Kevin Low

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.