Please note that you may want to do everything in a
project at once according to your "better" way and your
timing with no limits. That is the mark of your internet
generation. But that takes lots of times and in the end,
you take so much time that "opportunity costs" (if this
is the correct word) have passed you by.
What I usually suggest to my younger interns at Toa
Payoh Vets is to produce results within 3 days by doing
smaller segments of the project.
For example, in doing a stock inventory of drugs, I have
this young man, Mr Lim who has taken 2 months and has
not been able to produce the complete list of unit
pricing etc. This is because he tries to do all
categories at one time. I have asked him to do one
category at a time e.g. "Prescription Diets", then "Eye
Drops" and that should be the way to produce results to
show to your boss that you have achieved some results
for discussion and editing.
The google generation will always switch on their
computer to do the writing. Sometimes, a piece of paper
and pencil achieve faster results.
I hope you will be open to receiving instructions to
adopt the existing processes and not try and do new
things for the time being.
By "opportunity costs", I mean that the opportunity to
make money has slipped by if a person takes a long time
to produce results like trying to get every information
about a big project in place.
In the commercial world, performance counts and time is
money. For the youths, time is eternal and I note that
many simply waste their time daily in not being
productive, efficient and able to accept instructions
from old fogies whom they think are outdated and
close-minded.
Old fogies have learnt from the hard knocks of life and
some processes and systems have been produced through
trials and errors that are not explained to the interns
instantly, due to lack of time, pressure of work and the
need to assess of the intern's motivations and
diligence.
It takes a lot of time to explain the rationale of why
the processes and systems are being used and unless the
intern or youth has shown character and competence,
there is so much the old fogies have to perform such
that there is little time to just talk about the history
of why certain tasks need to be performed in the present
situation.
If there are improvements and innovations, the youths
can propose later. But first, the new intern or employee
must learn to adopt existing processes first and become
productive. Performance and prompt results count in the
commercial world and this is not taught in the junior
colleges and universities, in my observations of the
interns and new employees.
TOA
PAYOH VETS
