Philosophical Guidance

My wife, daughter and I arrived for a vacation in Paris on the 15th of July; a day after the French celebrated their National Day.

In 14th of July 1789, exactly 222 years ago, the people of France staged a rally to storm the notorious Bastille fortress-prison to release the political prisoners, and the date was celebrated as a notion of uprising of a modern nation, and sparked a Revolution that resulted in the collapse of the French monarch (although democracy republic of French was truly achieved in 1875), and eventually sent Louis the XVI and his wife, Marie Antoinette to the guillotine 4 years later.

I stayed within walking distance to the Paris Opera House, the Phantom of the Opera echoed beautifully in my ears

The modern era unfolds in the enlightenment of the French Revolution. The growth of the republics and the liberal democracies, the equal opportunities and the human rights, the spread of secularism, are all the outcomes of this Revolution that took place 200 years ago.

When a lot of people admiring the magnificent edifices that are left behind by the rulers such as Palace of Versailles in 1682 by King Louis XIV, and Arc de Triomphe monument commissioned in 1806 to celebrate the victory of Austerlitz by Napoleon Bonaparte, or the iconic Eifel Tower to mark the 1889 World’s Fair, where tourists snap pictures to prove their presence in Paris, it seems to me that the real contribution to the development of modern civilization lays in the four volumes of book, The Social Contract, or Principles of Political Right, written by a French philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), which heavily influenced the Revolution, and became the ideology guidance to the French people.

Philosophical guidance is always present in building of a great nation, and it is true for the successful brands too. For example, the French-made famous top fashion brand Louis Vuitton or largely referred to as LV, leading the trend for more than a century, persists in its own brand as the philosophical guidance, taking pride of the only leather-goods firm, for instance, it never puts its products on sale at a discount. It destroys stock instead, keeping a close eye on the proportion it ends up scrapping, which they called “destruction margin”.

Because of the persistency of its own brand, LV never gives licenses to outside firms, to avoid brand degradation. Besides, its factories adopt techniques from other industries, notably car making, and even hired quality supervisors from auto-parts suppliers to oversee the quality control. The result is fashionable handbags combined with long-lasting utility.

At FingerTec, We Make Things Easy has become our philosophical guidance. Our vision and mission are centered-around this ideology, to ensure easy deployment of our products in different levels of users and in almost all kinds of industries. With a clear guidance, the marketing and technical supports strategies also can be smoothly drawn and formidably followed by the FingerTec team.

The new Arc de Triomphe in La Defense?

One Finger Solve it All

In July, the weather in Paris was unexpectedly cold. We have particularly enjoyed the French’s culture, exquisite culinary and breathtaking scenery. I spent two days in the labyrinth of mammoth Louvre Museum for the Renaissance’s art paintings and antique sculptures, half day in Orangerie Museum mainly admiring Impressionist artist, Claude Monet (1840-1926) collections - Water Lilies series, depicted in varying time and weather. We also didn’t miss the opportunity to join a local tour group to visit Monet’s mansion at Giverny, where we found the garden pond filled with water lilies that inspired his painting works.

Monet's Water Lilies in Orangerie Museum

When most of the modern cities around the world compete to build the tallest skyscraper, Paris keeps the old and the new separated, and its buildings low (except for the La Defense business district at the Westernmost part of Paris) to maintain its legacies. I assume a proud nation with a wealth pool of history and culture, when heard about a tallest building being built somewhere in the world, can simply disregard the news with an enigmatic smile just like its invaluable painting collection, Mona Lisa, in the Louvre.

How I lost appetite to admire Mona Lisa in the Louvre

In fact, when we decided to create our face recognition reader, some suggested that we upload a high-tech look of digitalized human face as the startup image and when the reader at the idle mode. But Mona Lisa immediately prevailed without a second thought. And when our new Face ID 3 model is about to take its debut, we will maintain the tradition. Whose face would be more recognizable than the classic Mona Lisa?

by Teh Hon Seng, CEO, FingerTec HQ

Unfair Competition

Yellow badges inscripted with the word 'Bersih 2.0' (a mass rally planned on 9th July, also known as the Walk for Democracy) flooded Facebook, since a large number of Malaysians responded and supported the call for a clean and fair General Election, and added the yellow badges onto their profile pictures.

Bersih rally in 2007 to call for a clean election

The first Bersih rally was organized in 2007, and ten of thousands of Malaysian citizens joined the march to the Palace to hand over the memorandum to the King. This version two is jointly organized by over forty non-government organizations for the same objectives. Despite the government's clamped down on the pre-launch activities and arrested dissidents and detained opposition party leaders on top of imposing threats, the call for a clean election is still well received by the people.

When the Jasmine Revolution aimed to topple the corrupted governments in many countries in North Africa and the Middle East at the beginning of this year, this yellow Chrysanthemum movement in Malaysia is not a drastic political action, but rather to urge the Election Committee to ensure that no dirty tactics and to create a fair ground for the people to elect a government that truly represents their choice.

Fair ground, that is the punch line. Without the fair ground, there would not be a fair competition. Unfair competition twists the ballot boxes, which would result in political power to fall into the wrong hands.

In the business world, if an entity or a few entities control over the market through monopoly or oligopoly, consumers would be the victim of substandard products or services, or we are forced to pay a higher rate for the same products or services.

When there is an unfair competition, ethical issue would normally arise. Fraudulent, deceptive, or dishonest trade practices are the main causes that give rise to the unfair competition. Competition creates incentives for businesses to earn customer loyalty by offering quality goods at reasonable prices.

And I always thought that the business world was much cleaner than the political arena. My jaw dropped last week when Norana Johar, our COO passed me a document she got from one of our overseas distributors. It was about a Chinese biometrics supplier that launched a poison pen email attack to another Chinese biometrics supplier, with the intention to switch the rival's resellers over to them.

But I dare say that even if the strategy worked, the resellers that this company recruited would not be of any good quality. The malicious attack might damage the competitor's image at a certain extent, but it could also backfire to ruin one own's reputation. Furthermore, accusation without solid ground would expose oneself to some legal risks too.

Even if there are some truthness in the allegations, the market would soon find out. The better way of winning customers to your side is never by assaulting your competitor, but to build on your own competitive strengths.

Innovation is the key element for technology industry, where one has more options to draw out his plans and directions, and build his own blue ocean strategy market more easily than other industries. I always believe that if a technology company sought to use unethical strategies, they chose to walk on the dark side of the moon, never would they see the brightness of the sun.

by Teh Hon Seng, CEO, FingerTec HQ

Frugality in Exhibitions

Many were huge and luxurious. Over the years, I've been to numerous shows and I always observed some extravagant booths erected for the pleasure of the visitors. At the ISC West Security Trade Show in Las Vegas in 2007 for example, before the Subprime Mortgage Crisis, exhibitors competed to show who could play it bigger, regardless the risks of the impending storm. My opinion has always been this - It was a huge waste for just a three-day show.

Some giant companies, mainly through mergers and acquisitions, went a great length to entertain their invited guests and some really turned their booths into a mini casino, or into a lounge to serve beers and snacks. They were putting up a show, convincing everybody that they were still in good shape, and business was still burgeoning. But was this represent the true picture of the situation?

Extravagant booth

A few hundred thousand dollars good money was poured into the gutter just like that. These companies certainly would not agree with my opinion and may simply rebuke it as my defense mechanism.

But the truth of the matter is, many of the companies that were putting up extravagant booths were no Microsoft, Apple, Oracle or Google. Most of them debt-ridden, have poor profitability, some even have red ink in their books. Throwing a big party, inviting their clients to Vegas for networking purposes? When there could be other economical means to achieve the same objective. Some argues that it has always been the business culture to establish 'close-tie' relationships with their clients in the project-based business. But I think for a good sense of a corporation is the ability to stand firm, and have the responsibility to right the wrong. Was it necessary to commit 'sin' in the Sin City?

There is a simple psychological logic for organizers to entice exhibitors into having a larger commitment. Are you sure you want to look modest when your competitor is setting up a huge booth with grandeur design just next to you? Many were not willing to admit 'defeat' and ended up with bigger booths, taller renovations, prettier and sexier models walking around the booth.

For me, I'm okay with having humble exhibition booths, mostly we book 9 square meters, or sometimes 18. There are some of our partners that took larger space than us for their exhibitions.

All we needed to complete our shell scheme booth included a gorgeous backdrop, a few appealing posters or buntings, some FingerTec readers with display stands, a laptop computer, some gifts, product catalogues and two stand managers to take care of visitors. Simplicity. This is what FingerTec strives for. You may call it frugal; I prefer to call it the "Zen" concept.

FingerTec's exhibition booth

I encourage our staff to stay longer to tour and explore the country for a few more days on leisure at the company's expenditure. What a waste to rush back for such a good opportunity to travel overseas! Traveling light makes them easy to move around especially after the show, with brochures all gone and sample units all sold. It is my belief that one has to admire and understand the culture of a country and be able to absorb the findings to improve the products and systems to better be accepted by the local people. That's one of my goals for having my people take part in overseas exhibitions, besides gaining the global market exposure for some technology trends.

It's a common belief that a smaller booth would help sending away the prospects to your opponents; simply because the booth is not visible enough and it doesn't project enough confidence. I can't dismiss this statement all together as totally nonsense. But you can't judge a book by its cover, and furthermore, unless more values are added, nobody can deny that the overall impact can be expected from an exhibition is declining.

When information can be obtained easily and instantly from a website, through Internet anytime and anywhere; surely exhibition is losing its ground. But even though in the Information Age, you would see how little some businesses spend in Internet, but willing to churn out big buck for some less effective expositions.

I don't have an exact figure for the number of customers we yielded from exhibitions, but no doubt it would be much lesser than our Internet marketing efforts. And nowadays, nobody will just hear the bragging in the exhibition and signed up some contracts without thoroughly checking your background in the Internet. But in reverse, a good website alone can deliver sales. We sold our products to 120 countries, only participated exhibitions in less than 20 countries. The virtual power now is much stronger than the brick and mortar.

We have two exhibitions in this month-end. SME Solutions Expo 2011 in Kuala Lumpur and SecuTech in Bangkok, Thailand. “Since FingerTec is making money, debt free and cash rich, why don’t you book a bigger booth?” Please, don’t ask this question again.

We welcome you to come meet us, talk to us, feel our products. Never mind our booth's size, we are whole-heartedly present to serve you, our esteemed clients.

by Teh Hon Seng, CEO, FingerTec HQ

Dealing with Trivial Details

Yes, we all know the importance of details when it comes to term with efficiency. Yes, we split all matters into two main categories. The topmost important versus the least important, and the topmost urgent versus the least urgent. And they crisscross to 4 permutations in total: important and urgent, important but least urgent, urgent but least important, and least important plus least urgent. When asked to list according to its priority, anyone with common sense will give you the sequence as above with the second and third place interchangeable.

big vs trivia

But when ones follow the sequence in practice, they always end up not so efficient. Why? In fact the reality doesn't backfire, but there is some underlying truths that escape our eyes. Sometime you might have to reverse the sequence to achieve efficiency. You may ask why do you have to bother with the unimportant and the least urgent when you have more pressing matters in hand?

A lot of people tend to ignore the thread that sews the permutations, which is, the required time to complete one task. The logical fact is, if a lowest in priority ranking's job just takes 10 minutes, to compare with a top priority that needed 10 days, why not squeeze a negligible ten minutes to tackle it first?

time to complete one task

We all know that when a person follows the priority ranking to finish the highly important task, the insignificance that required only 10 minutes would completely be forgotten after 10 days. Not many customers will make a fuss or lodge a complaint over a trivia, let alone to pursue the matter any further. Of course your boss would not notice or would hold you responsible for not responding to the matter, or sometime even some bosses will agree with you that these are some kind of "distractions" that should be brushed off!

But when we think it in reverse, if a company or a person is taking trivial matters seriously, how would they handle issues that require more attention?

In fact, the irony for a company to emerge as a great company is not because it has plenty of great ideas or great plans in its pipeline, but normally it is due to how good it deals with details than the rivals. The tinier the details of daily operations a company taken care of, the more successful it will become. The same goes to a successful product, two smartphones might look similar, the superiority of one over the other could only be experienced when you own one. And the words spreads.

When a product is serious about its tiny details, besides the cores, it discerns itself and it creates better value. For example, to create a real good user experience and greater user interface for iPad, Apple undergone tens of thousands of discussions. Does it worth that amount of exhaustions? A total of 10-million iPads sold in 2010 sent out a thunderous answer!

How to distinguish FingerTec and other biometrics products? Our resellers and customers have always been impressed by how we dealt with details in everything, be it hardware terminals or software products, user manuals, logistics, support systems, customers feedbacks, or even just a piece of brochure, the customers would see the continuous improvement in details of everything.

This month, we took a step forward to improve the quality of our corrugated carton by redesigning it to endure rougher condition. With about 80% export sales and more FingerTec products travel farther away either by sea or by air around the globe, we have to take extra care in transportations. And as a part of our Going Green effort, we are about to release the Apps for iPhone and iPad version for user manuals with the enhancement of chaptering and user warranty registration. And we have more plans to make FingerTec a great product and a great brand by attending to all the details.

by Teh Hon Seng, CEO, FingerTec HQ

More Than How to Fish

Give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime. This ancient Chinese proverb by Lao Tzu became one of the famous teachings applied by companies or marketing gurus as bait to fish followers. People always believe in proverbs that project sensibility and intelligence, hence many use these wise words to lure newbie to sign up for courses; to make them join as member of clubs; to engage them as franchisee; and all of the newbie with a high hope that they would learn the mentioned skills, or some new techniques that “guarantee” them a lifetime of success.

But these wise marketing phrases are like half-baked dishes; to chomp and to swallow them all could give you terrible stomachache or worse food poisoning. The business world is volatile, full of uncertainties, and the availability of technologies worsen the situation by accelerating the environmental change. The fishing skill will never be enough to feed you for your whole life; your knowledge would be outdated sooner than you think.

It’s no doubt that you may benefit from the teachings in the beginning, but it is still far from the comfort zone that could bring you financial freedom; and the business ‘pond’ would soon be too crowded when more ‘anglers’ joined in for the same catch. Your chances of catching a good fish would be slimmer, and soon you would be starving again. I’d followed exactly the methods you taught me on how to fish, but …..? A good but, but why does it surprise you?

I’m discussing this topic here to provide our resellers with a conceptual advice. Our motto, We Make Things Easy is just like giving fish to our users. We aim to ease our users when dealing with our products, free them from all the troubles. And because they are end-users, it would be much preferred if we could feed them fish even without teaching them how to fish. The lesser the problem they have with FingerTec, the better. We just need them to enjoy the tasty fish. Period.

For our resellers however, the motto We Make Things Easy is more than just giving them fish, and it is even more than to teach them how to fish.

A lot of resellers prefer FingerTec because we make their life easier in two ways, easy to sell and easy to support our products. But disadvantages always come parallel with advantages, when FingerTec takes care of almost everything, it obscures part of the vivid role played by a reseller.

How to distinguish yourself, instead of being overshadowed by a brand? That’s the question of more than “how to fish”. But some of the resellers don’t mind this, they want to be a part of FingerTec, proudly embracing and carrying the brand around. And this is also a question of more than “how to fish”.

If you are a solution provider, if FingerTec is a part of your solution, you have to build your own reputation, and with our branding efforts and reliability of the products, FingerTec may enhance your solutions. How to make FingerTec works for you, and how to brand everything in your solutions, that’s no doubt, is more than teaching you how to fish. We hope our more-than-just-a-product’s holistic branding efforts can be of helpful reference to build your own fame.

And for the second scenario as a distributor, you have to think on how to add local or regional substances into the brand of FingerTec, more than just to “distribute” as merely a product.

If the local or regional substance is your own efforts, like you’re maintaining a local FingerTec Facebook or Newsletter to actively communicate with your customers, or to add local language in the software and hardware that make things even easier in your local market, or to improve your website to be more dynamite or plug-in with some of our functional modules, these are more than just “how to fish”, and you would be surprised of what it might be harvest in the long run.

In short, with the impending competition, teach a man how to fish would no longer feed him a lifetime. In fact, by adding more values or renewing your learned skills or knowledge, why bother to fish when you can breed the whole pond of your unique species of fish?

by Teh Hon Seng, CEO, FingerTec HQ

Labor Day, Diminishing Labor Class

This Labor Day, Hong Kong’s first minimum wage came into effect amid the rising public anger over sky-high rents and a growing income gap in the international financial hub.

This Labor Day in Australia, between 20,000 to 30,000 workers turned out for Labor Day marches across Queensland celebrating workers' rights.

This year in Turkey, Labor Day was celebrated on Sunday with mostly peaceful demonstrations attended by the country’s major labor unions and political parties, a definite contrast if compared to the bloodshed that happened in 1977 during the marching procession in Taksim Square, causing chaos that resulted 34 deaths.

This Labor Day, two Kazakh activists were beaten by police and hospitalized after the police forcibly dispersed groups marking Labor Day in Almaty.

This Labor Day in Malaysia, a demonstration calling for minimum wage saw 21 people being arrested in Kuala Lumpur. They were later released.

This Labor Day, downtown Manhattan was filled with thousands of people from labor and immigrants’ rights groups Sunday, as they manifested to celebrate May Day, an international celebration for workers’ rights annually commemorated on May 1.

This Labor Day holiday, I stayed at home reading “The Rise of Creative Class”, a book written by Richard Florida which discusses the emergence of a new social class, where they use creativity as a key factor in their work in business, education, healthcare, law or some other professions.

The author said in the preface, “human creativity is the ultimate economic resource. The ability to come up with new ideas and better ways of doing things is ultimately what raises productivity and thus living standards. The great transition from the agricultural to the industrial age was of course based upon natural resources and physical labor power, and ultimately gave rise to giant factory complexes in places like Detroit and Pittsburgh. The transformation now substituted one set of physical inputs (land and human labor) for another (raw materials and physical labor) while the current one is based fundamentally on human intelligence, knowledge and creativity”.

The numbers of people doing creative work has increased vastly over the past century and especially over the past two decades. And the norm of this class is, you would hardly see any worker strikes, for example IT industry that housed mostly creative workers.

For the same reason, when the creative class or knowledged worker number is climbing, you would see Worker Union shrinking naturally, even without any suppression from the government or employers.

I agree on the proposed minimum wage, and support the under privileged class to fight for higher wage from the heightening living burden. And to offset the gradually increased labor costing, employers have to upgrade themselves from a labor-intensive business that is based on price competition to become a creative organization that can improve profitability. And for workers, they have to upgrade themselves too to join the creative class in order to upgrade the quality of lives. That’s the trend, brainpower is always stronger than the labor power, and applies to everyone in all industries.

If you are a creative worker, you don’t need minimum wage to protect you, and you don’t need a Worker Union to shelter you; your knowledge and creativity would become your own bargaining power. You have to upgrade your knowledge and creativity at all times, to avoid slowly falling back into the labor category again in any industry.

As we are in the tech industry, this year we celebrated the Labor Day by giving away an iPad 2 to all our staff as a token of appreciation.

by Teh Hon Seng, CEO, FingerTec HQ

Having the Cake and Eating It Too: Sales vs Marketing

When a discussion yields a fruitful outcome, it just makes my day. Norana came to me the other day to discuss a campaign to boost sales. The idea was good; the details were flawless. I was about to give it a nod, but deep down in my heart there was still something deterring me from doing so which I couldn’t figure out at that moment. Then we drifted away discussing some other topics, and the answer suddenly hit me when our conversation arrived at the subject of how resellers place our products in their websites.

immediate result vs long term impact

Yes, that’s the difference between sales and marketing. One focuses on delivering an immediate result, another looks for a broader aspect and a longer-term impact. Sales activities are good to generate extra income in a very short period, but at FingerTec I'm always inclined to the latter.

I understand that psychologically, customers welcome sales or promotional activities such as straightforward price cuts, 10% discount, 20% discount, and so on; the more the better. We do witness some products or shopping malls starting with a monthly or festive season sales, only to eventually become all year long sales. You can't help but pity them because without any promotion, their business would be seriously affected.

As we are not selling consumer products, I perceive more value can be added, and by adding these values, resellers are building up their own strength too alongside FingerTec products. The value might not turn into instant sales, or some resellers might think of the process as “a waste of time”, but with the right ingredients and direction, it will set you apart from your rivals and make your sales and support easier.

Sales activity short-lived; the money value ends together with the activity. However, long-term marketing activity accumulates value that remains for a long time, and the value even works for you even if you're not aware of it.

One might ask, “Why not do both to boost sales and yield longer term value?” Yes, it’s good to have both, but as a Chinese saying goes, you can’t have both the fish and the bear paws at the same time. When you launch a sales activity, you’ll drive away the resellers to aggressively sell your products, they will not spend time writing their successful project story, they’ll not bother to gather customers’ email addresses and etc. So how about slowing them down in sales, speed them up in marketing? (Some people might think I’m crazy)

I always think pragmatism should be mixed with a touch of idealism; only then we can expect more surprises.

A lot of businessmen on one hand think it’s good to tap on the social media tool, but on the other hand think Facebook and Twitter can wait, but sales cannot. And they also feel a standard website with a URL printed on the name card should be good enough, and regular contents update and upgrade of the website is a waste of investment. Once, there was a “pragmatic” businessman that laughed at us for having a big team to maintain a website.

Yes, we do a lot of “unnecessary” tasks from some people's point of view, but all these “unnecessary” would eventually turn FingerTec to be a great product and a great brand in the Biometrics industry.

We urge our partners to write us stories, to send us some successful projects as a case study, to set up their own Facebook and to maintain it, to keep their website active and plug some of our sales and support modules into their website. Create more local contents in the local language. This month, we have substantial growth of Facebook members from Malaysia, because we gave away a special discount for resellers who joins us at Facebook as a member. And our records show us that partners who have their own Facebook and actively manage it also perform well in sales.

My urge is, spend some time and money on marketing, by adding little more value of your own, you would unlock all the hidden values beneath a great product.

And, we should be having very clear direction for future marketing campaigns after my fruitful discussion with Norana.

by Teh Hon Seng, CEO, FingerTec HQ