Hierarchy & Management
My first experience in an organization where no one knows anything has been terrible. I have always worked with small groups where communication is easily achieved with limited resources and though problems arises, they are easily overcome by face-to-face resolution. Having said that, I am entirely ignorant of the fact that huge organizations can barely achieve that level of democracy in information. Bureaucracy is resorted as a solution against chaos in these organizations and inefficiency prevails. The ultimate question that everyone asks is, ‘What’s going to happen next?’ in this organization of ours. Yet the fact is no one knows.
The highest level only knows the goal and those slightly lower will handle the practical aspects of achieving the goal. This means goals that are broken down are passed to the lower hierarchy and while some are translated into actions, others are further broken into bits and pushed downwards. The result is the accomplishment of ‘big things’ without anyone actually knowing what each of them are doing. It sounds amazing, but the problem with this system is that it assumes the entire organization follows the single agenda of the one right on the top. If we account for the tiny little agendas that exists within the little components of the hierarchy, then things gets complicated; delays sets in, inertia to accomplishment builds up, things becomes left undone, mistakes occur and the system may collapse.
This organization I am with circumvent the problem of ‘Little Agenda’ through force, through what they claim to be ‘discipline’, a series of threats ranging from informal punishments to legal coercion. This disincentive framework props up the organizational agenda as top in priority. That results in severe inefficiencies within the grander system where the organization lies in - the society. ‘Little Agendas’ that may be more important within the grander system would not be able to supersede those insignificant ones set by the organization because they are encapsulated by the organization I am in.
There’s a need to give freedom a chance, to integrate the ‘Little Agendas’ with what the organization is setting out to do. Efficiency is important in an organization where people only remain for a limited time and this time is pre-determined. This is because people do not have incentive to help push for improvements in an organization where they would never get the chance to enjoy the fruits of their labour. Having no incentive doesn’t mean people won’t try and improve but it does mean motivation for improvement is severely reduced. Inefficiency will prevail if there exist no incentive for improvement; speed of accomplishing stuff is not a physical limitation like what many in the organization claim to be, it is a limitation that arises out of the structure of the organization. If we want to respect the ‘traditions’, the residue of our influences, then we must leave them in the museum; ‘regiment’ have no place in an organization that requires talents to be put in the right place. Image follows from efficiency, from accomplishing the task one sets out to do, and not arbitrarily defined to be ‘looking smart’ or mere superficial nonsense we have become all too capable of.
Our structure have to be re-thought, the old guys got to go, let the new guys replace them. There must be an overhaul, gradual changes to be made through synchronized re-inventing, not testing the different boundaries slowly.
Growing Up
There was a time when I was much younger and I wonder why adults behave the way they do. They sometimes say things like ‘the world is always like that’ or tell us to ‘mind our own business’. They think being concerned about other’s matters is being ‘busybody’ and that a kid who keeps asking question is not being ’smart’. As I grow up, I discovered why; it is the nature of workplaces, perhaps asian workplaces and work ethics. The apathy that adults demonstrate, their interest in knowing the stuff in the newspaper and not exactly what reality is all stems from the work culture.
Saying ‘the world is always like that’ is a generalization that results from their observations of patterns in the society, due to the routine nature of most of their work. Routine in work makes things easier because those people who does something are ’specialized’ in doing that but they are also ’specialized’ because they know how to make things look like they are done and they know how to pretend they are doing that particular work. In other words they may not only have mastered the technique involved in their work but also that of pretending that they are busy with that work. At the same time the line reflects their apathy; in their haste to generalize the world, they fail to appreciate subtle changes that improves their lives. Being positive in this sad reality is some sort of a taboo.
Apathy or a lack of concern for things around them as a general feature of adults is caused by the fact that they are always given extra work when they show concern for someone else’s undone work or when they complain about something, they fear that they’d be asked to make changes to the status quo. As we all go into all sorts of work, we see strange behaviors at play: doing and undoing stuff to pretend we are busy so that we don’t get new work to do, or pretending to do work when boss comes around instead of spending time fruitfully by working on something that you have to do next but can submit much later. There are logical explanations for all these phenomena and they all stem from rationality but they are results of poor principles and work attitudes. This is especially typical of the civil service or public sector.
There’s perhaps a need to design newer reward systems for work and review work culture at these places somehow - though I don’t have ideas to propose yet at the moment.
As usual
Still busy at Signals where I got posted. I am surprised there are people out there who read my blog; the bad thing about staying in camp is that I can’t blog, I really don’t mind the free food and lodging and I also save on transport because I bunk in my camp. Well, I am supposedly one of the lucky few already so I shouldn’t be complaining. Life has been pretty good.
Chao Keng Mechanics
The problem with being in PES C is that people think you Chao Keng or that you have the tendency to do that. The problem of ‘Chao Keng’ is actually so widespread that it transcends far beyond Physical Employment Status or deliberate choice of ‘Out of Course’ Status. When people are forced into something that doesn’t seem natural enough (ie. people around the world like them are not doing similar sort of things, or that it is not essential), there’s a need to create a market system that provides incentives to justify the stuff they are forced into. Deterrence achieves similar effects as incentives sometimes but more often, deterrence eventually results in greater inefficiency.
I have seen people who wants to Chiong but don’t get into Command School and therefore decided that they shall Chao Keng for the rest of the time since there’s no way they rise in ranks enough. There are others who are not interested in Chiong-ing, but only want to build up their bodies through physical exercise, end up in Command School and decide to get out of the course (by hook or by crook). Assigning work to people is only effective when there’s room for the person in concern to negotiate and come to an agreement. And since convincing is necessary to enhance effectiveness, the ‘control method’ (ie. dictating what people should do) is very inefficient. On the other hand, if there’s a free market means where people apply to their desired place and get interviewed to see if they qualify (and with special advice on how they can qualify if they have not), things would be so much better.
There’s definitely scope in studying the creation of such market system that blends command and freedom in ways that maximizes welfare beyond command and scale chaos way below total freedom and this is exactly the system that the military needs for all their affairs. People don’t Chao Keng because they are interested in lazing around. People want to be useful in ways they deem themselves would be. If their value is to be judge by someone and this someone uses that judged value to dictate the life of the person, the person would have no choice but to choose to live up to that value judged, whether it is a matter of fact or not.
Smoking Out
When I was at NUS Open House last Saturday and I spoke to this Year 1 Law student, I asked her whether there’s a lot of ’smoking’ in law faculty. I was of course referring to the figurative sort of smoking but as she ‘err…’, it dawned on me that lawyers are known to be a rather smokey bunch (in the literal sense) so I clarified my question by saying, I mean the figurative type.
I was, in the most literal sense, applying to Law at NUS and there, I suddenly realised that I might have to survive with quite a big bunch of people who smoke if I really end up studying there. One thing is for sure: I hate smokers. My Grandpa used to smoke, and since the age of 3 when I could spoke pretty fluently, I urged him not to smoke. I drew ‘No Smoking’ signs that blurred the difference between a cigarette and a Pokey snack and place them all around the house in a bid to discourage my Grandpa from lighting up. It worked, especially when it came from a kid who was barely in Primary School. Soon after I enter Primary School, my Grandpa quit smoking. I am not sure how much effort it took him; today he’s 80 plus, very strong and healthy, free from any ailments that plague the old and very active still.
If perhaps, every smoking man/women have a single young kid bugging him/her everyday to get him/her to quit smoking, we can create a smoke-free nation. But of course, that’s not possible. Alternative policies are needed. And in a recent research paper that is about to be published, done by some people (I am not sure if they are students or professors, usually it’s a mixture) at MIT, it is claimed that higher cigarette taxes benefits poorer smokers because it gives them a more practical reason to quit. Where cigarettes are cheap enough for the poor to afford but expensive enough to take up a substantial part in their expenses, cigarettes have the effect of escalating poverty. They mentioned that the poor are more sensitive to price rises than the rich and thus they may have higher tendency to quit smoking in face of higher cigarette prices. Such a policy is of course, easier to implement than public education on the negative effects of smoking and more effective than erecting No Smoking signs around the place.
Yet there’s another camp, I realised, that was brought up by my lecture notes in the subject of Economics as well as myself. It is the argument that smokers are naturally price insensitive, because smoking is more or less a result of addiction. That is to say that the price elasticity between rich and poor smokers should not differ by too much. The implication of this argument is huge; the reason being that the prescribed cigarette taxes would only serve to make the lives of the poor more worst off because they end up spending more on cigarettes and this eventually widens the income gap.
I believe every country presents a different case and the position of the families/people on the scale of poverty does affect their price elasticity of demand. In case of extreme poverty where essential goods might have to be sacrificed in order to obtain cigarettes after imposition of new taxes, the policy is likely to succeed in convincing poor smokers to kick their habit. It’s no longer a choice between a short term pleasure and long term health and survival, it would become a choice between smoking now and living through the next couple of days. However, if taxes are imposed such that cigarette prices are raised to an insufficient level, the poor but not extremely poor smokers may continue to smoke and they end up being poorer because higher proportion of income is spent on cigarettes. For them, it’s a choice between the short term pleasure and improving their lives in long term. Having suffer so much, a puff to them is rewarding enough and they can only hope for the better.
Therefore there’s a need to assess the reaction of the smokers to cigarette price variations to correctly determine whether the taxation policy would actually work. My take is that it can never work perfectly; some smokers will be kicking the habit, some smokers will be worst off because of higher expenditure on cigarettes but the proportion of smokers belonging to either category needs to be carefully studied so that the tax applied can maximize the number of people who quit smoking and at the same time, not hurt those who refuse to quit (too much).
Passed Out & More
I have been inactive on my blog, very inactive. The first reason is that the past one and a half month or so of my life is devoted to Basic Military Training, where we were warned against blogging our experience (which may be critical of the military and possibly surface stuff that puts SAF in negative light). Anyways it’s over and I would say I learnt very much from the experience - my life in the military ahead may be more demanding but I must say that BMT has prepared me for military life.
Then comes the A Level Results together with all the implications it carries. I wouldn’t say I did badly though it was inferior to Kwang Guan’s grades. There’s college applications, scholarship applications and so on. All these nonsense are pretty nerve-wrecking but it’s the first hand experience of many game theory stuff at play: screening and signaling, coordination (in terms of the placement of open house dates and faculty talks) and so on. For teachers, they will have quite a hard time thinking about good things to say, or ways of saying the same old good things for their top students. Students are either spoil for choices or desperate for somewhere to go.
I am trying my best to head overseas but I realised the need to reserve places in universities at home lest my hopes of going overseas are dashed by the lack of a scholarship. At the open house of some particular local university, I came to realise that Singaporeans who stay behind in Singapore remains very much the same as the students who has been in our system for 15 years before entering tertiary education. They are happy with just doing well with whatever is thrown at them. Sure, they are intelligent kids who excel at almost anything - they have a great social life, they mix well with people, they got excellent communication skills and they may even have the best fashion sense - but alas, they don’t really have an idea what they want out of life.
After pondering about how wonderfully aimless most Singaporeans are, I became frightened by the prospects of having classmates who score exceedingly well in the subjects they do, the research paper they write and in the speeches they make; and yet when I ask them about what lies ahead in their life, they have little or almost no idea. More shockingly, they aren’t sure if they are doing something they really want. Perhaps these people merely want to excel, in anything they are doing, any field they are thrown into. This is a by-product of a dynamically engineered society, where needs of the society is quickly translated to roles to play for citizens at individual levels and government suggestions quickly heeded to prevent social catastrophes.
True enough, Singaporeans are able, receptive and adaptive, but they seem void of what I would term ‘true aspiration’, in contrast with ’social aspiration’, which is more collective and in many sense, prescribed by a higher authority of the society. That is not to say I am not guilty of such a ‘mistake’, if foreigners choose to think this way. There’s a real need to encourage Singaporeans to think extensively about what lies ahead for themselves (not only the world, just because in the classroom, you have to discuss that). We have to help more people get out there and see the world and come in contact with overseas counterparts who actually knows where they are heading to, and immerse into a culture of greater independence, greater sense of ‘true aspiration’, less reliant on ‘prescribed aspirations’.
Booking Out
There are some things in life, especially that of a Singaporean male’s life, when you want the thing to just be done and over with as soon as possible. I’ll relish the eventual moment of liberation much more than the tiny bits of freedom interspersed in the entire series of senseless struggle.
Adsurb Facts
I am finally recovered from that slight bronchi infection on my left bronchi that has got me trapped in cycles of fever-cold. Too bad I wasn’t quite in academic mood when I felt sick or I’ll be recording down my temperature every time I measure it (which I did very frequently and I was telling my sister I may have contracted the Compulsive Temperature-Taking Syndrome that struck our schools together with SARS). And then I could try plot a chart or something using Google Chart API and then link the image here or something. Some random announcements and some offers to be made, since the previous entry that happen to fall into any other categories in my blog was really long ago.
I encountered something rather weird today. There’s this J2 who happened to not know how to spell ‘absurd’ and decided he wanted it to be the name of his sub-domain for his blog - at first I even thought it was intentional, now that’s what I call absurd. The worst part is really not that. It’s that erpz.net is going to host his blog, so soon there’s going to be one more blog on erpz.net besides Mib and mine (which really has been around since 2005). People who are interested in wordpress blogs at erpz.net with full setup free, you might comment in this entry to negotiate the monthly price, or leave your contacts so I may contact you. Right now ftp will probably be provided upon request and webspace is very flexible.
Another thing is that I am leaving this place to an island without Internet access for me (maybe they do have it for some other people). The trip would be quite a while and I’ll probably be missing from the blog for that while. The worst part is that I am not allowed to write about the encounters on that island and even doing that in secret might threaten my life. That’s absurd too, at least somehow.