While I was in school, there was a certain pride for those who did triple science. I was on that side of the team.
And there was also a certain sense of despair when people talk about studying the arts. I also happen to love the arts and humanities as well, so I did take those subjects. Unfortunately, there was a sense that those softer subjects are fluff because there’s no systematic way in which you can score well.
This lack of ‘scientific-ness’ to the approach of improving in arts and humanities makes it less clear what is the knowledge you are trying to grasp when you’re dealing with those subjects. It’s almost like I have no good way of telling why one of my essays happen to do better than another one. And to the system, that seem to be a problem even though the teachers were happy, the students were too.
But the joke of life is that reality is exactly that way. When we cannot pinpoint or figure an exact solution/answer, we say that such and such is more art than science. So is it really better to be good at sciences and think of the world in that manner all the time? The problem with overemphasising sciences at the expense of the arts is growing generations of people who seem to think that they can only live well in a world that is systematic, predictable and can be controlled. If most things that are really important in life, like how to manage your emotions, your relationships, even your own behaviours are complex and more like arts, why are we getting people to be less humans?
The whole snobbishness about scientific education needs to stop; and we must learn to appreciate the creatives more, both in our lives (as we learn to consume more artisanal stuff, and experience products). We may be skeptical and still prefer our mass produced, industrial stuff. But up to a certain point, we need to reconnect with craft, and the idea of it.
There’s been a huge push amongst some of the big corporates in Singapore towards sustainability. Keppel announced their decision to exit the rigs business while DBS claims they have overshot their sustainability financing business and will more than double their target for 2024. One thing clear here is that we are gradually seeing that business forces are playing a big role in forcing the hands of big corporates rather than just concern for climate change.
Climate change might be the main flag that sustainability activists fly but it is not the only driver of sustainability trends. Besides, the climate is merely a global version of the kind of damage that humans have wrought on the planet for centuries. There had destruction of natural habitats for commercial agriculture, which in turn can reduce biodiversity, and set of further chain reaction.
And of course, there’s use of plastics, resulting in excess waste in the environment that is damaging wildlife and their habitats as well (think ocean plastics). It is interesting that we found this amazing material that can last so long without degradation but then only choose to use it for such a short time over its entire potential lifespan – allowing it to stay in the environment as waste instead for most of its life.
So yes when we embrace the fact that we are all an open system rather than necessarily just trying to optimise our own imaginary closed system, we learn to see how we can make things better by making better things. Not things that pollute, encourage bad behaviours or generate more waste, but things that really can change many lives. Here is the chance for responsible corporate leaders to try and channel all of these market, social and political forces together to create a future that we want to have. Not the future we would passively receive by continuing the mistakes of those who came before us.
What are you competing with others for? People say life is about competition, and that is what survival is about. But what are you really preserving yourself for? What are you contributing to this world, what difference are you making?
Too often people are saying they are competing to be better, to move up the ranks, the leaderboard, to get higher scores, better grades. Than yourself? Or than others? What happens when you are better than others? Are you becoming a better version of yourself? In Brene Brown’s podcast episode with Simon Sinek, she said something that struck me: when you’re better than others, your ego grows; are you able to do better?
So we have to ask ourselves what is the work we are doing? Is competition really just about self-improvement? Or have we skewed it to appeal too much to our ego, fed our obsession with our status and sow the seeds to some of the destructive behaviours (eg. Toxic work cultures, lack of sustainability in corporate practices).
For our mental health, and a better future, let’s change the culture of competition wherever we find ourselves by first practising it differently.
While building up my coaching practice, and spending more time with my dog, I was half-expected to pack for the upcoming Chinese New Year. So when work started getting busy, and my work study remains somewhat messy with packaging materials (read: cardboard boxes) accumulated through online shopping in 2020, I drew some flak from within the family.
On one hand there’s always the naggy feeling that those cardboard boxes can be reused or if I can put some of those stuff back into original packaging I could potentially sell it for a higher price when I do need to resell them (which by the way, is environmentally friendly and economical). But on the other hand, my house has its limits with carrying capacity (hint: extremely limited capacity) and I don’t want the reputation of being a hoarder.
We really need to do this better – this whole packaging thing. Making them more sustainable, more reusable, more re-deployable. There is really way too much packaging being used, especially with gifts – think about the amount of ‘value’ that is extracted from mooncake packaging. We need to start telling each other the story that we appreciate rustic packaging-lite (or even non-packaged) gifts. We need to deploy technologies to reuse the packaging so that delivery guys just have to press a button, reveal the product you ordered and have you grab it off him and he can reuse all the other stuff that carried the product and keep it safe. Because it we don’t, capitalism and all of these commercialisation is on this ratchet that sucks up resources for trivial things, that squanders valuable resources, and ignores sustainability.
No I have not read the book by David Graeber though I’ve been told by friends more than once to read it. I did take a read of the essay he published in 2013, which was the precursor to the book and I think right at the point of identification of the phenomena, he already struck at the heart of some of the source of it. It is deep and it entangles a whole host of complexity.
I think getting people to accept the phenomena is a good start; tracing it to our socio-economic systems is a good next step. But we ultimately need to work on moving forward, changing this toxic culture. David Graeber of course was pushing for Universal Basic Income ultimately to deal with the problem but I think there’s a huge narrative around our lives, around the world that supports this whole culture of bullshit jobs that we need to work around. If we fail to change this narrative, then bullshit jobs are here to stay, and to perpetuate.
Given the mess our world is now in, there’s a whole lot of problem-solving, of cleaning up, of undoing the old system that our new generation have to do. And we need to construct the right narrative around creating a future that can contain the solution to these problems, or avert the disaster that awaits. If we continue adopting the narrative of the generations coming before us who fail to appreciate the oncoming disaster, then we are just going to repeat the same results.
There are so many problems we need to solve – we need to get people talking about these problems. Whether it is climate change, the massive inequality, the ills of financialisation of the economies and the world. We need to get the attention of people who might eventually commit themselves to the cause, to spend their own resources dealing with it so they can make a difference as opposed to just making money.
And when we realised how we are spending our time at jobs just targeted at helping people save ‘face’ or to free up their time so that they can do more things that stoke their own egos, we know that we ought to be going out there and creating that new future that we envision, not the one that our boss had that is blurry in our eyes but that we still conform to.
“Kevin, you know you don’t just instant-message a director to ask her something right? And you address them by their appointments, not their first name okay? That’s the way we do things around here.”
So this did not happen to me, it happened to a friend who was in public service and I am appreciative of the very progressive work environments I’ve been in my career thus far. But the truth is, workplaces generally reward compliance before contribution. I’ve previously wrote something similar about the education system that we’ve been subject to and hence the behaviour of the workforce we have trained. Because ‘That’s the way we do things around here’ is more important in the day-to-day moments than ‘How do we make the things we do better?’
But here is an encouragement for everyone who agrees with that previous blog post of mine, and who wants to contribute and not just comply. And here’s for those who despise those who think ‘Doing less means less mistakes; doing nothing means no mistakes (少做少错，不做没错)’. When you are able to first comply, then demonstrate contribution, you can get rewarded with concession to not comply.
What am I talking about? Non-compliance? Not deviating from hard rules that are laid down, but from cultural norms that stops us from contributing. Once you’re accepted as a contributor, as someone concerned about making things better rather than just upholding legacy, you’ll find yourself being able to bend norms a little more. People would give you more lattitude to rearrange things a little and see how they like it.
So don’t be discouraged when you’re different, when you want to do the real work and get hammered down. And don’t lose that sense that you want to contribute and yet is unable because of the culture of conformity. If you can be rewarded in that way for your initial contributions, then you can start making a difference to the organisation you’re in.
Keep growing, and may your adventures ahead match your ambitions.
What do you mean when the product you got is value-for-money? How does that compare to the idea that a product is cheap? Cheap is a comment about the price you pay, nothing necessarily to do with the value you get for your what you pay. Value-for-money is probably what we are thinking of when we hope to get a ‘cheap product’ – because it implies that for the value you’re getting, the price is great! The value is a lot more.
Now in Public-Private Partnership (PPP) projects in infrastructure, there is the idea of a Value-for-Money (VfM) analysis. The idea is really to compare the PPP mode of procurement against that of traditional public sector procurement. In other words, it is taken that the government will need or want to implement the project, just a matter of how the project would be implemented. And in that spirit, PPP is not so much an enabler of projects than just a mere enhancement option that may make the project more efficient/effective, having already established the need for it.
I think too often, we get a little confused about VfM assessments and use it to evaluate if a project should go ahead or not. The Cost-Benefit Analysis that is used to establish the case for the project should be done even before the VfM – and at times, the VfM might be able to take advantage of that work to ensure that the private financing can result in a more efficient outcome. It is important that we see PPP as a mere enhancement rather than a panacea.
A lot of narratives about using private financing to alleviate state budget strains have been overly generalised and becomes simply untrue – because the state might be able to obtain financing at a lower cost and then deploy those funds into projects. So the private sector participation must contribute a lot more than that – and be able to articulate to the governments and help them echo those deeper advantages to the people. And for public sector contracting agencies, there are going to be private sector players coming along to promise lower cost of capital – but someone has to pay for it and you will have to consider whether you’re comparing quality like-for-like and if the output really is going to be as desired. The challenge of outsourcing is that responsibility to deliver projects is still that of the governments’.
For those looking into a career in infrastructure, or seeking coaching for career pivots into infrastructure, please do sign up for my mailing list, and also check out my coaching services.
I really love how Seth Godin thinks about marketing as ‘changing a culture’ and how he defines culture as ‘people like us, do things like this’. And in light of that, every startup, every ‘disruption’ is about changing the culture. We ought to recognise that culture is temporary, and regardless of how you think they are entrenched, they are continuously being assaulted, dislodged by various forces in the world.
Every single startup trying to enter a marketplace is trying to change a culture to some extent; and those successful ones managed that change so well we are quick to forget that it happened. More importantly, sometimes the change is so gradual that it is almost imperceptible. Think about Grab and what they did to quite a few different cultural norms that are supposedly so entrenched:
Flagging taxis on the streets or queuing at taxi stands
Not wanting to call private hire cars for fear of untrustworthy drivers or companies
Having to call cab by ringing a number and then getting to the operator and trying to describe where you are, get the license plate number from the operator and looking out for the taxi
Having different numbers to call different brands of cab because they all have different call centers
Not being able to call the taxi driver you’ve booked directly to ask him where he is when he is on the way to you
How many of these ‘norms’ still exists today and how much have we taken Grab for granted? The new behaviours they introduced includes:
Calling for grab even when there is taxis waiting for passengers at the taxi stand
Going down from the building only when your grab has arrived or about to arrive
‘Grabbing’ as a verb to mean you’re using grab to call a cab to get to your next destination
And the list goes on; you get my point.
Likewise Alibaba changed the culture of the Chinese internet where online merchants were not seen as trustworthy and scams seem to abound. They convinced users to buy from listed merchants, and persuaded merchants to use them as a trusted intermediary, then introduced escrow services to hold on to payments so that both sides can trust each other, effectively mastering the two-sided market in China.
When we think about a startup in terms of the culture they are seeking to change, the norms they are looking to dislodge, we discover how difficult a challenge they have. Yet it is also a way of thinking about their marketing, the story they tell themselves and everyone else, as well as the manner they design their products. All of these will feed somehow into the forces gradually dislodging the current power structures and cultural norms.
On a separate note, if you’re a startup that is just following the culture or feeding off the norms, it is quite likely there can be a dozen of you around to do minor variations of the same things. Of course, it need not always be about making big bucks; and as Seth Godin would say, it’s about making the difference.
Wasn’t quite sure if the journalist suffered a writers’ block when penning this poorly written coverage, which provided hardly any context for which the views he was trying to bring across was spoken. Which NUS forum, what was it for, where was it, slowly trickled in through the article and different terms were used (how did the ‘Tembusu Forum’ name suddenly got into this NUS forum?) And was it held in NUS – it mentioned participants watched it online, so were the speakers also speaking over some video conference or was it live – how did the photo of the speakers in mask get on the article?
Sorry for going a little off-tangent to lament the state of writing and journalism in Singapore but I was intending to comment on this bit of the article:
Prof Koh said that the issue of rented housing versus homeownership was a “mental block” for Singapore. He recounted how he had moderated a question-and-answer session with founding prime minister Lee Kuan Yew at the 50th anniversary of the Housing and Development Board in 2010, and had asked the veteran politician then to acknowledge whether there may be some young people in self-employment or in contractual jobs that face difficulties becoming a homeowner. “Mr Lee’s answer was no. (Home ownership) has become an ideology in Singapore that it is a mental block to building better rental housing for the poor, and good rental housing for the young middle class,” Prof Koh said.
Prof Koh just recounted a comment from then Minister Mentor Lee and it was 10 years ago. That was the pre-Grab era, where the gig economy was more on the fringe, where food delivery was primarily in the domain of fast food companies with their own delivery fleets or the logistics company dealing in the frozen variety. And MM Lee had good reasons to say ‘no’ – unemployment was a whooping 5.86% in 2009 and had come down to 4.12% in 2010. It would continue to fall over the next 3 years and continue to stay below 4% for the next 5 years. And I believe HDB itself would allow for financing facilities to support homeownership even for those self-employed or in contractual jobs.
The context of today is so completely different. The economy shifted and perhaps more importantly, home prices have increased perhaps by about 1.2-1.5 times (residential private property index now stands at 150% that of 2010; while that for HDB stands at 120%). Meanwhile, rental rates for both HDB (up 12% from 2010) and non-landed private property (up 3% from 2010) have not increased all that much. The culture and the economy co-evolves and influence each other.
In the past, the direction towards home-ownership was clear from the government perspective; and therefore home prices were kept low and affordable, criteria for allocation was stringent. The culture was aligned with the policy and reinforced by economic factors. In 2010, the attention of the government might be to create more stable jobs and to keep people employed so that they would eventually be able to become home owners. If you ‘deviate’ from the archetypical Singaporean that the government is seeking to serve, things might be a little harder for you.
10 years on, it would be unfair to use the words and perspective of MM Lee then to claim that the government has a mental block. The question is whether the government of the day is responsive in the right manner to the cultural context and the situation now. Is the leadership team overall working towards a general vision or having their own silo mission and stepping over the toes of one another? With the gig economy a reality and the willingness to keep ‘success stories’ like Grab in our economy, we must contend with the fact that transient sort of employment arrangements are here to stay. And if that is the case, where does the story about home-ownership really lie? Does it continue to fit into the economic realities of today? Are the prices in line with our goals and ideals (forget the nonsense about market setting the price – our market is small enough for the government to corner and control based on our policy objectives)? Is that still the story that HDB wants to continue perpetrating?
In 2010, when I emerged from National Service, I started the discipline of writing extremely frequently, to the extent of having even 2 blog posts on some days. It was a chance for me to ramp up and improve my writing especially during a period whilst I was doing a lot of freelance writing on Economics. I kept up with the discipline of writing also to keep me thinking about the materials I read, mainly from The Economist.
I’ve just loaded all of these older blog posts that used to be on ERPZ.net (it’s now defunct). The intention is to basically collect all of my blog posts, even earlier writings from more than 10 years ago into this personal website. The entries are using the old WordPress classic formatting and so I’ll progressively alter the style and bring it more up to date especially since some of the old photos that were used/linked are now broken. So please pardon me while the formatting looks a bit strange.
Now I want to warn you that most of these writings were from an age where I was commenting on somewhat controversial stuff and perhaps a bit less positive. Those writings might not reflect my current views on various topics and I just want to put this on record that the blog really is about chronicling the development of my thought and maturing process of my thinking. I would really encourage all of you to take up the habit of writing as well in this manner. Doesn’t matter that no one is reading because ultimately, you’re writing for yourself, for the craft.
