Three years ago, I invited Alice Chang, the CEO for Cyberlink and former CFO for TrendMicro and a NTUBA alumnus two years younger than I, to speak for my Finance Freshmen Workshop. Alice encouraged my students to step out of their “comfort zone”. Alice said young people in Taiwan like to be in a small, familiar, and friendly surrounding, mostly play safe when they have to choose a path, and feel satisfied with the smallest possible achievement. Alice received a BBA from NTU, an MBA from UCLA before she became an MA for Citibank. Few years later, she got on board with Steve Chang and Jenny Chen and helped TrendMicro IPO in Japan, before she started up Cyberlink along with her husband professor JH Huang. Now Cyberlink is the second (well, distant second) largest media software company of the world, follows Adobe. It seemed that Alice took quite a few years to make herself ready and really started up her own business. True entrepreneur not only begins a business, he/she has to be able to build an effective and long lasting system for it, and able to help it grows in the long run. It is his/her duty to the shareholders, coworkers, and to the society as a whole. It would take a lot of learning and preparation before that. Not to mention that he/she has to deal with those unexpected impromptu challenges from time to time. Most people have read “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost, but rare have someone really make use of it. Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. (The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost, 1874-1963) Alice thought a little feeling of “adventure”, “dangerous” or even “adversary” would help young people grow. But when a college professor assigns more than two exams and two project reports for a class, students might just be scared away and drop the class. When a college professor sets a 10 page minimum for the term report, students will come screaming and whining aloud. Here I recall D.H. Lawrence’s Poem as follows: I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself. (wild thing by D.H. Lawrence, 1885-1930) For classes we have at NTU finance; only Felice Chen’s “professionalism and leadership” warrants a dangerous feeling for students. Thanks for her tough and tall orders there, students may need this. My next suggestion: stop whining, young men and women; it’s your future.
Posted on: Fri, 30 Aug 2013 04:05:53 +0000
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