Kevin L, Author at Kevin Low

Manpower shortage

There’s been huge layoffs announced in the tech industry; and that’s been spreading to even the big established technology firms like Microsoft and Google. One could say this is many years in the making as those firms have grown perhaps too big and reaching the edges of the overall economy. Hence when the economy starts shrinking or just slowing its growth, these companies no longer have that much room to realise their original growth ambitions.

Yet at the same time, there’s a manpower shortage. We don’t have sufficient good people in the market who versatile enough to switch rapidly from one industry to another; or from even one company to the next, despite having gradually moved out of the whole lifelong employment culture and psyche since decades ago.

After years of drumming up the whole idea of upskilling, reskilling and all that nonsense around training, certification, we made the labour market even more rigid. And we do so by telling people stories around scarcity in skills, training, and affected their narrative and confidence in what they can actually do. Now you have to be ‘qualified’, and chosen by someone or some organisation before you can do the work.

That is simply not true. You need to choose what is the work you’d like to do and who are the people you seek to serve. And allow the job to naturally take its shape.

Who does the market serve?

For a government, it makes sense to periodically step back, figure out who and what the market is not serving that it should really be serving and create interventions to redirect the market.

This is why carbon regulations, carbon pricing and systems of disclosure is so important. And all of these entails the government and the people making a choice to take away that false liberty of choice that the market creates. This decision is driven by seeking to serve the people who otherwise would not be served by the market.

For example, in the case of people who are hard-to-insure. The market-based insurance approach makes things harder and harder for them as the companies are able to discriminate against them and pool only customers with better risk profiles.

The invisible hand is invisible but it is still guiding and directing. Better for us to articulate as a society how we want the market to serve us and get it to do just that.

Fraud and shortcuts to success

Maybe I’m writing this too early given the case just surfaced. I’m talking about JP Morgan’s allegation that Javice Charlie fabricated customers in order to inflate the price that she could sell her startup, Frank. It’s ironic to some extent that the fintech startup was supposed to help students cut through opacity with the college financial aid system in the US.

It reminded me of Theranos of course, if you looked at Charlie Javice’s profile, everything suggests she was incredibly intelligent and could certainly be very successful on her on merits without committing fraud. But yes she seem to have taken the position not so different from Liz Holmes or Sam Bankman-Fried.

Why is the culture making us so desperate for success or to go down the slippery slope of misrepresentation? Why are our young people believing that the whole startup and venture space is about faking it till you make it? Is there nothing wrong with that? What should we look into fixing?

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.