FUD - A GOOD DISEASE

Pictures: Men with FUD Disease.

-relevant to all who wants to take control of their lives, achieve their ambitions and succeed

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One do well to ask:
"If I don't graduate as ACCA Affliate - Will my current/future boss continue to exploit me for cheap labour and overwork me? Will younger chaps armed with overseas degree leapfrogged me on promotions? Will I accept the fact I am not realising my fullest potential? Can I provide best materially for my love ones - parents, spouse, kids and all."

Only the Paranoid Survives
The previous paper to P3 (BA), Paper 3.5, I gave a lecture about INTEL's boss Andrew Grove's ground breaking article that "Only the Paranoid Survives". Research shows that the Top 1000 largest companies at the beginning of 20th Century has all but lived less than a human lifespan. To be exact, only 12 remained relevant commercially. Once a giant ICI Paint (UK) Limited, was removed as a component stock from London Stock Exchange Index points as it no longer is considered large firm. Even IBM, the once IT titan is a fifth in size compared to new giants like Google and Intel. In short, to survive, you have to feel mightily insecure that you will be overtaken, made redundant, beaten.

FUD Disease in Silicon Valley
Deep sense of insecurity of the so-called FUD - Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. FUD drives IT entrepreneurs to prove they are really smart and work persistently to achieve perfection. It was so intense that Clash of Titanic Brains happen all the time. Sometimes, so ugly these industrial leaders fought openly as you could see in the article below. Ego fight you could call it. Its known worldwide (at least in the IT and informed people world) that when Apple conceded that they lost the Delta Model War (P3 - Business Analysis) or the format war to WIndows, it has to be compatible to Windows and pay franchise rights to Bill Gates. Guess what? Mr Gates only agreed on one condition - that his arch-rival Mr Steve Jobs personally come to him and apologise admitting that Windows are superior. Some ego.

What do we learn?
Insecurity and endless energy to self-improve should dominate anyone - especially ACCA candidates. As asked in the introductory paragraph above, should you try to catch the FUD Disease?

Lets learn from the IT moguls, billionaires they are, yet they have FUD disease. Some germs are good like yoghurt with acidophilus germs, so this FUD disease is also good.

Don't let others make you feel inferior.
Don't stop in believing yourself. You can PASS ACCA provided you're willing to be Paranoid like what INTEL Boss said. There is nothing wrong to feel insecure like fear of losing your job, fear that you will not pass upcoming exams. Convert this insecurity to powerful energy, let it flow through you. Convert it to works namely spend unbelievable hours in ACCA personal studies. Outrageous amount!

Know this, it drove Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, Google and Facebook to success! Insecurity rooted in FUD Disease is a symptom of SUCCESS! Do you feel that your boss will fire you? Or give you RM30 yearly increment? Or classmates will beat you to graduation? Then transform your life, to achieving the goal - obtain ACCA certificate as passport to take the world by storm.

Tony Fernendaz of Air Asia did it. So did CEO of Tenaga National or MAS or MRCB Berhad. All these started with ACCA qualification and proceeded to take the world by storm.Yes, its a war! Third World War, intellectual war.

Read the following article, and see for yourself, to win you need positive energy, lots of it, to drive you to success. Of course if you can succeed but deduct the egoism seen in these Silicon Valley leaders.

Third world war, it seems, has broken out in an unexpected place: Silicon Valley. Apple and Google were once so close that Eric Schmidt, Google’s boss, joked that they should merge and change their name to AppleGoo. Now, however, the two companies are at loggerheads over everything from apps to acquisitions—and Mr Schmidt and Apple’s boss, Steve Jobs, are taking the fight personally.

Meetings have been “heated” and “confrontational”. The sense of rivalry is “intense”. The two men are treating the world to “an unusually vivid display of enmity and ambition”. One of the Times’ insiders not only likens the squabble to “world war three” but also dubs it “the biggest ego battle in history”. So much for Julius Caesar and Mark Anthony.

The business world has always been a cauldron of personal animosity, and those animosities have been particularly intense in Silicon Valley. Few do grudges quite as well as geeks. Steve Jobs is legendary for his grudge matches. He has been feuding with Bill Gates for decades. He has described Microsoft’s products as “third rate” and complained that the company has “absolutely no taste”. (“I don’t mean that in a small way. I mean that in a big way.”) Apple’s annoying “I’m a Mac” ads are strikingly personal: they pitch a frumpy Bill Gates lookalike against a too-cool-for-school Jobs doppelganger (with added hair).

Mr Jobs has accused Michael Dell of making “un-innovative beige boxes”, for example. And Messrs Gates and Dell have given as good as they have got. Mr Gates once described Apple’s software as nothing more than “warmed-over Unix”. When he was asked what he would do with then-troubled Apple back in 1997, Mr Dell replied that he would shut it down and give the proceeds back to the shareholders.

Silicon Valley is an incubator of animosity for the same reason it is a wellspring of innovation: it is a small world populated by people who want to prove how clever they are. The boundaries between markets are vague and transitory. Companies flit between friendship and enmity. The pace of innovation is so fast that it is difficult to determine who first came up with an idea. (Steve Jobs once responded to the accusation that he had “borrowed” somebody else’s idea with a quote from Pablo Picasso: “Good artists copy, great artists steal.”)

People in the technology industry talk about spreading FUD: Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. Andy Grove, the former boss of Intel, entitled his autobiography “Only the Paranoid Survive”.

Tech rivals such as Yahoo! and Microsoft have long seen Googlezilla as a calculating predator. The bosses of media and advertising companies worry that Google is destroying their business models, as more and more activity goes online. Rupert Murdoch has complained that it and other online news “aggregators” steal his newspapers’ stories. Apple is rightly worried that Google’s Android phone is aimed directly at its iPhone—and has unleashed its arsenal of legal and commercial weapons to try to keep it at bay.

It is always potentially dangerous when competition bleeds over into personal animosity: judgments can be clouded and strategy distorted. The danger is particularly pronounced with internal grudge-matches. Andersen Consulting and Arthur Andersen spent the 1990s engaged in a distracting matrimonial feud which culminated in an expensive divorce.

Spit and polish
Personal animosity and FUD disease can be the grit in the oyster of competition. Sometimes it can actually create business opportunities: Mr Murdoch’s personal dislike of smug liberals has helped him create a right-of-centre media empire that now includes both Fox News and the Wall Street Journal. Even when vituperation does not drive competition—as is the case in the Google-Apple dust up—it can certainly sharpen it. Mr Jobs’s habit of personalising his commercial rivalry with Microsoft and Dell has honed Apple’s self-image as the coolest company on the block.

Conclusion
Note verbs in article like - unexpected, complain, worry, transitory, vague all negatives rooted in uncertainties that drives these leaders into creating giants today. What a lesson! We too can turn our challenges, problems relate to finance, obligations, conflicts into large positive energy to achieve better, get out of the hole, work relentlessly to achieve it.

Let's shout, "I WILL GRADUATE!" Well, if you did, welcome! There are 168,000 of us worldwide, waiting for you to join the club! Nurture your FUD.

Sources:
Schumper, 2010, The Economist, Look Forward in Anger, March 10
Andrew G, 2001, Only The Paronoid Survives, FT Publisher