6 weeks to Accelerate 2010 accelerate.six.sg

If you have been following my tweets, facebook, or is fortunate enough to receive a personal eDM from me, you would probably realise I’m helping put together one big conference in September called Accelerate which my team in SingTel (SiX) created after realizing that we need to also play our part in augmenting the innovation ecosystem here in the Asia region.

Today marks the 6 weeks to D-Day point, which is a good time for reflection. Generally things are going as planned, like every big event hiccups are a plenty, everyday we’re putting out fire by fire, but everyone’s spirit is still high, especially as we see the ticket sales number climb, and reading some of the social media reports about the word of mouth that’s going on out there.

Here I want to share some personal thoughts beyond the marketing that has already went around, which is more a personal story than anything. If you don’t know me, hopefully you can also related the story.

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At some earlier point in my life, I was faced with a vision, a tension and a confusion. I had this vision that I will throw myself into an unknown, build something great, and bask in the success that comes with making something big happen. The tension that comes with this is that, no man is an island, all great things comes from one’s ability to rally the community, sometimes the masses, in supporting the cause or business that is the vision. But at the same time I have a rather shy personality when it comes to gathering attention, growing up as a LEGO boy and later writing music on my own desk, creating my own software etc.

Then came the confusion: how to reach greater heights when I’m always doing something myself, maybe sharing it with a few friends, dealing mostly in my own social circle? In fact, there were a few attempts to do this, whether it is to sell tickets to strangers to ask them to attend my concerts, or to recruit volunteers for charity work, or to build a sizable fan base of my music. In other words, I am very happy being “successful” through my own colored lens and a pat on my own shoulder kind of way, and there’s enough to keep me occupied already, such that the vision of greatness is not really necessary.

After all, life is a mess. There’s so many things happening around you that you can related to but not care about. There’s no way to put all these pieces together in an orderly fashion, to feel like you have combed all opportunities and thus selected the best choice to invest your time and energy. Moreover, it’s not an employment consideration, which feeds me and support my relatively austere lifestyle, as these investment in time and energy that I’m confused about is still purely a side thing, some say a hobby.

To be specific, this vision, tension, confusion manifested itself very well in early 2005 when I started officially kicking off what I wanted to do for 10 years, that is to start transcribing music, arranging music, and hopefully grow it into something that can be a full time business. There were a few interesting projects; my weekends were meaningfully spent; I saw happy faces on the kids who play the music I wrote; and it helped me bridged my childhood into adult life.

But this vision, tension, confusion came to a point in 2007/2008 when I was exploring with Adrian to tailor a unique pops concert for Philwinds. After looking at the commitment that’s outside of a full time employment, I concluded that I will end up taking up all my available free time for at least 4 months, to be able to arrange some 20 pop songs into at least 10 pieces for the concert. That’s when something dawn on me: I cannot grow my endeavor (of eventually doing this full time) if I do not engage beyond my comfort zone, if I do not play in the “major league”, if I do not take up big projects that’s not just time consuming, but soul consuming.

What more, the “noise level” that comes with a big project was daunting. Singers wanted a change of key at the drop of the hat when there’s at least 35 parts to rewrite in a band, production meetings with Esplanade that was usually beyond the scope of the scriber to get the right sound + effect, the sleepless nights going through youtube after youtube to select the right kind of pieces for the repertoire, not to mention the soul-sucking “radio” that continued in the head while at work and cannot be stopped (if you write music by listening to your creative mind, you will know what I mean). In fact, I even had to ask Lip Hua for help in parts extraction, which was something I could handle personally on a more normal project, but the stress level was just too great to deliver on time for rehearsals. Add to that the lack of proper rehearsal venues and cutting down of rehearsal time, with an end result unknown at the time of writing. There was just too much stake in one project.

The positive thing from the project was this. Philwinds did a good show and gained reputation (and confidence in attempting it again this year OMG…) while at a personal level, I gain some permanent fans that I never knew existed. Some of these people could never had heard my works (some of them due to copyright restrictions in publishing / broadcasting) had they not attended that concert. Even if they are not potential score buyers should my endeavor turns into a full time business, they now form a base of which I know my output carries meaning, from a music point of view.

When you are in the market it is noisy. If there is no noise you are not in the market. Upping the noise level is necessary to create that large effect that’s of the vision, no matter how comfortable I am in my own circle, I need to permanently impress more people, make more strangers into friends into fans. And ambitious projects like this pops concert create that kind of opportunity to do so without contradicting the inward nature that is me (and most possibly many of the readers of this post), helping ease the tension between what I do well and what I should do. As I slowly learn to tolerate more and more noise that is our lives, I also gradually thrive.

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Why am I sharing this, as this post supposed to be about Accelerate? Because I see my organization faced with a similar challenge, except it is a much bigger organization challenge. I don’t want to articulate the specific details here, but the take away is the same: Just like every business, we need more people who can believe in our vision, we need to elevate the noise level to be in the market, we need to resolve the tension between doing what we are good at and doing what matters. Ultimately the more we go into the noise and face it, the less confused we become of our own vision, the more we embrace our bigger identity, the better positioned we are to actually be successful in attaining the vision.

I hope this is a meaningful read to you. I still have to do the advertising bit: there are still a couple of valid promo codes at this moment that entitles you to huge discounts on tickets (you can find one right away on e27’s website, or just contact me).

For those of you who runs businesses especially in the ICM (info comm media) space and also especially in Asia, I hope you can also see this as an opportunity to join forces in creating something that’s larger for yourself, whether it’s through sponsorship, deal rooms, demo pits, or other panel / hands on sessions. This is the chance for you to show that app that you’ve put your heart and soul permanently into our Asia’s Top 50 App list. This is the chance for you walk away telling people you were at the largest ever gathering of ISVs in Asia.

And to my colleagues and partners, if you happen to be into music theory, note that only by augmenting the six chord can lead us nicely to a dominant chord (see Augmented Sixth Chord on wikipedia). Thanks for your support and charge on!