The hunt is on
Looking for a job after 11 years of a highly charged career in a consulting firm has proven to be trickier than I thought. For the simple reason that I have no single clue of what I fancy, but a long list of what I do not want.
No more late night slogging to meet inhumanely project timeline. No more singing along with the pop songs of IT’s spin doctors that technology is the mother of all solutions to management’s headaches. Enough of trading in my conviction for down-to-earth and yet sustainable organizational improvements to flamboyant in-your-face type of big bang transformation. No more going through the ordeal of convincing young restless consultants the values of a job well done is more important than a job sweetened with lots of per deim and outstation perks.
I saw both the good and bad time of the local consulting market. I conclude, after all these years, that the best paid job there is, if you want to be a salaried employee, is still as as a hired consultant. The paycheck is fairly proportional to the density of your brainware and charisma. But the tide is turned if you are driving a business in an overly crowded local IT consulting market. Market forces, like plague, are without mercy. Such frustration, I believe, shared currently by our health minister, in his futile attempts to keep the foot and mouth disease under check. At least as a minister, I was told, enjoys lifetime pension even if you lose your job. Not in a million years for the folks sitting in management chairs operating in the local IT consulting market.
While I comtemplated to be a delivery consultant again, for an assortment of benefits from huge paycheck, opportunities to travel and ample opportunities to flaunt my intellectual breadth, my yearning to take driver’s seat to build something tangible is burgeoning each day. But based on previous argument, a management position in a local consulting firm is to be ruled out firmly. It is clear to me that taking a break from consulting business could be an idea worthwhile considering.
After uncountable attempts, I am relieved that I have come to some kind of concensus with myself on the following 3 criterion of my dream job. First it must be in a tangible brick and mortar business, able to allow me to be creative and work with people, while still giving me time to contribute to charitable causes in my community.
On the note of contributing to charitable cause, my friend PW’s advice resonates loudly in my head. To be the front runner for a charitable cause, according to her, requires time and money. It will be hard to achieve if I have a full time career during the week while prunning my budding potential in oil painting during the weekends. Moreover, charity begins at home.
So for now, I will settle for the first two criterions and wait and see if I could juggle community services in between my busy work schedule. In the meantime, my pursuit in my artistic and literary skill shall continue. Don't laugh. Hopefully this skill will come in handy for my next milestone in life.
Before I end this article, an assortment of job offers in brick and mortar companies has indeed come my way. From being the marketing manager of a movie production company (too little pay), to setting up a factory in poverty-stricken Nicaragua (Exciting but was a short term project plus it would be an uphill task to put my parents’ mind at ease), to a travelling regional sales manager for some filtration equipment (I turned it down as it is a lone ranger in the wild wild west of process industry), not to mention offers of key positions in an upstart business consulting firm and another in the company that I have just served for 11 years (yes yes is consulting business all over again). But none of them fits the total package of what I am looking for. Hence the hunt continues. …
An artist impression
My usual hair stylist Scott has recently set up his own saloon at a new and upcoming housing area in Mutiara Damansara. Not bad for someone who started off as a shampoo boy. His scrawny thin frame and droopy eyelids give no telltale sign of his entrepreneurial spirit in this highly competitive world of fashion and style. I stick with him all these years for his low maintenance no frill approaches to grooming, and his sensible pricing. From rebonding, hair treatment to several occasions of upbeat do for some corporate functions, I vouched for his skill.
If Scott could setup his own saloon, should I as PW said, set up my own consulting firm? Or any business for that matter. If my father is reading this page, he probably will sigh in disappointment and wondering if his daughter will ever settle for a job that is 9 to 5 and spend more weekends at home.
My previous post has shared a rather bleak picture of consulting business and I intend to stick to my gun. PW came up with another career option, which is to sell my oil paintings. I thought it was not a bad idea at all considering the market price for one piece easily exceeds a few thousand ringgit. That is provided that there is buyer. Henceforth the need of my own exhibition to showcase my work, said the eager PW, who herself is working half time at the IT department of a private hospital, and juggling household commitments, two high energy boys and a husband. Not exactly someone whose advice you will count on when it comes to business venture. Nevertheless what she said did make some senses.
Checking sheepishly with my teacher, who himself is an established painter, on the prospect of art market in Malaysia. He shared, after letting out a hearthy laughter that
a good painting should come from the artist’s heart. An artist should be sincere in sharing and believing in his interpretation. Painting with the buyers in mind, will limit the artist’s perspective. Of course, he added, this does not mean that, an artist should hesitate to sell his work in the commercial market. On the contrary, artist should be bold to exhibit and price his work and not fear criticism. Unsurprising to come from someone whose most admired artist is van Gogh, who persisted with his bold uninhibitive style despite the criticisms and being treated as a outcast. Now look at how much his work is valued.
Sticking to principles and moral high ground are hard when others are dependent on you, a hard truth that I learned in recent years. In running a consulting firm, there are overheads to be pay and salaries to be banked in.
But painting is a private affair and probably the only free haven to express myself in an uninhibited way. An art exhibition will definitely happen, but not until I have a wide enough collection. For now, I shall just be focusing at improving myself progressively in my training as an oil painter.
This is a newly completed painting modelled after a photograph I took in Bern in Switzerland near the apartment of my friend Karin
Taking a stand
In the last post, I made an annoucment of me going for a new post in Hong Kong as COO. Today, exactly 4 weeks after that announcment, I am back in Malaysia, my wooly scarf and corporate armour tucked neatly in the wardrobe. I have quitted my job in Hong Kong. For someone who has spent every solid moment of her life in pursuing hard deals in the business world, someone who has leapt boldly into new business challenges that come her way, this decision to quit, though unthinkable, was not a hard decision to take.
I knew before I joined the Hong Kong firm, the working hours in the new company would be far from humane. The package negotation had not been pleasant and I was told that it was a trumph that I managed to secure the same level as my previous job in Malaysia. All these for the price of being able to sample the working culture in Hong Kong, living in Hong Kong and to experience in person the breakneck drift of materialism getting caught with communism in the world’s fastest growing economy in China. After my grilling working hours, so I thought, I will have a place to stay in Hong Kong on weekends that I could engage in extra-curricular activities of scoutting every street, reading every social commentory there is in the newspaper columns, albeit making new friends outside work and understand how the society is changing in Hong Kong and China.
The finely crafted vision of work life balance was thrown into a shamble on the 2nd day itself when the PA came with the message that I should consider living in China. The writing was on the wall “I might as well stay in the factory in Shenzhen”. It was clear that this was not the deal I was in for. The days that followed, with an enormous cloud of suspicion, I did a quick review of the IT operations and workers welfare, and found many are “cutting corners” for the sake of politely put, financial prudency. Worst of all, all management decisions, big or small, were in the hand of the CEO. My title as COO, I soon discovered, was a mockery.
To be fair, I made great efforts to speak to the CEO but my attempts were elbowed out conveniently by the busy schedule of factory relocation and his impeding business trip to San Francisco. I hence decided that it is not worth spending my energy on realignment. Taking two weeks time-out back to Malaysia would be a face saving approach for both parties instead of direct confrontation. But when the plane touched the runway of KLIA, I knew I was not going back.
Though in the weeks that followed, I found myself caught in occasional panic seizure of remaining stagnant at my career crossroad, I am proud of my decision to leave. I am, afterall, responsible to chart my next career goal. I left the company that I was with for 11 years, to seek growth and not to entrap myself in the slaughterhouse of work. The knowledge that I was able to make a stand for what I believe in empowers me.
As a last note, I was never keen in registering my voter’s status, nor cast my ballot in any national election, a right every Malaysian citizen is entitled to from the age of 21. The 2nd day on my returning to my home country, I found myself in front of the voter registration booth. Despite years of procrastination, it took only 5 minutes for me to be endowed with an official status, which empowers me to make a stand to influence my country’s well being from now on.
Every cent counts
Funny that after I came back from Hong Kong, I found myself acquiring a new level of awareness with the financial markets, both local and international ones. To my astonishment, I noticed myself extending my symphaty to a group of small time investors clagged in Arabic robes featured on Saturday CNBC financial news who have been mourning in agony since 3 months ago when the Kuwaiti Stock Exchange took a nosedive. At my weekend art class, when our notoriously stingy classmate, despite staying in a mansion in Bukit Tunku and whose father and husband are multi billionaries, again attempting to negotiate a discount for the fixed fee RM60 canvas, I no longer passed judgement on her usual ritual of squeezing every drop of value out of her money.
Little woman's guilty pleasure
No I have not been indulging. I never knew I could derive such an enormous sense of achievement from filing income tax on time for the first time in 11 years, cleared all outstanding bills and letters and filing away all hundreds of them, in their respective folders with colour coded dividers. A dangerous confession for this sentences me beyond a trace of doubt, in the same profile of the obsessive-compulsive Monica, a character in the famous TV sitcom Friends. Neverthelesss, the truth is I feel extremely rewarded and says whom that it is bad to be Monica. Afterall she is a great chef and the center of the Friends’s circle. Only hope that I do not end up like her with a borderline queer husband and adopt an even bizzare sirname calls Mrs. Bing.
A precautionary note for those who are closet obsessive compulsive and would like to indulge in a similar guilty pleasure of organizing your shelves or wardrobe, make sure you have some high energy snack bars put away for emergency energy boost or an ice cream in the fridge. Oh man, it took me three days to complete the entire ritual of spring-cleaning.
