Organic Growth for companies. Most of our Singapore’s small medium enterprises grow organically despite the introduction of much Merger & Acquisition support from the Singapore government such as M&A Tax Allowance (which was enhanced following the 2015 Budget) . In challenging times, even larger companies may still want to conserve cash to be invested internally rather than go on an M&A ‘spree’ – that is if they believe that they will be able to emerge larger after the temporary downturn.
To the end of doing the tough stuff called sticking to organic growth, McKinsey has a couple of pretty good questions to ask oneself when planning strategically for value creation along short to long-term timescale.
How balanced is our portfolio? If we take our portfolio of growth and innovation initiatives and plot them against NOW NEW NEXT, how balanced does the distribution look? Do we have a perspective on which of the six “growth plays” would be successful in our business?
Who is thinking about disruption? Are we as systematic in NEXT as we are in NOW? Is anyone tasked with disrupting our core business—or are we leaving it up to competitors? What are we doing to explore additive business models?
Are we limiting our horizons? In exploring NEW opportunities, do we impose limiting mind-sets on how we define consumers, our category, or the addressable channels?
Do we use advantaged insights? Do we rely on the same data and insights as our competitors—or do we have a source of distinctiveness?
Are we agile enough? Have we been able to accelerate our time-to-consumer and time-to-market? Or are we still stuck with cumbersome and slow innovation processes?
Ultimately, these questions may also start leading companies to consider acquisition in the mid to long term horizon where threat of disruption may force even very niche companies to place some hedging bets through incubation of related peripheral technologies.
We get burnt out not so much by sheer hard work or exhaustion. Most people who work and work and eventually gives way, either through Karoshi (death from exhaustion) or committing suicide; not so much because they are being made to do more and more. Too often, it is because work life involves many things that one may not be comfortable with. And I thought to highlight a few matters that I find really burns people out.
Misrepresentation: Whether it is figures or qualitative facts, work in modern world often involves some form of distortion of truth (which is not necessarily outright lying) either to fit a narrative or make a case. This simply doesn’t sit well with our natural inclination towards truth and in long run, one starts doubting not only the information they receive but also themselves.
Buying into worldly motivations: Frankly, while we know that we are not genuinely motivated by colleagues’ recognition or money, but these are rewards of life that seem a lot more within grasp than the elusive feelings of security, affirmation from friends/family. So we work for the easier fulfilment and realise only later they do not fulfill.
Lack of completeness: The breakdown of work into bits and pieces that increases productivity makes all crafts just a series of tasks handed out to different stages of work. And as a result, most of us are only involve in part of the production. As long as we cannot see how our exact inputs feed into the eventual output, we find a lack of completeness in our work. Worst, because we are not a real assembly line, there’s less clear demarcation of when the work leaves our hands. So most ‘work’ just drifts off after we touch it a little. Craftsmanship is lost, and so is the pride along with it.
So I was really grateful for this article on grace-paced living. Frankly, I haven’t really been appropriating the grace that is extended to us from God – especially not so for the workplace. And perhaps I should really start.
‘Developmental goals’ in business has become a bit of a bad word; and it seem to imply that projects are not optimised to make commercial sense but more to ensure that people have better lives. There is this implicit zero-sum game mentality here that thinks that wealth is accumulated through diversion rather than creation. Yet the very business of development is about creation of wealth. From the economic point of view, value is unlocked through collaboration, realising of ideas, some bits of moving of factors around as well as making good use of knowledge that is already embedded within the system. Having longer time horizon and building up long-term trust (social capital) can help communities unlock the value.
I’ve seen a young farmer in Ghana going from a hired labour to owning a farm 5 times the size of his original employer. And this young farmer was investing into irrigation pumps and other productivity-improving equipment, that original employer farmer was just complaining about how the government has not done enough to improve the lives of people. Being able to take control of one’s fate and making the sacrifices for it is important; successive generations of being able to maintain that attitude helps accumulate wealth especially during times of macro-growth. Development usually takes place this way and deployment of first-world capital into third-world normally involves getting your hands dirty and being extremely operational but once you get started and figure out a model that works, you are way ahead of a lot others.
That is in part what happened to the many companies that first invested in Singapore; their investment often paid off many fold. The story of Singapore’s development, for most part was wealth creation and it has been done through agglomeration of those with knowledge and then putting our factors (geographical locations, people, proximal resources) into use through the know-how of global companies. Of course, over the years, as other locations have become more attractive in terms of cost competitiveness, quality of manpower and all, we have to re-strategize our development. But the basics have been cover already by now. For now, I believe Singapore is at the stage where we need to now think about how the fruits of development are distributed and should be distributed.
As I stepped into the working world, I became fascinated by micro-cultures within workplaces, organisations and groups of people working together within a department or division. This micro-cultures had a huge impact on the productivity of teams, the behaviours of its members, the output, the way results are articulated and above all, the well being of the members. Then I came across this old article from Havard Business Review.
Growth Mindset
I never quite knew about Carol Dweck or her book but I do recognize the term Growth Mindset and this is perhaps something I was directly or indirectly exposed to some point through my teenage when I was growing up. This idea was appealing to me then because I was never taught to think too highly of myself. I’m often kept in check by my parents who reminded me that my sister was more intelligent than me even when I did better in school and so on. I was praised, however, for my hard work and the desire to learn and improve myself. That constant feedback on my effort and the small wins that I secure encouraged me and allowed me to go farther in stretching myself.
I was surprised that the writer used Jack Welch as an example of a leader who fosters growth mindset in the organisation and encourages employees to grow. Because I imagined General Electric to be the sort of survival of the fittest organisation where the top quintile was richly rewarded and the bottom quintile was fired and replaced. That bell curve GE approach to performance appraisal stuck in my head because like probably many other workers of big bureaucratic organisations, that was pretty much the approach towards talent management. And to me, that is what a fixed mindset, ‘star’ organisation was like – they name and crown winners and allow them to keep on winning. When one stays in such organisation for too long, one takes on the fixed mindset and that necessarily affects his productivity, and willingness to work hard.
For instance, employees at companies with a fixed mindset often said that just a small handful of “star” workers were highly valued. The employees who reported this were less committed than employees at growth-mindset companies and didn’t think the company had their back. They worried about failing and so pursued fewer innovative projects. They regularly kept secrets, cut corners, and cheated to try to get ahead.
The Right Combination
Keeping secrets, cheating to get ahead, cutting corners all sound pretty nasty and value-destroying. And of course, the employees themselves are as culpable as the culture they reside in but isn’t it amazing that we continue to perpetuate micro-cultures in organisation that do this. Yet why was Jack Welch heralded for the growth mindset? It was the other practices he brought in to encourage growth and give opportunities for mobility within this whole bell curve exercise.
He hired according to “runway,” not pedigree, preferring Big 10 graduates and military veterans to Ivy Leaguers, and spent thousands of hours grooming and coaching employees on his executive team—activities that demonstrate a recognition of people’s capacity for growth.
In that sense, the bell curve appraisal approach must be combined with proper hiring practices in place that would actually encourage overall organisation growth. By adopting just the tool to encourage competition amongst employees without encouraging the culture of sharing and passion for learning, the organisation exacerbates the ills of a fixed-mindset organisation.
Growth-mindset organizations are likely to hire from within their ranks, while fixed-mindset organizations reflexively look for outsiders. And whereas fixed-mindset organizations typically emphasize applicants’ credentials and past accomplishments, growth-mindset firms value potential, capacity, and a passion for learning.
Singapore organisations suffer this way disproportionately; being a society transfixed with past credentials, accomplishments, rather than potential and capacity, we are allowing our genuine potential suffer when we don’t pay attention to our micro-cultures or hold our CEOs accountable for these aspects of organisation performance. To make matters worse, culture is a long-term matter while organisations are typically organised to deliver results year on year. CEOs with short (planned or unplanned) tenure aiming for quick results pays little attention to creating a good culture or designing a growth-oriented organisation.
Your Role
As a director interviewing CEOs, ask them questions about people and their perspective on manpower. Whether they are theory X or theory Y is an important hint to the kind of cultures they will foster. As middle management, focus on caring for your people and creating the friendly, growth-oriented micro-culture within your sphere of influence in order to provide a divisional best-practice that the entire organisation can imitate or learn from. As an employee, provide formal and informal feedback relentlessly about culture, about the signal that management sends to employees through their actions, policies, and practices. Don’t allow management to dominate feedback conversations (they have sufficient opportunities at appraisals already).
Finally, as a CEO, ask yourself if you care more about your paycheck or leaving a genuine legacy in where you’ll be. Do you have that stillness of mind and firmness of principle when you take on the role and promise to deliver? As visible as the evidence of hard output and results may be a reflection of the CEO’s competence, they are short-lived compared to the lasting legacy and wonderful memories of a leader who cared and changed their lives and mindsets.
Came across Ken Robinson’s TED talk. And then read about some of his critics stand. Then also about his counterpoints. He’s a witty guy and hopefully would be able to help coordinate and rally people to steer mass education away from our woeful state now.
Singapore desperately needs this sort of rethinking. But that also shows how much we have influenced the rest of the world to admire something we have which turned out to be just merely playing well in the wrong game after all.
One pondering over education and skills equipping.
What is the difference between education and training? Why is it that Einstein says that he never let schooling interfere with his education?
One of the greatest lie we tell a child here in Singapore is: “Study hard and you’ll have a bright future.” I hear it everywhere; parents telling their children, older folks telling youths, and even students telling teachers that to explain some of the sheer hours they are putting into studying. This relationship between studying hard and bright future is poorly established. And to put things a little more rigorously, there are too many countervailing factors even if this was true under a set of conditions (which must also require ceteris paribus).
Academic speak aside, there is the element of competition that we must deal with. We have been creating competition where there isn’t a need to. Competition in life is real but instead of teaching our kids how to conform and play the same game, we should be encouraging them to carve a niche for themselves. In forcing everyone into the academic game, focusing resources on these people, we are implicitly coordinating the entire society into just a single pocket of niche which makes us incredibly vulnerable. We often claim that we don’t have land nor any natural resources – our primary resource is our human capital. Yet by forcing our domestic human resources through a narrow funnel we have created increasingly fragile economic growth that critically depends on a constant inflow of foreign labour (to take care of all the other areas of life and economy that we have neglected to cultivate and groom people for).
Next we need to deal with the connection between our ‘training system’ (note: I don’t consider the bulk of our schooling years education – in the same spirit as Einstein), and the kind of talents needed in the world is severely disconnected despite good intentions. There is overemphasis of quantifiable, hard skills and lack of attention paid to other equally important soft skills, as well as character-building (which is really what education is about) that will help to build our next generation up to deal with challenges in life and adversity at work. In other words, training must be better aligned – schools have come up with their own standards and nice-sounding principles without really consulting the other stakeholders. When was the last time schools ask parents and the industry how they can partner these other stakeholders to develop better programmes to build up students?
Lest you think that I am putting too much hope in our schools, we still have to deal with the whole question of ‘education’. All the talk about character-building a decade ago is gone – focus went back to all the quantifiable stuff. The more centralised decision-making becomes, the more demand it puts on quantifiable elements, the more resources allocated to fact-finding, data-gathering and the more buffer we build between layers of hierarchy in reporting – the less contemplation takes place. We discovered long ago that centralised resource allocation is problematic but we also have to contend with the problem that governments who inevitably grow large over time. A mechanism to break it back down is necessary. I think education holds promise for something like that. The more we decentralise activity down to the individual schools, put less roadblocks, make principals and teachers more accountable directly to parents and industry rather than the ministry, we will be able to start growing a new kind of workforce to fill the needs of our economy.
While it might be attractive to think that the ‘government’ could coordinate lots of stuff and make magic happen, the truth is the needs of the people are simply distributed, and relies too much on micro, local knowledge for a centralised bureaucracy to handle. The amount of reporting, verification, and layers to clear before initiatives are implemented squanders a lot more resources than necessary. At the same time, matters are complicated by the need to constantly justify being ‘big’ through securing public support with big goals, big initiatives. Historically, we have made big gains by agglomeration, growing huge and becoming big. But the gains we accrue from such centralisation and consolidation is bound to erode at some point. At the same time, coordination becomes much more difficult and incentives becomes increasingly skewed as those decision-makers are well insulated from the ground and what really happens.
After finishing Nate Silver’s Signal & Noise (which was supposedly one of my readings for a module during my Master’s where I avoided reading the book cover to cover; but instead adopted the Master’s student ‘technique’ of reading only the necessary); I moved on to reading Nick Taleb’s Anti-fragile. On a side note, I didn’t realise until now that Nate was kind of put down by some NYU professors a while back on New Yorker. Nick is brilliant as usual but his lack of tolerance for people whom he perceive as stupid fully displays itself in his writing.
Perhaps because I was reading Nick’s writing, I thought the latest entry in Buttonwood’s Notebook seemed a little disappointing. Buttonwood imagines that without the presence of rigorously prepared forecast that are probably wrong, it will be filled with vague, baseless forecasts which cannot be disproved and thus believed – though they could be correct by sheer luck. Perhaps we should learn to dream of a different world where it is possible for us to shed the dependence on such false confidence, spend more of our efforts on fortifying ourselves against uncertainty than to prepare for scenarios that we came up with.
One dissecting the culture, the tiny traits that we need to consider and intend a mindset shift when deliberating policies.
In some sense, I have already written this article, in Culture of Competition. But I thought that rather than prescribing things, I want to think through the culture that has been created over the years a little bit more. I am not trying to be definitive but just to kickstart some thinking along this dimension where few have bothered to tread meaningfully other than to conjure some social critique or unconstructive sarcasm.
Harking back at the article I have written, I must applaud some of the qualities Singaporeans generally have:
Largely rational
Results/outcome-oriented
Generally hardworking
These qualities also make us very operations-oriented, tending towards the side of being skeptical about abstractions and theoretical matters. This perhaps relate to our slightly more simple, non-scholarly ancestry, particularly for the Chinese. We don’t generally try very hard to translate theory into practise, choosing instead to ideate on practise in a separate, parallel track. This is related to our constraints of being a small country without much resources so the lofty thinking always must be kept apart from the practical considerations lest those executing lose heart when they know of the longer term strategy and plans in place. Unfortunately, along the way, I think we easily and quickly lose sight of the ‘meaning’ because the much longer term ‘why?’ that truly was driving the shorter term ‘how?’ was lost in the process.
Happiness, Prosperity & Progress We want to thrive, not just survive. We want to be happy, we try our best to learn to be content. And because our thinking habit tend to deal with the practical bits at a separate, albeit parallel level, we orientate goals towards careers, grades, social recognition, paycheck, without establishing the proper linkage with the notions of thriving and happiness. We fail to be rigorous at the last mile where it matters.
Or, to put it in public service terms, we may establish that foreign direct investments are strongly related to job creation, knowledge transfers; and that direct investment abroad generates strong backward linkages that enhances our human capital, diversify our risk portfolio. And we may even manage to establish that job creation, knowledge transfers, enhancement of human capital and risk diversification generates greater economic growth (in terms of growth figures), promotes economic stability and robustness (in terms of volatility and fluctuations in growth rates). But how are all of these related to happiness, prosperity and progress of the nation (ie. the people)?
Our response to that had been to repair the pipes, to make sure that the value that flows from FDIs are connected directly to job creation (perhaps through application of conditional tax incentives), then possibly even tying them to jobs of citizens so that the various discipline’s graduates do indeed become employed after university (prosperity, checked). When Singaporeans are dissatisfied with jobs, then the question becomes what jobs they want and the public service is rallied to create those jobs (happiness, checked). So our new generation is better paid than the previous and also enjoy access to better quality of life (prosperity, checked).
Meaning & Purpose So what is wrong? We have confused the ‘sense’ of happiness, prosperity and progress with what they really are. We cannot guarantee that everyone in the nation can have all 3. So what does it mean if one group has all 3, another few different groups have variation of one or two of them? Did we pass our key performance indicators? To ask that question is to miss the point totally. And that is what we are suffering from, having dupe ourselves into focusing only on the hard stuff – on the tangible, specific, measurable goals.
Our culture suffers from a void of meaning; the finger-pointing from dissatisfaction with job, government, friends, the world, have much to do with our inability to create meaning in the first place. Purposes are dictated by others – your teachers, parents, nanny, government, boss, system. Yet there is no process or upbringing that help us relate our concrete actions and our daily thoughts and deeds to those purposes. This void of meaning underlies the sense of entitlement (or strawberry generation), the disillusionment of the previous generation who have worked hard, the gloomy outlook.
Meaning matters, yet we are so desperately skeptical of its role in our lives. We sink into the unproductive ‘complaining spirit’ when we should be encouraging each other and reinforcing more positive self-talk. The power of meaning to shape behaviours radically is abused. Edward Hess recounts this story for his MBA class at Darden School (University of Virginia):
An entrepreneur was in the waiting room of a heart clinic, having waited for 5 hours and checked in with the nurse multiple times only to be reminded they will eventually attend to him each time. At some point a cleaner came into the clinic with a mop, brush and bucket of water. The entrepreneur watched and observe the cleaner in the heart clinic – he was so conscious of his job, kneeling down to scrub the floor of dirt when he sees them. The entrepreneur knew a thing or 2 about building maintenance and the hard work, having grown his business through developing and providing facilities management for commercial buildings.
He went to the cleaner and asked “I’ve never in my life seen a cleaner work like that and I wouldn’t imagine myself cleaning like that? Why is it that you do what you do the way you do it?”
The cleaner answered “Doctor Brown is in the business of fixing people’s hearts. And I support him by making sure this clinic is free of germs because germs does bad to people’s hearts.”
We may not be cleaners but we can connect with what he said. We know at the back of our minds the larger role that our job and tasks are playing. But we have doubts whether they actually achieve that ultimate bigger picture. We need to be less self-absorbed that we may shift our focus away from the dreary and come to see it hand-in-hand with the bigger role that our work plays in the lives of others and the whole economy.
Tiny Traits I’ve taken a really tiny small thing and blow it up to make it big. Meaning by itself is tiny even if it underlies many things. But this would have incredible impact on a multitude of things. When we engineer policy that is supposed to create mindset changes, we need to think about the culture that will be created by the policy, and not just try to manage the culture through the process that is tied to the policy.
Then consider whether the culture spin-off is actually in line with our greater vision for the future (which I briefly mentioned in the first original article on Labour Perspectives). For all the stakeholders down the chain and the target audience, we need to ponder over what the deliberated policy really mean for each of them. Or are announcements for various packages, initiatives just times where various parties pounce on the public sector and try to see if there’s anything in for them? That is just one of the tiny traits borne of the void of meaning, together with many others including the complaining spirit characteristic of Singaporeans, the sense of entitlement we observe.
“No, it’s not! See, I can still drink from it” says Natalie, picking up one of the bigger shards and then trying to sip some of the remaining white wine from it.
“You are not well, Nat. Let me call Mom.”
“I’m perfectly fine Dave. Don’t you dare tell Mom about this. Everyone will think the glass is broken. What will they say? Yes even if the glass is broken, why would you want to even hint at this to anyone else? What is with this airing of dirty laundry? I trust you so much; but everything you know, you want to share with others.”
“I can’t support you alone my dear. Sharing with others is how I can be emotionally resilient. Others knowing don’t make you weaker; it makes you stronger.”
Natalie cups her hands over her ears. The glass pieces glittered with the spotlight of the dinning table; and the white wine that spilled on the floor slowly evaporated.
I had intended to almost go into a social commentary of our modern girls and ladies being so obsessed with perfection, with that idealised image of themselves – that the brokenness inside is being kept hidden at practically any cost. And the problem it brings, at a social scale. It was supposed to be inspired by a TED talk by Reshma Saujani. But frankly, this is also a spiritual problem and maybe it is necessary to look at it more deeply from the perspective of my faith.
And the passage I’d point to is the John 4 passage on the Samaritan woman who responded to Jesus. She had some underlying desires unfulfilled which explains the serial relationships she had (to eventually have 5 husbands). She was a broken woman – yet she probably lived as if everything was alright and she was just going about her day. The degree of amazement she experienced to even proclaim Jesus as prophet reflects the secrecy by which she has guarded this shameful secret. And in recognising Jesus as the Messiah, something within her must have convinced her that the Lord knows throughly of her brokenness and yet still loved her.
It is only through recognizing that there is beauty in this brokenness that is in all of us – that we relieve ourselves of the burden of having to live idealised, perfect images of ourselves. And seeing God’s love for us while being fully conscious of our sinful selves, our selfish desires and our pride have to impact on us in a way that allows us to open ourselves up. Can the view of ourselves by the society and others be ever above the view that our God have of us?
To go on the streets declare in John 4:29: “Come, see a man who told me all that I ever did. Can this be the Christ?”, was the woman’s response. It was bold and she broke through her brokenness. She acknowledged it but something in her cannot help but proclaim the good news of Christ’s coming. It would no doubt elicit questions about what is this ‘all that she ever did’. But I doubt she would be hiding anymore. The fountain of living water she has been promised, no one could take from her.
Why still drink from the broken glass cup? When one can drink from the fountain of living water?
I’ve a while back embarked on starting a research on some of the history of the intellectual engine behind Singapore’s growth. There is a general attribution to the government’s brilliance but it is essential to trace these back to institutional roots and the people involved – without understanding the process by which economic progress is made and considering the values that brought about them, our generation risks forfeiting what our forefathers worked to gain. The sort of circumstances that created our forefathers and the system that they created for their subsequent generation was the main focus of my next stage of research.
I foresee it leading on to more interesting stories about manpower in Singapore and narratives about the labour force. While I was on my way to the airport last week for a work trip, I came across a cab driver who looked like he was in his 50s, claimed to have been driving a Comfort cab for over 20 years and couldn’t stop complaining about a variety of different things. I struck a conversation with him which went from one which went from price of print newspapers to the taxi/cab industry in Singapore. Most times, in taxis and where mature Singaporeans congregate, I sense negativity, but conversations which concluded that there wasn’t much to do. Helplessness, lack of choice features a lot. Implicit beliefs about status quo and the difficulty of challenging them, even within ourselves is hardly addressed. The desire for comfort individually is not quite thought about (by the government) in trying to restructure our labour force. Even when the government is promoting jobs creation for Singaporeans overseas, they don’t seem to realise that those who would like to take up jobs overseas are already actively doing so and currently the ones left are people who need a tad bit too much nudging to get out.
The alignment of policies with socio-economic forces are important. That in part determines the success of policies – especially in the case of our early population control measures. Yet today we need increasingly creative solutions to go along with the socio-economic forces and yet steer it towards some longer term vision rather than pure reactive fire-fighting. The labour market is a key market that we still have a little bit more influence over. How we want to manage it will be one key factor for the growth of the country and our culture. I’ve already mentioned a while back that the soft stuff are the hard stuff. The government needs to start getting into the business of handling the soft, non-quantifiable stuff and pulling together the stakeholders who wouldn’t normally come together in the marketplace to make a difference.
Given the current makeup of our workforce and our skill sets; without radical culture change that goes beyond sticks and carrots, we will need to go through a period of convincing people to get out of their comfort zone. We don’t need compensation for the pain we will take. What we need is a vision and motivation, encouragement towards that vision. That vision is absolutely lacking – or poorly communicated if it exists at all. We need to trace our success in creating a labour force that worked and use that to chart a path towards that vision that we will formulate (or is formulated but perhaps too bold to be revealed in its full glory).
And with that, I plan to write a series of 3 articles. One dissecting the culture, the tiny traits that we need to consider and intend a mindset shift when deliberating policies. One pondering over education and skills equipping. Finally one that muses about the needs of the economy that we are shifting towards.
‘Developmental goals’ in business has become a bit of a bad word; and it seem to imply that projects are not optimised to make commercial sense but more to ensure that people have better lives. There is this implicit zero-sum game mentality here that thinks that wealth is accumulated through diversion rather than creation. Yet the very business of development is about creation of wealth. From the economic point of view, value is unlocked through collaboration, realising of ideas, some bits of moving of factors around as well as making good use of knowledge that is already embedded within the system. Having longer time horizon and building up long-term trust (social capital) can help communities unlock the value.
