The Business of Design:Your Road to Designpreneurship Success

As designers, we are a special breed of people. We are dreamers confronting realities through the practice of commercial art. We live by our dream of trying to decode the thinking and creative process. However, creative recognition may not guarantee sustained interest over time. Financial rewards do. Hence, the combination of design and entrepreneurship provides this attractive appeal of offering us both tangible and intangible benefits, through the creation of wealth and the building of a designer’s reputation respectively.

Remember that the decision to be a master of your own career destiny is yours alone. You have a choice to make, either to work for yourself, or for others. It is you and no one else who is the author of whether your life story turns out to be one of success or failure.

To equip you with a champion’s mindset, I will share with you the 5 most important actions required for you to become a successful designpreneur -

1. Keep Dreaming

Your dreams must be kept alive at all times. We must not stop dreaming of attaining your aspirations, along with its host of benefits. Subconsciously, it is these very dreams that will drive you forward, and direct all your thoughts and actions to helping you set your life’s priorities, in order to prepare you for the eventual actualization of your dreams.

2. Keep Questioning

Never take things at face value. One has to keep pondering and questioning every experience that has taken place in our lives and business as well as that of others. We need to satisfy our curiosity about occurrences in our daily lives, various kinds of human behaviour and reactions, market happenings, our surrounding environment as well as general matters, including the world economy, politics, investment, etc. We need to stay constantly informed in order to make wise decisions. Satisfying our curiosity is one good way to be market savvy and street smart.

3. Keep Thinking

Our mind should never cease thinking. We should always engage our brain in different thinking modes at all times. An engaged mind is often a well-oiled mind. Through constant questioning and thinking, we will be able to gradually increase our mental capacity and bandwidth, leading to a higher level of wisdom eventually.

4. Keep Looking

Design and business ideas can literally be found everywhere. We just need to be curious and observant. Every good old idea can be imitated, improvised and innovated to become novel again. This process of regenerating old ideas into new and better ones, simply requires us to engage in proactive thinking.

5. Keep Trying

Perfection can never be achieved through a single attempt. Through the process of trying, you will increase your level of perseverance and resourcefulness. And you will likely uncover more ways of doing things; unravelling new wisdom and sharpening your skills along the way. Best of all, you might discover hidden talents that you never knew existed.

Always remember that knowledge without action is useless. Real change must come from within you. Your only limitation lies only in your mind. If you think you can, you will. If you think you cannot, nothing else will matter.

Yours sincerely,
Mark Phooi
FMDS Principal

Happy Chinese New Year 2012

With the Chinese New Year 2012 coming round the corner, we have a checklist for you:

1. Are you already basking in the mood of the festive seasons?

2. Are you still planning and rushing to buy all the goodies within this week?

3. Reunion Dinner confirmed?

4. Exercise and go on diet - so that we won't feel guilty in indulging in all the goodies next week?

If you have more checklist to add, do go on.

Most importantly, FMDS wishes all a happy, healthy and prosperous New Year!

新年快乐!

FMDS Share Times 2012 - Issue 1

FMDS Share Times 2012 - Issue 1

Designing for life... literally

Broadly speaking, design is a process of discovery and experimentation leading to the realisation of a concept with the aim of commercial benefit. Be it a well engineered product, structural building, mass market product, fashion wear, moving images, commercial arts, etc., designers play a key but yet subtle role contributing to all aspects in our daily lives with the aim of making our lives more liveable in an efficiently managed and aesthetically stimulating environment.

Despite the enormous contribution to the society, designer, who has invested time, energy and financial resources suffers from inadequate compensation in exchange for the ‘soft’ investments. Their work is based on inspiration riding on their design passion. Witnessing the realisation of their ideal is considered rewarding enough rather than that of their own financial goals. True but sad, designers do not realise their designing career comes with a short life span.

Scan the industry and you will notice how few Asian designers are able to enjoy financial success pursuing this ‘hobby career’ of theirs. Financially, their designing success is typically creamed off by their employers.

The Asian employer’s mindset of employing designers as a cost rather than investment still holds true. Wage differences between talented and average designers form only a small fraction and output of designer is basically measured by the quantum rather than quality making many design firms no different from sweatshops operating out of a dingy tiny shop in some obscure street corners. Despite the huge contributing value of designer in today’s commercial world, the appreciation of design by the market and their willingness to pay top dollars for good design scores low. Employers are geared towards the bottom-line and paying top dollars to hire good designers are rare .

Unless there is a serious mindset change among paying clients, employers of designers and relevant government agencies, we are not ready to talk about developing sustainable design when the substainability of designers’ livelihood is often challenged.

‘Good design equates good business’ in the Asian context is still a myth reserved only for a select few.

Comment please?

FM Leadership with GRACE - Mark's Leadership Style

FM is success driven and has always been very result oriented. Since its last restructuring in year 2006, several short, mid and long terms goals were charted. A FM Road Map leading up to 2016 was mapped out. Milestones were charted out to benchmark against its progress. FM has grown significantly and has successfully migrated its business focus to design education. FMDS brand awareness in Asia is quite well accepted having able to leverage on its 20 years of accumulated knowledge, wisdom, networks and credentials to good use. The growth of First Media is a result of careful planning and execution plus strong leadership commitment. Started with only S$2,000 working capital, FM has grown to more than S$20,000,000 worth of property assets alone.

GOAL
FM starts with an end in mind. It is constantly mindful of its end game plan.

RESOURCEFULNESS
Learn - continuous learning. Top up new knowledge with old and remove obsolete knowledge
Out of Box Thinking - Always explore non-conventional methods
Venture - Always prepared to move out from its comfort zone
Enjoy - Always relishing the process of putting an idea into action

ATTENTIVE
Positive – maintain a optimistic outlook on its future
Open - openness in embracing new ideas as a change agent
Service - responsiveness, quality driven, proactive & initiative

COMMITMENT
Passion Hunger and Disciplined
Resourcefulness & always 'Be Prepared' for any eventuality

EMPATHY
People centric acting as servant leader and role model to others to emulate
Always uphold a honest and responsible relationship that is transparent, fair, just and respect.
Always trusting and willing to give others opportunity to grow.

The Race

An Administrative team and an Information Technology team decided to engage in a competitive boat race. Both teams practiced hard and long to reach their peak performance.

On the big day they felt ready. The IT team won the race by a mile.

Afterward, the Administrative team was discouraged by the loss. Morale sagged. Corporate management decided that the reason for the crushing defeat had to be found. A consulting firm was hired to investigate the problem and recommend corrective action.

The consultant's finding: The IT team had eight people rowing and one person steering; the Administrative team had one person rowing and eight people steering. After a year of study and millions spent analyzing the problem, the consultant firm concluded that too many people were steering and not enough were rowing on the Administrative team.

So as race day neared again the following year, the Administrative team management structure was completely reorganized. The new structure: four steering managers, three assistant steering managers and a new performance review system for the person rowing the boat to provide work incentive.

The IT team won the race by two miles.

Humiliated, the Administrative team laid off the rower for poor performance and gave the managers a bonus for discovering the problem

Morale of the story
This is typical of a company where the boss is not hands on.

The Pareto Principle (Pareto's law) - The 80/20 Rule

The Pareto Principle suggests that where two related data sets or groups exist (typically cause and effect, or input and output):

Here are some examples of Pareto's Law as it applies to various situations. According to the Pareto Principle, it will generally the case (broadly - remember it's a guide not a scientific certainty), that within any given scenario or system or organisation:

80 percent of results come from 20 percent of efforts
80 percent of activity will require 20 percent of resources
80 percent of usage is by 20 percent of users
80 percent of the difficulty in achieving something lies in 20 percent of the challenge
80 percent of revenue comes from 20 percent of customers
80 percent of problems come from 20 percent of causes
80 percent of profit comes from 20 percent of the product range
80 percent of complaints come from 20 percent of customers
80 percent of sales will come from 20 percent of sales people
80 percent of corporate pollution comes from 20 percent of corporations
80 percent of work absence is due to 20 percent of staff
80 percent of road traffic accidents are cause by 20 percent of drivers
80 percent of a restaurant's turnover comes from 20 percent of its menu
80 percent of your time spent on this website will be spent on 20 percent of this website
and so on..