Category Archives: Careers

Demand response to the future

The market system likes to pretend the consumer is king and producers are just responding to market demand. It is usually an excuse to avoid the responsibility of building a better future. The market system constantly tries to get ahead by shaping demand, through advertising and influencers. The whole system of exchange of influence and money takes place within the market context and that’s enough to refute the claim that consumers reign sovereign.

And that means consumers needs to be more conscious of what stories they are taking in. And more than being passive receivers of goods and services, consumers have more chance than ever to shape them. Demand is usually decentralised but it can respond to so many things beyond price signals. The problem with our economic view of the market is that we only try to capture market power in the form of price-setting and ability to substitute (even this is not so well considered despite the crazy mathematical gymnastics required).

Sustainability cannot depend on corporates championing causes and trying to come up with new products and services. Consumers need to and can respond by requesting to reuse their bottles, avoiding products with too much packaging, reducing gifting of everyday items with expensive packaging.

The easiest criteria to default towards is convenience and costs but we can also think in terms of alignment of values and cost to the future. If we are able to adapt our demand to these dimensions, we can co-create a future we want to be part of.

Half baked solution

Who eat half-baked cookies? Probably someone who have never tasted a cookie; or maybe someone who prefers cookie dough, or don’t know what you were trying to bake. Yes when you don’t know what you’re trying to bake, then something half-baked works just as well as one that is properly baked.

Likewise, there are plenty of half-baked solutions lying around and even implemented by those who have no clue what is the problem they are trying to solve.

We often overlook the importance of specifying a problem well before getting our hands dirty to solve it. Being biased to action isn’t always good when one does not have strong thinking. Of course, if there’s a system of trial and error that continuously test different solutions to find one that works, that’s okay. The challenge is in not knowing what problem one is trying to solve; or attempting to design a solution that tries to solve multiple problems.

Then there’s no proper test for the solution at all, no success indicators that allows the solution to past the usefulness test.

So if a government comes up with a scheme and it is not used; or an incentive programme which no one in the market qualifies, what just happened? Did the problem that it was designed to solve not actually exist? Or is the solution half-baked?

Investing into the status quo

When you spend effort figuring out the position in the train station you should stand to catch the train in order to alight at the optimal position at your destination, you’re investing. And you only would find it worthwhile if you take from the same point of origin to the destination over and over again. The reason is that each time you follow the rule you created for yourself, you reap the benefit of that first problem solving. And over time, the gains compound. You save the extra walking and the time.

But in having this figured out, there’s more inertia to moving workplaces, thinking you’ve already got used to commuting and knowing you are comfortable with the way to travel to that same place every day. It might be foolish to care that much on which station you’d alight for your workplace but you still do. And that can be because you’ve invested in that status quo, to the extent you can autopilot to the location you’re supposed to be.

When we learn to drive a car, operate a machinery, use the interface of a new OS, we are investing into some sort of status quo, or what will become a strong status quo for us. It will be hard to change, because we change the calculations involved on what it means to change whenever to optimise for a particular result. It might be annoying, or boring, but it works.

But upsetting that status quo every now and then, getting your mind to crack and solve new problems, or rethink ‘old ones’, makes for a better mind, and a better life.

Resource-rich

There is always this age-old question of what you’d do if you’re rich. And then you might give an answer of an outcome that is already within your reach so then wanting to be rich is more about the identity that one would like to associate with.

What if you were resource rich? Like having lots of friends, or lots of land, or lots of cars, or collectible figurines? Do you think of those resource or things in terms of money? What if they don’t easily convert to money like friends or time? Does it matter?

How do you steward the resource that you are rich in? Does it matter if you can monetise it? Or whether its benefit is depleted by some actions you undertake? How do you think about it? What does it mean to “cash out” on your resources?

We all have a common resource and that is our atmosphere’s carrying capacity for carbon dioxide before climate goes completely amok and make our planet inhabitable. Sacrificing it could give us some money and maybe some comfort to certain extent. How would we steward it?

What kind of competition?

Imagine an economy you preside over where everyone hones their skills in violin-making and produces violins. Everyone in the economy works really hard to make and sell violins. They do so many other things such as growing their own food, trying to sustain themselves, just to make violins. In the economy, there is no other markets; no one is producing food to sell, no one providing laundry services. Money is exchanged only to buy and sell violins. And only violins have a price.

That sounds absurd. Because if only violins have a price, then money is only worth violins. Then what is the value of money in this economy? Yet, without answering such questions, if we were to allow the metaphor to continue, say you are supposed to spur productivity of this economy, what would you do?

You could do things that enhance the labour productivity. This means everyone produces more violin in the economy, thereby driving the prices down and causing violins to be worth less vis-a-vis the currency in circulation.

Or you could start getting people to perform other work for others. That enhances productivity of the system overall as the ones good at violin making gets to outsource parts of their chores so that they are freed to make more violins. You allow more goods and services to be priced using money hence allowing more things to be exchanged and money becomes more valuable too. The higher productivity raises overall wealth measured in money and allows people to demand for more violins or pay more for them, enriching the violin makers.

Before I go further, you must be wondering what I’m talking about. I’m thinking about education, where grades are the only thing that matters, where students are expected to focus on grades despite having to fulfill other requirements such as CCAs, including sports, student activities, leadership activities, etc. All these while trumpeting that different students have different strengths and then consigning a future michelin-starred chef to the E-bucket and having him sent to vocational school.

Our system ties up and stifles talents, force everyone to be denominated and priced using just one attribute of their capability: intellect/academics (or test-taking). And so if you want to improve the system, do you still force everyone to produce more and better grades?

Feeling helpless

Things are happening to me. When we experience that, we lose sight of our agency. We were not consulted, we’re not in control, not any semblance of control. We don’t seem to have a choice. We feel helpless.

Recently, I was attending an investor conference that was focused on the topics around impact, sustainability and ESG (environmental, social, governance). There was a broad spectrum of attendees; some were well-versed in the topic tossing out various acronyms while others were confused, lost, frankly a little unhappy about how the investing industry is taken over by metrics beyond the financial ‘fundamentals’. Personally I think that capital can act differently from a while back and that we have the responsibility to ensure that it is no longer perpetuating the system as it is.

Of course, there would be naysayers who dismiss impact, sustainability and ESG as fluffy, intangibles which are running counter to the money-making that investing is all about. But even the naysayers, confronted with climate science would acknowledge there is a problem we are facing with climate change and all. Naysaying helps them soothe themselves because at least if there’s nothing much they can do, the eventually downfall of the earth is not on them. We choose to be helpless that way; even when we do have a choice.

The better road is towards action. When it comes to the climate challenge, a strong and useful key message is that it is not too late to make that impact and make the change.

Entrepreneurial endeavours

What counts as enterprising? How do you quantify that? Or is it more of a “I know it when I see it” kind of thing? Can one act be deemed as reckless by one and entrepreneurial by another? Whose views prevail? Does entrepreneurial necessarily mean taking risks? Or it is about being able to deal with problems and solve them creatively? Does it take cognitive flexibility?

Being in a capitalist world that is dominated somewhat by market-centricity, we often find the entrepreneur an alluring character. He (or she) is less controversial than in the past, having spruced up the image, and reduced the moral fatality of greed. Yet to me, entrepreneurship is more about the combination of action, courage and wits that sets one apart from another.

Action being about doing, not just saying. Courage being about risk-taking, but not recklessly so. And wits that combines self-awareness with large degree of cognitive flexibility that allows one to bend towards various situations and circumstances while successfully being able to achieve one’s goals. The entrepreneur can be an employee at work, a freelancer, the startup founder or the manager of a large institution. The entrepreneur need not be enterprising just from the perspective of creating financial value but also that of impact to the world.

The entrepreneur disrupts the precious equilibria sought after by economists, ensuring that the world never settles for what it is but moves towards what it could be. To a large extent, the entrepreneur actively seeks to create a future that he wants for himself and those around him.

Broken systems

In any civilisation, you’re in a system; so there are rules to follow, structures to abide by, and hence a sort of order emerges from the system. Of course the order can be disorderly but you get my drift. When however, certain realities don’t line up the way they do in a system, we think that it is broken.

I’m not too sure about that. Sometimes, we think that a system is broken because it is leading to an outcome which we don’t desire nor think is desirable. Whilst the designer or perpetrator of the system may agree with you on the outcome and results, they may not think the system is broken.

The reason being that their key objectives for the system does not align with yours. What you think as an undesirable outcome may be an unintended but necessary consequence of the system; and the results which you don’t agree with may not even be part of the consideration.

And that is the challenge when one works within a system. It is terribly difficult for a system to start paying attention to a new attribute that is worth looking at when measured against the values that inherently power the system. Effectively, the conversation goes like this:

You: ‘Hey system, you need to start looking more into the environmental damage you are causing while trying to make profits!’

System: ‘Ah, environmental damage. Does looking into it generate more profits?’

You: ‘Well, the point is thinking about we are trading-off environmental sustainability in our process of profit. Maybe we can rethink about the way we make a profit?’

System: ‘Sure! Come back to me when there’s a profitable way to reduce the environmental damage. Meanwhile, we carry on with what works.’

The reason we are facing climate change is not really because the system is broken but because the system we designed is working perfectly well – it is just trying to solve a completely different problem than the one we are facing or trying to get it to solve.

The only way is to establish new rules and new ways of doing things, of structuring our lives, our companies and our economy. This is why Enea Consulting, where I work at, has combined efforts with Isabelle Kocher de Leyritz to form Blunomy.

For now, the branding might still feel very foreign to an Asian mind, the URL quite strange (is the firm French or Malaysian?), the fonts on the website feels a tad bit too avant garde for the liking of the general masses. But the message, the intentions and planned actions are clear. We understand that the systems are not broken but they are simply not designed for the challenge that confronts us today. That is why we are not here to fix the system; we need new ones to replace them.

Just to reiterate that views presented here are entirely personal and do not represent the stance of any organisations I’m employed by or have any affiliations with.

Time is an ingredient

We envision an end point and we want to be there already. We think of time as a barrier. The fact that parts of the steps take time annoys us. We rather it takes less time as though it is better when it is faster.

And then on the other hand, we acknowledge that timing is everything, when to strike a ball, jump to defend one, meet your potential spouse, ask for a promotion and all. Time is an input, not just the passage of time but point along time.

So let us reconcile our views on time. Where things are taking time, let us recognise it is an ingredient that enriches and enables the outcome we are trying to move towards.

Beyond the edge of your circle

There are areas of our ignorance we are aware of, but there are also vast spaces of our ignorance we are unaware of. This area is perhaps where we would exhibit the Dunning–Kruger effect. It is really important for us to know and understand our circle of competence, and to create boundaries and rules for ourselves to navigate within, and beyond this circle.

Think of it as comparing a person who lives in a town for many years and know his way around it by his senses and strong local knowledge, against an out-of-towner who had got hold of a map and managed to navigate successfully to a few places of interest. The guy who is new in town tend to overestimate his understanding of the place and might make overly risky decisions or commitments as a result (eg. showing friends around, or bragging loudly about his knowledge of the best local foods).

One of the critical skills that we need to acquire especially as we are new to a space, and trying to grow ourselves, is to be able to develop not only the self-awareness but the toolkit to navigate a new space when one runs the risk of getting into the Dunning-Kruger effect. In fact, even as kids, we should already be conscious about what is happening and how we can deal with such struggles.