Kevin L, Author at Kevin Low

Dyad of boss and bossed

Seth Godin have been talking about the concept of enrollment and deepening it for years. Which is why some of his thoughts are really worth looking into, dissecting and pondering over. His influence is really at the level of marketing so to speak- he gives you the incentives that appeals to being human to act in alignment with the ideas he discovers.

Anyways, I want to talk about the concept of the dyad of bosses and bossed which he mentioned really briefly in that brilliant blog post.

Sometimes, this evolves into a mutually beneficial entanglement between the boss and the bossed. The enrollment turns into a desire to please, a figurehead-focused loyalty and dedication that often ends poorly because there’s nothing beyond the dyad. Without external signposts, solipsism and dittoheads result.
Seth Godin

The idea of external signposts point is interesting because most of such pairings he mentioned continues to operate and do not “end” per se as the boss tends to have certain requirements to continue perpetuating. Either because bosses needs to please their bosses and the top is looking at the stock market (which serves as an external signpost) or that they are indeed looking at some external signals.

The “dyad” tends to result more perhaps in a situation where organisations have less resource limitations (eg. Huge MNCs, public organisations, well-resourced donor-funded organisations). Those are situations when the bosses can truly relish so much in being pleased that she/he allows that mutual entanglement to take place.

The issue is how far removed those external signposts are for each one in the organisation. If only the boss cares, then clearly, solipsism and dittoheads will still result. Some people do prefer to be in those context either due to cultural conditioning or just plainly inertia.

But once you are aware of that, the question is whether you want to see that change.

The complain cycle

Years ago Singaporeans had a reputation of complaining. I’m not sure if this is still the case. I think they just call it feedback now. But the poison in complaining is not that it taxes resources of companies and government agencies by way of trying to address even trivial issues. It is the attitude that it creates.

It coaxes our mind into the habit of denying responsibility. It is a way by which we de-stress by assigning blame but doing nothing to improve the situation. In short run, you might be better off psychologically but because it does not address the problem at its roots, your stress level remains if not heightened.

There is a way to complain that rectifies this. First state the circumstance – which is completely neutral – to yourself and stakeholders. It should ideally point to things that happen without stating names or parties involved. For example “the pizza arrived at 1600hrs when I ordered it at 1200hrs” rather than “you guys delivered the pizza late”. Then go on to state your intentions and expectations, and take ownership if it: “your website stated that it was going to arrive in 45minutes from ordering and I needed to take my lunch at 1300hrs so I had expected to have my lunch on time”.

Then, having established the reasonability of your expectations (because if by now you articulated it and feel it is not a reasonable expectation then please don’t waste resources complaining); then invite the other party to take responsibility for any mistakes on their part: “I had to bear the cost of your mistake – whether it is the misleading statement on the website or the delay in delivery. I can only appeal to your goodwill in making this up to me”

Ultimately in this case, the actual problem they have is with their system and they have to rectify it. But the challenge we have is our expectations and correspondingly, we have to deal with ours.

Born a Syonanese

My Dad turns 76 this year. He was born in Singapore when it was called Syonan, when The Straits Times was The Syonan Shimbun. A look into the news articles published then reveals somewhat normal life.

There were advertisements about recruiting locals as officers with interviews at the officer’s club in Bidadari. That seemed innocuous to me though there may be some other motives to this activity. There was even a lottery going on and winners were announced on the papers. The prize money was huge!

For most part the sense of normalcy in the papers could be engineered as part of propaganda. But during wartime where perceptions are mostly skewed, it is interesting how the propaganda press looks like. You can check out the newspapers in those days as well here.

Growing up & responsibilities

There are lots of preconceived notions about growing up, being an adult, and the responsibilities associated. The truth is you often don’t grow up if you don’t or can’t take up the responsibilities. They come first, not the growth because they drive the growth.

Sometimes we wait around for time to pass so that we have “grown up” and can take on some new responsibilities. But the age doesn’t mean anything if you’ve just been wasting that time on nothing but hitting the number. So are systems that prize seniority in age or experience in years. Time is a proxy, not a measure of growth.

So instead of giving up because “time passes too slowly”, what are you spending your time on right now that prepares you for the responsibilities you want to take up?

Trashing Stuff

Waste is under-rated everywhere. Demand for second hand stuff mostly fell as the price of newly made goods fall with the rise of mass manufacturing. Efficient logistics moving manufactured goods helped to fuel the purchase of brand new items. Recycled goods are being seen as second class or for those underprivileged.

There is a clear case to using second-hand goods besides savings and economics. The reason is that the cost of waste and disposal has not exactly been priced into the goods because cities everywhere tends to put a blanket price on things like waste. There are arbitrage opportunities where this is the case and have been used by many different businesses or informal organisations around the world. But they are hard to scale, tend to be very specific around local context and culture.

Which is why growing a culture of acceptance for recycled products and second hand goods is going to be part of the drive for sustainability. It is not just about packaging but the goods themselves. I really think highly of marketplaces like Carousell which helps to match the needs and supply for such second-hand market. Curators of communities need to add this dimension of facilitating exchanges across members as a vital additional pillar to communities: coworking spaces, residential committees, management committees of buildings. Local community based marketplaces have the highest chance of spreading the culture and creating quick wins.

Memes & heroes

Memes are essentially ideas copied and spread across the internet with slight variations. What is interesting is the way a conceptual framework is being used to apply to various context often in humorous ways. There are two drivers for viral memes – humour and resonance. The manner by which the image and/or text combined generates universally appealing humour or the sense of “I know exactly what this is about” allows it to be shared, copied and spread.

Yet to be part of the media which carries the conceptual framework for the meme is perhaps a whole new level. Andras Arato experienced that being the meme character “Hide the pain Harold” and shares about it on a TEDx. It was completely accidental and the fact it started with some harrassment on part of internet users was pretty disturbing. But Andras embraced it in such a huge way – even starring in a funny video of a tour of Manchester particularly displaying his love for the Man City football team. The video reflects how sporting he is about this internet character and that genuine sense of enjoying the persona given to him.

Most recently, Swedish authorities used his stock image on the website for Covid-19 vaccinations and alongside giving people a good laugh, had to try and assure themselves this would not mislead the public on the level of confidence about the vaccine.

Tragedy & Meaning

It’s been the Easter weekend and I’ve just been reflecting on the significance of the manner by which God sent Christ to take away our sins. The lessons are deep and profound – and honestly, as a culture, we have lost the appreciation for tragedy as an important genre in literature and stories that will help us understand the world we live in. There is depth in the appreciation that Jesus did not just die in an accident but in an execution. And for crimes he did not commit, things he had not done. Every element of his trial, crucifixion, and finally death was steeped in meaning from fulfilment of scriptures.

And there is meaning in tragedy; though we may not know it yet or appreciate the lessons from there. If we fail to appreciate these and allow sufferings in life to turn us into hateful and resentful creatures, then we do not grasp that tragedy that Good Friday is getting us to remember. And the meaning of course comes, in an even deeper way on Easter.

Christ arose not to scare anyone but to give us a preview of what His death really means for us by way of eternity. And great rejoicing should come from it.

Skills and match

People underestimate the important of match quality when they overemphasise the role of passion in finding what you want to do. There’s then another camp that ignores what you want to do and just optimise for other attributes like prestige and income. These approaches do not work because they all generate misalignments; and these mismatches can eventually come back to haunt you in one way or another. Being balanced about where you can give and what you can get is key.

The techniques used today in terms of trying to match people to jobs and roles are still rather crude and this stems partly because the market on both sides has shifted without reference to each other too much. The corporate landscape and the private sector is always looking to keep up with consumer demand and new trends which means that their demand for skills tend to be not met by the structure of the current workforce. Yet because of the decades of ‘Great Moderation’, the labour force have in some sense been lauded into thinking that all the training and upskilling they need takes place in schools and formal training environment as opposed to responding, learning, facing difficulties on the job.

Today, skills matching is no longer about trying to just find the right person to fill the right roles because job preferences and skillsets are not catching up with the job roles available; and the job roles are not really aligned with the aspirations that we have created for our generations of workers. Skills-matching is really more about companies being willing to take on people with the attitude and soft-skills then investing in them. To keep doing so even when people would leave, even when that investment only seem to pay off in a limited way. For the labour force, it is about commitment to jobs and work, to also set clear goals for oneself and not just trying to ‘settle’ into a job that will take care of you perpetually.

Making impact in infrastructure

Governments build infrastructure. Well yes the private players get involved, and they might be the ones doing the actual construction, or they might even be the ones investing. Ultimately though, the government calls the shots, they approve the plans, they set the parameters and set up the policy environment which the projects operates in.

Governments measure themselves by socio-economic parameters. They should be focusing not on making money for the treasury (because there are wider externalities they care about which they won’t account for if they only think in terms of “returns” from an individual project), but on social level benefits and gains against social level costs. These quantifications are difficult; they probably require procurement of consultants’ assistance, and along the way, governments can get confused about the methodology, and hence the recommendations put forth.

So they might fall back on trying to get political value out of the projects. They’ll choose and work on projects that can capture people’s imagination, that can be repeated at the next couple of speeches or events. They might put too much weight on the anticipated political support or popularity of the project/idea.

Yet the fact is, if they want to make a genuine impact, and a positive difference to the system, they will need to do the hard work and possibly not take the credit. They need to think not what can they get out of it but what can they give to the people through it.

Dragon Fangs

The thing about Pixar (and now Disney-Pixar) movies is the depth of themes that they dwell upon.The high quality animation and the background story aside, the storytelling has been consistently brilliant. The universal appeal lies in giving the young and old, the men and women something to take away from.

I watched the latest one: Raya and the Last Dragon. I’m not going to spoil it for you but all I’d say is that the film keeps up with the contemporary times where they deliberately try to stuff it with more female characters.

For those who have watched it; and I want to confess that the thought that the land of Fang represented Singapore cross my mind. “Successful” and obsessed with their own survival (to the extent they threatened the entire land of Kumandra), Fang seem to mirror elements of being Singapore even geographically: being cut off from the rest of the land by a canal and hence protected, having insufficient land to expand.

While I really enjoyed and appreciated the lesson about trust and unity, it is hard not to reflect on Southeast Asia as a region, the diversity and the differences, the difficulties if you may, of having our own “Kumandra”. And given the political climate and the global context today, we need to create more pan-Southeast Asian literature and celebrate the diversity and fushion in the region more. Perhaps, we need to start looking for dragons.