Somewhat rarely (if not never), now I’d like to talk a bit about management. People management to be more specific. Now, since I’m not an organisational behaviour or marketing or business guru whatsoever, I’ll mostly just tell my real life encounters. For what it’s worth, I am risking myself to sound arrogant and condescending here. Believe me, I am trying to make a point here rather than boasting or insulting. I have to endure some mental pains when writing some of the not-so-pleasant parts. Now, before going on, I suggest that you read point 9 of what Guy Kawasaki learned from the late Steve Jobs if you haven’t done so.

I had stints with students’ organisations at my high school with varying degrees of success. I’ll take a few samples. I was once the project manager of a science exhibition. It was a failure. I guess because I was somewhat ambitious, but most of the people in the team didn’t share the enthusiasm, and they weren’t all equipped with the right skills. If you were in my team, I’m very sorry to say that it was among my early exposures to bozo explosion (I’m not saying that you were one of the bozos, but I’m not saying otherwise. I simply am not telling you which one you were. Your own five-minute contemplation would reveal the answer). I ended up doing some of the tasks myself, because I couldn’t accept second-rate stuff, and I was so young and reckless, and I would badmouth or at least annoy anyone who did second-rate stuff, and they would be sick of me, and they would be reluctant to do their tasks. (Just in case you were one of these people and I had not apologised to you, I apologise to you now.)

However, not all went bad. I was also involved in producing school magazines. I consider it as a success. The team before the one I was involved in could only produce two editions in a year. My team (by that, I don’t mean that I was the leader, but who cares) could produce four. From memory, a couple of them was sold out (they had a celebration party and they neglected to tell me!). There was no bozo explosion there. The manager knew how to manage and he was firm with deadlines and stuff and he was involved in filling in holes. I was given full authority in the desktop publishing department. The principal caricaturist always made sure that everyone laughed out loud reading his work before putting it in the magazine. The manager trusted us and verified what we accomplished. One time, our mentor teacher invited a professional journalist to give a workshop, and when we showed the journalist what we had produced, he praised our work. We simply made no compromise on quality. It must be good, or it would be scrapped to the bin.

Fast forwarding to university years at University of Indonesia… ‘Twas all a different set of stories. I had the biggest bozo explosions there. Typically, organisational teams had big numbers of people involved. Most of the people were clueless and/or not enthusiastic in what they did. Probably they were only interested in padding their CVs. And to be honest, I caught this bozoness disease (yes, it was an infectious disease) myself in some positions that I had.

I had a bitter experience trying to organise a hi-tech event. The student association chairman already put me in charge to lead the obese team, which was mostly my fault. I didn’t recruit the best people. I could not. It was a highly inefficient organisation, and led to various kinds of ineffectiveness. The publishing team didn’t know how to make pretty posters. The programme planning team weren’t technology enthusiasts. (At least the photographer was top-notch. My deputy and secretary also had the great endurance required. But of course, those weren’t enough.)

Still at the same university, I had varying experiences when managing a team of journalism photographers. At one event, I chose some random people that applied for the position. Another bozo explosion. The event was spread around two campuses, and one of the campuses was very big. So I had to spread the task of taking pictures to people. That meant, I had to distribute films (yes, at that time, we used this thing called film to capture images!) to these people and I specifically instructed them to return the films to me ASAP after they finished taking pictures. Some bozos did not. There was no great energy in the team overall.

For an event after that, I was again given the trust to lead a journalism photography team. This time, I chose to hand-pick most of the people myself instead of merely relying from the list of applicants. Most of them were the people that I had known earlier. They were great, they were enthusiastic, they did their job well. Great team. But was it because most of us had known each other? Or was it because we were indeed trying to do our job well? I suspect the latter. In the team I described two paragraphs ago, I had known most of the people, so I don’t think familiarity was a significant factor.

Fast forwarding to… now. Oh, hang on, rewind half a year. I was thinking of starting a band. I met lots of people, some great, but I was too shy to ask them (in the case that they were great) or I was reluctant (just average, or below par, or good but I was not really interested in their skill) or I just didn’t feel things would work out well between me and them (this was fully intuition work). One thing that was clear, I wanted the band to only have great musicians that I could work with.

And then Chelsea and I met for the first time in the middle of this year. I was about to play a piano-and-piano duet with John Curtis, and before we started, she asked me if she could join us. I said, “Sure.” We played Sonny Rollins’ St. Thomas. I was impressed by her playing. I was really stoked. Look, I had never soloed on that piece comfortably before, but that thing changed at that time (and the change’s sustained).

I liked her playing, and she liked mine, and we decided to form a band. We quickly agreed on the piano-bass-drum format. The little trouble that we had at that time was that in Melbourne, a good bass player was an endangered species (but luckily, humans are trainable to become bass players so hopefully we won’t end up like dodos). But a few weeks later, we met Daigo, and we agreed that we should ask him to join our band. I hadn’t played with him before deciding to enlist him, but I had just watched him play. There was something unusual yet interesting in the way he played that I couldn’t quite figure out. I just somehow liked it, and I approached him, and he was interested to join Chelsea and myself. (Speaking of good bass player scarcity, Daigo and I are also in MOU Quartet.)

So, here I am now, with great musicians who are virtuosos in their own rights. I am nowhere near bozo explosion this time. I know, there are only three people, so arguably, explosion is impossible. But, if I decide that I want to expand this band, I will continue doing it this way: avoiding bozo explosion at all cost.

(To anyone I have offended in this post, I sincerely apologise and hope that you already are a far better person, better than I.)