Author Archives: Kevin L

Corporate ladder

I always find Star Wars’ portrayal of corporatism and industrialism very interesting especially because despite the different forms they take, they very much mirror what happens in the world we reside in. The trading, bartering, and dominance of transactional behaviours across the galaxy is amazing. Yet there is also such a strong presence of politics, of fighting for beliefs.

One of the recurring theme for those within the ranks of the empire is the idea of climbing the corporate ladder. There are characters who climb because they actually believe in the cause of the corporate, and there are those who are there for their own egos and desire to rise. As we steep ourselves so deeply in work, have we reflected upon the ladder that we are really climbing?

It may not be the corporate ladder; it could be a personal one, or that of social expectations, familial expectation. And if we are not climbing, what then are we doing? Are we even conscious of our goals as we plow through each day?

The corporate system is best not at identifying talents and allowing them to rise (the market and community system tends to be better at that); but it is very good and wringing out standardized productivity from the masses of workers. With its means of doling out incentives and disincentives, from recognition to coercion of different forms, it bends people to its agenda and will.

Have you been bent? Do you know what you are climbing?

Green economy II

Why would we rely on companies’ goodwill and marketing desires to drive environmental, social and governance goals? Why don’t we as a society go out the push these agenda upon them? After all, we did the same with labour laws, we also regulate the release of harmful substance into the air or water bodies. There are more draconian and extensive rules around. The financial markets might look like they will survive climate change. But not human lives. Especially not the ones whose livelihood and critical infrastructure depends on stable environment.

There is a huge crack in the system and it is going to cause a great deal of pain if we try to fix it. This pain is in terms of profits; but we know it is also going to cause a greater deal of pain, agony and anguish to many lives, and a future that is ahead of us. Yet for some reason, we are willing to safeguard profits at the expense of a future. We think the profit can buy us safeguards – what form, I’m not exactly sure about.

A green economy requires external intervention and it is not going to come about naturally. Sure, it will be quite difficult to gain societal consensus around these issues and things. Most of the population may not be well-aware of the issues at hand enough to actually support some of these reforms or policy changes. Others whose profits and livelihood are impacted may question the wisdom of these. Public education and creating awareness is just as important – we’ve done that with hand-washing and encouraging public hygiene, we have moved people from kampongs (villages) into high-rise public housing in a single generation, and we have turned Singapore from Third World to First in just about 25-30 years.

We can make this transition to a green economy.

Green economy

What is the green economy? It is an entire system of production and consumption that actually acknowledges and properly handle the constraints and boundaries of the environment, nature and ensures sustainability of the system. The blue economy is captured in that. So is circularity in the economy. And so is the notion of nature based solutions.

Greenwashing is not part of the green economy even if the activity is borne out of it. A large part of the green economy is the government; they no longer just ensure monetary stability, enforce the laws and support various other institutional structures. They also have to provide some kind of structure to govern the pricing of carbon, enforce accounting of carbon emissions, invest into the technologies that enhances the sustainability of our economy.

All of these things are not entirely new to the government but they need to get used to being involved, taking responsibility and ownership over this area they used to leave out. Not only this, they need to look upon the transition towards this green economy as ultimately part of the security and future of the jurisdictions they are looking after. It can be difficult; when banks don’t finance baseload coal fired power plants you might think energy security is being undermined. But maybe that’s not the right problem we want to deal with; because energy security can also be about energy efficiency, switching to more decentralised sources of energy, and using more renewables.

So are we electing and choosing leaders who care about the future to lead governments? Are we behind them in their approach and thinking about creating a future that we can exist in?

Meritocratic complex

There are negative feedback loops that ends up self-limiting certain effects. But there are positive feedback loops that amplify certain effects. Meritocracy can be self-reinforcing particularly in the manner merit is defined.

The merit defined at a point in time can become entrenched as those “merited” take on leading roles and define the meaning of merit for subsequent generations. At the same time, those with resources gained through “merit” can likewise use those resources to build up merit for their descendents.

The education system is being challenged and as we look to review our social compact, we need to think this hard. How much should one be rewarded for good luck or penalised by bad? And if merit can be passed on through generations, then is it still merit for an individual?

Picking problems

You can’t solve a problem you aren’t willing to have.

Bill Burnett and Dave Evans

I know of a workplace a person close to me work at. They are essentially supposed to perform innovation and the staff are trained in design thinking. And yet the struggles of the staff there are unthinkable.

They spend some time hunting around for problem statements. And I think one of the biggest challenge is that they spend more time choosing the problems to solve rather than trying to deeply characterise them. As a result, they had a cohort of staff spending a lot of time and resources on problems which eventually appeared to be unsolvable. That then led on to the management trying to steer the team towards scoping down problems to smaller, manageable types.

What started out as a culture that was supposed to be more candid, fun and open became full of tension and sensitivity. People were afraid to voice real problems; and elephants started to appear in rooms, chats, and zooms. Issues were being skirted around. Indeed, if one is unwilling to have a particular problem, one will never be able to solve it.

Improving a system

One of the topics I was really interested in while doing my masters in economics was the impact of institutions on economic development. I looked at it from a few perspectives including the legal system, the existence of various policies or reforms and also studied the economic history of the US to see how the interactions between business and the orthodoxy of the day when it comes to big or small government.

There is no doubt the world operates on a lot of different systems and not one is right or wrong. There are systems better for deriving some outcomes rather than others but it is hard to say if a system is better overall. To begin, we have to agree on the principles; whose welfare to improve more of and what are the priority areas before others.

The market system which has been peddled around is not exactly the complete system. A market directs itself towards outcomes of those in power within the market. The politics and regulation are institutions above the market so they have a huge role in directing the market. While the government cannot be fully culpable of the outcomes of a market, they can help to coordinate the overall goal of the entire market: whether energies are directed towards production or gains diversion, whether one is working for one’s survival or some higher values.

History have proven itself that keeping people fed and with basic needs satisfied unlocks incredible boost to productivity and economic development. We need to enable more of that in all of our systems.

Vocal introverts

I find it funny how people would write articles about telling introverts they are not celebrated in the workplace because of certain norms and conventions, then conclude they need to be more like extroverts to succeed. Most strategies in the article aren’t really anything about leveraging on their introversion but overcoming them. Isn’t it discouraging for most introverts to hear that.

If you really look into the examples of famous introverts that Adrian mentioned in the article, you realise they do things differently. And I’d like to share some real strategies on how to actually leverage on introversion to achieve the kind of credit-taking, self-promotion and visibility Adrian is talking about.

First, when it comes to networking and making connections, introverts are actually extraordinarily good at going deep on common interest and common points. Therefore, they need to be particularly targeted and pick up a few key questions that they can ask almost like a template to new people they mean and use those to either continue the conversation or stay quiet and disappear quickly. This is great because it allows the introvert to steer networking in a very thoughtful and directed way that reduces less useful small talk.

Second, when it comes to self-promotion. It can be subtle so much so that one doesn’t even consider it any promotion. Introverts tend to dive deeply into work and go into details – when determining critical areas where they have worked on, they can set rule-of-thumb for themselves to always be presenting them to bosses and peers. These are subject matter they are intensely passionate about and would be more confident/comfortable to share details in. Start from these areas and allow your expertise/credit to emerge naturally from that intensity.

Finally, on visibility. Introverts can be quite visible when it comes to online platforms and even taking on a different persona. So for zoom meetings where one may prefer to turn off camera, make sure you put your favourite head shot photo of yourself as display. Also, use chat function, Q&A as well as other text-based functions to be vocal if you still find speaking up difficult. Create a rule to make at least 1 comment by text for online meetings or by speaking for face to face ones. Then dial it up.

Notice that my strategies generally suggest small rule-of-thumb that is about developing a practice rather than being motivated by climbing the ladder. The idea is to focus on personal growth and doing things the introvert way rather than bending oneself out of shape.

Skills & certifications

There had been a lot of talk about gamification and most of our social media addictiveness comes from idea of gamification. Where do you think the pull-down gesture for refreshing a page come from? Slot machines of course!

Even with lifelong learning, skillsfuture initiatives, there is a lot of gamification happening with the government trying to encourage people to go for courses. The design of the skills map in the skillsfuture dashboard even looks like a journey in a game, collecting various qualifications, etc.

The problem, as I pointed out in a previous blog post, is that we conflate certification with skills. So are you looking to acquire skills or certification? Are you keeping the skills you acquired by exercising them? Or busy collecting badges but actually discarding the skills as soon as you get the badge?

Sleepy villages

I was visiting a part of Singapore where there was a new MRT station but a small population of residents around that station. I expressed that it was such a waste of taxpayer’s money to build a station there when hardly anyone lived there and yet the cost of the station is borne by the population. On the other hand, there were amenities which were not built in more densely populated locations in Singapore where it would be needed and served way more people.

Then it dawned on me that if you have the transport node in place, the value of the land surrounding it would rise and any further developments in the area would be more valuable. The government being the main land owner around the new MRT station in this sleepy village would eventually benefit from the land sales. So in some sense, it was ‘investing’ in the taxpayer’s money for the future.

But to a certain extent, this argument mean that there’s probably no point building or serving the places where you’re originally extracting taxes from because those taxpayers would be the ones benefiting disproportionately from the developments rather than the government. I wonder how this calculus works. Public finance is actually such a fascinating topic worth more public awareness and public education on.

I think it’s such a pity that when budget of the government is presented, the things that catches people’s attention is mostly about what sort of handout or welfare benefits are coming along and for who. There’s insufficient attention placed on how much is spent on what infrastructure, where they are going to be, who they are going to serve and why. The common man should know, and should be questioning these.

Hot food stall

A few days back I wrote about my observations in Primark. There are simply products that needs to roll off shelves as soon as they are put on it for the business to work well and stay successful. And pricing contributes significantly to that.

Near my place, there’s always been a hot food stall that sells affordable hot breakfast food (for those who knows, it’s an economic bee hoon stall); they are incredibly successful with long queues every morning and they usually sell out right before or during lunch time. They start as early as 5.30am, and queues start forming from 6-6.30am. Unfortunately, some time late last year, they sold their business to another larger food company that runs multiple food stalls in neighbourhood coffeeshops. I heard it was because one of the proprietors fell sick.

In any case, after the company took over the business, they retained some of the previous partners but raised prices after renovating the stall. The food were not different but then because queues stopped forming, the food items were left on the display longer. As a result, they were less tasty, which reduced demand further.

Just by raising the price, the stall suffered a double whammy, the original model of selling made-in-time hot food broke down. The hot food stall became a mediocre stall in the coffeeshop. There are just some models of business that requires low prices; this is good for both the proprietor and the target pool of customers. When one considers raising prices, one must recognise that the pricing is part of the overall business model.