Category Archives: Life

I have been blessed by great teachers and parents who have helped to inculcate a growth mindset. One that I didn’t know I have until I started meeting people and getting to know several friends deeply. And more drastically, I realised that some of my cousins or even sibling do not always share that same sort of mindset. That this can be so radically different, I didn’t think much of until I chanced upon Bill’s article on Inc.

It is scary when I realise how those with fix mindset think of effort as a bad thing! Though I can appreciate or empathise with those who might think of failure as bad. Somehow, I appreciate the importance of viewing challenges as problems and I always thought these things came by chance! Nevertheless, there are still problem-solving types who flinch at the prospect of failure. These things build on each other; one who believes in nature more than nurture is forced to think that when they are bad at something they will not be able to change that. They would also thing that the need for more effort or tediousness of things is a signal to give up rather than try harder. This is a logical implication of believing that abilities and ‘talents’ are innate and not developed.

Through the article, I was reminded by how my Dad often exclaimed that I was good at such and such because I worked hard whilst he praised my sister saying that she is actually really much smarter than me. This actually got into me as a key belief. I noted that while I may never be able to be ‘genuinely smarter’ than my sister, I could still achieve more and do more. At the end of the day, the label for our identity falls away and the focus of our lives should be on what we actually do – not even what we achieve but simply, what we do.

In Chapter 16 of Rolf Dobelli’s ‘The Art of Thinking Clearly’, he talks about the emergence of ‘Chauffeur Knowledge’ – a term Charlie Munger used to differentiate it from ‘Real Knowledge’. Chauffeur knowledge is the sort of knowledge you need to put up a show: it may be to feign expertise, to engage in a conversation meant to impress or merely to deliver information to targeted audience. For example, the news anchor who goes on TV to deliver the news may not exactly know fully what he or she is saying in terms of the full implications of the news nor the exact circumstances leading up to the news. Or the taxi-driver who gives his assessment of the global economic situation based on anecdotal evidence from his experiences driving around New York.

Yet there is increasingly more insidious types whose chauffeur knowledge is difficult to tell apart from real knowledge. We want people with real knowledge about the economy, about policy implications, with a real sense of the politics out there to lead the country – not someone who pieces together random pieces of information out there on Fox News or CNN to formulate views on politics or economy. We need people with business acumen for a large organisation to be the CEO – not merely someone who can show and tell well in front of shareholders. The show and tell skills are useful but only to a certain extent; this phenomena of the rise of a chauffeur knowledge economy is a result of incentive super-response tendency (Chapter 18 of Dobelli’s book) and also Outcome Bias (Chapter 20, ibid).

Incentive super-response tendency relates to people behaving hyper-rationally to incentives such that the behaviours are no longer in line with the original intent of the incentives. Managing such consequences is harder than it seems and it can generate a lot of unintended consequences. For example, the original intention of rewarding comrades bringing in dead rats in China during the times of rat infestation was distorted when people started breeding rats to kill in order to earn the reward. Likewise when CEOs are rewarded based on quarterly earnings results, they start being short-term and divest of strategic assets which may be making short-term losses. Worst still, such salaryman CEOs may even relinquish core capabilities that helps enhance returns on asset in favour of building up a larger base of income-generating asset base, without realising that those core capabilities are necessary to maintain and ensure returns on the asset.

It is not always malicious so to speak; and honestly, employees do not have perfect foresight on how their action impact on the organisation in long run. They could be counting on securing the short term benefits for the organisation since the longer term ‘strategic benefits’ may be uncertain. Or more significantly, they would not materialise as quickly nor in time for them to reap the benefits.

The combination of this two ills plaguing the modern world are making our corporate world, public service, non-profit and all kinds of organisations ripe for disruption. What new management innovations would rise up to challenge this state of affairs? Something to ponder over.

Solar Power have come a long way. Now that solar power tariffs have been bidded so low they are matching the cost of a natural gas plant, it is believed they are finally delivering real value. With feed-in tariffs that are above US$0.05/kWh, governments are losing money for every kWh of power generated by solar – or put it another way around, taxpayers or consumers are paying extra for electron movements that are no different from that generate via other means. Assuming that carbon trading and carbon taxes have been applied, solar power was, until recently, destroying value.

Yet solar panels have finally reached such a cost that electricity tariffs from solar power could match that of more conventional thermal power plants; so despite the ‘losses’ from the past, solar PV technology has finally reached the goalpost we had all intended for. Solar power however, provides a huge challenge for financing as its cashflows presents an interesting profile with negligible operational costs implying that the bulk of the costs in the lifecycle of the plant is upfront. This makes it extremely sensitive to estimated performance through its lifecycle, the lifespan of the panels as well as the cost of capital. I was surprised however, that this single kind of infrastructure project attracted so much private capital as highlighted by the McKinsey article.

The high feed-in tariffs and good returns must have played a part but investors ought to realise that the sustainability of high tariffs needs to be considered. With high tariffs being committed for technologies not proven and improving radically, there’s a real danger of governments failing to honour their tariff promises, thus compromising the returns expected of the older projects. Therefore, high returns ought to be viewed with some measure of skepticism in terms of the expected ‘actual returns’. With much lower solar panel costs and such competitive tariff bids coming up especially in the Middle East (partly due to good solar irradiance which means any solar panels deployed there are used more intensively), governments are tempted to simply renegotiate contracts – or just ignore them eventually.

So the fact that we’ve hit US$0.03/kWh for solar is great news – and the true value is finally beginning to be accrued by those who have fought long and hard to get solar panels up and doing good for the world and for man.

Lunchtime.

My boss got slightly philosophical for a bit and lamented that infrastructure developments follow not the pace of the fundamental demand for infrastructure but simply the fiscal plans of government. Traditionally, infrastructure belongs solely to the domain of the government. The vast amount of capital needed was typically only mobilised by governments in the days when economies were much more domestic and cross-border capital and investments were heavily channeled towards industrial output and real estate assets rather than infrastructure.

In fact, through the recent downturns, all the talks about infrastructure seem not to stem from the need for infrastructure to catch up with growth and development but for fiscal investments into infrastructure as a means of generating growth. Even Knowledge@Wharton wrote any article co-opting this viewpoint. Yet for most part, this is largely a kind of illusionary financial play – actual growth can only really be generated out of making fundamental, strategic investments that will support the growth of those areas that will boom when the demand uptick arrives.

Assuming this, is a downturn still a good timing for governments to do infrastructure or to invest in infrastructure? It critically depends on financing costs; and in a climate where governments have flushed the entire world with liquidity and max-ed out their monetary policies, financing costs have been artificially reduced for a while. Nevertheless, the fundamentals will still have to be matched: infrastructure projects that taps on cheap financing will ultimately need to have the proper guarantees and safeguards to the lenders in order to match the kind of returns profile of the appropriate lenders/investors.

We get burnt out not so much by sheer hard work or exhaustion. Most people who work and work and eventually gives way, either through Karoshi (death from exhaustion) or committing suicide; not so much because they are being made to do more and more. Too often, it is because work life involves many things that one may not be comfortable with. And I thought to highlight a few matters that I find really burns people out.

1. Misrepresentation: Whether it is figures or qualitative facts, work in modern world often involves some form of distortion of truth (which is not necessarily outright lying) either to fit a narrative or make a case. This simply doesn’t sit well with our natural inclination towards truth and in long run, one starts doubting not only the information they receive but also themselves.
2. Buying into worldly motivations: Frankly, while we know that we are not genuinely motivated by colleagues’ recognition or money, but these are rewards of life that seem a lot more within grasp than the elusive feelings of security, affirmation from friends/family. So we work for the easier fulfilment and realise only later they do not fulfill.
3. Lack of completeness: The breakdown of work into bits and pieces that increases productivity makes all crafts just a series of tasks handed out to different stages of work. And as a result, most of us are only involve in part of the production. As long as we cannot see how our exact inputs feed into the eventual output, we find a lack of completeness in our work. Worst, because we are not a real assembly line, there’s less clear demarcation of when the work leaves our hands. So most ‘work’ just drifts off after we touch it a little. Craftsmanship is lost, and so is the pride along with it.

So I was really grateful for this article on grace-paced living. Frankly, I haven’t really been appropriating the grace that is extended to us from God – especially not so for the workplace. And perhaps I should really start.

‘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?