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Showing posts with label Kuching. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kuching. Show all posts

Sunday, August 19, 2012

Lee Kuan Yew On Getting the Best out of Life

“The human being needs a challenge, and my advice to every person in Singapore and elsewhere: Keep yourself interested, have a challenge. If you’re not interested in the world and the world is not interested in you, the biggest punishment a man can receive is total isolation in a dungeon, black and complete withdrawal of all stimuli, that’s real torture.”


MY CONCERN today is, what is it I can tell you which can add to your knowledge about ageing and what ageing societies can do. You know more about this subject than I do. A lot of it is out in the media, Internet and books. So I thought the best way would be to take a personal standpoint and tell you how I approach this question of ageing.

If I cast my mind back, I can see turning points in my physical and mental health. You know, when you’re young, I didn’t bother, assumed good health was God-given and would always be there.

When I was about 57 that was – I was about 34, we were competing in elections, and I was really fond of drinking beer and smoking. And after the election campaign, in Victoria Memorial Hall – we had won the election, the City Council election – I couldn’t thank the voters because I had lost my voice. I’d been smoking furiously. I’d take a packet of 10 to deceive myself, but I’d run through the packet just sitting on the stage, watching the crowd, getting the feeling, the mood before I speak.

In other words, there were three speeches a night. Three speeches a night, 30 cigarettes, a lot of beer after that, and the voice was gone. I remember I had a case in Kuching, Sarawak . So I took the flight and Ifelt awful. I had to make up my mind whether I was going to be an effective campaigner and a lawyer, in which case I cannot destroy my voice, and I can’t go on. So I stopped smoking. It was a tremendous deprivation because I was addicted to it. And I used to wake up dreaming…the nightmare was I resumed smoking.

But I made a choice and said, if I continue this, I will not be able to do my job. I didn’t know anything about cancer of the throat, or oesophagus or the lungs, etc. But it turned out it had many other deleterious effects. Strangely enough after that, I became very allergic, hyper-allergic to smoking, so much so that I would plead with my Cabinet ministers not to smoke in the Cabinet room. You want to smoke, please go out, because I am allergic.

Then one day I was at the home of my colleague, Mr Rajaratnam, meeting foreign correspondents including some from the London Times and they took a picture of me and I had a big belly like that (puts his hands in front of his belly), a beer belly. I felt no, no, this will not do. So I started playing more golf, hit hundreds of balls on the practice tee. But this didn’t go down. There was only one way it could go down: consume less, burn up more.

Another turning point came when -this was 1976, after the general election – I was feeling tired. I was breathing deeply at the Istana, on the lawns.

My daughter, who at that time just graduating as a doctor, said: ‘What are you trying to do?’ I said: ‘I feel an effort to breathe in more oxygen.’ She said: ‘Don’t play golf. Run. Aerobics..’ So she gave me a book , quite a famous book and, then, very current in America on how you score aerobic points swimming, running, whatever it is, cycling.

I looked at it sceptically. I wasn’t very keen on running. I was keen on golf. So I said, ‘Let’s try’. So in-between golf shots while playing on my own, sometimes nine holes at the Istana, I would try and walk fast between shots. Then I began to run between shots. And I felt better. After a while, I said: ‘Okay, after my golf, I run.’ And after a few years, I said: ‘Golf takes so long. The running takes 15 minutes. Let’s cut out the golf and let’s run.’

I think the most important thing in ageing is you got to understand yourself. And the knowledge now is all there. When I was growing up, the knowledge wasn’t there. I had to get the knowledge from friends, from doctors.

But perhaps the most important bit of knowledge that the doctor gave me was one day, when I said: ‘Look, I’m feeling slower and sluggish.’ So he gave me a medical encyclopaedia and he turned the pages to ageing. I read it up and it was illuminating. A lot of it was difficult jargon but I just skimmed through to get the gist of it.

As you grow, you reach 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25 and then, thereafter, you are on a gradual slope down physically. Mentally, you carry on and on and on until I don’t know what age, but mathematicians will tell you that they know their best output is when they’re in their 20s and 30s when your mental energy is powerful and you haven’t lost many neurons. That’s what they tell me.

So, as you acquire more knowledge, you then craft a programme for yourself to maximise what you have. It’s just common sense. I never planned to live till 85 or 84.! I just didn’t think about it. I said: ‘Well, my mother died when she was 74, she had a stroke.. My father died when he was 94.’

But I saw him, and he lived a long life, well, maybe it was his DNA. But more than that, he swam every day and he kept himself busy.. He was working for the Shell company. He was in charge, he was a superintendent of an oil depot.

When he retired, he started becoming a salesman. So people used to tell me: ‘Your father is selling watches at BP de Silva.’ My father was then living with me. But it kept him busy. He had that routine: He meets people, he sells watches, he buys and sells all kinds of semi-precious stones, he circulates coins. And he keeps going. But at 87, 88, he fell, going down the steps from his room to the dining room, broke his arm, three months incapacitated.

Thereafter, he couldn’t go back to swimming. Then he became wheelchair-bound. Then it became a problem because my house was constructed that way. So my brother – who’s a doctor and had a flat (one-level) house – took him in. And he lived on till 94. But towards the end, he had gradual loss of mental powers.

So my calculations, I’m somewhere between 74 and 94. And I’ve reached the halfway point now. But have I? Well, 1996 when I was 73, I was cycling and I felt tightening on the neck. Oh, I must retire today. So I stopped. Next day, I returned to the bicycle. After five minutes it became worse. So I said, no, no, this is something serious, it’s got to do with the blood vessels. Rung up my doctor, who said, ‘Come tomorrow’. Went tomorrow, he checked me, and said: ‘Come back tomorrow for an angiogram.’

I said: ‘What’s that ?’ He said: ‘We’ll pump something in and we’ll see whether the coronary arteries are cleared or blocked.’ I was going to go home. But an MP who was a cardiologist happened to be around, so he came in and said: ‘What are you doing here?’ I said: ‘I’ve got this.’ He said: ‘Don’t go home. You stay here tonight. I’ve sent patients home and they never came back. Just stay here. They’ll put you on the monitor. They’ll watch your heart. And if anything, an emergency arises, they will take you straight to the theatre. You go home. You’ve got no such monitor. You may never come back.’

So I stayed there. Pumped in the dye, yes it was blocked, the left circumflex, not the critical, lead one. So that’s lucky for me. Two weeks later, I was walking around, I felt it’s coming back. Yes it has come back, it had occluded. So this time they said: ‘We’ll put in a stent.’

I’m one of the first few in Singapore to have the stent, so it was a brand new operation. Fortunately, the man who invented the stent was out here selling his stent. He was from San Jose, La Jolla something or the other. So my doctor got hold of him and he supervised the operation. He said put the stent in. My doctor did the operation, he just watched it all and then that’s that. That was before all this problem about lining the stent to make sure that it doesn’t occlude and create a disturbance.

So at each stage, I learnt something more about myself and I stored that. I said: ‘Oh, this is now a danger point.’ So all right, cut out fats, change diet, went to see a specialist in Boston , Massachusetts General Hospital . He said: ‘Take statins.’ I said: ‘What’s that?’ He said: ‘(They) help to reduce your cholesterol.’ My doctors were concerned. They said: ‘You don’t need it. Your cholesterol levels are okay.’ Two years later, more medical evidence came out. So the doctors said: ‘Take statins.’

Had there been no angioplasty, had I not known that something was up and I cycled on, I might have gone at 74 like my mother. So I missed that decline. So next deadline: my father’s fall at 87.

I’m very careful now because sometimes when I turn around too fast, I feel as if I’m going to get off balance. So my daughter, a neurologist, she took me to the NNI, there’s this nerve conduction test, put electrodes here and there.

The transmission of the messages between the feet and the brain has slowed down. So all the exercise, everything, effort put in, I’m fit, I swim, I cycle. But I can’t prevent this losing of conductivity of the nerves and this transmission. So just go slow.

So when I climb up the steps, I have no problem. When I go down the steps, I need to be sure that I’ve got something I can hang on to, just in case. So it’s a constant process of adjustment. But I think the most important single lesson I learnt in life was that if you isolate yourself, you’re done for. The human being is a social animal – he needs stimuli, he needs to meet people, to catch up with the world.

I don’t much like travel but I travel very frequently despite the jetlag, because I get to meet people of great interest to me, who will help me in my work as chairman of our GIC. So I know, I’m on several boards of banks, international advisory boards of banks, of oil companies and so on. And I meet them and I get to understand what’s happening in the world, what has changed since I was here one month ago, one year ago. I go to India , I go to China .

And that stimuli brings me to the world of today. I’m not living in the world, when I was active, more active 20, 30 years ago. So I tell my wife. She woke up late today. I said: ‘Never mind, you come along by 12 o’clock. I go first.’

If you sit back – because part of the ending part of the encyclopaedia which I read was very depressing – as you get old, you withdraw from everything and then all you will have is your bedroom and the photographs and the furniture that you know, and that’s your world. So if you’ve got to go to hospital, the doctor advises you to bring some photographs so that you’ll know you’re not lost in a different world, that this is like your bedroom.

I’m determined that I will not, as long as I can, to be reduced, to have my horizons closed on me like that. It is the stimuli, it is the constant interaction with people across the world that keeps me aware and alive to what’s going on and what we can do to adjust to this different world.

In other words, you must have an interest in life. If you believe that at 55, you’re retiring, you’re going to read books, play golf and drink wine, then I think you’re done for. So statistically they will show you that all the people who retire and lead sedentary lives, the pensioners die off very quickly.

So we now have a social problem with medical sciences, new procedures, new drugs, many more people are going to live long lives.. If the mindset is that when I reach retirement age 62, I’m old, I can’t work anymore, I don’t have to work, I just sit back, now is the time I’ll enjoy life, I think you’re making the biggest mistake of your life. After one month, or after two months, even if you go travelling with nothing to do, with no purpose in life, you will just degrade, you’ll go to seed.

The human being needs a challenge, and my advice to every person in Singapore and elsewhere: Keep yourself interested, have a challenge. If you’re not interested in the world and the world is not interested in you, the biggest punishment a man can receive is total isolation in a dungeon, black and complete withdrawal of all stimuli, that’s real torture.

So when I read that people believe, Singaporeans say: ‘Oh, 62 I’m retiring.’ I say to them: ‘You really want to die quickly?’ If you want to see sunrise tomorrow or sunset, you must have a reason, you must have the stimuli to keep going..’

Have a purpose driven life and finish well, my friends.

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Monday, July 11, 2011

Datuk Dr Ang Bon Beng of Nissan Tan Chong Motor

Location of PenangImage via Wikipedia


Up close and personal with Datuk Dr Ang Bon Beng

By EUGENE MAHALINGAM eugenicz@thestar.com.my

Tan Chong Motor Holdings Bhd's principal activities consist of investment holding and the provision of management services to companies in the Group that main ...

 

IT may come as a bit of a surprise when Datuk Dr Ang Bon Beng, executive director of Edaran Tan Chong Motor Sdn Bhd (ETCM), a local distributor of Nissan cars, says he was never a man with big dreams.

What's harder to believe is that Ang, who is one of the most well-known and respected people in the local automotive industry today, used to earn a living driving taxis and lorries.

“I never had big dreams. (But) I had small yet realistic ones,” he says modestly. “Big visions come from small dreams,” Ang adds.

The eldest of 10 children, Ang was born in 1949 in Kepala Batas, Penang, to a taxi driver father and homemaker mother. Life back then was about living day to day and making ends meet; sometimes living off just biscuits and water.

After completing his Form Five education, Ang had no choice but to start working, as his parents could not afford to finance his education any further. To help support the family, Ang started driving his father's taxi to earn a living.

 
BIO

BORN: March 17, 1949
PERSONAL: Married with four children and two grandchildren
HIGHEST QUALIFICATION: PhD in business administration, University of Honolulu (Hawaii), USA
CAREER: Executive director for Edaran Tan Chong Motor Sdn Bhd and sits on the board of various subsidiaries of Tan Chong Motor Group
FAVOURITE FOOD: Char kuey teow with duck egg and loh mee with vinegar
FAVOURITE PLACE: Kepala Batas, my hometown
HOBBY: Listening to Buddhist music
PHILOSOPHY: Believe, commit, do and deliver
INSPIRATION: My father for instilling the right values in me; Tan Sri Tan Yuet Foh (the company's late foun der) for motivating me in pursuing career advancement; and Datuk Tan Heng Chew for grooming and preparing me for the cor porate world

“My father drove in the day and I would take over in the nights. It was tough. You would hope to make at least RM10 a day, but sometimes you can't even reach that.


“Sometimes, the taxi would break down and the repairs would cost RM20 or RM30. On certain days, if you are unlucky, you get stopped by the police and the passenger you're carrying is forced to get off and you don't get paid,” Ang reminisces.

In 1970, after several odd jobs, a friend approached Ang for a salesman job with the Tan Chong Motor Group. At the time, the company was expanding its presence in Penang. In the hopes of earning a better living for himself and his family, he took the job.



Despite knowing next to nothing about selling cars, Ang knew he had found his calling.

“After going through so much of hardship in life, selling cars wasn't hard. I persevered in taking on the challenges that Tan Chong had set out for me to do. I was motivated to push myself further each time I achieved my sales target.”

Ang was promoted to sales manager in 1981. The following year, he was posted to Sarawak and appointed Kuching branch manager. In 1989, he was made northern states manager, overseeing branches and dealers within Penang and Kedah.

Ang was eventually made sales director in 2001, and in the following year, he was appointed executive director for ETCM a post he still holds today. Ang also sits on the board of various subsidiaries of the Tan Chong Group.

The driven man

With over 40 years of experience under his belt, Ang is arguably one of the longest serving individuals to be involved in the automotive industry in the country.

Not many can lay claim to starting off from the front-lines of the automotive business and making it all the way to the top within the same organisation.

 
Humble beginnings: Dr Ang with his first car in his younger days.
Under Ang's helm, the Tan Chong Group has survived three recessions

 During the global financial crisis in 2009, while other car companies were struggling to manage inventories and pushing sales, Ang practised an internal safeguard strategy, or vision statement, called “Control the free-fall.”

The strategy was to drive his workforce to work harder in the downturn (than they usually would in good times) or risk spiralling down in terms of sales.

That vision statement worked well for the company despite a fall of 2% in total industry volume, Nissan sales in 2009 increased to 29,683 units from 28,313 units in 2008, which was a 5% increase.

 
 http://www.nissan.com.my/http://www.nissan.com.my/images/common/allvehicles.gif

This year, ETCM and other Japanese makes are facing a new kind of challenge production disruption as a result of the earthquake that hit Japan in March. On top of this, the recently amended Hire-Purchase Act 1967 (HPA) that took effect on June 15 is also causing a slowdown in vehicle registrations for all car companies.

“To drive my workforce and to safeguard against any impact, we are applying a vision statement called 55%-45%. I tell my team that if they feel they have put 100% into something, it is only 55% and there is still (a potential of) 45% more to go,” says Ang.

Ang says the strategy for this year is to still be able to continue growing market share within the local automotive industry.

“You constantly need to move forward and be able to expand your business. It's what the shareholders demand.”

Ang says one of the most important recipes for success is having the ability to adapt to changes around you.

“The market is constantly evolving and you have to keep up with the pace of the dynamics, and as a chief (of the company), you need to set a good example to your people. If you don't equip yourself with the latest strategies or knowledge, you'll be squeezed out by your competitors.”

Ang says he makes it a point to communicate with the sales advisors, all 700 of them, on the importance of staying ahead and being able to adapt to the changes, especially in times of challenges.

He reminisces about the time when Nissan Motor Co Ltd president and chief executive officer Carlos Ghosn visited Malaysia in 2008.

Ghosn had limited time here and with 20 minutes to spare, Ghosn wanted to visit ETCM's Serendah (Rawang) manufacturing plant, which is nearly an hour's drive from Kuala Lumpur!

“When our people were told that they had to find a way to transport him (Ghosn) to Serendah in 20 minutes, they thought it was crazy. The only way to do it is to fly him there by helicopter. “So we did just that we flew him by helicopter.”

The moral of the story? Be prepared for change at any given time, says Ang.

“I always talk to my people on the importance of change in a rapidly changing environment. It's demanded of them if they want to survive.”

At 62, Ang, who has a PhD in business administration and master's degree in law, seems to show no signs of slowing down. Despite the qualifications that he already has, Ang is considering pursuing a masters degree in psychology.

“Having the (working) experience is one thing but (having the) academic qualification is also important,” he says, adding that pursuing a masters degree in law helped him understand legal documents and terminology associated with the automotive industry better.

“It (academic qualification) is an important asset that helps to improve my performance in this company,” Ang says.

Ang's constant pursuit of knowledge and self improvement are traits he has inculcated in his children. He is quick to admit, however, that despite being able to provide a privileged life for his family today, in no way are his children having it easy.

“They say I'm a tough father,” Ang enthuses, adding that when he looks back at his career, he considers joining Tan Chong and marrying the right woman the best decisions he's ever made.

“In pursuing a career, you need a lot of support from your family. My wife has always supported me all the way. I'm still faithful to her,” he says with a laugh.

Ang, who has been married for nearly 40 years, has four children. Sadly, his youngest son passed away in a car crash in 2009.

As the chairman of the Penang State Social Welfare Council of 20 years, Ang spends time with the senior citizens at the old folks home in Bukit Mertajam whenever he can.

“It gives me satisfaction to be able to improve the lives of others. Their most common lament is that they wish they could turn back the clock, so that they won't repeat the mistakes of their past and be where they are today.”

Ang says he often shares his experiences (at the welfare home) with members of his staff.

“I tell my people that they should always make the best use of their time and not waste it doing unproductive things.”

That message is in fact a philosophy that was passed down to Ang by whom he considers his greatest mentor his father.

“My father always told me that if you keep walking, you will reach your destination. Along the way, it may rain and someone (or something) might get in your way and end up slowing you down.

“It might take you a little longer, but as long as you keep on walking, you will reach your destination. Eventually, you'll be there.”

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    The Nissan Leaf earned a top 5-star rating from the National Highway Traffic Adminstration and a Top Safety Pick Award from the Insurance Insitute for Highway Safety.The Nissan Leaf earned a top 5-star rating from the National Highway Traffic Adminstration and a Top Safety Pick Award from the Insurance Insitute for Highway Safety.

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