Say you failed to land on your dream job. You “settle” for something different. And then what? You prepare yourself bit by bit on the things you might have to hone if you had been in that dream job. You continue reading about the industry, you strive to be better in the areas which are important to that dream job but also coincides well with whatever you have settled for.
And you take ownership of developing yourself, and earn supporters who would root for you in whatever you do. Articulate your passion better and craft a clear mission for yourself that relates to that dream job. This is a kind of moving on, just different from the giving up that you had imagined.
Then one day when the opportunity comes again to land your dream job comes, you are ready. It could be a new opening, it could be a higher role, or just the introduction of someone influential inspired by your sense of mission. But when it comes, you are ready.
Thinking about how you can be ready for the opportunities you want to catch when it comes? Consider getting a coach.
There is a cost-push inflation coming along; the major challenge is the global logistics and the fragmenting of supply chains. We have traditionally built a global factory with conveyor belts running from country to country, through our ports, shipping routes and the vessels. The geopolitical struggles over the past decade have gradually weakened the links as people started focusing on building local supply chains to enhance resilience.
The pandemic worsened things further as countries going into lockdowns tend to disrupt their segment of the global supply chain and hence the next stage of the global factory have to spend time and effort reconnecting with other sources in order to keep things going. It has not been a pretty picture but because of that, the configuration of those conveyor belts have changed and been rewired.
This continues to happen as other forces manifest: pressure to decarbonise the value chain, government policies to reduce migration or enhance local employment, emergence of new technologies replacing the old. Consider the fact that a large proportion of vessels across the oceans are actually carrying coal where they were mined to where they’ll be burnt for power. When coal power gradually phase out across the world, the vessels are going to have to be out of business or carrying something else. The supply of power will gradually shift towards other fuel types. And most of the other fuel types are unlikely to use the same carriers.
Where companies have an efficient, vertically integrated supply chain, they bring with them great strategic value where they are able to continue their operations and deliver goods even as the market for intermediate goods or functions starts weakening. For all the environmental harm that has been brought on by oil & gas companies, their ability to coordinate supply chains, logistics and set up intermediate markets to enhance efficiencies of their supply chain is something that has to be picked up by other industries to move the world beyond the current cost-push inflationary challenges.
Industrial organisation was a very important discipline of microeconomics for a period of time especially when it came to supporting or counteracting the trust-busters. And then even as economists were just beginning to peer a little more into industries and understand the workings of firms and the strategic thinking behind them, finance came into the picture and all sorts of crazy connections between business metrics and financial metrics became the science of understanding business, evaluating and valuing them.
Strategic value of firms remain relevant in terms of thinking about merger financial models but these perspectives of looking at incremental value and the ‘main case’ of business-as-usual sometimes misses the point of an acquisition or integration. Aside from financial assessment, the whole strategic decision to undertake a merger or acquisition requires not a business-as-usual view but one that involves a vision of the future. Not forecasting the future but taking active steps to create it.
During a time of massive decentralisation and increasing marketisation, with lots of competitors, we can expect that value can be created by spinning off individual business units but when there’s shortage of resources, intermediate goods and services, vertical integration is powerful. And across the sectors, there are bound to be some that is plagued with bottlenecks and resource problems that only vertical integration can solve – which is to say the strategic value cannot be ignored. In fact, that is very often the way to compete in these markets.
When thinking about firms and business dynamics, are we just focused on the financial metrics or do we want to develop a view on the evolution of competition?
What is the value created from getting a match? How much value does a lifetime of marriage create? Or just 2 years of employment with a company? Or finding a house you can live in and raise a family for 20 years? Can the value created be attributed to the ones making the match or the parties matched making it work? Should the value of the match be based on the transaction value of the match?
I’m talking about buying a property, finding a life partner, a commercial or business partner, or a client whom you seal a deal with. Why is it that property agents, brokers, match-makers can extract the value they do? Is the value they extract really justified? There is no doubt certain combinations creates a lot of value and it should be shared amongst the parties involved – so the one who bring the parties together have a share. But how do we work out that share?
What is the pie available to share and how do we decide that the broker or match-maker deserves that share? This is especially the case I’m wondering for recruitment companies or agencies. Why can headhunters or recruiters get such big fees? Why can’t ordinary company HR do the job and find the right candidates? Why is the value they created based on the salaries given to the candidate? Are recruiters really helping to create the future we want to be in? If all of our salaries have a portion going to someone else, it seems more of some kind of parasitism to me.
Too much of our notions around freedom and liberty is rather confused. We think that freedom is the lack of constraints but we forget that constraints are a source of freedom as well. By working within rules, we are free to play the games we enjoy. This is because the freedom of one entity can clash with the freedom of another entity. Complete freedom of speech cannot really co-exist with freedom from being offended. And so there is a balance we need to navigate. Freedom exists even when there are constraints.
Thinking about freedoms in a binary way where we either have or do not have freedom is naive. Because being biological, and physical, we are constrained in many ways physically and by natural laws. Does that mean we lack freedoms? If so, then what is the point of pursuing any freedoms at all since we are ultimately constrained.
And then comes the question of where are we on the spectrum of freedom when the option set increases. When you can choose from 10 products rather than 5, does your freedom to choose increase? In fact, one could argue it decreases because now there are more options screaming at you and crowding our your attention. In fact you might be more confused and waste more time to arrive at your choice than before.
So next time before you evoke the notion of freedom, consider what you are referring to.
About 1.5 years ago, I left my job. I had started work believing I was working for a cause. And along the way, the pressures to perform based on corporate or management KPIs mattered. Performance appraisals started to take hold. What your colleagues started to initiate matters as a benchmark. There were actions that my bosses explicitly wanted me to take so I took them. I ended up working for a boss instead of a cause.
It could have been different but at what costs? Working for a cause does take its toll on one’s career, popularity with colleagues and bosses. Whereas working for a boss promises better bonuses, relationships, recognition. After all, you might have parents to feed, expectations of friends and family to meet. But the model worker seemed to me a lot like a mediocre one.
Working for a cause to me is the only way to work contrary to what we have been brought up to believe. Too much of our education system is around the industrial complex and more about obedience or conformity than to think critically and independently. They might fit the needs of the masses, but how about you?
As we replace our lighting with more energy efficient LEDs, we’d expect the overall system to consume less power, perhaps proportionate to the energy efficiency improvements that LEDs bring to traditional lighting. But that doesn’t seem to be the case because two things happen when you introduce more efficiency into the system:
Brightness of light bulbs or lighting increases with the same amount of energy input
Keeping the brightness constant, the energy input required falls.
Typically, the result is a combination of these two phenomena; so we have got people using brighter lights that may consume a little less energy. Or, at the same time, people started installing more lighting now that the LED lights are cheaper and more common.
Overall, the energy consumption reductions is less than the energy efficiency gains. This is known as the energy efficiency rebound effect. We see similar issues potentially with the deflation of goods and services over the recent decades. People did not spend less but in fact they spent more, buying much more of those cheap things that their parents could not enjoy at the prices they had paid. Probably also spurned by the easy credit available.
Do you spot any other areas like that in your life?
I thought this document from our Ministry of Social and Family Development about Singapore’s social compact is really interesting. It neatly articulates many challenging issues and dilemmas that policy makers have, and also the challenge to try and articulate decisions made. I think our approaches in terms of communication has become more complex over time as Singaporeans demand more sensibility and sensitivity from our government.
Shanmugam’s conversation on BBC Hardtalk Podcast itself is probably a best practice for Singaporeans and politicians in Singapore representing our country and the social dimension of the approaches we have taken. At the same time, we must not shy away from asking these hard questions and to get an account of why we are doing things the way we do. We as a society cannot be relying on foreign countries to try and ask our government these questions; we ourselves have to be the ones asking that as a society.
Maybe sometimes we are afraid that there are no answers or solutions; but that’s not the point of the discussion. To bring up what is perceived as a problem is the first step to possibly resolving the knots that we have in our hearts. What our government cannot do is to say that they have better things to do than to answer the pesky questions of citizens. Or that these questions stand in the way of a better, harmonious society. Typically they don’t.
People who have known me for years will know that I’m incredibly passionate about education and I can probably speak for days what is wrong with the education system, and what is my vision the ideal system. Or at least just some elements of it.
And that is why I think Sal Khan of Khan Academy is incredible. How he came to find the Internet as a powerful medium and channel for learning and meaningful, educational interactions that allows us to deliver education at a fraction of the costs. He spent the years, resources, gathering support and building up Khan Academy, extended his philosophy and even announced a new collaboration with Arizona State University to set up a real school. He has indeed manage to attract a good following a lots of support to make his vision closer to reality.
I wonder if one day I’d be able to set up an alternative structure like that to mainstream education in Singapore; or perhaps I would be better off trying to do something like this in a developing country to help intelligent but underprivileged students gain access to the opportunities that better education can afford like how Mohnish Pabrai’s Dakshana.
“Bean counter” is an expression in English language referring to “a person, typically an accountant or bureaucrat, perceived as placing excessive emphasis on controlling expenditure and budgets”. There are people who are mission oriented by focusing on the vision of a future but there are also bean-counters who are obsessed with measuring along certain identified metrics without recognising whether the metrics make sense or not. And that is the problem with our relationships with KPIs.
Let’s start from school. Today, we have more students than ever who are going through education system just to get a grade – not out of curiosity or a zeal to learn, but full of anxiety about a devastated future due to missing the grade. Why is the grade even an indicator and what is it indicating? Have we taught our students what the grade really mean? What an award or a prize really do to them? Thinking meta is important – and I’m definitely not referring to the metaverse.
Then businesses. There’s more than financial disclosure and accounting these days; there’s a lot around climate and impact related disclosures. At Enea, we help some of our clients navigate the requirements but more importantly, we advise our clients from first principles how to think about their business’ impact and interaction with the environment so as to report meaningfully to their stakeholders. Yet there are always consultants or companies who are focused on just taking a KPI which is popular out there and then using it – even cherry-picking the ones that look more favourable without a clear sense of what those measures are actually for.
Finally, there is the government, focused on giving a good report card to their political masters to show constituencies. There is still the traditional obsession with GDP and the growth figures, targeting job creation and so on. In fact, the term ‘statistics’, have more to do with the state than to do with the concept of numbers. Policies will really need to better articulate why metrics adopted are a good representation of the policy objectives and that results are not just reported when they look good, or for metrics to be chosen only after results are in. Being mission-focused is also more important than just sticking to a set of metrics. Because Goodhart’s law still applies.
Are you recognising the bean-counters amongst you? Those who are overly obsessed with the numbers without really appreciating what they mean? It’s probably worth focusing first on the parents who are obsessed with their kids getting an A.
