What a Malaysia journalist said about our scholar
leadership
Falling back on autopilot
By SEAH CHIANG NEE
IN a changed world that now competes on free-flowing ideas,
Singapores tradition of choosing the best scholars to run an
over-regulated nation is increasingly being questioned.
Sceptics feel that these scholar-technocrats in Singapore, an asset
in the old economy, may be short of modern requirements because
many are reluctant to try out new ideas but stick to safe
policies.
And they are no longer just armchair critics or Internet liberals,
but successful business tycoons and one of the most respected
(retired) senior civil servants here.
Quek: Some of my managers involve themselves in too much detail
and are afraid to make mistakes.
Being challenged are two fundamental strategies that are still
actively pursued; firstly, choosing government leaders from the
brightest scholars and, secondly, an over-regulated government runs
as someone said on autopilot mode.
The reliance on scholars, enunciated by Lee Kuan Yew 40 years ago,
is based on the assumption that academic achievement is the best
criterion for good political leadership, like in imperial
China.
Lees rationale then and now remains this: Until a better
system of identifying young talent surfaces, academic achievement
is still the most effective.
Get the top graduates from university, pay them premium rates, and
they will deliver, Lee believes and to an extent it had worked
well in the past.
But detractors say the world has changed and todays Singapore
cannot compete or navigate its next phase of growth by just relying
on problem-solving technocrats or technically competent
managers.
One complainant is Singapores billionaire tycoon Quek Leng Beng,
who said scholar-managers might have cost some of his companies
millions in lost opportunities.
Some of my managers involve themselves in too much detail and are
afraid to make mistakes, he told The Business Times.
One guy, a scholar with an impressive list of paper
qualifications, used to hand me reports of at least 10 pages on
anything I wanted.
In turn, he demanded reports of at least 20 pages from his
subordinates. So he had piles of reports on his table and when I
asked him if he has time to read all these reports, he replied that
he did not.
He was so bogged down reading reports that he had no time to deal
with the real business. He did not last long.
There are a few more like this. All afraid to make mistakes and
take risks when business is all about having a broad vision and
taking risks.
Quek is undertaking a review of his Hong Leong group of companies
with US$20bil in global assets.
Not long ago, another successful entrepreneur, Sim Wong Hoo of
Creative Technology, told Lianhe Zaobao that he was worried about
Singapores future.
After decades of pampered, crisis-free living, Singaporeans did not
realise or admit to facing a crisis, but continued to live under a
false sense of security, he said.
Another was the states reliance on school grades to assess
quality.
In the new economy, academic excellence is no longer the key to
success. Only the government departments continue to place a lot of
importance on (exam) results, Sim said.
Many scholars move into the work-life with only one skill: how to
do well in exams.
They only know how to follow rules and suffer from the No U-turn
syndrome or NUTS, he added.
Sim used it to refer to the Singaporean bureaucrats conditioned
no response to anything that has not been explicitly written down
as acceptable.
In such an environment, a young manager would consider it easy to
tackle problems if they were given a set of rules and guidelines to
work with.
Unfortunately, the new economy is constantly evolving.
Being nimble is the only way to survive, but Singaporeans dont
have the ability to respond and adapt to changing situations. This
is a big worry, Sim said.
It would be naïve just to blame the scholars for this state of
affairs. The government has always depended on laws and regulations
as a vital ingredient of a stable society, the new economy
notwithstanding.
It has created a national mindset of compliance and obedience,
giving rise to a generation of play safe Singaporeans who lack
initiative and enterprise.
The environment of high government salaries and career safety
discourages risk-taking initiatives. In politics, it spawned a new
breed of autopilot technocrats who are content to follow past
policies rather than risk entering visionary ventures.
Great national leaders, it is said, are often thrown up by the
chaos of history, amidst mass suffering and national dangers, not
in times of wealth and peace.
These include such historical figures as Abraham Lincoln, Mahatma
Gandhi, Mao Zedong and Winston Churchill, all of whom achieved
greatness because of chaos.
Few rich modern societies are known to have produced wise,
visionary leaders, so can Singapore, operating its scholarship
government system, succeed in disproving this?
Lee Kuan Yew, Goh Keng Swee and other strong leaders had emerged
from a Singapore in danger of collapse.
Before he succumbed to dementia, the late S. Rajaratnam, once the
Peoples Action Party's top theoretician, said Singapore had
matured to a point where it needed problem-solvers more than
visionaries. That was, of course, before todays global
economy.
However, one of the states best-known (retired) permanent
secretaries here, Ngiam Tong Dow, doesnt think too much about the
PAP putting all the scholars into the civil service.
This belief that a monopoly of talent is the way to retain
political power forever was a short-term view, he once told a
newspaper interviewer. It is the law of nature that all things
must atrophy.
