S.W.O.T

“You are intelligent, and are able to judge people critically. As a result you draw danger to yourself.” (Lao Tzu to Confucius, paraphrased)

Of the many things discussed in today’s lesson Klinghammer’s Strength, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threat (SWOT) struck me as the freshest and most relevant point of learning. I observe that we are generally well trained to evaluate things for their Strengths and Weaknesses. However, the dimensions of Opportunity and Threat are something often neglected. A lot of intelligent people with brilliant ideas do not succeed in getting their projects off the ground because of this very real problem.

Opportunity: No matter how viable a project is, without a thorough exploration of the opportunities it presents, one will likely miss ways in which the project could be fully exploited for maximum productivity. Application is always a problem in risk-adverse Singapore. In my experience it is rather annoying, if not demoralising, that whenever I propose a new idea, the first thing that comes out from majority of Singaporeans I speak to is “it can’t be done” or “that’s idealistic.” So much for the entrepreneurial spirit that the government is now desperately trying to instil and encourage.


Threats: Often when one has a brilliant idea one can fall into the trap of assuming that everyone else will see the logic behind the idea. One can be blinded by political, social and cultural biases that may see the proposal as a threat to their status quo and plenty of people may not want to see the project successful. Even Confucius, being as brilliant as he was, failed to understand how his ideas could have been rejected by his countrymen again and again until his death. Lao Tze, when uttering the quotation above, displayed deeper insight into the nature of men than Confucius in this sense.

Applying my observations to the political situation in Perak [everyone is offering their two sen's worth, so I might as well jump in the bandwagon for posterity's sake] this lesson appears to be something the BN government has learned well—to study a situation and seize the Opportunity. And the Pakatan Rakyat has yet to learn to evaluate seriously the Threats instead of naively resting on its laurel. [To be fair, hindsight is always 20-20.]

It's Chap Goh Mei, and the Lion Dancers are banging away on their drums downstairs. It made me think: how like the BN to open the Chinese New Year so "Ox"-piciously by "steer"-ing the coup-d'tat, "bull"-dozing it's way and "cow"ing the Perakians into submission. Not to mention the cock-and-"bull" stories the four frogs gave. Negaraku: what a sad state of affairs you are in. Sigh!