Author Archives: Kevin L

Following recipes

Which recipe do you follow? It really depends on what you want to cook. It doesn’t matter that everyone else is following the chicken rice recipe and you’re following the one for making Laksa – if making Laksa is your objective.

The challenge of students today in our education system is that they have been taught to follow recipes; all kinds of recipes available to them because there are recipes; and not because there are dishes worth preparing. The students ought to make an assessment of which recipe is solving what kind of problems and hence the ‘right one’ to follow.

What is happening however, is that students are following recipes that bring them into prestigious or well-paying careers, not realising that it wasn’t what they signed up for in the first place. And in the late twenties, they discover that they’ve been following a recipe for a dish they never did like anyways.

This is why I wrote dream, think & act!. This free ebook is now available for download in all the different formats here.

Root canal treatment recipe

A dentist friend who teaches in the dental school sometimes was complaining to me about the declining quality of students. No one could explain that the objective of the root canal was to actually help the patient save a natural tooth. The answers given were around the technical aspects of the procedure such as cleaning out the bacteria.

The problem wasn’t that the students weren’t smart. They seem to expect to enter a lesson empty awaiting to be filled with knowledge and content and see their sole role as soaking up what is needed to ace the assessment and then move on with life. We have structured education so much that students think of learning as a means to the end of taking exams. That is a very serious problem and mindset gap that needs to be filled.

These students are not going to be able to deal with problem solving on a forward looking basis. Because we want to train students not to be solving known current problems though that is useful but to prepare them well enough for the problems that may come along in the future. In fact, most of highest level of academia is surrounding discovering problems at the frontier of knowledge to crack them.

Being able to understand and define a problem should precede mastering the solution to solve the problem. I’m not too sure if it’s an issue with intelligence, the system or the culture that we are creating because we have over-optimised on too many things. A system that is over-optimised over-indexes the problems today and the current solutions; without equipping our people with the ability to see beyond and into problems of the future.

That will be a problem we have to treat.

Story of consumption

What are you telling yourself when you consume something? Or when you withhold a consumption? The difficulty with saving the world is that we actually need to consume less and not more. Yet we need to get the markets to continue doing the work of delivering what we need. How can we know that the economic system already delivered what it needs to and perhaps a different machinery will be needed.

When you try to consume less, you retain the purchasing power to be tempted again and again towards consumption. And that is why it has been difficult to encourage people to save if they can maintain access to their savings – you need to force people to lock up their money for long times.

And maybe better to work on the path of culture; to develop the right storylines to consume less. It can be about degradation of the environment; or it can be about products that does less to the environment (ie. Consuming 1 instead of 3 alternatives). Or it can be about an identity that people should be aspiring towards.

Permanent big things

We overestimate the permanence of big things and underestimate that of the small. When a company is big and seems well established, we think it is less replaceable than the small mom-and-pop shop somewhere in your neighbourhood.

But getting big means more leverage, more overheads and it is also costlier to maintain. It is hard to imagine an alternative big thing to replace Google, or Nokia, or Kodak at those points when they are at their peak, until an alternative appears. And at no point before the big unravelling would the alternative seem like it is displacing what was thought of as permanent.

Fossil fuel is big, and we think baseload is hard to displace but the alternatives will slowly gain traction invisibly before you expect the collapse of the incumbent.

So close yet so far

If you’re so near to success but then at the last point it failed, what does it mean about your effort and all the time spent on it? It can be for a business, a project, a single deal, or even a relationship. If you had known, would you have gone for it anyways? Or maybe that’s not a fair question to ask; the better question is how you’d value all the progress up to that point. Before the failure.

Would you just walk away and try to forget? Or simmer in anger? Or start gathering the pieces and see what they can be used for next?

I think the last point is particularly interesting because news just came out that Suncable entered into voluntary administration due to the shareholders not being aligned. It was a big and ambitious project. There are people concerned with Singapore not getting enough green electricity. But even if Suncable really failed, there had been expertise built up, teams familiar with the system and processes, plans or ideas that can be refashioned.

Better to think that what brought you close to success but did not get you there has already brought you closer to other successes you’ve yet to see.

Slow or fast

We think the world is better off faster mostly when we live in cities. When the train or traffic is slow, when the queue at the checkout counter is long, we have an issue.

Yet that’s actually a narrow perspective on things; it comes from that dominant, productive workforce view. In fact, maybe not even the workers’ view but that of the manager. That things have to move faster and we have to produce more.

Yet as the world progresses and the composition of our workforce and consumer class changes, there will be fundamental shifts in the way we think about speed and productivity. Dutch supermarket chain Jumbo introduced slow checkouts for lonely elderly who would prefer to chat with people probably both in line and with the cashier.

And there will be new business opportunities arising from a world that might be slowing down. For people entering middle age and confronting unhealthy lifestyles, falling sick frequently, they might soon be seeing their western medical doctors requesting they go to traditional chinese medicine (TCM) clinics to “rebalance” their health. TCM is generally seen as slow but that is unique suited to more long term issues and preventative in approach. In that sense, certain ailments lends themselves to this slow way.

Like parental controls and screen time limitations, speed limits on things, having the slow option might actually be an alternative for niche customers. And this pool of customers might be growing.

Competitive analysis II

Having written my previous post, I think it’s important to say that knowing your competitor is still important after knowing yourself. As you understand you resource pool and how you can serve your customer better, you can start appreciating why some strategies work better than others. Your competitors’ actions or execution failures become an excellent resource for you.

So what is a good competitor analysis really about? It is more about firstly defining the market properly and figuring out how much of your competitor’s business really competes with you. Then there’s the historical lessons of that competitor that you can learnt from.

Finally, focus back on the customer and how they perceive and view various substitutes or alternative where your products and services are concerned. That’s the true current status of “competition” then consider how you can develop strategies to get more of the relevant customer groups’ mind and wallet share.

Competitive analysis

I’ve done countless competitor analysis in my career. I think about strategy intently when it comes to business, career, life and that works its way into my coaching and consulting career. Most businesses are obsessed with what their competitors are doing.

If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.

Sun Tze

The quote is probably well remembered especially by people who have a chinese upbringing. But we often take for granted the part about knowing yourself. In fact, the original chinese saying has it in reverse from the above translation. It starts with “know yourself”. Of course we know ourselves, you’d think.

Yet countless businesses whom I’ve worked with when performing competitor analysis are not thinking about themselves enough. They are just identifying random brands or companies doing the same activities as themselves and considering them as competitors, trying to find out their pricing and what they do. If you know yourself then you know where is your stronghold and which is your true battleground. If you know you’re weak, then focus on where you can garner resources; more often in blue oceans rather than red ones.

When Barnes & Noble started their online bookstore, Jeff Bezos rallied the young Amazon team who was trembling in fear by telling them that there was no point focusing on their competitor since B&N wasn’t going to write them cheques, better to focus on the customers. Jeff Bezos knows Amazon well; there was no way a small upstart can win by mimicking their competitors. They’d run out of breathe before they start if they’re on the same race.

Of course, Amazon was afraid. B&N had lots of resources to try crushing them. But if Amazon was obsessed with this fear they’d be running in circles. The greatest competitor they need to analyse is themselves, their ability to focus on the client base will set them apart from each version of themselves.

Subsidies and fundamentals

Huge amounts of subsidies goes into fuel and energy. The companies are not necessarily being the ones subsidised to produce the fuel but rather, domestic markets of net exporters tend to be protected somewhat from international energy prices through subsidies. The notion is to help maintain internal price stability and hence cope with cost of living.

Australia is one of the few markets who are net exporters of natural gas for example and yet do not really “shield” its domestic market from international price impacts. The result is that the recent price spike in natural gas had Australians screaming in pain and for perhaps the first times in decades, businesses and households are seriously considering disconnecting from the grid and electrifying.

But there can be a middle ground. Subsidies can exist for these energy exporters to protect their domestic users given that these exporters stand to gain when the energy price increase. How can they share these windfall with their own economy and the users in local market? The government can subsidise users but make the subsidy transparent. This way, households are not paying the full prices and they are also given information about how much the government is helping to make them affordable. At the same time, it becomes more politically acceptable to pull back on such subsidies for those heavy users who are higher on income brackets and can afford it.

For far too long, we shield the markets from the proper price signals and artificially create false sense of affordability by subsidies, we reduce the resilience of our economies and contribute further to wastage and carbon emissions. Making subsidies transparent is a great first step, towards removing this political gridlock around domestic energy tariffs.

Cutlery on the go

I was going through a security check and the security officer saw that my bag had fork, spoon and chopsticks. They were from my portable dinning cutlery set. The officer was amused and asked me to remove it from my bag to check. He then realised it was more for sustainability and that I was not some homeless dude lumbering around.

Lots of disposable cutlery can be saved from bringing your own cutlery set around. That reduces material waste. But at the same time, what we eat matters too!

Cutting down on meats especially beef reduces significant amount of carbon emissions and also animal waste. The globalised world has more diversity in diets so that helps to disperse demand for different food products but the way food is produced had become a lot more industrialised and intense in those particular areas where crops and livestock are produced. This means more logistics, centralisation of profits and inequality.

If you were to make a choice to change your cutlery use or your diet, I’d prefer you think more about your diet.