Category Archives: Life

Strategy is required as a result of scarcity – limited resources, time, capacity. If you had infinite resources, you don’t need a strategy because you can afford to squander any amount of resources to get to where you want. But then again if the end goal of strategies are to get more resources, then having infinite resources basically mean you already fulfilled your goals.

Then there is evolution, which is where optimising resources at system level is not as important as proliferating diversity and searching for multiple optimal strategies. This is how a specie survive, and how the market system perpetuates. In such a system, tactics in the short term can become an obsession. So it is important to understand what is the game you’re playing before figuring out how you play it.

So what is the strategy for? Why do you want to be number one? Why is that worth living, training for? Are those questions really necessary? Can we ignore them? Is there something else we are trying to move towards when we think about our “strategies” – can we achieve the something else differently?

We could be focused on sustainability thinking we just want to reduce plastics waste, and think about all ways to substitute it. There’re reusable bottles, food containers, etc. My home is full of plastic reusable water bottles, as well as food containers. We do use them but there’s a sense they eventually become plastic waste as well. And then there’s the whole drive on biodegradable plastics; which I discovered to be more resource intensive than normal plastics – and gets incinerated in our waste-to-energy plants anyways.

When we are militant about single outcomes: eg. losing weight, getting good grades, becoming a manager, or running a unicorn startup before the age of 40, we can lose many things. And we can be burning resources unnecessary to get to those single outcomes without recognising that what we want is something more general. We have this obsession that with this one thing, all things will be alright. It’s exactly the kind of struggle and challenge that Disney Pixar’s Soul (a film) is trying to reflect on.

When we select our desire outcomes, we might want to think more holistically; it’ll be hard to work out the strategy and paths towards that, but allowing ourselves to think this way will help us go farther.

Given how prolonged the ongoing pandemic is, those who have been holding things off until ‘normalcy returns’ can no longer really hang on to that. You will have to start considering how to move forward, how to be able to making progress regardless of the kind of circumstances that are in place.

For starters, progress is non-linear. It is not unidirectional or unidimensional. You can’t look at progress just from one metric and certainly, it is not just about moving in one direction for each of those metrics. There will be trade-offs, and there is no single driver for the whole time.

I want to consider the example of the solar power industry. It had a lot of false starts which in retrospect, contributed to its longer term development. Those window of opportunities drew bright minds and investors into the picture when they otherwise would not have entered. And these were important contributions to the industry even if they did not immediately make things take off.

There were times when the industry was not focused and still in limbo as to whether mono-crystalline or poly-crystalline or thin-film technology would be the de-facto. Even when the leading technology became clearer, further cost reduction and revenue enhancement opportunities had to be explored, including replacing string inverters with micro inverters to reduce single-point-of-failures in the solar array.

So your business may not be getting so much volumes now, perhaps it’s time to look at improving customer service, raising the quality of service, introducing better processes. These are things that are hard to do when all your staff are engaged, and busy with the status quo. Investments take the form of capital and also time. This might be the time to work on those investments that takes time.

I used to work for a big boss who often shared tidbits of humorous wisdom during some of the smaller meetings we have when he reviews our work. He usually have his set of 2×2 matrix which he comes up with analogies about all kinds of things. One of these matrices is about strategy and tactics. He reminds us that they are different and also that people with different combination of intelligence about strategy and tactics would derive quite different outcomes.

So we have 4 quadrants, from the combination of high and low abilities in strategy and in tactics. So there’s the ones who are high on strategy and tactics. He calls them the guided missiles; they do well at strategising and executes them well, on-point, on-target with resources optimised. Then there are those who are high on strategy but low on tactics; he calls them the empty canon (or artillery), they’d point at the enemy and at the right angle but then when it comes down to firing, nothing gets hit. Then there are those who are low on strategy and high on tactics; he says that’s the machine gun; you fire blatantly hoping you’ll hit the target which you might but also drain a lot of resources and potentially cause collateral damage.

Finally, those low on strategy and tactics are submarines. They’re just hanging around. But maybe, they are carrying a guided missile with them.

So who are you, and are you thinking about strategy and tactics clearly? Do you differentiate them?

Been pondering what a good citizen means in Singapore for the future that we want to live in, and to create for our future generation. One of the things we were conditioned to consider in our nation-building days is “if everyone does this then…” and usually if we can agree that chaos will ensue then we will opt not to do it. As a result we learn to understand rules and regulations in the context of the overall social outcomes.

At some point we had been railing against some degree of inflexibility and stupidity in this. I recall one senior who tried to flag down a cab outside the departure hall only to be rebuked by the security guard and was told the cabs are only allowed to drop off and not pick up there. In some sense, Singapore’s orderliness is possible by design and not emergent. But can orderliness be emergent?

Actually it can, and when we have active good citizens who are able to act in considerate manners, who self-organise into queues and lines, who practice grace and politeness, then we get order that is ground up. Which we do see in Singapore. The next generation of good citizens would be those who can recognise what is truly good and important for the nation, and without prompting or mandate from government, organises the others toward those goals.

Was looking at the short video featuring Ray Dalio’s views on Lee Kuan Yew and a bit of history about Singapore. And he interestingly pointed towards the notion of good citizenship that contributed to the manner he built up Singapore in the early days. The fact that Singapore’s people responded to the policies and mixture of sticks and carrot in those days to eventually fulfil Lee Kuan Yew’s vision should not be overlooked.

Of course, to be able to develop one great vision of Singapore as an oasis in the region is powerful; to act in concert and rally the crowd matters. But there was a population of motivated, hardworking individuals who were so used to just doing their own things to survive. Now they had to sign up to a dream about the country. There was little to lose by way of wealth other than the fact this is something completely new for them in their lives. They moved from ghettos and kampongs into high-rise public housing. They changed their way of life completely. And they formed our defence force, they helped to form the core labour in the facilities that the MNCs invested into.

As a country, we determined to invest into human capital in the deepest form. Not just mass education but really changing the way of life, how societal affairs were conducted. Those were deep changes not to be taken for granted. But now that we’ve the fruits of those changes to enjoy, do we not recognise that the new era we ushered in requires a new kind of good citizenship we need to arise to be?

I had a recent chat with a teacher who shared with me an issue he face in school. He had students who disagreed with certain school rules and do not comply with them. In some cases, it could be about sleeping during the reading period for example where they are supposed to be reading a copy of newspaper that day. That seemed mild enough and the rules only state they are not supposed to sleep or work on anything else except to use that time to peruse the newspaper.

He realises that some students are involved in so many activities or busy with many other things in school and hence would naturally be sleepy or tired during that time slot. So it seemed pointless to go around classrooms waking these students up. He had the chance to speak to these students but they just generally don’t believe that time slot was going to be helpful to them and hence rather take the time to ‘rest’. He asked me when the students do not accept or align themselves with the intention of the rules, how should we get them to comply?

I suggested the following analogy: If you visit your friend’s place and they take off their shoes before entering the house, do you keep your shoes on and enter their house just because you do that at home yourself, and disagree with their practice? And the reason for you to be doing that is because you do want to maintain your identity as a friend, and receive the benefits of friendship and the house visit you’re taking part in. Likewise in school, respect for the rules comes with the privilege of being able to attend the school.

If, even after explaining such and giving the student (in his/her teens) to digest it, then it makes sense to mete out punishments. The problem with an approach to just get students to ‘follow the rules’ without clear indication of the intent is that they would only learn superficial compliance. But the even greater challenge is when they are resentful about being ‘forced’ into that compliance if they don’t buy into the intent. Then, the principle is that of privilege and responsibility. Something I’m not sure we emphasise enough in schools.

I recall the days back in school when I’d spend hours in the library in this small reading cubicle doing my homework, studying new topics, doing research. In fact, after the age of 16, I never really did school work at home anymore. I did almost all of my work in school, at benches or in the library cubicle. I found the same kind of cubicle in the library of Hwa Chong, and then LSE, and then NYU.

Then I graduated and started working. It’s funny how since I started working, I spent hardly any time in the cubicle. Granted, I never really had one because my first workplace embrace the open concept. It was a bit messy, disruptive and can be stressful when I need to do focused work. But I got used to it. I’m not sure if I could have produced better quality work if I had a cubicle but most of my work requires lots of collaboration so it was just as well.

And now, I’ve been working from home a lot and for more than a year. I begin to rediscover the importance of the cubicle. Which essentially is the boundaries we want to set around our work. If we allow interruption, if we do work outside the cubicle, we need to know how far we want to let it go. As the society marches towards a mental health crisis, I wonder if it is important that we revisit the older model of salarymen (and women) who recognises that work is there to support us to live the life we aspire – instead of work being the life we aspire.

On this National Day, I pondered over my own ‘heritage’ and background as a Singaporean and how my aspirations for myself has been deeply rooted in one of our founding fathers, Dr Goh Keng Swee. I went to study Economics at the LSE because of him; and joined the public service of Singapore, focused on the economic sector because of him. In fact, during the most challenging times in my stint in government when I was helping to start the new office, Infrastructure Asia, I revisited his speeches and thought through the fundamentals of how we wanted Singapore to be positioned. I asked myself what are the economic factors and practical considerations he would be thinking about.

Today, I have moved out of the public sector, hoping to develop deeper expertise in Energy Transition and Sustainability, an area which I deem an important part of the future that our country and economy will be stepping into. I continue to ponder over topics of business, economic strategy and human capital development. This is after all, the cornerstone of Singapore’s development strategy. We always say that people are our only resource, given that we have hardly any natural resources nor sufficient land. It is the brain power, combined with the culture we create for this nation that will steer and determine our future.

And it continues to be so; which is why I continue my work of mentoring youths pro bono through the network that Advisory.sg has and also coaching young professionals.

Singapore may be small in terms of land space but when you actually do come to Singapore and experience the country, it will feel like anything but small. There are a lot of spaces built up and designed to be big – often it is through stacking, use of underground but also, there are tricks employed such as placement of elevators, escalators etc that requires you to walk a lot more in order to get to a location where the displacement from your original position isn’t that much. Likewise, sometimes public transport routes are convoluted so it takes much longer to get from one place to another than if you were to just take a cab, ride a bike or walk.

And maybe because of that, we seem to have a lot of signages. To point towards different directions, to make sure you know how to take the convoluted path to get to where you want to get to. And when the paths are diverted, it becomes frustrating quickly, especially when signages are wrong or obsolete as a result.

A recent trip to Changi Jewel was insanely frustrating for me. I walked towards Terminal 2 (according to the signages) from the MRT station only to be told that I had to go to Terminal 1/3 side in order to get to Jewel. Then, I was looking for a place where I could call a Grab to pick me up at. I was told to go to the taxi stand but the doors which are usually for Grab pick up are closed because of Covid measures. And I kept going between B1 and Level 2, figuring out where to board the Grab.

A signage is actually a design flaw because if things are well designed, it should be quite intuitive where to go for what and roughly how to go there. Relying on signages is a result of poor or lazy design. Yet when we do fall back on a sign, we need to be careful about the investment we make towards the sign – how permanent it is and how responsive it is to changes. We need to make signages serve the people rather than the development.