Shanghai Tan

The past week has been an intensive leadership discussion week for me. There was the visit of a Distinguish Engineer (DE) from Austin Texas during the first half of the week, and I had a classroom training at the second half of the week. Therefore, I had discussion on leadership all week long, what characterise [...]

It’s been exactly a year since my last visit to hometown Montreal, and I’m about to return for another visit next Monday. I’ve been working at IBM Shanghai — precisely IBM China Systems & Technology Labs (CSTL) — for a year and a half now. I’m starting to forget how it was like to work [...]

I like to read the blog of Mr. Irving Wladawsky-Berger, a retired IBM senior VP that I admire tremendously for his technical leadership as well as business and social observations. In his blog, I like his style of putting things in plain English, he doesn’t pretend to know everything and didn’t try to answer all [...]

One thing that is very different in the China’s IT industry versus North America is, there’s practically no gray hair in the workplace here. The average age is probably around 26-27 at the place where I work, many of them were born in the 80′s, the youngest are from the mid-80′s. Most of them started [...]

During the past 8 weeks, all the teams in our office are having an annual badminton competition. Every Monday I went there to be the official photographer of the competition. It’s not easy to bring a laptop bag and camera bag in the subway during rush hour, but at the end it’s worth all the [...]

There was a story in a Shanghai newspaper about a British expat who left behind her photography studio job in London, coming to Shanghai to document the transformation that the city is going thru. She calls China the hub of change, and that is so close to how I see this as well, but with [...]

Since my resolutions for 2006 were pretty much fulfilled, I shall continue to write my 2007 resolutions down here. Only this time I’m less confident, although optimistic should I say, as the resolutions involve many elements that are out of my control, and equally depend on a great deal of luck and good timing… So [...]