Hong Kong’s quick-buck mindset is the reason why we are losing vibrancy.
Almost everything in Hong Kong is of half-baked effort — putting things offline online in digital marketing, using a brick-and-mortar mindset in e-commerce, etc. When the rest of the world is investing heavily and eagerly in innovation, Hong Kong is still eyeing on speculation — this time with innovation added to the list of money-making things.
Whatever is the trend, Hong Kongers will grab at the opportunity, but only when profits can be envisioned in the near future and after everyone else has proven it. Still, things are still done with the same mindset.
It’s like putting on new clothes without taking off your old ones first.
The latest new clothes is data science
The biggest misunderstanding about research, insights and analytics (note their order) is that you only need to focus on one because it has replaced everything that has come before. Due to the current hype over analytics, everyone’s eyes now are on data science, without knowing what it really means.
Data science is the scientific theory and methodology behind analytics with the goal of understanding our data, making predictions and solving problems. It is, and should be treated as, one aspect of our view into our customers and the market, not the only perspective. (Of course, there are also infrastructure and technology, etc. But I will focus on analytics and insights.)
When you see tech companies hiring anthropologists (Professor Genevieve Bell @ Intel) and others engaging in futuring (future imagineering @ Walt Disney), this should be reminder that hard data alone are not enough.
If you still insist that data science is all you need, watch this clip from a machine learning course taught by Professor Cynthia Rudin in which she reminised about her conversation with the winners of a Netflix competition. The winning recommender algorithm is still in use today.
“These guys knew how people behave when they rate movies and they realise all sorts of interesting stuff like when people rate multiple movies at the same time, their ratings change from when they are rating one movie at a time. So their model was absolutely laid in with gems of (the) behavioral psychology of movie raters…” (emphasis added)
Bruno Bertelli, CEO of ad agency, Publicis Italy, also agreed:
Data are your ingredients and data science is the chef. The “soft fuzziness” of social sciences, humanities, design and arts is the vision and creativity that will elevate your restaurant to Michelin stars’ level.
Small-mindedness is the reason
Small minds feed into the approach to work in Hong Kong. Anything that is different, no matter how slight, or that will not give quick returns, is seen as wrong. People do not open their minds to novelty and diversity. The vicious cycle continues.
I relocated to Shanghai from Hong Kong in 2011 for work and came back mid-2019. My first reaction was culture shock — at how much Hong Kong has not changed.
I’m not talking about mobile payment based on which mainland Chinese are mocking at Hong Kong’s backwardedness. To this, I disagree. Hong Kong has a mature credit card payment system. The risk of counterfeit money is almost non-existent, thus cash can be safely and widely used here.
My shock, which slowly grew to disappointment, was at Hong Kong’s lack of vision. When you are groomed from young to believe that learning is only about doing good in your exams so that you can put your newly acquired qualifications on your CV, it is not surprising that Hong Kong is slowly losing its glamour when the rest of the world are evolving with time. Some may defend this as result-oriented but the “result” here is over-narrowly defined. Instead of learning a new skill for knowledge, which will come in handy in the long term, although sometimes with indirect benefits, learning among Hong Kongers is geared towards direct results. You would see people learning how to pass the ABRSM exams, but not music. When you learn to drive in Hong Kong, your instructor will only take you along the routes in your road test so you end up not knowing how to drive despite having received your licence.
However, what disappoints me most is the resentment towards anyone who has come back from other places outside of Hong Kong, be it Singapore, US, UK, and especially mainland China. We are often seen as “people who could not make it in Hong Kong”, even though many of us were either sent by our company or were headhunted and sponsored for our relocation. The typical reactions to our non-Hong Kong-experience-gap on CV are:
“So you have not worked in Hong Kong for a few years, does it mean you are not familiar with Hong Kong anymore?” (my own experience)
“You have not worked in Hong Kong for the past few years, can you adapt to Hong Kong’s working culture and pace?”
“Why did you move to Market X to work? Were you rejected in Hong Kong?”
I have never encountered this attitude in Singapore, Canada and the UK, where I used to live and study, nor in mainland China where I have worked for almost a decade.
When my friends return to their hometown after working in mainland China, only the Hong Kongers experience discrimination in Hong Kong while Singaporeans, Germans, Americans, British, Australians, Belgians, you name it, are valued for their other-market (i.e., China) experience. However, in Hong Kong, our China experience is considered a career gap. We have wasted our life by not continuing to build up our experience in Hong Kong.
The assumption that only Hong Kong matters is another new clothes widely worn in this city.
We need to stop these bullsh!ts!
