This week, I had to say goodbye to a large group of people with whom I’ve devoted quite a large part of my life to for some time. It was a happy moment though some might say it was sad to see me leave. What I really appreciated is being able to work with some progressive people to break through traditional barriers to get things done; or to suffer bureaucracy together with like-minded colleagues and try through the day anyways. People has always been central to the work I do; and people matters because they are ultimately the ones who makes things happen.
At the same time, I had quite a few reunions and gatherings with old friends whom I’ve walked alongside a long time ago, in school, projects, and other groupings. We recounted the old times, found out about each others’ recent endeavours as well as up-and-comings. It made me recognise that farewells were never for good when it comes to such friendships and connections. More importantly, it is your choice to keep in touch, to create the opportunities and possibilities – by joining them or starting your own adventures.
Unfortunately we cannot always take everyone with us when we embark on new adventures. And we will often be joined by new adventurers along the way. What is interesting however is that once we crossed paths, we are essentially walking together at some plane, whether we like it or not. Because we can always check in to find out how each other is walking. We can use that to compare status, or we can use that to cheer each other on and show one another new possibilities and new ways to walk.
Tim Ferriss, famous for the idea of the 4-Hour Work Week was working his life away selling a cognitive performance enhancing drug and wanted to start taking away some of the workload he had. With the customer service team, he was originally making decisions on unusual sales cases (urgent shipping, special customs forms, etc.) where there’s some costs involved.
He first allowed his frontline team to make decisions if it involved costs of $100 or less. And then he increased to $500 and $1000. And for each of the cases, the details will be documented, to be reviewed weekly, but then the frequency changed to monthly, and then quarterly, then almost never. One of the things he realised in that process is that “people’s IQs seem to double as soon as you give them responsibility and indicate that you trust them”. Why is that?
Ownership and respect. When you empower your staff like this, they are given bigger shoes to fill – just big enough to make them uncomfortable and help them grow each time. That ownership will give them space to grow and the respect from entrusting the work will fuel their growth. What we commonly think of as ground people acting ‘stupid’ is often just the result of fear, and the lack of respect from leaders. Our cognitive functions end up being devoted to too much ‘mind-reading’ (what does the boss want? what would he want us to do in this situation?) as opposed to actual problem-solving (what does this case require of me? how do I move things forward?). As a result, we can appear to be stupid or make really silly decisions.
So I updated my web page design and made it probably a bit more minimalistic. It now looks a tad bit more like Medium. And hopefully encourage me to write more articles there – the longer form ones. At least long by definition of a web article. This design might be a bit more mobile-friendly as well, which might suit the audience I’m now targeting: young millennial civil servants, professionals, entrepreneurs looking to create the future. The new theme I’m using is Seedlet; and it probably helps that it is updated to integrate the new WordPress block editor system.
I wanted to say something about how the world of digital products has changed the way we consume the latest product – in the sense that the product gets ‘updated’ across the board. For example, all WordPress.com users will have the block editor when it eventually gets rolled out. The problem is that we don’t technically have a choice even if we don’t really want it. This is both a good and bad thing.
For stuff we want, that solves our problems or improve our performance related to exactly we had bought that product for, it’s a plus. That way, you don’t have to increase your expenditure on it; and you’re probably just paying the same subscription fees. So the payment basically comes from you staying on the service, or getting more sticky with it.
For features or functions that we did not want, or prefer not to have, it’s like getting something we didn’t sign up for. Even if implicit in the consumption of the product at the beginning, we have already given the rights for the company/provider to force us to take on whatever they gives us later on. In some sense, digital product/service providers who are running a subscription business basically has a pretty strong local monopoly over you.
Just pointing that out. So that we can try to make sure they ‘don’t be evil’.
In 1950, the life expectancy of an average Singaporean (that is, someone living in Singapore, rather than having the nationality since the nation technically did not exist yet) was around 58 years. By 1965, it was at 67 years. So when my parents were born during that period, their parents, don’t expect to be able to grow old enough to care for all their grandchildren. Most of them would expect to retire around 55, or 60, and then spend less than 10 years in retirement before passing on. Should they die younger at around 50s, their children pretty much should be able to take care of themselves.
Today, the figure stands at 84 years. So not only can you have kids later. You can parent your kids for longer. Instead of training them for independence, you train them to hit the society’s metrics for success and support them with all the resources you have. Often, you use them as your further trophies in life and psychologically co-mingle their success with your own. This psychological dependence on the child’s relative performance vis-a-vis their peers reinforce their dependence on you. After all, to win your affection requires them to do better at violin classes and who else is going to drive them to the classes?
I wonder if anyone would study the cultural impact of having most of our lives lived with surviving parents. This means that the prevailing ideas, thought patterns of our parents actually might have greater influence on us than previous generations. The impact of the boomers’ mentality and mindset persists longer than most other generations, sustaining the franchises of Star Wars, Lord of the Rings. Yet our generation also face continued fast pace of change; and so we face greater tension than previous generations in terms of trying to manage the force of the resistance to change, and the onslaught of it.
So the irony is that while people are claiming that children no longer have much childhood – or that their childhood ended prematurely, I’d argue that childhoods are getting longer, we are creating more childlike adults who have not really gained independence, and parenthoods are getting longer than what is good for the children.
This article is being read and recorded for readers here to increase accessibility of my writings and also to prepare myself to start a podcast that is currently in the works. Note that the written article is not an exact transcript to the reading.
I’ve been posting on my Instagram account daily inspirational quotes. So I decided to challenge myself to blog daily as well. This would mean that my posts might no longer be as long, and I’d be focused on sharing interesting short snippets of ideas. Longer entries might end up going on to my Medium page before eventually being made available free on my blog.
A couple of months back I got slapped with a hefty “fine” from Citibank for paying my minuscule bill late. I did a little rant here, but tried to address some of the unsustainable issues underlying the business model. I subsequently wrote in to try and cancel the card, citing the episode as my key motivation and also highlighting that the company needs to learn to change their culture and focus on serving the customer rather than beating the competition.
The longer I work and live in the world of business, the more I find it absurd that we accept companies doing things to make a profit rather than the serve their customers. After all, shouldn’t profit be the by-product of a job well done?
In December 2020, just before the extraordinary year ended, I got slapped another charge – this time from my telco, M1. I overshot my mobile data quota by 500MB and was charged $12. I read on the bill in fine print that additional data above my plan are chargeable at $10 for 10GB. So I called them up and asked them how they calculated the surcharges on my bill. They said, the extra usage cost is $12/GB (or part-thereof) when I do not go into my app and purchase the 10GB bundle. So even though they could just charge me $10 for 10GB on my bill, they introduced that additional step so that if I don’t monitor my usage, they could charge me at $12/GB.
I told the call center operator to submit my feedback that it doesn’t make sense to try and profit from the customers’ mistakes and what they designed seemed like a deliberate attempt to trip me up. I would not dispute the charges but this experience certainly left a sour taste for me.
So businesses, think again. If serving your bottom line is number one, then you truly deserve to be bottom.
This article is being read and recorded for readers here to increase accessibility of my writings and also to prepare myself to start a podcast that is currently in the works. Note that the written article is not an exact transcript to the reading.
One of the things I’m going to focus on personally is working for the right rewards. And for me, it’s incredibly encouraging when my blog posts or articles generates discussions and new ideas. To me, that is making a difference in the thought process and growth of people around me and even those readers distant from me.
2021 represents a very interesting new step from me as I stepped out of my comfort zone even more to be more conscious about the most critical question facing millennials living in a world that the boomers have built: “Do I stand and watch the show saying ‘this is not my idea’, or do I go out there and create the future that I want to see?” I could play the game that the boomers created and continue perpetuating a culture I find myself in – it would be immensely rewarding in the traditional sense – there is proven sources of prestige, of some financial rewards, and pat on the back by those well-established within the system. But I could also start changing the culture, changing the game, and work for the reward of a better future for my generation when we are older, for a better world that I would want my kids to live in (if I ever have kids).
We need to start getting people to work for the right rewards. Often we care too much about just the outcome and we think that it doesn’t matter as long as we structure the sticks and carrots to nudge those people to the right behaviours. Over time, we might find diminishing marginal returns. And over time, we might be damaging the culture. Children who get paid reading loses the chance to learn to read for the pleasure and love of reading. Using monetary or other rewards for steps recorded in trackers encourage gaming of the system. Let’s stop using temporary fixes. Let’s try to create a culture that allows us to progress as a society, and not to encourage gaming of the system, or cause people to turn against one another – all for the wrong rewards.
So for over one and a half month, I’ve been doing a lot of posting on my Instagram page (@kevlowco – please follow if you have not yet done so) as I committed to do so daily in order to practice the discipline and consistency of posting relevant, useful, inspirational materials. It’s been a very interesting experience because there’s just a continuous stream of ideas that comes along as I plan for the materials to put up.
Quite frankly, the topics I hope to share about keeps on coming because there’s just so much ideas surrounding thinking about the purpose we want to imbue in our work, and the overall ideas surrounding motivation, mindsets, and handling of difficult situations or challenges. The curation of quotes however, was more of a challenge as I often have to check the original author/speaker’s background and also appreciate better the context.
That is especially important because of how much I came to learn of the manner by which Robert Frost’ poem have been misinterpreted or misconstrued. There are many articles online about it covering the entire poem but I’ll just go on to talk about the last stanza:
I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Tworoads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one that dared me to try, And that has made all the difference.
Robert Frost in The Road Not Taken
The common quote from the poem that talks about taking the road less traveled would be the last 3 lines in the stanza. But the truth is that nowhere in the poem did the road he ‘dared to try’ was one that was less taken (in fact in earlier stanzas he was rather ambiguous if at all that the conditions of the two roads was too much different, nor did he even suggest that they pointed to different destinations). The key context that perhaps was missed in people using the quote is the point that he said ‘I shall be telling this with a sigh / Somewhere ages and ages hence‘. He is imagining himself in the future, making this point with a sigh which could imply he has either regretted it or that he has suffered or wearied much through it. But he hasn’t lived through it yet – it could still be the well-worn road that was way too boring!
Either case, context is important and this message from Robert Frost is also a nuanced and subtle one that I would like to emphasize pertaining to the ‘wisdom of the world’. At the end of the day, it is up to us to write our own story and to interpret the outcomes of our actions – what intents they had been meant to serve in the first place and how does it look from the other end of the tunnel. Thanks for staying with my musing thus far. If there’s a message I want to leave with you, it would be for you to follow me on Instagram. Thank you!
This is going to first sound like a rant. But I need you to stay with me and read through this patiently. I’m in the process of getting over the fact that Citibank charged me over $100 worth in late fees and interest charges on a credit card bill of about $260. They declined my fee waiver request and when I called in to appeal, it was declined again.
My latest attempt to appeal further through the secure mail system once again resulted in my request being declined. While you may think I’m an angsty customer just looking to air this in public to shame the bank, I am more concerned that you, as a current or prospective customer, knows about the vicious cycle that banks and credit card companies are now getting themselves into.
Sign-up bonuses and customer acquisition costs
Just a quick look a Milelion’s credit card page shows you the active sign-up bonuses for ‘new-to-bank’ customers which have been getting more and more generous since 2-3 years ago. When I first got my credit cards more than 5 years ago, the competition for customer acquisition was just getting heated up and the best prizes they were giving out were just American Tourister luggages. Then came the one-off cashbacks on minimum spend within months of activating the credit card, grab vouchers thrown in on some. And then it grew bigger, freebies that became more costly: Apple Airpods, Nespresso machines, and even Airpod Pros. Often, these sign-up bonuses don’t even have minimum spend requirements. Just sign up by a certain date.
Assuming that with all the marketing efforts and tie-ups with various web platforms, the cost of customer acquisition comes down to $300 per customer. Let’s suppose further that the customers then goes on to spend about $500 a month for that year. Assuming a 2% fee charged to merchants, the credit card company earns only $120 over that entire year from you gross, not withstanding the other infrastructure costs and the administrative cost of billing you, etc. Even if you spend an average of $1000 a month, that is only $240, not enough to cover the cost of acquiring you as customer especially when first year annual fees are usually waived to lure you in (in any case, we all absolutely hate credit card annual fees).
Problem of having to cover acquisition costs
You can see how that is a problem, the credit card companies need to cover their cost, but also they are forced to acquire you in order to maintain their market share so that they can tell merchants they have a certain number of customer base and convince merchants to continue accepting credit cards. There are some network effect that helps maintain some degree of stickiness but competition from other e-payment methods is intense and being incumbents, the credit card companies have the most to lose from the new entrants.
So they have to recover more of their costs from you. How do they do that? They can hope you pay only the minimum payment and incur interest charges on the balance. The interest rates are as high as 28% on some bank credit cards so they can earn quite a fair amount from here if customers willingly borrow at such rip-off rates. Unfortunately, most customers are not so clueless and also have access to cheaper credit so credit card credit is not viable as a form of consumer credit for most people. Only those really out of options resort to “borrowing” on the credit card. Now, if majority of the credit card customers would pay their bills in full anyways, then how else can the companies generate more income to cover the costs?
Late fees. That’s a big way of generating income to cover cost. Basically be a payment punctuality Nazi and zap every single customer with late payment charge as long as they are just even hours late. Now you’ve got a huge pool of customers who are beholden to you and have to pay you the late fees. Then you can look at your customer acquisition cost and ask yourself, how much late fees do I need to collect in order to cover my costs? So having decided how much you need to “keep”, you can then feign magnanimity by allowing for fee waivers to those who call in to request. Of course, the biggest spenders whose acquisition fees have been more than covered by the merchant fees, they’ll be happy to waive the late fees and interest charges. The rest to missed their payments, but are low-spenders like me, become victims who will have to fork out to pay for and shoulder the customer acquisition costs.
This creates perverse scenarios like this where I now owe the credit card company $366 – where $106 consists of late fees and interest charges and only $260 was my actual spending. In a climate like this with Covid-19 still wrecking havoc in the economy, the banks are hardly doing their part.
So you, prospective customers, think twice before being drawn to that Airpods Pro. And the current customers who have got your Airpods Pro; you might end up having to pay for it anyways!
A couple of days back whilst at friend’s (yet another teacher) place, I got asked, ‘If you were a parent, how would you like the education system to be?’ For those who know me for years, you’d think I’m an educator at heart, and also cut out to be a teacher. But more often than once, I have declared that I will never teach in the mainstream education system because there are too many things about it that I’m against. People would often tell me I should go and change it; but trust me, you don’t want to get me started. Yet with this license to day-dream, I gratefully seized it.
The first warning before I get started is that I think about systems as a collective whole so I don’t see our education system as separate from our economy, our culture and our identity. All of them work together and reinforce each other. This is why I often try to make a case for the idea that culture and education could be the cause of our productivity problems. And that brings me to the second warning that the system of my dreams will probably be ‘far-fetched’ in that what we’ve been doing in our schools is nowhere close to it. But if we can agree on a future society we are striving towards, then we can collectively make that a representation of our vision to strive toward.
Anyways during that short time I had with my friends, I shared only 3 main points which I’m going to pen here for the record. There are many more dimensions that I envision and I welcome Singaporeans from all walks of life to augment this vision and to build it out in greater details and to tweak it more. If you’re an official in the education system today, let me first encourage you not to think about the practical constraints or just dismiss these as ‘idealistic’ but to consider the difference any of these would make on to the students, on the future economy and society you’re trying to shape. Let the end goal rather than immediate challenges fill your mind and vision; because, as Watt Emerson once said:
What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Abolish cohort-based education (or teach for mastery, not grades)
I start with the most radical one to weed out those readers who have no commitment towards discarding flawed premises. I think cohort-based system is helpful because it is where we find a little more of our social bearings, and perhaps from a cost and administrative point of view, using a cohort is just ‘easier’. But I call for it to be abolished because we should not be forced to promote students who are poorly prepared for the next level of education. In fact, a single student should be allowed to progress for subjects he/she is strong for and held back on subjects that he/she have not gain certain benchmark of mastery. Salman Khan, the founder of Khan Academy once described very well what is wrong with having that kind of system that focuses on tests one year after another rather than focusing on mastery.
Now of course, the focus is actually not on cohort but once we focus on getting students to gain mastery, then we have to break up the idea of a cohort and to stop comparing across students but against the benchmark of the standards they have to get to. If you think about it, the current system promotes a student scoring 51% together with one scoring 91% on Maths exams to the next grade and then teaching them as though they are no different, only to achieve the same gap end of the year, and the weaker student is discouraged. Compounding this over a period of over 10 years, a society that prizes head above hands or heart, and you seeding mental and emotional health problems of an entire group in the society.
It’s been 5 years since Salman delivered that short speech and it’s been viewed millions of times. And the fact is that we already have the tools and technology to achieve this sort of system. But because of sunk cost fallacy and the unwillingness to disrupt the current education infrastructure, we seem only capable of making incremental changes which will not be able to get us anywhere close.
Focus on core skills before content
At younger ages (up to 10), schools and teachers should be really focused on helping students acquire language, numeracy skills, and give them chance to explore these skills in various different contexts of life. So language needs to be more than just speech and words, but getting them to practice persuasion, comforting those in need, expressing themselves, displaying empathy and so on. Numeracy needs to be expressed in monetary transactions (such as purchasing decisions at a school canteen or bookstore), as well as in the calculation of reward points, even quiz scores or even getting them to form up into the right groups of players for different sports.
Of course, it is an easy win to teach science to these kids and then when they express superficial understanding of deep concepts, we are wow-ed and misled into thinking they already got their fundamentals sorted out. This is because by the time we (during our time) learnt those scientific knowledge ourselves, we were already more advanced in our mastery of other fundamentals. The truth is that they’d have none of the core skills, nor the genuine understanding to take them to the next level in life. Better to forgo content which they can acquire later by themselves than to give them an illusion of being ‘intelligent’, even risking them having oversized egos.
Our younger brains are better suited to pick up skills and learn new ways to learn, rather than to be somehow acquiring dense amount of information and trivia. Skills for knowledge acquisition is more important than knowledge acquisition itself at this stage.
Involving the entire society in education
Currently, parents are not taking enough ownership of their children’s education; more often than not, they can practically outsource all of education to schools. This was never the intention and parents who are reading this, should recognise their role in partnership with schools and teachers to bring up their children. Not only that, the entire society is in a partnership to bring up the next generation. The fact that our young is largely educated in a taxpayer-supported system is part of that; but more than that, companies, industries should start playing a role in terms of adopting schools and being connected with them in terms of sharing with students about the company, about the role they play in the market, and the economy, as well as to provide students with some experience with work, or to catch more of a glimpse of the ‘grown-up world’.
Parents will need to work with schools especially when students are younger; by moving focus away on content, the load on parents trying to understand what is covered in school shifts towards appreciating the intentions of what the students are being taught, hence allowing them to easily try and reinforce it at home. By shifting content-heaviness towards a point when the student is more mature, they can handle the learning independently and be less reliant on adult guidance for content.
I know there’s already a lot of pressure on our educators and I’m going as far as to try and suggest that they should be responsible to help reshape the economy of the future. Perhaps the government really needs to divert some of the quick-fix kind of approach such as providing business incentives and grants towards supporting an education system that really contributes to the economy. It is no use incentivising businesses to hire Singaporeans if the education system is unable to prepare a labour force deserving of those jobs. Of course, the system cannot predict what specific sectors will be in vogue or the skills demanded. But as you can see from my vision, the skills I speak of is not programming, or STEM, or arts. There are foundational matters like core skills in language (communications), emotional intelligence (empathy), numeracy and above all, knowledge acquisition, that the education system must build up within students – these will prepare them for just about any market they graduate into.
And if job creation is really important, why not encourage entrepreneurship right from schools through a focus on asking the right questions rather than finding the right answers? During the earlier days of our nation building, we really needed our workforce to be plugged into the industries and so we just basically ‘trained’ rather than ‘educated’. Whilst we now have the ‘luxury’ to get away from this ‘training’ kind of approach, we ought to.
In today’s work life, too much thought goes into how to do the work rather than the culture and enabling environment that surrounds the work. There are countless anecdotes about people at their deathbed would not wish they had more days to work; or stories of the employee who passed away and the company was just busy trying to find someone to replace him/her, whilst complaining about the hassle and delays caused by his/her death. All of these tries to discourage people from pouring out way too much of themselves into work even as our society as a whole is actually increasingly consumed by work.
What I don’t understand is that for almost all of our work in life, there are ways of making it more fun, conducive to put effort into, and to stress us positively. Yet we don’t do that, nor explore ways of doing that. Good culture that enables rather than disable is a luxury, people say. And they see it being at odds with generating value and profit, as though precious resources are either committed to employee well-being or shareholder returns. This is just lack of imagination and the inability to think dynamically and across time.
For some reason, a 2015 article from INSEAD appeared on 2 separate of my social media platform news feed, shared by different people and with different commentary. It was about the fall of Nokia; and yet as I was reading through it, I am struck by how applicable those lessons are today. And how important it is that we invest into reworking our culture.
I shuddered at several parts of the article that describes behaviours no different from what I’ve observed in large, important institutions and business organisations that I’ve had experience with. Allow me to quote 3 portions of the article that really stood out for me:
Although they realised that Nokia needed a better operating system for its phones to match Apple’s iOS, they knew it would take several years to develop, but were afraid to publicly acknowledge the inferiority of Symbian, their operating system at the time, for fear of appearing defeatist to external investors, suppliers, and customers and thus losing them quickly. “It takes years to make a new operating system. That’s why we had to keep the faith with Symbian,” said one top manager. Nobody wanted to be the bearer of bad news.
Hiding bad news is a result of the lack of an open communicative culture resulting from poor responses to ‘bad news’. It will be reinforced by a sense of helplessness about the communication; either by the belief that management will not believe it, or will not respond to it. Such erosion of trust does not bode well.
Fearing the reactions of top managers, middle managers remained silent or provided optimistic, filtered information. One middle manager told us “the information did not flow upwards. Top management was directly lied to…I remember examples when you had a chart and the supervisor told you to move the data points to the right [to give a better impression]. Then your supervisor went to present it to the higher-level executives.
Encouraging miscommunication, whether intentional or not, will only lead to organisational decline. This is especially if the flow of information about reality or truth is obscured, and top management makes decision on the basis of such flawed or misconstrued information. This is the issue when there’s too much emotion caught up in reporting. Reporting should ideally be unemotional, clinical and rational.
[T]op managers also applied pressure for faster performance in personnel selection. They later admitted to us that they favoured new blood who displayed a “can do” attitude.
This led middle managers to over-promise and under-deliver. One middle manager told us that “you can get resources by promising something earlier, or promising a lot. It’s sales work.” This was made worse by the lack of technical competence among top managers, which influenced how they could assess technological limitations during goal setting.
Misalignment of incentives that drives unhelpful behaviours throughout the organisation. So to that extent, being able to create a culture that implicitly rewards honest behaviours through praise and recognition; punishing or frowning upon over-promising, and inaccurate reporting, sows the seeds for success of an organisation. There will naturally be a tension between behaviours which promotes the interest of the organisation and the need to ‘perform’ at an individual level. The ability of the organisation culture to protect behaviours that promotes the sustainability and long-term interest of the organisation is so vitally important.
Yet in most of today’s organisation, we have not invested sufficient thought into the culture; focusing instead to utilise our resources to drive work performance, measured mostly by short-term metrics. A good place to start is really by reworking the prevailing narrative, especially rewiring the mindset obsessed with linear, unidimensional growth. Caring for the mental health and well-being of employees at the level of supporting them to deconflict those tensions mentioned above will go a long way.
