Life in a fast and busy lane

Call it whatever you want, I actually feel my life getting better and more interesting by the day. Whether its sheer luck, like some of my friends say, or some careful planning and execution, which I'd like to attribute where I am now to. In any case, I am greatly enjoying the experience. For the first time in life I'm in the place in which I'm challenging myself. Moreover, I am putting it seemingly to a good use helping the organization see the gaps and move forward in return for it giving me a lesson in what works and what doesn't work in the world of business.

Its been four months since I came to Singapore, and I have been fortunate to be able to gain exposure to lots of different projects. Both the organization and my bosses are being surprisingly very accommodating to my learning style. I basically get involved in anything and everything. I started in the Product Management position which mostly entailed analyzing the performance of our product promotions as well as bringing quantitative rigor into the design of the new campaigns, an interesting tasks in itself and the best part being the exposure to all the various departments that Products naturally impact: Sales, Actuarial, and Finance. I quickly discovered that I needed to keep everybody in the loop to make it a successful exercise. The Product Management remains the core area of my responsibilities.

As an aside, there were two funny questions that people kept on asking me when I first joined our business in Singapore. First of all, the question of how old was I, kept on coming up time and again. It was a safe bet, no matter who I got introduced to, the first question never failed to be related to my age. It was a bit shocking for the first little while, as I couldn't understand if its simply part of the greeting or there was something wrong with my age. The answer turned out to be that people were apparently really curious about how young I looked for the position. Which is really not the case, but I attributed it to the fact that I was a new face and everybody wanted to know who I was. The second question was whether I have a girlfriend. Honestly, I was a bit shell shocked for the first couple of days by this friendly interrogation. I ended up shifting the topic by asking them why they were curious about my age / relationship situation and than talking about an unrelated topic of mutual interest. The girlfriend question was even funnier, as it turned out that people's curiosity went to the extent of doing a due diligence on my life back in Hong Kong. I took it in good heart though as people were surely curious, and sometimes a little bit too so. At the same time its good to know those things right off the start, so that you can manage them appropriately going forward.

So in terms of the actual work, the first month was mostly concentrated on learning about the products while helping on the product launch initiatives. It did not take long to land in the thick of the action. I remember the CMO calling me into the office and explaining that he needs a simple calculation to estimate an impact of a promotion, easy enough that spiraled quite quickly into a model which spanned multiple spreadsheets. That marked the beginning of lets go to George as he is the Excel guy story. Of course I didn't mind as I was actively adding value to the team and helping them to become more data driven.

Second month was more interesting yet. In the beginning of the month it was announced that we have signed a distribution deal with a major partner and also as part of that have to take on their insurance business. The next day I was informed that I'm going to be spending a large part of my time helping with the integration of the two entities. As the integration project progressed I have gradually get to participate in all the various parts of the project eventually ending up playing a supporting role on Steering Committee for the whole integration. It has definitely been an eye opening experience as far as the complexities go. Giving me visibility into some foundation things that happen in all the various areas to write a new business.
Lastly, my boss suggested that we have a challenge with one of our distribution channels and he mentioned that he volunteered me to provide an objective assessment of the problem and come up with potential solutions. So that was actually very interesting as I got a chance to spend time with our distribution people and understand how the whole sales process happens on the front end of our business. I've spent number of days interviewing various stakeholders. After spending some time on the project, I did come up with three main ideas, two of which was very well received by the channel head and one is already being implemented. And the best part? I'm actually getting to implement the second idea which can have a potential for a major impact on our distribution.

I feel that my work is finally having a meaningful impact on the business rather than simply recycling information and putting it in different formats. This is exactly what I was looking for and I'm glad that I was finally have been able to get to this place.

Till next time,
George