Category Archives: Life

Had the chance for a break back ‘home’ to UK and spent some time thinking about the economy back home in Singapore – the apparent lack of ‘growth drivers’, the preliminary attempts to ride on waves in the world made by China and the current short term lifting done by the US economy for our tiny island-state one. We are in the midst of shifting steady states or rather the movement from one potential steady state to another. There are some thoughts i had about our economy, about the economic system, where we are and some of the key things we need to set our sights on for the next couple of decaes – where we might have done right and where we may have gone quite wrong.

Current Status 

In short run, our economy is still well-positioned to capture growth coming in from established institutions based on prevailing ‘world order’ but as the transition starts taking more form, we are left wondering if we should have thought about transformation earlier. The truth is we did but no one really had answers yet. There is an anxious scramble to get into ‘position’ but we really need to consider more deeply what this positioning is about and how we need to make use of the earlier generation’s thought-followership success and move towards genuine thought-leadership in economic development.

External vs Internal Positioning

There are 2 dimensions one could think about businesses, economies, or just plain economic entities – one is external positioning, and the other is internal organisation. External positioning is important because the place you are at would determine the universal set of opportunities available for grabs. Whether those opportunities can be well-exploited will depending on your internal organisation. There are lots of economic entities that have great internal orgnisation and I’m thinking about much of the Western European economies. But they might not be in a good external position. Perhaps it’s because of the demographics of the country, the circumstances, the industrial mix. But all these are ‘external’ to the extent they can be seen. When I refer to ‘internal organisation’, I’m thinking about the rules, the institution created in the economy. And institutions have the tendcy to be multi-equilibria systems. Which is to say that you can end up being very stable in a not-so-good institutional set-up and have absolutely no impetus or path of low-resistance towards the better, known institutional artrangement. So this is actually much harder to get right than external positioning.

Consider the Chinese businessmen who built his initial empire up through opportunistic entry into basic cornerstone sectors at the points when China moved towards a market economy. His external positioning is excellent and he might be able to milk it for a while but if he does not take that opportunity to clean up matters relating to corporate governance, improve internal structures and framework that allows the organisation to continue humming without his personal relationships or connections then the viability of the business empire beyond his time is in question and so is the economy of the village he resides in. Singapore can be detroit during an auto-boom, but the wealth generated must be used to buffer and strengthen its internal structures such that it relies on more than just the auto-boom for growth. In the earlier stages of growth, the economy can rely on the government to build frameworks and structures to help the economy ‘lean’ on something like an auto-boom. But in the long run, the government will have to hand this back to the market economy to make a choice on which sector to develop and grow. In other words, the extrnal positioning, the easier part of the job needs to be handed over. The government then must launch itself to deal with the issues of internal organisation relentlessly.

The Right Stuff

That is where our recent attention towards productivity and manpower development becomes so important and right. We definitely need to raise productivity. This is can only be done through a mixture of soft incentivisation for greater adoption of machines and equipment that reduces the need for unskilled labour as well as to create hard structures that are tied to these  actual technological products in order to curb the use of such labour. In other words, work permits that are made available to companies must be tied to demonstration that the company has seeked out other ways of accomplishing the required tasks without labour but failed. A formula or way of valuing the labour vis-a-vis the capital has to be worked out so that companies unable to demonstrate reliably that they are using the overall more efficient approach willl have to be disallowed from hiring more unskilled workers.

The question of manpower development is more tricky as it has more to do with manpower that are local Singaporeans than foreigners in the country. Our manpower quality has been suffering and I should caveat this statement with the fact that I did not conduct any research relating to this other than speaking to a handful of business owners and I think (again, speculatively), that this is largely a combination of increasing emigration as well as the change in structure of economy resulting in the irelevance of some of the skills of our older workers. The overall gene pool of workers with positive working attitudes is further eroded by a corporate culture that emphasize KPIs over individual workers’ well-being, often to the extent that well-being has to be measureable before it is something to be worked upon. This sort of evidence-based resource allocation optimisation, while beautiful in theory and on paper, generates immense dissatisfaction at working level. Again, I caution that I’m overgeneralising and potentially exaggerating the degree the problem manifests in reality.

Skills upgrading has been peddled around for decades but have not been ramped up as much as recently. But even then, I believe the existing measures are a little too broad and not targeted enough.  The soft skills of Singaporeans are more lacking than hardskills. And I’d go further to argue that good work ethic makes up for more than lack of skills. The willingness to learn, to advance in the work without necessarily having to go through n’certification’ and arbitrary ‘courses’

The Not-so-Right Bits

Here’s when merely working on building skills without improving attitudes and work ethics cannot go very far in developing our local manpower. The injection of competition through bringing in ‘foreign talents’ can continue but needs to be tempered with a proper mechanism that allows our local workforce to gradually phase those ‘foreign talents’ out. The more I work with MNCs, the more I realise how bringing in talents from their home country or countries they already operate in is indeed much easier than trying to hire locally. A mechanism that allows the local talent pool to be tapped and then freeing the the local talents to go into the private sector and ‘do their own things’ needs to be  created. We are doing a lot of startup-mentor matching and that is a great move.

Corporate culture and governance is something we tend to overlook when assisting local industries. I don’t know how we can assist in this aspect especially since junior Stat Board account managers don’t often have the insights into organisational behaviour the way bosses of bigger corporations do. The question is whether we can do something that provides cross-pollination opportunities with the end goal of improving the gene pool of the labour force.. This would likely be done by bringing people people with experience in places with great corporate culture into ‘poorer’ places and lead a transformation.

Summary

The above discourse is meant to kickstart some more thoughts in this area of economic development of Singapore towards a true first world stage, where the quality of our workforce is truly comparable with countries of the first world and definitely with productivities that are comensurate. To a certain degree, I have let out the underlying variable I hope Singapore can start developing as a unit of driver for our internal organisation that will enable our market economy to better settle the issue of ‘external positioning’ – improving corporate cultures and building genuine first-world enterprises.

Finally got down to updating some of the things on this website including a contact form, the publications page which was getting a tad bit too outdated and also putting in some pictures which hopefully cheers up the text-filled site a little.

So after fumbling about for a while and a bit of a hiatus from writing I finally got down to completing the latest edition of our Project Work Guidebook. A while back this was supposed to be the combined effort of my cousin, Kimberly, and I. It didn’t work. Apparently, her student life at Raffles Junior College was busier than my life at NYU as a masters’ student. This time, with already the previous edition as a strong foundation to work on, I expanded the chapter relating to research – adding materials on research methodology and approaches.

More importantly, acknowledging that time is a struggle for most of the students doing PW; I’ve added an appendix to provide some guidance about how to manage the team’s time. It is important to set customized milestones according to what is to be included in your project and these targets should be refined as one gets more information while also closer to the deadlines.

So boys and girls who are entering JC or simply still confused about this Project Work thing – hope this will be a good and useful read for you!

Ha-Joon Chang does a brilliant job trying to make slightly more obscure bits of Economics accessible to the public and in so doing, demonstrate the significance of understanding the history of the development of economic thought.

Economics: A User Guide.

Excellent piece on Productivity.

Brought on a little tour of Block 71 today. It’s a wonderful little place for entrepreneurs and business-starter wannabes to try and work on their ideas or start work on their ideas without too much capital nor too much expense. Rental is mostly free, particularly in the co-working space; power is free too so you can be your first employee at a desk and get free power, sometimes with free coffee and potentially free events to attend. Life probably has never been so good for an entrepreneur.

Of course, the costs associated with failure is significant given the opportunity costs. Most of these kids can command pretty decent amount of pay in the existing tight labour market; but I think that place offers a kind of co-working experience, ideas-exchange and tinkering culture that would prove valuable for these entrepreneur wannabes.

What I am concerned about is that this sort of spirit remains only within the tech sector without spewing into the more traditional sort of engineering-based industries. The real economy is still stubbornly reliant on manufacturing to grow. The rise of services is simply an accounting illusion; manufacturing increasingly outsource some of their process design and engineering to third party ‘consulting firms’ which are services. Therefore, value that was previously treated as being generated from manufacturing now becomes re-classified as services. The economic activities taking place is still the same. The bulk of these ‘new services’ are just repackaging and most of the staff or ‘entrepreneurs’ are merely ex-employees who have started these new businesses to capture the benefits of increasing outsourcing.

Yet in order for things to be changed, there has to be more cross-pollination. By far, there is no evidence that the consulting services yielded more engineering innovation in their respective spheres. If anything, the increase in competition only serves to drive improvement in slightly more superficial things such as more user-friendly 3D modelling graphics or better visuals that have little impact on the actual carrying out of the projects. In other words, the kind of market competition we have been generating may not actually be good. This is something for our economic ministries to ponder over…

I believe in learning. And behind all that slogging for grades, what I really see is development of ability, and acquisition of skills. Grades and scores may be performance/progress indicators or checkpoints for me to assess my development, but in no way defining me.

When it comes to work, I absolutely believe that training is necessary – not so much developing our skills from scratch. No one can reverse all the bad habits of speech (eg. fillers, pet words, etc.) within a day or even a week but such training sessions serves to consolidate what we already know into one place and focus our application in various areas, often in a more disciplined manner. So many people I’ve come across in life have so much potential but the environment does not encourage them to shoot for the longer term goals of self-improvement, only the short-term objectives of completing the work on-hand.

At any workplace, there are only 2 kinds of things that you can take with you when you leave. One is your track record (project references, achievements) and the other is your skills. In every project, we should seek to emerge from each one more capable and being able to deliver more or better in the next one. We should never be falling back on something we have already done. In other words, the only way to avoid becoming too comfortable with one’s position is to keep focusing on potential. And that means, while there is the 2 kinds of takeaways – what we should be putting our attention on is our skills.

Therefore, hurry to brush up skills and pull up socks, not to meet deadlines (though that eventually must be met anyways).

I just went through a course on effective presentation skills and it was mentioned that Q&A is actually the most important part of the presentation – in fact so important it is more important than the presentation itself. After all, Q&A is where it is much harder to prepare and you are more vulnerable. I remember the trainer saying, some people are just born able to think on their feet and others will have to develop the ability to do so over their life.

It actually got me thinking about it. What set people apart in this sense? How was Tharman able to answer Stephen Sackur so quickly about the Trampoline that the host was a little surprised and stumped for a bit? It’s actually through preparation. It isn’t quite ‘born’, as we would think of. The truth is all of life is preparation. The way you spend every moment in your life, whether you have chosen it or not, is preparation for all of the moments ahead. And having the habit of thinking, having thought through different things, having pondered over issues far and wide or about things in the periphery of the related topic, is part of all the preparation that brought you to the point of being able to ‘think on your feet’. It might feel like you had a stroke of genius at the moment or people might have thought so but it’s not genius. It’s hard work, dedication and devotion to the topic area or issue implicated.

So prepare well for all the times ahead you have. And think; it sure takes practice but you get better.

Listened to Tim Keller’s Sermon again and thought this line was worth noting down:

“Forgiveness is you may go. Free justification is you may come.”

And then I got to listen to another sermon by Michael Baughen, and another line he shared struck me too:

“Religion is about achieving, the gospel is about believing.”

Yet it’s so tough because we are told we have to give an account of ourselves – so ‘despite’ this so-called free grace, our deeds are fruits of the faith and the surest manifestation of our lacking in our faith. In Jerry Bridges’ ‘Respectable Sins’, he quotes from older writers who calls for believers to:

“Work as if it all depends on you, and yet trust as if you did not work at all.”

That was all helpful, now on to living a life justified by faith.

It’s been a long time since I actually sat down to write an article, not to mention an article about my faith. I must say I haven’t been particularly attentive to the gradual shifts that are taking place in the world though I have my eyes set upon the economy, the structural things in the economy of Singapore. Having spent more than the past 4 years being abroad, I always thought I could share some new perspective about Singapore – how things are different here or the same. And more important, how much we have come to be part of ‘the world’.

The debates of the world that sets groups of people up against each other can stem from a variety of factors and in particular, culture seem to be highlighted. While globalization is said to make the world more homogenous, the role in its ability to bring cultures together so they may clash and interact in more profound manner is understated. In the clashing of cultures, and attempt to reconcile things, I believe that we have not become more polarized but allowed ourselves to accept sub-par standards of clarity that generates even more controversy. The refusal to clarify often stems from sensitivity – political, racial, religious or whatever. And one that I would like to highlight here is our messing up of the concepts of tolerance and forgiveness.

First, we look at the concept of forgiveness, which is more or less lost in this modern world. And the reason is that we have lost the concept of sin. We no longer think about transgressions the way we do. We think of it as a single-sided thing involving a mistake – the outcome and consequences that one has to bear is solely attributed to the system in place. The one that the victim has to bear no longer is part of that picture. This very subtle shift towards self-centeredness as a whole society is probably something people have observed time and again but seemed, by and large to be praised rather than resented. The ‘mistakes’ is therefore to be dealt with through the penalty of the system, a punishment that allows you to ‘pay’ for the mistake rather than to be forgiven of it. There is absolutely no mention of forgiveness in this whole cycle – the culprit doesn’t need to be forgiven by the victim, just to be released or ‘dealt with’ by the system of justice. And there is no wonder why we find that justice and forgiveness is incompatible. This is because we see punishment as diametrically opposing to forgiveness – and that if one were to consider wrong-doing a ‘sin’ then punishments are but necessary ‘sins’ against ‘sinfulness’.

Forgiveness, rather, has to do with a pardon of the deed itself that still involve a cost from the deed – not so much the punishment that is just a fraction of the true costs, designed to attempt to pass on the cost the deed creates back to the perpetuator. Of course, God and all of us realize this merely serves to multiply the fallen-ness in the world when this punishment is not meted out by God. Only God, who is able to renew and restore, can also channel His wrath righteously at the perpetuator. Not even the victim, bearing just part of the cost of the deed (as God bears the other part) can be qualified to take revenge, having no means whatsoever to restore his state through his revenge. Vengeance therefore, can only be of the Lord’s. As victims, what we can offer on our part is only ‘forgiveness’ and that is to bear that cost inflicted upon ourselves and carry it no further. As culprits/sinners, all we can do is to ask for forgiveness, from the victims and from God Himself.

By now you might have realized that what we have always thought forgiveness is, or involves, is tolerance. But it isn’t. We can think of tolerance as something that has elements of overlap with forgiveness but misses the mark. I would say one could capture their relationship with a Venn diagram where the overlapping part involves the bearing of costs of the deed. What does not overlap that is in Tolerance, is that of being indifferent to the deed itself as a matter of principle. Forgiveness, on the other hand, by virtue of its necessity having arisen from the presence of a ‘sin’, will have to involve rejecting the deed. It would require that the deed in itself be considered morally wrong. Forgiveness does not allow you to ignore the evilness of the deed; rather, it fundamentally requires you to trust in and place your hopes on the repentance of the one who is forgiven. Tolerance requires nothing of that sort; rather it involves an inner stoicism that is rejected by Christians as the path to salvation. To believe one is tolerant can breed self-righteousness and that is why people who preach tolerance are themselves non-tolerant of people seen as intolerant. They might not have observed the irony but that by itself already shows that tolerance is not the lifeboat that can take us out of this mess in conflicts – whether it is about abortion or homosexuality, or Amos Yee. It is forgiveness.