I found this company as I was researching for a sustainability-related competition. I was inspired by the firm’s achievement, especially in what I thought to be pushing the frontier of sustainability in Singapore. They are a decentralized water treatment company which basically means that they recycle wastewater for individual factories, residential precinct and institutions – basically to save water for big consumers. After some quick online research, I was sold. I told myself that I must join them when I have the chance.
Months after, when I was looking for a new intern opportunity, I call the number I found on the website. Surprisingly, it was the CEO who picked up the phone. I joined the company one week after that.
I think everyone can relate to this – when you join a new company, the first two weeks will be thrilling. After that monotony kicks in, excitement wades off, and your work gets dull, or at least interesting-ish. But this time, well into a fortnight joining this firm, worse, I was shocked and pretty upset. I found out that most of the achievements that I saw in the Internet were relics of the past, from posts that are published like 5 years ago. Now, due to series of losses, many of the permanent staff left. The company of about 20 people strong shrunk to 6 – including me.
It didn’t take a long time to figure out what went wrong. I have experienced them day-to-day. There are so many mistakes, misjudgment, poor habits and systems that made working in the firm so painful. And who knows? Perhaps the same thing may have tanked the company. More infuriating, I found that no one else has seen it! I brought some of the issues to my mentors and peers but they were not willing to listen.
As the weeks go by, my speculation hardens. The problem gets so patently obvious that you just cannot see it. If my assessment is correct, I bet that if the firm doesn’t forcefully overturn its current way of doing things, it will go bankrupt soon.
Just to really make sure my judgements are substantial, I got hold on articles, interviewers, videos from successful entrepreneurs who have walked the talk on what it takes to build a successful company. I am proud to say that observations and complaints are not very off the mark! Since many of them articulated those advice and concepts better than I am, I feel appropriate to quote them as we go.
Maybe they don’t take me seriously because I am an intern. Fine. In any case, I prefer to keep my sanity, and vent all the frustration, anger, and disappointment here. Below, I summarized 6 lessons I learnt working as a frustrating intern. I hope this can be valuable information to those who want to start a business, or scouting for a company that is worth working for.
Here we go:
- Running a business 101: the 3-leg principle.
For a company to succeed, it seems that you need 3 things: ability to produce, the ability to sell, and the ability to manage. I call it the three leg principle, because it seems that you must take care of these 3 main things to grow a business.
Take any business—let’s say a pastry shop. To build a good pastry business, you need to bake good pastries (duh). But also, you need to let people know about your shop (marketing), and convince people to buy your pastries (sales). Unless you are running the company by yourself, you will pay others to do some of the work for you. Those people, just like the oven and your shop, must be regularly invested in, inspected, replaced and maintained
Come to think of it, running a successful business is like bodybuilding. In fitness, people would have to train their shoulder, their chest, their back, their legs, their core, etc. to develop a well-rounded physique. If you suck at one, or you just don’t pay much attention to one particular body part, you won’t look as good as a person who works out on all of them. One good thing in business is that unlike working out, you can outsource some jobs to other people. [1]
If you’re terrible at selling pastries, pick a good partner that is good at it. If you don’t know how to train new employees on how to bake a good pastry, learn to do that, or ask someone skilled at teaching to play that role. The ability to produce, the ability to sell, the ability to manage – if you don’t have 3 legs on the ground, my guess is that your business will likely topple.
The company I am working at was just that. The firm had a good sales arm (hence my initial inspiration to work here) and a decent producing arm who knows the engineering and technology side of the company (I have my own qualms but more on that later). But tragically, they are not good at managing people. We had workers who were not proactive in communicating issues on the ground to the top; we didn’t have good guides and systems that teaches the workers on how to track the condition of operating plants well, and we didn’t have a protocol to troubleshoot the plant as quickly as possible when things go wrong. All have to go through the top to make good decisions. This practice slow things down and frustrate the everyone who has to deal with these problems longer than necessary. - Be an effective communicator. Don’t waste people’s time.
I think some companies underestimate the importance of effective communication in the workplace. The thought that “work” translate the act of producing is common to many. It is not entirely false, but this misunderstanding can hurt a company more than they think.
This is especially true in meetings. In a meeting, only the people who needs to know about the project should stay in the meeting room. Remember, as the employer, you are paying people to sit there and listen. Sometimes that means listening to things they are not relevant to their work whatsoever. Your employees don’t leave the meeting room not because they find what you say to be made of gold, but because you are the damn boss! I rather see people watching Tiktok rather than to pretend that some remote project issue that doesn’t help them in doing their work better. At least people are having a good time.
Second, come prepared when attending to a meeting. I admit, I’m not guilt-free on this regard. But my point still remains: everyone should refine their thoughts and prepare relevant materials before a high-volume exchange of information began. Don’t start to dig through the folders only after you’ve called for someone’s attention. Don’t ramble about when you want to convey something important – people would need to take extra time to ask for clarification. Don’t stand there and introspect when your juniors are anticipating your breeding thought. Don’t keep repeating the same thing when you know that your employees are smart enough to understand what you are saying from the get-go. If you have nothing more to say, move on to the next step or let them do their work. People have work just like you okay? Anticipate questions so that you can cut the slack and dive right to the root of the matter. Remember: people are paying attention to you over the work that needs to be done. Time is gold, so treat your time and the time of others as such.
I give you one better: practice effective communication EVERYTIME in the workplace. In whatever company you are at, the speed and accuracy at transferring information between people is vital irrespective of your seniority and duty:
- Boss to junior:
Provide instruction or inquire about the situation on the ground, cultivate the right culture, communicate during tough times - Junior to boss:
Reporting of situation on the ground, promote yourself and others. - Mentor to mentee:
Training, teaching, and giving perspective on the work of a mentee - Mentee to mentor:
Asking questions and seeking clarification to ensure their work is done properly and effectively - Within project team:
Provide latest news relevant to the team, motivate the team and settle disagreements productively - Talking to clients:
Negotiating, educating and balancing interest between company and client.
It may be hard thing to do, but this shall be an aspiration for all.
- Boss to junior:
- Make sure you crush on your turf before seeking to expand.
The older I become, the more I realize how much effort is needed to produce great work. Even if you have no experience in the workplace, preparing for exams is a good analogy. Let me explain.
Students will know: improving from an F to D is pretty simple. If you take notes for all the lectures attentively, I guarantee you won’t fail during the exam. If you get F. People would guess that you trounce from class and go to parties for the entire semester. Those who put at least some effort in their studies cannot get F in their exams.
If you want to get from D to C, you may need to revise one week before the exam starts. From C to B, you may need to revise the contents a month before the exam and consistently go through the weekly tutorials. From B to A-, you may need to consistently finish your tutorials before class, on top of what a B student does.
But to go from A- to A+, we are playing on a very different level. You are very likely to work on past year papers, talk to professors about specific questions after the weekly classes, drill into the seemingly minor mistakes you have done in your tutorials and past year papers. At this point, your friends may think you have gone crazy. If you want to get full marks? Hell, you might need to memorize a table of facts just in case the professor wants to surprise the students with tricky questions! See where I am getting at? The effort needed to get one grade higher gets exponentially higher the higher grade you aim for.
Running a successful business is the same. In fact, I contend that running a business takes hundreds, if not, a thousand times more effort, time, perseverance, experience that scoring an exam in flying colors. This is because not only that you need to learn more things (remember the 3 leg principle), most of the skills and judgement valuable to business cannot be found in a single textbook, or any textbook at all. The rules of your industry constantly change, enemies and competitors will always try their best to take you down in new and creative ways, and the sheer unpredictably of the world can knock you over in the blink of an eye.
Those ambitious, intelligent, and confident people knows what I am talking about. They have tried to spinning multiple plates in their university time, and they found out that all of them eventually produced unimpressive work or burnt out regularly. They have understood how much time, focus, and energy is needed to do something A+. Science confirmed this: the 10,000 hours just has to be spent to be a master of anything. Those who are distracted by new opportunities may be jack of all trades, but they are master of none. Look it up: Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos are known to have a habit of focus on one thing for a long period of time. “Renaissance man” – people who are well-accomplished in multiple, very distinct fields – are the same. They only flirted the idea of expanding their field or business when they have crushed on the market or discipline they are currently at. [2]
Back to my company. Based on sheer number of employees, my company is effectively a two-legged start-up that has backlog of unsuccessful projects that we have to clean up before reaching ground zero. If the CEO is wise, I assume that he will try to slow things down, assess what led to this dreadful situation, and figure out ways to fix the details that accumulated issues that contributed to the firm’s downfall. Based on my juvenile judgement, it will take years of eating glass and making losses to turns thing around. Hopefully, by the end of the tunnel, he have gained some much relevant experience and mastery that when opportunities arise, he is pretty much bulletproof of any missteps that had tanked the company in the first place. It will take another few years to establish yourself in Singapore, and another few years to make a name regionally. In my opinion, the key ingredient for the company now are patience and perseverance.
To my shock, one my second week, I was told that the CEO is planning to venture the firm to the Indonesian market. Are you serious? You have four people (excluding CMO) in a firm that people don’t want to work or associate with. You have tons of C grade projects left by your previous employees and they are tearing the attention and peace of mind of your remaining ones. And hang on, I remember you said you plan to work with a new O&M partner? You must understand that this is a bold decision for the company. You have no direct experience working with a O&M company before – when I am gone, someone from your fantastic four must be able to commit their effort and time to attend the conflicts and friction that will inevitably arise. Who is going to do it? You? Everyone?
And now you decide to expand your company’s presence to Indonesia? Indonesia is a foreign country which you have no context about. You are unsure about the intricacies of Indonesian business culture and regulations. Moreover, you may not be capable of finding the partners that are competent and trustworthy. It is a completely new terrain. Even with best preparation and strategy, someone has to again, commit their effort and time to attend the conflicts and friction that will inevitably arise. You failed in algebra, and now you say you want to get an A in calculus?
On second thought, I feel that the company is repeating its own mistakes. When I first joined, my colleagues told me that many businesspeople and observers were impressed with how this relatively young company managed to secure deals with multinational firms in the past. They were big names in various industries—semiconductor, food and beverage, hospitality, and government agencies. The scale of some of the projects was so large that it shocked me how our firm managed to win the tenders.
As it turned out, this gamble led to significant losses for the company. Those big projects were too complex and too taxing on the employees’ time and attention, resulting in tremendous losses. Worse, as the projects failed to meet their promises, the clients demanded extensions of the contracts without compensation. If not resolved promptly—which seems unlikely given the current situation—the company will continue to bleed for a long time. The lack of funds and manpower will turn the situation into a vicious cycle. If we are not careful, the company will soon face its own demise.
In the past, while the firm was spectacular at convincing big companies to accept our bids (selling), the backend of the business could not keep up (building and managing). As I heard, most of the engineers were young. They were too inexperienced and stretched too thin (the projects occurred nearly concurrently, and the contractor margins were very low). This eroded the engineering quality of all the projects. Overall, the speed of the sales team was too fast for the engineering and management teams to keep up, which ironically accelerated the failure of the business. Isn’t that what the CEO is still doing now? Witnessing the failure of his business, his knee-jerk reaction is to promote the company in other places—more foreign, more risky places—as if new clients will stick around after discovering how terrible his services are. He is so blind to the company’s mistakes that it baffles me [3]. - Be married to your work. Let people own a project from the start to finish.
Some time ago, I was involved in a project. It was a team of urban planners, and our task was to design the future of a district in Singapore. In a meeting, one of the senior team members said that to plan for a new district well, you must fall in love with the place you are planning.
“Fall in love with the place you are planning.” It made a strong impression on me. It was a profound personal revelation because I realized that falling in love with your work is an elixir that produces great results.
When I say fall in love, I do not mean one-night stands or short-term flings; falling in love with your work means getting married to it, being loyal to it, and staying with your project even when things get hard, hopeless, and tiring. This is not a secret: it is well documented that those who excel or master anything are willing to endure the boredom, pain, and failures that inevitably befall them. Those who stay in the weeds and push through the hard times become more disciplined, skilled, and confident in their capabilities, which motivates them to climb higher, further building their capacity to do great work. Those who are not willing or able to endure this go on multiple dates. They dabble in one exciting project, then hop on another when the first one gets dull, never truly understanding or mastering anything. Worse, they think they have. [4]
This is something I see in some people I know from my university. They are relentless, starting many businesses, organizations, and projects in a very short period of time. Some of them may gain public recognition for their seemingly boundless energy. However, in their minds, they are chasing an excitement that only the new can offer. When the honeymoon is over—which always happens—they start flirting with a new idea, a new project, or a new side hustle. They never end anything well. Satisfaction from work for them is only a series of fleeting highs, never stable, and never satiating. When they are thrown into the real world, they are terrified by how dull work can be. If they continue sticking to their old habits, jumping from one thing to another, they will never achieve anything substantial in their careers. Their resumes may look impressive, but they are actually frauds.
These people don’t understand that mastering anything requires building seemingly boring skills and accumulating minuscule facts that, in sum, lead to the true fruition of a big skill or understanding. It requires the expenditure of our limited intellectual resources. And when you are young, it is much more important to value your time and energy because these are your only fuel to make progress in your professional career. Focus is key.
For managers and supervisors, this means you should not assign too many projects and tasks to your subordinates. Spinning multiple plates may make them look busy, but it will not make them work productively. From my experience, beginners should only take on one project at a time. Slightly more experienced ones can handle two or maybe three. Three is the hard limit.
Not only should you limit the number of projects you assign, but you should also entrust the entire project to the person, ideally from start to finish. In an EPC (Engineering, Procurement, and Construction) company like mine, an employee should manage a project from the design phase to piloting, operations and management, and the handover stage—everything. This teaches them how the upstream and downstream work inextricably correlate with each other. Poor design at the beginning of a project may entail grave consequences that cannot be salvaged when it reaches the operations and maintenance stage. I surmise it is no different outside the engineering industry. - Archive everything. For your sake and for your company’s sake.
What if you cannot finish the project from end-to-end yourself? Archive it.
This is something that strike to many as common sense and I was shocked that company paid no heed to need to archive things. When working on my task, I will browse through the archives to understand the context and information that may contribute to a better quality of my work. Sometimes, important information such as the project contract, proposal and even the as-built drawing of our project are not kept in the drive. You waste a lot of time scanning through reams and reams of poorly categorized and poorly named files and folders to get hold of something simple as a pdf file.
Archiving doesn’t limit to the important documents and deliverables that are involved in the project. It also means to record your record your progress, subjective reflection, mistakes, reasoning and timeline of events that led to the current state of the project and the immediate action plan onto something permanent. This should be included the handover documents so that the employees who will take our baton don’t have to start the learning curve from zero. And in this day and age, archive it in digital text or recording form. You don’t want to playing a game of telephone on a project that costs millions.
Archiving doesn’t only benefit the company, but it can benefit you. Those who writes regularly knows what I am talking about – when you put pen to paper (or fingers on keys), it sharpens your mind and memory. In the future, when you encounter a project similar to the ones you work on now, you have a repository of experiences and thought processes that are caught in great detail to which you can refer. This prevents you from making decisions that are based on vague, potentially distorted memory of the past. - Be an active thinker
From time to time, our water treatment plants will have some issues pop out. The plant may have shutdown, or the water drastically becomes alkaline, or the flow rate may decrease or increase for some reason. On the graph, you might see data points where the value drops to zero then shoots back up within an hour. I was tasked with collecting, analyzing and interpreting the data, and compiling all of it into a nice looking report. If I can successfully explain the anomalies that occurred to the plant, I may be able to train our technicians to become better operators and faster troubleshooters when things go wrong. It was my first time operating and plant, let alone analyze and try to troubleshoot it. So, of course, I am open to listen to the input from those around me who are all more experienced than I am. I showed them the data and they gave me their explanations.
When I went back and wrote the report, something bugged me: the explanation they gave didn’t make sense. On the next day, I urged my superior to elaborate on his hypothesis, and as I listened, my gut told me that his explanations were not right.
I went back again. This time, I trusted my gut instinct and developed a hypothesis of my own. I visited the plant multiple times and talk to the technicians who operated it daily. While the data we could collect is limited, it is sufficient to give me the confidence to trust my analysis. When I met my superior again and shared what I found, he was initially skeptical. But as I showed him my thought process and the data trends I had analyzed, he eventually relented. It was at this moment that I realized that my superiors are not always right. After that incident, I grew to trust my intelligence and prove my superiors wrong a few more times.
This was a revelation to me because, in the past, I always told myself that I should listen to the advice of those senior to me, even if their advice didn’t seem right. This is for the sake of respect and because I had no relevant knowledge and experience in the industry. While being respectful and humble is important, we should always have a mind of our own.
This is not only true in a junior-senior relationship but also between peers. Just like our seniors, our peers and colleagues don’t always have the right answers. But because we are social animals, and as our primal brain prefer to be accepted by others rather than be truthful, we are vulnerable to groupthink and conventions. There have been many times when I developed an odd idea on something to potentially improve a project, but when it was time to confront the people, the idea disappeared, and I find myself agreeing to their ideas, even when they were still suboptimal or unfounded. Having independent thought can sometimes be difficult, especially when you are the person with the least experienced.
You can say that being overly agreeable and overly respectful is the root cause, but perhaps the problem is not that we don’t have a spine or are behaving politically. Maybe we are just lazy? I read a blog from this guy called Alexandr Wang. He is the CEO of a billion dollar AI company and he has an interesting take on this phenomenon. He makes sense because let’s be real: independent thinking is an energy-intensive activity, and people, having many wants and desires, rather trade their energy for other things rather than engage indenpedent thought of their own that helps to improve the company.
In the blog, Alexandr describes five archetypes of lazy thinking:
1 – nice syndrome
The fear of challenging people’s ideas and the expectation that one’s ideas shouldn’t be challenged — a form of lazy thinking
2 – philosopher syndrome
Using vague statements as a shield against outcomes and data, showing unwillingness to embrace reality and deal with it accordingly
3 – “someone is thinking about it” syndrome
Assuming that all the hard problems are being thought out by some nonspecific other person
4 – clean abstraction syndrome
Believing that the purity of diagrams and charts can explain the messiness of life.
5 – incrementalism (syndrome?)
Focusing on optimizing rather than thinking outside of the box to make massive improvements
These archetypes are good filters that can use for ourselves and to others, but let me add another one: the “I am so smart so I don’t have to double confirm my ideas” syndrome. When you start to think for yourself and you prove to be right many times, people—being lazy—will outsource their thinking to you (or as they say, “they trust you can do it”). This creates a deceptive impression that you are smarter than you really are. Previously, you were fighting against a popular idea, forcing to be more rigorous and self-critical because if you were wrong, it could be quite humiliating. But now, since no one challenges your thinking, you become more proud and comfortable with your ideas. This can be dangerous because if you fuck up, you are to blame (in the engineering industry, a mistake can be very costly). So even you are a proven independent thinker, you have to keep challenging your ideas like a scientist.
Although this is rare, it is advisable to find a company that promote the culture of active thinking. Jeff Bezos’ Amazon seem to be an exemplar to that. He implements this idea called “first day thinking” in his company, which means that everyday, the people at Amazon has to rethink their strategies to improve the company, as if it were first day of the company, and no overbearing structures, precedents, and business models exist. This means that workers are trained to be aware that while past metrics, methods, paradigms and conventions that worked yesterday, they may not today. The ultimate goal to make sure the company doesn’t slide into Day 2 thinking. In his 2016 shareholder letter, Bezos wrote:
“Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1.“
Day 2 is the moment lazy thinking creeps in, when the past ossifies into law, when experience and conventions bias us against freshness and innovation. While Jeff doesn’t have a comprehensive set of approaches to safeguard the “first day thinking” culture in Amazon, he did shared some tried-and-true tips that we can all emulate in our own companies, from the top down or the bottom up.
These are the 6 lessons I learnt working as frustrating intern in an ailing company. Do you have other lessons you want to add on? Let me know in the comments. I’d be happy to know!
Footnotes:
[1] With the condition the you know how to find the right person to do the job.
[2] This topic holds very dearly to my heart. More on this will be published in the next blog.
[3] My opinions are solely made based on the evidence I have garnered so far, mostly by reading between the lines. This is what my supervisor really said when I asked about the rationale behind the two bold moves: he said that our company decided to outsource this service to a company due to the high expense of time and cost in running a successful O&M company. (He also used the word collaborate but the company like to use this word so it can be very vague – like calling a friend when it can just be your hi-and-bye person.) Apparently my company decided to enter the O&M market because there are very few players in the arena. It is only that they have entered that they know why. Next, the company decided to expand to Indonesia because unlike Singapore, Indonesia has many high ticket projects. Investors are only interested funding the ailing company if they can secure contracts that are in millions, which is very rare in Singapore. Of course, our company will engage with the local Indonesian O&M partners.
[4] Dunning-Kruger effect
References:
I am grateful for the businessmen, leaders and writers who have showered their wisdom to generation after them. They are giants on which we step on. And also thanks to the Internet, I can get all of them for free! What a time to be alive! These wonderful people include, in no particular order:
– Jeff Bezos
– Alexandr Wang
– Elon Musk
– Alex Hormozi
– Robert Greene
– Lee Kuan Yew
Also thanks to the mentors, supervisors, seniors and my peers around me. You have taught me some important life lessons by instruction and demonstration.
Randolph Yew 
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