Editor’s Note: It All Started With That First Bond

The days and weeks march on as we enter month five! This week, we celebrate mothers everywhere and wish everyone all the best when preparing that Sunday breakfast for mom!

From young, we have looked to role models like our moms and dads in developing different skills – not least of all our ability to socialise and connect with others. From taking those tentative steps on the playground to say a shy “hello!” to the new kid, or gathering friends round to play five-stones, bottle-caps or congkak – we started to flex our leadership muscles by building those early relationships.

Twenty, 30 years on, we’re all sophisticated and too cool for games (I’m always up for a game of congkak though!), but are we really? Granted, our universe of friends and stakeholders may have grown exponentially, however we are still essentially seeking to understand and connect with others, often to seek mutual benefit.

At the workplace, Joseph Tan nudges us to consider networking with stakeholders that don’t usually top our lists of strategic partners, and convinces us that there is an upside to having an insecure CEO.

Richard Newton talks us through some key points for mapping our stakeholder universe. We share an example of the consequences of not doing it right, and how we could go about building on a strong network.

And what works in one setting, need not necessarily work in another. In her debut article, CK Wong shares how the humble peanut could make or break a business opportunity.

Never mind building new networks! Dr Travis Bradberry reminds us that we need to also maintain what we already have and avoid the nine worst mistakes we can ever make at the office – like backstabbing. The horror!

In this instalment of The Leaderonomics Show, we had a great chat with Luca Barberis, managing director of a leading fashion e-commerce site. Read what he had to say, and for the full interview, you can watch and listen to the man himself.

In Starting Young, Alvin Dan doesn’t just leave us with “Dream BIG!”, he shares concrete examples of how we can go from our big dreams to reality of today, vision for tomorrow and how we can take steps to get there.

Last but not least, we end with how we all began! A great big Happy Mother’s Day to mothers, adoptive mothers, foster mothers, stepmoms, working moms, stay-at-home moms, tiger moms? (you know who you are!) – all women everywhere who have given their hearts to caring and raising young ones!

Onward, upward!

KAREN NEOH
Editor

Published in English daily The Star, Malaysia, 9 May 2015