Chanced upon Mariana Mazzucato’s The Big Con in the bookstore today and took the chance to read a bit of it. I first heard of the book from the media and my curiosity was piqued, not least because I’m a consultant myself. The firms highlighted by the book are the usual big consulting groups and Mariana’s main area of attack was on their work for governments enfeebling the public sector and exercising undue influence on the decision and politics of countries.
Being focused on the energy transition, I thought perhaps that my work is less implicated by Mariana’s attack but having been a public servant myself, I do wander if the government contracting out work to the consulting industry is a problem in itself. I think for Singapore, we can safely say that Mariana’s attacks don’t have teeth because the public sector in Singapore maintains a lot of the critical capabilities and information even whilst drawing upon consultants to help drive forward its work.
The Big Con then has in mind very specific governments as targets and in some sense, cherry-pick specific stories, case studies and situations to make its argument. Nevertheless, I still empathize with what the authors are driving at and the change they are hoping to make. Mariana Mazzucatto also wrote The Mission Economy and while I have not read it, I understand the underlying ideas and how The Big Con interacts with some of those fundamental notions. I do think that governments and more actors in the economy needs to get together to galvanise the economy and wider society to collectively embark on the joint mission for a future that is worth creating.
In school, the guy who raise his hands to answer a question gets praised. The one who puts up his hand to ask a question feels like he might have disrupted the flow of a lesson or wasted everyone’s time on something that no one seemed to be interested in besides him. Besides, there never was a quiz by the teacher where credit was given to a student for asking questions.
Yet the older I got, the more I realised that having answers is overrated. The ability to ask the right questions and discover new ideas or thoughts from there is so much more important. The journey of discovery starts with questions and not knowing what to discover. The incentives that our education system designed was more about ease of creating robust, scientific measurement without necessarily aligning with the needs of students going through the system.
There has always been a question of whether schooling and the education system is ultimately about training and uplifting people or just measuring and sorting them. I’ve previously pondered over this quite a bit – whether we intend for the system to produce a pooling or separating equilibrium. It is still a question on my mind and I think it’s a conundrum for systems all around the world.
As Singapore steps into the prosperity of modern society, we recognise increasingly that our prosperity and success isn’t about us as individuals but something we need to develop as a society. And that is driving the whole Forward SG exercise: the idea around reworking our social compact. Prime Minister Wong declared, “Here I have a plea to all: For a new definition of success to become a reality, all of us – as consumers – must be willing to bear a higher cost for the goods and services we consume. We must recognise the important work that our fellow citizens undertake to keep our society going, and do our part to uplift and boost their wage prospects.”
For this plea to work, it is not just about consumers and cultural mindset changes, the whole economic engine of the government including our policies on trade and industry. Essentially, our government needs to develop new ways to think about inflation: that it may be part of the consequences of uplifting the wages of our fellow Singaporeans and tradesmen. And the mechanisms around public sector procurement might need to change too if the PM himself is suggesting that consumers must be willing to bear higher cost?
We all are consumers, taxpayers, employers or employees somehow; the whole economy works such that we have these overlapping roles and what we fail to spend through consumerism, can be spent by the government through taxation. If the government genuinely wants to uphold certain principles of social distribution, it would be really hard to do so by moral suasion and avoid damaging the pro-growth stance.
The small firm is the original basic unit of analysis of business in economics. It is one who is more or less a price taker, trying to somewhat differentiate themselves but having a pretty short cost curve and goes up somewhat quickly. These firms are supposed to proliferate in the market, not grow. In fact, typically in economics, there isn’t really a real motivation for growth in firms other than technical or management progress that changes the cost curve such that the minimum efficient scale changes.
Now on to the real world; there are plenty of small firms, differentiated and there are interesting markets that support them. There are those places culturally oriented towards “local, independent, small” type of firms. And therefore these firms proliferate. It is not because of market competition that they spread but rather the diversity of preferences.
Where preferences somewhat tend towards a kind of homogeneity, small firms tend not to have an edge; it is scaling difficulties that keep firms small. Likewise, it is scaling difficulties that lead to proliferation of firms. The new entrant can typically be a small firm and it needs to determine what is the minimum efficient scale and rapidly work on the areas that can shift its minimum efficient scale more and more towards higher quantities of goods and services.
When I first penned the blog post on hydrogen ecosystem, I had a couple of ill-fitting ideas that I thought could come together but I did not successfully pull them together beyond putting them in a single blog post. What I really meant to say is that the government will need to do more work understanding and studying the nuances of the ecosystem and industrial value chain that makes sense for green hydrogen and then perhaps take action to ease the struggles of the market in developing projects.
The thing about green hydrogen is that it is something that requires quite a fair amount of new infrastructure. And the situation is uncertain because governments are thinking that maybe electrification will be more dominant and want to avoid investing in white elephants. Or they think that it is all a zero-sum game due to budget and resource constraints and that investing into transmission and distribution which meant favouring electrification would naturally be inconsistent with investing into more gas infrastructure.
In reality however, green hydrogen is made from renewable energy and hence the alleviation of electricity grid issues that foster more wind and solar can also support the development of a green hydrogen sector. The key here again is that the government needs to have better knowledge of how different parts of the value chain works and the value they are contributing.
Only in appreciating that, the governments can make the right moves.
I had a bad memory and in school I was never quite able to cram for examinations. I found memorisation a complete chore and my mind really strained trying to remember things. Most of the time, the harder I try, the more difficult I find it. Subsequently, whenever I had to remember something, it was important that I found something already in my memory to associate it with so as to bond the materials better to my mind.
It turned out that this exercise from young did two things for me.
One is that it caused me to develop an interest for learning and genuine understanding when confronted with something new. Since I wasn’t able to retain much in my mind, what I did, I kept them for much longer than everyone else. And I had to develop my own reasons and purpose for wanting to put something into my memory since they were usually stored longer term.
Second, it gave me a method that increased my memory capacity as I learnt more. This requires a bit more explanation. When I recall things by associating the new information with something already in my mind, I’m actually causing the web of my knowledge to be denser. When a piece of information stands alone, it is easily forgotten. But when you connect it with other information, it suddenly becomes more memorable.
Take for example you meet a guy and he tells you he is 23 years old, then says nothing further. Your memory of him is reinforced by how he sounded, his clothes, hairstyle and perhaps handshake. But if he also tells you that his Mum is a widow, and he had gone to college in Boston, you might actually take all these pieces of information, form even more associations and once you meet him, you’d be able to recall him better than if he had not shared the additional information.
In other words, we actually have a slightly mistaken analogy for our memories. We tend to think there’s some kind of limited shelf space such that trying to remember more things means we need to forget some old things or remove some of the existing memories from the shelf to accommodate the new.
After years of experience trying to deal with that poor memory of mine, I noticed that our memory are more like webs. When we don’t have much in our memories, it is as though there are many gaps within our web and most materials that comes our way just fly through these gaps rather than getting retained. But as you are able to catch hold of more using what you already have, then you naturally hold on to even more memories that allows you to capture more.
Our understanding and what constitutes deep knowledge from repeated practising creates new contexts for us to absorb further new information and knowledge. This is incredible because it means that our memory capacities are not being consumed but rather expanding. Capturing more and richer information enhances our ability to compress new information and knowledge further, drawing upon what is already in the mind.
This is part of a series of republished articles from my Medium page because I am worried about the platform ceasing to be. A version of this article on the same idea was published in here a while back.
Banking business is about trust and a lot of traditional trust is based upon relationship. And so it is not surprise that old institutions are tied in deep and strong relationships that we may not always be particular conscious of in trying to create a future for our economy and our world.
In this funny video, we are reminded of the bits of the iceberg we don’t see in all public communications of people, companies and governments. And in our bid to drive change, such exposure continuously played out, spoken of, reminding the public, every staff of financial institutions and workers of oil companies ought to put some tension for greater change.
Most of the Chinese migrants who came to Singapore and whose descendents now form the majority of the population here were ‘coolies’ or manual labourers who came to Singapore to seek out employment opportunities and a better life. The mindset really was to find a boss to serve, and gain a good life through that loyalty. Life was basic and more about survival than really thriving. In fact, the term ‘coolie’ still mean ‘employee’ colloquially amongst the older folks.
Generations later, the bar for living standards have gone up, and so have expectations of how much you achieve and how much you need to live on. But has that coolie mindset changed? Are we still just trying to follow directions to a better life? Are we thinking independently and by ourselves? Are we looking to continue to use resources at our disposal just for ourselves or to make the future a better place?
We have been successful as a society that follows order to fulfill a clear-cut, straight-forward vision. For the longest time, it was almost a matter of survival that we fulfill the vision. Mediocrity was simply not an option and there was no worthwhile status quo to hang on to. Our forefathers worked hard to set up a path towards “better life”. And we’ve reached this stage of being a metropolis.
Question is where do we go from here? Given the chance to develop our own path and vision forward, do we take that chance? The ability to think independently does not have to be political, and it involves the smallest things such as identifying opportunities in the market where people see none. To architect a vision and actually commit to pursue it requires resilience that is based on a sense of purpose. How do you cultivate that? It is unlikely for the child of a soccer Mum, going through various enrichment and supplementary activities and busy with getting good grades in school to develop that. To the coolie, busyness might seem like excellence, but for a leader, it shouldn’t be.
As the next generation of Singaporeans to helm the leading positions of various parts of society, we will have to leave the inherited narratives of our parents and the boomers, to write our own story instead. The chance to do so comes at the point when we recognise that the hard work put in by our coolie forefathers was for us to break out of this. If we don’t know how to manage this kind of freedom of the mind, and mature, the social freedoms that are being fought for will not be able to serve the society well.
Meanwhile, you might like to check out some really amazing recoloured photos of historical Singaporeans here. Get a sense of the hardship they went through and what life really means for them.
This is part of a series of republished articles from my Medium page because I am worried about the platform ceasing to be.An older version of this article was originally published at on January 5, 2021.
In today’s work life, too much thought goes into how to do the work rather than the culture and enabling environment that surrounds the work. There are countless anecdotes about people at their deathbed would not wish they had more days to work; or stories of the employee who passed away and the company was just busy trying to find someone to replace him/her, whilst complaining about the hassle and delays caused by his/her death. All of these tries to discourage people from pouring out way too much of themselves into work even as our society as a whole is actually increasingly consumed by work.
What I don’t understand is that for almost all of our work in life, there are ways of making it more fun, conducive to put effort into, and to stress us positively. Yet we don’t do that, nor explore ways of doing that. Good culture that enables rather than disable is a luxury, people say. And they see it being at odds with generating value and profit, as though precious resources are either committed to employee well-being or shareholder returns. This is just lack of imagination and the inability to think dynamically and across time.
For some reason, a 2015 article from INSEAD appeared on 2 separate of my social media platform news feed, shared by different people and with different commentary. It was about the fall of Nokia; and yet as I was reading through it, I am struck by how applicable those lessons are today. And how important it is that we invest into reworking our culture.
I shuddered at several parts of the article that describes behaviours no different from what I’ve observed in large, important institutions and business organisations that I’ve had experience with. Allow me to quote 3 portions of the article that really stood out for me:
Although they realised that Nokia needed a better operating system for its phones to match Apple’s iOS, they knew it would take several years to develop, but were afraid to publicly acknowledge the inferiority of Symbian, their operating system at the time, for fear of appearing defeatist to external investors, suppliers, and customers and thus losing them quickly. “It takes years to make a new operating system. That’s why we had to keep the faith with Symbian,” said one top manager. Nobody wanted to be the bearer of bad news.
Hiding bad news is a result of the lack of an open communicative culture resulting from poor responses to ‘bad news’. It will be reinforced by a sense of helplessness about the communication; either by the belief that management will not believe it, or will not respond to it. Such erosion of trust does not bode well.
Fearing the reactions of top managers, middle managers remained silent or provided optimistic, filtered information. One middle manager told us “the information did not flow upwards. Top management was directly lied to…I remember examples when you had a chart and the supervisor told you to move the data points to the right [to give a better impression]. Then your supervisor went to present it to the higher-level executives.
Encouraging miscommunication, whether intentional or not, will only lead to organisational decline. This is especially if the flow of information about reality or truth is obscured, and top management makes decision on the basis of such flawed or misconstrued information. This is the issue when there’s too much emotion caught up in reporting. Reporting should ideally be unemotional, clinical and rational.
[T]op managers also applied pressure for faster performance in personnel selection. They later admitted to us that they favoured new blood who displayed a “can do” attitude.
This led middle managers to over-promise and under-deliver. One middle manager told us that “you can get resources by promising something earlier, or promising a lot. It’s sales work.” This was made worse by the lack of technical competence among top managers, which influenced how they could assess technological limitations during goal setting.
Misalignment of incentives that drives unhelpful behaviours throughout the organisation. So to that extent, being able to create a culture that implicitly rewards honest behaviours through praise and recognition; punishing or frowning upon over-promising, and inaccurate reporting, sows the seeds for success of an organisation. There will naturally be a tension between behaviours which promotes the interest of the organisation and the need to ‘perform’ at an individual level. The ability of the organisation culture to protect behaviours that promotes the sustainability and long-term interest of the organisation is so vitally important.
Yet in most of today’s organisation, we have not invested sufficient thought into the culture; focusing instead to utilise our resources to drive work performance, measured mostly by short-term metrics. A good place to start is really by reworking the prevailing narrative, especially rewiring the mindset obsessed with linear, unidimensional growth. Caring for the mental health and well-being of employees at the level of supporting them to deconflict those tensions mentioned above will go a long way.
This is part of a series of republished articles from my Medium page because I am worried about the platform ceasing to be. A previous version of this article was published in here a while back.
So over the past 2–3 weeks, I’ve been pondering over our education system. It all started with that chat I had with my friends, and then the article I wrote, and then more thinking. I even thought at one point I want to start a podcast about education and go around interviewing people about how they want to change it. The truth is the majority of us have brushes with it and experiences with it — pleasant or not. And those were worthwhile voicing out, to augment and improve the system. You don’t need to be an educator or professional to do it. I was not just thinking about the system in Singapore but this whole industry of education, testing, whether it is about building up or just sieving out; whether it is implicitly defining merit rather than bringing up people to merit.
Now the recurring question I had in mind was whether education, which is supposed to be the great leveller, should be ‘sorting’ people with its system of testing and exams or ‘lifting’ people up to a certain level. To put it at another layer, it is also about whether education should be tuned to provide signals about a particular person or be tuned to develop a person. What underlies this difference is implicitly the ‘fixed mindset’ vis-à-vis the ‘growth mindset’ that the one tuning the system has about people, and the potential of the society at large.
Signalling Function: Separating or Pooling
Now the title of the article references this feature of systems that are set up to create signals. It assumes there are different ‘types’ in the environment and the system design can result in everyone signalling the same (ie. pooling) or signalling differently (ie. separating). In general, examinations are designed to create separating equilibria. We are taught to think that a test that results in everyone scoring A is pointless because exams are to help us differentiate the best from the rest. Or is it? Shouldn’t an exam or test be used to measure students/learners against a benchmark you want to train them up to?
So shouldn’t we be keeping the testing constant and adjusting the teaching and content to ensure we can ‘lift up’ everyone rather than ‘sort them out’. Because when we design exams to generate a ‘normal distribution’ outcome, then we are implicitly saying someone in the room deserves to be the last when it is just a natural outcome of a relative system. We can no longer trace ‘culpability’ back to the students’commitment and efforts because someone has got to be last in class — someone has got to be in the lower tail of that normal distribution. What a depressing way to think about education outcomes.
Therefore, this signalling function of education runs against the grain of all the effort, sense of purpose that we are imbued with as we try to develop our students into people worthy of our society, yet that is the way we design our assessment, which nowadays seem more like the end of school rather than just an instrument that the schools used to provide a means for students to check themselves against some kind of standards.
Competing with yourself
Now the way our assessments are designed also means that you are creating competition amongst students. Because results are somewhat relative, you can do better when your classmates do worse. At national level or in moderated standardised testing which is really used to perform ‘sorting’ at cohort population level, the result gives you your relative position within the society rather than your absolute standards.Well, people will say, that’s all that matters, isn’t it? Life is a competition and it’s about getting ahead of others.
As I mentioned previously, this is a recipe for a society-wide mental health disaster; especially if job options are strongly correlated with academic performance subsequently. Worst, the parents and society shares the idea that only jobs requiring those qualifications are worthwhile going for. In reality, the most important competition in your life is with yourself and it is important for you to be able to track your progress, to know you’re growing. Take for example when you measure the height of a child to see he is growing; you might look at the height percentile chart at any one point to say, oh he is 40th percentile, below average for his age, but we know he used to be 136 cm but now he is 140 cm, he is definitely growing. You don’t get worried that he used to be 55th percentile when he was a year younger but now at the 40thpercentile in height.
You might say because relative height don’t matter as much as academic achievement in life. But the same principle remains that having an objective way of tracking your progress of growth helps give you the encouragement to keep going. Our school testing and exam systems do not help us achieve that. They do not allow students to compete with themselves; at every test, they are just taking the same cohort, sorting them into grades/scores again and again with different combinations of topics and subjects. How this really helps the growth and development of a single child is anyone’s guess. It doesn’t matter so much when your parents, society at large and teachers focus on your attitude, your character and values more than exam results. But I have a feeling that we naturally gravitate more towards what is measurable and allow that to become the dominant yardstick.
By ‘pooling’ students into just a few ‘prestigious subjects’ (eg. the sciences) and ‘separating’ them into grades within these disciplines, we risk funnelling them further and deeper into intense competitions when we should be training them to find niches for themselves to escape competition. In business or society, when you encounter a red ocean (full of sharks, ie. competition), you run, and you try to define your own market, a blue ocean you can swim in. Yet in schools we don’t prepare students for a life that involves seeking blue oceans, we try to force everyone to swim in the bloody waters and create artificial bloodbaths.
An alternative: Sorting by strengths, Lifting up everyone
I thought long and hard about what the education system should really be separating and pooling instead of the traditional model. And I have an alternative to suggest. It will be aligned with the ideas I proposed previously. To prepare students truly for society, the system should be sorting students into various areas of strength/practice/disciplines that they are to be nurtured for rather than choosing a fixed set of disciplines and then sorting students according to their abilities in those disciplines. And be serious about nurturing them in the areas they are sorted into. Expose students to more things whilst they are young instead of specifying subjects and saying they ought to have headstart in those areas and drill them with content. Sort people horizontally across a spectrum of different areas rather than vertically along a spectrum of ‘abilities’ — help students develop their strengths and hone their craft.
A well-functioning society requires a good spread of people with head, heart and hands. You may say that we are exposed to the competition of the global market but price need not be the only signals we heed, quality matters, identity as fellow citizens matters. And these are values that we can cultivate when we sort people not by their ‘abilities’ in narrow areas of human endeavour, but by sorting them in a way where they see the value they can contribute to the society.
Why this is so important is because so much of Singaporean’s students’ lives are squandered meandering around the system designed to not so much to genuinely develop every student but to sieve out the top academics/intellectuals. Imagine you are cluelessabout your strengths but you know you’re not a study-type. And each year you try hard but you’re consistently sorted into the tail end of the distribution, for every single subject where there’s a test/exam. You score A for arts and you are told you draw well but none of those are reflected or considered when you have to select which school to go into. You’re continually told you’re underperforming, ‘doing badly’ — of course you try to deal with the feelings of inadequacy and being judged harshly by ‘rebeling’ against the system. And then the system tells you that you’re doing badly precisely because you’re behaving badly.
If we had an alternative system, I believe Jerome Yap’s story would have turned out differently. Of course, if I were him now, I wouldn’t want it to be any different because the adversity I went through mademe who I am. But under the different system, he would be ‘discovered’ at an earlier age, and his talents will be nurtured by his parents and teachers (who do not have to seem like they are working against the system); he might have already started his own successful design business by the age of 28 — with a degree or not. In fact, the degree won’t be what we are celebrating, it would be the fact that we have such talent from this small city state.
This is part of a series of republished articles from my Medium page because I am worried about the platform ceasing to be. A previous version of this article was published in here a while back.
