Kevin Low

My mum left her job recently. There were red flags about her employer early on but she ignored them. The employer didn’t pay her for the salary she was entitled to during her sick leave (she had a certain amount of fixed annual paid sick leave though it was a part time job); and that included some of the days when she was down with Covid. My mum, being a traditional worker just stayed on. Five years without a single increment, working on her tasks responsibly and keeping things in line when the management was not maintaining the structures and protocols laid down.

She knows the structure, the service and work she was supposed to deliver, and she believes someone needs to be doing the work. She can’t quite figure out who will if she doesn’t. So she does the work. This is a model of the responsible worker we were brought up to consider a believe in.

But there can be an alternative: Must the work be done? Are there other ways management can observe things besides having more employees filling out paperwork and doing reporting? Are there tools the company can adopt to automate the tasks? Can the boss write an email or text message rather than call for a meeting? Must the decision be made by the boss? Why can’t the staff be empowered to do so?

The industrial complex around all kinds of systems will not throw up such questions because it takes a human, a creative mind, one that cares and not one who ‘just do’ to ponder over these. We need to consider how to make the work of the future more human, more flourishing for workers, not just the shareholders.

What does success look like for a teacher? I heard a story about a school principal who realised that the Secondary school system was so good at drilling students for the O Levels exams that despite getting incredibly good grades at the national exams, they struggle when they rise to the next level (in Junior Colleges). She went to the teachers and wanted to do something about it but the teachers thought that their existing techniques worked to produce results, so why change things.

So she waited. And soon a former student approached her about this problem, having struggled in junior college despite having done well in O Levels. She invited this student to share at a staff meeting. And it woke the teachers up to the reality of what they were doing; they convened a committee to look into this. Was that a success? I don’t know. What does it mean for teachers to address this issue? Was it about making sure O Levels really gave a more truthful assessment of the students’ abilities? Or was it about teaching students higher level stuff to cope with A Levels? Was it to encourage them to truly learn and that it doesn’t matter if they didn’t do so well in O Levels?

I have no clue because the story ended there and it was all there was in a story. Teachers need to consider for themselves what they pride themselves upon and what is really the important thing for them. Was it really the grades of the students? Was it the attitude? Was it their ability to learn something on their own? As a culture, what do the education service really expect of our teachers? What kind of aspirations do we really desire, and how are these aspirations working out on the ground?

I’ve been very open and frank about one’s struggles in terms of working in public service. Should a public service officer be serving the people right in front of them based on what is possible, potentially stretching themselves dry and yet having to meet high level policy objectives or should they toe the policy line and just try to serve in accordance to what the policy allows and don’t? I think the truth is we are expected to be both, and they are often fundamentally at odds. The fact such political realities contaminate the work of public service officers feel really distasteful but so many people face it day to day.

They face it within the environment where there’s emphasis on company performance and yet also demands for managers to care about their people. How many companies hold management meetings on staff welfare metrics regularly? How often do shareholders ask the CEO how the employees or staff are responding to the new strategy to bring in new businesses?

And they face it again when they are under pressure to sell to clients but they are under-resourced to truly meet clients’ needs. There’s the question of who you should be serving? The clients, or your boss? In the case of public service; the people directly, or your management, or the political masters? Or the cabinet?

We are all sandwiched by these competing demands and tensions. They didn’t use to exist when we were building up the entire system and network with a more common objective. They appear less visible when diversity wasn’t the focus and people were just supposed to stay in ‘their place’ in society. They were not the point of policies when we could see the potential to grow and improve lives with clearly marked signposts of development. But we no longer do, and so we are sandwiched.

Thanks in part to the ongoing war and crisis in Europe, people are starting to look for ways to reduce their energy consumption. There is the argument of weaning off Russian gas and also reducing energy bills given the prices of natural gas. Yet it is such a bummer no one ever did it to reduce carbon emissions or to save the environment.

For the longest time we’ve been passive energy consumers and we didn’t really know with much precision where and what was energy consumed going towards within our houses, buildings and factories. Yet we already had technology to track that for many years; it’s just that we don’t think those are going to help us reduce energy consumption. We are too complacent, we want to think we’re already at optimal point. After all, why would we desire to pay hefty energy bills?

The company that needs a new machine tool, and hasn’t bought it, is already paying for it.

Charlie Munger

Unfortunately, economics does not work without the cost benefit analysis by individuals and I love the Munger quote here because it is exactly what energy efficiency investments are about. You are already paying for the new equipment that you need but did not buy. It is just a matter of who you’re devoting that cashflow to, and what you really get in return.

The Energy service company (ESCO) industry is growing thanks to rising electricity tariffs and greater consciousness about the energy transition. Now the marketing needs to keep up – are we putting that tension and pressure on our energy users yet?

I had this friend years ago who was brilliant in thinking strategically about things and he would be able to spend the minimum time studying but maximise his results. He would spot questions and take risks on exams in that way. The time he saved, he’d do many other things, participating in activities that beef up his profile, spending time with friends. Even then, he was good at focusing on more high profile activities such as those involving politicians, community grassroots – the shiny credentials that provides greater influence in time to come.

When I was in school, I didn’t find that particularly appealing; because I genuinely wanted to learn and wasn’t just trying to ace exams. In fact, I didn’t care if something was going to be on the test, I’d devour all the different knowledge and materials I found interesting. Yet as we leave school and enter our working lives and all, I cannot help but recognise how brilliant that friend of mine was. He was practising something that our system implicitly encouraged even if it was reserved for the somewhat elite-class. It was the same idea of asking what would be the highest value activity to spend our time and resources on.

More critically, it was also about asking, what are the others doing, whether I can adopt a strategy to achieve the results that I want without necessarily mimicking what others are doing? It wasn’t so much about how do I fit the bill or to fit in; but how do I convince others that I’m already the good fit. Most of us aren’t comfortable with that; and we often want life to be ‘simpler’. But if simpler life just means following clear instructions and being a cog, you might want to think twice.

I was watching The Dropout and it got me to read a tonne of stuff about Elizabeth Holmes. The storytelling was pretty interesting but my main takeaway was that Elizabeth Holmes seem to be so extremely caught up with the story about young founders, raising startup capital, changing the world, getting the serious guys, putting together pitches, that she forgot what matters was for the startup to have something that actually works.

The thing about business is that we have been so caught up with the story of having to sell. We usually have something that works but people don’t buy it. The challenge becomes selling, making things convincing, faking it till you make it. There’s the endless chicken-and-egg issues that you have to get over. Yet once you enlist the network effect, there’s no return, and the ground game have to catch up with the air game.

What if you keep pushing the story in the air game, in order to get more funding, to get higher valuations, to be able to get your ground game in order? At some point the leverage becomes so high, the margin becomes too thin for you because the gap between promise and reality is so wide. It will just unravel. One of the things about stories is that they can really drive us – so it’s also important that our stories have some firm footing in reality; knowing not just which story to pick and write but which are the ones you actually can write.

12 years ago, around this time of the year was when I applied and interviewed for a couple of government scholarships. I just finished my national service, and was working part-time at a small company selling household water filters. I was reminded of the case interview that was part of the selection process.

The question was around the strategy to brand and market a company involved in green beer manufacturing. I went all out on a branding campaign built around St Patrick’s Day, the celebratory mood, appealing to the Irish ancestry and all. And the directors and Assistant CEO nodded without batting an eyelid while I went through the presentation.

When I left the interview and met a friend who also just went through it, I asked him how he approached the topic. To my great embarrassment, he mentioned he talked about the circular economy, targeting consumers who were conscious about the environment and so on.

I guess the directors at IE Singapore were certainly open-minded if not mildly amused by me. Either by my strange general knowledge about the Irish or the creative approach I took with the topic. Either way, I was actually offered a scholarship and the rest is history.