Energy Nerd | Circular Economist
I chanced upon this brilliant letter penned by Stephen Fry to a fan named Crystal who wrote to him for help in a bout of depression and with no one else to turn to. It was kind of Stephen to have thought through it and replied, kindly and lovingly.
You might enjoy the letter as well as Stephen’s public reading of it in audio form nicely captured in this website stewarding all sorts of letters.
I think that schools and parents should spend a lot more time teaching kids to read labels and discern marketing from science and verified statements. One of the problematic trends that emerged from our market economy or highly marketised, monetised society is the rise of wildfire marketing. You’d think that lies or wrong claims would be quickly discovered but often, verification takes time and money and has the nature of a public good so no one invest in them.
Yet the interest of the marketing departments and companies to make claims that can get them customers is so much more. So there is no prize for guessing who would put more resources into the activity and who emerges as winner, at least in the short term.
Question is why has our market economy created such short-termism? The people at marketing departments are measured perhaps by the short term sales figures. The management is assessed based on short term profit and loss or worse, share prices. No one within the transactions have any long term stake other than the consumers.
Besides strengthening consumer bureaus, you will have to strengthen the consumers through education. And that has to start whilst young; and these are extremely long term investments that will pay off for the broad society.
During my time in public service, I’ve attended lots of different training programmes. There were a lot of training on writing minutes, professional reports and trip reports, as well as some on professional etiquette in a wide range of situations including during presentations, business meetings, business meals, cross-cultural interactions and so on. I won’t say all of them stuck with me and in fact, the elements that stuck were the ones I found useful on the spot and decided to make it a point to adopt. If they didn’t stand out when I first received them, the chance of them being useful to me was really low.
So the notes I took during those courses were at best museum artifacts of professional training I had received. The greater learning was done actually observing how my seniors, my managers and bosses behaved in those various settings, what they deemed important and asked questions about in reports and minutes. Those standards and disciplines were cultivated in that manner rather than through a couple of hours of training. In fact even days of training won’t cut it.
So is training a good way to enforce standards and uplift them across the people in an organisation? I think it can be if it aligns well with what is being practised and expected in an organisation to such a level that the senior management is practising them already. As David Maister rightly pointed out, training doesn’t work if it’s designed to change the juniors or frontline staff while the senior management or middle management is allowed to be set in their old ways.
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.
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.
One of the key fundamental steps to take in order to move towards a low-carbon future is to re-assess our notion of value, economic value. Over the past decades, economic value had been increasingly important as more and more things in the world could be bought with money. This is what Michael Sandel calls the making of a market society.
This is worrying because the value of anything and everything used to be so much more. There’s richness in being able to evaluate and appraise value of various things in different ways. And this is why dollar values can never encapsulate all of that. In fact, there is no such thing as a market for single goods and services. The notion of a market price is just about as real as the notion of an average. The same good can be simultaneously sold at low and high prices depending on where, when, and to whom it was sold.
By defining this abstract concept of market values, we are trying to make a subjective valuation something objective. We are trying to abstract from specific context and circumstances and forcefully say that surely there is something about the good or service itself that has nothing to do with all that. And if we can gather the averages or have a large number of observations, we can use that statistic as something objective. In reality, the statistic is just a statistic – is it a market value? That’s up to whoever is reading the statement.
Beyond the market, the real way to appraise value continues to be subjective and that is okay because we all should be selecting the dimensions we all care about and build our decisions based on that.
Change is difficult and too many things have to change at the same time for some desired outcome or results. What if we don’t get caught up with the outcome but just change the process for the sake of it? What would be one thing you want to change? Because that is probably easier. And adulting can be made easier that way.
Change things. One at a time.
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.
In 1977, more than 45 years ago, James Black, a senior scientist from ExxonMobil delivered a sobering message to the company:
In the first place, there is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels…
And in later warnings, he was clear about the need for action
…present thinking holds that man has a time window of five to 10 years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical.
And if you want to know more about this you can check out the article published 8 years ago in Scientific American. What I’m trying to say here is that incentives are important guide to corporations, businesses and while they are operated by humans, we cannot trust them to follow moral principles or human values that are not captured within regulations, rules or laws. In fact, we already cannot quite trust them to follow rules, regulations and laws to begin with, especially when they are at odds with profit-making.
The market is designed to act in certain ways that do not necessarily promote the greatest general well-being of the society. The conclusion that Adam Smith came to unfortunately doesn’t apply to the extent that market incentives rule so many aspects of our lives.
If ExxonMobil had been not only incentivised to ignore the climate problem but potentially contribute to confusion in the subsequent decades, how can we expect shareholder pressure, financial reporting and disclosures to help? And at the same time, putting all of these burden on the companies are probably going to make more enemies to decarbonisation. Disclosures are more about self-regulation and expecting the market to bring the whip. That’s hit and miss; and when there is incentive to ignore the problem, the market would, as we have seen for more than four decades.
It is time for governments to wake up and lead the mission on climate change. Businesses, consultants, NGOs, activists can only go this far and no more.
From the last couple of blog posts, I’m clearly revisiting the pondering of my youth in college about the role that market ideas should take. As I learn to live in a different society – this time as a working adult – from where I grew up, I begin to become more conscious of the way we structure our societies and how that reflects our values.
This talk by Michael Sandels is still relevant today if not more so. And especially for Singapore during this time with the recent saga from a certain social media post.