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!
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?
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?
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.
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?
What is the value created from getting a match? How much value does a lifetime of marriage create? Or just 2 years of employment with a company? Or finding a house you can live in and raise a family for 20 years? Can the value created be attributed to the ones making the match or the parties matched making it work? Should the value of the match be based on the transaction value of the match?
I’m talking about buying a property, finding a life partner, a commercial or business partner, or a client whom you seal a deal with. Why is it that property agents, brokers, match-makers can extract the value they do? Is the value they extract really justified? There is no doubt certain combinations creates a lot of value and it should be shared amongst the parties involved – so the one who bring the parties together have a share. But how do we work out that share?
What is the pie available to share and how do we decide that the broker or match-maker deserves that share? This is especially the case I’m wondering for recruitment companies or agencies. Why can headhunters or recruiters get such big fees? Why can’t ordinary company HR do the job and find the right candidates? Why is the value they created based on the salaries given to the candidate? Are recruiters really helping to create the future we want to be in? If all of our salaries have a portion going to someone else, it seems more of some kind of parasitism to me.
“Bean counter” is an expression in English language referring to “a person, typically an accountant or bureaucrat, perceived as placing excessive emphasis on controlling expenditure and budgets”. There are people who are mission oriented by focusing on the vision of a future but there are also bean-counters who are obsessed with measuring along certain identified metrics without recognising whether the metrics make sense or not. And that is the problem with our relationships with KPIs.
Let’s start from school. Today, we have more students than ever who are going through education system just to get a grade – not out of curiosity or a zeal to learn, but full of anxiety about a devastated future due to missing the grade. Why is the grade even an indicator and what is it indicating? Have we taught our students what the grade really mean? What an award or a prize really do to them? Thinking meta is important – and I’m definitely not referring to the metaverse.
Then businesses. There’s more than financial disclosure and accounting these days; there’s a lot around climate and impact related disclosures. At Enea, we help some of our clients navigate the requirements but more importantly, we advise our clients from first principles how to think about their business’ impact and interaction with the environment so as to report meaningfully to their stakeholders. Yet there are always consultants or companies who are focused on just taking a KPI which is popular out there and then using it – even cherry-picking the ones that look more favourable without a clear sense of what those measures are actually for.
Finally, there is the government, focused on giving a good report card to their political masters to show constituencies. There is still the traditional obsession with GDP and the growth figures, targeting job creation and so on. In fact, the term ‘statistics’, have more to do with the state than to do with the concept of numbers. Policies will really need to better articulate why metrics adopted are a good representation of the policy objectives and that results are not just reported when they look good, or for metrics to be chosen only after results are in. Being mission-focused is also more important than just sticking to a set of metrics. Because Goodhart’s law still applies.
Are you recognising the bean-counters amongst you? Those who are overly obsessed with the numbers without really appreciating what they mean? It’s probably worth focusing first on the parents who are obsessed with their kids getting an A.
At the recent presentation I gave on ammonia as the new low-carbon maritime fuel, I was asked about the ability to scale production over the next couple of years. I think the time horizon we should be looking at is over the next 8 years up to 2030 and then 10 years after that, how things are likely going to change. We as consultants are often asked to look into our crystal balls and envision the future. We try our best to do it using data, looking at trends, making assumptions and all.
For ammonia, the demand is expected to more than double over the next 28 years. That’s still a fair amount of time, and as long as it grows by a rate of about 4% per annum, the supply will be able to meet demand in 2050. Not inconceivable though from historical trends on the production figures, it seems far fetched. But that is because ammonia has traditionally been demanded only as an industrial feedstock and for production of fertilisers. The people concerned about the competition with the existing agriculture or food industries have misplaced concerns because those are the guys who have been using grey ammonia and perfectly happy to continue to do so. The new demand is likely going to require green hydrogen; which means we are going to start growing new supply of this ammonia from scratch; no legacy issues of waiting for existing facilities to ramp up.
Then there are people pointing out the challenge of getting green electricity which seem short in supply to begin with. That is true to a certain extent; Singapore is having to import electricity from neighbouring countries, using actual physical transmission lines. But most of the time, this is caused by the fact that renewable resources may be scarce where the power demand centers are. If there are far flung locations rich with renewable resources, we can still capture these sites to produce green hydrogen as well as green ammonia, then ship them out.
So I’m actually pretty optimistic about trying to hit those demand and supply numbers over the long time frame that we are talking about. It might well surpass those numbers when the market really takes off. But the key is ensuring there’s clear price signals; and if there’s proper legitimate demand for green hydrogen, then someone will have to certify it and audit the production.
I was listening to the first part of Barry Nalebuff’s interview on ‘People I mostly admire’ and it turned out to be pretty cool and insightful, particularly that very rapid sharing of his thinking that developed Honest Tea. It reflect how important simple ideas were when taken seriously and scaled up. And it also helped to demonstrate how an economics (and strategy) professor use his intellect to take calculated risks in entrepreneurship.
He was probably oversimplifying but considering Honest Tea as a product that basically makes use of three simple economic principles:
Diminishing marginal returns/benefits (on sugar or the taste of sweetness)
Principle of maximising the value of the content of a fixed cost container in order to maximise the overall value of the bottled drink
Navigating trade-offs on the marginal utility curve: Convincing people to trade off the lower sugar for the fact that the drink had lower calories
That is pretty brilliant as a way of thinking about a market and a product; those ideas are simple and yet profound precisely because the world had not evolved solutions around a combination of these ideas prior to Honest Tea.
For new readers, you might not have realised that I have a coaching practice. I call it career coaching but it could well have been performance coaching, or work coaching, or whatever you might call it. I’m now working with an coach to help me with English for business but I’m essentially being coached to align my messages more with my communication objectives. At the heart of coaching, is the ability to help our clients identify and crystalize their objectives, and then focus their attention and resources on meeting them.
Meeting our objectives often require us to take a series of actions or adopt certain behaviours to maximize the chances of the outcomes we desire. We may not be too sure ourselves and so we hedge our bets; we prefer not trying than to try and fail. Coaches help to reduce incidence of that thought by helping us reframe and focus our attention on the work that needs to be done rather than fretting over the outcome that we cannot control directly.
So it is on my career coaching practice; I work with you to identify and crystallise your career objectives and then work out what actions or behaviours are necessary to get there. We then try to focus on developing those behaviours and undertake the actions that maximises the chances of you getting there. Even when you might think it could be a waste of time, or if you’re afraid the investment of effort would not pay off. It’s not about the immediate returns on your investment, but recognising that investment in yourself is a case where the returns come through from yourself rather than from the job you find. In fact the job or role you eventually take on, is merely a means by which you contribute your value to this world.
