What is leadership, talents, insight, foresight or all the ivory
tower assumptions made in implementing many of our policies like
meritocracy or foreign talent? Is our particular leadership
working? What are the good and the bad ? Are there more bad than
good or more good than bad when only a few top echelon is doing all
the planning or sitting around and are they only fond of spewing
out wonderful sounding ideas without much actions or results?
Are these talks about leadership and assumptions behind all the
policies still working for us or are they working against us and
dividing our unity as a people?
Yes, it is easy to agree that leadership is an important and
critical element in government.
However beyond this rhetoric, there is nothing tangible or
practicable about leadership or how to exercise or implement
leadership in particular being too conceptual and difficult of
definition/
When leaders talk about leadership, do they have indeed know what
they are talking about or are they simply engaging in portraying
themselves as good leaders being influenced or prejudiced by a
conflict of interest to present themselves as good in their
preoccupations.
Will the leaders of government define their role, duties and
responsibility as to serve people or will they keep silent and
reserve their right to pass themselves and judge their own
performance without any comments or views from the people
themselves?
Do leaders identify as their challenge to bring about the greatest
good of the greatest number or do they only expect people to accept
whatever they are doing out of their own narrow-mindedness,
self-centredness or face.
If leaders talk about leadership, vision, foresight, insight but
refuse to let people be the judge of their performance, and instead
only seek way and means to deny problems and justify their own
actions and policies after the facts or criticisms or problems are
they still capable of objectively exercising good leadership
qualities in the actual work place?
What kind of leadership qualities did citizens expect from our
leaders today ?
Should leaders be expected to possess leadership qualities as
stated in the foregoing or should they be given their divine right
of some kind to do as they like despite all the wrongs like the nkf
or shin corp ignoring the need for proper accountability,
procedures, processes, codes of corporate governance, passion,
moral uprightness or nobility of spirit?
It would appear that although there are a lot of talks about
importance of leadership and talent everything being done is still
very abstract and intangible and unaccountable.
So leaders cannot expect people to understand them as they so far
have not defined leadership or leaders' accountability and are seen
to be seeking convenient justifications and excuses to cover over
their mistakes, negligence or ignorance.
Hence if leaders want to gel with the people and work as one with
them they should own up and be more proactive and stop engaging
themselves in all the look-good policies, assumptions and
justifications of their actions without true implementation
abilities.
Despite many years of such rhetorics, what the leaders have been
doing is actually legalistic wrangling of laws and regulations
aimed at taxing and recovering fullest costs depriving people of
essential services in housing, transportation, utilities and
medical care.
The ordinary citizens are suffering from dropping wages,
unemployments with the domestic economy being heavily squeezed out
of their survival by government's getting into businesses of all
sorts to compete with its own citizens.
What happen to all the talents of our own citizens or do we have no
talents?
The Asian Financial crisis has exposed self-centredness as the
ultimate cause of financial instability.
Why is it that after so many crises and despite all the talks about
leadership there does not seem to be any real leadership but what
we are seeing is only individualism and self-centredness resulting
in malpractices in all the NKF going on in so many
organizations.
The real challenge is to work out a system of collective leadership
processes where all leaders are openly laying out out whatever
their policies and actions in attainable work processes capable of
being effectively delegated or decentralized to be performed in
teamwork and results-oriented manner which involve and motivate
all.
In the fast-paced technology and knowledge-based age only when the
whole team is in action mode will it be possible for the
organization to work with leadership and talents.
What we actually need to lead is in areas of down-to-earth
broad-based technology and knowledge application by the
masses.
Therefore our leaders will need to go for actions and not all the
brandishing of their self-importance.
For them to be action-oriented, they need to translate all their
ideas and policies to tangible attainable work processes which will
allow staff to take over and exercise their broad-based knowledge
application and teamwork.
We will need to recognize shortcomings as stated in the "20 major
major government policy errors" as posted to the Feedback Unit
since 2002.
We need ministers and civil servants who are well versed in
translating all their public statements and policies into whole
action processes failing which we will again miss opportunities to
restructure the economy to value-adding technology-driven economy
talked about for years.