The Yin Yang theory, a non-confrontational approach to culture

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Me, together with Professor Tony Fang, Stockholm University, School of Business. As I am right now working on a collaborative research project with Professor Fang, it was nice to listen in on his guest lecture at the Department of Applied IT, at the University of Gothenburg and Chalmers University of Technology.
Text and Photo © JE Nilsson and CM Cordeiro 2012

Tony Fang, who is Professor of Business Administration at Stockholm University, gave a guest lecture today at the Department of Applied Information Technology (IT), on his concept of a Yin Yang perspective to culture. In today’s Internet culture, where collaborative work can be done through Dropbox, Skype and via emails, that he was in Gothenburg proved a good opportunity for us to meet in person.

His talk was hosted by Professor Jens Allwood and Dr. Nataliya Berbyuk Lindström of the Department of Applied IT located at Campus Lindholmen, that is part of both the University of Gothenburg and Chalmers University of Technology here in Sweden. And it was at Campus Lindholmen that I found myself spending the better part of this day in the company of old friends.
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Managing complexities, extending Singapore’s national defense strategy of “auftragstaktik” to its socio-cultural fabric.

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I read with interest, Peter Ho’s RSIS working paper no. 248 on “Governing for the future: what governments can do”.

It is a paper based on an adaptation of his speech delivered at the Australia-New Zealand School of Government (ANZSOG) Annual Conference 2012 in Wellington, New Zealand on 26 July 2012. Mr. Peter Ho is Senior Advisor to the Centre for Strategic Futures and Senior Fellow in the Civil Service College. He serves as an Adjunct Professor with the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies. He is a Senior Fellow of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, and was formerly the Head of the Civil Service in Singapore.

In brief, Ho outlined in his paper, how accelerating changes in the 20th century, for example such as population growth, rapid urbanisation in combination with technological innovation has come to result in complex interconnected environments that in turn give rise to unpredictable trajectories and “wicked problems” (Horst and Webber, 1973) or interesting problems that have no immediate / obvious solution.

Globally, there are many international diplomatic talks that revolve around “wicked problem” issues such as climate change, food, water and energy supply, all preferably within a sustainable economic development framework. At a local level in Singapore, Ho cited the example of the complex nature of extremist religious pursuits that led to the need for new warfare strategies that counter forces both material and cognitive in order to keep the nation secure and how Singapore was under the constant challenge to disarm extremist ideologies.

But whether facing global political-economic environmental changes or ideological extremism, Ho’s point was governments that have the agility and capacity to act swiftly in such circumstances will benefit and thrive in today’s complex environments. And my perspective is that it is in this aspect that Singapore’s regional geo-political position and albeit seemingly contradictory socio-economic policies have most of the time benefited the country and its people on multiple levels.

As a national security strategy in coordinating counter-terrorism for example, Singapore has continuously worked towards and adopted a multi-layered, integrated and holistic “Whole-of-Government” (WOG) approach, leveraging on the diverse strengths of existing agencies and ministries at various levels from strategy and policy to operations.
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Lemon custard polenta cupcakes

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Lemon custard polenta cupcakes.
Text and Photo © CM Cordeiro 2012

Polenta is etymologically Latin for the hulled and crushed grain of barley meal. It is today the English borrowing of the Italian word to refer to coarse ground cornmeal had been eaten as porridge or gruel since the times of the Roman Empire, before it was generally introduced in Europe in the 16th century. Because of its accessibility and easy preparation, polenta had mostly been conceived as peasant food through history and up until the 1940s to 1950s, it was still considered “poor man’s fodder” even in Sweden, prepared through boiling in water and eaten with a little salt, anchovies or herring.

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Weekend dawn, Swedish west coast marina

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A weekend morning at the Strysö yacht marina – ’twas the time before breakfast, when all through the lull, not a creature was stirring, not even a gull… (freely after C. C. Moore)
Text and Photo © JE Nilsson and CM Cordeiro 2012

The summer has been unusually rainy they say. But for me, it has felt like each summer’s day thus far has had something interesting to share or show. Perhaps it was the growing up in Singapore, in the midst of warm tropical rainstorms that hits you one minute just to be replaced by sunshine from a clear blue sky the next minute that makes it impossible to think anything bad about rain, especially the warm kinds. Perhaps it is the fresh Nordic air, the complete silence or the deep sapphire blue waters lined with green, softly waving gossamers of seaweed that touches the primordial in you. The sense of serenity that greets you in the early mornings of the southern archipelago of Gothenburg is priceless.

In the land of the Midnight Sun, where the nights are short during summer, the stillness of the early weekend morning goes uninterrupted with nothing much stirring. It’s difficult to tell if the occasional persons are early risers or just on their way home from a yesterday’s come-together.

As I sit at pier side contemplating the breaking colours of a seaside dawn on the late summer days of 2012, I overlook the narrow waterway that leads the occasional boating tourist to this place that is also an important coastal route for commercial trawlers and bunker boats servicing containers ships en route to the Gothenburg harbour. I think it marvelous too that the same waters would come in rich shades of azure when lapping off the shores of the Swedish west coast archipelago that turns various shades of mangrove green when curled around the granite littered shores of Pulau Ubin in the archipelago of Singapore. Sitting here at dawn, that one force that swirls around the two entities that are continents apart in different climate zones reverberates at your core.
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Gödel’s theorem and executive education: reflections from the Chinese automobile industry’s strategy in talent management

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Part of what makes being in academia so exciting for me is the very incompleteness of each project as expressed in Gödel’s theorem, here not referring strictly to its origins in mathematical logic of incomplete axiomatic systems, but rather used in a general linguistic sense of how research by definition, lies in a perpetual state of unfinish, the completion of which would warrant it redundant.

It is this continuous dialogic and dialectic process of thought, creativity and innovation of ideas, a journey that continuously reveals and uncovers what was previously obscure or even unknown that I find oddly comforting – finding familiarity in the unfamiliar, a constant in the flux of things.

As part of a collaborative publishing effort with friends from the IESE Business School in Barcelona from the International Faculty Program (IFP) of 2011, where colleague Peter Zackariasson was an editor, I contributed a chapter to the book entitled, New Perspectives in Management Education (Amann et al. eds, 2012) entitled “Chinese Wisdom. World Quality” Looking East for brand innovation and change management: reflections from a study on Geely automobile 2007-2011. It was a paper that reflected upon brand innovation and change managment in China’s Geely automobile from the years of 2007 to 2011. It was also during this time that Geely acquired Volvo Cars from American Ford in 2010, landing China the single largest foreign acquisition, at the same time (McDonald 2010, Wang 2011) setting up several technological and knowledge platforms for China that lent support to the country’s efforts in the aggressive acquisition of knowledge in general.

Although American owned, Volvo Cars continued to carry a strong Swedish heritage in quality and branding where many of their engineers continue to sit in Sweden today. This meant that the acquisition of Volvo Cars by Geely was under sharp and curious observation both East and West, not in the least by Swedish academics and researchers from the disciplines of management science and international business (IB).

Having previously studied the Swedish management style in comparison to the Singapore Chinese management style (Cordeiro-Nilsson 2009), a hypothesis of mine with regard to Geely’s acquisition of Volvo Cars was that the strict vertical hierarchy and authoritarian leadership style of the Chinese might end up severely clashing with the more lateral, egalitarian and consensus seeking leadership style of top level Swedish management, even if under the steering of American Ford. It made interesting observation to see how these differences in management ideology of which one had its roots in centuries of authoritarian dynastic rule, compared to the more individualistic developments of the occidental cultures, might be construed and subsequently manoeuvred in a cross-cultural setting.
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A rustic version of the Eurasian Almond Sugee Cake

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For anyone with an adventurous mindset, I would like to share my take on a rustic version of the Eurasian Almond Sugee Cake, made with unblanched almonds, topped with almond-vanilla icing.

My vesion of the Eurasian almond pastel de sémola de rústica, served with the grated zest of a lime atop the almond-vanilla icing glaze.
Text and Photo © JE Nilsson and CM Cordeiro 2012

As a little Eurasian girl growing up in Singapore, I can remember Almond Sugee / Semolina Cake from a very early age. In my family it was also my father who carried the Eurasian heritage forward and who had baked the cake in the family well before I was born.

My grandmother, Dorothy Yap, and me in 1978.

To all appearances this cake might well have a long history stemming from Medieval Europe where we can find numerous variations of similar semolina cakes today. Some googling around, shows that in the Middle Eastern countries, they have variations of Revani (an orange semolina cake), Namoura (without eggs) and Basboosa (with coconut and yoghurt). In south Europe, Italy has its own variations of torta di semolino made with lemon or orange, and from India to Southeast-Asia, there are variations of the sugee / sooji cake made with essence of rose or rose syrup poured over the cake after baking and cooling.

The recipes also vary with regards to the use of semolina, with some recipes using pure semolina flour and others calling for a mix of semolina and plain flour.
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Sémola bizcocho de almendras – the Eurasian Almond Sugee Cake

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Dorothy Cordeiro, my grandmother. Photo from the late 1990s.

For some reason, history is hard to hold on to in Singapore. The pace of life is fast, the landscape continuously sculpted by new and evolving technologies. It somehow seems like everything new is immediately better than anything old.

The Eurasian community in Singapore is small and memories are fading fast, which is one among many reasons why I have put some effort into reconstructing my own grandmother’s, Dorothy Cordeiro’s recipe of the Eurasian Almond Sugee Cake.

While my grandmother managed to cut a svelte figure throughout her life, I have the fondest memory ever from my earliest childhood of her mother (my great-grandmother) being one of the rotundest women I have ever seen. So, go easy on this cake, if you get to try it!

The aroma of my grandmother’s cake was so tantalizing that my grandfather Aloysius, could hardly wait for them to cool before stealing a few slices for his own cup of afternoon tea, to be enjoyed in the company of his chirping caged birds.

The Eurasian Almond Sugee Cake from a recipe by Dorothy Cordeiro.
Text and Photo © JE Nilsson and CM Cordeiro 2012

In my earlier blog post on “Blueberry Muffins Intellectual Property“, I have mentioned that the secret to good cooking is not only knowing the recipe but knowing how to put it together. Therefore, no two individuals will produce the same result even with a shared recipe.

I have personally stood beside master chefs, recipe in hand, observing and absorbing as much information I could and still ended up with something different once at home. Then I have seen other chefs recreating dishes from memory, from entirely different raw produce, but still getting very close.

So with this said, in keeping with the belief that recipes are meant to be shared, if not evolve, here is as close as I can get it, Dorothy Cordeiro’s traditional Eurasian Almond Sugee Cake.

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Swedish west coast Harbour Festival, Donsö 2012

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On an island vintage transport moped, with an Emilio Pucci beach shopper bag.
Sail preppy in nautical red and blue at this year’s Donsö Harbour Festival organized by the local sports club.
Photos JE Nilsson and CM Cordeiro © 2012

As is the tradition the first Saturday in August, it was festival day at the island of Donsö in the Swedish west coast archipelago just outside of Gothenburg.

The crowd filled up fast along the Market Street as soon as the festival began. Compared to the Donsö Harbour Festival of 2011, where an enormous Skandia engine from the 1950s caught everybody’s attention with its comforting low key chug of a ship’s heartbeat, there was no real crowd stopper around this year.

The narrow street between the small red storage huts for shipping goods huddling near the seafront soon filled up with stands carrying all kinds of items. Everything from Swedish homemade marmalades and candy to hand knitted woolen scarves that one would always need up here in the Nordic countries, to high style cruising outfits.

Besides being something of a tourist summer’s paradise, Donsö island is also a functioning suburb to Gothenburg with the extra feature of having more ship owners and freight companies per square meter located here than anywhere else on the planet. Nothing much hints of this though except than that the number of luxury yachts and motor cruisers that are docked here side by side, reminds you more of Cannes at the Cote d’Azur than a Swedish fishing village.

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Coconut cookies

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Coconut Cookies
Text and Photo © JE Nilsson and CM Cordeiro 2012

I grew up with colourful homemade coconut candy and have been so accustomed to the thought that the recipes for most coconut related foods would contain Asian influences, I was surprised to have found a coconut cookie recipe in the Swedish cookie book, Sju sorters kakor that was labelled a “traditional” Swedish recipe!

Of course Sweden already began trading with the Far East since the 1700s, and would have had access to a variety of tropical spices and food types, so on hindsight, it was perhaps the realization that these coconut cookies were a favourite sort of the household that came as a pleasant discovery.
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