Kevin Low

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.

I’ve been reading Annie Duke’s Thinking in Bets. I’d say it’s a fantastic book we all should take time to look into and consider the implications for our thinking. It is very subtle unlike the usual popular non-fiction compiling studies and evidence to support a compelling theory or story. Annie’s book is largely a combination of personal experience, research and she is helping us recognise something we tend to gloss over in our lives.

My personal journey in understanding what learning is about and how it interacts with evolution started when I was barely 15 and read Eric D Beinhocker’s “The Origin of Wealth”. As it turns out, complex systems grow by being able to run loads of tiny experiments that enables it to learn and adapt at system level. That’s neat but the implications on a single individual is not that clear. The only encouragement is that survival is in itself a kind of win.

So back to “Thinking in Bets”; it gave me a new perspective in terms of reflecting back about life, actions taken, decisions and choices made in a manner that allows me to make room for chance and probability which is how the world really works. Take for example one of the biggest choice and commitment in my life: taking on the scholarship.

On one hand, having left public service, I could think it was a mistake to have taken up the scholarship and spent 6 years of bondage to the service when I had not develop my career further in there. Yet on the other hand, I might not have gone to UK for my undergraduate studies and got the exposure I had if I didn’t take on the scholarship.

Rather, the way to approach it is to recognise firstly that when I took up the scholarship, I had not expected that IE Singapore would merge with SPRING to form Enterprise Singapore. And because I gave public service a chance, I got a much more global and broad experience; and made the friends I did, got to appreciate and understand business in a profound way that helps me do my work as a consultant today. It certainly wasn’t a mistake, not when you are able to think through the complexity of such decisions, the limited knowledge, and the outcomes produced that brought you to the state of reflection this very moment.

Do you lose your ideas when you share them, shelf them, or when they fail? Or do you lose your ideas when someone else takes it, makes it happen and succeed? Then what happens when people take your ideas and then fail? Do you pin it on them, and go on to try make those ideas work? Or do you decide to discard them instead?

Gaining and having ideas is such a mysterious process but losing an idea is basically a story you tell yourself. Because so many ideas are lost because we dismiss them when they come. And yet we behave as if we lost them when someone does all the hard work of putting those ideas into action and succeed (“he stole my idea”). On the other hand, when people fail with those same ideas, we might also lose them (as if we never had them).

This story is important because it affects how you share your ideas and make the effort to develop them. It is easy to claim and insist some kind of “ownership” and hence the story around “losing it”. But what if ownership of one’s idea is about taking actions, about developing them further, investing into them? Then you can only earn ownership and never quite lose it.

As we build organisations, raise families, work with teams, do we want to create a culture around fear or around support? We know we certainly can get employees, kids and even dogs to obey because of fear. But is that the kind of culture we want to develop as we move into the future? Do we want our next generation to continue perpetuating these fears and projecting them on to even future generations?

During this period of the Resignation Tsunami, it is important for companies to begin realising the implicit fear-based tactics they apply on staff. It usually surrounds the idea of scarcity and how they might not be able to find a job, or even come back to their job. I’ve heard more than once teachers who yearn to leave the MOE schools and to explore their own interests and passions only to stay because they cannot be sure their passions can translate to some livelihood, and also because they’ve been reminded in one way or another that it would be hard to return to teaching service.

I think that any organisations that claims it is hard to return to it once one leaves should be flagged out. That is a major red flag because an organisation most certainly would embrace talents and sure enough, many people who leaves within a short period leaves a bad impression and may be assessed as one whom the organisation do not prefer. That’s not a punishment for the people who left but simply an observation on their quality. Again, we have to be aware and conscious these are fear-based tactics to talent management and retention.

At some point, the public institutions and government service ought to help regulate against such abuses of power on the part of the employers. Moreover, when employees take back their power in a labour market facing shortage of labour, and then exercise their power, employers tend to blame them for being unfit for the work or being entitled. Yet such sense that the fault lies on employees is generated from centuries of power imbalances, especially in the global south and eastern economies where labour seems to be abundant. As a society, we need to decide if we want this to continue.