Skip to main content
Tag

Honour Singapore

Uncategorized

THE IMPORTANCE OF SOCIAL NORMS

The Straits Times on 13 March 2015 published an article entitled "The importance of social norms", which was written by David Brooks, an Op-Ed columnist for the New York Times who has been described as relatively irreligious. It is a commentary on American society today with a perspective useful for Singapore. Allow me to quote extracts: “We now have multiple generations of people caught in recurring feedback loops of economic stress and family breakdown, often leading to something approaching anarchy of the intimate life. It’s not only money and better policy that are missing in these circles; it’s norms.”  “The…
Honour Singapore
March 19, 2015
Uncategorized

“WHAT IS THE TRUE MEANING OF THE BLACK BELT?”

I had the privilege of speaking as the Guest of Honour at the ACS (Barker Road) Founder's Day Celebration last Friday 27 February 2015. As I entered the school auditorium, all the students were standing up, clapping their hands.  But what made the occasion so different from any other function I have attended was that the students were cheering with gusto. Thus it was not simply the polite stand-up welcome for visitors but a warm, noisy welcome of the heart (or just the boisterousness of ACS)? Awards were a major part of the programme.  And the first awards were for…
Honour Singapore
March 5, 2015
Uncategorized

How can we lubricate our social interactions and make city life more agreeable?

Observation in a Japanese airport:  A limousine driver met a visitor in the Arrival Hall, carried his luggage, brought him to the car park, and asked him to wait while he went to get the car. Amazingly, the driver began to run to the limousine, not walk, or even just walk fast. This is the driver honouring the customer so that the visitor does not have to wait a minute longer than he needs to! Observation on a Japanese road:  Two men were cutting grass - one with a rotary grass cutter, and the other holding a screen that he moved along…
Honour Singapore
November 24, 2014
Uncategorized

REFLECT, REMEMBER, HOPE, AND HONOUR

I visited the 9/11 Memorial, officially called the National September 11 Memorial, in New York City last week. The Memorial commemorates the attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington D.C. by way of three hijacked commercial airplanes, plus a fourth hijacked plane which crashed in Pennsylvania, all of which happened on 11 September 2001. The attacks on the World Trade Centre resulted in the total collapse of both the Twin Towers, the burning upper floors simply falling one on the other all the down to "Ground Zero", a frightening, unbelievable event.  The…
Honour Singapore
October 31, 2014
Uncategorized

Like. Love. Honour.

It is good that there be criticism of what we do from time to time, as that makes us think of how we can express our ideas better, correct our mistakes, and improve as we go. In this regard we acknowledge the comments that have been made against our last blog, where we shared our thought on how we can honour others in a simple practice of keeping to the left when we use escalators so that those who wish to move faster could freely move on the right.  The comments basically make the point that this is a matter…
Honour Singapore
October 16, 2014
Uncategorized

How do Expensive Cities Survive?

I had the opportunity to speak at the stars Symposium for Leaders of the Next Generation at Stein am Rhein, a little medieval city in Switzerland, on challenges and choices for future leaders. Before getting to Stein am Rhein, I had the opportunity to walk through "old Zurich" - the older, historic part of the city of Zurich, where there are many narrow, cobblestoned passageways lined with small, exclusive, specialized shops that sell items that are not cheap - certainly not cheap by Singapore standards. How could these shops possibly succeed and survive? The answer is not hard to find.…
Honour Singapore
September 19, 2014
Uncategorized

Honour on the Train

Following the Susan Long interview published in the Sunday Times on 31 August 2014 which included the point that I ride the MRT every day to work, and also that I stop one station away from my office to walk to work as part of my daily exercise, several people have commended me for setting a good example in taking the MRT.  But others have remarked that since I have a car, I should not take the MRT as I am adding to the crowdedness.  What this shows simply is that there is no way to please everyone, no matter…
Honour Singapore
September 11, 2014
Uncategorized

SWEETS AND MARBLES

There was this boy who had a wonderful collection of marbles, and a girl with an attractive collection of sweets. Each saw the other's collection and wished they had it. One day they decided on an exchange. The boy would pass all his marbles to the girl, and the girl would give the boy all her sweets. That night, the boy began to pack his marbles for the exchange.  He looked at them one by one and put them in a bag.  He held a particularly beautiful marble in his hand, and decided to put it under his pillow instead of into…
Honour Singapore
August 29, 2014
Uncategorized

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO HONOUR?

Some people have commented that the word “honour” appears somewhat abstract and could therefore mean different things to different people. So they asked why we do not use a simpler word like “trust” or “respect”, which will be easier to understand and has less ambiguity. While we agree this would have been simpler, it would have lost a very important point about “honour”. Let us explain it this way. “Honour” is something we offer someone, whereas “trust” or “respect” is our reaction to someone.  Thus if someone behaves in a way which makes us believe in him or her, we respond with…
Honour Singapore
August 22, 2014
Uncategorized

WHAT THE HELL IS WATER?

 The late author David Foster Wallace began his commencement address to the graduates of Kenyon College in 2005 with:There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”As Wallace explained, the point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest…
Honour Singapore
August 15, 2014
Close Menu