Kam Raslan’s Talking Edge

(Reprinted from The Edge – Options pullout, 8 August 2011 issue)

Dear Kam,
At a job interview recently, the hiring manager told me my original ideas would not be needed and I should just be happy working with the current ideas in the company’s idea bank. I feel like I should complain to some higher authority about this.
I M Fresh

Maybe they already have some excellent ideas in their idea bank (I wish I could make some withdrawals from there), but that shouldn’t stop them from seeking out new ideas. It sounds like you need to work for an organisation that encourages the creation of new ideas. A bank, even an idea bank, can never be too full.

Malaysia has a fairly small population and we can’t compete with the likes of China, India, Vietnam or Indonesia as a source of cheap labour anymore. Having said that, people in those countries are rapidly getting wealthier. I’ve heard a factoid about India, which says that India’s middle class is now bigger than the population of Europe. Just to be clear, that doesn’t mean there is just one huge Indian guy, it means there are lots of middle-class Indians. You get the idea.

We need new ideas all the time because that is where we can compete. It will be a disaster for all of us if people are discouraged from coming up with ideas, and yet we face discouragement all the time. Sometimes the potential for originality is extinguished early in life at school, where conformity and memorising propaganda is rewarded. Sometimes the penchant for ideas can be extinguished after years of drudgery in a workplace where the key to success is boosting the bank account and vanity of the boss.

But human nature is such that new ideas are always there. We all have ideas, all the time, even if we’ve been told all our lives to just keep quiet and not rock the boat. We have ideas because we’re human, and that’s why our species has been so successful. Crazy and exciting ideas are always bubbling away, but sometimes we’re just too afraid to say anything.

All we need is a little encouragement and suddenly we’re coming up with new ways to do things. Some ideas are really bad but if you work together with a good group of people you can find the gems. Some ideas won’t come to anything but you’ll learn from that anyway.

Sadly, not enough organisations and leaders have the guts to accept new ideas. Never mind, just take your ideas somewhere else.

Dear Kam,
Did you see the new Raya ads on TV? What were they thinking?
Courteous & Chinese

I’ve just written about how we should always be encouraging ideas. But now it is time for an example of a very bad idea.

One of our TV stations came up with a series of Ramadan adverts. They were instantly controversial and the TV station dropped them. This is not surprising because the adverts were truly, truly awful. The ads featured a Chinese girl in a market. She is being altogether all too familiar with the nice, quiet Malay folk. She is asking for a discount and is (gulp) touching the makcik. Suddenly a caption says, “Do not be loud or obnoxious.” Another caption tells us: “Do be polite and discreet.” Clearly, this Chinese girl comes from a place that most local dramas insist all Malaysian-Chinese come from: Chinamanland. If you can find Chinamanland on GoogleEarth, it is probably near to ComedyIndianland.

The adverts go on to show other things but I don’t want to write about them because I find the ads deeply repellent. It is possible, although highly unlikely, that a Malaysian-Chinese girl would go to a Ramadan market wearing nothing but a bikini and would say (as the Chinamanland girl says in the ads), “I feel like I’m the centre of attention and I love it.” But it’s highly unlikely and a very minor issue, and to take the trouble to highlight it is hardly in the spirit of Ramadan. The ads are obnoxious, condescending, negative and divisive. They say, this is our thing, it’s not your thing. Actually, it’s everybody’s thing. These ads are a giant leap away from the spirit of Malaysian festivals that Lat drew for us so many years ago where people enjoyed their festivals but were happy to share.

There was a time when TV ads used to light up any festival time. For a decade or so, Petronas had a series of ads that were made by the late, great Yasmin Ahmad. Her ads could have you weeping in 30 seconds and even thinking about one of her Merdeka ads still gets me choked up. That ad wasn’t about flag-waving, winning the Thomas Cup or the world’s longest sandwich. It had a man talking about going to Merdeka with his late father. It was about the truly important things that reside inside a nation: family, memories of the past and hopes for the future. Yasmin Ahmad was sometimes accused of being overly sentimental but she had a deep, emotional commitment to the deeper truths of her subject, and her subject was ultimately always her country. The audience recognised and responded to the truths behind the images. The ads were always positive and appealed to the better angels of our nature.

This recent ad was a very bad idea on so many levels but one that really sticks out is that it was so unnecessarily negative. The imagery is immediately negative (behaviour that upsets people) and the first caption starts with “Do not.” Do not ever, especially in advertising, start with “Do not.” Is this supposed to put me in a happy mood? You can start by scaring the audience if it’s an advert for mosquito repellent, but this is Ramadan. Why be so negative? And why must I always be spoken to like I’m a badly behaved child? Why not, and here’s a crazy idea, be positive?

Dear Kam,
Where do you get your best ideas?
Brainstormer

I don’t know. I don’t even know if I ever have any good ideas. All I do know is that an idea is worth nothing until it is out there. If you think you have a great idea but you don’t tell anyone or do anything about it then it simply doesn’t exist. You have to put it out there, you have to try to make it happen. Then people will see it and they can decide if it’s a good or bad idea. There’s no point silently sitting on an idea and raging to yourself that nobody takes you seriously. You have to say it, because we all need your ideas.

Reprinted with the kind permission of