We mostly grow up in the national education system; and through even our work life when people talk about life long learning, they talk about certifications and all. But the bulk of learning took place first before school, when we were babies observing the world, and actually at work. It would be such a huge waste to forget all that.
So why is it that we feel we learn only when in structured environments? Why have we not recognised the radical amount of learning and growth that takes place at personal and private level? I’d argue that we have over-relied on testing and certification, gradually lost our ability to properly assess people.
This provides an opportunity in the talent market to companies who can leverage strongly on underappreciated talents and partner them to generate value. It starts from losing all our requirements in terms of experience, qualifications and focusing on skills brought to the table, both tangible and intangible. And sharpening our abilities to sharpen those intangible ones.
In Andrew Yang’s book, Smart people should build things, he talked about how young people right out of school are being coached and lured into the high-paying consulting, finance or other professional jobs. And there are limited times when they get to actually work towards their dreams to build things that can change the world.
The fact is that having attractive options can indeed limit us and our pursuit especially when the attractiveness is measured not in the actual qualities that we care about. For example, most young graduates would obviously be keen to learn about different industries and they are right in thinking that going into consulting helps them do that. Yet after they cycled through different industry projects, they no longer value their place in consulting that way – their metrics start shifting towards the lifestyle that the paycheck can afford, how much they can save up, the recognition they get in the eyes of peers.
This is no different from the behaviour we have when we go into the supermarket buying so many different things other than the item we first thought we wanted to buy at the supermarket. For grocery shopping, that probably doesn’t matter because your fridge has sufficient capacity; but our work life don’t have sufficient capacity for many different jobs or roles!
Our jobs play very different roles for us in our lives and we ought to be clear what are the qualities we are choosing our job roles for. If we forget that, we might end up jumping from one boiling pot into another.
I am actually not surprised that the coping mechanism of the school for not being able to explain to parents how their kids fell or injured themselves was to deploy teachers for corridor duties. It wasn’t about encouraging more responsibility and caution from students, it was not to empower prefects to write simple incident reports. It was to deploy NIE-trained teachers to perform surveillance.
But before even looking at the way the issue was being addressed, schools need to determine and decide for themselves where are the boundaries of the problem they are trying to solve and their responsibilities to the students. While the minister brought up a more complex issue on parenting, it is clear to me that the principal of the school in question did not know the boundaries of the school’s responsibilities. Perhaps the inability to push-back is due to years of the system pandering to parents. Or politicians just passing on requests and complaints to the civil servants without due regard for what are the critical issues at hand.
Either way, I see this as progress for our leadership at the education ministry.
Funny how I talk about seasons and cycles and rest; and then Covid hit me. Yes as it becomes endemic. And with this enforced pause that took place right after a vacation and whilst I was almost jumping back into work, I had the chance to reflect on more of life, work and rest. And here are some of my random learning:
Our attention matters a lot. When our attention is not present, we simply miss the moment.
When we develop a plan, perhaps it is more important to note down our intentions rather than how exactly we want things to be.
Make room for serendipity – it gives an addition meaning to the notion that opportunity favours the prepared.
Maybe I should have more pauses in my life – certainly not one forced by an illness. But my mind certainly cherish being forced to pause and just linger in existence.
Recalling the wonder of my first trip to the Primark store along Oxford Street in London was rather amusing. More than 10 years ago, as I stepped into the store and looked at the price signages, I was so incredibly surprised by the low prices. Being from Singapore, with little natural resources and gone past the stage of textile manufacturing industrialisation – clothes, especially the type you can wear out of your bedroom are not cheap.
But at Primark then, I could get a hoodie for £5, a tee-shirt for somewhere between £3 and £7; shoes for just £10 or £12. Today, the prices have probably gone up by 20-40% but that’s probably just inflation. These clothes were manufactured in Asia, mostly in Bangladesh and Vietnam, but even regular clothes sold in these countries may come at a higher price. I distinctly remember that the Cedarwood (a Primark brand) and TM Lewin shirts sitting in a store in Bangladesh (said to be selling factory rejects), selling at about $25 (around £22).
That reflects the sheer cost savings that comes from economies of scale, being able to manage huge coordinated logistics, of procurement, shipping, fulfillment, and distribution in-store. By selling a these prices, Primark pretty much guarantee volume sale, thus enabling the huge economies of scale. They try to optimise further by reducing packaging to the minimum, doing away almost completely with anything beyond the label and tags on their products.
And just like that, by pricing things low, Primark essentially create a strong flow of anchor business for the textile plant that needs business in emerging Asia. They are willing and able to keep running for Primark because in times when they don’t have so much orders, Primark is there; and when they have too much orders, Primark can step back a little. This flexibility is valuable to the plants who are looking to cover overheads and staff costs, maintain the skilled labour they had hired and trained. And so the value they create gets passed on to customers, and perpetuate the cycle that keeps them in business.
The world economy is not just in an energy transition or move towards lower carbon emissions. Given increasing automation and digitalisation, the demand for labour should be declining. Nevertheless, there seem to be a general shortage of labour all around. Perhaps it is an issue of skills mismatch post-pandemic. But many have also identified a few other emerging issues including the fact that people are quiet quitting or finding the existing landscape of work broken.
I don’t think people are not willing to work long hours. In fact people are working so much more than in the past despite the luxuries their higher income can afford, including more leisure time. The question is who and what they want to devote these ‘working hours’ towards.
It would seem almost hilarious that people deem it strange the new generation wants to have space and time for their own lives and side hustle. If we look beyond the cultural norms created in the boomer’s generation, it is clear that the direction towards greater capitalism, marketisation and the free economy is that people would be more cautious about how labour is being traded and delivered.
And perhaps that is exactly what is happening. We are finally recognising that the labour market has been broken and with the advent of technology, the solution is more freelancing, contract work and piece-based or scope-based compensation. No more over time or time-based pricing. No more self-worth being tied to your job titles. Everyone can be in the C-suite. Everyone can be their own bosses.
It already started when the corporate or career ladder was torn down one or two decades ago. Partly as a result of economic crises requiring ‘restructuring’ or ‘right-sizing’ of firms. And partly because of the perverse financial incentives pervading the frenzy of financial optimisation through spin-offs, mergers & acquisitions – all of which disruptions the more traditional notions of the ‘ladder’.
In any case, I think the new trends of the workplace are still functions of the direction we have been taking our economy towards: increasing adoption of technologies, reduction in contracting costs leading to the breakdown of the Firm (as predicted by Coase in his theory of the firm), fragmentation of markets driven by endless differentiation and specialisations. That in turn creates a force to reshape demand through marketing, advertising, culture-making – an aspect not addressed by economics but nevertheless driven by economic incentives.
We often forget that our culture is in a large part shaped by economics and incentives; and the doctrines and policy approaches we have taken shapes these incentives in profound ways.
I’ve been receiving emails from recruiters. The sustainability and energy industry is in need of talents. Those who are keen to enter the industry and need some directions on how might like to search some of my past blog posts, as well as my coaching hub materials.
Meanwhile, one of the recruiters who reached out to me with a really poor linkedin mail to solicit interest in a job role which inspired this post. For recruiters to be do a good job as they reach out to targeted prospects, they should be including the following details into their initial messages rather than to just connect broadly:
Exact name of role or at least describe the role to indicate if this is a leadership or individual contributor role
Ballpark range of remuneration (even a broad range like 80-150k gives a clear sense whether a prospect should invest time in the conversation)
How a targeted prospect’s profile may potentially work for the prospective client
I thought the 4 points above were pretty basic and part of the work that has to be done by a recruiter. For junior entry roles, perhaps it is not really necessary to do all that because the prospect who is probably an entrant into the industry may not have much history to align with the job role. If the expectation for the job role is to identify mid-career candidates however, then the recruiter must be expected to take on all that work to initiate conversations.
Yvon Chouinard, founder of Patagonia has just announced that he is giving the full stakes in the company to trust entities that are committed to addressing climate change challenges. The company is valued at about $3 billion according to New York Times but I imagine the value that it is going to have in terms of making a difference for the world will be way more than that.
Instead of “going public,” you could say we’re “going purpose.” Instead of extracting value from nature and transforming it into wealth for investors, we’ll use the wealth Patagonia creates to protect the source of all wealth.
Yvon Chouinard
Patagonia has always been leading the way in terms of its focus on sustainability and profit for a purpose. To a large extent we need to recognise that Earth and our existence on it is not just the source of all wealth but also all the income stream and values we can generate. It thus serve also as the greatest possible investment we can make in our lifetimes for both our own and our descendants’ future.
The continued fragmentation of the world, driven both by political interests, the self-interest driven nature of capitalism, and the sheer inability to coordinate climate action beyond lip service is frustrating. But Patagonia gives us a clear example of how meaningful drastic actions can be taken that flips the switch on our incentives.
I previously wrote about the power of physical retail and as I recently was on vacation in London, going through high street shops, huge department stores such as Harrod’s and shopping malls like Westfield, I feel even more qualified to share more about the magic of physical shopping and hence retail.
The shopping experience is more than just about giving shoppers a moment of experiencing how it is like to own the item physically and “have it” – there’s also the environment, the context to make the purchase decision, and also the opportunity for store to tell a story about the shopper’s identity.
Take for example the Prada stores that control the number of shoppers in the store at any moment by creating a queue and allowing only a certain number of people at any one time to enter the store. This makes you have that special sense of pride when you’re in the store while looking at the long queue outside, thinking you’ve earned the privilege of being in, so it must make sense for you to at least buy something.
Then, there’s the concept like Harrod’s of having many service counters focusing on an array of product each, breaking down a phenomenally overwhelming shopping experience into something bite-sized. When combined with the sheer variety of goods all around you, there is this sense that something around here must fit you; that you should be getting something!
To that extent, the magic of physical retail would remain for decades to come even as online retail comes to take over more of the purchase of more mundane stuff.
I finally watched ‘Don’t look up’ – which itself is a great piece of satirical artwork. The themes are much deeper than what the movie initially set out to do; it reflects troubles with the culture that we have in the way science, politics, media and citizen actions interact, especially to deal with somewhat distant-seeming troubles that do not have immediate next-moment implications on us.
The film turned out to be really more than just a critique of our response to climate change but how the abuses of attention by politics, social media and mainstream media including pop culture has done to us. The ineptitude extends beyond management of a crisis; it is also problematic in the manner one responds humanly towards the crisis.
The character Kate, portrayed by Jennifer Lawrence was vilified for displaying her alarm towards the issue discovered. The appropriate response is being shamed and threatened out of existence. In the film, leaders were also seen as being highly opportunistic and acting almost purely and solely in self-interest. In all that sense, it may seem unreal but perhaps the fact is closer to this fiction than we think.
Kevin Low 
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