Category Archives: Life

You choose to be a professional when you set yourself apart not just by the work you do but by the way you carry yourself, manage the interactions with your clients. And it is not about just producing the best work out there, but choosing to do so within scope and budget, on time. This is different from just producing the best work; and people like working with professionals more than with artists precisely because of that.

When you choose to be an artist, it is different; you take ownership of the work and also almost always the full risks. Because you need to work in the shadows for a really long time, waiting to find the audience that resonates with you, and hoping to be ‘found’ some day. Perhaps within your lifetime, perhaps not.

For the professional, the work done is more valuable because it is with the client. But for the artist, the association with the artist itself should be what makes it more valuable. So when we deliver our work in our workplaces, we need to appreciate and understand – are we being the professional, or are we being an artist?

One of the arguments against e-fuels (that is, producing fuels from electricity generated; for example by electrolysing water to produce hydrogen, or synthetic methane from that hydrogen) is that it is very inefficient and wastes a lot of energy. A lot of energy storage is not worthwhile because the energy cannot be held efficiently over long time, or that they cannot be released when needed.

The gross amount of energy wasted never really seemed to be a problem when we were in the old fossil fuel world. When there’s no power generated, we are happy to flare away gaseous fuel, wash machine parts with petrol and use oil wastefully even though a lot of energy, fuel have been consumed to extract them, transport them. When converted into actual energy potential in joules, I’m pretty sure a lot of energy had been wasted all these while.

With the climate crisis and energy crisis today, reducing energy demand is a sure-win approach to mitigating those problems. Yet people are unwilling or unable to do much about it. Australia is still not adopting double-glazed windows as the standard, many countries still do not have Minimum Energy Performance Standards (MEPS) for motors. Part of the reason is that supply chains are still entrenched; and people are just being caught up with their sunk costs.

There is definitely going to be a lot of new costs involved with replacing equipment, electrification, removing the need for conventional fuel and switching to renewables, adding battery energy storage systems to our grid. But by simultaneously reducing energy demand and increasing green supply, a Stanford study seem to indicate this is easily within reach. It certainly brings up a lot of interesting questions and would be worthwhile digging around to appreciate the bottlenecks better. But are we even willing to take that first step of digging around? Or do we prefer covering up?

I’ve been hearing this recently. That the organisation someone is working for is top-heavy. What does that even mean? Too many people ordering others around but no one to follow the orders?

That would seem to be the simple interpretation of this phenomena. It may have to do with Singapore shifting away from its reliance on foreign manpower, towards increasing localisation. It may also have to do with the fact that there are more companies relocating their operations to Singapore (say, from Hong Kong) and the roles that were kept for people who were relocating from Hong Kong were the more senior roles and they were expecting to hire junior people from Singapore market.

What I suspect is that this is a function of the changing aspirations of the millennials and the newer generation. People are beginning to find it stinky to be serving the whole capitalist-industrial complex and sick of being a cog. And through the financial markets, as well as the increasing mass affluence, the market for new products, services is growing. This means opportunities to be your own boss, to be freelancers, or form a small business.

Customers are becoming more open-minded and novelty-seeking, and this generation that would have formed the middle and junior management in large companies suddenly decide that they relish the freedom of their own business more than working for “progression”. Time is the real thing that is scarce – there is abundant work to do, and enough to make a living and survive. A social status bought with one’s time and health is no longer worth the while.

As I mentioned in a previous post, this means big and traditionally relevant organizations may start to see a decline towards mediocrity as they fail to retain quality workforce. Until they start being able to create the kind of autonomy and conditions that encourage good quality talents to move out of corporate, those organisations will need to make do with mediocrity.

When I was in high school, the name of the game was to get good grades, score a job with a big firm or with the government. People worked hard to conform, to understand the requirements of the system and serve it well. The ones who were coding away their free time, starting their own lemonade stands, and doing ‘enterprising’ work had no place in the system.

But by the time I left university, the friends who were doing all sorts of quirky stuff during my high school days: starting blogs, running web design services, coding computer games – they all suddenly became well-sought after by tech firms. And yes they did well.

Today, these graduates don’t even bother joining firms, they go ahead and start their own, seeing that starting up, raising venture capital investment as a viable way to earn a living. In less than a decade, here in Singapore, a vibrant startup ecosystem have facilitated the ability for younger people to realise this dream.

Towards the end of 2010s, startups became a really glamorous thing. And while people might think of it as fueled by crazy valuation (for a large part it is), venture capital ecosystem, and just hype, there are other dimensions of this revamped entrepreneurship drive being galvanised in the current generation of graduates. But more than that, I think the sense of owning something, creating something from nothing is no longer out of reach as we have increasingly secured our basic survival.

It is vital for Singapore as a society to move towards this stage; but it would mean the bigger companies will have to work harder to acquire and develop their talents, especially the younger ones. The big incumbents, for the first time, may risk falling towards mediocrity as the quality of their workforce decrease gradually while the demands of the market increases. Automation, greater capital requirements will delay this process of decline, but without dealing with the human capital challenges, they would not stop the decline.

What exactly is career progression to you? Is it just having more salary? More responsibilities? More staff under your charge? Or a bigger title. Different people are caught up with different things and every company have their own ‘policies’ and ways to try and industrialise the whole practice of human resource, choosing to see labour in its traditional factory format.

Often, in a bid to standardise, to create salary bands and so on, they alienate workers and fail to see them as talents with ability to contribute to a shared mission of the organisation. Human resource departments add to the problem by thinking in a hierarchical manner and refusing to recognise that value is created in the company jointly by the employee, in partnership with company resources. They choose to see that value is produced magically and the top gets to decide how much they disburse to the bottom.

And in this disbursement, the company is trying to just set up structures to maximise the effort and production of the workers, without room to consider the impact of creativity, culture value or synergistic effects across the team. Time to tear all that down and begin to see employees as humans who have needs for affirmation, to get a proper share of value creation, and crave for a sense of ownership over real work produced.

The end-use of hydrogen was originally in mainly chemical industries and oil & gas. Hydrogen is used for purpose of reduction in a redox reactions; and they are also used to produce ammonia by reacting it with nitrogen through the Haber Bosch process. Hydrogen is so tiny and its density so low that it is hard to properly store them; so they are typically produced onsite before they are fed into the reactions that require them as a feedstock.

The world of sustainability suddenly turned towards hydrogen as the magic low carbon energy vector. Besides the fact that it contains no carbon, the combustion of hydrogen will only produce water as a by-product. It is about the cleanest possible fuel if you treat it as one. And on a per unit weight basis, its energy density is incredible. Just 760g of hydrogen can power a Toyota Mirai (a fuel-cell electric vehicle) for 100km. That is lighter than the fossil fuel required to power an internal combustion engine car over the same distance.

But for everyone to use it, all the cars on the roads will have to be able to take in hydrogen as fuel; and there will have to be hydrogen refueling stations. In Japan where the government laid out plans more than half a decade ago to push for hydrogen adoption in the country. Even after supporting the production of fuel cell electric vehicles and some combined heat power systems for households utilizing hydrogen, even subsidizing the capital investment in hydrogen refueling stations, the adoption is still poor.

Perhaps to add insult to injury, the hydrogen used in most of these use cases were not even green hydrogen. They were produced by steam methane reforming – ie. extracting hydrogen from methane (giving off yet more carbon dioxide emissions). But I’d argue we have to start somewhere and it is really difficult to transform the end-use part of the whole value chain. Getting adoption even before mass availability of green hydrogen is the only way we can shift the world today to prepare for a cleaner future.

Again, it seemed when it comes to carbon emissions, that it has to go up to come down.

A while back I did mention about the world being stuck in the traditional, carbon-intensive value chain and so decarbonising the world is a lot about transforming entire value chains and ecosystems. This means changing relationships across the markets and the world. Imagine when you change your production pathway for the goods you produce, you need to negotiate with new set of suppliers, source for new materials, come up with new structures for your companies and maybe engage different logistics partners. It is a lot of overhauling to do.

And that is why most companies won’t. Even when they know that the disruption is coming. They choose to keep their original identity and to think that the current set of value chain, suppliers, and relationships are what makes the business. To change all that is to tear down the entire business. In some sense, it is true. But consider that if you’re not tearing down the business, you might be tearing down the planet.

Besides regulations coming in to force these changes, another means is to change the identity that is held in the minds of the existing players. Many of the Oil & Gas companies are trying to lead this change by seeing themselves as a energy supplier as opposed to just providing fuels. This led them directly into power generation or other energy technologies supposing that they are not just green-washing. Banks are beginning to emphasize their green credentials but it is vital that their products, services and loan criteria starts following their claims.

It is not an easy journey and that is why many newer players in the market have taken it upon themselves to realign the value chain and actually build it up from scratch. SpaceX is a good example of how Elon Musk basically rebuilt the supply chain to produce rockets after discovering how expensive and broken the previous supply chain was. The same will happen in the space of green technologies, of new manufacturing processes that reduce waste and use more sustainable materials.

But this future can only be made if the consumers also start caring about how their goods and services are produced.

How often do we come up with something original in our thinking? In fact, I don’t think I ever had any original idea – at least not original from scratch. Most of our ideas are adaptation of the ideas of others, which came from yet more ideas of others. And this is the beauty of human knowledge accumulation and innovation. It is precisely because we have been able to copy, to varying degrees that things improve and work. That is effectively what the process of evolution achieves in nature. It is the poor copying that results in innovation.

A successful copy isn’t exactly direct imitation but being able to interpret the original idea for a new audience, in a new context or environment. And that is why it is so difficult to have purely original ideas that take off or are useful. Most genuine original ideas have little place in the world. And most good ideas that have a place in the world can hardly be considered original. And so being original is really not that much something to boast about.

What we truly value and want to value is the ability to think independently and arrive at conclusions. The conclusions can be similar and reinforces what the world believes in already; but they can also be divergent and it becomes exciting how things bear out in reality.

What I have attempted to explain…is how the scientist is to set about making a selection of the innumerable facts that are offered to his curiosity, since he is compelled to make a selection, if only by the natural infirmity of his mind, though a selection is always a sacrifice…

There is a hierarchy of facts. Some are without any positive bearing, and teach us nothing but themselves. The scientist who ascertains them learns nothing but facts, and becomes no better able to foresee new facts. Such facts, it seems, occur but once, and are not destined to be repeated.

There are, on the other hand, facts that give a large return, each of which teaches us a new law. And since he is obliged to make a selection, it is to these latter facts that the scientist must devote himself.

No doubt this classification is relative, and arises from the frailty of our mind…No doubt a vaster and a keener mind than ours would judge otherwise. But that matters little; it is not this superior mind that we have to use, but our own.

Henri Poincaré, Science and Method

My wife, a zoologist by training with an undergraduate degree in biology always lament the point that in our mainstream school system, biology is increasingly about genetics, DNA and proteins rather than about ecology, wildlife and biodiversity. That is true and I have myself experienced the change over the period of 15 years in formal education system in Singapore. Ecology played a smaller and smaller role then eventually disappears from the syllabus that national exams would be testing students on.

What Poincaré talked about is that there are so much facts in the world for us to collect and learn, why do science pick on certain rather than others? The more basic a fact is, the simpler the truth, the more we observe across the world we reside in, the ‘better’ it is. Hence in biology, we prefer to study cells, or proteins rather than to look into the behaviour of an entire specie of birds – because in some sense, the generalisations we can make on the biological impact of a protein can have greater impact.

To that extent, we observe that the spread of market-based capitalism and globalisation including the integration of financial systems across the world gradually makes such knowledge more common and broadly applicable, increasing the value of economics and business knowledge. To the extent we often assume there are global business practices when there isn’t. Businesses and the way they are carried out is different across the world.

It is hence paramount perhaps to establish the hierarchy of knowledge or facts that one ought to acquire about businesses and investments in order to function well and thrive in the world today.

I’ve written a lot on problem-solving; and I had talked about different approaches to it. In particular, I think it is worth pointing out some heuristics which are more useful amidst the process of problem-solving when you get stuck. I observed myself getting stuck when one of two things happen in the process of thinking about problems:

• Looping: I’m thinking in a circular manner where my thoughts lead on to the same thoughts and goes back on itself.
• All at once: I’m thinking of multiple thoughts all at once with some order but interconnections that are too complex I can’t seem to entangle one by one.

In both cases, it is important to practice separation. Separation of elements that are being thought about. It could be that a problem has multiple components or aspects that is being considered. Dividing them up finely is important; or that a solution can tackle different aspects of a problem – again, to approach it first by dissecting them into separate elements.

We then visit these elements one by one and broaden or deepen them as we deem fit. By first separating the elements and then listing them down, we also keep separate the concepts and the connections between them. We then start ordering and putting in the connections one by one and slowly.

It will take patience, and a great sense of curiosity about being stuck itself rather than feeling like you’ve hit a roadblock to dealing with the main problem. Small problems thrown up along the way like being stuck is quickly forgotten when we manage to get them out but when they are in the way, it can really tear you down.

Good luck!