Author Archives: Kevin L

Sense of loss (of options)

There are things you once have and then gone. But there are also options that gets discarded when a choice is made. The choice you made cease being an option but just the path you go down. So you are losing all the options when you make a decision.

Our modern, liberal, capitalistic society celebrates some kind of freedom in the form of optionality. But life is essentially about removing options continually. In fact, as I learnt from Oliver Burkeman, the latin word for “decide” has the element of “cutting off” which is why it looks similar to “homocide”, and “suicide”.

The question is how we experience losing this optionality as if it was an actual thing we had. The problem with holding on to options is that we never really get to enjoy what they actually stand for by holding it. In order to move forward, we actually have to embrace a decision and sacrifice optionality. That is a gain rather than a loss.

But for some reason, that is still so strongly felt as a loss. The framing is probably a result of a lifetime of being conditioned into thinking that we should always be trying to build more options for ourselves. Even in school, we have more options when we do well and in many cases, we wanted to have more choice over the subjects we can do by doing well academically. What is less obvious is that shedding those options, and coming to a focal point on what to do became incredibly painful when one spent a long academic career amassing options. We can’t seem to appreciate that life is really about eliminating options – but sooner or later, we will have to.

Independence of time

Time is something we experience through our memories but because we measure it, time became independent. Independent of our experience such that it goes by whether we feel it or not. And we then treat it as a resource to use or to waste. Yet it slips by even when we don’t use it, so we consider it wasted. Or is it?

Was time ever ours? And in trying to use it, and pressured to use it well, do we end up rendering our experiences empty and meaningless instead? And when we have a looming deadline we think time is short and there is always so much to do.

What we have to do is given by ourselves though. And if we had gone the other way around and measured time by the work we do instead, will we actually get more out of time rather than get things out of shorter time?

So should we treat time as independent from our experience or to let it be something that is there only because we experience it? Much to ponder.

Cost reflective

Are our energy prices cost-reflective? In many countries where low energy tariffs are results of subsidy, there is not cost reflection. Government continues to mask the subsidy by controlling prices. It is not clear if this is good but besides the fact that market signal is not properly expressed, it is also not a very equitable way of spending taxpayers money.

Subsidies on goods and services like energy and water often are regressive because the rich tend to use more of these resources. By keeping prices low, those who can afford to consume more takes a lion share of the subsidy. When fuel is subsidised, those who have more cars and can drive more miles will receive more “funding” than those who do not even drive. The ones who have large houses with lots of appliances consuming lots of electricity and water will get more of that subsidy through low prices than poorer households.

Making sure even the strategic and essential goods are cost reflective helps to ensure transparency of subsidies and also allocate subsidies to the right group of people, those who needs them.

Chicken and egg

There is the chicken that laid the egg, and the egg hatches into a chicken. Which one comes first? Which one do you need first to start a cycle? That’s the challenge for so many different areas of life, and the energy transition.

We need to find the loose bricks that allows us to tear down the existing systems which perpetuates carbon intensive systems.

We need to identify the first part of a value chain to support and push through to get the rest of the activities through. For example, what should the government subsidise to get the hydrogen industry going? Would it be to subsidise the production, or the use of hydrogen? We need to figure out where is the bottleneck to deal with in order to break the cycle.

That’s one of the areas we are hoping to target and deal with. And that’s why blunomy was created.

What kind of competition?

Imagine an economy you preside over where everyone hones their skills in violin-making and produces violins. Everyone in the economy works really hard to make and sell violins. They do so many other things such as growing their own food, trying to sustain themselves, just to make violins. In the economy, there is no other markets; no one is producing food to sell, no one providing laundry services. Money is exchanged only to buy and sell violins. And only violins have a price.

That sounds absurd. Because if only violins have a price, then money is only worth violins. Then what is the value of money in this economy? Yet, without answering such questions, if we were to allow the metaphor to continue, say you are supposed to spur productivity of this economy, what would you do?

You could do things that enhance the labour productivity. This means everyone produces more violin in the economy, thereby driving the prices down and causing violins to be worth less vis-a-vis the currency in circulation.

Or you could start getting people to perform other work for others. That enhances productivity of the system overall as the ones good at violin making gets to outsource parts of their chores so that they are freed to make more violins. You allow more goods and services to be priced using money hence allowing more things to be exchanged and money becomes more valuable too. The higher productivity raises overall wealth measured in money and allows people to demand for more violins or pay more for them, enriching the violin makers.

Before I go further, you must be wondering what I’m talking about. I’m thinking about education, where grades are the only thing that matters, where students are expected to focus on grades despite having to fulfill other requirements such as CCAs, including sports, student activities, leadership activities, etc. All these while trumpeting that different students have different strengths and then consigning a future michelin-starred chef to the E-bucket and having him sent to vocational school.

Our system ties up and stifles talents, force everyone to be denominated and priced using just one attribute of their capability: intellect/academics (or test-taking). And so if you want to improve the system, do you still force everyone to produce more and better grades?

Feeling helpless

Things are happening to me. When we experience that, we lose sight of our agency. We were not consulted, we’re not in control, not any semblance of control. We don’t seem to have a choice. We feel helpless.

Recently, I was attending an investor conference that was focused on the topics around impact, sustainability and ESG (environmental, social, governance). There was a broad spectrum of attendees; some were well-versed in the topic tossing out various acronyms while others were confused, lost, frankly a little unhappy about how the investing industry is taken over by metrics beyond the financial ‘fundamentals’. Personally I think that capital can act differently from a while back and that we have the responsibility to ensure that it is no longer perpetuating the system as it is.

Of course, there would be naysayers who dismiss impact, sustainability and ESG as fluffy, intangibles which are running counter to the money-making that investing is all about. But even the naysayers, confronted with climate science would acknowledge there is a problem we are facing with climate change and all. Naysaying helps them soothe themselves because at least if there’s nothing much they can do, the eventually downfall of the earth is not on them. We choose to be helpless that way; even when we do have a choice.

The better road is towards action. When it comes to the climate challenge, a strong and useful key message is that it is not too late to make that impact and make the change.

Entrepreneurial endeavours

What counts as enterprising? How do you quantify that? Or is it more of a “I know it when I see it” kind of thing? Can one act be deemed as reckless by one and entrepreneurial by another? Whose views prevail? Does entrepreneurial necessarily mean taking risks? Or it is about being able to deal with problems and solve them creatively? Does it take cognitive flexibility?

Being in a capitalist world that is dominated somewhat by market-centricity, we often find the entrepreneur an alluring character. He (or she) is less controversial than in the past, having spruced up the image, and reduced the moral fatality of greed. Yet to me, entrepreneurship is more about the combination of action, courage and wits that sets one apart from another.

Action being about doing, not just saying. Courage being about risk-taking, but not recklessly so. And wits that combines self-awareness with large degree of cognitive flexibility that allows one to bend towards various situations and circumstances while successfully being able to achieve one’s goals. The entrepreneur can be an employee at work, a freelancer, the startup founder or the manager of a large institution. The entrepreneur need not be enterprising just from the perspective of creating financial value but also that of impact to the world.

The entrepreneur disrupts the precious equilibria sought after by economists, ensuring that the world never settles for what it is but moves towards what it could be. To a large extent, the entrepreneur actively seeks to create a future that he wants for himself and those around him.

Broken systems

In any civilisation, you’re in a system; so there are rules to follow, structures to abide by, and hence a sort of order emerges from the system. Of course the order can be disorderly but you get my drift. When however, certain realities don’t line up the way they do in a system, we think that it is broken.

I’m not too sure about that. Sometimes, we think that a system is broken because it is leading to an outcome which we don’t desire nor think is desirable. Whilst the designer or perpetrator of the system may agree with you on the outcome and results, they may not think the system is broken.

The reason being that their key objectives for the system does not align with yours. What you think as an undesirable outcome may be an unintended but necessary consequence of the system; and the results which you don’t agree with may not even be part of the consideration.

And that is the challenge when one works within a system. It is terribly difficult for a system to start paying attention to a new attribute that is worth looking at when measured against the values that inherently power the system. Effectively, the conversation goes like this:

You: ‘Hey system, you need to start looking more into the environmental damage you are causing while trying to make profits!’

System: ‘Ah, environmental damage. Does looking into it generate more profits?’

You: ‘Well, the point is thinking about we are trading-off environmental sustainability in our process of profit. Maybe we can rethink about the way we make a profit?’

System: ‘Sure! Come back to me when there’s a profitable way to reduce the environmental damage. Meanwhile, we carry on with what works.’

The reason we are facing climate change is not really because the system is broken but because the system we designed is working perfectly well – it is just trying to solve a completely different problem than the one we are facing or trying to get it to solve.

The only way is to establish new rules and new ways of doing things, of structuring our lives, our companies and our economy. This is why Enea Consulting, where I work at, has combined efforts with Isabelle Kocher de Leyritz to form Blunomy.

For now, the branding might still feel very foreign to an Asian mind, the URL quite strange (is the firm French or Malaysian?), the fonts on the website feels a tad bit too avant garde for the liking of the general masses. But the message, the intentions and planned actions are clear. We understand that the systems are not broken but they are simply not designed for the challenge that confronts us today. That is why we are not here to fix the system; we need new ones to replace them.

Just to reiterate that views presented here are entirely personal and do not represent the stance of any organisations I’m employed by or have any affiliations with.

Subscriptions

We talked about two-part pricing and some of that involves the use of subscriptions. Subscriptions are interesting because they ensure the match between the flow of services and the cashflow. This allows goods or services to be continuously supplied regardless of whether they are actually consumed or not. This gives producers the ability to invest more, produce their goods more cheaply, and leverage on the existing base of users to serve more people.

All well and good. The key is to enable those users to feel that there’s added value in subscribing instead of not. Especially in the world where there’s tonnes of free content out there, it is difficult to believe in value from subscriber content.

Despite the challenge, I’m creating a new subscription model where readers who would like to support my continued blogging, ideation and sharing to contribute through subscribing to my Kevlow Blog podcast. It allows me to offer additional value beyond the free daily blog posts to those who care about them and would like to support me while keeping my blog free for anyone and everyone. As a perk, you get an almost daily dose of audio track version of my blog posts. You’ll be hearing the voice of a (probably AI) system by Anchor.fm reading my writings but it sounds pretty smooth and comfortable in my opinion.

I think listening to them at 0.75x speed is ideal because writing text from me can be somewhat mouthful and harder to follow than very verbal writings. So once again, I hope you’d support me.

Everybody and nobody, everywhere and nowhere

When you try to please everyone, very often, you end up doing and producing things that would make nobody happy. When you try to be everywhere, as I’ve seen some of my college coursemates who tried to attend multiple parties and networking sessions on the same evening, they end up nowhere.

Fearing that you miss out inevitably means you miss out on everything because you’re not even at where you’re physically present, which is just about the only joy you really can have.

We are not capable of pleasing everyone, nor designed to be everyone, or to be everywhere. Let us enjoy these things that constrain us rather than putting our emotional selves intensely at odds with them.