I’ve been fighting against the prevailing culture for the past decade of my career. And for those who blame things on culture and act like it cannot be changed, they are being delusional. I have a few examples to show:
How did we get from flagging for a cab on the street to punching our mobile phone screens to hail a cab?
How did we get from ‘solar power’ is too inefficient and there is not enough space in Singapore to targeting a 2GWp solar by 2030?
How did we get from being in kampongs where we helped each other and lived for generations in a house to thinking that our financial lives depend on getting BTO, then selling it after MOP and then upgrading non-stop over our adulthood?
While it takes time, culture can be changed. It also takes identifying some loose bricks in the existing edifice to overhaul the structure of our prevailing culture. Energy transition is one tough one to crack, but that said, our region in Southeast Asia has already moved quite a bit from the days of coal-fired power generation. Yes there was a bit of attempts to catch on with the hype around hydrogen but the dollars and sense prevailed at least for now.
So I’ve been toying with the idea of doing a lot more content to teach all of us about energy transition and to be able to learn together. There is a whole lot of de-stigmatising, trying things out, and unlearning our previous biases to be able to move the culture a bit and accelerate the transition. There’s a question of format, level of engagement, how to manage and nurture a community and so on. I guess I’ll have to dive in head first.
Despite being a Christian, I’d probably confess to living most of my life like an atheist, and for most of us in the modern world, that is perhaps the case. As we send our reports and deliverables to clients, we don’t start praying to God for Him to grant favour in the eyes of our clients. At the same time, before we start our meetings to make crucial decisions, it’s not like we ask the Lord to grant us wisdom to decide the right course of action in a corporate prayer. Beyond prayer, more often than not, we are petty with the way we approach our suppliers, and potentially quite transactional on many interactions.
If we had been in a more agriculture setting, surely after tilling the land and sowing the seeds, we would have prayed for good weather and for patience to arrive upon harvest time. Each day as we work the fields we’d ask the Lord to bless the work of our hands. And when if we were to be waiting in the market for someone who needs our produce to pass, we might ask for customers, and we might deal with them with greater kindness than we would when chasing a customer for bill payment.
I don’t know if it’s the environment, the (false) sense of self-sufficiency and control that leads us to act this way. But we often enjoy acting like we are in control; and we are glad for the assurance from others’ false sense of control over circumstances and happenstance. We have lost the security and comfort that we can have in the embrace of God’s grace and His provision. And each time we practice that modern day ritual of self-reliance and independence from nature and from God, we weaken our faith so much.
Having worked in consulting across cultures, I have begun to recognise some cultural behaviours when buying consulting across different countries and the attitudes towards consultants. Having advisors is nothing new; the monarchs of ancient times have had advisors to support them for as long as they existed. These advisors offered more than just advice, insights or knowledge that leaders did not possess (or did not think they possessed).
They offered assurances when it was scarce. Soothsaying, contrary to what people might think, actually means telling the truth; with ‘sooth’ being an old English term that meant truth, as opposed to ‘soothe’, which means to calm. And the advisors also provided perspectives that during times of wiser monarchs, could contradict the conventional wisdom or call out the folly of the leaders.
So if we distil it down to the value that consultants provide today:
Knowledge of what may not be known to the client: this is when consultants are selling their expertise, and familiarity with a topic area that clients are not familiar with
Assurance of a particular course of action, decision, or information: this is when the client needs something verified, checked, validated and confirmed. The confidence and conviction of the advisor matter here as well, compared to those who hide behind jargon and ‘expert lingo’.
Sparing partner or challenger to ideas: consultants can be valued in bringing new perspectives, especially an outside-in view of things thereby co-creating more valuable solutions or decisions with the client.
I begin to recognise that Asian firms especially with rather paternalistic leadership tend not to use consultants the way the West use them. So for example, when it comes to knowledge, the Western clients may appreciate specific subject matter expertise that comes through years of experience and in-depth research. In contrast, Eastern clients may value knowledge of implicit/unwritten local rules and norms rather than expertise in a more technical subject. The more institutionalisable the knowledge set is, the less likely an Eastern client would appreciate it as worth paying for.
Western clients see assurances from consultants as important while Eastern clients prefer to take the risks of not having check through things by themselves. This might have something to do with the way trust is formed. In Asian societies where getting things verified can be read as a sign of mistrust, it is challenging to value such independent checks and perspectives. The very deed of using independent validation can almost be an insult.
Finally, when it comes to having a sparing partner, the typical harmony-loving, and conflict-avoidant Asian culture would really struggle with the idea of paying someone to challenge you. In fact, leaders might instead assert the power of their wealth/influence over people so that they would not be questioned.
In this sense, Asian cultures tend towards getting advisors who can provide knowledge that is undocumented and unavailable in the public domain, and are often independent individuals with the specific gifts of being able to reveal ‘truth’ to the client. They also prefer that the knowledge advisors gain about the client cannot be easily disseminated. And as far as possible, they only care about knowledge that cannot be institutionalised.
This means that it is incredibly challenging for most professional, western-chain consultants to survive solely from serving a pool of Asian clients. If anything, they usually have to ‘survive’ off the big multi-nationals who are growing into new, and perhaps opaque markets, or needing more capacity support. In other words, consulting has grown out of an increasingly international market, yet not overly uncertain because surely some stability is necessary for consultants to be deemed to have accumulated enough lessons and experience to share.
Random musings as I continue to build up my knowledge and capability of managing a consulting practice.
Tom Bilyeu posted something insightful on Linkedin a few days ago that’s worth mulling over. He said, “There are no solutions, only trade-offs.”
And that the belief in a perfect solution can cap your growth as it paralysed you from making decisions as you wait for the perfect solution to come by. It may also be just because you are endlessly searching thinking that the ideal solution will emerge.
Yet when we do chance upon some things, we do recognise them as solutions. I realised that this is because we have priorities in most settings and it is the priorities that determine what we value more and what we value less. The trade-offs then allows us to exchange things that are less valued for things that are more valued. The ability to do so increases the overall value and hence becomes a ‘solution’.
There may be times when the things being traded off against are both valued – and then it takes that strategic mind, one that is able to look into different versions of the future to try and determine which elements in the trade-off is more important and would have lasting impacts.
Ultimately, there is no way one can navigate life and decision-making without the ability to prioritise things. If we see everything as equally important, we suffer from the plight of Buridan’s Donkey and never get anything done.
There seems to be some conventional or prevailing wisdom about people having to keep to their lanes in different ways. So there are so-called norms for being a worker, being a father, a brother, a son and so on. Overlay that with the dimension of culture, including heritage and religion, you get a different set of different norms that as an individual, you are expected to display.
And so all my life I’ve somehow been defying classifications. One of the big divisions in school I had was between a ‘science’ student and an ‘art’ student. In high school, I defied that classification by doing arts (not just humanities but even fine arts, digital arts, and film) alongside all of the sciences (biology, physics, chemistry). When I entered junior college, I took two science subjects and two arts subjects as my main subjects.
And when it came to college, I just had to go to a school that offered a Bachelor of Science (BSc) in Economics when in most places, Economics was considered a Bachelor of Arts (BA). And then in my masters of economics, despite joining the advanced mathematics course, I also did a module in Economic & Business history.
I often recognise the value and importance of arts despite being an economist and finding it difficult to quantify the value that arts generate. Life in Singapore has become so draining and taxing on the human spirit often because we don’t know how arts play a role in helping us recover and restoring dimensions of our lives that we fail to see or identify. In recent times, as I caught plays from Checkpoint theatre and various films or shorts produced by Singaporeans about life in Singapore, even poetry that is written about life (eg. Government Haikus), I begin to see more and more that we all need arts more than we know. It could well be what will keep us alive.
I was watching Carl Sagan’s explanation of how the Greeks knew that the earth was spherical and how Eratosthenes (then head librarian of Alexandria) calculated the circumference of the Earth without even leaving his home country. It’s a brilliant one worth watching:
Brilliant men in the past would have mastered astronomy, geometry, and mathematics and played the role of military strategists. The ability to make observations in nature and draw interpretations were essential to determine the approach on the battlefield.
Yet, today, with technologies supporting the interpretation of observations and supplying multitude of information to leaders, there’s less of a need for the ‘strategist’. Rather, the tasks of looking and interpreting the various information is decentralised and the information comes together already processed for decision-making.
In such a world, we use resources to displace thinking. Eratosthenes will have to pit his wits against the rocket ships, satellites and scientists with funds for expedition who will say that his calculation yields a figure which is ~2.5% off the mark.
The role of strategic thinking has diminished in importance in the societies which are highly developed and well-resourced. Every now and then, someone comes from seemingly nowhere and overcome an incumbent with all the position, and the resources. A David and Goliath story. In many ways, DeepSeek is an example of that; especially when put in contrast with Sam Altman’s response to a question from an audience at a talk where he said that any worthy competitor to OpenAI will have to invest massive resources and datasets to train another LLM to achieve the prowess of ChatGPT.
I think we need to go back to a culture that appreciates strategic thinking and this sort of brilliance. And believe once again that it isn’t just about resources and overwhelming others with abundance. For those who feels limited by their resources, let the ability to think strategically provide a channel and means to defeat the giants.
This ad campaign by Activista, mainly targeting Space X on Earth day – I believe that was in 2021 – is brilliant. It helps to put things into perspective in terms of how we approach our resources and earth.
The message still rings true today and in many ways, it is saying something about the human heart. Our wandering heart often wants to look for something else to sustain ourselves. Something else that may not be designed to sustain us, but we want to make it what our lives depend upon.
Yes, as a Christian, I’m talking about Christ, who provides the salvation we need when we are wandering about seeking salvation through our work, relationships and other forms of addiction in our lives.
The challenge of industrialising some kind of process, expecting things to move in a “business as usual” fashion is that it tends to decline towards mediocrity. There would be people expecting to just pick up how to do things once and then coast to keep things as status quo.
Yet the issue is less to do with this group than the leadership. Leaders who try to tighten things ad hoc rather than develop a culture of continuous improvement will discourage staff from improving themselves but instead see improvement as being able to guess what the boss wants. Yet if we are unable to see the mission of the organisation, only the boss, then the march stops when the boss is gone.
And the march towards mediocrity starts when leadership becomes weak and is formed from previous generations of followers who never learnt how to drive the mission independently.
This might be the first time tears have welled in my eyes as I read a news article. I was moved, perhaps, by the judge’s humanity. There was so much latent grief embedded in the case itself: the unreconciled relationship, unexpressed emotions, pent-up difficulties, and struggles that weren’t understood.
How different would the world be if we brought more of our humanity to our work, our relationships and our lives?
Charlie Munger once said of the legal profession that it was very much like a pie-eating contest where the winner gets to eat more pie.
I laughed at that.
Because many other professions are the same. The capable staff gets more work to do; and having proven himself, gets promoted into handling more responsibilities.
But for most part, workaholics love their pie.
And to a large extent, for some, they don’t care about winning or losing at pie-eating. What matters to them is they get to eat pie.
Maybe that appreciation for work is what we need. Not to obsess so much over the winning or losing but instead, focus on the pie. And when the pie is no longer tasty, you quit. Because there wasn’t so much at stake to begin with.
