Kevin Low

In a recent conversation I had along with some old and new friends, a question came up about what is Fiat (referring to the type of currency; though some certainly thought we were talking about cars)? And a few of us had thought of Singapore dollars as fiat money but our friend’s Dad who was in the conversation disagreed.

And it was his attack on our economics credentials that got me thinking about it and came to understand his perspective. The very key element of fiat money is that they are inconvertible into anything else by the issuing authority. Fiat is a word from latin (“let it be done”) basically implies “by decree”. And the thing is, Singapore dollar is technically backed by a basket of currencies, which means that it is supposed to be “convertible” per se though it isn’t since the actual composition of the basket of currencies is not disclosed.

Nevertheless, that basket of currencies probably are all fiat or at best backed by other fiat currencies. So to say Singapore dollars is not fiat seems be ‘turtles all the way down’ kind of argument. Nevertheless, these are just semantics. I think what is important is to recognise then that the so-called “intrinsic” value of fiat has to do with confidence in the economy and government/central bank of that country.

Thinking through these is probably very important at a point of time when the concept of money is being challenged by cryptocurrencies and all. Something I never had thought would happen in my lifetime.

In my recent farewell chat with HR (otherwise known as an exit interview), we ended up talking about cultures and changing a culture. The HR officer, as a sweeping generalisation, said that cultures are entrenched and hard to change. That, to me, is fascinating because I have been in the organisation for a long time and I know that cultures do change. All culture is temporary; and it is formed by the people who are there, whether they care or not. In fact, the culture is always evolving and whether it is for the better or not, is up to the management to be aware of it and to play an active role in shaping it, by the way they communicate, including the example they set.

What we may not have been thinking about more consciously when we talk about changing people’s mindsets is the stories that we tell ourselves. For example, this HR officer’s story about culture is that they tend to be entrenched. And that may have a role in reinforcing the status quo because people just use culture as a blackbox reason to attribute things to, and then don’t try to change things.

I previously wrote about the stories that we as millennials should be more conscious we are telling ourselves, and to learn to develop what it takes to be able to rewrite that story. So forget about trying to change mindsets by talking about concepts and plain facts, it is necessary for you to start thinking about the stories we are telling ourselves and each other.

As one grows older, the striving for results starts to recede as our attention and minds seem to gravitate towards making human connections. That’s seems to be my experience or perhaps that has been my disposition all along and it just took a while for me to accept that. Regardless, I realised how much self-awareness and appreciation for the human condition it takes to make a truly meaningful connection to begin with.

I attended multiple weddings last couple of weeks and there were some really heartfelt speeches that were made. What struck me was that for most of the key moments of our lives such as births, deaths, marriage, even more minor ones like graduation, promotion, or work success, we inevitably turn back to the idea about people around us. Some might say it is social norms and culture that led to speeches being about thanking people around us; that perhaps self-aggrandising in these moments served only to put others off. But the truth is that the culture is really about people and it is responsible a large part for those celebrations in our lives.

That is why I found what Dr Jim Loehr‘s idea of the invisible scorecard extremely compelling. Without the culture we live in, life would be brutish even with the luxuries of modernity. At some level, we understand that we are primarily driven by that human connection that takes place when we put in our best, when we do a good work, and when we make things better. It is about the feelings evoked, the impressions made.

Sustainability is the ability to maintain at a certain rate or level. The interesting thing is that rate and level denotes drastically different things. Maintaining a certain rate indicates some kind of constant change whereas maintaining a certain level literally implies no changes or that changes are cancelling each other out.

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That wasn’t what I was hoping to talk about in this article. Rather, the sustainability “industry” has more or less taken off. It started more or less with consumer brands that was looking at reducing the waste, enhancing awareness/consciousness around the consumption chain. It can come in the form of Body Shop’s initial use of non-packaging (or even charging for packaging), to Patagonia’s initiatives that deploys company’s resources into sustainable practices as well as environmental causes. These were seen as more hippie kind of companies just appealing to specific psychographics (as opposed to demographics).

Then it went on to businesses building business models around efficiencies that may have environmental consequences. Monsanto have been developing agriculture technologies that help to grow more crops within less land area. This allows more land on earth to be left for natural forests as opposed to agriculture. Urban infrastructure can be said to play such a role as it attempts to aggregate demand for various services such as clean water and wastewater treatment. With piped clean water, there’s less bottling, less plastic waste.

With the increasing awareness and focus on sustainability, there’s now a proliferation of consulting work involved in this sector. Mostly entailing compliance audits but a new class of consulting work involving coming up with ideas around integration of sustainable practices in business. The tricky thing is that this area is still nascent and they are actually in need of talents but do not have sufficient people who are experienced. The pool of talents they are drawing from are often from in-house big corporates who have been looking at sustainability in their business practices. Those are the best areas of picking up the relevant skills and thinking required.

The industry has a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem where corporates looking at sustainability are often clueless and would like to hire help from these consultants but they themselves are short of talents in these areas. Yet there is a whole lot of talented young people passionate about the cause for sustainability who wouldn’t be considered for such positions no matter how keen they are on it. To this group of young talents, I would advise you to first look for an industry where you want to make that sustainability impact on – it could be bottled drinks, IT, entertainment, etc. The key is that you like what the industry produce and do but would want to make it more sustainable – and within that, you try to pivot yourself to roles and work that is more focused on sustainability.

Most progressive firms looking into sustainability have already realised they need to build that competency in-house for now because they are still in the frontier and pioneering the efforts, especially in Asia.

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’.