Categories
Business Career

Start the career I

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Recently a few friends completed graduate study, and got full time positions. They asked me the question: how to start in the new company? Or put in another way, how to win the trust from the boss/coworkers, and do well in the new company?

While I don’t think I am expert on all these, I do believe I have learned a great deal in my past six years. So here are my experience and lessons (some are learned from the hard way).  

First, business is very different from the school. While in school a student is measured by scores or GPA; in business an individual contributor is measured by performance (or contribution, or results). In school a student can simply do the homework, read the text book, work on the projects, prepare/take the test and get “A”. Note all these tasks are assigned by the instructors. The only thing a student can show some creativity is the project, in that case he/she can get some bonus points if he/she do really well. In the company the boss (manager, project leader) will typically give some guidance for the work, they may even give detailed instructions for the new hire, but in my mind, if a guy/girl really want to do well, he/she should be more proactive. This means working closely with the boss and coworkers, define what needs to be done, and deliver it.

Let me emphasize this again, what matters is the “results”, not how hard you  work, not how funny your joke is during lunch break, or how many common hobbies you and your boss share. The reason is simple, business is for profit, ultimately everyone in the company should strive for that goal. I remember Jack Welch once said, a company without profit can not give back to the share holders, the employees and the community. Very much true.

OK, back to the topic. To be successful, I believe two things are equally important: work hard (the real work) and make the work known to others (marketing, communication, customer relations). When I first started, I put lots of emphasis on the first portion and did not take the second portion seriously. As I gained more exprience, I began to appreciate the importance of “speak up” or get “buy in” from the management or customers. The reason is also simple: if one doesn’t speak up during a few meetings, people will not ask his/her opinions later on; without the management’s “buy in” your work and effort could be wasted because the results may not be what the customer wants.

Categories
Business Fun

Cell phone problem

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I did not realized my cell phone did not ring until yesterday. I was suspicious of my missing calls in past a few days. But as I normally set it to “vibrate” mode and it did vibrate when I wear it, it disguised the real problem. Basically my Motorola V600 did not ring and the speaker phone is broken.

I decided to get a new phone. I don’t need a fancy phone, as long as it works, I mean, it rings when somebody calls. But soon I found out I need to either sign up for a two years plan or pay high fees for a new phone. That sucks. So what did I do? eBay. I went to eBay and bought this Nokia 6010 phone for $54.00.

Nokia 6010

Meanwhile, while I am anxious waiting for my new phone, I have to wear the phone more often now.

PS (Aug 29): got the phone for a few days now and loved it. I remember my first cell phone is also a Nokia (candy bar style). I liked its simple user interface. The sound quality is also good. There are many fancy cell phones on the market these days, but do I really need those features?

Categories
China

Li Jia Jun

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Li Jia Jun, the legend Chinese short track speed skater, announced his retirement today. Here is the news (in Chinese). And here is his picture. The thing I like him is he never quits. Let’s wish him well upon retirement.

Li Jia Jun 

Categories
Saint Louis

The ideal house

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Buying a house is probablly the biggest investment most people make during their life time. In past few years, as I was looking for my first house, and accompanying my friends for their house hunting, I have seen lots of houses in St. Louis area. The price ranged from 100 K to 800 K; the square feet from under 1000 to 5000; stylewise from condo, to townhouse, villa to Single Family House; agewise from more than 50 years old to brand new. So which one impressed me the most?     

It’s not the 800 K mansion, although I liked the size (2 stories plus basement), the atrium, the family (game) room, etc. Here is a picture of the luxury home:

Spring Mill at St. Charles

 

Besides I can not afford it (the house itself and utility bills), I think the house is too big for me. It is designed for a family of five I think.

My favorite place, is a townhouse I saw recently. It’s a decent size town house with lots of light (San Francisco style). Here is a link. And here is a picture from inside.

Town house

That’s about the right size for me. I can imagine I will be very happy just sit on that sofa and look out of the windows, doing nothing.

Categories
Business China

Shaq Shaquille O’Neal to wear LiNing?

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This is going to be huge, if proved to be true. Here is a link about the sponsorship news.

A few months ago I saw an article on WSJ talking about LiNing signed up Damon Jones of Cleveland Cavaliers. I don’t have the link of original WSJ article but here is a press release from LiNing’s own web site. The rationale behind LiNing’s move was to fight off the international brands such as Nike’s growth inside China.

Now with Shaq’s help, LiNing is one more step closer to their goal.

PS, I saw Damon Jones’ blog here.  

Categories
Web

Do because believe self

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Saw this word from a Chinese blog, and I liked it. Recently I started to work on a web project I thought about for a long time but did not do too much about it. This past weekend I started working on it again, and I did learn something. Now I know why I need Ajax (why HTML and PHP are not enough) and what is Ajax, the buzz word (technology) of this web 2.0 arena.

Last few days I also found two interesting web sites (or search engine for vertical market), they are kooxoo (in China) and propsmart (house listings with google map). They are just startups. But I believe they are solving real problems for consumers and will have bright future.

Since I am working on my project, I will probablly scale down on the blog for the moment, which I think may worked out better because I don’t think I can come up interesting things everyday, and there are lots of interesting blogs out there (hint, the links at the side bar).

So, for the moment, I will do what I believe.   

Categories
Business China Saint Louis

Small is beautiful

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I like ice cream. The one I liked most is not hagen daz, it’s a little known place called Ted Drewes. If you do a google search on “st. louis frozen custard”, it will show up on the top. It’s located at Chippewa, very close to my old apartment. This is a very popular place in St. Louis. In the summer evenings, you can see lots of people standing outside of this store, waiting in line or just eating the ice cream. This place opens even in Winter, here is its web site (warning, its’ web site is slow).

At one time I wondered that since this place is so successful, why not go ahead and expand, open more stores in St. Louis, if not nationally? Turns out the owners of Ted Drewes keep it small intentionlly, so that they can keep the quality and community feelings. For them as long as the business is doing well they feel they have enough to live on. In another words, they potentially give up the oppertunity to be very rich.

I think in China there are also similar stories, here is just one I saw yesterday. Remember the corner “noodle store”? Or “dumpling store”? We all have our favorite stores, right. I still remember one where I went for graduate school in Shanghai.

Unfortunately, last time when I visit Shanghai, I saw more and more franchized stores, I am not talking about, McDonald, KFC, Pizza Hut (those are well known ones); I am talking about “Chatea”, “Xiao Mie Yang”, etc. I am not against those, but I like the small specialty stores better.

Categories
Business Technology

Make money using Google AdSense

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I am not going to explain how to make money using Google AdSense. Here I just put a real world example: a successful web enterprenur got a check from Google. Guess how big is the check: almost 1 million Canadian dollars. And here is the link. The nice thing about his web site is that he runs it by himself. So after he paid the web-hosting, and other service fees, he can put the money into his own pocket (after paying tax). Certainlly this is a very rare case. Also don’t think he built the web site and the business overnight, as a matter of fact, I believe he has done this for more than 3 years.

Not everybody can be as good or as lucky as him, but I think Google AdSense does provide a new revenue stream for many start-ups.   

Categories
Saint Louis

Power outage

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The following was written on July 19, 11PM.

This evening we had a big storm here in St. Louis. When I walked out of the door at the TKD place at Woodson plaza, the sky was full of black clouds and the wind is blowing hard. I hesitated for a minute and decided to drive back home anyway. I saw some trees being split by the wind. And the power was out at our condo. Since everything in my condo is powered by electricity. I pretty much can not do anything. My roommate came back from work shortly. Since we are out of power, the only thing we can do is chat, which ispretty nice because we don’t have much time to talk. He does lots of trips recently for work.

I called my Chinese friends to see if they have power. They are in the same boat as mine. So we went out to search for food. MCD and Subway, IMO all are busy now. Luckily we get in Sunway although they closed at 9, they are nice enough to let us in.There are lots of fire trucks running around. But no luck in power as of now (11 PM). I will go to bed now.

The following was written on July 20, 8 PM.

I left some lights on when I went to bed. During the night the lights went on and off couple times and never sustained. In the morning I went to two Panera Bread stores and both are out of power. Many traffic lights are also down and it caused delays. From radio I heard it is the biggest power outage in St. Louis in many years: half a million people are out of power. I believe St. Louis region has about 2.3 million people. The bad thing is it is also the hottest days, the high temp reaches 100F.

Luckily my home got power back today. From the TV news I heard they restored about 1/4 of the power, I felt very lucky compared to people still live without power.In retrospect, I don’t have a good contingency plan for those things. A few weeks ago I laughed at a friend when we talked about the preparation for those kinds of emergency situtaions – thought it was unnecessary.

Categories
Saint Louis

Hot weather and gas price

Reading Time: < 1 minuteThe gas price hang around at $3.00 for a few days now. The temporature is even hotter, it’s more than 100 F. Looks like it stay at 100 for a few days. Maybe we all drive too much and emit too much CO2 from our cars?