Kevin Low

We often look at market-driven outcomes and claim that is what the market wants and we are all good. That can be case with obscene inequalities, or when some stupid useless cute looking product goes viral. Or even when we emit carbon dioxide through our industrial process and transformation of energy forms in our economy.

When we allow the market mechanism to reign, we ought to be clear what we are trying to achieve in the first place. We know the market achieves efficient allocation, but based on what? Should our lives be just about taking action to satisfy the demand and utility of mankind?

Perhaps we have forgotten there is a greater system out there that our economy interacts with, the lives of people, the beliefs we hold, the discoveries we are trying to make, the environments that we live in. Does it really make sense to be just feeding the market whatever we think it wants? There are already things we determined markets are off-limits; and we have alternative models for them – can’t we be more open about exploring non-market models?

I had two friends, across different industries, operating in different markets share similar stories about their recent experience with the recruitment process of different companies. In both cases, they were applying to a particular vacancy or were introduced to it by someone inside. They had been given clear indications of their interest in the role but the company decided to put them up for selection for another role instead without being entirely upfront that those other roles were significantly different and not going to meet their salary requirements.

They went through multiple rounds with the companies and took time to prepare for each rounds. When they eventually were given offers or clearer indication of what the job they were interviewing for actually entailed, they immediately tried to withdraw their application or stop the process. It was as though the HR who took in their information, salary requirements and interest in the roles were turning a deaf ear to the requirement.

There was no reason for that kind of bait-and-switch tactic. One of the hiring manager actually took time to try and convince my friend to take on a lower level job, even offering for him to drop by for an unpaid “two-day apprenticeship”. None of these makes any kind of sense for these friends of mine. The failure of HR in Asia is really atrocious and I deeply welcome the tighter labour markets as a means for companies to embrace automation and to learn to respect people.

History doesn’t repeat itself, (but it does often rhyme).

Mark Twain

So, as history would have it, Mark Twain did not actually say what was beyond the first four words. Yet many great writers, speakers and leaders might have mentioned or alluded to this point that there’s certain rhythm that history seem to follow. The challenge for people performing forecasting is that they tend not to have looked sufficiently at the rhythm of history to perform their forecasts but instead just expect more of the same thing in near term.

Indeed the best forecast of what happens in the next moment is what was the case in the last moment, but if you look through the daily cycle, you’ll note that you can’t extrapolate that easily for further moments. When you do know about the daily cycle of day and night however, you can predict some activities better. Likewise, you can do so about activities through the week as you master the weekly cycle, then the monthly and seasonality across months. As you go over longer time horizons, you begin to observe longer time period cycles that you can potentially model.

These all applies towards the things that lasts. What about new things; new trends and technologies? How would we know if people would adopt and how popular it would be. For example, the last two years saw massive rise in awareness and involvement of the masses in cryptocurrency. And of course it fueled a maniac rise which then more recently became a collapse with regulators jumping the bandwagon of sounding more warnings and curtailing retail ‘investors’ involvements. It would be important to find analogies, not only that of great successes but that of great failures and look at not just the short rise to success of these analogies, but the long slog they might have gone through.

The rhyme of history provides such valuable lessons that we too often ignore to our detriment.

In the previous post I wrote about how the best workers for me unfortunately won’t want to be employees and perhaps that is why it is increasingly difficult to find good people. The organisational environment for some reason tends towards cultivating and retaining mediocrity especially when the corporate environment double-down on becoming more corporatised.

I envision that the concept of cooperatives would be making a bit more of a comeback in the medium term as I think that employees, especially the good ones will need to take on equity ownership of the company they work for and be seen as partners rather than just labour. And by developing a more sophisticated form of capitalist structure, we can step into the new world in need of newer forms of labour including a good mix of intellectual and emotional labour.

Just as electric cars have been developed in the past and has now made a comeback; some of the older concepts discovered in the past might prove to be more suitable these days. By creating new forms of management and incentive structures in modern corporations, we can unlock greater creativity and energies for the new economy with the new culture of our young today. Cooperatives that see staff as members and partners can play a part.

Having taken on the challenge of a management role, I begin to see the delicate balance that we have in every workplace and in various function of having to allow staff to take their own initiative and develop their own autonomy without making them feel like they are not supported. This is perhaps not too far removed from parenting but having not been a parent myself, it can be quite tough. And when I put myself in the shoes of any individual contributor, I begin to realise the struggle.

As a manager, being supportive isn’t just about scheduling check-ins but being able to add value and perspectives to the challenges that one’s staff is having. Even if we may not necessarily have the exact same experience before or that we believe one must just go through the struggle. And on the other hand, an individual contributor may have various risk appetite when it comes to claiming if he or she can do something.

Some people may not know but are willing to try; they may stretch themselves to varying degrees in order to accomplish the work objective. They may or may not be okay with having an end result that is far from what is desired. And they know that is the way for them to learn. Others are more conservative and prefer to learn not by doing but by seeing how it has been done. In that process, the manager ends up doing the work thinking it is a one-off affair and expect the staff to handle it by himself or herself subsequently.

That is to say that the meaning of managerial support can mean different things to different staff and a manager ought to be sensitive to that; and also be prepared to go out of the way to do what it takes. This can be a great toll on the manager who is trying to take more time and effort on the longer term efforts including BD or building up the profile of the company.

And if I think about what makes an ideal staff; he or she is probably one who is willing to take the risks, to make mistakes in the process, take ownership of both the mistakes and the lessons, moving forward knowing they themselves would gain from it despite the emotional costs. The desire to develop that sort of independence is valuable but it is also they are the very same people who would eventually resist being an employee.

It’s not the first time I’ve thought about doing a PhD, with the intention to take on some kind of academic position in a university, primarily to teach. I’ve been able to express this desire to teach at my work in Enea Consulting, and also as part of my coaching practice, but somehow perhaps I thought of going a bit more intellectual. I had briefly thought about incorporating more intellectual elements into my mailing list but I dropped the idea as I didn’t think that was the main objective of my target audience when signing up to the list.

I did also think about starting a youtube channel and teaching lay economics topics in bite-sized pieces. That could be an avenue though I suspect such resources are already widely available online. Perhaps I’m wrong. Or I could also start a podcast discussing some of these topics – perhaps to apply economics on more topical issues.

All of these, to be able to take on the teaching role and be a public intellectual without doing a PhD. Because almost every single person who has done a PhD in my circle cautioned me against it and talked about how I would be better off learning about a discipline or subject by myself. And unless I’m so deeply passionate about a single niche area of knowledge. So perhaps I’d be undertaking my own research, something like a private PhD, perhaps not with a single supervisor but being under the guidance of many different people in my network.

Having been so critical about the education system, perhaps working on a PhD by myself or doing PhD level work by myself (ie. DIY PhD) in order to undertake deep research in a particular niche with the view of publishing some paper or a book.

In one of Steve Levitt’s interview of Steve Pinker, when asked about strategies for life, he brought up the idea that everyone needs a good dose of “benign hypocrisy”. I’d think that comes across as controversial, for a podcast episode titled such as to say that Steve Pinker manages his controversy portfolio carefully.

Yet when I think deeply about it, I guess perhaps the term bears out of this modern style of calling out on people especially with regards to perceived inauthenticity. Because we are in such a sensitive age, even being polite can be misconstrued as hypocrisy while being rude lauded as authenticity.

So perhaps it should not be called benign hypocrisy but the ability to undertake emotional labour. Basically to put our emotional selves at work in order to practice certain responses that is true to our intentions towards dealing with the situation as oppose to being true to our feelings. In other words, we smile, say nice things and be polite even when a customer is behaving badly or being unreasonable. We may sometimes practice this emotional labour even with friends and family. And the ability to do this work is important because it trains us to show up even when we don’t feel like it – to achieve our intentions, not necessarily to express our feelings.

Ever tried walking up the stairs two steps at a time? How about down? What about climbing up three steps at once? Which makes you more exhausted, and what is better? Well, it will depend on the length of your legs but in general, taking smaller steps allows you to clock progress more gradually and allows you to advance towards your goal in a more orderly manner.

It is also more sustainable to take small steps towards goals. The problem is that most of the time, the small steps may not always be moving forward. As I mentioned before, sometimes progress involves some degree of backtracking in order to advance. And it might be the same for the case of Hydrogen economy in Japan. The country have been vesting itself into hydrogen technologies and all kinds of end-use applications for this new energy vector but continues to utilize grey hydrogen, without introducing any necessary certification to differentiate grey from green hydrogen.

That can seem problematic as there’s still a lot of Scope 3 emissions from that perspective. In fact, they introduced these decentralised fuel cell based combined heat and power plants for residential homes which also supply hot water (because the hydrogen fuel produces water when it reacts with oxygen in the fuel cell thus releasing energy in the process in the form of electricity). The strange thing is that these decentralised plants are actually fueled by Liquid Petroleum Gas (LPG) or Natural Gas (NG) which goes into a fuel reformer to produce hydrogen, releasing Carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

I wonder if all of these are small steps sometimes but in the grand order of things, having the ability to shift end-use towards hydrogen is a first step so that we don’t have to rewire the decentralised applications when green hydrogen starts being widely available.