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Winners of the board game competition in Cyberjaya, Wednesday class I assume..jpg)
Students playing the game MMU Cyberjaya..jpg)
Everyone is smiling, except one. I wonder if he is about to go broke in the game.jpg)
Students from Friday group.
Cnergy celebrates Alwyn's newborn child..jpg)
Photo from the board game exhibition
Preparing the game.
A look at the game board.
Playing with a group of students.
Briefing students how to play the game, the camera man caught us by surprise.
Exploring the game themselves?
Studying the game cards. Hmmm.
Negotiation is the key to victory
This group believes they can think better by standing
Have fun while playing
Guy in Red: " You're Fired! "
Another player in red proposing some ideas.
Has red have anything to do with winning?Source: http://malaysia-today.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=28481:li-fook-gao-are-we-being-fair-to-pr&catid=17:guest-columnists&Itemid=100130
Assuming (B)elum (N)yanyuk company (in short BN) was the sole apple wholesaler in Malaysia and there was no other apple wholesaler to compete with them over the past 50 years. We had another 3 individual apple sellers that we did not pay much attention to because we hardly heard any of their advertisements anywhere. All wholesale apples were sold in a bag, with each bag contained 100 apples and had to weigh around 5kg to ensure those apples were almost identical in size.
During the early days, BN’s apples were very good in quality. We as customers were very happy and satisfied with their apples supply. We were very supportive of BN’s apples to the extent of, even though occasionally we found out that there were 8-10 bad apples in a bag, we were forgiving enough to not ask for single cent refund. After all, they were the only apple wholesale seller available at that time.
After 30 years in service, BN’s directors got greedy. Their directors demanded to live like a king in a palace, so they had to come out with a way to quadruple their profits to build their palaces.
First, they started to import low quality apples to replace those high quality apples and sold to us at the same price as before. We found something amiss about the apples’ sweetness, but they assured us that the apples were the same. Being naïve, we trusted their words as we trusted them for the past 30 years.
Unfortunately, by importing low quality apples did not quadruple their profits, they had to figure out other ways to make their palaces dream came true as soon as possible. Next, they started to tamper with their weighing machines’ scaling. With that, they managed to reduce the number of apples by 30 per bag yet they continued to sell us those apples at the old price despite being cheaper in cost.
Of course we were unhappy with the move and accused them of frauds. But due to of our own stupidity, they managed to convince us that these batch of new apples weighed more because they contained more nutrition than the previous batch of apples. Since we had trusted them for 40 years, so we decided to believe them one more time; after all we yet to have an alternative to choose from at that point of time.
After 3 years, those BN’s directors happily moved in to their new palaces. To their horror – after staying in the palace for barely 2 months, they started to realise that the cost of maintaining a palace in good conditions required much more money than to build it. To make things worse, those directors’ families got greedy as well, some of them demanded that their father to bring them to Disneyland’s tour every summer.
To fulfill all those evil requests, they raised the price of apples by 50% citing rising cost of transportation as the culprit for the major increment. They were braved enough to take this drastic move as they were not afraid that we (the customers) would run away because they were the only one with apples in Malaysia.
When we protested against them, they were arrogant enough to threaten us with defamation suits and requested the police to detain us under (I)kut (S)uka (A)ku Act. Greed brought them to the point of arrogant. They forgot that - we the loyal customers were the people that kept them in business for 50 years. Because of our blind loyalty, now they treated us like their slaves -- whereas in contrary to the business’s world where the customers were always regarded as the boss.
We kept our cool and protested in silence. Quietly, we figured out ways to stop relying on BN for apples. We forced the other 3 individual apples sellers to merge together to become the alternative apple wholesaler in Malaysia. For 50 years, most of us never really bought any apples from them because we trusted BN’s advertisement that their apples were hazardous to us. They agreed to give it a try and with our support, they merged together under a single company called - (P)rotect (R)escue Company (in short PR).
With the birth of PR, we now have 2 apples wholesalers to choose from. But we yet to get the best bargain for our apples, because PR is still weak because they are still in the transitioning phase as running the small apple stalls is very much different from running a wholesale company.
After realizing their sales were dropping exponentially, BN promised to make some changes to their business conducts. However, BN’s promised is like the saying “tomorrow that will never come.” BN’s new approach is always about shouting the same thing - that they have the best apples in town, and we are getting the best bargain from the price we paid. They even come out with a slogan called “1Apple – The only apple company in Malaysia you should trust” to hoodwink us that they are changing for the better. Besides that, they also promise us that they will change their arrogant way of treating us but quietly they are still using the same old tampered weighing machines to weigh their apples behind our backs. But now, we are smart enough not to fall into their tricks again.
As for PR, they are still learning on how to be a good apple wholesaler. They are still learning on how to maintain the quality of apples, how to reduce transportation costs, how to expand their business to meet our never ending demand while moving away from the old habits of selling apples individually.
PR knows that their existence hurts BN’s rice bowl a lot. BN is getting desperate by the day as their business can no longer cover the cost of their palaces and their families are grumbling because they have not been able to visit Disneyland for the past 2 years. PR also realises that counter attacks and sabotages from BN are imminent. Hence, PR has to be always on guard to continuously fight off BN’s attempts to ruin their business.
To add to PR’s list of misery, all transportation companies, apples suppliers and packaging houses are very reluctant to accept orders from PR because they are afraid of offending BN who has given them business for the past 50 years. The business environment is tough for PR because BN is trying to influence everyone to be biased against PR. Despite all that, PR managed to stay afloat for the past 20 months because we gave them enough business to survive.
At least PR knows, we are the one that give businesses to them. Unlike BN, who treats us as we owed them the money to keep them in business. They think PR was purposely started by a certain few to rob their business away, while forgetting the fact that PR was born because of their greed and arrogance towards us.
Next Level showcased our products at the National Innovation Conference & Exhibition (NICE 09) organized by the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation.
