I met Heather Beem, founder of Practical Education Network (PEN) at an MIT social innovation event several years ago. I like her/ PEN’s mission to improve learning outcomes by building teacher capacity with locally available materials. We became friends. I reached out to her recently asking if anything I can assist with my voluncation (volunteer …
Category Archives: Inspiration
Buy-in => Believe-in
Change is never easy. I’ve learned that to be effective and lasting, we need “Believe-in” beyond “Buy-in”: people not only agree but also understand why and take ownership to drive it. When things go well, people feel proud to be part. When things get hard, people would persist, collaborate, and come up creative solutions to …
冬令進補,三喜臨門 Winter’s Coming, Triple Happiness
Winter is coming. According to Chinese tradition, people celebrate with tonic (warm, nutritious food). I celebrated with three good news this week: Biden/ Harris won the US presidential election. I hope that means integrity, justice, and opportunities for all. We completed the customer portal interviews: we built everything (process, material, relationship) from scratch and successfully …
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Worth it?
We, product and UX team have spent the past few months designing the customer research and interviewing users to gather feedback of the current customer portal and the new design. It took a lot longer than expected to set up the calls though most of sales/ Ops teams welcomed the idea to engage customers. Looking …
Not Perfect but Always Get Better
I attended a virtual AI conference and several speakers/ hosts, based on how they spoke, were not native English speakers. One host kept saying ‘you know’, another seemed hesitated to choose word to use, and a panelist spoke on ‘n on in circles… At first, I was irritated then I felt bad for them (they …
I Have Time
My roommate Stan is a consultant at a top healthcare consultancy. It’s not unusual to see him to work till 10PM or later and over the weekend. Sometimes, with big project and tight timing, he even worked till 2-3AM or overnight…yet he is usually cheerful and always willing to support others. I asked him how …
Engineer & Communicator
A few month ago, the product manager proposed to change the feature demo after the sprint (development cycle) from by himself to the development team. I thought it’s a great idea. It let developer showcase his/ her work and engage with stakeholders. Even better, the product manager said he’d coach and support the team in …
Thoughtful and Resourceful
A few weeks ago, we received email invitations from CEO’s executive assistant, Tammy and head of HR for a “social distance” lunch today. It will be great to see everybody after seven months of working from home due to Covid. To keep social distance, we were assigned “time slot” based on last name to get …
What Sells?
My editor got ill recently and apologized that she wouldn’t have the energy to work on the book. She recommended Linda, a freelancer friend. I talked with Linda. She told me she has been focusing on marketing works for a company. She also did editing and ghost-writing for some others. When I asked if she …
One Word to Describe You
I started a new pathway at Toastmaster. The first project is ice breaker, to introduce yourself to the club. Instead of giving an overview of my bio, I decided to present differently… If I tell you that I’ve lived, studied, and worked in 5 countries and across 6 industries in the past 17 years, what …