According to Peter's principle, a person is promoted to the
position of incompetence because of his or her tendency to copy his
or her past successful methodology from his or her training or
experiences into the next job which may require a totally new
approach.
Hence a lawyer who is trained to control people from passing of
laws or regulations will tend to manage people legalistically i.e.
based on the psychology that as long as one is supported by forms
and legal sanction of some kind, the leaders could do as they
like.
Yet in life, not many problems affecting competitiveness and
survival can be solved in such a manner. Problems of practical
knowledge application and entrepreneurship are solved because of
incentives to people to earn a living or create jobs and not by
allowing the government to become more and more powerful through
sanction of laws and regulations.
Entrepreneurship is badly needed in our society due to its demise
for many years due to past mistakes in promoting only top-down
legalistic governance based on passing of laws and legal wrangling
with legal processes.
If we look at the schools now, we will find that all or nearly all
the teachers are teaching the students by condemning them, blaming
them for not trying hard or passing certain grades instead of
encouraging them to apply knowledge.
Now the whole society has grown up being subjected to legalistic
wrangling and tweaking of rules and regulations on the population
due to many years of top-down legalistic system of
government.
URA has tried to use raw powers of land acquisition and summary
processes to extend the past conservation of properties to new
commercial sites without looking into whole range of newer problems
which may be caused.
Knowledge application is the way to go and people are now the
centre of the universe. So schools and politicians cannot use old
methods of governance and management if there is going to be
greater entrepreneurship and creativity and competitiveness in the
future.