Author Archives: Kevin L

Benign hypocrisy

In one of Steve Levitt’s interview of Steve Pinker, when asked about strategies for life, he brought up the idea that everyone needs a good dose of “benign hypocrisy”. I’d think that comes across as controversial, for a podcast episode titled such as to say that Steve Pinker manages his controversy portfolio carefully.

Yet when I think deeply about it, I guess perhaps the term bears out of this modern style of calling out on people especially with regards to perceived inauthenticity. Because we are in such a sensitive age, even being polite can be misconstrued as hypocrisy while being rude lauded as authenticity.

So perhaps it should not be called benign hypocrisy but the ability to undertake emotional labour. Basically to put our emotional selves at work in order to practice certain responses that is true to our intentions towards dealing with the situation as oppose to being true to our feelings. In other words, we smile, say nice things and be polite even when a customer is behaving badly or being unreasonable. We may sometimes practice this emotional labour even with friends and family. And the ability to do this work is important because it trains us to show up even when we don’t feel like it – to achieve our intentions, not necessarily to express our feelings.

Go on and try

We push out bikes to the top of the hill and let it free wheel down so we can learn to balance without having to worry about pedalling. One step by a step we learn to cycle. Just balancing is not enough, and just pedalling isn’t enough either. And none of the small step does the job, only when they are done collectively, sequentially, in the proper order.

Yet it is not the assurance of being able to ride the bike downhill that we push it up. It is the promise that we will learn something, we will get better, and something in us is being changed, each time we adhere to the practice.

So we go on and try not because it will succeed or that we won’t fail. But that it will change things just a bit, and that will be good enough. Till the day we succeed, till the day we gain mastery.

Take small steps

Ever tried walking up the stairs two steps at a time? How about down? What about climbing up three steps at once? Which makes you more exhausted, and what is better? Well, it will depend on the length of your legs but in general, taking smaller steps allows you to clock progress more gradually and allows you to advance towards your goal in a more orderly manner.

It is also more sustainable to take small steps towards goals. The problem is that most of the time, the small steps may not always be moving forward. As I mentioned before, sometimes progress involves some degree of backtracking in order to advance. And it might be the same for the case of Hydrogen economy in Japan. The country have been vesting itself into hydrogen technologies and all kinds of end-use applications for this new energy vector but continues to utilize grey hydrogen, without introducing any necessary certification to differentiate grey from green hydrogen.

That can seem problematic as there’s still a lot of Scope 3 emissions from that perspective. In fact, they introduced these decentralised fuel cell based combined heat and power plants for residential homes which also supply hot water (because the hydrogen fuel produces water when it reacts with oxygen in the fuel cell thus releasing energy in the process in the form of electricity). The strange thing is that these decentralised plants are actually fueled by Liquid Petroleum Gas (LPG) or Natural Gas (NG) which goes into a fuel reformer to produce hydrogen, releasing Carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

I wonder if all of these are small steps sometimes but in the grand order of things, having the ability to shift end-use towards hydrogen is a first step so that we don’t have to rewire the decentralised applications when green hydrogen starts being widely available.

Trying to affliate

On Linkedin, I see people starting to use their former affliations to brand themselves. Ex-Google, ex-McKinsey, ex-Tesla, what have you. The people who find it hard to stand on their own ground, to initiate ideas, to test and run with them are usually the ones who try to leverage on affliations to move.

I learnt from a conversation with a small fund manager recently about how the Indonesian startup scene has a dearth of good manpower. Frequently, young people are using their 3-6 month stints at ToGo’s platforms or startups to level up their resume even as their real skills are lacking behind.

The problem with using metrics, KPIs is that they can be gamed even if they don’t lie. What we should care about are probably much harder to measure and assess. But one principle to bear in mind perhaps is that the more one is leveraging on their past affliations, perhaps the more skeptical one should be. It should be what exactly they did on the project they claim they were part of. Just attending meetings, or delivering the goods?

Brainstorming for pain

As a consultant, we often need to understand the painpoints, challenges and problems of various parties in the conversation. That is how we can add value to work on the problems, identify the solutions, offer the right recommendations.

The challenge to sharing painpoints or problems is there will always be some kind of resistance. It is difficult for parties involved to openly confess they need help; and the problems they identify at first may not necessarily be the fundamental problem. They might also be afraid that the problems identified traces back to themselves or some mistakes they had made before.

So what can we do? Reminder of the objectives of the brainstorm and objectives of the team. Walk through with the team what is the process they have at present to get from their starting point to their objectives. And ask them about the difficulties or bottlenecks at each step along that process.

Hope this general framework for a start contributes to your brainstorming!

Mouldy places and spaces

Are there dark and moist corners of your life? Unvisited and rarely given light? What grows in there?

Could it be certain friendships and relationships? Or the job you had for 10 years where you and the organisation is stagnating? Or the hobby you had considered pursuing before other life’s concern caught up?

When are you clearing out the fungus and lighting up the place?

Wrong direction at speed

Does it make sense to compete on whose car goes faster if you have a different destination in mind? What do you say to the 12 year old math whiz in you class who just got 105/100 because he even got to the bonus 5-mark question while you got 5/100 because you only finished the first 3 pages of the exam and got plenty of wrongs? What would you have said if 20 years down the road you realised you were going to be a successful artist?

So what if you are fast and furious if you’re headed off a cliff? As compared to being on the racetrack? We all think and behave as if everyone is heading in the same direction that we get caught up on very narrow, specific metrics to measure ourselves in ways that may not matter. In fact, if you’re trying to compete on speed in the wrong direction, you’re just going to get farther from your goals.

More important to take time to get the direction right. So many of the guys in Singapore think of their two years of national service a waste. And they find themselves believing that they are falling behind. The question is whether they took a pause to consider which direction they are trying to move in. Perhaps the two years serve to discover oneself better? Perhaps you’d realise at that point life is not about just doing what others are doing, except better?

In being constrained, you find yourself freed.

Opportunities favour the prepared

Say you failed to land on your dream job. You “settle” for something different. And then what? You prepare yourself bit by bit on the things you might have to hone if you had been in that dream job. You continue reading about the industry, you strive to be better in the areas which are important to that dream job but also coincides well with whatever you have settled for.

And you take ownership of developing yourself, and earn supporters who would root for you in whatever you do. Articulate your passion better and craft a clear mission for yourself that relates to that dream job. This is a kind of moving on, just different from the giving up that you had imagined.

Then one day when the opportunity comes again to land your dream job comes, you are ready. It could be a new opening, it could be a higher role, or just the introduction of someone influential inspired by your sense of mission. But when it comes, you are ready.

Thinking about how you can be ready for the opportunities you want to catch when it comes? Consider getting a coach.

Vertical integration II

There is a cost-push inflation coming along; the major challenge is the global logistics and the fragmenting of supply chains. We have traditionally built a global factory with conveyor belts running from country to country, through our ports, shipping routes and the vessels. The geopolitical struggles over the past decade have gradually weakened the links as people started focusing on building local supply chains to enhance resilience.

The pandemic worsened things further as countries going into lockdowns tend to disrupt their segment of the global supply chain and hence the next stage of the global factory have to spend time and effort reconnecting with other sources in order to keep things going. It has not been a pretty picture but because of that, the configuration of those conveyor belts have changed and been rewired.

This continues to happen as other forces manifest: pressure to decarbonise the value chain, government policies to reduce migration or enhance local employment, emergence of new technologies replacing the old. Consider the fact that a large proportion of vessels across the oceans are actually carrying coal where they were mined to where they’ll be burnt for power. When coal power gradually phase out across the world, the vessels are going to have to be out of business or carrying something else. The supply of power will gradually shift towards other fuel types. And most of the other fuel types are unlikely to use the same carriers.

Where companies have an efficient, vertically integrated supply chain, they bring with them great strategic value where they are able to continue their operations and deliver goods even as the market for intermediate goods or functions starts weakening. For all the environmental harm that has been brought on by oil & gas companies, their ability to coordinate supply chains, logistics and set up intermediate markets to enhance efficiencies of their supply chain is something that has to be picked up by other industries to move the world beyond the current cost-push inflationary challenges.

Vertical integration

Industrial organisation was a very important discipline of microeconomics for a period of time especially when it came to supporting or counteracting the trust-busters. And then even as economists were just beginning to peer a little more into industries and understand the workings of firms and the strategic thinking behind them, finance came into the picture and all sorts of crazy connections between business metrics and financial metrics became the science of understanding business, evaluating and valuing them.

Strategic value of firms remain relevant in terms of thinking about merger financial models but these perspectives of looking at incremental value and the ‘main case’ of business-as-usual sometimes misses the point of an acquisition or integration. Aside from financial assessment, the whole strategic decision to undertake a merger or acquisition requires not a business-as-usual view but one that involves a vision of the future. Not forecasting the future but taking active steps to create it.

During a time of massive decentralisation and increasing marketisation, with lots of competitors, we can expect that value can be created by spinning off individual business units but when there’s shortage of resources, intermediate goods and services, vertical integration is powerful. And across the sectors, there are bound to be some that is plagued with bottlenecks and resource problems that only vertical integration can solve – which is to say the strategic value cannot be ignored. In fact, that is very often the way to compete in these markets.

When thinking about firms and business dynamics, are we just focused on the financial metrics or do we want to develop a view on the evolution of competition?