Ricky’s Online Business Blog

My MBA study in UPM got more interesting and exciting as it came to the third semester from March to June 2010. In this semester, I took up Business Law and Marketing Management. I was also allowed into the Consumer Behavior class by one good lecturer as sit-in student.

Initially, I considered the law subject boring and very tough. Indeed it could be. But luckily our good lecturer taught it in a very easy-to-understand way that most of us got A in final grade.

But I knew knowledge in law is very important in business. In business, I have had disputes with customers and companies before. If not handled well, those issues could have been escalated into legal cases. By knowing the law, now I feel more confident in making deals and avoid being cheated by others.

In the subject, we needed to understand various laws applicable to business, such as law of contract, agency, partnership, sale of goods and hire purchase. We were presented with situations and were required to draw on legal principles and past cases we learned to solve the problems.

The study on law was very practical. I found much use in what I learned. However, one thing I was not good in doing was remembering the case law. In fact, in order to save time, I chose not to memorize any case but focus on the principles and applications instead (yet I still got A!)

But there was one principle I learned well, not only for law, but also for study of any subject. I know law can be boring. It can be tough and can drive us crazy. I could read many people complaining about it on Facebook. But don’t hate a subject that we don’t like. Choose to like it.

Do you believe in law of attraction? If you keep saying negative things about something, like you don’t like something, it will really get disgusting. You will have attracted negative energy about the subject to yourself.

But choose to like it. Choose to develop an interest in it. Choose to understand how it could relate to our life. Start to appreciate it. Then slowly we attract positive energy around the subject, start to develop an interest and like it.

My study of business law was one good testimonial. Do you know any business student so passionately read up law books, even those not related to his study? I was one of them. Business law was something I could not catch up at the start, but at the end I started to complain I had not learned enough!

One of the most memorable experiences in my MBA study was my involvement in a mock court drama called The Revenge of Tara in our business law class. In the drama, we played out a real case in the 80s Tara Rajaratnam v Jaginder Singh, where a poor woman sued a group of lawyers for cheating her land.

It was an eye-opening experience to me as I was tasked to write up the script for the drama and act as Jaginder’s lawyer. Thanks to everyone’s good acting, multimedia effects, and various entertaining enhancements, the drama turned out to be very successful! I’m so proud to be part of it

Tara (acted by Kashturi) and Cullen (acted by Ricky), lawyer of Datuk Jaginder Singh, accusing each another in court

Credits go to our directors Leanne and Liza, all actors and actresses, and all who worked behind the scene. Of course, our dear lecturer Dr Rozanah too!

Cullen with his client, Datuk Jaginder Singh (acted by Muni)

Besides the satisfying experience with business law, I also learned from the Marketing Management class especially in presentations. It was so arranged in the class that every week two groups competed with each other in the same presentation topic. The bar was raised very high because of this. Up to now, this was still the class with the highest level of presentation quality I’ve seen so far.

In the marketing class, our group made two presentations, one on an US company on industrial branding, and another on Marriott Hotel. We even go to the hotel itself and took pictures!  We also submitted a marketing plan based on a real service in human resource outsourcing (HRO) by one of my customers.

This was the time I started to use mind mapping to take note for quick revision before exam.  I once sent my mind maps on business law to a few students. But I didn’t know who started the forwarding, that my mind maps got circulated around MBA students here.  Since there were “demand” for the maps, I also created a special page for their benefit to download all mind maps I created.

In this semester, I also faced various people problems working in team, both in the business law drama team, and also the marketing management team. I can’t detail the issues here, but I was culpable for many things and I learned many lessons for my own improvement.

One people lesson was that I could not expect people to do things my way because they had different circumstances and resources from me. As a weird student who took only 2 subjects per semester compared to 4 subjects by others, I had a little more time to delve into more depths in my study and make every piece of work more perfect.

But I didn’t understand that others did not have such luxury to spend much time on a single task. Instead, I imposed my own expectations on others and made their life difficult. Two marketing management team members even left me and formed their own group. I heard they didn’t know what I wanted from them.

These people issues had made me review myself. The lessons had also inspired me to write an article on the different motives by different types of MBA students in the inaugural issue of MBA Edge magazine, in the next semester, the 4th semester.

I watched the film Devil. I thought it was just a normal horror movie. It’s more than that. It’s also about forgiving others for their wrongs against us.

Recently I happened to come across the forgiveness issue from various places. I read about it, post and even discuss it on Facebook. I heard about it from friends. Some seminar speaker told me about it. Someone even sent me email about it!  Is it a hint to me I should be forgive anyone?

Back to forgiveness, I think we really need to forgive others who have done something wrong to us. If we don’t forgive, we harbor the hatred in us. It will not only strain our relationship, but also become a kind of bitterness in us that can curse us in our life and relationships.

But if we could choose to forgive, we will release our self from the hatred and bitterness. Then we are able to enjoy relationships with people and live our life to the max.

Unfortunately, people who do not enjoy true, loving relationships with people are most probably the ones who are in the bondage of unforgiveness.

A customer told me on Facebook it’s very difficult to forgive people in some cases. Absolutely right. Indeed, may I venture to say that by our own strength we will never be able to forgive those who wronged us?

But when we have experienced for our self that someone has forgiven us for our wrong to him or her in the past, it will not be that difficult to pass on the forgiveness to others.

Think about the kids. If they never learn to own a toy, they may not learn to share it with other kids. But if they have learned to own and enjoy a toy, they will learn to share the joy with others.

About one year ago, a friend lent me some lecture notes but unfortunately I misplaced it. However, she didn’t blame me. She forgave me.

But in recent months, I lent some lecture notes to another friend but somehow he also lost it. I felt angry. But if my previous friend could forgive me for my mistake, why can’t I forgive this friend for his mistake?

By the way, we also often hear people say they will “forgive, but not forget”. But I wonder when some of them say this, they are saying it with bitterness in heart. Are they truly forgiving others or not?

I’m thinking that the key is to forgive. Forget or not? It does not really matter. What do you think about this?

Today I attended the Webmaster Malaysia gathering of the year in The Curve.  I didn’t mingle around much, but managed to talk to two notable dotcom figures for a while.

First of all, I finally met – the famous tech blogger Liew CF of LiewCF.com!  I’ve been following his blog for a while and learning from him.  He started blogging years ago and later his income generated from blog exceeded that of his full time job.  Now he is a full time professional blogger!

He has been earning mainly from Google Adsense.  Though he didn’t reveal how much, the US$ X,000 figure he said aroused much curiosity among the audience.  Though the X figure is a single digit in US Dollar as he said, I do believe it’s a double-digit in Ringgit Malaysia!

He was one of the speakers today and he said it’s his first public talk (really?)  But he has successfully captivated our attention and regaled all of us.  Let’s wish him success and continue to grow from strength to strength!

The second dotcom figure I met is Andy Low of HomeTuitionCare.com.my, a tuition agency business online.  I’m glad that he graduated from University of Malaya (UM) too – same with me!

One might think that his business is a competitor to my NextLevel Tutor Network.  In a loose sense, maybe.  But I think he is not because our business models are different.  He charges tutors commission for each successful tuition assignment, while I charge tutors a fixed fee upon joining.

Even if we are competitors, I still like to get to know him as there may still be things we can do together in the future.  Who knows maybe we may form alliance and harness each other’s strengths to serve our customers?

As one of the speakers mentioned today, such webmaster gathering should be conducted more often.  I have also got some idea on conducting our future gatherings in the Internet Business Fellowship (IBF) later.

Thanks and kudos to the organizer!