reinforces the culture and drives further risk taking from the shared experience.

Foreign Currency potential and local loan interest rates

The financial crisis of 2008 brought to an end one of the longest periods of sustained global growth experienced in modern times.

While many Western economies experienced unsustainable, property-fuelled consumer booms, which boosted both their growth rates and their exchange rates, the prolonged phase of expansion allowed many emerging market economies to expand their shares of world trade, increase their currency reserves and improve their fiscal balances to a remarkable degree.

The end of that global expansion was certainly not good news for emerging markets, but its aftermath has revealed this remarkable shift in relative structural fundamentals between the economies of the old and new industrialised worlds.

As the world economy now picks up again, we expect favourable cyclical forces to combine with relative structural improvements to generate significant further capital inflows to emerging markets, driving notable potential strength of their currencies.

Of the cyclical forces, interest rates antheir likely future course are of course critical, but so too the resilience of domestic economic growth, or prospects for commodity prices in the case of the larger resources exporters. Brazil, Indonesia and Turkey offer such cyclical appeal here.

Combining these factors, here are some currencies which offer the most appealing blend of value, yield and cyclical attractions:

 The Mexican peso is among the cheapest of major emerging currencies. It should also be supported by economic recovery, a moderate interest rate pick-up of 4.5 per cent versus the US, and a relatively firm oil price, as Mexico is an oil producer.

 The South Korean won offers value on all metrics and should remain supported by the economic recovery and Korea's current and capital account surpluses.

 The Indian rupee is cheap on most, though not all, value metrics. The currency should be supported by a pick-up in foreign direct investments and overseas corporate borrowings, as well as a policy preference to use the currency to contain imported inflation.

 The Turkish lira is reasonably valued at current levels, and should remain supported by economic recovery and one of the highest yields among the liquid emerging market currencies.

 The Russian ruble is not overvalued and should remain supported by a significant economic recovery, a continuation of firm oil prices and a high interest rate.

 The Indonesian rupiah is neutrally valued, and should remain supported by economic recovery and an improving domestic political situation.

 The Brazilian real has already appreciated significantly, such that it offers no outright value appeal, but the currency remains well placed to benefit from a positive commodity market and good domestic growth. High interest rates are likely to attract foreign capital inflows.

These currencies have the potential to show total returns (interest rate carry plus potential spot currency appreciation versus the US dollar) in the region of 7-10 per cent in the coming year.

As individual currencies always carry certain political and idiosyncratic risks, it important to approach currency investment in a well-diversified manner, spreading exposure across a number of favoured currencies. In this way, a portfolio approach can gain exposure to the overall theme of favourable cyclical and structural drivers of emerging market currency appreciation, while limiting the drawdown risk from any individual currency.

THE credit crisis has brought about a lowering of local interest rates across the board for loans to Singapore SMEs. We have certainly taken advantage of this opportunity by procuring bigger loans for our local company's expansion and development.

LOWER interest rates are indeed a boon to SMEs during good and bad times. Lower interest rates translate into lower cost of capital and ultimately lowers the cost of doing business and improve cash flow.

Pursuit was able to generate our own working capital from internal sources and so did not have to borrow from banks. However, as we continue to grow and expand in the region, we may have to tap appropriate available external financing options to fund our expansion plans. Hopefully interest rates will continue to remain low and attractive. Interest rates to remain at the current level for probably the next six months. However, as the economy continues to grow, pushing up prices and nudging inflation upwards, interest rates may rise in 2011.

Furthermore, the government's Special Risk-Sharing Initiative (SRI) scheme which was introduced during the recession will be discontinued in January 2011 and there is expectation interest rates for bank loans to gradually trend up.