Kevin Low

This is a post full of questions with no answers. In line with my belief that questions are more important than answers, I’m cultivating the ability to ask good questions and get us all thinking.

Are you the sort of people who read the operating manual of a device or machine before touching and working on it? Or do you figure out along the way? Or you treat the manual as a guide you go to only when something goes wrong? How important do you think are the intentions of the creator?

Do you also have an operating manual in your head about how the world works? Or how others should behave, respond to you, and achieve good things? Question is which one of us really expects our operating manuals to be followed by anyone at all, especially when no one has really read the manuals and you have not yet written it? How often do we actively convey our expectations to others? Do we mostly expect others to read our minds? Have we practiced articulating and communicating expectations?

When I was a kid, I consumed lots of self-help books. Mostly in the self-help section of bookstores, sometimes in the library – I certainly helped myself very much through acquiring most of these knowledge for free. One of the biggest things I learnt was that leadership is not about being in the front, asking people to do things, and bossing others around. It is to build relationships and influence with people; and others would naturally look towards you.

Of course, that is the hard part of things for most people. But then there’s also the additional challenge of actually knowing where to go when people look to you for directions. Now that’s where the second part of ‘being influenced’ comes from. It’s good to be an independent thinker but a leader cannot be thinking about everything from ground up and developing every solution by himself. He ought to draw upon the strengths of the team. He needs to know also whom he can approach in order to seek good advice on the way forward on a variety of matters.

This model of leadership places a leader not as a driving force but the conduit. The leader steers but he don’t have to be the fuel, the force nor the front guy.

I wrote about misaligned incentives, but the more specific situation I was describing is the principal-agent problem that is so rife these days. It might have to do with marketing, and influence. More attention is paid to what people say than how people are actually paid. As an economist, I think it is still important to see what is the incentive structure behind people’s actions. Of course, the incentives involves other elements such as sales targets, the kinds of conversation and culture an organisation is having.

As we think about how the new industrialism is going to be weighing even more heavily on production from capital, the value that labour brings will likely be oriented towards selling. This is challenging to me because it has an impact on the distribution of rents and gains towards those with capital, and those with ability to sell. And organisations will have to think of how to incentivise and help their people sell more. This naturally seem to pit the people against the interest of their customers at least in the short term. Reputation and longer-term sustainability needs to be added into the equation.

Insurance policies needs to be designed well, with the best interests of the customers in mind in order to ensure the reputation of the organisation remains good and keep customers flowing. But customer experience at the point of commitment cannot be determinant on the decisions or such products. To me, the sales agent is providing a service and the only way his interest can be aligned to the customer is when he is paid a fixed fee by the customer to provide that service.

I had people I’m coaching ask me why they should put their hobbies or interest in their CV – how is it relevant? To be fair it probably doesn’t matter what you say there though it does show your personality. And to be a bit more candid, your prospective employer probably has a better view of your real hobbies by following or checking your social media account than reading your CV.

Either way, I think your interest and hobbies section shows a bit more of your personal side and your personality. And it allows you to stand out, to be a person rather than just a cog, to allow others to take an interest in you as a human and not just a worker. In fact, if your hobby is swimming, go ahead and state your favourite stroke; if you’re interested in classical music, mention your favourite classic piece; if you enjoy DJ-ing, list down your ideal 5-track mixtape. Go all the way, show you care, and not just have a hobby listed because everyone has it there.

The way you approach your hobby bears a hint on how you might want to approach work; there should be moments of light-heartedness, enjoyment, amidst the seriousness. Your identity and personality will also leave a mark in the work that you do, just as your hobby will contain that mark.

I had a chat with a friend who turned into a financial planner (which of course has become a bit of a new title for what we used to call ‘insurance agents’). I realised soon based on what he described of the industry, that insurance, much like property, has the feature of growing naturally alongside a growing economy.

And insurance agents, like property agents/brokers, have the advantage of earning their income through commissions which are linked to the underlying transaction value. In the case of insurance agents, it is the premiums. And of course, premiums are functions of insured sum, and everywhere we know, financial protection is often calculated on the basis of income capacity (rather than in expenses). This means a growing economy and rising incomes will raise the financial protection needed, and raise the premium payments, thereby naturally uplifting the commissions of insurance agents in absolute sum even though there might not be a change in the value of the service rendered.

More significantly, I’ve always been against the way the incentives are structured in this industry. Sales commissions on the basis of insurance sales is simply an unsustainable way of incentivisation and there’s fundamental misalignment of interest between the agents and the customers. I’m still a champion for Do-It-Yourself when it comes to financial planning. While I do think you can free up your mind-space on financial planning by going to a financial planner, I’d rather go to a fee-based financial planner rather than someone whose incentives are based on sales/product commissions. Especially not one who is subjected to sales targets.

I wrote about scaling laksa in Millennials’ Narrative, and then I reminded us that we need to consider what we are scaling and are we really doing ourselves and others a service when we try to scale things. Infrastructure is one thing that originally appeared to be the sort of things that benefit from scaling. After all, they are more cost effective when distributed across more people. And they are a good way to distribute wealth.

But is bigger necessarily better? What sort of utilisation levels are we expecting, and how can we be sure that the trends in demand for the piece of utilisation will continue? What sort of income, positive externality and wealth will it create?

Today, infrastructure is too often about politics more than economics and we are worse off because of that. When we don’t properly size projects before working on them; when we focus overly on a piece of infrastructure than the overall system of infrastructure. Thinking long term about the maintenance, the lifecycle of the asset is important. How many governments are thinking through that enough?

Those who have followed my blog, my mentees and coaching clients would know I’m an educator at heart. And I had some really dated education products still listed for purchase. Now, I’ve just completed a really jam-packed intense 9-day email course design which I’m doing a bit of a soft launch here on my site. This is the first of my coaching products after getting really good feedback on the ebook which lays an important foundation for the materials I teach in this email course.