Why it never pays to carry balls in the office

I got away with a hell of a presentation today, and this is one of the slides I shared with folks who attended my class preview today.

Throughout my career, I've always found it strange why people are so eager to Angkat Bola / Carry Balls / Brown Nose their way up a workplace. I think employees should be generally agreeable and get their work done promptly, but there is not need to go overboard when it comes to making your bosses feel good.

One particular case I know involved a colleague of mine who had an exasperating habit of inviting her managers to her home for a barbecue while not inviting her immediate peers. She was not mean to her peers - she just wanted to "manage her superiors" beyond what was socially acceptable in a Singaporean workplace (Obviously, she's not Singaporean). As a consequence of that, she rose  up the ranks of the company very quickly. I remember the day my company failed to win a major government tender, and since this colleague played a major role in the bid, I recall her peers were quietly celebrating the loss.

If you look at MOM data, an average worker can expect a 5% every year from age 25 to 45. After that, staying employed becomes a problem, and salary trends tend to flat-line after age 45. A lot of senior managers lose their jobs in a retrenchment exercise and political savvy is not that useful given that their patrons may also be out of a job as well. The reality of the situation is that, once retrenched, a 50-something worker will never be able to get a five-digit a month job again, so why shore up this amount of political capital when companies will discard you like an empty printer cartridge in the future ?

The idea behind this slide came from Thomas Piketty's controversial idea that for the most part, the inequality (r>g) holds in a capitalistic society unless there is a plague or a war going on. The growth in the value of your investment assets will always outstrip the growth of income derived from labor (proxied by GDP growth ).

Let's put this down using a practical example.

Scenario A) Be a balls-carrying sycophant and lose the respect of your peers

Suppose you decide to carry your bosses balls. In the normal case you get a 5% increment. If your boss is particularly impressed with your brown-nosing, you can raise your average increment by 60% or get a nice 8% increment.

Let's just say that you are this good at balls carrying.

Scenario B) Be an uncontroversial worker but save 50% of your income.

If you can save 50% of your income and can get 8% investment returns last year, you would be able to get a 5% raise on your salary and the equivalent of a 4% raise arising from your investment savings made last year. At 9%, you can actually beat the sycophant by 1%.

Of course, the two options I selected are not mutually exclusive. The best solution is to combine (A) and (B) and become a sycophant who also invests in the markets. In practice, that requires a lot of effort.

If the (r>g) inequality holds in Singapore society, you are always better off just being a solid corporate citizen but also be an avid long term investor. My personal experience is that manager types, upon knowing that I'm pretty good at investing, are often eager to befriend me instead. It has made my time in SGX a lot more pleasant when your key customer is also a retail investor. When an engineer accidentally brings down a server, maybe I can start the conversation with a friendly tip to ease into the ugly discussion about the IT incident.

When you hit your fifties, your bosses' balls have become so sagged that you may need more than two hands to carry it. On the other hand, if you plan your finances well, after 20 years of work, your investment income may have already exceeded your take home pay.

Just don't invite hubris by crushing the balls that fall unceremoniously onto your hands.