Kevin Low

When you’re going through a hard time; most often people will be asking themselves where they’d rather be. And the images of alternative reality comes into mind. And the nice things that you’re missing out on just floats around. And the reality you are going through just sucks a little more. How is that helping?

Better to ask yourself what can I learn from this? To put your brain into that curious learning mode. When we ask a question of ‘why’ in a manner where we cannot answer, we are not actually in a learning mode. Because to interrogate reality requires first that you’re willing to find out the truth rather than to dream up alternative reality that fits your psychology.

When you start with ‘what am I trying to accomplish here?’, you begin to question reality by first getting your intentions right. Then you take the little steps to advance your intention, and put yourself in more reflective mode to be conscious about the things you’re truly getting from the experience. The learnings, and not just the outcomes of doing a piece of work.

The conditioning we’ve gotten since going through the school system is that there are times when you learn, and there are times when you express your learnings. False. Reality doesn’t work like this. Neither does your brain. You learn because you do the work. Period. And if you’re ‘suffering’ from work, that’s really when you’re learning.

When you work for a huge organisation, you spend a lot of time in meetings. Significant number of them are in alignment meetings. What happens in them? People bargain over what should be priority across their teams so that the organisation is not wasting resources moving in different directions. They want to put it down on paper that these are the priority projects and they jointly agree to work on them.

But through the year, things happens and ad-hoc opportunities appear so the different teams jump upon them and the alignment meetings themselves became the waste of resources.

Why not align our intentions instead and make sure that we all sync-up our criteria on what constitute importance, and the principles for assigning something to be priority throughout the year. Especially when they randomly pop up. Isn’t this a better way to organise ourselves? Sure, people’s judgments may differ slightly but that’s not as bad a point for contention than having to throw the work of hours of meeting out of the window?

When I was in the infrastructure business; they always say, you’re this close to being extremely rich and this close (much smaller gap) to being bankrupt. And so the takeaway is that you have to fake it till you make it. You need to make sure everyone believes in the project; that the demand is there, or can be fostered, and the project will be financed, so that the demand can be addressed. And then probably at some point, the project can be sold off to someone richer, with stronger balance sheet and cash position.

I never truly felt comfortable with that. I always thought it was important to build trust on the ground and be candid about the situation. You may start collecting wind data with some wind masts, work with local villages about getting access to their farm land for wind turbines, etc. But you will have to be clear to them about the risks. Also engage the financiers sincerely, sharing the impact of your work and the scale of the possibilities.

Today, in the sustainability world, there are a lot of people taking up leadership positions of Chief Sustainability Officer but really just with a thin layer of credential or experience dealing with genuine sustainability issues and topics. The world is going to learn and catch up very rapidly. And you’ll be tossed 101 different issues you won’t be able to google for answers. Ironically, those positions are not sustainable. You can fake it but it’ll be hard for you to eventually make it.

And it’s going to be bad for mental health. Imposter syndrome is one thing; being an actual fraud is another.

People are stressed, burnt out and resigning. Why do people leave their jobs today. Most of them are working too hard; and there’s this performance workaholic-ism out there. On Linkedin, on TV, by our politicians trying to show they are working for the people; by our civil servants, by the MPs. Welcome to work in Singapore.

There is a game out there. Everyone is trying to out-work one another. Everyone is performing, and no one wants to lose out. The performance-driven-ness in Singapore is really about showing off hard work. The truth however, is we are tired. Mentally and physically. And we all need rest. We confess that. But are we backing down? Before illness sets on you. Before it’s too late.

We ought to get better not just at admitting we need rest and resting. But communicating that enough is enough. There’s always good reason to work more, to do more, to think that it’s about excellence and growth. But it can also be about mental health, and illness, and life. If we can learn to be more human once again, to share about our limits, to care for one another by not just checking in but creating space for one another; for our vendors, clients, consultants, we can really make the future one that is worth living in.

I think it is a red flag when your boss post on Linkedin that he is working during a national public holiday. This sort of public display of workaholic-ism should probably be more regulated as it breeds an extremely unhealthy culture. Especially for those who are taking on higher position within an organisation.

Years ago, one of the number two or three person of an important public institution I worked with passed away suddenly of heart attack. It happened on a Sunday and I was shocked because I just received an email from him the Thursday before where he approved something I was seeking permission for. My friend had a worse shock because he received an email from the person just a few hours before he passed away. And yes, he was replying a work email on Sunday.

Then a week ago, a friend told me her colleague who was with her on an pretty intense work trip just passed on from heart attack after he returned from the trip. That was an emotional time but for most part, people at work moved on. And naturally, someone else took on and continued the important work he did.

So much life gets given away to work but what is lost by the family can never be returned. How can we make a future of work be one where work truly enables a life worth living?

You choose to be a professional when you set yourself apart not just by the work you do but by the way you carry yourself, manage the interactions with your clients. And it is not about just producing the best work out there, but choosing to do so within scope and budget, on time. This is different from just producing the best work; and people like working with professionals more than with artists precisely because of that.

When you choose to be an artist, it is different; you take ownership of the work and also almost always the full risks. Because you need to work in the shadows for a really long time, waiting to find the audience that resonates with you, and hoping to be ‘found’ some day. Perhaps within your lifetime, perhaps not.

For the professional, the work done is more valuable because it is with the client. But for the artist, the association with the artist itself should be what makes it more valuable. So when we deliver our work in our workplaces, we need to appreciate and understand – are we being the professional, or are we being an artist?

One of the arguments against e-fuels (that is, producing fuels from electricity generated; for example by electrolysing water to produce hydrogen, or synthetic methane from that hydrogen) is that it is very inefficient and wastes a lot of energy. A lot of energy storage is not worthwhile because the energy cannot be held efficiently over long time, or that they cannot be released when needed.

The gross amount of energy wasted never really seemed to be a problem when we were in the old fossil fuel world. When there’s no power generated, we are happy to flare away gaseous fuel, wash machine parts with petrol and use oil wastefully even though a lot of energy, fuel have been consumed to extract them, transport them. When converted into actual energy potential in joules, I’m pretty sure a lot of energy had been wasted all these while.

With the climate crisis and energy crisis today, reducing energy demand is a sure-win approach to mitigating those problems. Yet people are unwilling or unable to do much about it. Australia is still not adopting double-glazed windows as the standard, many countries still do not have Minimum Energy Performance Standards (MEPS) for motors. Part of the reason is that supply chains are still entrenched; and people are just being caught up with their sunk costs.

There is definitely going to be a lot of new costs involved with replacing equipment, electrification, removing the need for conventional fuel and switching to renewables, adding battery energy storage systems to our grid. But by simultaneously reducing energy demand and increasing green supply, a Stanford study seem to indicate this is easily within reach. It certainly brings up a lot of interesting questions and would be worthwhile digging around to appreciate the bottlenecks better. But are we even willing to take that first step of digging around? Or do we prefer covering up?

I’ve been hearing this recently. That the organisation someone is working for is top-heavy. What does that even mean? Too many people ordering others around but no one to follow the orders?

That would seem to be the simple interpretation of this phenomena. It may have to do with Singapore shifting away from its reliance on foreign manpower, towards increasing localisation. It may also have to do with the fact that there are more companies relocating their operations to Singapore (say, from Hong Kong) and the roles that were kept for people who were relocating from Hong Kong were the more senior roles and they were expecting to hire junior people from Singapore market.

What I suspect is that this is a function of the changing aspirations of the millennials and the newer generation. People are beginning to find it stinky to be serving the whole capitalist-industrial complex and sick of being a cog. And through the financial markets, as well as the increasing mass affluence, the market for new products, services is growing. This means opportunities to be your own boss, to be freelancers, or form a small business.

Customers are becoming more open-minded and novelty-seeking, and this generation that would have formed the middle and junior management in large companies suddenly decide that they relish the freedom of their own business more than working for “progression”. Time is the real thing that is scarce – there is abundant work to do, and enough to make a living and survive. A social status bought with one’s time and health is no longer worth the while.

As I mentioned in a previous post, this means big and traditionally relevant organizations may start to see a decline towards mediocrity as they fail to retain quality workforce. Until they start being able to create the kind of autonomy and conditions that encourage good quality talents to move out of corporate, those organisations will need to make do with mediocrity.

When I was in high school, the name of the game was to get good grades, score a job with a big firm or with the government. People worked hard to conform, to understand the requirements of the system and serve it well. The ones who were coding away their free time, starting their own lemonade stands, and doing ‘enterprising’ work had no place in the system.

But by the time I left university, the friends who were doing all sorts of quirky stuff during my high school days: starting blogs, running web design services, coding computer games – they all suddenly became well-sought after by tech firms. And yes they did well.

Today, these graduates don’t even bother joining firms, they go ahead and start their own, seeing that starting up, raising venture capital investment as a viable way to earn a living. In less than a decade, here in Singapore, a vibrant startup ecosystem have facilitated the ability for younger people to realise this dream.

Towards the end of 2010s, startups became a really glamorous thing. And while people might think of it as fueled by crazy valuation (for a large part it is), venture capital ecosystem, and just hype, there are other dimensions of this revamped entrepreneurship drive being galvanised in the current generation of graduates. But more than that, I think the sense of owning something, creating something from nothing is no longer out of reach as we have increasingly secured our basic survival.

It is vital for Singapore as a society to move towards this stage; but it would mean the bigger companies will have to work harder to acquire and develop their talents, especially the younger ones. The big incumbents, for the first time, may risk falling towards mediocrity as the quality of their workforce decrease gradually while the demands of the market increases. Automation, greater capital requirements will delay this process of decline, but without dealing with the human capital challenges, they would not stop the decline.

What exactly is career progression to you? Is it just having more salary? More responsibilities? More staff under your charge? Or a bigger title. Different people are caught up with different things and every company have their own ‘policies’ and ways to try and industrialise the whole practice of human resource, choosing to see labour in its traditional factory format.

Often, in a bid to standardise, to create salary bands and so on, they alienate workers and fail to see them as talents with ability to contribute to a shared mission of the organisation. Human resource departments add to the problem by thinking in a hierarchical manner and refusing to recognise that value is created in the company jointly by the employee, in partnership with company resources. They choose to see that value is produced magically and the top gets to decide how much they disburse to the bottom.

And in this disbursement, the company is trying to just set up structures to maximise the effort and production of the workers, without room to consider the impact of creativity, culture value or synergistic effects across the team. Time to tear all that down and begin to see employees as humans who have needs for affirmation, to get a proper share of value creation, and crave for a sense of ownership over real work produced.