Tag Archives: motivation

Tailpipe emissions

We moved to Sydney earlier this year and one of the main highways that the buses move on to get to our place in the suburbs is Parramatta Road. It was a highway leading into the western suburbs but now it is just a road – a relatively narrow one for the heavy traffic that goes through it.

I recall one morning when I walked along the road to get to the bus stop that gets me a bus to the city. There were heavy trucks going down the road, with large SUVs and smaller passenger vehicles as well. I didn’t recall tailpipe emissions bothering me that much back in Singapore – perhaps only the heat that the cars were emitting then. But I noticed how much the tailpipe emissions were stinking up the air even in Sydney where it was less humid than in Singapore and smells tend not to linger or stay strong in the air.

It did make me wonder what the roads would be like without those tailpipe emissions. And that’s probably the dream of those EV companies and the policymakers who are trying to push for more EVs on the roads. Singapore could have done that way earlier; given our ability to manage the vehicle population through COE. Moreover, Singapore already has one of the highest taxes on vehicles in the world. This means the population was ready to shell out the kind of money that an EV would cost.

It is a fine balance to strike given that there’s a lot more consideration around the readiness of our electricity network infrastructure to develop the charging capacities needed. There’s a lot of thinking around whether our vehicle refueling infrastructure is going to be disrupted – and how we can manage those disruptions. Sometimes we just want the transition to happen immediately and for all of us to gain access to the latest technology at reasonable costs. Singapore has done a good job juggling these difficulties and we can do more to explain the linkages between systems to allow us to pinpoint and put pressure on the bottlenecks.

Self-learning and ending industrial learning

There was an age when we needed mass education to get everyone up to speed on some basic things. Civics, some basic sense of rules, laws as well as literacy to be able to perform functions as a citizen, be it to serve in the community, read public notices or just the wisdom to spot a scam. Mass education helps when the parents at home don’t have that education background or ability to inculcate all that into their children. It enable very quick uplift of a generation of people. And of course, we designed credentials, qualifications and all that to go with the mass education to certify the skills and abilities, and to use educational qualities as a means to filter people.

More importantly, those were times when knowledge and information was scarce. And schools became essentially the distribution centers of such products. Teachers were facilitators of this transfer and distribution of both explicit knowledge as well as tacit knowledge about civic behaviour, values and character. This is why the problems and tests in exams are more about what and why; less about the how though there’s attempts at getting students to ‘solve problems’. But the application of knowledge was something taken to be done later in life through work and other contexts, not really at school – unless it is a vocational institute. In any case, most of the problems defined are pretty closed ended – with right answers or model answers.

Today, learning can be done through very different channels. Self-learning through the internet is pretty straight-forward. The core skills that is required in school becomes more about developing wisdom and discernment in the information received; the taxonomy around what constitutes more close-end problems vs open-ended problems where solutions can be more multi-faceted. And because this is the case, we need to reconsider how we value the old school certs and qualifications and find new ways to test and identify the talents in our midst, as well as the fit for various different work.

Gone are the days where we can easily get people to fit into the work and job roles designed within a company. We may have to start finding the right talents to deal with the crucial problems we want to solve and then leave the rest to be outsourced or dealt with by technology. At the same time, the ability to self-learn becomes so much more important. Not only should we start giving employees time to self-learn, we need to invest into structures, environment and coaching that enables that.

Good professional versus good employee

Sometimes I wonder if being a good professional can be different from being a good employee. After all, what is being a good employee when you’re over-delivering or serving your customers better than your employer expects? Is that “stealing” from your company? How about when you are over-worked by trying to be a good employee – does that set a bad example as a professional?

There seem to be some tension between doing good work and being a good employee. And it has to do perhaps with the actual business culture and character of the firm that you’re in. Or it comes through from the self-interested capitalist identity of what a firm stands for. It is strange though, that the firms that would persist tend to be the ones who have been able to uphold their values and commit to them.

So all the short run success factors and metrics turn out to be pretty poor indicator of long-run success. Yet people feel like they have no choice but to stick to these short term metrics because people can’t patiently wait for results or their fruits.

Specific thinking

I wrote about the holistic thinking that was characterised by western researchers of Asian’s approach towards persuasion as contextualised by Erin Meyer. I had the chance to reflect a bit more on specific thinking as I begin to observe it more and more at work in western workplaces and cultures. There are no right or wrong and the good and bads can only be appreciated from particular perspectives or lenses.

Specific thinking parcels out bits of work and various tasks, having more of a tendency to operate in silos even when coordination is excellent. This can make things difficult to change and also individuals becomes less sensitive to the overall workings of the system they are part of. It can be good in that it reduces the anxiety around being unable to bring about the intended collective outcome because one can just focus on delivering one’s part and leaving the rest to others. Being specific in thinking also encourages focus on the smaller specific outcome that is within one’s control.

However, specific thinking may mean that there’s less ability to navigate situations that are far more complex where clarity does not come instantly. For example, during a business development meeting, one may not yet figure out if there’s chance of collaborating or working with the prospect when we are still in discovery phase. Specific thinking can lead one to try and force a result and be counterproductive, or to give up too early.

Specific thinking may also render us unable to genuinely celebrate collective wins as one becomes overly focused on the parts they are ascribing to themselves to the extent they ignore other parts of the system they are part of.

Just some observations and muses on my part.

Expert vs advisors

I’ve been reading the ‘Strategy and the Fat Smoker’ by David Maister. I think very highly of David’s crisp thinking in the manner he approach strategy and the manner in which he cuts through issues and topics. He simplifies the concepts to the core of the subject matter without ignoring the human elements in them.

One of the interesting ideas he introduced is the idea of expert vs advisors when it comes to serving in professional services. A lot of consultants claim to desire to serve customers as advisors, as trusted partners but in reality they want to be treated as the expert, to have control and defend their expertise rather than to build strong trusting relationships with their clients.

In essence, from my perspective, the expert cares about the topic and the subject matter more than the client’s problem. And as a result, the client can benefit from the expertise but more as flat information or knowledge than actionable insights.

The advisor may not be the expert but he gains his authority to consult with the client through his deep understanding of the client’s problem. And that allows his synthesis of insights gathered from other parties, especially those who consider themselves experts.

A client can decide what he needs is an expert but he can never expect the bespoke synthesis to come from the expert. He or she will have to take responsibility for that.

Facts or opinions

I saw a pretty brilliant video of a mother trying to teach her child about facts, opinions and mindsets in response to social environments. It’s in Chinese so I paraphrase in English the approach she has taken.

She held up an apple as her daughter eats a cob of corn and asked, “This is an apple. Is that statement a fact or an opinion?”

“A fact” said the daughter.

“Yes. That is a fact. Now Mummy says that the apple in my hand is tastier than the cob of corn you’re eating. Is that statement a fact or an opinion?”

“An opinion” said the daughter, still happily chewing on her corn.

“So when the kids at the playground says that they don’t like you and don’t want to play with you. What do you think that is? It is an opinion.” the mother continues.

The mother than took out a mug with black coffee in it. She said, “Look, daddy loves to drink this black, bitter drink but mummy doesn’t like it. Whether someone loves it or don’t like it, the coffee is the same, it has the same color, smell and look. People liking or not liking it says more about themselves than the coffee.”

She went on to say, “So when those kids at the playground say they don’t like you, it has nothing to do with you being you. You are still the same.”

The wisdom extended from the simple analogies were really brilliant and the manner she brought it forth and contextualised it for the daughter really made for a great model in teaching these ideas.

Making the contribution

For first time in history but it’s already been a while, the world collectively seem to have abundance. The total amount of food produced could feed the entire world one and a half times over. If energy is used efficiently and excesses trimmed, the entire world should have decent amount of power to live normal modern lives. Of course that depends on what you mean by normal but I’m covering the same point that there’s enough in the world but the problem is distribution.

And distribution is not just a physical problem of course. Distribution can be an economic problem in itself. The fact that the market doesn’t really care that much about the distribution of resources, buying power / puchasing power is actually a problem. It skews the global economy towards what the people with means needs rather than producing for the best outcomes of the world. And this is perhaps why energy continues to be skewed towards the developed, high energy consumption countries or markets.

So making a contribution to this world isn’t really about production. If the world continues in the same fashion tomorrow, you can really make a greater impact on someone’s life – from an incremental perspective – by improving the distribution in the system. By bringing access to higher quality energy, better nutrition, bringing critical and vital knowledge to the communities which can use them properly. That sort of contribution is of unparalleled value. Probably not the kind of contribution involving helping companies break into new markets or keeping fossil fuel businesses alive to emit more carbon.

Ready-made solutions

Just add hot water to instant coffee and you get your morning cup of coffee. Boil some water and pop the noodles and powder in, or even better, just rip the packaging and put it into the microwave, pressing just a few buttons then wait – and you get your meal. Bring a packet of ready-mix cement and mix in water, and you can have some of the bonding materials for your brick building. Or you can start paving the road.

So why can’t you just order a report and instantly know everything there is to know about a market? Or to pay someone to give you all the answers to entering a market for your business? Even better, pay someone to enter the market, run the business for you and then you just reap the business success benefits? The challenge of having instant, ready-made solutions in some parts of life is that we start expecting all parts of life to be like that.

And worse still, we allow the market to grow into crevices of our lives expecting it to deliver but it never does. Professional service can deliver a report but won’t be able to ensure you learn all about a market. You could get someone to develop a strategy to enter a market for your business but you’re the one who would eventually have to follow through with it. And moreover, the less you’re involved in co-developing the plan, the less you’ll be able to actually execute it.

There are just so much work that is better, more beautiful and meaningful because they involve co-creation and where you’re paying for someone to partner with you to make a new thing happen. The reason you’d pay them for it is because you will eventually reap the full benefits of the result while they wouldn’t have been working to partner with you otherwise. And in this domain, there are no ready-made solutions for you to purchase; you will have to do the work if you want the success. And it won’t be guaranteed.

Creating a market II

For some reason most people forget that energy markets were created through a combination of business activities and government regulation. There would be a push of some kind towards energy access, electrification in the beginning of any modern country’s development. There wasn’t that much public consultation around these topics – that was simply how development takes place and everyone sort of aspired towards that. Or so we thought; but systems were built to drive countries and societies towards those directions.

Today, in the struggle to set up an orderly energy transition, policy leadership from government is more important than ever. The challenge is in determining what are political choices and what are really policy-choices that is to be determined through more rigorous research and analysis. There is always the search for market-based solutions even though we might actually have seen in history that a lot of big dislocations are resolved or handled through public sector decisions and investments.

The idea of seeking the market for solutions is a new idea. And while the market appear to have been terrific in generating a whole load of choices and new options, the fundamental innovations are still pulled together by a greater sense of mission than market competition. We probably need to mature further to appreciate this.