So far, I have been discussing the interesting aspects that made Singapore such an economic and political success worthy of emulation throughout the world. As expected, there are many drawbacks in the Singapore miracle, though, and in this article, I would like to discuss just two of them.
Death of risk taking
The success of the Singapore government has an unexpected negative effect on the private sector. Much of the success of the government sector starts with drawing resources and people from the private sector. This is achieved by pegging public sector salary to baskets of private sector salaries in pools of equivalent positions. This means that prospective public servants do not need to make financial sacrifices in order to serve in public service, as is often the case in most other countries. Such a strategy has been successful in combating corruption and ensuring that the best resources are also deployed in government.
It also has the effect of bringing corporate practices into government, again very much unlike many other countries where there is a clear distinction between private and public sector ethos and approaches to work. Among the corporate practices brought in were decision-making methodologies. Basically, the idea is that there is always a proper process for decision-making, which involves working out your objectives, gathering data, evaluating options, and selecting the one that best fits the objectives and circumstances. Such methodologies became baked into government procedures as corporate practices gets married to government bureaucracies.
Effect on corporate sector
As in the rest of Asia, the Singapore government engaged closely with corporations in private-public partnerships, not just in individual projects as in the West, but also in long-term planning for the commercial and economic architecture of the country. And as in very much the rest of Asia, the dividing lines between the corporate businessmen and politicians & government servants got blurred, especially when many government officers were formerly from the corporate world and sometimes, vice versa. Unlike the rest of Asia, though, the anti-corruption code in Singapore help maintain a healthier relationship between businessmen and government. This close relationship means that the influence between the private and public sectors flowed both ways.
The Confucianist reverence for authority common throughout East Asia, on which Lee Kuan Yew modelled his highly authoritarian ‘benign dictatorship’, eased the assumption of the leadership mantle by the Singapore government. This is particularly with the government’s success in bringing the nation to prosperity based on its long-term planning. As a result, the private sector begin to adopt the very structured decision-making methodology the public sector had developed, into private sector decision-making.
So, in many Singaporean companies today, decision-making is very much the application of such a methodology and Singaporean managers are trained to identify a proper decision-making process before a decision is made and apply that process to achieve an optimal decision. In addition to ensuring a rigorous basis for decision-making, having a methodology made it safer for the Singaporean manager as it avoids blame if they had applied the correct decision making process but ended up with an undesired outcome. This has the effect of taking risk-taking out of management decision-making and hence risk-taking features much less in corporate decisions than elsewhere in Asia, especially in large companies - its all about process.
Where is Creative of today
This is the reason why you will find many large and competently run companies in Singapore but very few that captures the imagination of corporate world elsewhere. There was one such company in Singapore's past: Creative Technology, famed worldwide for its Soundblaster sound cards that helped ushered in the PC audio revolution in the early 90s. The company has now long faded into a maintenance culture unable to compete with more daring companies in a fast-changing high-risk industry.
Most Singaporeeans I spoke to found it hard to name an equivalent of Creative in the corporate world in Singapore today. Indeed, only one company in the top ten of the Singapore stock exchange is currently run by a Singaporean entrepreneur: Garena, an online gaming company which competes largely in the South-East Asian market only. Six of the rest of the top ten are owned by the government, two more by Malaysian entrepreneurs and one is American.
Singapore has highly stable, highly competent companies like the Development Bank of Singapore and Singapore Telecom, which are not there because they took risks: they are in effect huge corporate bureaucracies. In comparison, neighbouring Malaysia which started off with a similar corporate culture, has built up businesses like AirAsia, Grab and Genting through imaginative but risky management strategies. It speaks volumes about the different outcomes in the two similarly sized economies.
Impact of the education system
As a part digression, this reliance on a settled methodology for decision-making is due at least in part to the education system in Asia. Education systems throughout Asia are based in large measure on the venerable Chinese education system and its Confucianist basis. This education system has been eminently successful in its two-thousand-year historical context and has been responsible for churning out the millions of engineers, accountants and other technical people much needed by the emerging economies of post-war Asia and lifting the social and economic status of many families and entire generations. In this article, though, I will only focus in isolation on certain aspects that relate to Singaporean corporate decision-making.
The Chinese language is unique among the world’s major languages, in that it is not phonetic based and do not have an alphabet. Chinese is written using pictographs and each character is unique. As it is not made up of letters, there is virtually no way you can figure out the meaning of unfamiliar words and how they sound.
If you come across an unfamiliar English word, you can work out how it sounds from the letters that make up the word and find out its meaning in the dictionary. There are no Chinese dictionaries for laypeople and Chinese dictionaries are based on stroke order and only useable by linguists. If you come across an unfamiliar Chinese character, someone has to tell you what it sounds like and what it means: there is no other way. So, learning the Chinese language is a matter of memorisation, which is why Asian education system is so much based on rote learning.
Furthermore, it Is not enough to reproduce the character. You have to write it in the prescribed order of strokes. So, if you faithfully duplicated a Chinese character but wrote it in the wrong order of strokes, you will still get a scolding from the teacher. What it teaches the child is that there is a correct way of doing things and you have to find out what that correct method is. You can see how the Asian education system shapes corporate decision-making in Singapore, making the problem so much more entrenched.
Ultra-competitveness
Attending training in Singapore tends to be much more difficult for me than in Malaysia. In Malaysia, I would often be sitting in the training room whiling away the time, thinking I could do a better job than the trainer. In Singapore I had to work very hard during training just to keep up with the questions that my fellow attendees were asking. Welcome to the world of Singaporean competiveness - or maybe, I was just not as good as them.
Origins of competitveness
When Singapore was expelled from Malaysia in 1965, the Singaporean government made meritocracy one of the pillars of the Singapore identity, together with its strict anti-corruption stance. It was intended to contrast with the race-based preference that was the basis of the governing coalition in Malaysia. Singapore was expelled because it challenged this defining feature of the Malaysian governance.
As a result, the Singapore government pursued meritocracy with a vengeance. It ensured that positions in government were given only to the best candidates. Putting aside personal racism, which was hard to legislate for, most commentators would agree that the government had been largely successful in this and Singapore prides self in its non-racial basis for selection and decision-making. And with that success, came prosperity that meritocracy had a big hand in engendering.
Meritocracy had the effect of making people more competitive as success is now based on one’s personal efforts rather than race, religion or family networks. As Singapore became successful, this competitiveness only increases, leading to a darker side of Singaporean meritocracy. Competitiveness means you have to constantly keep an eye on your work colleagues trying to get any form of advantage over you in the office. Competitiveness means that you constantly have to push your child to perform better at school because other parents are doing the same thing. In a society that has succeeded in providing for the basic needs of its people, competitiveness drives one’s position in society and in the work space to be the measure of success, often the sole measure of success. It all makes for a very stressful working and living environment.
Kiasuism
This ultra-competitiveness has a name: kiasu, a Hokkien word which literally translates to afraid to lose (Hokkien is the predominant Chinese dialect in Singapore). There is no easy way to describe this term to outsiders but to recount an incident I witnessed during a bumper-to-bumper jam on the Second Link bridge from Malaysia. All the cars around me carried Singaporean number-plates and they followed each other literally one or two feet apart. I commented that this was an accident waiting to happen and sure enough it did: one car did bump into another car in front. Amazingly, neither driver got down to inspect the damage as one would usually do. I realised that both drivers was afraid of losing their place in the queue. If the queue had moved, another car would have moved into their lane ahead of them. Nobody wants to lose their place in the jam - nobody wants to lose anything.
The term goes beyond not wanting to lose and denotes a mentality of not wanting to give anything to someone else if it gives the other person an advantage. It conjures up an image of someone who would avoid giving away something even if it is of no cost to them just because someone else gets a benefit. It implies that social interactions as transactional and largely bereft of altruism. It, and the government social engineering, probably are the main contributors to the word sterile, used often to describe Singapore, in contrast with the chaos of its rival Hong Kong. All in all, it is not a very positive term, and even if it is not exactly insulting, it would aspersions on the person you apply it to.
Impact on society
This ultra-competitive streak has made Singapore an alluring market for products that gives the ultra-competitive an edge in life. My wife and me have always been amazed at the dollars Singaporean parents are willing to pay to introduce music to their foetus in the womb, to expose foreign languages to their new-born, to teach mathematics to their toddlers and to introduce computer programming to their pre-schoolers. Marketeers often capitalise on the Singaporean Fear of Missing Out and sometimes uses the kiasu term to entice shoppers not to miss out on sales that their friends will get.
Of course not all Singaporeans behave in such a way, but enough of them work in Singaporean offices I have visited to convince me that this is not somewhere I would like to work on a permanent full-time basis. It was just too stressful - and lonely. So while Singapore has many
qualities that I admire – meritocracy, honesty, competence – there are also much drawbacks for someone like me who has more of a people-based management style. I have always stated, hopefully without any hint of racism, that I don't mind working in Singapore as long as it is for a foreign boss.
Kiasuism is so pervasive in Singapore that Singaporeans embraces it as something that defines them, negative as it is. Commentaries on social habits in Singapore are often liberally littered with the word. Singaporeans even wear T-shirts proudly proclaiming it. It is something that Singaporeans cannot change and so the only way to live with it is to wear it with pride, I guess.
Conclusion
That really is Singapore in a nutshell. It has been highly successful, much more successful than most people had expected on that traumatic day in 1965 when it accepted its expulsion from Malaysia with trepidation. With that success, comes challenges to fitting into a modern society which increasingly sees itself to be as part of a compassionate global village. Only time will tell whether Singapore can reinvented itself the way it did in 1965.