To Know or Not To Know
Technical knowledge is not always a good for you in the modern workplace. Unless you are careful, others will take advantage of your expertise and dump their responsibilities on you. You may not mind...
View ArticleInternet Reading
Major changes are afoot. They have been afoot for the last twenty years. I’m talking about how we learn things, how we read, how we do basic arithmetic and so on. In high school, I used logarithm...
View ArticleStress and a Sense of Proportion
How can we manage stress, given that it is unavoidable in our corporate existence? Common tactics against stress include exercise, yoga, meditation, breathing techniques, reprioritizing family etc. To...
View ArticleKnowledge Silos
We know a lot. By “we,” I mean humanity as a whole. We know so much that it is impossible for any one of us to know more than a fraction of our total knowledge. This is why we specialize....
View ArticleRumour Mills
Employees seek insights into their organization’s heading. And they should, because what their organization does has a direct impact on their well-being. If your organization is planning to retrench...
View ArticleWhen the Going Gets Tough, Turn Around!
Elton John is right, sorry is the hardest word. It is hard to admit that one has been wrong. Harder still is to find a way forward, a way to correct one’s past mistakes. It often involves backtracking....
View ArticleHow Friendly is too Friendly?
We all want to be the boss. At least some of us want to be the big boss at some, hopefully not-too-distant, future. It is good to be the boss. However, it takes quite a bit to get there. It takes...
View ArticleGraceless Singaporean
We Singaporeans have a problem. We are graceless, they say. So we train ourselves to say the right magic words at the right times and to smile at random intervals. We still come across as a bit...
View ArticleIn Our Defense
The financial crisis was a veritable gold mine for columnists like me. I, for one, published at least five articles on the subject, including its causes, the lessons learned, and, most self-deprecating...
View ArticleSubprime: When Good Intentions Turned Sour
As the world is still feeling the reverberations of the 2008 global financial crisis, a lot of blame has been directed onto subprime lending, and in particular mortgages, as the cause of much of the...
View ArticleEthics In Business and Leadership
[This post is the speech given by Prof. Surya Sethi at World Forum for Ethics in Business - International Leadership Symposium Monday, April 2, 2012 in Singapore. Reproduced here with permission.] I...
View ArticleThe Student Debt Crisis
[Guest Post by By Sofia Rasmussen] It has become common knowledge as certain as death and taxes that a college education leads to a better life. A recent Pew research poll found that Americans holding...
View ArticleSpeak Your Language
The French are famous for their fierce attachment to their language. I got a taste of this attachment long time ago when I was in France. I had been there for a couple of years, and my French skills...
View ArticleTroubled Conscience
At times I suffer from a troubled conscience. I get this sinking feeling that I am part of a large problem rather than a solution to it. Working for a modern corporate empire, a bank to boot, it is...
View ArticleWas Yours, Now Mine
I feel I have lived through an era of great changes. The pace of change can seem accelerated if you travel or emigrate because various geographical regions act as different slices in time. I have had...
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Quiet Me
I’m an introvert. In today’s world where articulation is often mistaken for accomplishment, introversion is a bit of a baggage. But I have no complaints about my baggage, for I have been more...
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Off the Beaten Track
Recently, I gave an invited lecture to the Master of Financial Engineering students at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. I thought I would make a series of blog posts out of my talk...
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Agendas
In the dog-eat-dog corporate jungle, there always is a hidden agenda. Always. In writing this series of posts, I have a hidden agenda as well. It is to promote my book – Principles of Quantitative...
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Trading Platform
A trading platform is a program that enables the front office traders to price and book trades, the middle office professionals to manage the trade lifecycle and risk, and the back office staff to...
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Structure of a Bank
The trading arm of a bank consists of three so-called “offices” — the Front Office, the Middle Office and the Back Office. The Front Office (which may go by the names Global Treasury, Global Markets...
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