I am sometimes guilty of trying to be efficient all the time. Yet things will always take time to be better. In fact, sometimes the goal of efficiency undermines being able to do something effectively because we are stingy about the time or resources that we have to spend – in service of efficiency.
Yet when I put on my artist hat, I cease to consider efficiency. Sure, there may be deadlines for my painting or Chinese calligraphy works but there is no need to rush through the creative process. Putting some time constraints can improve the works but more often than not, the hurried mood is counterproductive.
Same with cultivating and building relationships. Or growing, gardening, bearing fruits. These things all take time. Question is, are you taking the time? Or just trying to move on to the next thing.
You need to say something but you couldn’t. The body begins to feel the tension of those words and thoughts stuck in you mouth. At first they were words unexpressed, then they become thoughts suppressed. And finally when they are pushed out of your consciousness, they just stay in your body as the tension. This tension stresses your system and if sufficiently severe, causes pain.
So that is how your body spoke on your behalf. Are you ignoring any pain? What was the body speaking, perhaps on your behalf?
I’ve been writing random thoughts about HR for a long time now. The traditional HR was about stewardship of company policy, complying with labour laws; and we all know it is broken, in need of change. Recently, I considered a few building blocks; on the labour side, desire to work is changing quite a bit. And then there’s an alternative way of thinking about our work identities in the form of projects rather than employers and roles.
On the supply side, I think it is important to note that the traditional HR is actually absolutely unnecessary. Long ago, I’ve noticed how Octopus Energy did away with their HR function and the truth is that people can organise themselves pretty well without too much fuss. Do we really need to standardise some of these things? Like working hours, like dress code, etc.? Aren’t these relics of the factory age? If you’re able to hire for a combination of capabilities and fit, why would you still need to constrain your people?
From my experience, the capabilities and progressiveness of the HR can really make a difference in terms of how strong your staff can be in terms of delivering on the objectives of your organisation. For most part, the policies of a company can undermine the work of staff severely; and often during these times, we lose sight of what those policies were for to begin with. HR 2.0 should be combating that urge to introduce more constraints whenever there are abuses. In fact, the hiring decisions are really what needs to be improved when these things happen.
How many of you admire and aspire to be in your boss’ place? For most in this generation, that no longer is something that happens; we don’t really want our boss’ jobs, their responsibilities or their challenges. The idea is to find one’s own path to walk on. The shift in labour markets and the corporate world away from lifelong employment and traditional corporate careers will continue to shift. I foresee that within the next decade, corporate structures will continue to break down further such that work becomes increasingly like freelance type arrangements.
Rather than having departments, managers and traditional ways of splitting up firms, the corporate environment becomes a mini marketplace in itself where the employees goes around looking for others with the right set of skills and experience to take on projects together. This is especially the case for more creative and innovative industries.
The value of working for a company then is no longer the corporate or career ladders to climb. Companies can no longer pay someone low in exchange for the promise of nurturing them towards their potential; they will simply have to pay for the work they require. This is because the labour force is no longer interested in scaling in an organisation; rather, it is about contributing in the manner that suits them, in the interest of the organisation, with a fair value and wage being paid to them.
I was back on reservist and had an interesting short conversation with one of the new friends I made there in camp. We were talking about the lack of seasons in Singapore and how that affected our sense of time. He talked about how when he was abroad, people were making plans according to seasons; taking a summer break, going skiing during the winter, visiting certain gardens in spring and so on. And in most cases, it was so stark for us to miss our catch-ups with family and friends when seasons were passing that we are extremely aware of the time that has past.
For example, as winter passes, there’s no way we can go skiing anymore until long later; so we know there are those natural deadlines for life. But in Singapore, the deadlines for work looms so much larger than other seasonal deadlines. For festivals or occasions, they are just that, and feels almost completely arbitrary with no clear sense of seasonal context. Christmas is at the end of the year but there are no snow, no coldness, no need for fireplaces or more lights to spruce up the place whilst the sun set earlier.
I found this a better way of understanding why the passage of time seem to pass so differently in Singapore than when I was overseas. It is easier for me to recall what I was doing towards the end of summer in 2012 (while I was in UK) than what happened in August of 2018. Seasons do really make so much of a different in our experience of life that we should perhaps learn to differentiate the subtle aspects of weather patterns in Singapore and get a better sense of appreciation for the passage of time we experience.
I previously mentioned about this matrix introduced by a boss I used to work under. I’ve produced graphical representation of it. And I think this is an extremely elegant way of understanding the difference between strategy and tactics. You can be misguided by your abilities in one dimension and fooled into thinking that is the most important but both are as important.
Though in today’s world, people are biased towards paying more for people who are able to think strategically, it is likely because getting strategy wrong just puts you in such a mediocre position. On the other hand, if your tactics are mediocre while strategy is great, there might be some slim chance of doing fine.
Either way, the purpose of this post is once again to remind ourselves that strategy and tactics are both required and it’s important when we think about our careers, and job-seeking, that we not only try to beef up our CV, write nice cover letters and apply all kinds of tactics you can find online. But perhaps more importantly, you need to think through the strategy of the job fit and the role you actually want to do.
When I first joined consulting, I always wondered if we were being silly by specifying our consulting methodologies in the project proposals. If we could just clearly demarcate what we were going to do, and even the steps we will have to take, then what is stopping the client from doing it by themselves? Ultimately, it is a matter of the motivation behind the client hiring us.
A client might be hiring us to bridge the shortage of manpower; especially qualified manpower for the work that needs to be done. It could be a study or a report, but without the necessary staff with good contextual understanding, it would be difficult for them to find the information, put them together or generate relevant insights from them.
Or the client might be lacking the capability completely; even when they do have idling personnel, the overall company lacks a good understanding of the full subject matter at hand. And bringing in the consulting team helps to provide sufficient contexts for the management to decide subsequently whether to build up the capability internally.
Finally, the client may actually be engaging a consultant in order to get close to competition. This may particularly be the case when consultants are working for different players in the same industry. Of course, they ought to be independent but for certain neutral pieces of information, by hiring the same consultants you often ensure that you are accessing the same information. It’s almost a strategy for loss-prevention.
Ultimately though, you should be hiring consultants because you can’t do the work yourself, and should not imagine that you can. The challenge with the industry is that there are too many people willing to be labeled as consultants but just doing exactly what the client is specifying almost to the step that they hardly add much value. There’s a tension between having to maintain strong relationships with the paymasters while being sufficiently disagreeable in order to make sure the projects serve them rather than simply what they think they want.
After the thoughts around instant messaging, I’ve been thinking of a philosophy of engagement to define the types of correspondents I want to get involved in – at work or in personal life. We should leave some room for serendipity and surprising conversations.
We should stop replying to “lazy messages” where people initiate some kind of meeting without mentioning available timeslots or options.
We should probably not respond to emoji-based feedback/comments/likes.
Where messages sent are without context or clear communications, the onus should be on the sender to clarify. The receiver could ignore messages until clarification is made.
Now the biggest burden of the instant messages is that once you received the messages it feels as though the ball is in your court and replying relieves you of the tension so that it is out of your court. Developing these protocols for engagement effectively takes that tension away under certain conditions. If we just focus on the communications required at hand, we can develop and internalise these protocols to help us deal with further anxieties induced by instant messaging.
What do you think drives you more? The desire for pleasure or for purpose. I think it takes both and to some extent they are substitutable. Yet I cannot help but see pleasure as the lesser cousin. In some sense, we are made for purpose while pleasure is made for us. And so when we live simply for a life of pleasure and purpose eludes us, we can be terribly empty.
Ultimately, we need both. Pleasure can help alleviate some pain along the way of purpose but when it ursurp the place of purpose in our lives, we are lost.
Some consultancies thrive on creating frameworks and processes and protocols. They sell, especially well to management. But the ops guys know some of these processes cannot be upheld. They are counter-intuitive, perhaps too onerous. Why is it so hard to convince the management to drop that sort of nonsense?
Because the management wants to believe that the operations are really so rational and systematic. They like to think that most of the things can be measured, quantified and put into a nice dashboard for visualisation. It is the same with a city authority, or even a government.
‘Statistics’ is derived from the latin word ‘status’ that means ‘political state’ or ‘government’. It was related to the ruler collecting data on the territories and the people in order to extract taxes, monitor their subjects, know how powerful their military is. Frameworks, protocols and all that stuff is naturally attractive to the corporate management, that derive most of its techniques from public and military administration. It should come as no surprise that managers who might think they are kings would love these.
Which leads me to ask, how did businesses and leaders learn to break out of that? To envision something entirely different, and to actually try to realise it in their organisations.
