Category Archives: Careers

In Clayton Christensen’s “How will you measure your life”, he keeps his final idea about life to a warning about marginal thinking. It was surprising because he was a business school professor and trained in Economics. One of the gifts of the subject of Economics is actually the ability to think in terms of marginal costs. And this marginal thinking allows us to achieve great optimisation.

The warning that Clayton was sounding is really about over-optimisation in a context and environment that is ever changing. And because the context and actions of others are going to change and influence your flow of cost and benefits, thinking marginally can cause you to miss the big picture and fail to take the right pre-emptive actions. You will fail to realise the cost of not investing in something new and disruptive.

His application to life is equally surprising. It was to issues of moral and integrity. And I think his idea is important because so many of us have begin to think of cost-benefit analysis exactly in the marginal way prescribed by economics textbooks that we no longer leave room for discussion of values and morals. The economic principle of marginal thinking assumes that the costs and benefits assessed are independent of the context and unlike to change any of the future costs and benefits. Either that, or the dynamic element of time do not exist in the decision-making framework here.

Clayton encourages us to understand the full costs of our seemingly one-off deviations from our values and principles. Because when we perform cost-benefit analysis and think that the once off deviance would be worthwhile, we do not realise how the deviation changes us as a person, our identity and relationship to our principles.

Sharing some common phenomena at workplaces to help you put words to your angst:

• The boss want us to solve all kinds of problems instead of the problems we’re supposed to deal with!
• The team/colleague is nice. They just disappear when work needs to be done.
• One of the job requirements is mind-reading.
• There are too many managers and no one to manage!
• None of the managers want to roll up their sleeves and do the work
• Colleagues are too competitive; most of them specialise in humble bragging.

Sharing some ways to think about seeking new opportunities and change. They are not necessarily direct quotes but lines adapted from some people who articulated them so I attributed them here.

• Why make a living when you can make a difference? (Seth Godin)
• Are you working hard to avoid mistakes or to achieve something? (Angela Duckworth)
• Whether you’re important or not does not matter as much as whether you’re working on something important.
• If the work is going to be uncomfortable, then at least work for an outcome you can be comfortable with.
• What are you contributing – your labour or your work?

At every juncture of the spectrum of resources, we will find excuses not to fail. When we have little, we think failure is fatal. When we have a bit more, taking risk is a bit reckless. Then when we have even more, it can seem there is no need to take as much risks. And the story goes on.

It has more to do with culture than resources or incentives. In Singapore, we see incentives applied by government to enterprises who venture abroad, start businesses, invest in new things. The idea is that by partaking in some of the risks, people can take more of it. And that assumes you’re not changing the fundamental risk aversion of people. But you might just be doing that. The culture can start telling a story that entrepreneurship is not worth it without incentives. And worst, you can have armies of entrepreneurs focused on navigating bureacracy than the perils of the market, in search of grants than of market opportunities.

We can tell a different story about risk-taking. When you have little or nothing, there’s nothing to lose. When you have a bit more, it should not be so hard to make it back when you lose it. And when you have more resources, there is more cushion to fail. As a society, if we can grow to be tolerant of failure, of seeing the beauty of learning and growing from failure, we can be in a better cultural environment.

What do you take with you when you graduate from school? Do you take with you your certs and grades or do you take with you the friendships, the social skills, cognitive and problem solving capabilities? That was a trick question because you get to take all of those with you.

But for many of us, we choose to take only part of the suite of gifts that education and schooling grants us. And we inevitably choose the “practical” and simplest gift to take away – our paper qualifications and our grades. Because that is a clear signal and what we’ve been indoctrinated to work for in school.

We can choose to be different. And we can make the future a better one for our children by making sure they make the choice to take the right gifts away when they graduate. Because what you ultimately need in life would be almost everything that the system can give you.

Every single year, a proportion of the graduating cohort of Singaporeans join public service. It’s no wonder because they mostly hire only Singaporeans. It was strange then when as a public servant, I was helping the Singapore companies find Singaporeans to fill their headcounts and meet their talent requirements. It was difficult; the quality of labour available to be hired off the market wasn’t really there.

And then I thought about the people within the service and whether they’d be able to fit the requirements of these companies and be satisfied with the remuneration. Sometimes so, and I then wonder why we are still in public service. Often it was about serving the public, working for the higher goal and mission. It could also be just some kind of Messiah complex.

Either way, the great resignation tsunami is hitting our shores and there is no turning back. The burn-out, being always on and on the hook, responsible for some public complaints, angst against the establishment: these are all wearing our people out. Perhaps then, it’s time for a change.

Market competition drives improvements and with service, there’s always room for some kind of improvement. And the ability to charge people for such improvements is perhaps the main challenge for these firms. Personally, I think the ability to serve well in F&B to generate loyal, recurrent customers who are always in the area is quite valuable. Nevermind whether you’re operating a chain store or not.

The other day, I was at 79 Robinson Road’s Fun Toast outlet. I ordered a set with a drink and a sandwich to go. The coffee was ready in about 2-3 minutes upon ordering and I was holding on to it while waiting for my sandwich which took another 7 minutes. By the time I arrived in my office to drink my coffee with my sandwich, the coffee was pretty lukewarm.

If they had been thoughtful – and such takeaway orders should be extremely common – they’d wait for the sandwich to be ready before preparing the drink. Especially since they’d know better than anyone else how long it takes to make the sandwich. But they don’t want to take ownership of this problem of coffee turning cool, nor the risk of forgetting your drink order when the food is ready. The result is poor service. Or at least unthoughtful service.

You can be sure I won’t be going back there anytime soon though my office is nearby. Would I pay just a little more for the thoughtfulness? Probably for the drink, yes.

Ask the boss what he wants exactly. Help him to get off his addiction to mind readers. He should not expect people to read his mind. Tell him that.

Or just share Seth Godin’s blog post with him.

Like I mentioned before, we are fearful of efforts in vain, because probably there’s this belief in scarcity and somehow in the recesses of our mind, we’re afraid of squandering ourselves, our finite resources.

We’d rather not try. Because we can continue to enjoy the thought that we have the potential, if only we put in the effort to try, we definitely would get it. It was a choice not to achieve what we could have. And then the very same thought morphs into regret after the window of opportunity to exert the effort disappears. Or at least when we perceive it is gone. So why don’t pre-empt all that and just get started already?

Best day to do it was 10 years ago. Next best day is today.