Thursday, February 25, 2010

Empress Dowager

How quickly the week has zoomed past....it's been one hell of a hectic one indeed..having fought a couple of fires at work.

It's the 2nd week of work for our new group head, my boss's boss, and already she's been making a very deep impact in the way things are run in our shop. She's pretty fierce, aggressive and strict. And she's already nearing 60! A veteran indeed. I call her the 'empress dowager'.

She seems gentle on the outside but beneath the kind benevolent look is the 威嚴 that you can never imagine. She's taking the entire department by storm, and in her eager pursuit to find out how things work in our shop, she's picked out every obvious and subtle flaw in our processes. And obviously she's not happy about them, and she's gonna do a Reformasi in the next couple of months. Sounds really scary indeed.

But for sure she is aware of the kind of work everyone in the team is doing. And now that she's shouldering the weight of the world (all the retail offices selling funds around the world report to her now), she's gonna make sure everything gets done without working me and my colleagues to death. And now that the department is about to take it more chores from other parts of the bank, it worries everyone especially Empress Dowager how we're gonna cope with the sheer amount of work to come.

There's just so much politics in a big firm like my employer. Just today alone, i've seen some really nasty sides of people within the bigger group - covering of assess, feigning ignorance and pushing blames. And today i also learned a bloody big lesson: always make sure you know every single word of a document before penning your name on it, cos if anything happens, u will be held responsible.

And these all happen within a day, thanks to empress dowager's brilliant eye in identifying problems here and there. Now, everyone really needs to pull up his/her socks.

Jialat la...Empress Dowager seems to have gotten too comfortable yelling out my name already. Let's hope i dun become a eunuch!

But for sure, it's really invigorating to work for a toughliner like Empress Dowager. Even though I have only interacted with her for 2 weeks since she came onboard, to a large extent, she's really pretty admirable. I do hope i will grow to become more dynamic and capable under her leadership.

For now, I'm still worried about the major reforms that'll take place shortly in our department. Really hope there's time for me to revise for my CFA exam.

I hope i will survive. I shall start singing that song everyday in the shower.

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Monday, February 22, 2010

Idiots At Work

Now i can totally understand why some people get retrenched or fired apart from typical departmental cost-cutting reasons.

Cos they don't add value to the company at all. All they do is to waste people's time, they don't do their jobs properly (they make others do for them), they mess things up and put the reputation of the firm at risk....

There's a type of employee working in private banks called investment counsellors or investment advisors or whatever sexy name you wanna call them. These people are not bankers themselves (they don't have or are far from having their own portfolio of clients), neither are they assistants to the bankers (assistants or client support officers are important support people who gather data and book trades for clients). These people don't do investment research/management either. They are the mouthpieces of the investment/research guys who are ring-fenced from the bankers' clients for gawdknowswhat reasons (not every bank is like that of course).

So they basically repackage/simplify the words of the research guys for the bankers so that the clients can understand all the mambo-jumbo. Unfortunately, these half-f**k sales guys most of the time don't quite understand what investments are all about, hence conveying the research findings either in the vaguest form or totally getting the message across wrongly. I mean, come on, what they are capable of doing - the research guys are capable of doing. Why do we need so many of them to play relationship management for the relationship managers (bankers)? And guess what, these are probably the guys who are first to be asked to go in a corporate downsizing exercise. And that's cos they not just don't add value, they max out entertainment allowances and screw things up for their colleagues.

I swear if i were ever given the chance to redraw org charts, i would make sure these people stop repackaging things and better do more constructive stuff, or they totally don't exist at all in the organization.

Tmd...浪費公司的resources, 又害我少拿bonus.

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Saturday, February 06, 2010

Took an uncrowded train that day down to boon lay on my way to the Home Team Academy.

The train hadn't felt so spacious in a long long time. I wished this country wasn't so populated.



I'm going for her concert! It's on a Good Friday..woohoo!

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Monday, February 01, 2010

段落

今天我終于嘗到什麽叫做自作自受。

那滋味可真是要命啊。好像被龍捲風捲走一樣,並在風沙裏遭受塵埃的猛烈打擊。

簡直是折磨。我想這就表示過去的瘋狂追尋,也應該告一個段落了。

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