Toastmasters Leadership Series: Nine Presenters, One Argument — Leaders are Built, Not Born

Toastmasters is a programme that boldly states that this is where leaders are made.  This was a programme to make good on that promise.  District 80 Division G organised it, in collaboration with Division S and Division E.  The presenters included Eric Tan, DTM, Kin Ng, DTM, Scarlett Zhuo, DTM, and me.

Why Leadership Is a Skill, Not a Personality

Inspirational leadership can be acquired.  Leadership itself is an active, continual process of incremental improvement and striving.  It does not merely happen.  It is a culmination of work and experience, the sum of applied experiential knowledge.  Leadership is the art of providing direction, giving people a vision, and inspiring them to work towards it.  The best leaders develop other leaders, nurture talent, and inspire them.  The best teams are built from exactly this kind of leader.

Contrary to popular belief, there is no single type of leader or leadership style.  Broad definitions exist.  They rarely match what leadership looks like in practice, because these definitions are theoretical interpretations of reality without nuance.  Every person carries their own history, their own talents, their own prejudices.  Leadership develops by finding the common denominator of humanity underneath all that, and building something new from what each person already is.  Leadership begins with values.

To that end, the series ran a set of presentations by established leaders across different fields within the Toastmasters community.  Corporate leadership.  Successful entrepreneurship.  Military command.  Different types of leadership, in different environments.  Every session emphasised practicality, built on case studies drawn from personal experience.

At club and District level, these individuals’ records speak for themselves.  They came from some of Division G’s most accomplished clubs, carrying decades of Presidents Distinguished Club awards, multiple contest wins, and some of the strongest programmes in the District.  The series asked how that accomplishment applies to personal and professional life, and how Toastmasters extends well beyond public speaking.

Below is the synopsis for each session, as sent out in the marketing material at the time, with additional context added.

Session 1: 23^rd October 2021, 1100h to 1300h

The Context for Success —Kin Ng, DTM

Leaders do not simply appear.  There has to be a context, a framework for leadership to function.  Success is contrived, never an accident.  Kin Ng shared his experience building that framework before results follow.  Once a leader can frame his own position clearly in his own mind, he is in a far stronger position to articulate it to others.

Kin Ng, DTM, is a former Commando Officer.  He is also a leadership and presentation skills coach for C-suite professionals and managers.  He served, at the time, as Chief Executive Officer of a technology start-up in the ESG space, managing a team negotiating with investor groups to establish regional electric vehicle manufacturing using graphene battery technology.  Military planning doctrine calls this “commander’s intent,” the discipline of framing an objective clearly enough that subordinates can act correctly even when the original plan breaks down.  That discipline transfers directly into corporate negotiation, where the objective must survive contact with an investor who has not read the same briefing.

Picking the Winning Team — Terence Nunis, DTM

Leaders never work alone.  They have generals.  A good leader chooses his team with care, selecting people who are leaders in their own right.  Leadership is a process, not an event.  This session covered leadership as a team game, and why a leader is only as effective as the team surrounding him.

Terence Nunis, DTM, is a former commissioned officer specialising in threat assessment.  He is Chief Executive Officer of a strategic consultancy whose clients include politicians, governments, and state-owned enterprises across South and Southeast Asia, managing a team spread across the region.  NASA’s own Apollo 13 mission offers the clearest illustration of this principle at its highest stakes.  Flight Director Eugene Francis Kranz did not solve the 1970 oxygen tank explosion alone.  He assembled specialist teams under pressure, each handling a distinct technical problem – power, oxygen, trajectory, and re-entry, and the mission returned its crew safely because Kranz had already built a team capable of functioning without him micromanaging every decision.  A leader who cannot delegate under pressure has not built a team.  He has built an audience.

Session 2: 13^th November 2021, 1400h to 1600h

The Courage to Lead* — Eric Tan, DTM

Leaders are not born.  They are made.  Leadership begins the moment someone realises events need a hand on the wheel, and decides that hand can be theirs.  It takes courage to face the fear of failure, the fear of disappointing others, the fear of making a genuinely difficult call.  No leader has ever tasted greatness without confronting these fears directly.  Eric Tan, DTM, walked the room through his own path to becoming that person.

Eric Tan, DTM, is an IBF Advanced Certified Personal Wealth Manager, specialising in risk management, and led a team assessing political and financial exposure for ultra-high-net-worth families and Family Offices across Singapore and the region.  His team structures complex investment vehicles, including trusts, Variable Capital Companies, and Multi-Family Offices, managing assets under management in the hundreds of millions.

The R.I.S.K.Y. Leader — Dr Tan Kwan Hong, DTM

Leaders take risks.  They never stay on the safe path.  Kwan Hong’s, DTM, framework holds that a good leader must be Resilient, Influential, Strategic in thought, Hungry for Knowledge, and grounded in his own Why.  Taking risks means qualifying them first, through a deliberate thinking process that turns raw appetite for risk into genuine strategic advantage.

Kwan Hong, DTM, ran his strategy consulting business from 2012, scaling multiple businesses from six figures to eight.  As an international speaker engaged almost daily, his live talks and sessions had reached over 1.3 million people across 1,100 organisations in 50 countries.

Session 3: 27^th November 2021, 1400h to 1600h

Managers or Leaders — Gerald Yong, DTM

Leaders always manage.  Managers seldom lead.  A manager supervises the events and resources of the present moment.  A leader weighs the consequences of decisions and plans for them in advance.  Gerald Yong, DTM, walked the room through that distinction and how to cross it.

This distinction has real academic weight behind it.  Warren Bennis, the American scholar regarded as a founding figure of modern leadership studies, put it plainly: managers do things right, leaders do the right things.  The difference is not competence.  It is horizon.  A manager optimises the plan already in motion.  A leader questions whether the plan itself still points in the right direction.

Gerald Yong, DTM, began his career in accounting and audit, spending seven years at a Big Four international audit firm, followed by ten years sharpening his corporate finance skills as Regional Controller across multinational corporations.  He was, at the time, transitioning into the role of Chief Financial Officer at a technology company.

Attributes & Disciplines of Leadership — Robert Ng, DTM

Leaders grow.  They never stay still.  Growing as a leader means acquiring attributes and discipline as an ongoing process.  A leader is only as good as his last success.  Just as still water turns foul, Robert Ng shared his thinking on the attributes a leader must cultivate in himself and in his team.

Robert Ng, DTM, began his career as a systems engineer in the IT industry before moving into shipping.  Unwilling to turn away from challenging opportunities, he had taken on large projects and held multiple regional leadership roles across a career spanning more than 35 years.

Session 4: 18^th December 2021, 1400h to 1600h

Beginning with the End in Mind — Dr Sivanesan Murugayan

Leaders start at the beginning.  They begin planning from the end.  A good leader picks his team, builds their capability, and weighs the consequences of the project before it starts.  He plans for shifts in the market and the environment, rarely caught out by a dynamic situation.  Siva shared how this discipline is built.

Stephen Richards Covey made this habit famous in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, arguing that every genuine achievement is created twice, first as a mental picture, then as a physical reality.  A leader who has not built the mental picture first is improvising the second creation, and improvisation under pressure rarely produces the outcome a genuine plan would have.

Siva is a management consultant with 20 years of senior executive-level people engagement experience.  He holds an Advanced Certificate in Training and Assessment and works as an executive mentor, alongside a private practice as a life coach.

Building a Legacy — Scarlett Zhuo, DTM

Leaders plan to the end.  They manage only for the moment.  Part of leadership is mentoring the next leader and preserving institutional knowledge.  A good leader builds a system capable of running without him standing over it, trusting the people he has elevated enough to let go.  Scarlett Zhuo, DTM, shared her experience building exactly this kind of mentorship programme.

The counter-example makes the stakes clear.  Michael Dammann Eisner ran The Walt Disney Company for 21 years and grew steadily less willing to build a credible successor, forcing out one potential heir after another.  By 2004, a shareholder revolt led by Roy Edward Disney and Stanley P. Gold forced Eisner out, and Disney’s own board could not find a single external candidate ready to take his place.  A leader unwilling to build a legacy beyond himself eventually leaves an organisation with nobody prepared to run it.  Zhuo Shu Zhen’s own model, built on deliberate mentorship rather than accumulated indispensability, was the direct answer to that failure.

Scarlett Zhuo, DTM, is an expert in group health solutions and a top producer with AIA Singapore, recognised for her ability to train leaders and transfer knowledge.  Her speciality lies in building mentorship programmes and identifying talent before it is obvious to anyone else.

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Terence Nunis, DTM | Division Advisor, District 80 Division M | Club Advisor, AIA Toastmasters | Past President & Founder, Awesome Toastmasters

Compliments & Gratitude: The Positive Organisational Culture Few Bother to Build

One of the top priorities of any organisation is establishing a positive organisational culture, one where different stakeholders support each other because they recognise themselves as part of something greater.  People need to feel recognised, enfranchised, and celebrated.  That recognition buys commitment and loyalty.

Why the Brain Treats Praise Like Money

One of the simplest ways to reinforce this culture is inculcating the habit of praise and gratitude for good work, delivered sincerely enough to raise morale.  Positive feedback mitigates stress and pressure, improving team performance.  Neuroscience confirms this is not sentiment.  MRI studies show that receiving positive feedback activates the ventral striatum, the brain’s reward centre, in much the same way a financial reward does, releasing dopamine that reinforces the behaviour that earned it in the first place.  Gallup’s own Q12 employee engagement survey found fewer than one in three American workers can strongly agree they received any praise from a supervisor in the past week, and employees who feel unrecognised are twice as likely to leave within a year.  The positive effect of praise is not merely underestimated.  Most organisations are actively starving their own workforce of a reward mechanism their own brains are already wired to respond to.

The Barrier is Not Praise; It is the Giver’s Anxiety

Psychologists have identified a critical barrier standing between organisations and this positive culture: a mistaken expectation of how effective praise actually is.  People doubt themselves and grow self-conscious when giving compliments, an unsupported anxiety that leaves them pessimistic about the effect of their own words, a kind of impostor syndrome applied to gratitude rather than achievement.  This is the barrier leadership must overcome first, by setting the example itself rather than waiting for the habit to appear on its own.

Why the Habit Rarely Takes Hold on Its Own

Even after giving a compliment, people frequently fail to grasp its actual effect on the recipient, and without seeing that effect, they never adjust their own behaviour to repeat it.  This is best addressed through group activities that build rapport and culture, and through mentors who instill the habit by example rather than instruction.  The focus should sit on the emotional sincerity behind the words, not the craft of constructing the perfect compliment.  Herbert David Kelleher, co-founder and long-serving CEO of Southwest Airlines, built much of the airline’s famously loyal workforce on this principle, personally writing thousands of handwritten notes and birthday cards to employees over his tenure, a habit small enough to sound trivial and large enough to define an entire corporate culture around genuine recognition.  For any version of this to work, it must be seen as genuine.  Compliments and gratitude should be the norm in everyday communication, not the exception, and the habit does not lose its value the moment it stops being rare.  It gains value because a culture where recognition is constant is a culture where nobody has to wonder whether their work was noticed at all.

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Terence Nunis | Executive Chairman, Equinox Zenith | Author, The 1% Playbook: The Billionaire Cheat Code

Indonesian Plans for a Carbon Tax

Indonesian plans to impose a carbon tax.  This was always expected.  Indonesia submitted its post-2020 climate pledges to reduce global emissions, their intended nationally determined contributions (NDC), to the to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). 

Indonesia signed the Paris Agreement, and ratified it through Law No. 16 of 2016.  Indonesia submitted its NDC in 2016, and sealed its voluntary pledge to reduce emissions by 29% to 41% by 2030.  These are ambitious targets.  To achieve this emissions reduction target, Indonesia is in the process of drafting a more progressive emissions reduction scheme under the draft Presidential Regulation on Instruments of Carbon Economic Value for NDC (Carbon Economic Value Bill).  This will likely take a while, and there are contentions as to whether the government would reserve the sole right to regulate the trade, allow private transactions, or have a mix of both. 

The proposed scheme would be to regulate the carbon trade, provide payments based on performance in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and impose a levy on carbon emissions.  The Carbon Economic Value Bill is in the process of being finalised, and is expected to enacted by the end of the year, or more likely, the first quarter of 2022. 

The current Indonesian administration is pursuing an amendment of Law No. 6 of 1983, the General Provisions and Taxation Procedures (Tax Law) to include a new carbon tax scheme.  The proposed amendment would be the fifth amendment to the bill.  This bill is registered with the Majelis Permusyawaratan as one of thirty-three bills included in the priority national legislation programme.  This bill is intended to become the legal basis to impose a levy on greenhouse gas emissions outlined in the Carbon Economic Value Bill. 

Under Indonesia’s Tax Bill (Article 44G), carbon emissions with a negative impact on the environment will be subject to a minimum carbon tax of Rp 75 per kilogramme of CO₂e or other equivalent measurement unit.  This would be around US$5.20 per tonne CO₂e.  The proposed carbon tax would be imposed on individuals or entities purchasing goods containing carbon or engaged in activities that generate carbon emissions.  The Tax Bill contains general carbon tax provisions, which include catch-all provisions to tax any goods or activities that cause environmental externalities, such as depletion of natural resources, environmental pollution, or environmental damage. 

According to the bill, goods containing carbon include, but are not limited to, fossil fuels that cause carbon emissions.  Regulated activities are defined as activities that produce carbon emissions in the energy and transportation, agriculture, forestry and peat lands, industry, and waste treatment sectors.  Indonesia’s NDC identified these sectors as the five main sources greenhouse gas emission contributions.  Aside from this, the full scope of the carbon tax is still undefined, and details are still scarce. 

If all five targeted sectors are taxed without any exemption, many businesses will be affected and will have to recalculate their strategies in response to a carbon tax that directly puts a price on greenhouse gas emissions.  Businesses in carbon-intensive sectors such as coal-fired power plants, oil and mining, pulp and paper, cement, plastic, petrochemicals, and palm oil plantations, among others, will be the most heavily affected.  Industry player have already voiced their concern, and there have been nascent attempts to lobby against it through business associations.  Their primary contentions that the carbon tax places too high a burden on businesses, and not the government.  Businesses have also questioned the calculation of the carbon tax rate. 

Brown energy companies are rightly concerned about the imposition of Indonesia’s carbon tax scheme.  It is expected that there will be incentives provided for taxpayers to lower their greenhouse gas emission.  It is expected that the carbon tax may help generate investment in the renewable energy sector.  This could support the government’s intention for renewable energy to account for at least 23% of the country’s total energy mix by 2025.  That is an ambitious goal.  Currently, the share of renewable energy is 10.9%.  Coal-fired plants dominate the supply of power in Indonesia and are a major source of revenue. 

It is expect that with the expected exponential increase in carbon credits, and the pressure on brown energy businesses, there will be an increasing shift to more sustainable energy generation.  It is about the money.  There is a blue ocean market for generating profit through the issuance of Verified Carbon Units (VCUs), and the sale of carbon credits on the international voluntary carbon market.  As the government moves toward the enactment of the Carbon Economic Value Bill, to regulate carbon trade and provide payments based on performance, more players will explore opportunities to generate additional revenue streams. 

There are a number of projects and initiatives that intend to take advantage of these new developments in carbon trading.  We will closely watch the market in the next few months to see if Indonesia can keep to the ambitious timetable it set.

Fund Insights: AIA Managed Funds and the Chinese Regulatory Crackdown

This addresses client concerns regarding the Evergrande Group debt default and the regulatory crackdown in China.  Many clients hold exposure to the region, and this update covers both the original 2021 position and what has happened since.

Chinese regulators introduced widely publicised restrictions and rule changes across a wide range of sectors and companies.  These rattled Chinese equities and extended to Evergrande Group, one of China’s three largest property developers.  Evergrande built its name in residential property, running more than 1,300 projects across over 280 cities in China.  By late 2021, Evergrande had warned investors of cash flow problems, stating it could default without immediate access to fresh capital.

Evergrande disclosed in an exchange filing that it was struggling to find buyers for some of its assets, amid a glut in the Chinese residential property market.  Its share price had already fallen more than 80 per cent that year.  Fitch and Moody’s both downgraded Evergrande’s credit rating in early September.  The debt problems triggered fears over the wider impact a collapse could have on the Chinese economy.

AIA’s Fund Exposure at the Time

AIA Elite Funds and AIA Global Dynamic Income Fund carried no exposure to Evergrande Group.  AIA Elite Funds run diversified, actively managed positions across four core underlying funds, three global equity funds and one global fixed income fund, none holding any Evergrande exposure.  The underlying funds were the AIA New Multinationals Fund, the AIA Global Quality Growth Fund, the AIA Diversified Fixed Income Fund, and the AIA Global Multi-Factor Equity Fund.

Given rising market volatility and caution over China’s regulatory clampdown, tactical exposure to Asia excluding Japan and Greater China equities was reduced to zero by the final week of July 2021, following months of prior reductions.

AIA Global Dynamic Income Fund ran a similarly diversified structure across three core underlying funds, the AIA Diversified Fixed Income Fund, the AIA US High Yield Fund, and the AIA Equity Income Fund, none carrying Evergrande exposure.  This fund was actively managed to deliver stable quarterly income alongside consistent long-term total returns.  AIA Investment Management increased allocation to the AIA Equity Income Fund over time, using higher volatility to generate healthy premiums from writing call options.  As of September 2021, the fund’s annualised dividend yield stood at 5.70 per cent.

At the time, AIA’s stewardship and focus on long-term investing had carried portfolios through prior market disruptions.  AIAIM did not expect a broad-based impact on global equities, and maintained an overweight position relative to fixed income.  Chinese equities traded at attractive valuations, though AIAIM remained cautious pending clarity on the government’s policy direction, judging a full bailout of Evergrande unlikely and holding a neutral stance on Chinese equities while continuing to evaluate macro and policy developments, alongside US-China tensions over cross-border capital markets, data, and national security regulation.

Fund performance as of 31^st August 2021, annualised since inception: the AIA Elite Adventurous Fund returned 22.16 per cent against a benchmark of 17.84 per cent.  The AIA Elite Balanced Fund returned 14.42 per cent, and the AIA Global Dynamic Income Fund returned 12.22 per cent, against a balanced benchmark of 13.57 per cent.  The AIA Elite Conservative Fund returned 9.52 per cent against a benchmark of 9.46 per cent.  These figures were calculated in Singapore dollars on a bid-to-bid basis, with net dividends reinvested, before fees.

What Happened to Evergrande

A Hong Kong court ordered Evergrande’s liquidation on 29^th January 2024.  The company failed, across eight adjournments since a 2022 winding-up petition, to produce a viable restructuring plan for liabilities exceeding US$300 billion, roughly C¥2.39 trillion yuan.  Evergrande was delisted from the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on 25^th August 2024.  Nearly one million Chinese households had already bought apartments the company no longer had the means to finish.

Accountability eventually reached the auditors.  Chinese regulators suspended PwC Zhong Tian’s audit activities in mainland China for six months in September 2024, alongside a record fine of C¥441 million, about US$62 million, for failures in overseeing Evergrande’s accounts.  This signals Beijing treating the crisis as a failure of financial oversight, not merely one company’s mismanagement.  Country Garden, once China’s largest developer, defaulted separately, confirming the crisis ran across the sector rather than sitting isolated in one firm.

AIA’s Original Position Held Up

AIA’s zero exposure to Evergrande in 2021 remained zero through the eventual liquidation.  AIA Investment Management’s decision to cut tactical exposure to Asia excluding Japan and Greater China equities to zero by July 2021, taken before the liquidation order existed, protected client capital from what became the largest real estate bankruptcy in Hong Kong’s history.

China’s property crisis did not resolve quietly.  It produced the largest developer bankruptcy in the market’s history, a six-month regulatory suspension against one of the world’s largest audit firms, and a fine large enough to signal consequence rather than a symbolic gesture.  AIA’s underlying funds carried no exposure to any of it.

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Terence Nunis | Executive Chairman, Equinox Zenith | Author, The 1% Playbook: The Billionaire Cheat Code

Quora Answer: If Somebody Supports Terrorists, are They Terrorists by Proxy?

The following is my answer to a Quora question: “If somebody supports terrorists, are they terrorists by proxy?” 

Someone who supports a terrorist is either a sympathiser, enabler or active combatant.  They are all not the same.  A sympathiser is someone who aligns with the cause or the underlying reasons, such as a shared sense of disenfranchisement or oppression.  They would be the largest group, but they are often silent in their support, and only tend to express their position in close groups.  These people may either disbelieve reports of atrocities, or be ignorant of it.  They might even try to explain them away, because they are invested in the propaganda. 

The next step of support is the terrorist enabler.  He could be the person who runs a forum disseminating their views and influencing others, or the person raising funds for the group, or the person who facilitates people entering or leaving said group’s area of operation.  They are guilty of major crimes.  The final group are the active recruiters, propagandists, and are seeking to join them in atrocities, either in the area of low intensity conflict, or to open a new front at home, by perpetrating acts of terror.

Quora Answer: Why Does Sweden Have a Higher Percentage of Millionaires Than Singapore?

The following is my answer to a Quora question: “Why does Sweden have a higher percentage of millionaires than Singapore?” 

The population of Singapore is around 5.5 million.  Of these, the wealth management industry broadly estimates that there are between 270,000 to 300,000 millionaires.  That means around 5.5% of the people in Singapore are at least millionaires.  That wealth is expected to grow by 62% by 2025.  The population of Sweden is 10.3 million.  Sweden has 570,000 millionaires, which means around 7.3% of the population are at least millionaires.  That number is expected to grow by around 13% to 15%.  These numbers do not tell the whole story.  Sweden’s CPI compared to Singapore means that it is a lot more expensive to live there.  That means a millionaire in Singapore would have his money go further.  This is tied to the nature of government. 

Sweden has been a nation state with contiguous territory for over a thousand years.  It has been a major European power for several hundred of those years.  Modern Sweden was established in 1523, with the crowning of Gustav I, born Gustav Eriksson; and the dissolution of union with Denmark.  In contrast, Singapore gained independence in 1965.  It took six decades for Singapore to catch up in wealth, despite the smaller population, and lack of resources.  This can be seen in the nature of the wealth.  Much of Sweden’s high net worth have their wealth tied to real estate and land.  In contrast, a larger proportion of Singapore’s wealthy, while they do own land, actually gained their wealth through entrepreneurship.  The market fundamentals are different. 

That being said, while the number of wealthy is expected to grow as a percentage of the population, it pales in comparison to Asia in general.  Western Europe is a place of developed economies, meaning the GDP growth has slowed.  Asia is a place of growing economies, meaning that GDP growth is higher.  That means the percentage of wealthy will continue to outstrip that of Europe in the near future.

Quora Answer: Do Financial Planners Play a Role in Helping Clients Prepare Wills?

The following is my answer to a Quora question: “Do financial planners play a role in helping clients prepare wills?” 

The financial consultant does not prepare the will per se.  He advises the client on estate planning, and that goes beyond the will.  This depends on the assets and their ownership structure, since some assets are owned directly, and some are owner through vehicles such as companies and trusts. 

Insurance policies can be nominated.  This bypasses the probate process, and the proceeds go directly to the beneficiaries.  Assets that are jointly owned, such as the bank account and property would revert to the surviving owner.  An exception is when there is a successful creditor claim.  Assets in companies become part of the estate, and are covered under the will.  Assets in testamentary trusts are subject to the terms of the trust document, and distributed to the beneficiaries accordingly, or as amended by the trustees, within their discretionary powers detailed in that trust document.  All other assets are part of the estate. 

The role of the financial consultant is to work with the lawyer, the relationship manager, and perhaps, the tax consultant, to identify gaps in the estate, and what the client wishes to leave to specific beneficiaries, and propose insurance policies or other means to address them.  Depending on where the assets are in the world, there are considerations such as local taxes, currency exposure, political exposure and other forms of risk to be mitigated.