Category Archives: Life

Sometimes, choosing your battles is not just about the strategy that was first determined but the metrics that we choose to track our progress along the strategy. Using the wrong metrics can lead us to adopt the wrong tactics when executing the right strategies. At the end of the day, the wrong metrics causes us to lose sight of the strategy that we are pursuing and go down the wrong path entirely.

For example, there is this curious point about services job creation and de-industrialisation of an economy. A government might be pursuing a strategy of job creation and targeting to attract particular FDIs so they track their own performance by looking at the manufacturing job growth each year. Concurrently, the manufacturing companies are increasingly looking at outsourcing so the security guard at the factory is now employed by a security company rather than the factory, though he is still guarding the same facility. At the same time, the truck drivers are now hired by a logistics firm who took over the fleet of trucks delivering the output of the factory to the port. Total number of jobs that this factory created and kept has not changed but on the statistics, it would seem that manufacturing jobs have declined because those who were previously directly hired by the factory have been re-employed by services firms. The government might start thinking despite attracting much manufacturing FDI, the manufacturing job growth is low and so they might want to pursue a different strategy, not realising that they are embarking on the right strategy but just looking at the wrong metrics.

Their subsequent decision might derail the overall policy actions that was supposed to address the issue of job creation in the economy. Likewise, companies and businesses needs to think about the right metrics when they are tracking progress of their strategies. Have you thought whether your metrics are still serving you well as an individual?

When I was a junior staff in the public service, I often try to get every single thing aligned to my ideals and get rather upset when things don’t go in that direction. For example, I believed that as a public servant, our goal was to serve the public. But often, there were overriding management and leadership priorities that could detract from that even though those actions were trying to serve overarching policies which were supposed to serve these people.

Of course, I was rather disappointed and I came up with this catchy phrase for the younger people who were rather disillusioned by the jobs they had, “you thought you were working for a cause but actually you’re just working for a boss”. Yet as I mature and grew, I came to recognise that because we don’t have unlimited resources, we need to develop strategies. Strategies mean picking your battles in order to win the war. And by focusing resources and coordinating your actions, you are able to move towards your goals more efficiently.

But understanding that is insufficient; there’s a need to know which battles to pick. It has to do with being extremely clear what are the fundamental problems and issues to deal with. For example, in public service, there are fundamental challenges in the society we have to deal with that may or may not seem like we’re serving the public upfront in a single case. We may have to choose not to help a single person in order to focus our resources on dealing with more fundamental challenges.

For example, there may be a lot of good in helping a single small business to expand and grow but often, the expansion of a larger business can create more jobs and greater spin-offs whereas the single small business might just enrich a single person.

Critical thinking is really important when one derives results from a model. They are behind so much of modern day decision-making. Whether it is a decision to invest (financial models) or policy-making (economic models or models calculating social impacts); they generate a false sense of precision and scientific-ness in the process. There is of course the interdisciplinary subject of decision science that tries to be eclectic in drawing out tools and resources from various disciplines to help support decision-making.

I recall at one point, Dr Goh Keng Swee talked about how economics is not necessarily going to help us get things right but it does help to eliminate almost 99% of the options which are necessarily wrong. In the same spirit, I think modelling should be a way to eliminate the fringe cases and allow us to work within scenarios that make sense rather than give us a view of the future.

Forecasting should not so much be seen as ‘what will happen’; but to help us cast out the ‘what will not happen’. Decision-making, on the other hand, is choosing between eventually the options that are plausible within what was not eliminated. To that extent, we need to use models extremely critically – even after we have spent lots of time and money building a model. We cannot say to ourselves, ‘if we spent all the resources building this model and not using the results, it is a waste‘.

When I was labouring away in my economics classes at LSE more than 10 years ago, there was a lot of debates around accuracy of models we were using to understand the economy. And the agreement was that all models were ‘wrong’ because they are (over)simplified versions of reality.

But simplification was necessary for us to understand something that was complex. Incorporating the complexity into our models may not help us very much. To give a concrete example, in economics, we claim that all purchases which were the realisations of demand for all goods were driven by individual preferences. But in reality, there are also goods which were gifts and because you are buying it for someone, it is not about the preference for the underlying goods but something more complex. Yet if you need to start working out a model where the demand for a good is driven not by preferences for it but cultural perception of the signals around the gifting of a good, it is not so generalisable and would not be useful.

Today, models are getting more complex, and we are building out more and more models in order to perform sophisticated calculations and help support decisions. We create metrics to test our models and they tend to be around how ‘right’ the models are with ‘predicting’ results we already have. The challenge is no longer oversimplification but a problem we call ‘overfitting’, which is where we are trying to create models that is able to fit the data we have so well that it is not generalisable. This is actually the problem above – just because we are capable of building more and more complex models, we think it is better when it isn’t.

What is time-wasting to you? I realise that perspectiv matters a lot when it comes to this. But as this article in The Economist suggests, there are some perhaps universal time-wasters in the modern day office worker’s life: logging in, mistyping, deleting emails, scheduling meetings that eventually gets cancelled or rescheduled, looking for available meeting rooms. All of these are often ridiculous. Most of the time, technology plays an important role in both time-wasting and time-saving.

I spend time to write for this blog daily – is that a waste of time? Perhaps so to some people in my circle, including some loved ones. But for me, it’s an investment, a training that I sorely need, and the development of a positive habit. On the other hand, I think that time spent making small talk to ease into a meeting is a waste of time but I’m too culturally attuned to do otherwise, plus it doesn’t help I happen to be naturally curious and happy to make conversations.

As I enter a stage of life when time becomes so much more precious, I need to guard it more carefully, and make sure I’m not wasting time. But that’s only possible when I know what are my objectives.

In accounting, goodwill is when a business has somehow paid the past owners a price over the book price of the original business and now capitalises this premium in the books of the acquired business. At the same time, we may say we do things out of goodwill, basically for free or token, as an act of kindness towards people. Most of the time these are towards strangers, or clients, customers. It may or may not involve expectations for reciprocation.

Now the last part of the previous paragraph is the part that I think is the most tricky thing about goodwill. There’s a sense, in our modern world where there is always a chance of repeated interaction, that goodwill is worthwhile and also worth multiplying. At some point or in some way, it gets reciprocated in profound ways. Some might think of it as Karma – or at least just the positive sort of it.

What I think is strange is that the use of the term goodwill in accounting or business may have contaminated our sense of what it really is. I personally identify the non-business ‘goodwill’ to be something in a spirit of generosity and giving, whereas in business and on commercial basis, goodwill is treated like an asset, something that is supposed to bring value – therefore the returns that reciprocation of a kind gesture might bring.

Maybe it’s me thinking too much about semantics – but it matters.

Probably the last thing I imagine myself writing about on my blog is a movie I just watched but I’m going to do just that. Given my track record for reading movie synopses in lieu of watching them, it might be surprising that I actually enjoy movies very much. Perhaps it is precisely because I’m such a critic that I don’t want to waste my time on a movie that is not worth the while.

Which brings me to Top Gun: Maverick. Honestly, it was done so well. The script was well written, the words exchanged carefully thought out, and the emotional content was properly executed through the movie even as the fighter jet cockpit scenes created so much tension as you watch the fighter pilots move through simulated navigation across the landscape. It was one of those movies where the story honestly did not matter as much as the manner the situation and characters were portrayed.

Entertainment have become so much of a staple in our modern lives we sometimes get desensitized and forget the art behind it. Top Gun: Maverick reminds me of it very strongly. Those days when I actually studied film critique and consider various aspects of what a film is about.

When was the last time you reviewed your life, your goals, activities or take stock of how you’re spending your time? I’ve been so busy most of this while, working on my coaching, consulting and also sharing ideas on my blog I haven’t really done a quick review even of how I’m allocating time across my activities.

One thing that becoming a consultant made me do is to really value my time and take proper stock of how I’m spending it. It forces me to consider if the activities I’m engaging in is really worth my time. I also started thinking about the marginal value of each hour outside my usual work time.

Given the value of the time I have outside work, I have to perform my work more efficiently in order to gain more space and engage really in the stuff that gives us life satisfaction and not just the ‘value’ as defined by work.

Labour markets are very tight now and with the rate of job transitions that people have now, it should be more and more interesting for labour economists to start studying the markets and understanding if they are working efficiently, and if not, what are the distortions. While I may say distortions, they are not in and of themselves a bad thing. They actually often help us to achieve certain goals by triumphing over shortcomings in our culture. But it is important to understand their impacts anyways.

One of the distortions to labour markets is the fact that companies offer salaries to new hire based on the market rates but then give pay raises by performance. In other words, even if a staff is not performing well, typically if his experience and skills are becoming more and more scarce in the marketplace, his pay does not rise if he stays where he is. Therefore, he would switch to get a higher pay. The company which loses him has no one else to blame than their system.

At the same time, those people who performs well, but yet their skills are becoming more and more common in the marketplace, would enjoy pay raises while incoming labour supply gets lower starting wages without affecting this “top-performer”. The company justifies its decision that this person is tried and tested, have been delivering value to the company (never mind the fact actually they could have replaced him with someone cheaper and have equal skill). So he stays in the company and draws the higher pay.

In the first case, you observe that salary offered in the market tends to be higher than the prevailing salaries being paid to existing staff. As the recruiter only observes the information from newly offered salaries, the new offers tend to be higher than the actual salaries being paid out on average. In the second case, you’ll observe that people in their roles are paid pretty well while the new offers in the market tends to be quite low in comparison.

Such is a cultural distortion that may have to be corrected by increasing awareness, as well as improvements in HR.

Seth Godin recently wrote about the delay; and basically the challenge of situations where there are no short feedback loops. I’ve written a lot about feedback in the workplace and how we all need to learn to be able to give feedback in order to improve the people and the world around us. Of course, one of the reason that we want to be able to do that is to help shorten the feedback loop.

After all, if you’ve bottled-up resentments against your colleagues, there’s going to be some point of time you express it through your action – whether it was some unjustified anger, or just quitting. So there is still some sort of ‘feedback’, except they become longer, looks less connected, and therefore make it harder to draw connections, even for yourself.

Recognizing the long loops requires a sensitivity to patterns and ability to draw the connections others tend not to. I’d suggest to:

• Pay more attention to processes of how things lead on to one another
• Make connections between trends and drivers step by step

The point isn’t to conduct sophisticated studies to establish the connections; it is more around reflecting more deeply in the flow of these processes, forward and backwards. And to also see how outcomes are driven by not just intentionality but also chance and circumstances. Identifying the role of chance and the environment will go a long way to learn more about the feedback loop.