Coordination problem

Most of modernity is built upon solving coordination problems. As we coordinate on more things, we discover yet more things that requires coordination to work and as we work on them, we progress. This is a story of Singapore, its progress from Third World to First. It is not about having brilliant engineers or Nobel laureates though they can certainly contribute something to this issue.

In case you haven’t realise, there’s a lot of resources about how Singapore came to be the way it is, at least in terms of physical forms and our urban system. The Centre for Liveable Cities publishes their research, rich with anecdotes and experience from our early nation-builders. In there, you’d realise most of the work in terms of raising living standards, solving issues of water, sanitation, energy, housing, are not rocket science but making bold trade-offs.

Charlie Munger had gone to the extent of saying that China’s transition into the economy today is possible due to its ability to model and take from the learnings of Singapore’s nation-building. Of course he goes on to attribute it to Lee Kuan Yew. The real world is much more nuanced and it’d be important to study the historical context, the team surrounding our nation’s first Prime Minister and so on.

But suffice to say, coordination problems are intractable; and in our society today, we continue to struggle with them even as we already had great success dealing with much of them. As we progress, these coordination problems naturally becomes more tricky and the roadmap we used to have disappears because we’re now at the frontier of development with no one else’s experience to learn from.

The climate challenge of today is exactly a coordination challenge that the world face today. And unfortunately, the experiences we had as a small island nation offers very little ideas to the world about how to navigate the climate change issues. Not to mention the fact that Singapore itself is often under flak for having high per-capita carbon emissions – which is nothing but a feature of a statistical quirk of being a highly industrialised, small island economy.

Misalignments & feedback

I’ve written about how we don’t learn or talk enough about feedback – receiving and giving of feedback. So this episode from Brene Brown’s Dare to Lead podcast is an absolute gold mine. The story that Brene shared right in the beginning of the podcast is wonderful. The kind of emotional intelligence, ability to disarm people, muscles involved in selecting the right words, the body language, is just so important and amazing.

We want feedbacks to gather ideas and leverage on the perspectives of others; but we don’t want to listen to complaints or be put in a position to defend ourselves. So how do we set up environments to encourage constructiveness and positivity in the process of feedback-gathering? How do we set up a process to get people to cycle through both the pleasant and the unpleasant parts of feedback giving and gathering? We all need to learn that.

To be able to set up the scene, to deal with any misalignments is so important. The first step that Brene Brown introduced, to make sure that the one you’re eliciting the feedback from is able to feel that you both are on the same side. That is so important. The consistent reminder we should have during this pandemic times that getting you to do this or that; to comply with restrictions and so on, is that we are all trying to keep one another safe, and to be able to flourish once again as a society. It’s a pity these points tend to fall on deaf ears in our outcome-obsessed society.

Staying Small

When I was in secondary school, I was part of a debate team that had to argue against the house during a round of debate where the motion was ‘This house believes that size matters’. It was a truistic motion; there was no way we could argue against it. The proposition simply has to define size in a way that is broad and all-encompassing including physical, or any other measurable metric, and size matters – not just when it is big but also when it’s small.

Size matters, and sometimes there’s nothing wrong with being small and refusing to scale. Not scaling is different from not growing. A. business can grow in different ways and it’s not just about size. Revenues can grow through pricing up and providing more value for the services rendered to the same client base. Profits can also grow if the products and services can be delivered at ever-increasing efficiency.

Sometimes businesses stays small because the potential client base they are good at servicing is just that group and the business sustains well with healthy margin without forcefully growing. I think we have to understand and appreciate that even from an economic development point of view. This is contributing to diversity and richness in an economy. There’s no need for every business to be like a Starbucks, MacDonalds, or IKEA.

Problem of nice culture

When I first heard Brene Brown spoke about the problem of a “nice culture” referring to workplaces and corporate environments, it blew my mind. She was talking about the need for brave leadership and from her deep and rich research with real world leaders, she uncovered facets what courageous leadership meant and what it did not.

So the difficulty with that research is that she had to look first at what it isn’t because most of language and expressions are more well developed on the negative side of things. As it turns out, we seem neurologically wired to dwell more on lack than what we have. Which probably is a post for another day.

One of the things in the workplace culture that lacks courageous leadership is the avoidance of difficult conversation. This gets masked in a culture where everyone is so nice and simply refuse to give negative feedback or be honest about failures. While it is probably plain that such a culture hurts innovation and prevents people from moving forward, the “niceness” bit of things seemed worth protecting.

That is until you realise the niceness isn’t genuine niceness; it is driven by fear. And when I mentioned this to a close circle of friends, they said it was the fear of conflict. Which on the surface may seem to have little to do with leadership but it does. It is because the leadership is not trusted to be bold to do what is right that the fear of conflict arises. There’s the sense an individual must fend for himself/herself even when trying to discover the truth and making things right.

Niceness is the fear of offending that results from having witnessed abuse of power from leaders who are insecure about themselves. It can be as subtle as just raising their voice over others to insist on a point, use of his/her veto regularly to ensure decisions made reflects well on himself/herself rather than for the organisation.

I’ve been in these cultures and I guess I’ve often also failed to look past the niceness into the fear. Rather than to say nice-ness is bad, it’s more important to ask whether there’s such fear beneath the niceness and how do we address that. How do leaders lead and inspire a courage culture where people can have tough conversations and be willing to tell their leaders “I don’t think I can take this…” rather than just silently resign and leave for “personal reasons”.

Effort in vain

Does success teach us anything? What can we learn from success if we try to examine the elements of luck that is incorporated? A whole load; it is important for us to recognise whether we are studying success to retrospectively tease out our brilliance or to really examine which part of our efforts actually contribute our success.

One of the problems I notice about people used to achieving success and smart about hacking ‘wins’ is that they want to optimise effort and they hate it when effort is squandered along the way not towards the success they wanted. Yet learning doesn’t work this way. Learning, being creative, solving problems, trying things out is always about applying effort in vain towards the ‘goal’.

But if you notice that your goal is instead is to be a better person, to grow your skills, to deepen your experience, to serve others. Then, detours are just opportunities. And ‘failures’, won’t be in vain. Your efforts are gifts to the world and they are never in vain.

Hedonist-seeking

Seth Godin wrote about the hedonic buffet and I want to apply it to thinking about jobs and careers. There are so many choices out there and we all now have so many interests. We also have different narratives telling us whether a job is meaningful or not, and whether the career is going to be sustainable for our lifestyle and so on. We may keep seeking and switching, or focus so much on building out our CV, forgetting what it is for.

There’s no single CV that allows you to land any job you want. Industries shift and move; but so would your interests and areas. I suggest you drop the labels. The titles like engineers, lawyers, teachers, accountants are useful when you look at others, when you have to search for roles and sort them on a website. But start thinking of your interests in terms of the problems you’re trying to solve, the kind of creativity you want to deploy, the kind of interactions you want to have.

At a buffet, people think about what food they like to eat, and also what are the expensive dishes which will make the buffet experience worth it. But they eventually sit down and eat. You have to be consuming the meal to make the buffet worth the while, not just infinitely stacking your plate. Likewise with jobs and careers you’re eventually trying to go somewhere, and pursue some kind of interest. You need to be clear about that.

For more ideas how to approach these questions, download my ebook.

Writing Textbooks

I wonder who writes textbooks. What kind of person and what kind of relationship would one have with the subject matter for one to write textbooks. And actually wondered that before, more than 12 years ago, and came to the conclusion that it’s useful but eventually we all need to learn things in our own words.

And so it’s more useful to make notes, to produce materials that have been thoroughly digested, distilled. I’ve previously distilled a whole bunch of materials for students at A-Levels; the students who were able to access them on the now-defunct ERPZ.net which I used to run were privileged.

For those preparing for A Levels right now or in the future, you might like to enjoy this privilege by purchasing my re-packaged materials linked on my writings page. They are available for sale at affordable prices. I spent 3 years teaching A-Levels students, and about 1.5 years teaching undergraduates Economics. So don’t miss the ability to take on self-learning and move away from being spoon-fed.

Old Stuff

Discovering some of my old writings (previously published on ERPZ.net) and now archived here on my blog is pretty cool. So apparently, even before taking and interest in and then writing about the Right to Repair, I wrote about planned obsolescence before! Again, that was more than 10 years ago, and the film project I cited, Story of Stuff, continued its work of encouraging more exposure of companies’ supply chain and the way the world is using various different materials.

What is wrong with old stuff anyways? Shouldn’t we try and use them as best as we can? And what do we really think about when we are throwing away things? Do we imagine they just disappear? Where do they actually go? It’s probably worth understanding the process and knowing the impact it eventually brings.

In my previous job with IE Singapore, I was supporting Singapore companies in the environmental solutions space internationalise. I therefore had the privilege of visiting some of the less traveled bits of Singapore including visiting some of our waste incineration plants, Pulau Semakau (which is our only, and offshore landfill). I’ve even gotten the chance to visit similar facilities abroad such as in Ho Chi Minh City. It is wonderful that we have evolved urban centres to be able to manage, treat, and eventually remove waste from our lives systematically.

But if it causes us to forget the negative effects on our environment, then something is wrong. Worst, if businesses running waste management and treatment facilities want to have continued streams of waste around in order to maintain their business and operations, then we’re not evolving our society in the right direction.

Job Interviews

More than 10 years ago, whilst I was preparing and working on my scholarship interviews, I actually wrote to give some advice around those interviews. The fact that it’s been more than 10 years ago scares me but the points that I gathered in the piece is relevant, even for job or work interviews.

I quote some of the points I find really powerful and applies very much to just about any interviews:

Remember there is no right or wrong answers in an interview so never look as if you regretted something you just mentioned (if you really do, please correct yourself immediately on the spot) and in many sense, as long as you are sure what you’re saying, you’re giving the right answer.

Don’t appear self-important but show the interviewers what you are willing to do to serve them and what you’re not willing. When you’re given the tough questions, ask for time to think about it. You could say, “Wow, that’s a big question, give me a moment to organize my answer” or something like that. Try to think about the tough ones beforehand so that you’re more prepared to handle them. Don’t bet on them not coming out.

Don’t hesitate to clarify their questions; if you don’t know what they’re asking, ask them questions to clarify; sometimes the question they’re trying to pose is more close-ended than it seems.

The underlying premise is that we should just be ourselves, and really chill. There is so many different tactics to do well but what they all don’t replace is good and strong preparation coupled with alignment of your skills and experience for the role you’re gunning for.

With so many jobs requiring practical wisdom and intelligence in dealing with problems, interviews have shifted to lean heavily on looking at role playing and situations. Developing that ability to help everyone be at ease and chill; inserting appropriate humour, would be really useful.

Corporate Histories

Amongst Singapore’s government-linked companies, there is much interesting corporate histories that is worth exploring, understanding and appreciating. I wonder why we don’t document this things more, and to learn lessons from them. Sometimes it could be because we think the past is not relevant, or that we don’t want to seem like we are digging into ‘mistakes’ made by CEOs. But I think we are missing great stories and lessons by shying away from these.

Sembcorp is one of the companies I have been looking at for a while. Today, they are a sustainability solutions company with business across Europe (UK), Middle East, India, China and Southeast Asia; focused on Energy, Water & Wastewater, as well as development of industrial parks (China, Vietnam and Indonesia).

It is interesting to note that just a couple of years back, they also do have businesses in South Africa, Chile and Panama – mainly water concessions where they were basically retailing municipal water to ordinary people and businesses. These businesses were divested in a bid to focus.

But this idea of focusing is not new to Sembcorp. When it was formed in 1998, it was actually from the merger of Singapore Technologies Industrial Corp (STIC) and Sembawang Corporation. At that point, the newly formed company had businesses in the area of infrastructure, marine engineering, information technology, and lifestyle. It was a proper conglomerate, a popular sort of business structure in Asia and also early days of nation-building. Network, capital and influence all comes together to allow businesses to be built and expanded.

It might be unthinkable this day but in the early 2000s, Sembcorp actually entered the waste management business in Singapore (which it is still involved in), on top of owning the Sembcorp Marine business, Sembcorp Utilities with the various utilities plants in Batam, Jurong Island. It also owned Pacific Internet (one of the first Internet Service Provider in Singapore), the Delifrance franchise in Singapore, Sembcorp Logistics (subsequently acquired and rebranded by Toll Logistics). You can see what’s with the lifestyle as well as the information technology involvement they had.

My personal favourite in terms of the random mix of business that Sembcorp was, is their full ownership of the Singapore Mint (which continues till today). It wasn’t super clear to me how Singapore Mint which was started by Dr Goh Keng Swee in 1968 ended up in the hands of Sembcorp. This probably warrants a separate article itself but I speculate that it came through ST’s acquisition of Chartered Industries of Singapore (which held Singapore Mint). So ST must have structured Singapore Mint into STIC when it merged with Sembawang Corporation resulting in it residing with Sembcorp.

So what if we know all of these history of corporations? I think it is important to recognise that corporate histories have an impact on the company’s culture, identity, and the complexity. In fact, it probably is extremely complex from a human resource point of view with non-uniform salary scales and all kinds of standards or protocols which are not rationalised. After all, when you’re dabbling with so many different industries, you can always trot out arguments about having to compete in the different spaces. These nuances also help us appreciate Singapore’s nation-building efforts and subsequent impact on local capabilities better.