On 9 August, flags will go up along the corridors, the Home Team will march past, and most of us will have another NDP song stuck in our heads by lunchtime. This year's parade carries the theme "Majulah Singapura, Go Beyond," marking Singapore's 61st year — a reminder that moving forward together has always rested on a line from the Pledge most of us could recite half-asleep: "regardless of race, language or religion." We say it every year. But how well do we actually know th

Why data cleaning isn't the stage before analytics. It is where analytics begins. Data Cleaning Has Always Been the Overlooked Step-Sibling of Analytics If you ask people which part of analytics they enjoy the least, data cleaning will probably appear somewhere near the top of the list. It is repetitive, time-consuming and often feels like the obstacle standing between us and the work we actually want to do. We look forward to building dashboards, discovering insights and hel

Household income is one of the few numbers that matters almost everywhere at once. It is the primary means by which families feed, house and educate themselves; it is also, multiplied across Singapore's 1.49 million resident households, a large part of what makes the national economy move. Governments track it, banks lend against it, and most major life decisions — where to live, when to have children, when to retire — get planned around some expectation of it. And yet "house

Why becoming more efficient at preparing data creates better analytics A question has stayed with me ever since I asked it in one of my workshops. "How many of you spend more time preparing your data than analysing it?" Almost every hand in the room went up. The response wasn't surprising. Anyone who works with business data knows that analysis rarely begins with data that's ready to use. Information comes from different systems, customer records don't always match, dates app

Why good leaders don't just define success. They define what success should never cost. Most leadership decisions begin with good intentions. A company wants to improve customer service. Another wants to reduce costs. A hospital hopes to shorten waiting times. A government agency looks for ways to process applications more efficiently. Whatever the objective, the motivation is usually the same: to make the organisation perform better than it does today. The next step is almos

How organisations quietly shape behaviour. The first week On Monday morning, Sarah walked into her new office carrying the same excitement most of us remember from our first day in a new job. The reception area was welcoming. Her colleagues were friendly. By mid-morning she was sitting in an orientation programme, listening as senior leaders spoke about the organisation's mission, its values and the difference it hoped to make. The message was clear. Customers came first.

In a country you can drive across in under an hour, why the differences between neighbourhoods still matter. Every year, the Department of Statistics Singapore quietly releases one of the richest datasets available to the public: the General Household Survey. Buried in its tables are answers to questions that shape national conversations — about wealth, about ageing, about work — questions that are usually discussed in headlines as single, national percentages. “1 in 7 househ

How good organisations slowly lose their way When a company makes headlines for the wrong reasons, our instinct is to search for the moment everything went off the rails. We look for the unethical executive, the disastrous board meeting or the reckless decision that brought the organisation down. Failure feels easier to understand when it can be traced to a single event. Howard Yu's recent article, The Science of Moral Decoupling, challenged that way of thinking. His argument

Spend a little time on Singaporean social media and a pattern emerges quickly. The cost of living is too high. Owning a car or a home feels out of reach. Work and school leave little room to breathe. There's a small, well-connected class — scholars, senior civil servants, established families — who seem to have everything, while everyone else competes hard for what's left. And, inevitably, someone points out that some other country does it better. Spend time instead with fore

For over a decade, FYT's curriculum has been built around three words: Data, Insights, Decisions. As we wrote in Bridging the Gap in the Analytics Value Chain, good analytics doesn't start with a spreadsheet — it starts with a clear question, a set of hypotheses, and a disciplined path from data to insight to action. That framework has shaped how we teach, and how our students learn to think. It has worked. But as AI becomes part of everyday work, we think it's time to make e