Kevin Low

Your current habits are perfectly designed to deliver your current results.

James Clear, Atomic Habits

Until we realise that it takes changing our own systems, processes and habits in order to change our results, we will continue doing the same old things, sometimes trying harder, to get different results. We might realise it can be challenging to figure out when we have to try harder and when we have to try something different. And then again, what does it means to be different?

Sometimes, trying something else need not be so different after all. When one is ‘bad’ at a subject, it doesn’t have to be changing your focus to a different subject. For example in my case, I spent my first 15 years being bad in English language. What changed was that instead of reading more fiction and trying to memorise vocabulary. For me, the beauty of English language became apparent to me when I saw how you could construct sentences to cogently make a point. To argue for what you believe in.

It will take a lot of effort to think about what is it that you can do differently in order to change your outcome. And sometimes, tweaking your system isn’t about an overhaul. It is a tweak. Those tweaks can really improve things.

One of the largest challenge that the bureaucracy face when it comes to managing staff is dealing with burn-out, and creating the right motivations. There’s always this presumption that staff would be motivated to serve the public, and to uphold their role, to deal with emotional distress by themselves. Managers who rose from being excellent individual contributors can do better with supporting their staff and teams during this pandemic and mental health crisis.

Part of it involves making genuine connections with their staff. For the longest time, I’ve seen how bosses’ solution to employees’ burn-out was to ‘keep calm and carry on’. I don’t think stoicism is categorically wrong but it doesn’t fully account for our psychological make-up. Public-serving work involves a lot of emotional labour; and to a large extent, the inability to help employees steward their emotional resources is really poor management. By being more than just a boss, but also a friend, a coach and a counsellor to a staff, managers are actually managing the actual resources that is required to carry out the work that public service entails.

We tend to think that public resources are just tax-payers’ money and public infrastructures. If we want to really be good stewards of public resources, it should be about taking good care of the emotional and mental health of our public servants. Are our permanent secretaries, statutory board CEOs really taking care of our people? Or are we just busy trying to make numbers that ‘serve the public’?

I wrote about the basis of competition in schools. What about in business? Is it price? There are many prices associated with a specific business: the price of their shares, the price of their products, the price they pay their staff, and the price they pay their suppliers, and so on. What is the price that we should take reference from?

Or are those a distraction like the way grades are distraction from learning? Because what is a business for? To make a profit? Hardly. Profits are incentives; and incentives tend not to be an end in themselves but a means to an end for a system. So what is the end that we want to achieve as a society to allow businesses to continue perpetuating? Probably to continue producing and delivering goods and services that people need; that makes the society ‘better’, and raise standards of living.

So why are businesses talking so much about the prices? Are these prices linked to the end goals of the businesses? What are the end goals they have in mind?

As we step deeper into the future of work, one with lots of knowledge-working, sitting in front of a computer, with a pandemic out there and remote work, there’s going to be less boundaries between work and other segments of life. The ‘always on’ mode will be tightening around us and eventually suffocating us.

The ability to truly disconnect and disengage from work is so important that our bodies would otherwise rebel by shutting us down, both physically and mentally. And that’s why we not only need to think about the amount of time we need to finish a piece of work, but also the amount of rest we will need in-between the work, and after that.

We should be scheduling the rest into our calendars, and that should not be something negotiable. Even if we think it is. Our culture still needs quite a bit of work to get there.

It’s the Christmas season and a period of lots of shopping, mostly for others rather than oneself. Gifting is a tricky affair and most economists think it’s a bad idea to give someone something in particular. In fact, that might be the reason for Boxing Day; where you box up the stuff you don’t want from your Christmas gifts and give them to the less privileged. Yes, it is not another day to shop, and certainly nothing to do with fighting in the boxing ring.

It is much better for you to offer a cash gift and let people do the shopping themselves for what they actually need. Yet this can feel hyper-rational so the modern economy settles for something in-between by giving shopping vouchers instead. It is cash already spent on something but allows you to go through the process of choosing what you want on yourself.

And then there’s a whole economy and market out there which simply caters to selling products which are specifically designed to be gifts. These typically feature fancier packaging and more frills designed to pass the message ‘I’m being extravagant with you’. They are also environmentally unfriendly and produces much more waste than we need to.

Peacock feathers may be necessary for the peacock to attract a mate; but being environmentally wasteful to impress our fellow earth-dwellers probably is not wise systematically. Let us not be fooled by the ways of our culture.

Companies have long recognised that hiring talented people off the job market is an important aspect in market competition since the labour market became much more open and knowledge workers became much more mobile. In the past when most employment were seen as lifelong, companies really only had to focus on competing on getting their products and services out.

Labour was previously seen as largely rather ‘fungible’; it was probably more important to get cheap workers than good workers because in the traditional labour economics, quality of labour wasn’t so much a quantifiable parameter.

No longer, but there are two ways to think about this competition. We can hire talents to make better products, perform better services for customers; and at the same time, it takes these talents off the market for our competitors and thereby strengthening our position. For those with monopoly power, the second objective might be more important than the first.

This is because the monopolies tend to have the power to pay for these talents through the market power they weld on both ends: both the labour market as well as the market for their customers. They are big enough to be able to squeeze the more commoditised labour while paying big bucks for their ‘talents’, and also pass on some of the costs to customers.

There is a price to pay however, for talents who are in these hoarding entities; (1) they may end up being unfulfilled or unsatisfied; (2) they tend to end up being disempowered rather than empowered in these environments; (3) they are conditioned to take less risks.

(2) and (3) contributes to (1) but the dissatisfaction can come from the bureaucracy and continued need to keep up with appearances rather than practice genuine innovation. (2) happens partly because monopolies are great businesses or entities that can survive poor management thanks to their power. Finally, (3) is a result of these environment that tends towards status quo and entrenched power structures.

And sometimes, just sometimes, the biggest monopoly out there is the state.

What do you care about is not always something your body, personality, character imposes on you. You can make a choice whether to care or not; and a lot of it depends on the goals and purpose you have selected in your life. For the longest time in human history, what people care about is true basic survival, and also survival of the tribe, the family.

When we talk about survival today, it is actually a different level, there’s more than just physical safety, and having a filled stomach; it is often also about psychological safety, dignity, and some degree of a filled ego. Likewise, we start to subconsciously (or consciously) care about a lot more things than we used to.

With so much to care about, there’s that tension to between being able to not care about non-core objectives, to be willing to be criticised for being single-minded – against trying to juggle and balance just about everything and potentially achieving none of your core objectives.

What are clothes for? To protect us from elements, to cover us, to make us look good, give us a certain sense of identity? Probably all of them? So what does appropriate mean here? From a perspective on weather and climate, or activity, or culture, or identity?

Dress codes are cultural innovations and we need to see how we are interacting with the culture whenever we dress in certain ways. The awareness of this allows us to gain some agency to decide, what we are really dressing for and which goal we want to pursue in our choice.

Of course, I’m really not really talking about dressing but the many other choices in life we make so subconsciously or without conscious thought that we take them for granted. We forget that we are playing by cultural rules, we even forget that we actually have a choice in terms of what purpose we can choose to serve.