Author Archives: Kevin L

Umbrage Bandwagon

While people are making fun of SPH CEO bringing the somewhat archaic lingo back into mainstream, I think the real reason is that people are taking umbrage at what was announced about SPH. There’s generally a sense of socialisation of losses as the media substance of SPH is being packaged into a CLG to be held by the government.

I guess that move simply make the “state ownership” of the media outlets involve a little more explicit per se. The listed status is probably problematic but I’d think there is no need to cave in to investor pressure. The company itself is unique being regulated by special laws – that should already warrant it special status and allow shareholders to self-select. There is no need for them to compete with others for capital. In fact, 99.9% of the company is in the hands of public shareholders and they themselves signed up for it fully aware this is a regulated company by the government. Maybe the regulated status made it hard to innovate its business model?

Nevertheless, that is not an excuse to get a bail-out. Imagine a bank who says they can’t compete because of the central bank’s capital adequacy ratios and hence will transfer all the non-performing loans to a vehicle which will be guaranteed by the government. Hmm. Being regulated does not mean the public can be made responsible for losses.

What is for sure about this move though, is that it takes a loss-making business out of the hands of CEO Mr Ng. The same thing happened when NOL was divested to CMA CGA under Mr Ng’s leadership. Perhaps like NOL, the business may come back to turn a profit when it is led by someone else.

Telling stories

At some single-digit age I came to enjoy books, and stories. And at the age of 6 when I was in a mini-bus that was driving in and out of the Pinnacles Dessert in Australia, I spent hours telling stories to an attentive 4 year old friend I got to know in the tour group. I still recall his name was Marcus.

I seem to enjoy telling stories since young. Teachers repeatedly described me as talkative in class though I was certainly not the extroverted sort. It was also because I had attentive parents who gave me time, aunties and uncles who listened to me, undistracted by phone screens.

When I grew a little older I had a lot of opportunities to listen to the stories of other people because I started doing a lot of community work with the elderly folks. That was when I begin to discover the importance and power of the stories we are weaving, which we tell others and more importantly, ourselves.

Being able to tell positive, powerful and encouraging stories about our lives can make a difference to it. That is why I started working with people to ponder over their story and to discover how they want to write it, tell it and use it to achieve their desired careers. Head to my coaching page learn more about my coaching practice.

Good company

Not another piece about jobs and companies. Rather, I’m thinking about friends, the company we have in our lives. And the important of good company. Friends are the people around us that we technically can choose. Often we might think it boils down to some chemistry and circumstance. True to a certain extent; since for example, the friends you make in the first few weeks of university tend to be the ones you end up sticking to for the rest of your time in university and potentially even for life.

As we grow older, it becomes more challenging to make that same kind of friends. It feels less organic perhaps than a school environment though there are still clubs, associations and other opportunities to network but friends made with the intent of collaborating for a project, or for business gains just seem different from friends made in school, or joined by some other kinds of common interests.

Yet all that doesn’t mean we can’t be in control of the company of people we are in, and we can’t choose ‘good company’. It is more important perhaps to choose good company than to try and work for a good company because the people around you can shape your thinking which in turn shapes your capacity to strive and achieve.

I chuckled when I saw the quote ‘You can’t change the people around you but you can change the people around you.’ I laughed because I got it. Did you?

Temporary Failures

The only kind of failure that is permanent is one that terminates you. Or the one that you choose to keep you; because you’ve allowed it to terminate you. In Chinese, there’s the saying that failure is the mother of success. And that is the acknowledgement that more than being polar opposites, failures are building blocks of success.

In fact, life really isn’t about attaining successes. Ultimately, in our hearts, we are after the things that comes with success, perhaps the recognition, the sense of being loved. And we all know that success, like failures, are temporary too. We can only be successful ‘so far’. Introducing the time dimension helps us see that success or failures are not part of our identity but merely experiences that we go through as part of our growth.

When one ponders over failure, do you think about actions you regretted, not taken, or do you consider what are the new aspects of reality that you come to know through the process? It takes humility to say ‘I was wrong about this’ rather than to think ‘I knew it should have been so’ – but this humility is rewarding because it turns the temporary failure into a lesson, one that can be used as a building block. The arrogant ‘I knew it’ only turns the failure into regret and bitterness.

Measurement & Growth

If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.

Peter Drucker

This resonates with us in business and in personal life, lots of productivity experts have been looking at it. And what we’ve been doing is trying to figure out ways to measure just about everything. But does it mean whatever that cannot be measured, cannot be improved?

Yet at the same time, we know measurement and improvement is distinctly different; efforts invested in measurement cannot translate to improvement by itself. The measurement is in essence just a state of awareness that can really be achieve with varying degrees of precision.

What that means is that many aspects of growth is going to be moving because of things other than measurement. It will have to do with our habits, thoughts, behavioral patterns. How do you improve confidence, or trust, or responsibility? These are all non-measureable yet we know when these things are improving. Is it because we have some kind of barometer inside us to make that measure but no scale to synchronise towards?

How do we respond to that then? We make sure we are aware. Our awareness is our measurement; and that is why self-awareness is so important. And being able to observe yourself: your thought process, your behaviours, is such an important ability. Awareness, is that first step to growth.

Energy Disruption

The energy transition is vital for the world, for our future generations and I’ve previously explained how moving toward sustainability is a change and there is pain associated with it. And I’ve also used the term disruption then. This time, I want to look at it from the perspective of disruption to the energy industry itself.

The energy industry acted like a chain, passing on hydrocarbons from one segment of the chain down to another, processing it in different ways until you get energy. That’s why there is the upstream (which is mainly exploration, drilling, extraction), followed by midstream (transport vessels, pipelines, etc) and downstream (power plants, internal combustion engines, marine and aviation fuel engines).

Trying to decarbonise this energy value chain inadvertently changes the dynamics of that ecosystem that has been working for quite some time (if you consider just Oil & Gas, that is recent but if you consider Coal, then it’s been centuries). The players used to work together and despite the commoditisation of these products, the connections and relationships within the industry means there is some degree of coziness with the structure of who does what and how.

When an international oil company now wants to be sustainable and sees themselves not as an oil company but one that supplies energy (which they technically have been doing in the past), they are now having to sever ties with some midstream players and competing with those who were their downstream customers. All of a sudden, they are bidding for renewable energy projects against the independent power producers whom they counted on to purchase their fuels.

Transitions have knock-on effects and eventually becomes disruptions because things displaced don’t fit well naturally elsewhere. Are you ready for them? Is your business ready for them?

Complexity & Bureacracy

We all want to work for good companies. The brand names, the recognisable ones that makes the relatives go wow and continue conversation about what you do during Chinese New Year gatherings. Or maybe actually we just want a good boss who can give us that sense of mission, offer appropriate advice at the right point and empower you to operate independently.

One of the big challenges at large corporations or organisations is bureacracy. They use it well too; such as to relieve employees of certain administrative duties and make respectable specialisations out of them. In fact, for some specialisations, you might be really performing optimally only in large organisations with the structure for you to utilise your potential.

But all of that generally builds upon complexity. Bureacracy generates complexity partly as a product of layers but also because complexity tends to justify bureacracy so it becomes a self-reinforcing cycle. Do you want to be part of that, to contribute to that complexity, or do you prefer to pursue simplicity?

Growing in commoditised markets

Do you have a set way of thinking about innovation in business? These days, governments are heavily involved in funding research and development in a bid to help their economies lead the way in one area or two. These are all good except when people come to think of it as a one-size-fit all approach to business problems.

When a product or market becomes commoditised and competition reduces pricing power, the prescription tends to be about differentiation and “innovation”. The nature of the product or service is important to consider what kind of innovation there can be. A lot of commoditised businesses are simply cash cows: mature and cashflow generating but not growing.

The optimal way to grow with less risk is not to try and change the product. It is to consider consolidating the market slowly and one at a time. Find niches to acquire and gain scale, focus on optimising costs to enhance profitability and then use that to make more acquisitions. This is basically what is known as “roll-up” strategy commonly practised by private equity firms.

This sort of innovation is less visible but more profitable and meaningful for those companies. Maybe you won’t be poster child for being a company who went through “transformation”, but that’s okay!

Opportunity Cost & rise of FOMO

I wrote about opportunity cost and it dawned on me that I need to improve upon the story. Not just about the opportunities forgone but also the opportunity set. Implicit in the economics concept of opportunity cost is that you’re only have to consider the best alternative, just one.

But in this age of almost infinite choice, what is the best choice? Not to mention the best alternative. In trying to consider the choice and to “price” it against the alternative, our brains often just decides to be lazy and ask what everyone else does instead. There is less independent thinking, evaluation and decision-making.

To certain extent it is our cognitive abilities being overwhelmed but it is also us being lazy. The danger of following the crowd is that we then become afraid of missing out, which causes us to consider even more things, and lose even more bandwidth.

So the way to think about opportunity costs, might be to consider the set of opportunity that exists as alternative, and see roughly that “alright, those are what I’ve decided to miss out for this – more as an objective statement to oneself”. That is your subjective valuation of the choice you made.

Disagreements

How do you draw up an “agreement”; more often you should not really be thinking of what you agree on to include. Because the agreement is not really used again until you disagree. So better to think about what you’d likely disagree on later as a way to approach the drafting of an agreement. Ironic, isn’t it.

Dwelling on disagreements is an unlikely formula for harmony but I would say it is not disagreements which results in disharmony but what we do about disagreements in general. And that is where the education system comes in again.

The modern education system is there with an immense amount of nobility but also vested interest. Mass education lifts people out of poverty by enhancing their opportunities but they are also there to train people to become employees, to follow instructions, be obedient, conform. The industries want workers and reward them for having gone through those comformance training. And the cycle continues.

And that is probably why they don’t teach you much on how to disagree. Yet all the more it is important because these skills are scarce – disagreeing in a way that is agreeable. Disagree but yet be able to influence others to your side. Disagree and make a case with passion but no offense, with just joy and conviction the others want to join your side.