Category Archives: Life

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.

Having spent more than the first years of my career deeply involved in infrastructure investments and looking at infrastructure developments in the emerging markets, I was incredibly moved by this video on the living bridges of Meghalaya on this BBC programme.

When I think about the type of investments made by private sector or by government into infrastructure meant to benefit communities and how these infrastructures were built and maintained, we leverage a lot on the power of markets, especially financial incentives, and various instruments. After all, IFC and World Bank had for a long time thought about maximising finance for development. Yet there are so many other instruments that various cultures have evolved which we miss out in our zeal to develop.

Coaxing nature to direct its relentlessness towards growth that benefit humans is perhaps one really important area that we as modern humans have not really adopted as a sort of proven innovation to develop ourselves. And I think the idea of nature-based solutions should be wrapping its mind around these sort of examples and innovations already present in the world right now.

It’s almost been two full years since I started this website with my own domain name. Of course, it doesn’t look like it because this blog contains stuff I wrote as far back as 2009 (when I was nearing the end of my National Service); but most of those content were imported from my previous website. On my blog there is ultimately 3 sets of posts; the ones that were from 2009-2014, when I ran ERPZ.net, and then 2015-2020 when I had my own personal wordpress blog.

Then, about 6 months after I registered the domain, I started writing daily from 3 January 2021. It’s been more than a year now and it has been amazing how I’ve been able to keep up with this habit. Writing keeps me thinking and helps me to think clearly than if I had only held my thoughts up in my mind. This site have also been storing up resources I’ve created for my coaching practice.

So I’m glad to say that I’ll be renewing the domain and carrying on with this work.

I’ve encountered many different kinds of clients who approach us to perform market studies. There are those who are more conservative and looking at studying the success of others, so they can replicate the success. They are not necessarily trying to outdo the incumbents, just recognising that the market is growing and they can get a slice of the pie.

There are others who are looking at markets that does not yet exists; areas where others believe doesn’t work, either due to lack of regulatory structure, some previous beliefs about costs. They will say ‘don’t tell me about it being impossible, I want to understand why it hasn’t work, and what is not working’. We would try and understand what are the missing pieces, what is within the control of the market players, what else needs to happen for the market to take off, for it to work.

In the areas of infrastructure and energy, people tend to look towards the government. So when there’s lack of regulation, they might think it’ll be a no-go. But market leaders think differently, they are looking not at the competition, but the problems at hand: what stands in the way of the market working? It is not about shortcuts through imitation, nor finding ‘success stories’; it is about solving problems and sorting out the fundamentals.

Are you thinking like a market leader? What is setting you apart?

So I’m rather interested in the Stuart Kirk saga not just by virtue of my job, my sense of mission and my interests but also because of another insight about the situation in financial industry through that presentation.

It reflects that the finance industry is still considerably dettached from the struggle on climate change. And regulations will have to bite them harder, or the pricing of externalities, and so on. The disclosure and reporting required by authorities is precisely one of the ways that allows the finance industry to influence climate outcomes; but I guess Stuart Kirk was actually deliberately being ironic about it.

If you go through this presentation closely, you’ll notice to some extent that he is actually mocking the traditional frameworks of analysis and approaches towards trying to convince investors to lend a hand to do something about climate by talking about the potential losses. Well, the sheer uncertainty around the climate impact (eg. various impacts cancelling each other out) will of course encourage skepticism, but that’s honestly missing the point.

The point is that finance has a role in shaping our future, one that involves a combination of climate change mitigation and also adaptation, and if we don’t start measuring these attributes and the impact of our financial decisions on these attributes, we are at risk – not financially but physically. A single war may not destroy the global economy, but it can destroy a single economy, and many lives. To measure and look at our lives through just the financial markets is a grave mistake.

My colleague alerted me to this recent judgment in Singapore of a man accused of drug trafficking. It made me think and wonder quite how we conceptualise, construct and then attribute culpability.

In many sense, our laws tries its best to identify evidence disinguishing intention from the outcome when it comes to crimes. This is why there is a difference between murder and manslaughter. So there is some kind of penalty both in terms of intent and outcome; and they compound.

Now the point is that intention is hard to tell; if a person fails to achieve an outcome, it is not always easy to be able to demonstrate his intentions. On the other hand, it can be hard to think that an outcome wasn’t driven by some kind of intent. And there is the intent that is long-developed and the one that emerges on the fly. They are all different.

So to what extent do we take responsibility? When we consume electricity from the grid, are we responsible for the emissions that were produced in generating the power? What if we tried to switch to green electricity but the solar panels aren’t generating so we are consuming from the grid? Who should be responsible of making sure supply chains are free of corruption and exploitation? Is the ability to shoulder responsibility based on financial capacity? Knowledge? Or other resources?

At the end of the day, if we managed to reduce our carbon footprint to zero as individuals and yet our fellow man continues to emit and eventually climate changes and affects all of us, are we being held culpable for a crime we didn’t commit and an outcome we did not intend?

In Christianity, the whole idea of differentiating meekness from weakness is a very big theme because meekness is a very important attribute of Jesus Christ and his followers. He taught in Matthew 5, “Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.”

For me, this distinction that is often overlooked by everyone outside the context of Christianity except perhaps for a few linguist and people particular about the precision of their use of language. So meekness continues to be confused with the personality of being somewhat timid, soft-spoken, and lack of covert expression.

As Christians, we recognise meekness actually takes a lot more strength and power than being someone who is strong and mighty. Because meekness involves withholding of strength. The restraint that is exercised, silently behind the will of a person requires a lot more than the raw might in expression of anger or hatred. Think about another picture: Is it easier for you to pick up a tiny piece of ant and move it to another place or simply to crush it?

When you recognise that meekness is actually great strength, it unlocks a lot of clarity in what you want to cultivate in your character and personality as you grow. At the same time, it changes radically what kind of behaviour you respect and value in the context of work and relationships.