I don't want to be interpreted in any way as not appreciating how lucky I am to be in this position, but oh my god a month is such a short time!!! I feel I'm barely getting a taste of this wonderful country. Despite being extremely westernised, there's still something excitingly exotic about Singapore. It's a country of juxtapositions - as much futuristic city as jungle; fiercely conservative by day, wilder than Glasgow at night; on the one hand as busy as central London; on the other as safe and as community orientated as a small rural town. I can't get used to it. I'm always feeling like there's so much to take in, so much to learn. I think you could live here for years and still find stuff to surprise you.

 That said, I've certainly tried my best to cram a lot in! When Lynsey was here we went to the Night Safari - taking a tram ride round the zoo at night when all the animals are up and about (it's too hot during the day even for the non-nocturnal ones). I'm certain they must have been in enclosures of some kind, but neither of us could quite work out what these consisted of. It feels like you're only inches away!!
Then we got the bus back to reality: back to Singapore the City, and spent the following day exploring the markets of China Town and Little India searching for bargains and the best curry I've ever had.

Did I mention before how good the food is? Wow. I'm a vegetarian, but even so there's no shortage of weird and wonderful new things to try. And my colleagues are quite insistent that I do! I think I've already learned about 15000+ ways of preparing tofu, I've sampled several "sweets" I can't pronounce the name of, "carrot cake" which actually consists of turnip and rice and the infamous Durian: the king of fruits - a highly odorous (euphemism) fruit that's incredibly popular here, seemingly only because it amuses the Singaporeans so much when EVERYONE else spits it out in disgust!!! (I found it not too bad actually - but it is best thought of as something savoury; not a fruit).

Skip back to Sunday and we spent the day recovering from a night in Clarke Quay on the wonderful beaches of Santosa. A place which definitely merits going back to. Absolutely beautiful. Although so far I haven't had a chance! A few of the guys at work are keen I try my hand at Dragon Boating - something I'm a natural at due to my manly upper-body strength. That said - what more beautiful way to see Singapore than from the river. When we stopped - and we had too, frequently - what a spectacular view!

Meanwhile, I'm in the odd position of being simultaneously two weeks away from the end of my placement and only two weeks in to my time at Jurong. In terms of work here, I think the best description would be a very rapid learning experience. It's intense. Trying to focus on a concise means of summarising and comparing OE implementation (and reaction to) at both sites, I feel all I've come up with is new reasons why they could never be the same. All of which beg for further exploration! It's a strange kind of torture having to hone in on one aspect at the sacrifice of another... but oh well, not enough time.
So last week I was lucky enough to be privy to an assessment of how well OE's embedded here by three internal consultants (one of who’s a Change Management expert so you can imagine my excitement)! Not only was this a wonderful chance to get some expert perspective on the need for OE and the reaction against it (not to mention an excellent floozing opportunity!) it was also a great way to see around the site from the processes at the plant, to HR (Jurong's so much bigger than Montrose it would have been really hard to do this otherwise).

Yet all the time I'm confronted by the clearest cultural disparity between here and Montrose: the huge emphasis here on "not rocking the boat". Where people in Montrose were quick and more than willing to point out exactly what they didn't like about OE, people here are almost desperate to paint a happy picture. There's a deep-seated desire to follow rather than question authority and this sometimes manifests in covering issues up.

Yet despite knowing this, and being reminded of this often, I can't help but feel people here (at least most of them anyway) have taken OE to heart. There's so much more evidence here of people really supporting the "continuous improvement" culture, of taking the tools and adapting them to suit the needs of their department, of just generally being more accepting of this kind of change. Why should it be that the same strategy should be more successful here than in the UK? Has it got a lot to do with OE trying to standardise the way of working, therefore impinging on our Individualistic Western way of working but appealing to a Confucius mindset?

To what extent then, is this out of compliance rather than true intent? And turning this around, a more potent question might be:
to what extent are we justifiably suspicious of change and to what extent are we just being stubbornly cynical?

As business becomes increasingly globalised will one way of working prove to be better than the other? Can a Western business ever be successful in an Eastern market or with Eastern employees (or vice versa) without having to adapt its way of working? When waxing lyrical with my manager here about whether there is in fact one Best Practise, and couldn't two polarised environments adopt two necessarily different practises with the same resulting success? he cleverly reminded me: "But you would say that: You're an Individualist".
Faced with the reality that Eastern process-orientated businesses are trumping Western competition the question maybe isn't "WHAT can we learn from the East", but "CAN we learn from the East?"

And that said, just as Singapore is a VERY Western example of the East would we quicker to cite similarities between Scotland and... America, say... or differences?

A good example of this is the disparities between reactions to the "customary corporate propaganda" that accompanies any company change initiative - the photos, the success stories, the team-building days, the OE branded mugs, mouse mats and t-shirts. In Montrose my colleagues beautifully described this as "patronising rhetoric" and "American guff" yet over here they love it! They eat that cheese up; they wear their OE t-shirts with pride. In that way is Singapore more "American" than Scotland? Can we really draw such clear distinctions between East and West and why and when do they overlap?

And if this isn't a "Western" thing is it an inherent "Scottish" thing? Are we making ourselves miserable? Of course there are benefits in questioning what you're being "fed" - surely this strategy comes out of a desire to be risk adverse. But I can't help but feel they're having more fun than us. The cheesy accessories are at worst a waste of money, but at best they're a great morale booster! What advantage is there in being so hostile? How often have you been forced to attend some sort of team-building activity either at work or at uni and initially dreaded it but really enjoyed it in the end? How is it that we can be so aware of the benefits of rhetoric and yet simultaneously be so turned-off by it? Have we become so suspicious of any kind of influence that actually we are holding ourselves back?