My company recently brought in this external “leadership and corporate behavior consultant” to train our team. I took one look at his LinkedIn profile… wah lao eh.
Guy signed on straight after degree, served 20+ years, reached LTC/COL level, then retired and immediately dropped into this high-paying consultant/trainer role. How he get the gig? You and I both know—Kaki network, SAF enterprise connection, connections through his old poly/uni batch boys.
This guy has literally ZERO actual corporate experience. Never had to deal with client rejection, never pitched a deck to a hostile VP, never had to manage budget KPIs in a recession, never worked a real office job a single day in his entire life. But now he’s standing in front of us, wearing his tailored shirt with rolled-up sleeves like he’s doing a TED Talk, trying to teach us “corporate agility and executive leadership.”
What a freaking joke.
His whole philosophy is just re-skinned army regimental nonsense. Everything also must follow strict top-down chain of command, cannot push back, cannot question “commander’s intent.” He genuinely believes that managing corporate stakeholders is just like shouting at blur recruits during BMT. Yesterday he actually told us, “In corporate life, when your director gives an instruction, you don’t offer excuses, you just execute!”
Bro, this one is tech/ops, not outfield exercise leh. If my director gives a stupid idea that will crash the server or burn 50k USD, my job is to push back and warn him, not blindly say “Yes sir, copy sir!” and march off a cliff!
He keeps using army analogies like “drill sergeant mindset” and “operational readiness,” thinking he sounds damn sharp. In reality, everyone in the room was silently rolling their eyes. You can tell he’s so used to people carrying his paper and calling him “Sir” that he cannot handle it when real corporate staff ask logic-based questions. Once you ask him a deep technical or strategy question, he will deflect and talk about “mindset” and “discipline.”
Sigh. Earn high salary just to come into our office and power trip. Anybody else’s company love to hire these ex-regulars to teach corporate culture? How to survive these sessions without getting marked ah?