Category Archives: Life

‘Developmental goals’ in business has become a bit of a bad word; and it seem to imply that projects are not optimised to make commercial sense but more to ensure that people have better lives. There is this implicit zero-sum game mentality here that thinks that wealth is accumulated through diversion rather than creation. Yet the very business of development is about creation of wealth. From the economic point of view, value is unlocked through collaboration, realising of ideas, some bits of moving of factors around as well as making good use of knowledge that is already embedded within the system. Having longer time horizon and building up long-term trust (social capital) can help communities unlock the value.

I’ve seen a young farmer in Ghana going from a hired labour to owning a farm 5 times the size of his original employer. And this young farmer was investing into irrigation pumps and other productivity-improving equipment, that original employer farmer was just complaining about how the government has not done enough to improve the lives of people. Being able to take control of one’s fate and making the sacrifices for it is important; successive generations of being able to maintain that attitude helps accumulate wealth especially during times of macro-growth. Development usually takes place this way and deployment of first-world capital into third-world normally involves getting your hands dirty and being extremely operational but once you get started and figure out a model that works, you are way ahead of a lot others.

That is in part what happened to the many companies that first invested in Singapore; their investment often paid off many fold. The story of Singapore’s development, for most part was wealth creation and it has been done through agglomeration of those with knowledge and then putting our factors (geographical locations, people, proximal resources) into use through the know-how of global companies. Of course, over the years, as other locations have become more attractive in terms of cost competitiveness, quality of manpower and all, we have to re-strategize our development. But the basics have been cover already by now. For now, I believe Singapore is at the stage where we need to now think about how the fruits of development are distributed and should be distributed.

Came across Ken Robinson’s TED talk. And then read about some of his critics stand. Then also about his counterpoints. He’s a witty guy and hopefully would be able to help coordinate and rally people to steer mass education away from our woeful state now.

Singapore desperately needs this sort of rethinking. But that also shows how much we have influenced the rest of the world to admire something we have which turned out to be just merely playing well in the wrong game after all.

After finishing Nate Silver’s Signal & Noise (which was supposedly one of my readings for a module during my Master’s where I avoided reading the book cover to cover; but instead adopted the Master’s student ‘technique’ of reading only the necessary); I moved on to reading Nick Taleb’s Anti-fragile. On a side note, I didn’t realise until now that Nate was kind of put down by some NYU professors a while back on New Yorker. Nick is brilliant as usual but his lack of tolerance for people whom he perceive as stupid fully displays itself in his writing.

Perhaps because I was reading Nick’s writing, I thought the latest entry in Buttonwood’s Notebook seemed a little disappointing. Buttonwood imagines that without the presence of rigorously prepared forecast that are probably wrong, it will be filled with vague, baseless forecasts which cannot be disproved and thus believed – though they could be correct by sheer luck. Perhaps we should learn to dream of a different world where it is possible for us to shed the dependence on such false confidence, spend more of our efforts on fortifying ourselves against uncertainty than to prepare for scenarios that we came up with.

“Piang!” The glass cup broke on the table.

“The glass is broken.” says David.

“No, it’s not! See, I can still drink from it” says Natalie, picking up one of the bigger shards and then trying to sip some of the remaining white wine from it.

“You are not well, Nat. Let me call Mom.”

“I’m perfectly fine Dave. Don’t you dare tell Mom about this. Everyone will think the glass is broken. What will they say? Yes even if the glass is broken, why would you want to even hint at this to anyone else? What is with this airing of dirty laundry? I trust you so much; but everything you know, you want to share with others.”

“I can’t support you alone my dear. Sharing with others is how I can be emotionally resilient. Others knowing don’t make you weaker; it makes you stronger.”

Natalie cups her hands over her ears. The glass pieces glittered with the spotlight of the dinning table; and the white wine that spilled on the floor slowly evaporated.

I had intended to almost go into a social commentary of our modern girls and ladies being so obsessed with perfection, with that idealised image of themselves – that the brokenness inside is being kept hidden at practically any cost. And the problem it brings, at a social scale. It was supposed to be inspired by a TED talk by Reshma Saujani. But frankly, this is also a spiritual problem and maybe it is necessary to look at it more deeply from the perspective of my faith.

And the passage I’d point to is the John 4 passage on the Samaritan woman who responded to Jesus. She had some underlying desires unfulfilled which explains the serial relationships she had (to eventually have 5 husbands). She was a broken woman – yet she probably lived as if everything was alright and she was just going about her day.  The degree of amazement she experienced to even proclaim Jesus as prophet reflects the secrecy by which she has guarded this shameful secret. And in recognising Jesus as the Messiah, something within her must have convinced her that the Lord knows throughly of her brokenness and yet still loved her.

It is only through recognizing that there is beauty in this brokenness that is in all of us – that we relieve ourselves of the burden of having to live idealised, perfect images of ourselves. And seeing God’s love for us while being fully conscious of our sinful selves, our selfish desires and our pride have to impact on us in a way that allows us to open ourselves up. Can the view of ourselves by the society and others be ever above the view that our God have of us?

To go on the streets declare in John 4:29: “Come, see a man who told me all that I ever did. Can this be the Christ?”, was the woman’s response. It was bold and she broke through her brokenness. She acknowledged it but something in her cannot help but proclaim the good news of Christ’s coming. It would no doubt elicit questions about what is this ‘all that she ever did’. But I doubt she would be hiding anymore. The fountain of living water she has been promised, no one could take from her.

Why still drink from the broken glass cup? When one can drink from the fountain of living water?

Last month, South China Morning Post ran a somewhat scathing article about manufacturing in Singapore. I’m not too sure if Jake was deliberately turning off his economics knowledge and putting on a journalist hat when he made the statement:

Singapore is not really suited to manufacturing. It is too wealthy and has too little land, labour and manufacturing infrastructure.

In any case, for a long time, Ha Joon Chang has argued that the ‘decline’ of manufacturing is mostly just a statistical illusion of outsourcing – the shifting of direct hiring of supporting services to having these workers attached from service companies who are paid to keep up with the services. Not sure whether manufacturing and services can really be thought of as mutually exclusive.

Buttonwood’s recent blog post threw out a similar point when trying to scrutinize the ‘source’ of productivity and hence value-creation:

Manufacturing generates lots of spin-off service jobs, from the accountants who audit the firm’s books to the shopkeepers who sell the resultant goods or the restaurants that feed the factory workers. How many service jobs would disappear if the manufacturing sector went bust?

Singapore has had its time in manufacturing with most of the manufacturing capacity and output generated through attracting foreign manufacturers. These European and American firms provided the jobs, training, foreign direct investment; but Singapore also worked hard – through a combination of incentives, education policies that helped to churn out the necessary manpower and produce the effective labour market. Infrastructure investments that were necessary to ease the passage of goods out of Singapore to the targeted markets were made by the government. Returns on these investments took the form of trade surpluses, higher domestic incomes, which generated tax dollars. Combined with strong state capacity, an ecosystem was bootstrapped into being.

The SCMP column hit pretty hard on a few points:

1. Singapore’s cost base is increasingly unattractive to foreign manufacturers (Jake’s point about them being fair-weather friends)
2. Profits do get repatriated to investors’ home countries rather than reinvested into Singapore’s economy when times are bad
3. Overall investments made abroad by Singapore economy as a whole might not have been yielding attractive returns (Jake’s point about unwise investments) – note that this point is really harder to prove or substantiate

I have little doubt that manufacturing is incredibly important to our economy nevertheless; and while Singapore is supposedly ‘moving’ into service economy, the truth is that our domestic economy has always been service-oriented, providing services that helps to drive the (foreign-owned) manufacturing sector forward. The link between manufacturing and services is well displayed in Singapore where we are beginning to see cracks even in our service economy as manufacturing sets on a path of decline. The question then, is whether as capital and manufacturing capacity increasingly moves beyond our borders, we can continue to capture value generated by them through the services that we can offer abroad. And more importantly, how are we going to ensure that this value really pipes back to Singapore economy at the end of the day?

The next generation of our economy will most likely to show up in figures as being more service-oriented but we should actually rely on high-value manufacturing and also work increasingly with hardware that has to be integrated with software. This is an area where we can have more of an edge and more to offer since over the years, we have built a solid base of firms doing an excellent job in system integration; involving both hardware and software components, often injecting their own value add, across several industries. So can we manufacture? Perhaps in a different way from what is traditionally thought. But we really ought to shift from just incentivising localisation of manufacturing to investing into new niches that we want to get into and surpassing those foreign investors who have given us our first shot at having a manufacturing base.

There’s a huge presentation that is due in two weeks; you’ve done quite a bit of research, gathered the materials that you have to read in order to begin working on the presentation slides. Then there’s 15 unread emails in your mailbox. 5 of them are just ‘for info’ emails, the other 5 are from the bosses where you have to chip in on some discussions going on about changes in the workplace or some projects that your firm is running. They are not that urgent but requires a bit more thinking to reply. And another 5 are slightly more urgent – but your colleagues who are CC-ed can reply to some of those queries as well.

What do you do?

I’d expect you to reply the 5 urgent emails first; and in order to avoid starting work on the longer emails, you might even reply ‘thanks’ to some of the ‘for info’ emails. And then in-between writing the longer emails you might fire up Microsoft Powerpoint, start doing the cover slide and the outline slides without even bothering with reading any of the materials you have gathered, just crafting out the slides based on your preconceived ideas about the topic or the light readings you have already done. This slows you down and you ended the day finishing all of that 5 long emails, satisfied with yourself. The workday ends, you’ve accomplished writing about 2 briefs and 3 updates to your bosses. But meanwhile there was no progress on the presentation – oh well, it shall go to another day.

In fact, you didn’t even think about prioritizing your ‘to-dos’ but whimsically did whatever your mood tells you to. And that is the result.

Sounds familiar?

Since I started work, I find myself so happy with these small quick wins each day I really lose sight of the more strategic tasks on hand and the deep thinking I could have done each day with the mental capacity I have. Instead, my job seem to stretch more of my attention capacity making it difficult for me to focus and deliver on any single thing to the best of my abilities. We are so addicted to this quick wins it makes us addicted to our emails and checking inbox without actually spending time or attention on the more important things that might be in the pipeline.

I’m still working out how to deal with this – I would highly recommend the Podomoro Technique if you have sufficient control of how you spend your time at work each day. But if you are like me, with meetings randomly scattered throughout the week, try to identify pockets of time where you can do deep thinking and apply the technique. Having a workflow to properly deal with the various different types of emails that lands in your inbox is very important as well. This will be my next personal work project.

Interesting discussion sparked by Nominated MP Kuik recently. This is a space that I have been thinking about for a long time particularly have been through both British and American education myself. The confluence between innovation and culture was something I looked quite briefly into when I wrote my term paper on intellectual property rights and innovation. In Singapore, where we have been trying to promote productivity and innovation without cracking the mystery of productivity gains, this is something worth the while looking into.

My sense is that we need to spend a lot more time looking into the ‘soft stuff’ and mastering a completely new mindset of measuring or thinking about outcomes. The hard, ‘quantifiable’ measures have been exhausted – to no avail on the outcome. The whole debate on search for KPIs remains inconclusive. That we still spend time looking for these unicorns is an exercise of stubbornness that needlessly exhaust human capital.

Through many other aspects of life: CPF, HDB, the Education, we have created in Singapore a ‘gaming’ culture – it’s always about hitting the right buttons in the right sequence and sometimes with the right pressure. We pretend as if there are genuine ‘roadmaps to success’ that all can follow – no doubt an implicit assumption behind our practice of meritocracy. Naturally, when considering fluffy stuff like productivity and innovation, and then using carrots to try driving that would only produce more ‘gaming of the system’.

This puts the burden of thinking over what specific activities/actions contributes to genuine innovation on the government – something I doubt it is capable of. The creativity that we foster is just targeting the unlocking of incentives; the very same way we study the parts of the syllabus that is the most effective at delivering marks, or time our HDB flat application to maximize grants, etc. Until we truly learn to tap on the markets’ creativity, we are just being naive about the sticks & carrots and mis-applying it to softer stuff.

A farmer sows seeds into the field, plodding the field and tending to it. When the weather turns harsh against the seedlings, he built shelters for them.When some of the seeds failed to turn into seedlings, he noted the part of the field and tried to ensure conditions through his plots were consistent. He worked tirelessly and ensured he tended to the field – even the sections where the crops were not doing particularly well.

The seeds began to grow strong into leafy vegetables, ripe for harvest. He shared the harvest with those neighbouring farmers and got their feedback. He worked with other farmers to assess the quality of their produce and try to understand how the conditions affects the growth of his crops. He loved his field and his crops; but also those around him who was at work in their own fields. Over time, his knowledge of caring for crops grew and the other farmers happily allowed him to supervise their farms as well, and the plots under his purview and care grew as well.

Another farmer also sow seeds into the field and worked equally hard. He built shelters for the seedlings that were not faring well against the weather. But when they performed worse, he began to curse the land for not giving their yield. He became clumsy towards the saplings that didn’t seem to do very well. He noted the parts of the fields that ‘were bad’ and treated them badly – he would water them inconsistently and applied too little or too much fertilisers. Only the land that yielded good crops, he tended to them in accordance to what he knows about caring for the crops. The size of the plot he was attentive to shrank each year.

During harvest times, he gathered all the good crops and seeing they were few, guarded them in a barn that was well secured. He was often embarrassed about the bad harvests and thus consulted no one about it. The land plots that he stopped tending became weed infested; and the weeds started encroaching into the ‘good plots’. Enraged, he applied too much weedkillers on those lands and ended up poisoning them. The leachate from the soil washed into the good plots and destroyed even the good crops he was cultivating.

When other farmers tried to help, he pretended he didn’t hear their advice. He ignored them during farmer gatherings and focused on griping about his plight. The profound loss he felt in failing at his life work had overwhelmed him.

The good farmer came to offer his friendship and fellowship, desiring to work together to restore his land with him. They returned to his field and he stared at the mess with tears in his eyes. He wondered if the mess could ever be fixed; he was deeply embarrassed by his naivety and childishness. There was a deep urge to breakdown, and chase out the good farmer but he held back and remained cordial. He suspected the good farmer had simply come to mock him.

• Stay tuned for Part 2 of the tale –

These are some thoughts on a taxi ride recently. Meritocracy, competition, hardwork are cornerstones of our economic development in Singapore. But this are also the 3 attributes that are poorly defined and whose implied definitions will need to be reviewed through the stage of our economic development.

Early Stage
At an early stage of a post-war economy, where most people are pretty much starting off the same starting line, meritocracy in the plainest sense of the word is good. It builds upon common understanding of fairness, encourages hardwork. As long as the framework in place builds up trust through punitive punishments on cheating, a positive, self-reinforcing cycle develops. Competition is largely friendly, all for the sake of building each other up and getting everyone on to the growth path. Most forms of hardwork is by itself a virtue at this stage; there’s no sense of ‘overworking’ because there isn’t sufficient to go around more often than not – there is still quite some way to desirable levels of comfort. But there is joy in the process when trust is in place.

Growth
When the economy begins to grow, the shaping of culture and values becomes incredibly important. Meritocracy is constantly reviewed and refined by the leadership; and they have to be benign to those who might not necessarily possess the skills/merits that they value. And this valuation is often subjective – extremely dependent on the foresight and vision of the leaders. At this point, there will always be trade-offs, some ‘merits’ are more valued than others and the kind of growth attained depends on careful selection of what constitute merits. Competition then rallies around attaining this sort of merits. Hard work becomes less generic and certain kind of working hard becomes frown upon.

Those who gets slightly ahead may then look down on those working hard the wrong way or having the wrong kinds of ‘merit’. This is the point where a culture of charity has to be promotion, where people well-endowed need to be open to the idea of sharing and caring with their endowment. Meritocracy now cuts both ways; it can serve good but have potential to be abused as an excuse to withhold charity.

Sustaining Growth
As growth is sustained, the top leadership is convinced that the set of valued traits and ‘merits’ truly delivers value and thus constitute merit. They also take the appropriate action to cultivate the next generation to achieve the same sort of merit. These actions in the form of more sophisticated and enhanced policy measures elicit different sort of response from different groups. Those who respond poorly may risk marginalisation; the rest may coast along but an elite class gradually forms. The elite class tend to follow the ‘tried and tested’ model and abides by the key values laid down previously, supporting the superstructure that has helped them succeed in the first place.

This is the stage where sustained growth is secured through the social contract that was forged in the earlier stage of economic development. But it is also the window of opportunity to leverage on the immense wealth created to help those who may have been marginalised. The notion of meritocracy needs to be weakened with measures designed to support these people through promotion of things such as culture/music/literature that has more of a bearing on the long term economic development. People in society needs alternative ways to ‘succeed’ and to learn to ‘work hard’ in those areas that truly exploits their God-given talents. Merit needs to be radically and continuously redefined.

The other direction leaders could go is to ditch those who are marginalised, continue adding weight on to the existing notions of success and hard work. Then, finding that they may not have sufficient numbers in the local populace to continue their formula, start bringing in foreign population to attempt to ‘entrench’ the success. Competition steps up; now between new migrants and the local population – all driving forward the more traditional notions of ‘success’, ‘merit’, in name of Meritocracy.

Maturity
In longer term, as the economy truly hits maturity – that is, the soft and hard frameworks of the society are more or less settled, the (local) population profile highly aged – the potential for smooth and impactful change lessens. To start thinking about welfare, softening of the culture of meritocracy, and steering the culture of competition for good at this point will require the ability to disrupt and upset the superstructure.

I would think that we have come a really long way, and while we do try our best to stay on a more balanced path, natural human pride, tendency, and biasedness have driven us to favour the somewhat culturally unsustainable path – even if it may be economically sustainable.

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Perhaps only after I am done with this ideas that I noticed how Marxist in character they seem to be. Of course, I did offer prescription for conscious intervention rather than come to the conclusion that chaos is the only means out.