A pristinely curated garden sprawled over 101 hectares in area, Gardens by the Bay is 36% larger than the Singapore Botanic Gardens and populated by more than 750,000 plants in total. Opened last night by Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, the project costed more than $1 billion and boasts of 7 key attractions including the Dragonfly and Kingfisher Lakes, World of Plants, Heritage Gardens and the Bay East Garden.
Courtesy of Blaze Institute
Why do some teams produce outstanding results while others lag behind given similar resources?
The secret, according to “The New Science of Building Great Teams” in Harvard Business Review, is that successful teams have higher energy, are more engaged, and spend more time exploring outside the group. These patterns of communication and interaction are strongly correlated with performance metrics such as the average handling time in a bank’s call centre.
Project Intan is an initiative by The Intan (a boutique Peranakan home museum) which won the Museum Roundtable awards in 2011) with the goal of helping raise funds for charitable causes. Brainchild of Alvin Mark Yapp, owner of The Intan, Project Intan seeks to help worthwhile charities through direct donations and pledges.
This year, The Intan is working with the ARC Children’s Centre to help create a flu-free environment and increase its educational and development programmes for the kids. Started in 2011, Arc is a daycare charity for young patients with serious illnesses such as cancer. These kids receive intensive medical treatment and are unable to return to school or socialize in a normal setting as they are still
prone to infection.
Participants and facilitators of the inaugural YLT in Singapore
As Facebook’s IPO continue to garner interest (both good and bad), the question on many people’s lips is this: Can Singapore produce business leaders who started young such as Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, or Bill Gates?
Well, perhaps the Young Leaders of Tomorrow (YLT) programme can help to usher the way.
Fantasy Parade at Everland Theme Park
“안녕하세요 (Annyeong Haseyo)!” greeted our tour guide Colin every morning, rowsing the weary coach-load of travellers during our recent holiday in Korea. With an action-packed itinerary packed into 7 days, one could hardly consider Korea as the “Land of the Morning Calm”.
Squeezing a population of 50 million packed into 100,000 square kilometres of mostly mountainous space, South Korea is both an economic and cultural miracle. With a GDP of US$1.164 trillion (2011), the “Miracle on the Han River” is fast overtaking Japan in global prominence. Korea’s tremendous influence on popular culture in terms of K-Pop and soap dramas is also unprecedented.
Courtesy of Royal Caribbean International
Launching its maiden voyage from the new Marina Bay Cruise Centre Singapore, Royal Caribbean International’s Voyager of the Seas weighs 137,276 tons and can carry a staggering 3,840 guests at full capacity. At 1,020 feet long with 14 passenger decks, the colossal vessel is Asia’s largest luxury cruise ship, serviced by an international crew of some 1,176 staff.
What is the secret of enduring business success? The answer, according to Bain & Company’s Chris Zook and James Allen, is to develop repeatable business models. This is described in Bain’s website on Repeatability and highlighted in a recently published book by the authors.
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In this podcast on HBR Ideacast, Chris shares that businesses which keep changing courses and introduce unnecessary complexity in their systems are actually killing themselves. To cope with a fast changing, highly complex and unpredictable world, businesses shouldn’t introduce increasingly convoluted systems that add layers of bureaucratic layers that slow down work processes unnecessarily.
Leading investor and serial entrepreneur J. Christopher Burch has more than 30 years of experience in various technology and luxury brands, including Aliph (Jawbone), NextJump, and Tory Burch. At a talk given at the Asia Fashion Summit recently, he shared about his experience with C. Wonder – a fast growing apparel, accessories and home décor retailer, and how he built a strong retail brand focused heavily on delighting customers and meeting their lifestyle needs.
Predicated on the concept of the customer being “our girl”, the customer experience in C. Wonder stores are predicated on “service credos” such as the following:
The platforms are free but the time and effort producing them isn’t (courtesy of zenfolio)
Let’s face it. We are swamped by content.
What used to be physical has now invaded our virtual and mobile spaces. With a gazillion blogs, videos, photos, podcasts, slide presentations, and so on, consumers are literally “consumed” by data.
What are some of the big issues facing the consumer of tomorrow? How should retailers, lifestyle businesses and fashion brands equip themselves to reach these customers?
Speaking at the recent Asia Fashion Summit, Ruth Marshall-Johnson, Senior Editor of Think Tank at WGSN, highlighted that consumer businesses need to consider five key trends and suggested how these should be addressed as follows:
