Category Archives: Life

Normalcy is overhyped. Wishing things were going ‘back to normal’ is basically hoping to return to comfort zone. But we all know if that really happens it means we declined or stagnated, it means the point of the changes were not really taken in, growth was forgone in search for comfort.

We talk about ‘new normal’ as if changes should be once off, and things settle back in an ‘equilibrium’. I think we are capable of handling dynamics way more than our economic equations would care to suggest. Some things I observe in the retail business activities out there at large is interesting:

• Takeaways are increasingly important for F&B businesses outside; but a lot of them are still sub-optimal in the way they prepare food to be packed and then sent out for delivery or for self-collection. This might be an area ripe for some disruption though the gains from it is uncertain.
• Self-service checkouts are increasingly usual and more sophisticated as the machines tend to be able to detect the entire shopping basket of goods when you put them into the sensor area. Packaging into shopping bags appears to still be a bottleneck. For non-food places, this can work nicely (people can chuck products into their bags or just store-sold totes/paper-bags) but for food outlets, new solutions might be needed.
• Dinning outlets might have to rethink their desire for quick turn-around of customers because of cost associated with wiped-down, etc. It might pay off for them to keep customer around longer, feed them with increasingly high margin foods (smaller portions, higher priced) – which is likely the drinks and the desserts (prepare a menu for after-mains). Better queue-management systems like from Haidilao that really gets customers vested in the queue would help.
• Given more work-from-home, there’s more on-demand food delivery but would food-subscription based business be more efficient? Especially when one already suffer from decision-fatigue while working.

None of these things were ‘normal’ years ago but now they kind of are. And they continue to be evolving and changing. So what does ‘back to normal’ really mean? Nothing.

When we approach our employment, we can take on a very pragmatic, transactional approach. And it is the same on the other side; the employers can be transactional. They can come up with a HR policy that is attractive, that provides a “return on recruitment” and with good “management of talents” that allows them to utilise the talents and generate the outcomes for the organisation.

Then the individuals in these system can maximise their career outcomes, their profiles, their remuneration while offloading as much of their individual risks and taking credit for outcomes as far as possible. There will be innovation for the sake of staking a claim, planting a flag for one’s profile rather than genuine client or industry interest. There will probably be some greenwashing to skew external perception. There will be a lot of gaming the system when people cannot tell apart commitments from actual outcomes.

The world could be different if HR was different; if we are collectively less transactional about employment. Where we make use of our surpluses- in terms of savings, inherited wealth and be able to say no to transactional employers. We can choose only those who invest in their people rather than milk them. We can refuse to play the game that people are setting up. We can maximise not our careers but our impact, and create a future we want for ourselves and future generation through our work.

Companies are going out there and committing to carbon-neutrality, net-zero and all that catchphases. I wonder if they really know what it entails or it’s a case of talking first and sorting things out later especially when the guy on top may not be holding on to his job by the “deadline”.

When Bill Gates tried to exit fossil fuel from his portfolio, he began to realise how hard it was. I think we only start recognising the difficulty or the ease of certain things when we start doing them. If we keep putting them off then we will never discover the true extent of the difficulty.

Take action now. Refine later. Instead of promising now and doing later.

Does a society exist for its members or do the members exist for the society? Think of “significance” as the extent or ways in which members feel that appreciation and sense of being part of the group that they make up. The demand for significance have increased.

Wait, no the way significance is manifested have changed. Maybe it was an arms race after all, but maybe, it does not have to be. Members don’t have to be pit against one another for significance, they all can have significance.

So many of our systems have been built by drawing upon the resources and members of a society in order to help govern and maintain the society. These systems reward significance to those who are helping to lead and control (or maybe those people reward significance to themselves); but either way, the people who are ‘managed’ are often mere digits. They are called to work their way up to gain significance, to learn the skills to be a top dog, to lead and manage.

What about a world where all the members of society are rewarded with more significance by the leaders and so the members can themselves attribute more significance to the leaders? Where we as constituents don’t just say people are leaders because they make the cut in competence but above all, they care for the people.

Man are social animals and so it is natural that with the pandemic out there, social media is going to have a greater hold of us than before. The unique feature about social media is that fringe group can find more strength in numbers because distance is no longer a barrier. And with some kind of perceived veil over our identities (as an online digital avatar rather than our real physical self), our voice may be a bit more expressive.

That can be used positively or negatively; we can decide to amplify positive or negative voices each time we share, and every time when we post. We may try to punch above our weight in terms of voice by exaggeration or taking a more extreme stance than we actually do just as a tactical way of counterbalancing the voices. But it is our choice whether to do so.

Now that we have that awareness of how we come across, we are better positioned to think about how we are being influence. Thinking through more clearly about our stance on different things helps us give pause to what we are reading and consuming and consider whether we are relying too much on similar viewpoints and others who are in agreement with us. Social media algorithms have their patterns of keeping us hooked to them because they show us things that agrees with us. But what about those opposing views that are available out there which social media is not showing you? Does the algorithm make them less valid?

We have to start regulating our influences and also our influence, especially online. And make your contribution a positive one.

Regular readers would have discovered the rescued stray dog my wife and I adopted passed on last week. I’ve had friends who suffered greater loss of loved ones over the past month. And of course, there’s been quite a lot of bloodshed in the US stock markets as well and there are others mourning different kind of loss.

Before I came to faith in Christ, I actually had more problems with love than suffering. Life seemed to contain lots of suffering – and it can seem arbitrary when we just survey them randomly. So what was strange was that one could love – because it seemed even more meaningless than suffering if there wasn’t a God, or if we just spontaneously emerged in the world without purpose or intent. Love was more a mystery to me.

But as I came to understood love through what was demonstrated by God in Christ, I begin to see perhaps suffering was more a challenge. Faithful Christians suffered, perhaps more than others. And through the bible, whether it was the old or new testament, people who believed in God suffered – often greatly. Yet if one pays close attention, it is often through suffering that we ourselves experience the greatest growth, and we develop more depth in suffering. I’m not saying we should encourage or create suffering but I think we have to learn to see how God’s goodness and His perfect will allows for suffering. And there is meaning in it – yes, even with the misery, the angst, the grief, the pain.

Having gone through all that, the question is, how do you respond? Do you turn bitter against or do you turn to God?

I’ve previously wrote about my thoughts in HR (here too) as well as some stories about my brushes with them. I had never thought about eradicating them entirely though – but Greg Jackson from Octopus Energy actually did that, for his 1,200-strong company. I thought that’s beyond remarkable, and once I read the story, it made perfect sense to me.

Greg’s point about how HR and IT departments can infantilise the employees and end up drowning creativity in bureaucracy and process is almost definitely true. It doesn’t mean it is easy to manage a company without these functions though. He has placed that onus on the manager, which can be quite challenging. Though in today’s highly automated world, there are a lot of the traditional HR functions that is actually already automated or outsourced.

Unfortunately, in a bureaucracy, even when things are not automated, it can seem as though the human touch has been long lost. An anecdote to this is a true story I’d like to retell: an employee who was usually allowed to make transport claims when going from his home to client meetings outside the office had to first drop off his ailing dog at a friend’s place so that the dog would not be left alone at home. However, because the friend’s place was a detour from the meeting location, he paid out of his own pocket for transport from his own home to the friend’s place, then got a cab to the client’s place. When he tried to make a transport claim from the friend’s place, his claim was rejected because the origin location of the trip wasn’t his home address. Even when he appealed to HR on the nature of the situation, the staff (read: humans) were not able to make an exception even when his line manager was supportive.

I think the value here is really in empowerment of the employees and getting the management to do the emotional labour of managing remuneration, incentives, training needed for employees rather than leave it to some specialised department. The way I think about the future of HR is that it is no longer an administrative function but that of empowerment and improving productivity through watching out for mental health. And if that is all incorporated into management, it might actually give management the needed boost and reason to continue existing.

When I was 15, I wanted to go on an exchange to China – I think it was in Ningbo or somewhere East China. It was an experience of a lifetime, or so I thought during that time. I had 3 other schoolmates selected for the programme and they were going ahead. I needed my parents’ approval to go ahead. It’d be only 3 weeks, and I’ll learn so much, make new friends and differentiate myself from my classmates who were all really elite students.

I brought up various benefits of going on the programme, but my parents countered citing safety issues. I talked about assurances from the school, and staying within the campus where the Chinese students stayed too. I mentioned how another of my schoolmate (who was my classmates when we were 12) would be going. They somehow found out and then told me he was okay because he had an uncle who lived in China. At that point I didn’t know but my parents already made the decision to exercise their power not to allow me to go for the exchange. To them, there was no point discussing further because they just wanted to close the case and move on.

Honestly, it wasn’t a nice feeling and I did feel rather bitter about it. I think it was because I felt I wasn’t engaged as an adult. They weren’t honest with me in sharing all that they had concerns with, which they were unable to mitigate and hence needed me to give up the opportunity. It was a lost opportunity for them to reinforce certain values they wanted to see in me before they were willing to let me have more autonomy or support my choices.

When I was reading up the recent coverage on the budget debates, especially the ones on the budget responsibility office (or whatever it is called, because I don’t get confused just because of different names) suggestion from the WP, it reminded me of the time my parents were shutting down the debate. There was no genuine response but just condescension and sarcasm from the cabinet. Perhaps the cabinet ministers felt like parents who knew what’s best and it was so obvious there was no need to waste time explaining further. But I think the opposition MPs this time did come across as the genuine schoolboy I was. He sincerely had a point that he believes in which he wants to make, and is giving the parent an opportunity to engage maturely.

It was a lost opportunity for the government of the day to demonstrate they continue to care and value fiscal prudence rather than just paying lip service to the fact our forefathers sacrificed to build the reserves we have. I think the cabinet ought to remember that the opposition MPs also represents the people (and in the case of the last election, I would say the Leader of the Opposition in Parliament is leading MPs representing a non-trivial 38.8% of the voters or whoever did not vote for the government of the day). And when answering to concerns of the people, the government can be more respectful and engage in more meaningful discussions.

My parents never faulted me for doing badly in school; whether I was top in class or last in class, they always said – as long as you’re doing your best. The problem was, I don’t usually know what my best really is. There isn’t really a proper benchmark. Competing with yourself, doing better and better in each of the next test is also not easy to achieve because the topics tested keeps on changing. Or if you’re gunning to be better in class ranking for each upcoming test, then it is also just a relative exercise.

Doing your best is really more of an attitude, that you have not spared any effort, you’ve not done things you regretted looking back. And looking back means not necessarily knowing the end result but then taking the same course of actions anyways. It’s another thing to say, having known the results, you regret doing such and such (that kind of regret is merely constructing an alternate universe and then attempting to live in it).

So what does it mean to have not done your best? Honestly, only you know. It could be pockets of skiving that you could have been bettering yourself. It could be actions you kept thinking you’d take and then you didn’t despite being fully capable of doing so and with no other obstacles in the way. But above all, it could be anything. The point is, what are you going to do from now? So what if you didn’t do your best just now? It no longer matters; what you do henceforth matters more.

In allowing me to put pressure on myself, and selecting my own success metrics, my parents liberated me but also gave me ownership of my own goals and targets. That is perhaps them doing their best at parenting.

Recently, I had a nice CNY dinner at Whole Earth that was specialised in ‘plant-based cooking’ which of course is there to appeal to those with ‘plant-based diets’. Really pretty good food and I’m really glad we got to go to the place – and it really did happen only because there were a couple of vegetarians within that group I was having dinner with. And this sort of diversity is great, it brings about new ideas, and causes us to think about things we take for granted. Being challenged even in terms of one’s identity is a useful way to grow.

Yet it can be difficult; when asked why we are on one diet rather than another; we might give a response that evangelises the diet, or one that tries to provide excuses for your personal idiosyncrasies. And when people test the boundaries of those diets (‘isn’t alcohol vegetarian?’ or ‘why do some vegetarians eat garlic and onions while you don’t?’), you might get uncomfortable about it. And you might not even have a ready defence or clear idea because you didn’t really think about it when you signed up to the diet. I think these are times when we can be more genuine, to say we’re still figuring these out, but that there are good reasons that you committed to the diet, and hence you’ll figure out why.

What would be an inappropriate response is to ask ‘why are you on that diet of yours then?’ as a response to the uneasiness or the discomfort of being challenged. Or to offer a more personal counter-challenge veiled in intellectualism: “what is the role of your diet in your life then?” Often we don’t even think much about our diets – the masses of us who just are brought up to eat certain things and in certain way! But with the changes that our global economy needs, we had better start questioning and thinking.