You bought an expensive foie gras meal and paid for it but can’t finish it. So who foots the bill?
If you finish it and get sick as a result? Is the doctor’s fee part of your foie gras bill?
If you don’t finish, and it goes into a food waste heap that requires public subsidy to manage and clean up, are the taxpayers footing your bill?
Would knowing all that change your decision to buy that foie gras meal?
What if you knew the future path of your choices? Who would you allow to foot the bill? How far ahead would you care about the consequences of your actions?
This is a story about externalities, cost and consequences. Who should care? Who should we care for? How much should we care? No one teaches us all these? We have to work them out and make decisions.
What does a job mean for you? What is work to you?
It used to be just tasks or collection of tasks that had to be done. The tasks were easily connected to the end goals.
Then things got complex and the tasks were clear but it felt more distant from the ultimate outcomes that the whole lot of people were trying to achieve.
Finally we did away with task-based identification of the work and changed parts of the work to be based on creating some kind of outcomes. In trying to connect the outcomes to the person, we lost the clarity on the specific tasks required. That can lead to undisciplined exhaustion of energies and burn out.
On the other hand, for all the jobs where tasks can be clearly specified, technology has been used to displace human workers. Leaving humans to only supervise or check through the results. In fact, at some point even the quality checks can be automated.
Where does that leave us? What does that mean about the future of work?
The future of work can be meaningful if we resume our human role of caring for who the outcome of work is for, and the manner in which the work is done. We carve out that higher role for ourselves by being capable of continuous improvement that focuses on the final objective of the work itself – the satisfaction of the user.
One of the greatest challenges confronting our modern world is the sense that when there is a solution for something, the idea that we didn’t apply it indicates a lack of responsibility or some kind of mistake on the part of a human. The fact a surgeon could have healed someone but failed to puts the blame on the surgeon even when the chance of success is probabilistic. Of course, some things require a lot of resources to achieve even when they are feasible, so that doesn’t mean that the feasibility of a solution isn’t the only parameter to determine whether it should be applied or not.
Yet somehow at the back of our minds, if we didn’t apply it, that seem to imply we did not try hard enough or do our best. The issue is that with limited resources, you probably can’t ‘do your best’ in everything. There’s only this much you can give. This applies even to the government, whether it is taken from the budget perspective or the use of manpower.
And for a small country with a lean government like Singapore, solving for the ‘which problem’ to tackle is perhaps increasingly important as there will always be some fringe issues that you can deal with to make yourself look as though you’re doing your job when you’re not making any progress. The recent cigar dish case seems like one of those situation where it is probably not significant enough to escalate to higher (or more mature) decision-makers while seeming to have that easy solution of ‘order them to remove it’. We have a limited attention span available for our public servants, especially those handling frontline issues.
We can organise our economy in very different ways, and even as the free market and the idea of capitalism reign, there can be different extents to which goods and services are produced and supplied to the end consumers. The non-profit organisation can serve as a way to coordinate activity that delivers real economic results in the form of goods and services.
I think we have overlooked the ability of such a form of economic organisation to do more for the world. The advantage of a non-profit that it explicitly pursues resources specifically for a cause. It doesn’t mean it will squander resources inefficiently, but the stated purpose of it, is to generate the impact or advance towards the mission. Ironically, some of the more profitable companies in the world can tend to make claims that are similar to non-profit in terms of the contribution it brings to society.
And since non-profits often have to deliver results in exchange for funding, or to unlock pre-committed funding, they will learn to optimise their budget and utilise resources optimised to deliver some of the results or at least provide inputs to the causes they are trying to champion. The funding portion of non-profits may be different but the way it should be ran operationally is probably not so different from a typical company, with the exception it may not be able to use the usual incentives for its staff (in those circles, they sometimes call it a passion tax).
Yet perhaps more forms of organisations should be acting as non-profits. For example, banks should potentially operate without profits, with the key objective of optimising risks in the system while providing access to credit for organisations and people. In fact, I think that all financial institutions, even those providing payment solutions probably should have limitations placed on their profits because ultimately, it is the real economy that they are trying to drive and allowing them to extract too much from the real economy can hinder the more fundamental process of capital allocation – which is what we are already seeing. Everyone needs to contribute to the real economy and finance in particular, has become the tail wagging the dog, in name of the pursuit of profit. That is a shame.
Continuing my series of musings about the nexus of sports and life. Something more important than winning in the sports arena is that your character is being built. How do you measure the extent of character development? What am I thinking about exactly? And why does it matter?
You can’t measure character. It doesn’t mean it is not important but you just cannot measure it. In the film Les Choristes, the Maths teacher, Mr Mattieu, formed a choir believing it would help reform the badly behaving boys. And it did! But how do you measure it? What changed? Maybe the school grades, maybe the noisyness of the classroom, perhaps even their sense of aspirations. In sports, the players’ performance can be seen in their behaviour on the pitch or courts, as well as their scores, but perhaps also in their lives, the way they treat the people around the sport, and so on. Even how they treat their competitors and how they talk about them. Max Maeder, the Singaporean kite-foiling Olympic medalist, impressed everyone by giving kudos to his competitors after finishing third in his final race when asked to comment on the race.
So that’s what I’m thinking about. There’s something unmeasurable that we can achieve in sports and sporting culture. Are we going to invest into that as a nation? Do we care enough about our people’s lives and their mental fortitude, resilience in face of struggles, competition, and need to perform? Those are precisely what sports offers us an opportunity to train and build up. And so investing in sports is not just about shiny stadiums, sport science degree programmes but also providing athletes with sport psychologists, equipping athletes with the science involved in training, practice, self-care and so on.
An excerpt from Roger Federer’s commencement speech for the graduating class of 2024 at Darthmouth this summer:
In tennis, perfection is impossible… In the 1,526 singles matches I played in my career, I won almost 80% of those matches… Now, I have a question for all of you… what percentage of the POINTS do you think I won in those matches?
Only 54%.
In other words, even top-ranked tennis players win barely more than half of the points they play.
When you lose every second point, on average, you learn not to dwell on every shot.
He could be considered perhaps the most long-running, persistently successful individual athlete of our times, and the lessons he can draw from his experience are timeless. If we could have more of such models and examples to train, motivate, and encourage our next generation of Singaporeans – for their lives not just in sports but other aspects, won’t it be great?
For some reason, despite not being particularly sporty or athletic, I’ve had the benefit of knowing good athletes and learning a lot from them about psychology, personal development, and mindsets. While not being involved in the sporting scene, I’ve come to recognise the many ways our attitudes or behaviours during sports can mirror some other aspects of our lives.
One of them shared a really good practice introduced by her coach in Australia. After each training, he would get the athletes to go down the line to describe how they thought they performed for the training and why. And he’d listen to them, and then tell them whether they are judging themselves accurately regarding the performance and reasons provided. Often, people could judge their own performance correctly, but they come up with the wrong explanation, which means they are not going to correct it properly. And the coach would then offer his thoughts. Compared to Asian coaches who typically just drops his feedback directly, this Australian coach was challenging because he required his athletes to develop their judgment of themselves.
I thought this practice is great because over time, the athletes are building up a stronger ability to judge their own performance and pinpoint why. That creates a strong ability to coach oneself and also develop the right approach towards improvement. Many aspects of sports is about psychology and even getting oneself to put in the effort to practice can be something psychological. By coaching this way, athletes can come to see sports as more than just about performance but learning about oneself and one’s body even more intimately.
This is important. In Asian societies, especially with strong examination cultures, we never learn to judge or discern our own performance in things nor develop that independent sense about our abilities. This is a shame because once you’re at work, you will need to form judgment about the quality of your own work before you make submissions, you’ll have to determine if coworkers are doing what you need them to do, and of course, you’ll need to do so on many different dimensions including the social performance aspect of things. We strengthen our mental resilience and fortitude when we can judge ourselves more objectively.
As a consultant, we sometimes encounter clients who only want to pay for the outcome but not the inputs or the efforts. It is probably true that a client takes on the cost of the work and all of the risks when they are just paying someone for the efforts, but they do also get most if not all of the upside pertaining from the subsequent business success. Of course, the consultants get a track record or credential but that’s probably a win-win situation, not something you’d expect the consultant to be paying the client for.
But paying for effort, monitoring it and managing the risk continuously can sometimes be the only way to achieve success, rather than striking an agreement with someone whom you would only pay for success. You see, outcomes are often not a function of incentives, they are a function of effort, timing, chance and many things outside the agent’s control. By paying for success, you might not even be optimising the effort for success.
And that brings me to the payouts for Olympic medalists. A gold medalist for Singapore gets a payout of a million SGD, whereas an Australian gets a payout of $20k AUD, which is about $17.5k SGD at current market exchange rates. The point isn’t about whether that is a lot or little; and in any case, the Singapore government might say there are so many Aussie gold medalists that it would not be worthwhile paying them too much. The point is that Australia probably already spend a lot more money upfront in terms of public infrastructure for sports, supporting local sport teams, supporting talented coaches, and promoting a culture of sportsmanship. The ‘outcome’ of Olympic success is already ‘bought’ when they make those investments.
On the contrary, Singapore still thinks that sporting excellence and investing in sports is out of a desire to win. I think that’s a shame, because there are so many other great outcomes that comes from a strong sports culture. And I think the many years of ‘investing’ into Olympics thus far had been out of that desire to ‘buy outcomes’, which is probably why we are offering such a big payouts to the Olympic medalists for Singapore. It allows us not to spend taxpayers money if we don’t get the medal – but at what costs to our sporting culture?
If we are prepared to secure a gold medal, why not take 90% of that million dollars and spend it on something like paying coaches better so they can focus on coaching a one or two teams rather than two handfuls? And why not alter the education system so that civic values are also taught through sporting interactions? There are so many possibilities only if we are willing to put our minds to it, and think about the effort we want to pay for, rather than trying to buy an outcome.
For most of my life, I had wanted to be an expert. I wanted to be looked up upon for specific knowledge or intelligence, or smarts in some area. There were of course, some areas I was more keen on than others. And as I read more, and gravitate towards specific topics, I wanted more and more to be known as an expert in those subject matters. The problem is that I was curious about many other things as well; in things I would not consider myself expert in (yet).
So then my knowledge starts to broaden, and I get to know a lot more about a variety of things. And I begin to see patterns across the domains. And I begin to think of expertise less like a deep hole, and more like a network of connections across disparate bits of knowledge that others might not recognise as fitting together but you, as the expert, can see it. Precisely because of the lots of learning you had to get there – not by hoarding knowledge but by eventually seeing patterns in the knowledge you acquire.
And then you begin to belittle dense knowledge in any single field or narrow buckets of knowledge that serve specific and narrow purposes. You no longer think that an expert is worth becoming; if you were an expert in just one or a few areas, you are losing out so much more of reality worth exploring. Maybe I just need to be reminded that I never was keen on being an expert, just pursuing wisdom more than mere knowledge. And wisdom is truly a more worthwhile pursuit.
A good coach puts some pressure on you to do better and demonstrates his belief that you can do better in you. But more than that, the coach makes sure that what is expected of you is clearly communicated so that you have a clear vision of yourself accomplishing it. The ‘video’ that can be played in your head is important. If the resolution of this video is poor, then it is harder for the coachee to perform. And putting pressure on the person by reminding him or her of the deadline or final prize is pointless.
A coach doesn’t review a race with the runner telling that him or her that at different point of the race, how far or near he/she is still from the finish line. He tells the runner about his or her gait to improve, the rhythm of breathes. The how is more important than the what; but the why even more so. The good coach then reminds the runner of why he or she is running.
It is not possible for managers to help a team thrive without these coaching capabilities. Most managers would just be churning output without developing the team or sustaining the right motivation for the team to go on. Often this could lead to burn-out and poor morale. This is where a strong individual contributor needs to learn new skills to move into manager position and not thinking that he or she can just keep doing what they are good at.
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.
