Archive for September, 2009

That was the question that the Pan Asian Women’s Association asked at their inaugural launch event last night.

PAWA (sounds like “power”) was created by a group of UK based Asian women with backgrounds from the Indian sub-continent, Korea, Malaysia and more and its tag line is “Empowering Asian Women Worldwide”. The event took place at the lovely premises of Asia House and was packed with high-powered, high-achieving professional women and entrepreneurs - they were mainly of Asian origin but the organisation is also open to men and non-Asian women with an interest in the region. I was delighted to have been invited and it was so energising to chat to so many dynamic women representing 30 countries ranging from Iran across to Japan.

The high aims and global vision of this association was signalled from the start with an opening addres by Baroness Lydia Dunn who had been a member of the the Cabinet in Hong Kong and is a leading light on the international business stage.

The evening began with a short vox pop film asking ordinary people in one London street “What comes to mind when you think of an Asian woman?” There were young white men, Asian men, older men, white women and young Asian girls, a young Chinese boy so the answers were many and varied. But there were some themes that kept recurring: charming, strong, outwardly subservient, sexy, strong mothers, good wives. When asked about role models, the answers ranged from Indira Gandhi, Aung San Suu Kyi, Benathir Bhutto and Michelle Yeo to “don’t know” to one lovely man who said, “My wife.”

But there was not among the stereotypes in the vox pop an image that described many of the women in the room. Business woman. Lawyer. Accountant. Entrepreneur. TV executive. Journalist. Sure, many of us there were charming, strong, sexy, mothers and spouses and perhaps outwardly subservient when we needed to be but we were - are - also engaged in the business and professional world. There was a lively panel discussion following the film where a consultant psychiatrist Dr Ghazala Afzal Hameed, an acclaimed choreographer Gauri Sharma Tripathi, a formidable financier Sonia Lo and a policy advisor on women’s issues Anni Marjoram discussed the stereotypes and their own experiences of being an Asian woman in their respective fields.

The formal part of the event came to a close with some remarks by the Founder and President of PAWA, the striking SungJoo Kim, a leading entrepreneur who built her billion dollar business from nothing.

I had been invited along with my co-author Silvia Cambie by Mei Sim Lai and also Betty Yao, two lovely women whom I’ve recently got to know. When we first met, I liked them immediately - they are down to earth, charming and friendly. It was only later, when I Googled them (as you do these days!), that I discovered that Mei Sim is an OBE and Betty is an MBE and they are both amazingly high achieving in the field of finance (Mei Sim) and Asian culture and arts (Betty).

For me, the power (ha ha) of yesterday evening was seeing all these extraordinary - and also in many ways, ordinary - women all gathered in one place. In my daily life, I mix quite happily with a primarily English crowd and a range of international friends. I have Malaysian and Asian friends but they are often dispersed around London and the UK. In the daily news and public media, it’s not often that an Asian woman makes the news - other than sad stories about poor Indian/ Pakistani women murdered by their families or Chinese migrant women (and men) found dead in the back of a lorry and other disempowered images. So in my daily consciousness, dynamic Asian women don’t really feature. Which made the impact of last night all the stronger for me - I had a sense of relaxing, that these women understand some of the challenges that I’ve faced being a Malaysian-Chinese woman in the UK and I also felt inspired by the vibrant energy buzzing around the room!

So, yeah, I’m going to be signing up as a member of PAWA - I’m off to fill in my form now!

If you check them out because of this post, do mention FusionView.co.uk and also come back and let me know and we can keep an eye out for each other at their next event.

I’ve been doing some research on music and social media in preparation for a lecture that I’ll be giving to students on the Music and Media Management course at the London Metropolitan University Business School, along with my co-author Silvia Cambie. There’s a lot of interesting stuff out there and I have quite a stack of case studies and notes on the issues I’d like to discuss during the lecture in October.

And the great thing about the digital world of social media is that you come across a range of wonderfully, wacky items and fascinating people that are as wonderful and fascinating as the real world can ever be. This video is one of those items:

I’ve featured another air guitar video before which starred the winner of the Air Guitar championship in the documentary film Air Guitar Nation. The runner up in that film was Bjorn Turoque, the Bruce Springstein look-alike who stars in the video above. Bjorn - the alter ego of writer and musician Dan Crane - has clearly capitalised on the window of opportunity opened by the film and notwithstanding not winning that championship has gone on to air guitar stardom in his own right.

Today, 23 Sept Sydney woke up to an eerie dust storm - the red dust from the outback has been picked up by strong winds and blown across the country. Experts have attributed this to climate change and the ongoing drought afficting in Australia.

I picked up the above photo from the Guardian Online website, one of a gallery of amazing scenes. (You can check out the gallery by clicking on the pic alongside). Wanting to find out more- and especially how this phenomena is being covered online - I had a meander through the internet to see what else was out there.

There are a lot of home videos on Youtube, uploaded by Ozzies affected by the red storm - mainly shots of their backyard and local area. The most interesting video of the batch is a slideshow compilation of photos sent in to ABC Radio Australia by their listeners:

On Flickr, there’s also a group project on Flickr, “The Red Sydney Project - Dust Storm Days”. One of the group administrators explains on the group page:

“We awoke to an intense glow. We rose from our beds and we started shooting. This group is a collaborative effort to capture a virtual Sydney from Sept 23 - the morning when an eerie duststorm captivated thousands of digitial cameras across the city.We hope you’re enjoying the group photos, so far. The response has been tremendous and the photos are stunning. We welcome shots all shots from the dust storm including NSW, ACT and QLD.

Thanks to everyone who has contributed! 1000+ photos!”

Anyone who has a Flickr account can join the group and at the time of writing, there are 368 group members (up from 367 even as I was viewing the page!). The slideshow below shows the photos submitted by the members to the group pool:

There’s a map, too, showing where the photos were taken as well as a discussion forum.

For background information about the environmental conditions that caused the dust storm, The Sydney Morning Herald has a good slideshow with audio interviews on top explaining the issues. There’s no embed code for me to bring that over here so you’ll have to go over to their page for the meteorological backgruond.

Word based blogs have been secondary in this news event, with many of them posting Flickr items or linking to news reports (rather like me here on the other side of the world!). This is not surprising as the phenomena is obviously best captured visually. I’ve found a few brief blog accounts:

Silvermonk

Travelblog

Wedding Planning Tips

When I posted an link to the Guardian photo on Facebook, an Australian friend based in London added a comment to say that he’d been in touch with a friend in Sydney who reported that everything had cleared by midday and blue skies were back.

Writing books is an odd thing. I’ve now just published my third, as regular readers of this blog will know, and my co-author Silvia Cambie and I have been busy over the summer doing all the related publicity for it - writing articles, giving interviews and presentations. Now that we’ve had the big launch party, I feel that I can relax a bit now and get some of my life back.

Because when you write a book, whether it’s fiction like my two novels or non-fiction like this latest book, the whole process of each book dominates your life for several years. In the case of International Communications Strategy, it took about 18 months to 2 years from the point that Silvia and I first talked about it to publication in July this year.

She had been commissioned by Kogan Page to write a book on international PR and communications and invited me to co-author the social media aspects. We needed to beat out a strong concept and the main themes of the book to present to our editor so that the publishing house new what the produce would be when they got the final manuscript. We evolved the book together over several months, discussing the hot topics in global corporate communications as well as developments in online communications and drafting several versions of the proposal. Annika Knight, our editor, then took it through Kogan Page’s rigourous internal processes - while we were not privvy to these discussions, from what I know of the publishing process, this would most likely have involved getting the Kogan Page team behind the book ie the sales team, the publicity team, the international team and ultimately the senior management, such as Helen Kogan herself.

When we heard back that we had the green light, the next step was to negotiate the contract and agree a timetable for delivery of the manuscript and a deadline for publication. All of which takes time and forward planning.

And finally - we were good to go.

In the meantime, of course, Silvia and I had been collecting case studies, following up on leads and doing background research. This process, for me, continued for a little while longer before I felt confident to sit down and actually start writing. I had never written non-fiction before and was feeling a bit nervous about it all - so my solution was to put off the writing and to carry on doing the research! As a fiction writer, you can make things up and change the scenario if you find that your story is not working out as you had hoped. Or you can fudge some facts if they prove difficult for your narrative thrust. You are after all the god of the universe you’ve created. But non-fiction! You have to back up everything you say with real evidence and hard facts. You have to reference and footnote everything. Your opinions and extrapolations must be derived from reality.

Eeks.

But once I finally sat down to write up my research, I found it was not as scary or difficult as I had feared. It was actually rather like writing a blog post. Where I normally would put links to items I was referencing, I just inserted a footnote. In some ways, writing non-fiction is easier than writing fiction. I could always cross-check the facts or double check something with a respondent I had interviewed. I could quote their very words. The case studies were real, existing in this universe so I didn’t have to make up a world that I needed to convince my readers to believe in. I was still telling stories - but it was the stories of real people in the real world.

And I really loved it!

And then came the tedious part. Once we finished the manuscript, we had to make it lovely and tidy to submit to Kogan Page. Silvia had used a different font and layout from me and had set out her footnotes differently. So we had to amend the formatting to make it all match and sort out a contents page and pagination. We submitted it via Box.net in true Web 2.0 fashion (rather than on a CD as requested in the Kogan Page Author Guidelines). Next came the editing process where an editor and copy-editor went through the text line by line making amendments, raising queries, checking for errors and inconsistencies - and engaging us as authors in the process. So we went through the manuscript yet again - and again, and again!

When the final text was signed off, there was still the blurb and author bios to do. There was the author questionnaire from the marketing and sales department so that they would have all the information they needed to hand to do their jobs of selling and marketing the book. We also had a long discussion about the book title - should it have the word “PR” in it? “Cross cultural”? “Strategy” or “Strategies”? and so on - and after several weeks of to-ing and fro-ing settled on the current title. Whew!

But no, it’s not done yet. In the lead up to the time of publication and in the few months afterwards, we’ve been talking and writing endlessly about the book and its key concepts as part of the publicity process. Don’t get me wrong - it’s very exciting and satisfying when other people (the media, bloggers, business people and professionals) are interested in our book and it makes all the hard work worthwhile. But for me, I finished writing the book last year so in my mind, it’s a completed project - so the whole publicity process feels strange. I know from speaking to a number of writers that many of us feel this same sense of disorientation.

So, now that our book launch went off with such a bang, I feel finally the sense of having achieved a wonderful thing together with Silvia. I guess I just needed the big party to celebrate and put a marker down, like planting a flag at the top of Everest or on the moon. Aaah, the long journey is done!

And I can now move onwards to my next project….

Photo: thanks to Marc Wright

Marc Wright, Chief Executive of simply communicate and Chair of the simplygroup, did a video interview with us during our book launch. He has edited the interview down to this great 3 minute video that brings out the key points of the book.

When I walked into the premises of Chicago Booth University in the heart of the City, I was stunned by the wonderful architecture and sense of space created by sleek, subtle lines. I had been a little nervous as our big day approached but the moment I arrived at these stunning premises, I felt a sense of calm and also, an eagerness to enjoy the party we were going to have that night.

After two years of hard work with my co-author Silvia Cambie, this lovely evening amongst friends and colleagues was the best way to celebrate. We are really indebted to Chicago Booth University (especially Arnold Longboy and his team) and also The International Alliance for Women (especially, its president Diane Morris) for sponsoring the event - support for our book from such well-respected institutions means a great deal to Silvia and me. We were also honoured that Helen Kogan of Kogan Page came to the event and say a few words about their response to our book proposal and why they are excited about the book - so excited that they nominated our book, one of two nominations from their list of business books published this year, for the FT Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award.

Silvia and I were also delighted to be able to have a party to thank all our friends and colleagues for their encouragement while we were writing the book. In particular, we were very happy to see some of our respondents who gave up their time to answer our interview questions for the case studies in the book, sharing with us their experiences of international communications and social media. We were also delighted that Cafe Spice Namaste supplied the finger food at our party.

The slideshow below captures the formal presentations and hopefully, some of the atmosphere of the party.

I was also pleased that Mark Smith of Ipadio could make it. We’d been in touch by email and phone over the last few months about Ipadio’s live phoneblogging service and it was great to meet him for the first time. He’s a lot like his photo on Ipadio but very, very tall - he used to play rugby and has the build of a rugby player! It was his love of sports that inspired him to create the live phoneblogging service as a way for ordinary people to broadcast live sports commentary online. Now it is being used by those who have difficulty accessing typing-based online communications as well as - well, writers at their book launches: Mark kindly streamed live audio of the presentations onto the internet via Ipadio. You can check out the archived audio here.

And finally, the most important person on this roll of honour I want to thank is Silvia. She has been the driving force behind this book and I really admire her energy and intelligence in everything she does, not least her work on our book!

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If you’d like to view the slides from the formal presentation that Silvia and I gave at the event, you can view them below:

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Update: You can read a write up of the event in The New Straits Times, Malaysia

My co-author Silvia Cambie and I are very excited that our big day has arrived. The launch of our book International Communications Strategy is taking place tonight, hosted by Chicago Booth University and The International Alliance for Women.

Due to restrictions on numbers, this is an invitation only event but Mark Smith, CEO at Ipadio.com, is kindly running a live phoneblog from the event where he will hopefully be able to live stream some of the speeches and also interview some of our guests during the party so that those who have not been able to come along will be able to get a flavour of the event through the audio feed.

I’ll also be calling in at various times during today to let you know how the preparations are going.

You can listen to the audio blog via the player below. When the tab “Live: On Air” shows up, you will be able to listen to the live audio feed (subject to a 5 second delay). Otherwise, you can listen to already-recorded audio sessions by clicking on the Previous tab (and move about the various sessions by clicking Next and Latest as required).

The event starts at 6.30pm UK time (GMT +1hour). The live audio feed will be running intermittently whenever Mark calls in on his mobile phone.

I hope you enjoy the audio version of the event.

I’ll be phoning in after the event, too, to share my impressions and de-brief of the event so do come back in the next few days as well!

I’ve always been a fan of The Sound of Music and Julie Andrews, so I loved this video when it was forwarded to me by a friend - especially the rap bit in the middle…

(It is a promotion stunt for a Belgian television program, where they are looking for someone to play the leading role, in the musical of “The Sound of Music”.)

My childhood friend from KL, Mei W, sent me a link awhile back to a blog all about my old school Bukit Bintang Girls School, Back to BBGS in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

I was at the BBGS Primary School 2, from between 1973-75, after which I left to come to school in the UK. Although I was there for only a short period, I’ve always had fond memories of the place and the friends that I made there.

Sadly, the school is no longer on its original site. In modern KL, the location is prime real estate, right in the middle of the shopping district. It clung on for as long as it could but eventually gave in to commercial pressures around 1999. The site is now the location of the luxury Star Hill development of condos - Bukit means Hill in Malay and Bintang means Star.

Although the primary school building was more modern than the colonial style secondary school, I loved the school building for its open verandahs and I seem to remember giant banyan trees and rain trees in the grounds. There was a very basic canteen near the playing fields selling laksa and friend noodles as well as stinky salted fish satay sticks and bubble gum. I would sometimes buy a bowl of laksa (10 cents, I think) but other times bring in home made sandwiches - chicken, corned beef fried with onions or fried luncheon meat, or home made fried rice.

I can still remember the names of some of my classmates - Gwen, Bek-Ngan, Jia Yee, Latifah, Valencia, Dolly, Helen. My class teacher was Miss Teh and our Malay teacher was Cik Zaleha. Miss Ma, the principal, was a very elegant Chinese lady who always wore a cheong-sam. Her deputy was Mrs Bux, whom we were all scared of because she had a very stern presence.

There were 50 pupils to class and I always came bottom - 49 or 50! - except in English, where I usually got 100% in all the tests. My family despaired that I was a dunce. At best, I was lazy and didn’t study as I should. They tore their hair out that my father was spending all that money to send me to school in the UK - what if it all turned out to be a waste of his hard earned money and I spent my years in England a layabout, good-for-nothing dunce? What if I never amounted to anything?

I think my difficulty at BBGS was that the text books and schoolwork was in Malay and I had previously gone to an English language school. We spoke English at home. I read in English, wrote in English, thought in English. At that point, the medium of instruction was still English and my friends and I also spoke in English. I was finding it hard to deal with the school work in another language, even though it was the national language of Malaysia. Also, I knew I was going to school in England and that I would never need to use Malay there so what was the point of it all?

In the UK, it took me awhile to adjust but as it turned out, this is where I thrived. I was still never top of the class to my extended family’s disappointment but I’d come in at respectable above average ranking. I never matched the string of A’s that my parents and uncles and aunts boasted of in their O’ and A’ levels but trundled solidly along with Bs mostly and the occasional shocking C and even an E! But I think I found that being in England suited me and I felt free to develop those other talents that I had that couldn’t be measured by exams.

But there are many things about Malaysia that I miss - the food, the climate, the warm and friendly Malaysian way of being, Malaysian English, the rain trees, that orange sunlight in the evenings after school. And although I did dismally at BBGS from an academic point of view, I had a happy time there with my class mates and my memories of the school and the sense of place I have about it makes me sad that it is no longer there physically in the location that I remember. Reading through the Back to BBGS blog has made me feel a bit like an old lady, looking back at her young days!

Back to BBGS is the personal blog of an Old Girl, Joanna Yeoh, and collects the memories and stories of BBGSians. It’s a huge undertaking for one person - thank you, Joanna, and all power to you - and all the BBGSian contributors - for creating such a fantastic resource and archive!

Photo credits:

Modern Bukit Bintang - thanks to Sham Hardy from flickr.com (CCL)

BBGS school sign - thanks to Suriani Sanusi from the Back to BBGS blog