Activate Your Intuition To Discover Your Potential

Activate Your Intuitive Abilities. Discover Your Potential

Intuition is challenging to define, despite the huge role it plays in our everyday lives. Steve Job says that “intuition is more powerful than intellect.” 

It is that gut feeling or an inner voice. - that unconscious reasoning that propels one to do something without saying why or how. It is a "knowing without knowing".  It is "knowing without thinking". The nature of intuition has led to much scientific research, including philosophy and psychology fields to understand what it is. 

Often dismissed as paranormal or the "woo-woo" stuff that women do, cognitive science is beginning to demystify the strong but sometimes inexplicable presence of unconscious reasoning in our lives and thoughts.  “There is a growing body of anecdotal evidence, combined with solid research efforts, that suggests intuition is a critical aspect of how we humans interact with our environment and how, ultimately, we make many of our decisions,” Ivy Estabrooke, a program manager at the Office of Naval Research in an interview with the New York Times in 2012.

Our intuition is always there, from reading a situation, knowing what to say, making a decision and even knowing where to drive to.  However, we may not always be paying attention to it.  Our lives may be so dominated by our logical brain that we dismiss any signs of it.

If we can tap into this resource of wisdom, we can greatly improve our lives.

Henry Poincare said "It is through science that we prove. But through intuition that we discover". An ancient Native American proverb goes like this "We can only give ourselves the power to be".

So, for those of you who are interested to realize your full potential.  Come tap into the healing power of our intuition.  Join us for a fun interactive workshop where you can learn about and activate our intuitive capabilities on 30th Jul 2016.  Or sign up for a one-on-one tuning of your intuitive and tap into your psychic potential.

We will cover what are the different intuitive abilities, how to recognize if you have them, how to set intentions and manifestation, how to awaken the hidden talents, practice connecting with our inner self and practice simple energy healing work. We will share practical ways to awaken our inner self to uncover gifts, connect with the universe and send healing to mother earth.

Gain self confidence, improve ability to learn, achieve balance in life by tapping into our intuitive self. Learn how to activate your intuition and talents, such as sight, hearing, taste, feel, touch and speak.  How do you recognize your true voice to make decisions.  Join us for an interactive hands on experience.  

 

As a channeler gifted in light language and with all six intuitive senses opened for psychic practice, Anne Phey will guide you through specific practical ways to start experiencing or to help you expand them if you have started. She brings her Pleidian heritage and remembrance of past mastery to aid us in the path of awakening.

It does not matter what level you are at. Just come with an open mind.

http://annephey.com/product/activate-intuitive-abilities-2016-jul-30/ 

Marketing Creates And Captures Markets

We recently won a Global Innovation Award for our Asia Pacific efforts to grow and capture the market.  It was a recognition of marketing in our true profession of strategy, management, multi-channel and integrated marketing across content, social, digital.

Code named CAMP (Create A Market For Power), marketing lead the initiative with understanding the market dynamics, being creative to develop a programmatic approach, daring to do things differently and making an impact to the business.

It helped us achieve several consecutive quarters of year on year growth. Here is the story of how marketing led the way to this transformation.

IBM Power Systems in Asia Pacific is the market leader in the Systems of Records for IT infrastructure requirements.  With the shift in infrastructure consumption to solutions for big data, , we needed to take a hard look at our business to assess what we needed to do differently to win. We started by understanding more about the market place.

Understand The Market. Use Analytics.
The market had developed besides Systems of Records to Systems of Engagement, Insights, etc.  This new area was a fair fight with many market players who were trying to make the shift.  We assessed our position of power, who we needed to work with to extend into the new solution areas and what was needed for the shift.  This was done by using analytics, social and other listening.

Appoint Champions. Lead The Business Plan
Within the business, we needed champions who could prioritize and focus on the growth areas. The champions were needed to pitch the propositions, drive capabilities and align resources. We then mapped out the business and marketing priorities and what the game plan was. Resources included budgets, facilities and people across sales, technical, marketing from both internal and external. 

Develop The New Approach. Make It Simple.
We clearly defined the business problem as “How do we generate revenue for Brand with Who for What Solutions in Where".  The plan included considerations for conditioning the market, recruiting key players, training to develop skills, developing joint go to market, creating the market demand and generated business opportunities.  The approach had to be systematic and scalable, easy to understand and execute, convincing for investors and worthwhile for the time and effort spent.

Choose The Battle Field. Define Success
We chose to test the approach in a region where the opportunity was the largest but adoption was the lowest and in another region where adoption could match up to the pace of the opportunity growth. The approach yielded great results against the targets. In the first market, we grew our revenue by over 400% year on year.  In the second market, we achieved grew almost 200% of our target.

Determine Success Factors. Learn As You Go.
Through this initiative, we learnt that there are critical success factors that made a significant difference.

1. Quality over quantity: creating an impact helps to then ramp up the volume
2. Standardize and simplify: making things easy to speed up go to market.
3. Leveraging others' ability: Each party is better positioned as advocates and have greater influence to their segments, and it would greatly accelerate the results where we can overcome resource or capability limitations and creates self-sufficiency
4. Ownership & team work: Strong collaboration across each activity phase across the various stakeholders is crucial.  Often, one of the team members will just step up to lead beyond their role to ensure success.
5. Integrated marketing: A 360-degree engagement is required - internal and external communications, digital and off-line, business and technical, social and content, etc.

Marketing truly creates and captures the market.  While this winning initiative is being replicated across the business. The principles of how marketing can lead in business transformation can be applied to what we can create to make a difference.

This is the awesomeness of marketing!

Time to Amplify The Power of Marketing

As some of you may know, I was awarded #2 Social Seller by LinkedIn in November 2014.  It is now November 2015 and I wonder about how well I now stand with my social media ranking.

The good news is that in 2015, our IBM Power blogs are being pumped out almost on a weekly basis with "We Believe - Power Wins" and "We Amplify - Power Marketing" blogs, and responses to the many global and regional Systems and Marketing blogs that we actively contribute and respond to.  I have lots of re-tweets, re-posts, shares and comments on IBM on all my social media platforms - Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Linked In.  I would like to think that besides the great work from our brand, technical and sales team, marketing and our social efforts has helped us turn around our business to several consecutive quarters of year to year growth since I have joined the Asia Pacific team.

Looking across 2014 and 2015, there was a significant change in my personal social engagement. In 2014, I was in ASEAN Systems Marketing and had to manage the System x team which had the challenge of enduring a year of uncertainty before they eventually transitioned to Lenovo.  Blogging had become a way for me to share my thoughts about the industry both tech and marketing.  I had hoped that my raw and honest view helped to provide an objective perspective amidst rumours and nay sayings.  It was my way to inspire my team, encourage my fellow colleagues, business partners, customers and the industry.

Many who were inspired or touched by my blogs reached out to me to share with them and their teams.  So in 2015,  I began sharing, training and mentoring many who were willing to learn about digital and social.  I was invited to share my expertise on how to build social eminence with general managers, directors, managers, staff and students.  These included universities, trade associations, government boards, human resource organizations, manufacturers, marketing forums and public events.

As I spend time mentoring and coaching, coupled with ramping up our IBM capabilities, I had somehow neglected myself and when I forget to share "me" to the world, those who followed me have lost the opportunity for inspiration.  Several followers recently commented that they have been following me and been missing my blogs.  So, it is time to really amplify the power of marketing by re-awaken my social identity and re-vitalize my blog. 

I will share as I learn.  As Tim Cahill says, "A journey is best measured by friends than miles."  Come and follow me on this journey.

Social Media Is Indispensable & Personal

Earlier this year, I was invited by Jason Chu, the Chairman of the Asia Pacific Customer Service Consortium to speak at the Customer Relationship Excellence round table hosted by DHL on my views on Social Media as part of the O2O customer experience.

The first step is to recognize that Social is Personal and that is is indispensable as part of a customer experience.  The more involved you are, the more you can capture those moments to make it an awesome customer experience.

Being someone active in social media, my behaviour is typical of what customers are like, and companies should embrace and care about being engaged in social media.

Here are 5 why the Chief Customer Relations Officer should care:
1. I have 4000 followers on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Blogspot, Linked In
2. I wake up and reach for my phone to check my social accounts and that's the last thing I do before I go to sleep
3. I am great at multi-tasking: I am active on my social accounts at work or at play
4. I shoot, post, tweet, share and answered the responses before I finish my meal or leave any social event
5. I share everything - the good, bad and ugly. I am vocal. Hear me express myself!

In 2010, only 25% will share their negative experience on social media.  That has risen to 75% in 2015.  Capturing the negative is not all.  It has also become a sales generation tool.  Gartner's research suggests that by 2015, businesses around the world will get 50% of their sales from social media.

Looking at Gartner's Hype Cycle for Digital Marketing, we have already experimented on many elements from all the various stages.  We are definitely already on a journey in a new way of marketing supported by technology from real-time marketing, to data-driven marketing, to commerce everywhere, to web analytics, and so on.

But why are we not seeing the results of our technology and digital marketing getting exponential results?

Gartner thinks that only 80% of social business efforts will not achieve the intended benefits due to inadequate leadership and an overemphasis on technology.

From the response around the audience, while many have acknowledged that social media is here to stay and the customer engagement needs to evolve, many are still hesitant due to fear of backlash of negative comments going viral.  While the desire is there, the management focus, processes, policies and skills may not be ready.

Let's look at how well our top leader, the CEO is doing in embracing social media. IBM's CEO Study estimates that only 16% of CEO use social media as a tool to connect with customers.  This is expected to grow by 3.6x to to 57% by 2018.

The social transformation must start with setting the strategic goals and culture, strong executive sponsorship, integrated orchestration across the organization with new processes and roles, governance and policies, and then technology and standards.  Will the CEO drive this change?

Postgraduate studies – Why, When, How?

 

The  Career Advisory Council for the Centre for Future Ready Graduates invited me share with the undergraduates of the Faculty of Arts & Social Science (FASS) at the National University of Singapore.  

All the speakers invited were past students of FASS. So it made it all the more special to be back at my alma mater, where I had graduated with a Masters of Arts.

It was an interesting combination of different viewpoints: Associate Prof TC Chang (Vice Dean, FASS) representing academia, Gloria Chin (HR Divisional Director) representing the public sector and myself from the private sector. I was glad to share from my experience as a student, working in the private sector and being a manager who hires. 

Here’s what we learnt from the forum on post graduate studies:

Why do you want it:  

A post graduate degree does not guarantee securing a job, promotion or better pay package, unless you are in a discipline or career which values the field of study.  The post graduate degree helps to broaden your horizon, network with and learning from others from different backgrounds, deepen the research area of interest. Knowing your aspirations on whether you wish to pursue an academic route, public sector or private sector route would be advantageous. If not, you still have youth on your side to decide.

When do you do it: 

If the economy is in a downturn, that’s the best time to study with minimal impact to income and employment.

If financing is not available, then finding scholarships, sponsorships or working to finance would be necessary.

Like Prof Chang, further studies upon graduation was great as the mind was fresh and able to continue the momentum without interruption, but youth also meant less he had fewer publications under his belt compared to his school mates. 

For myself, coming back to school after working for a few years provided a good blend of youthful energy and experience to make the studies become relevant in real life application. Plus, in single and early career years, balancing studies and work was easier.  

Gloria faced the challenge of balancing work, family and studies when she picked up the post graduate studies later in her career. However, she was able to know clearly the choice of her studies that would best complement her as part of her career development. It had helped her develop competencies to advance her career in senior management.

How do you get there:  

For academic, Prof Chang advised to pick the mentor and start wooing them early.  Good grades are a must to pursue academia.  I felt that grades matter, but a more balanced approach would be preferred, with character building, soft skills such as good communications and interpersonal skills, and having more diversified interests such as sports, hobbies or community work.

The students enjoyed the sharing with an active question and answer session, and more questions post session. We wish all the students the best in their studies and a brilliant path ahead of them!