Wilson Ng started helping the family business since 9 years old. Since then, he had dreamt to be a successful entrepreneur, one who starts great businesses  ( he has started 7) from scratch with insight, guts and initiative. He keeps his focus on growing the business by creating value-- not on politics, or wasteful distractions. He brings the same focus to community service, teaching, life and family.

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  Saturday, December 04, 2004


A Person's or a CEO's Greatest Success and Challenge    ( on life )

In one of the webboards, we got into talking as to what is the American dream.  Then somebody came in and said what was the European dream.  Being Asian, I talked a little bit about the Asian dream.

This might be too generalizing a bit, and hardly accurate, but the American dream is usually meant to be understood as having great wealth and power.  The European dream is normally about self fulfillment, education and  respect from peers.  I am more Asian, and has always been made to believe that the Asian dream is about leaving a good name, and making your children successful.  In fact, a lot of Asian Entrepreneurship is about owning a small business that you can give to your children.  The greatest accolade an Asian businessman can get is to be the founder, the honorary chairman, or the PATRIARCH of the numerously successful business of the next generation. 

I have been fortunate to be influenced by many cultures, and I always say that I want the best of 3 worlds -- so if you note my motto, "to be a learned scholar, a successful businessman, and a good father"  it is really a global dream, a meeting of the east and west mentality.

I hope that I am not alone in this, about wanting my next generation, my children to succeed because I think that is the acid test of a man's ( or woman's)  success.  I remember a while back somebody did comment in one of my post that success outside cannot compensate for failure in the home, and I agree.  More recently, this has also received a lot of attention, and winning companies, like GE and Intel make it a point that the greatest success criteria of a CEO is actually how well you groom the next CEO and how well he does after you have left.  Having to go outside the company to get a CEO is normally looked at as a desperation move, and hardly a sign of management excellence.

To be successful, and passing on the success to others would be my goal, and hopefully yours too.  Training the next in line or the next CEO thus becomes my greatest success factor and challenge.  People might think this is too early ( my eldest is still barely going 11, but I figured I have 5 more years.  After that, if I don't have his trust, I'm a goner.).  What do you think?

By the way, if you have not read, this is a similar theme to "focus on things that lasts" I wrote a few posts earlier.

I myself have been spending a lot of time now not only in the various aspects of business, but in doing some amount of reflective thinking ( while my kids are still young), on how I can help shape some of their attitudes in life without necessarily railroading their character or inclination.

Most recently, my kids just got their report cards, and I wrote myself some notes on how I analyzed their progress so far.  This might be of little interest to others ( after all, this is my kid!), but if you are interested to see how I work out with my kids performance evaluation scorecard, please drop a note, and I will do my best to share it here without boring you.

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