Category Archives: Careers

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.

We are terrible at forecasting how we would think when we get into some kind of situation hypothetically. It is why we can be happier in situations that we think we’d be miserable. Dan Gilbert spoke about this more than 16 years ago.

And part of the reason I think, is that we often associate our identity with just a narrow subset of ourselves such that when things change, we imagine that there’s not much more within our identity to accommodate those events, situations or trauma. Yet our real identity is so much bigger, and so much more. Maya Shankar shares about this a bit more on Brene Brown’s Dare to lead podcast episode.

I found it fascinating that corporatism was an original political ideology that has to do with common interest forming groupings that will help to organise the society. It seem to have nothing or little to do with the ‘corporate’ that we know of today. So this piece has nothing to do with that original term and more to do with what we understand about corporate interests, depersonalisation and the need to be human.

Corporates are typically legal persons, they are responsible legally for a lot of things that the law subjects them to. But they can only be as human as the people who makes them up. Yet like a biological organism, they try to sustain itself, and that brings about certain behaviours that can be detrimental to parts of it.

After all, if your hand is stuck in something and there’s a truck which is about to run over you, you’re going to try rip your own hand away to save your life. When you’re in a corporation, and making decisions for the organisation, do you think as a human? Or have you accepted the only thing you care to keep alive, is the corporation?