Precision. Perfection. Parity.

If making a shirt is a science, wearing one is an art.

When I worked in the Southern California and in the Silicon Valley, what I learned most to me was not so much about the emerging technology, but the refined arts of grooming oneself especially at top level negotiations or formal presentation or making public delivery. This is what I want to share with all of you, here.

In the precision technology area, the bit error rate (BER) in the design is so critical to the performance of a precision semiconductor that a lot of time was spent on its detection and correction, and improvement. All tech companies involved in selling high precision chips in the telecoms and datacoms or transmisstion industry must jolly well people in the sales and marketing groups who dress up well, or almost perfectly.

Anyone who wore a shirt say with a tiny thread hanging from a buttonhole or sleeves, would get a high reprimand from one of the two Henry's, ex-UCLA (Berkeley) EE professors and founders of the the most admired company I worked for.

His rationale was simple, if you could not wear a perfect shirt and a perfect suit, you could not sell our highly precision chips or semiconductors, especially at a high level meeting or negotiation. His laser eyes were so sharp that he always was able to catch some before an event unfolded.

Later I found out that it was not so much his personal style, but it was the standard of the industry we were in. This explains why if we bought an Arrow shirt, albeit at high price, we felt a level of comfort that all buttons and holes and sleeves would be devoid of hanging tails or threads. We paid for the perfection built into a shirt, not just the shirt itself.

I adopted the same industry standard ever since when I interviewed people to work for me in the USA and outside. I found out that there was indeed a correlation that if a person cares not what shirt he wears, his attitude toward precision in life or expression or behavior is never of an excellent class.

This says a lot why politicians make sure they wear a perfect suit for a major event. Just watch out what and how PM Najib wears, how Xi JinPing wears and how others including the CCTV News Anchors wear in front of the camera. If they mean business, they wear perfection.

The cost of an Arrow shirt is never the real issue at hand. The real issue is whether you know what's at stake and in store for you. Precision. Perfection. Parity.