Sufiah Mohd Salleh,
National Parks Board

Sufiah is the heroine of the Lifestyle Business Division. Beneath her shy and unassuming exterior is a superwoman who produces high quality work under minimal supervision. She makes the task of assisting eight managers and the director look easy. With her built-in Google search engine, she always has answers to our queries. A manager said recently: “I really don’t know what I’ll do without her.” She is the division’s heartbeat, No. 1 in her work and No. 1 in our hearts.

Mark Teo, NParks

Eric Pok & Ryan Hong,
People’s Association

One Saturday at the Toa Payoh East Community Club, children having tuition were interrupted by a huge husky on the premises. Unaware of possible risks, they crowded around the dog. Constituency Manager Eric Pok and Constituency Management Executive Ryan Hong were concerned for their safety and ushered them back to class. The duo lodged a missing dog report, bought dog food, and took the dog to a vet to scan for an embedded identification microchip. This helped to reunite the husky with its owner. Their actions were truly commendable.

Jeffery Lim, PA

Leelavathi,
National Environment Agency

Customer Service Officer Leelavathi has been with NEA since 1976. She’s always consistent in her work. At the peak of the election campaigns last year, our unit received a high number of appeals and feedback. Leelavathi went the extra mile, despite the increased workload, and scanned our replies for errors before they were sent out. Because of this, we prevented some erroneous replies from going out, especially during this sensitive period. Leelavathi retired on March 29 and we’d like to take this opportunity through Challenge to thank her for her invaluable service.

Yan Chui Ping, NEA

Arthur Ng,
Immigration and Checkpoints Authority

Arthur is our unsung hero who ensures that all court forms are accountable for Court mention even if it’s not his duty. It’s our fortune and pleasure to work with him. Always remember that when you need help just call the name “Arthur” and he’ll be there. Do you ever wonder why you can sleep soundly at night? It’s because the great superhero “Arthur” has done his rounds.

Sam Samudra Mizzy, ICA

Related posts:

1. Engaging the Public – Overrated or Necessary
2. Serving the Nation and Proud of it!
3. The Bucket List
4. The Gen Y Workforce: How Are They Like?

Submit your answers using the form below by JUNE 15, 2012

All winners will be notified by email.

cforms contact form by delicious:days

Congratulations to the winners of the March/April 2012 Trivia Quiz!

• Elaine Goh, NHCS
• Muhamadnoh Wandy, LTA
• Angie Yeo, DOS
• Jasmine Ho, NHCS
• Amanda Ho, DOS

Related posts:

1. Get Moving!
2. Get Sporty
3. Trivia Quiz March 2012
4. Singapore’s National Sport

Do you have a photo that is funny/interesting and deserves its own caption? Send us your funniest photos with your creative and witty captions to psd_challenge@psd.gov.sg and you might just get them published on Challenge Online!

Don't forget to ensure that your photos are yours and you have the right to distribute the photos!

Related posts:

1. CSI
2. I Take my Hat off to You
3. Going Places
4. Bonus?

The first features our theme of Serving the Nation and Proud of It, with stylised representations of various functions in the Service. Use this especially if you identify with one of those icons!

The second is contributed by our PS Week partners, the Singapore Kindness Movement. Each week this month, SKM will send out an email encouraging us to practice kindness @work, so that we can “make each other’s day” and indeed serve the nation with pride. Use this if you support kindness for a more gracious workplace and society!

Related posts:

1. How to Copy Right
2. One-Der Map
3. Save the Earth Conference 2011
4. Three Ways to Motivate Yourself at Work

We all want it yet we don’t often admit to it: We want to be loved.

The best place to get it? Yourself. Trying to earn it from others may result in over-achieving, perfectionism, self-neglect and other problems, both at work and home.

Self-love is a major route to happiness. And happier people have been found to be kinder.

And some wise leaders know how this leads to better service. Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com, and author of Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion and Purpose said: “Businesses often forget about the culture, and ultimately, they suffer for it because you can't deliver good service from unhappy employees.”

Hal Rosenbluth, former CEO of Rosenbluth International, who wrote The Customer Comes Second: Put Your People First and Watch 'em Kick Butt, said: “Service comes from the heart, and people who feel cared for will care more…Happiness in the workplace is key to providing superior service”.

Let’s take an analogy to really understand this. When you’re on the plane, and if there’s a crisis, however much you love your child, you are asked to put on the oxygen mask for yourself first, and only then for your child.

It’s the same with service. Serving others is an important and enjoyable part of life. But we can only offer joyful and sustainable service to others when we love ourselves and are joyful enough.

If we serve others from a place of lack within ourselves (for instance, if we’re very tired), we may not be able to help meet their true needs, leaving them unfulfilled by the interaction with us. We would have lost an opportunity for a mutually fulfilling and compassionate connection with another human being.

A friend lamented to me, “How can I love myself? There’s no time! The leaders need to change. There are too many meetings, new goals and rising expectations. I have no choice!”

Those in leadership do have influential choices. So their level of self-love is critical. But we are all leaders of our lives and have the power to make many choices too.

To those holding leadership positions, ask: “How much do I love myself?” and “How do I enable my employees to love themselves?”

To all employees, including leaders, here are 10 things you can do to love yourself.

1. Appreciate specific things about yourself daily.
2. Play. Be creative.
3. Rest. What’s your body trying to tell you? Rest your mind too. Develop a contemplative practice. If at work, enjoy the silence at a place of worship or quiet space nearby.
4. Forgive yourself. Everyone makes mistakes. Show yourself compassion. Learn and grow from it.
5. Release the need to chase “perfection”.
6. Heal emotional wounds.
7. Courageously say “No” to what is hurting you or adding little value to your wellbeing.
8. Watch your diet– physical, emotional, mental and spiritual. Do you eat, watch, read and listen to what inspires, nourishes and challenges you to grow?
9. Discover your purpose in life. When you die, what do you want your life to have meant?
10. Invest in relationships that support you to love yourself.

“I have no time for all this!” you might say. Then that may be your most important first act of self-love – to give yourself “me-time”.

Start your “me-time” with a regular specific duration each day, even if it’s just 20 minutes during lunch. This is your “petrol station” time, where you refuel. Protect it. Get a self-love support buddy so you can get encouragement for your new journey.

Watch “Eat, Pray, Love” or “Mary and Max” for inspiration. And link up with resources that can support you.

Love yourself more and watch your service blossom to a whole new level at work and at home.

Related posts:

1. Leaders Help Employees Find Meaningful Challenges at Work
2. Where Am I Going? Is My Organisation Going to Get Me There?
3. How Do I Respond to Change?
4. A Time for Handles

Do you have a photo that is funny/interesting and deserves its own caption? Send us your funniest photos with your creative and witty captions to psd_challenge@psd.gov.sg and you might just get them published on Challenge Online!

Don't forget to ensure that your photos are yours and you have the right to distribute the photos!

Related posts:

1. CSI
2. I Take my Hat off to You
3. Going Places
4. Bonus?

Do you have a photo that is funny/interesting and deserves its own caption? Send us your funniest photos with your creative and witty captions to psd_challenge@psd.gov.sg and you might just get them published on Challenge Online!

Don't forget to ensure that your photos are yours and you have the right to distribute the photos!

Related posts:

1. CSI
2. I Take my Hat off to You
3. Going Places
4. Bonus?

Education authorities worldwide are at a crossroads. They find it difficult to know which way to turn. The accepted purpose of education is preparing the young and the not so young to deal with the changing world around them. Preparation includes acquiring knowledge, learning personal discipline, becoming articulate and lucid, understanding analysis, exercising judgment and obtaining social skills to enable civilised and rational social intercourse.

Character self-determination

The way education is conducted in practice means that only some of these have been addressed in the past. Acquiring knowledge is applauded partly because it is easy to measure whether it has been acquired or not. Personal discipline has been seen as more useful for the conduct of lessons than for the conduct of life. It is now necessary to treat it as an essential part of character formation. The world can no longer function without our self-determining our characters.

Analysis is acknowledged but expected to lead to a prescribed answer – any other being regarded as unacceptable or even seditious. In a world of ambiguity and uncertainty analysis must assume a more important role leading to the individual concluding his own moral structure rather than one handed down by religions or social tradition. Personal discipline and analysis are closer together than ever before.

Lucidity comes a very poor fourth but still beats judgment which, for reasons I cannot fathom, is thought to be outside the scope of students of any age. Social skills are almost totally ignored even though when students enter or return to work their emotional intelligence quotient will be the most important in their relationship kit.

Fine feathers not penguin suits

Examine the root of education and you will see that it is a ‘drawing out’, not a ‘shoving in’. Each student has talents and potential. Education is intended to expose these, to help them to flourish, to celebrate individuality, to expand personality. It is intended to let each bird show its fine feathers, not to produce a colony of penguins.

To this end the acquisition of knowledge should be a relatively unimportant part of the system. Knowledge is freely available at the touch of a button. Why clutter up the mind with what is easily accessible? Denmark allows Google into the exam room; so should everyone else. What a student needs to know about information today is how to assess its validity and how to judge its source.

More important still is the need to relate information to the questions we have to answer. Asking 100 students at the Management University recently what were the implications of the Costa Concordia accident for Singapore I met with blank faces. Most had head of the disaster to the passenger-carrying liner off the Italian coast. None had related it to the shipping traffic in the second biggest harbour in the world.

The accident, of course, has huge implications for any busy shipping lane or harbour where the rules of pilotage probably need urgent reexamination leading to fundamental change if a further accident is to be avoided. I have always questioned the old rule “Master’s orders, Pilot’s advice” in areas of exceptionally difficult navigation.

Flexibility, Debate, Tutorial

If knowledge acquisition is relatively unimportant today how can curricula be designed to accommodate the ‘drawing out’? I suggest there are three rules for this Flexibility, Debate, Tutorial. Streaming has always been a nightmare for anyone except the dedicated scholar. Scholars have made their mark in many societies, including Singapore, but they are not the people who create wealth or do most of the work. A scholastic genius needs education like everyone else but of a specialised sort.

A less academically inclined student is as potentially valuable to society and needs to be able to change direction as s/he discovers new talents. I might have made an excellent builder but the talent was simply not recognised – even by me - in spite of the many things I constructed. Flexibility of the path I was set upon would have allowed that talent to emerge. The importance of the Tree on the other side of the Field is second only to the importance of being able to change trees when necessary.

Exchange of views both adversarial and collegial is key to developing an individual. The debating chamber has been the best source of sensible decision since mankind could talk. Of course, once institutionalised it becomes self-serving and forgets the needs of its members – the British House of Lords is a good example – but even so it remains the greatest source of learning available to us.

Tutorials are a sort of mini-debating chamber and benefit from the less formal and more flexible environment. It is here that the real exams should take place. “Marking” papers for correctness of answers in any other than purely technical matters looks positively quaint in the light of today’s needs. For all its faults, subjective judgment still remains the basis of all good engagement, partnership and relations. That is what a student is being prepared for. S/he will learn significantly from their Tutor’s example.

Education is about being able to lead lives of fulfillment for oneself through service to others. I know of no measure that will forecast that. I know many wise people who will help to ensure it. They are Mentors.

Copyright © Terrific Mentors Pte Ltd 2010. All rights reserved

Related posts:

1. When – and When Not – to Measure
2. Becoming Truly Global
3. Leadership Article 8: Leadership and Creativity
4. When Age is Meaningless

On time: Amos Koh, Senior Scientist at the Marine Aquaculture Centre (MAC), catches the 8.30am boat to St John’s Island daily. If he misses the chartered boat, he’ll have to hop onto a public ferry a few hours later.

Walk to work: Once he arrives on the island, he makes a seven-minute trek to the MAC office. The MAC, which is part of the Agri-Food and Veterinary Authority (AVA), develops new technologies to help local fish hatcheries and farms increase productivity to boost Singapore’s local food supply.

Fishy lab: Amos’s team studies ways to breed stronger, faster-growing Asian seabass, and more recently the Pompano. This includes ensuring that “broodstock” (mature individuals selected for spawning) spawns well, selecting the best eggs for breeding, weaning fish fry from eating microorganisms to fish feed, before sending them off as fingerlings to local farms. “The best quality eggs are highly buoyant. They get scooped up and the fry raised from such eggs are usually more robust,” says Amos.

Hello babies: Amos checks on the health of 2-day-old Pompano fish larvae. He scoops a beaker out of a tank, looking fortheir feeding responses and key morphological developments of the larvae. His team had recently gotten Pompanos to spawn, and is now closely tracking their survival. If critical water and culture conditions are not adjusted properly, this batch won’t do well and more than half may die by the following week.

Diffusion of knowledge: The MAC shares its findings with local fish hatcheries to help them improve the survival rates of their larvae too, hence raising productivity.

Close up: Amos peers through the microscope at a specimen of the 2-day-old pompano larvae for a closer look.

Routine checks: Amos conducts a routine check in one of the culture facility to ensure the fishes are growing well. Otherwise, he will make necessary adjustments.

Micro feed: During his inspection round, Amos stops by the lab where algae are mass cultured. The algae are given to rotifers which are microscopic organisms that are, in turn, fed to fish fry. The MAC breeds algae from pure culture and supplies them to fish hatcheries. The better the algae, the better the survival rate of fish fry.

Checking in: Amos returns to larviculture unitand checks on thefry production.The two week old Seabass fry swarm eagerly towards him as he scatters fish food. Amos’s team are trying to wean them slowly off from rotifers onto dry feed. Those that cannotbe weaned overwill die eventually.He sees an aggressive fry that has become cannibalistic and scoops it out.

Protection: Amos and his team vaccinate theSeabass fish fry. “This booststhe immunity of the fingerlings against specific disease so they will have better survival rate at the farms,” explains Amos. Vaccination is done by dipping the fry into a tank of water that fish vaccine. The fingerlings absorb the vaccine through the gills and their bodies. They are exposed to thefish vaccinefor about 30 seconds.

Paperwork: No job is complete without the paperwork. Amos goes through the daily records to check on the various batches of fish that are at different growth stages. The records help MAC scientists refine their “protocol” – their hatchery techniques of rearing fish from eggs, to larvae, to fingerlings – so as to increase survival rate. So far, Amos’s team has improved the survival rate of the Seabasslarvae from 20-30% to over 50%.

Taking stock: Egg samples are collected from each culture batch to conduct genetic tracing to the contributing parents. With the results, the team compares the growth rates of different batches of larvae. “If one batch grows faster, we can try to get their parents to spawn again,” he says.

Back to shore: Amos is off to visit a fish hatchery and a fish farm to check on the growth of eggs and fingerlings supplied by MAC. He hops onto a chartered boat back to mainland Singapore with some co-workers who have to attend a conference.

Partners: MAC supplies satellite hatcheries with eggs from its broodstock. Amos visits SIF Technologies at Pasir Ris Farmway which has been earmarked as a satellite hatchery to produce fish fry for the local farming industry. He checks on the larvae that are about two weeks old.

Look how you've grown: Amos looks on a batch of two-month-old Seabass fingerlings. He checks if they’re strong by seeing how they swarm to the feed, and notes the ammonia levels in the tanks. These fingerlings will be sold off to fish farms once they are about 3 months oldwhere they will be robust enough to cope with the conditions out in the sea.

See the light: Amos has a discussion with a hatchery staff on the conditions for growing algae on-site as there is a mass culture trial in progress. He suggests using artificial light during the rainy season. They also discuss ways to scale up the operation so the hatchery can eventually supply good quality algae and rotifers to other hatcheries.

Off to sea again: After a late lunch, Amos is off to sea again. This time, he hops onto a small boat at Changi Jetty and heads for a fish farm near Ubin island. A storm is approaching and the waves get choppy.

At the coastal fish farm: Amos arrives at acoastal fish farm operated by Rong-Yao Fisheries. Following the successful spawning of Pompano at MAC, Amos and his team went on to transfer the technology and to develop a Pompano breeding programme for the farm.

Successful spawn: Using MAC’s “structured and scientific” approach, Pompano broodstock was successfully spawned at Rong-Yao Fisheries in October. Amos watches on as Mr Luong, the fish farm managerfeeds the locally-bred fingerlings.

A sustainable supply: The farmmanager says that he usually relies on imported fry from Taiwan, which is seasonal in nature. For example, during the winter season, there would be no supply. Hence, a local pompano breeding programme will allow local farms to develop their own capabilities in breeding Pompano, resulting in a ready supply of Pompano fry which would in turn boost local food fish production.

A sustainable supply: According to the AVA, the local production of Pompano was approximately 4.4 tonnes in 2010, and a fivefold increase to about 20 tonnes was expected for 2011. By 2012, the supply of Pompano is expected to be 80-100 tonnes.

Off to the supermarket: This batch of Pompanos is from Taiwan, but from April to May 2012, Rong-Yao Fisheries will be ready to sell off locally-spawned Pompanos.

Home sweet home: The Pompanos from Rong-Yao Fisheries are sent by boat to a local supermarket for sale the next morning. Amos hops onto the boat to catch a ride back to shore where he calls it a day at 6pm.

Related posts:

1. Fishy Business on St John’s Island
2. Design Thinking in Schools – Mata Ikan 360 project
3. Flights of Fancy
4. Beneath the Caverns

Duck and Cover is an original comic strip chronicling the life of Jonson Quek, a mild-mannered duck in the Public Service. Follow Jonson as he experiences the ups and downs of being a public officer.

If you are in the Public Service and have an interesting storyline that we can use, do contact us. We would love to hear from you!

See all Jonson comics in Duck And Cover.

Related posts:

1. Duck And Cover: Earthquake!!!
2. Duck And Cover: The Misunderstanding
3. Duck And Cover: A One-on-One Meeting
4. Duck And Cover: KPOP Kraze