When was the last time you reviewed your life, your goals, activities or take stock of how you’re spending your time? I’ve been so busy most of this while, working on my coaching, consulting and also sharing ideas on my blog I haven’t really done a quick review even of how I’m allocating time across my activities.
One thing that becoming a consultant made me do is to really value my time and take proper stock of how I’m spending it. It forces me to consider if the activities I’m engaging in is really worth my time. I also started thinking about the marginal value of each hour outside my usual work time.
Given the value of the time I have outside work, I have to perform my work more efficiently in order to gain more space and engage really in the stuff that gives us life satisfaction and not just the ‘value’ as defined by work.
Labour markets are very tight now and with the rate of job transitions that people have now, it should be more and more interesting for labour economists to start studying the markets and understanding if they are working efficiently, and if not, what are the distortions. While I may say distortions, they are not in and of themselves a bad thing. They actually often help us to achieve certain goals by triumphing over shortcomings in our culture. But it is important to understand their impacts anyways.
One of the distortions to labour markets is the fact that companies offer salaries to new hire based on the market rates but then give pay raises by performance. In other words, even if a staff is not performing well, typically if his experience and skills are becoming more and more scarce in the marketplace, his pay does not rise if he stays where he is. Therefore, he would switch to get a higher pay. The company which loses him has no one else to blame than their system.
At the same time, those people who performs well, but yet their skills are becoming more and more common in the marketplace, would enjoy pay raises while incoming labour supply gets lower starting wages without affecting this “top-performer”. The company justifies its decision that this person is tried and tested, have been delivering value to the company (never mind the fact actually they could have replaced him with someone cheaper and have equal skill). So he stays in the company and draws the higher pay.
In the first case, you observe that salary offered in the market tends to be higher than the prevailing salaries being paid to existing staff. As the recruiter only observes the information from newly offered salaries, the new offers tend to be higher than the actual salaries being paid out on average. In the second case, you’ll observe that people in their roles are paid pretty well while the new offers in the market tends to be quite low in comparison.
Such is a cultural distortion that may have to be corrected by increasing awareness, as well as improvements in HR.
In Singlish, there’s a question that typically stresses people out and has answers varying significantly based on the interpretation of the questioner’s purpose. But at the heart of the question “why like that?”, the questioner is questioning reality. And effectively trying to pit the answerer against the reality at hand.
In fact, implicit in the question is that the answerer should not be accepting reality as it is but to do something about it. That assumption is something worth some attention and awareness. For one on the receiving end of the question, bringing to attention is assumption takes a bit of courage but immediately resolves the internal tension and cast it back on the questioner.
So the answer becomes “why not?”, or “what did you expect?” Maybe just done a bit more politely.
When I was in primary school, I have this problem of doing mental sums. Calculations done in my head that I didn’t write on paper in my answer scripts. When the teacher marks my script, she’d penalise me for “skipping steps”. Well, those steps were taken but just not on paper.
It is very different in the real world where we also get penalised for skipping steps:
Trying to submit an application without sufficient documentation
Rushing to give customer a proposal without first understanding what is truly needed by them
Booking your vacation without thoroughly checking your calendar for conflicting commitments
In all of these cases, steps were indeed skipped, intentionally or not. And there are going to be consequences to them. Often, the time or money saved may not be worth it to deal with the consequences.
However, if you are able to perform those steps through other means which is more efficient and brings other benefits, such as what I did in school with math problems, then you can still get to the results well and good. That’s actually useful in the real world. The nuance that we need to learn from this childhood lesson is that you can short-circuit a process only when you can address every step adequately.
Financial capital: either through passive investments or actively starting and reinvesting in a business
Knowledge: by pushing the boundaries of what you know and applying that towards your decisions (whether it is to challenge how things works or put your money on things you believe will work when others don’t).
Time & efforts: by spending time and effort to build something. Maybe it takes some money but mostly just your time and effort. And the value of what you build as a result is worth way more than the time and effort your put in. Or it may not be.
Reputation & connections: by selling or recommending people in your network and connection some product or services to earn some returns. The product or service might work out for them, it might not.
Whether you think of it this way or not, you are already taking risks in life. Being mindful of how and what you take risks on might be a useful skill you missed out in school.
Seth Godin recently wrote about the delay; and basically the challenge of situations where there are no short feedback loops. I’ve written a lot about feedback in the workplace and how we all need to learn to be able to give feedback in order to improve the people and the world around us. Of course, one of the reason that we want to be able to do that is to help shorten the feedback loop.
After all, if you’ve bottled-up resentments against your colleagues, there’s going to be some point of time you express it through your action – whether it was some unjustified anger, or just quitting. So there is still some sort of ‘feedback’, except they become longer, looks less connected, and therefore make it harder to draw connections, even for yourself.
Recognizing the long loops requires a sensitivity to patterns and ability to draw the connections others tend not to. I’d suggest to:
Pay more attention to processes of how things lead on to one another
Make connections between trends and drivers step by step
The point isn’t to conduct sophisticated studies to establish the connections; it is more around reflecting more deeply in the flow of these processes, forward and backwards. And to also see how outcomes are driven by not just intentionality but also chance and circumstances. Identifying the role of chance and the environment will go a long way to learn more about the feedback loop.
In “Thinking in Bets”, Annie Duke identified this problem of “resulting” – that a bad outcome automatically points to bad decisions. I’ve written about how I dealt with regrets in the past and I think understanding our tendency to “result” (I’m using it as a verb to the word “resulting”), is going to help us deal with how we reflect, and consider our regrets.
Regrets always involves a strong dose of “I should have known” except you didn’t know and whether you “should” is a moot point by then. And because you had to make decisions under situations of uncertainty, the process determining the decision is more critical than the decision itself.
For example, due to some really tight scheduling and limited buffer time in our weekend plans, we ended up neglecting our dog quite a bit at home a particular day. It would have made sense in retrospect to arrange for it to go on a day care and we would have been happy to arrange. But we had thought it was possible to have more time in-between our commitments so it was fine.
Except of course eventually it wasn’t, as our commitments overran and gave us razor thin slice of time gaps to be back home with the dog! We could choose to say it was a bad judgment but we cannot think the decision not to arrange for day care was bad. There is a fine line between those thoughts but in terms of mental health and hygiene, it makes a huge difference. Resulting causes unnecessary stress, anxiety and afflicts pain on ourselves and others. It would have been better for us to focus on dealing with results rather than being caught up with whatever led to it, especially when there was a lot of uncertainties prior.
Having spent more than the first years of my career deeply involved in infrastructure investments and looking at infrastructure developments in the emerging markets, I was incredibly moved by this video on the living bridges of Meghalaya on this BBC programme.
When I think about the type of investments made by private sector or by government into infrastructure meant to benefit communities and how these infrastructures were built and maintained, we leverage a lot on the power of markets, especially financial incentives, and various instruments. After all, IFC and World Bank had for a long time thought about maximising finance for development. Yet there are so many other instruments that various cultures have evolved which we miss out in our zeal to develop.
Coaxing nature to direct its relentlessness towards growth that benefit humans is perhaps one really important area that we as modern humans have not really adopted as a sort of proven innovation to develop ourselves. And I think the idea of nature-based solutions should be wrapping its mind around these sort of examples and innovations already present in the world right now.
It’s almost been two full years since I started this website with my own domain name. Of course, it doesn’t look like it because this blog contains stuff I wrote as far back as 2009 (when I was nearing the end of my National Service); but most of those content were imported from my previous website. On my blog there is ultimately 3 sets of posts; the ones that were from 2009-2014, when I ran ERPZ.net, and then 2015-2020 when I had my own personal wordpress blog.
Then, about 6 months after I registered the domain, I started writing daily from 3 January 2021. It’s been more than a year now and it has been amazing how I’ve been able to keep up with this habit. Writing keeps me thinking and helps me to think clearly than if I had only held my thoughts up in my mind. This site have also been storing up resources I’ve created for my coaching practice.
So I’m glad to say that I’ll be renewing the domain and carrying on with this work.
I’ve encountered many different kinds of clients who approach us to perform market studies. There are those who are more conservative and looking at studying the success of others, so they can replicate the success. They are not necessarily trying to outdo the incumbents, just recognising that the market is growing and they can get a slice of the pie.
There are others who are looking at markets that does not yet exists; areas where others believe doesn’t work, either due to lack of regulatory structure, some previous beliefs about costs. They will say ‘don’t tell me about it being impossible, I want to understand why it hasn’t work, and what is not working’. We would try and understand what are the missing pieces, what is within the control of the market players, what else needs to happen for the market to take off, for it to work.
In the areas of infrastructure and energy, people tend to look towards the government. So when there’s lack of regulation, they might think it’ll be a no-go. But market leaders think differently, they are looking not at the competition, but the problems at hand: what stands in the way of the market working? It is not about shortcuts through imitation, nor finding ‘success stories’; it is about solving problems and sorting out the fundamentals.
Are you thinking like a market leader? What is setting you apart?
