Author Archives: Kevin L

Singapore’s economy is going into a period of much less optimism and this of course is something that we are not alone in when we look at the global economy. As much as we’d like to think we are insulated from some of the headwinds or that we can mute some challenging effects with expansionary budget, the fact that we are an open economy remains.

The idea of a small export-oriented economy succeeding in the world and that being the right strategy finds itself more in the global context that the economy is in, rather than the inherent structure or nature of the economy. Of course, Singapore put in place policies that allows us to execute on the ‘small, open economy’ idea well, and we reaped its success but let us not kid ourselves with that inward looking view that our policies by themselves stands up well (as though they are inherently good and not made optimal due to circumstances).

I’ve been a champion of using closer study of history (some older pieces includes this and this) to appreciate and understand the global context by which an economy succeeds or fails. And as the world enters a phase of increasing trade tensions, nationalism, indulge in the folly of closing their economies, we too, need to rethink our ideologies associated with being able to compete, and consider how far we are going with our so-called advantages and whether we need to invest more deeply into them. Our traditional metrics of competitiveness, of targeting growth might need to change and this is a window of opportunity to shift people’s attention to some new ways of looking into diagnosing the growth of our economy and fruits of our labour.

For a start, considering the structure of the economy in terms of demographics and how income, wealth and government’s revenue structure from various socio-economic groups in the country will matter. Next, looking at our connections with the rest of the world in the form of Foreign Direct Investments, Direct Investments Abroad, net Direct Investment Abroad, Imports, Exports and scrutinising the network of our Double Taxation Agreements and Free Trade Agreements will help. Finally, we can consider vibrance of community life of our citizens – be it civil society, or religious activities’ involvements.

When we were younger, our parents gauged our growth based on physical parameters like weight, height; then when we grew a little older, they looked at our behaviours, and the intelligence we exhibit. As we enter teenage and adulthood, our growth became more based on social parameters and maturity. While in some sense, those attributes manifest themselves imperfectly through grades, salary, job positions, etc, we need to acknowledge that as one grows, we ought to look at different and new parameters that indicates genuine growth.

Likewise, in an economy, if we are still stuck with looking at GDP and having policy or resources responding to that, then it would be rather immature. Yet at the same time, we ought to realise that those figures/quantities that represents the concepts behind them, are often flawed and we ought not take them too seriously to the extent of assigning them 100% weightage in reflecting the reality of matters. Finally, the global context we reside in must inform our actions and allocation of resources, investment into different areas. A man do not grow inherently or inwardly, he grows because external circumstances forces it to – if we often just think about insulating ourselves, then we may even insulate ourselves from the need to grow.

Clinical psychologist Sara-Ann wrote a recent piece on CNA about young people burning out in life and work (especially work); it relates somewhat tangentially to my not-so-recent musings on prestige careers. Strangely, she decides to spend more of her piece empowering the individual, listing 5 points that the individual can do to combat burn out. Nevertheless, she tucked in the piece a very important statement we should delve more deeply into, as a society:

[T]he onus is on organisations to recognise the importance of workplace health and build workplace cultures conducive to their employees’ physical and mental health.

There is a need to put this responsibility back to organisations; and one of the difficulty of doing this, is perhaps the misconceived notion which Sara-Ann herself perpetuated by saying:

Indeed, organisations should tread cautiously and strive to achieve a balance between increasing productivity and deleteriously endorsing a hustle culture.

This is ultimately an issue of balancing short-term and long-term priorities for any organisations. To me, the only perspective worth taking is still the long-term perspective and anything that is used to deal with short-term issues must not detract from the long-term perspective. The lack of worker engagement, endorsement of hustle culture, always asking for ‘more’ (which might involve cutting corners to create capacity to deal with more) as oppose to ‘better’ (which could involve questioning practices, eliminating inefficient or unnecessary ones, so as to create capacity to do more important things), reflects an organisation that has lost sight of the long-term perspective.

I think organisations, leaders, need to assist individuals on all of the 5 points that Sara-Ann pointed out in her commentary.

1. Structures and leadership in place must be able to catch the warning signs of burnt out individuals – especially good-performing ones
2. At risks of being paternalistic, organisations need to ensure basic needs of staff are fulfilled – work can never be the expense of physical and even (genuine, not perceived) psychological needs.
3. Companies and organisations must develop credos that emphasize clear sets of priorities and actively help staff resolve conflicts between these priorities so that each individual have a good sense of how to order their work to achieve the most for the organisation
4. Workplace health promotion and social activities can sometimes end up being additional obligations – take active steps to ensure that downtime for workers are genuine downtimes and encourage participation gently. Provide staff with time and space for down-time.
5. Create routines for engagements that are genuine, unpretentious and safe for staff to express their views, engage in meaningful debates on things that matters to them at work. Too often, ground views are suppressed in favour of management views, politics ignored or taken as given; respecting employees, down to the lowest level, is the

A recent book I’ve been reading, Enlightened Capitalists by James O’Toole talks about many leaders and companies who have sought to do all that, and more. Whether the small size and open nature of the Singapore economy allows for that sort of practices is another story. Too often, these companies are considered sui generis but given Singapore being also a bit of a sui generis itself – I wonder, if we could choose to take this lead in this part of the world to make a difference to the way our own country continues to develop, and the manner the region would grow.

If we are to do so, then our extreme meritocracy which Sara-Ann described would be the first place to start working on. In fact, Clifton Mark penned a piece earlier this year in Fast Company, which suggests that not only is the notion of meritocracy an illusionary ideal, believing in it actually do you little good. And that, is probably how our poor 26-year-old Dave in Sara-Ann’s commentary came to be where he is. To address this conundrum relating to what could well be one of our national ideals (another one, probably less mentioned now and peddled around only when necessary, is pragmatism), would be a great challenge.

The only means would be to identify other values to supplant this so-called ideal. It has to be compelling both in psychology, philosophy and also sustainable in its economics. And to that end, I think the virtues of care, and making sure that we can sustain caring, can be a good starting point to see what we can crystallise eventually. Just as people had thought that treating people as resources for a company rather than as the soul of the company (courtesy of Sara-Ann who used that description) made economic sense; we can rewrite this orthodoxy through learning from companies highlighted in James’ book: Johnson & Johnson, ACIPCO, Levi Strauss & Co, Lewis Partnership, etc.

Been reading quite a bit of writing on this topic primarily because I’ve been speaking to many young people about jobs and careers.

A friend shared this link to a Medium article. He was suggesting that in the context of Singapore, there is this happening and added to the list of the careers would be the sort that is promised to “government scholars”.

Singapore is unique in the sheer number of government-sponsored students in the foreign universities perhaps in proportion to our population. And myself being a beneficiary (though my friend would think, “victim”), I’d say that it has definitely help to develop a rich pool of human resource and talents. Yet as any MNC trying to move into Singapore would attest, talent for those sectors listed in the article is actually hard to come by, primarily because they are hoarded by government.

Through that article, I also found out about Andrew Yang’s book which I started reading. The beginning chapters which share largely about the motivations of high-achieving students aligns well with the true story of “elites” in Singapore. Not just the academic heros but those with lots of co-curricular achievements and even volunteering experiences.

Probably something worthwhile for Singapore government is to consider how to foster more risk-taking communities and to support talents to build things. And also to continue opening its talent pool up to be accessed by the industry- it can be shortening of bonds or just simply doing away with scholarships altogether, creating new forms or institutions that provides education in a manner that works closely with the industry and is primarily led by the industries which generate real value.

The infrastructure industry represents such a place where business focuses on value-generation for long term developments that enable economic growth, and creates new employment opportunities in the emerging economies. Yet risk-capital and human-capital is clearly under-allocated because the world has become increasingly short-term in its thinking and the influx of short-term (to the sense of instantaneous) data is worsening our myopia.

We need talents for these areas of human development. And we lack them partly as a result of the same myopia; lots of talents have poured into technology leading to that same momentum feeding itself. By virtue of its long term character, infrastructure development will find it hard to compete for both talents and resources. There will have to be a sea-change in culture and a shift in our attention towards the common future the world needs to head towards.

The greater the resolution of the big data, the poorer our vision of the big picture.

This is a bit of a seminal piece dealing with draps and bits of ideas mashed together. Hope I find time to think through and put up a few more coherent pieces soon!

In my day job, I work with regulators often. I take on a more outward promotion role but I need to coordinate with counterparts from regulatory offices to improve our promotion efforts. Countries with reputation for good, sensible and wise regulators then to do well in terms of perceptions by investors. Of course, the past two decades of global economic trajectory may have altered this slightly (as the sheer momentum and weight of the emerging economies take hold more so than reputation of regulators); and as a consequent, countries which were “well-regulated” realised that they ended up falling behind because regulation tend to preserve status quo better than markets do.

Regulation needs to increasingly keep up not by just suspending rules or simplifying them. These actions are often needed and review processes need to be radically reduced for regulators to adapt to the volatile world quickly. More importantly tolerance or intolerance of mistakes must stem from an enlightened understanding of operations being regulated so that the spirit of rules rather than just the letter is being complied with.

Political leadership to such change is of paramount importance. Regulators are normally bureacrats who relies on political leaders to give them cover and even directions. Leaders who are too easily shaken by public opinions and populists tend to do a bad job supporting regulators’ work because of the generally negative perception associated with them. On the other hand, a publicly popular regulator may not necessarily be a good sign of a job well done. This tension has to be well balanced.

In a recent chat with a colleague, we were reminded about how our schools tend to make the best school team train the hardest in every sport – while the second teams or backbenchers are often treated with more laxity. “Shouldn’t the poorer-performing teams be working harder? That way they can get better! And in fact, it’s easier for them to get much better by training harder, as opposed to those who are already good!” I exclaimed. I am basically suggesting the possibility of diverting resources from the best, and propping up the poorer ones – very controversial. Too much ink have been spilled over (see RI boy’s support for elitism and Middle Ground’s comeback) the whole equality vs equity argument and whether elitism is in itself good or bad. I want to consider a very different perspective on the very same issue.

The germination of the ‘winner-takes-it-all’ attribute in sports has bred fixed mindsets. Schools are giving off the impression that if you are no good at something, don’t even bother trying. And the poisonous combination of meritocracy with such a fixed mindset creates social immobility and entrenchment of inequality. Is that the right message we want our students to pick up? Is it true that even for winner-takes-it-all settings, it won’t be worthwhile to strive?

Kids today are smarter than they ever were at the same age – but they have also been brought up in a manner that attempts to get them to ‘play it smart’. Admittedly, when one’s resources and potential are limited and close to its limits, playing it smart is wise. Yet for one who is young and with boundless energy, perhaps learning how to channel those energies correctly would mean a difference for all of life ahead. Are we satisfied with merely selecting students who had shown themselves to be ahead early on in life only to lose out the vast human capital locked in everyone else? In fact, are we destroying the human capital potential of everyone else in perpetuating a system like that? That is something we should think more deeply about than just be stuck in considering whether elitism is good for society and then move ahead. The construct of that elitist culture matters.

Let’s take a detour and consider grit. When writing about mavericks’ attitudes, I actually wrote about the importance of encouraging grit and persistence. I probably had a little inkling that a lot of life and learning is not about being smart but having the stamina to go through the hard stuff. Growth mindset essentially is about structuring good inner conversations that allows one to encourage oneself in times of difficulty; in many ways it is a belief – not necessarily in oneself but in values of persistence and a faith that it would all eventually be worth it. Angela Lee Duckworth’s talk on TED would probably convince you that we have to look more deeply into this. Our only chance at nurturing a more robust future generation would depend on it. And in some sense, it means devoting more resources not in selection of any individuals or any pool of them but nurturing that overarching culture and framework by which individuals strive and thrive.

Is our society investing in grit or forsaking it just so we can have short-term gains in sporting finals of students in teenage? Or for just the sake of being able to select the small handful of ‘future leaders’? In fact, is the thought of someone being a ‘future leader’ merely a manifestation of the fixed mindset we have inherited?

Some questions to reflect on.