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WHAT THE HELL IS WATER?

The late author David Foster Wallace began his commencement address to the graduates of Kenyon College in 2005 with:

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”

As Wallace explained, the point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.

We celebrated our 49th National Day last Saturday 9 August 2014. It also means we are now into our 50th year of independent statehood, our year of Jubilee. I will discuss the significance of Jubilee in some future blog. But in this blog I would simply like to draw our minds to what is the important reality about Singapore that is possibly, or even probably, hard “to see and talk about”.

What is the reason for Singapore’s economic success all these years, when Singapore had to strike its own path of success and survival after giving up the idea of needing to have an economic hinterland next door, which was the reason for Singapore’s desire to merge with the Malayan peninsula to its north and thus had been part of Malaysia?

In terms of strategies and schemes, Singapore had decided to “leapfrog the region” and reach out to the whole world as its “hinterland”, the source of investment capital, management capability, technology, and, most of all, markets. There was massive investment in education and training, a major thrust in home ownership through the work of the Housing and Development Board and the Central Provident Fund scheme to create stakes for everyone, and a global push for investments through the Economic Development Board. But this focus on schemes and policies, exactly, could cause us to miss the critical point.

Why should companies invest billions of dollars in Singapore knowing they would need tens of years to recover their investments? They have done so because they have found the people and government of Singapore to be trustworthy. We could be relied on to work hard and to deliver on our promises, even if we faced unexpected difficulties and many obstacles along the way. Singapore’s perspective was that of long-term business and personal relationships, the type of relationship which could only survive where trust and credibility are never in question.

Singapore is an artificial construct: We are the result of human effort and invention. We have a reputation for honouring our word as manifested in integrity, incorruptibility, hard work, imagination in solving problems, and future-orientedness. It is easy to forget that Singapore is the product of human ingenuity and trustworthiness, which can be easily lost if not understood and sustained by Singaporeans.

A Harvard University professor visiting Singapore for the first time remarked he found honour even in the simplest behaviours among Singaporeans, as he saw in the taxi driver who arrived to pick him up exactly at the time promised. To him this was a demonstration of the taxi driver honouring his word.

Singaporeans run the danger of saying, as the fish at the beginning of this story, “What the hell is water?” without recognizing that “Singapore water” is honour and trustworthiness built up over many years through consistent behaviour, predictable policy, social stability, and national unity.

These attributes have certainly made Singapore unique among the many developing countries of the world…the important question is: Are we able to sustain this uniqueness to not only survive, but thrive?

15th August 2014 by Joanne

HONOUR GETS THE TURNIP OUT

Honour (Singapore), a non-profit enterprise that seeks the well-being of Singapore by promoting a culture of honour and honouring, was launched by Minister for Education Heng Swee Keat last Tuesday, 5 August 2014. It seems a fitting lead-in to National Day, which we will celebrate tomorrow, by reminding everyone to honour Singapore.

Honour carries the dual message of

being a people who honour our word
being a people who honour each other despite possibly having widely different views on issues

Perhaps a good way to appreciate the message can be found in the well-known Russian folk tale about The Great Turnip.

The story is about a farmer who planted a turnip that kept growing…and growing…and growing until it became a real giant of a turnip. One day he decided to pull the turnip out of the ground. He pulled and pulled, but it would not come out.

He asked his wife to help. The wife and the farmer pulled and pulled, but the turnip still would not come out.

The wife asked a boy to help. So the boy and the wife and the farmer pulled and pulled, but the turnip was still stuck in the ground.

And so the story carried on. The boy called the girl, who then called the dog, who called the cat. And the cat and the dog and the girl and the boy and the wife and the farmer pulled and pulled, but the turnip would not come out.

The cat next called the rat to help out. And the rat and the cat and the dog and the girl and the boy and the wife and the farmer pulled and pulled…and finally the turnip came out of the ground.

The wife then cooked the turnip and everyone had wonderful turnip soup for dinner.

Often the story is told to illustrate the value of teamwork. But in fact we could find not just one, but a total of five morals in the story.

The first moral is that if we all pull together (in the same direction), we can get things done which we will not be able to do individually. Yes, it is about the value of teamwork and synergy.
The second moral is that even natural enemies, like the cat the dog, and the mouse and the cat, can find it worth their while to work together. It is a matter of “enlightened self-interest”, a valuable idea for the workplace and the classroom.
The third moral is that until the rat, the smallest of them all, joined in, the turnip would not come out. It shows that everyone is important and valuable, even the smallest member of the team. We must appreciate everyone one…no matter how small.
The fourth moral is that there is fair and just reward after the job is done. The farmer’s wife gave turnip soup to everyone, and not just her favourites. “Reward for work and work for reward” is an important principle.
And, finally, the fifth moral is: we must honour our word (give fair and just reward) and honour each other (respect and value every effort and every one). It is a good way to conduct ourselves in life.

Honour is the foundation of trust, and trust is critical for long-term, beneficial relationships, whether the relationships be personal or business.

8th August 2014 by Joanne

MIND YOUR MAP

I came across this commentary by Global Business Network, which illustrates how hard it is to change our beliefs.

There was a 1701 map of North America by a Dutch cartographer called Herman Moll. California is shown as an island. Moll produced the map based on reports from Spanish explorers, who travelled up the western side of the Americas to the tip of today’s Baja Peninsula. Around 1635, the Spanish had sailed further north to Puget Sound. It seemed logical to the cartesians then to connect the northern and southern points, and the Isle of California was born!

Years later, some missionaries landed to go inland to bring the Word of God to the American Indians. Relying on Moll’s map, the missionaries disassembled their boats, packed them on mules, hauled them across California, up the Sierra Nevada mountain range, and down the other side – only to find no beach but just a lot of sand that went on, and on, and on. They finally realized they were in the middle of a desert.

They then wrote to the Spanish map-makers, saying, “There’s no Island of California; your map is wrong!” The map-makers replied, “No! You’re in the wrong place; the map is right!” The Spanish finally changed their maps in 1685, while Herman Moll continued to defend his Isle of California until 1721.

The point is: if you get your facts wrong, you get your map wrong. If you get your map wrong, you do the wrong things. Once you believe a map, it is very, very hard to change.

Everyone has deeply ingrained maps, especially successful executives. However, the map that got them to the top is unlikely to be the map that they need for the future.

People, especially top executives, need to be able to ask themselves difficult and often painful questions about how the future might be different from the recent past. Failure to do so would be failure to anticipate the future, which is the most common reason for fatal outcomes for organisations and campaigns.

1st August 2014 by Joanne

THINKING THE FUTURE WITH COMMUNITY LEADERS

I had the privilege to address more than 200 community leaders last Sunday. These are the people who volunteer their time and energy in the various grassroots organisations to serve the community, maintain social harmony, and build relationships and understanding among Singaporeans.

I started off by saying that if we were to look at an atlas of the world, Singapore fits quite nicely within the letter “o” of the name of our country. This smallness, if it were not to be an insurmountable impediment to the success and survival of Singapore, and therefore the hopes and aspirations of Singaporeans, must translate into certain ways of thinking and of working together. I quoted Lord Parlmeston, an English statesman of the 19^th century, who had said: “Nations have no permanent friends or allies, they only have permanent interests.”

I outlined what I felt were the three big challenges the world faces and which Singapore cannot avoid:

lack of leadership
lack of ideas
the rise of relativist secularism

On the lack of leadership: I take as my starting point the definition of leadership as “making things happen which on their own would not happen.” So the leader has to make things happen. But obviously this definition is not adequate, in that the head of the mafia, for example, would still qualify as a leader, despite the criminal activities associated with the mafia. So we need to improve the definition by saying “leadership is making good things happen which on their own would not happen.” But the moment we insert the word “good”, we have entered into the moral and ethical dimension, as we then need to also decide what is good and what is bad, what is right and what is wrong. So in leading people, we cannot run away from making moral judgments of whether the goals and results of our leadership are good and right for the people we are leading and serving.

On the lack of ideas: I said that, in my mind, the greatest danger for our future is when our young, who would be taking up the mantle of leadership in years to come, do not think for ourselves, but instead simply “follow the crowd” or take on the views of people elsewhere without thinking for ourselves as to whether that is the best way to think and to behave which would be beneficial for our long-term well-being. In today’s world of the social media, it is so easy to just follow whatever we feel comfortable with, rather than to challenge what we read, dig into the data to check for accuracy and truthfulness, and reason things out for ourselves to come to our own convictions. This way we will not simply fall prey to the loudest voices or the urgings of those who do not have our best interests in mind.

And on the rise of relativist secularism: This is where there are no stable standards in values and beliefs to guide our decisions and behaviours as we make our way into the future. Instead, people justify their actions on a relative basis. “I am OK if I lie, so long as the lies I tell are smaller than the lies other people tell.” Bad behaviours and poor ideas are justified by quoting others with even worse behaviours or poorer ideas. Contrast this to why Singapore has been able to attract so many large investments where investors will need years to recover their money. They do so because they see Singaporeans as people whose word is our honour: people who will deliver on our promises, who are reliable, who will work hard, and who are trustworthy, a people who will deliver despite unexpected difficulties and much effort.

25th July 2014 by Joanne

THE YOUNG NEED TO BE SHAPED

There has been much public discourse in recent days about whether the National Library Board should have removed three books it deemed unsuitable for children.

That many parents have said the decision on whether the books are suitable should be left to parents is a worthy statement, based on the assumption that all parents who send their young children to the library will be vetting every book their children would be reading.

Would such an assumption be reasonable? It would probably be reasonable for the parents who have spoken up, but it would not be a reasonable assumption for the majority of parents in Singapore who could possibly be feeling that they are already doing the right thing simply by taking the trouble to take their children to the library once a week or every few days.

So the public debate should principally be whether the National Library Board has the duty to exercise its judgment – because many parents assume they are actively doing it, and would hold them accountable for it – to ensure that books available in the library are age-appropriate, and the courage to admit and correct any wrong judgment they may have made, including withdrawing books they had cleared but on review feel they should not have cleared.

All these arguments then lead to the question of how much children need to be shaped in their understanding and character, as opposed to being largely left to develop on their own.

The Chinese have a saying that one can see the future simply by seeing how the child’s character is like at three years of age. And psychologists have said that by the time a child is four year old, much of his or her beliefs, attitudes and values are already formed for life: This is BEFORE the child turns up in school, which therefore places the responsibility squarely on parents to consciously and deliberately attend to their children’s development of character before they even get to kindergarten.

We find the following in Plato’s “Republic”:

“You know that the beginning is the most important part of any work, especially in the case of a young and tender thing; for that is the time at which the character is being formed and the desired impression is more readily taken. . . shall we just carelessly allow children to hear any casual tales which may be devised by casual persons, and to receive into their minds ideas for the most part the very opposite of those that we should wish them to have when they are grown up?

“We cannot. . . . anything received into the mind at that age is likely to become indelible and unalterable; and therefore it is most important that the tales that the young first hear should be models of virtuous thoughts. . . .

“Then will our youth dwell in a land of health, amid fair sights and sounds, and receive the good in everything; and beauty, the effluence of fair works, shall flow into the eye and ear, like a health-giving breeze from a purer region, and insensibly draw the soul from the earliest years into likeness and sympathy with the beauty of reason.

“There can be no nobler training than that.”

Or as the Bible states even more succinctly in its book of Proverbs: “Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not turn from it.”

18th July 2014 by Joanne

Open your hearts to Life

I was shocked to learn during the course of this week that if a girl less than 16 years old were pregnant, she would not need to get her parent’s consent to abort the baby, but she must get her parent’s consent if she wants to carry the baby to full term or to subsequently put the baby out to adoption. I may have been told the facts of law wrongly, but if true, it is shocking for me to learn that the whole system is skewed towards aborting the baby. For the girl, to abort the baby would at least save her from any scolding at home!

On a separate issue, I had the special opportunity to visit the charity known as Sanctuary House. Sanctuary House arranges for infants and children up to 16 years old to be put into foster homes. The foster parents take them in on a temporary basis, which may be for a few days, but in exceptional cases could go on to a few months or even years. These are children who need a sanctuary away from their own parents while their parents sort out the issues that trouble the parents.

It was so heart-warming to learn that there are a fair number of families in Singapore willing to open their homes to these needful children. At the same time, however, it was somewhat disappointing to learn that a clear majority of these willing foster parents are expatriates, while the clear minority are Singaporeans. The cynical call this Asians opening their cheque books while Caucasians open their hearts. It may be an unfair characterization, but the facts of numbers cannot be denied. Perhaps we would get better with heart work as we mature as a country and a society; but then again, perhaps we wouldn’t.

11th July 2014 by Joanne

LIFE & DEATH

My observation this week is somewhat sombre, yet my intent is to uplift.

I was attending the wake of a husband and a father of children below ten years of age. One wonders how to be helpful and not show indifference at such an event. Yet often the most one can come out with is to be quiet, to listen, to contemplate and to be still.

Dealing with death is very much a matter of perspective. The sadness is undeniable but oftentimes the relief may also be felt.

I have found the commentary by a Bishop Brent in answer to the question “What is Dying?” to be particularly helpful:

“A ship sails and I stand watching till she fades on the horizon and someone at my side says, ‘She is gone.’

‘Gone where?’

‘Gone from my sight, that is all; she is just as large as when I saw her. The diminished size, and total loss of sight is in me, not in her, and just at the moment when someone at my side says ‘She is gone,’ there are others who are watching her coming, and other voices take up a glad shout, ‘There she comes!’ and that is dying.”

Complement this with the words of Henry Scott Holland who was Canon of St. Paul’s Cathedral:

”Death is nothing at all. I have only slipped away into the next room. I am I and you are you. Whatever we were to each other, that we still are.

Call me by my old familiar name, speak to me in the easy way which you always used. Put no difference in your tone, wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow. Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes we enjoyed together. Play, smile, think of me, pray for me.

Let my name be ever the household word that it always was. Let it be spoken without effort, without the trace of a shadow on it.

Life means all that it ever meant. It is the same as it ever was; there is unbroken continuity.

Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight?

I am waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere very near, just round the corner. All is well.”

4th July 2014 by Joanne

LESSONS FROM MAURITIUS

I have been spending the last couple of days in Mauritius as one of the speakers in the “Mauritius Africa Partnership Conference”. The conference is a strategic move by Mauritius to position itself as the gateway for investment into the whole of Africa. It is organised by the Board of Investment of Mauritius, the equivalent of the Singapore Economic Development Board in Mauritius. Attending the conference are the C-suite representatives from the investment boards in 28 African countries and more than 100 other delegates. I also met the Mauritian Secretary to the Cabinet and the Financial Secretary, and spoke to more than 30 senior officials in their Ministry of Foreign Affairs on superior civil service performance.

There was a whole variety of speakers including Senator Dato’ Sri Idris Jala, Minister in the Malaysian Prime Minister’s Office in charge of government and economic transformation programmes in Malaysia, as well as Ms Penny Low, Singapore’s Member of Parliament Penny. I spoke on Leadership in Public Service based on the Singapore experience.

Interest and admiration for Singapore was very high, but I must say the presentation by the Malaysian Minister was very impressive and inspiring, and detailed a way for African countries that would seem to them more achievable than if they tried to follow Singapore’s experience. The approach Malaysia is making to transform itself is to be admired, and Malaysia is certainly making a direct impact and building governmental influence with African countries.

The fact that the conference has been able to bring together so many investment agencies from Africa is indicative of a rising self-confidence among African countries, as well as their focus on economic development with a huge interest on attracting foreign direct investments.

I list here some interesting things I personally learnt from the speakers:

First from Larry Farrell, Founder of The Farrell Company, who spoke about entrepreneurship. He described the four stages in the life cycle of ALL companies as Startup, High Growth, Decline, and Survival. The spirit of entrepreneurship is particularly relevant in the first two stages, and the loss of this spirit is what results in decline and death. Larry listed the basics of entrepreneurship as fourfold: sense of mission, customer/product vision (i.e. that any product fulfil some customer need in order to be successful), high-speed innovation, and self-inspired behaviour (i.e. behaviour driven from deep inside us). He shared that the statement by Walt Disney, who founded the greatest entertainment company in the world, reflects all four elements: “The inclination of my life has been to do things and make things which will give pleasure to people in new and amazing ways. By doing that I please and satisfy myself.” The life cycle of countries has its parallel to companies: Rise, Growth, Decline and Fall. In order to continue growing, countries should create and honour the entrepreneurs.

Second from Dato’ Sri Idris Jala, the Malaysian Minister, who described the 8 steps which discipline the Malaysian strategic planning and execution process with clear ministerial accountability. While transparency of performance is an important part of the process, he warned with much humour: “It is a fine line between transparency to nudity and then to pornography!”

27th June 2014 by Joanne

SHOOTING PANDA

A panda walks into a cafe. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.

“Why?” asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.

“I’m a panda,” he says, at the door. “Look it up.”

The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.

“PANDA. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.”

This story came from the book “Eats, Shoots & Leaves – The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation” by Lynne Truss (Profile Books).

If you understand punctuation, you will also understand this life-and-death story due to a comma that should not be there. The comma may be just a little wiggle, but can contain a lot of power.

Most of the time we simply do not pay enough attention to punctuation or to choosing words that say exactly what we mean, an exercise that frequently involves a preference for short, simple words rather than long, complicated words – most of the time, our sentences are much too long, and our paragraphs even longer!

Many years ago I worked under bosses who insist on well-written notes that say exactly what they intend, no more and no less.

I particularly benefited from a couple of rules:

No sentence should be longer than 3 lines, and no paragraph should contain more than 3 sentences.
Watch your punctuation and use conjunctions sparingly.

22nd June 2014 by Joanne

What is the Secret to Singapore’s Success?

I spoke at a lunch event of The Economist Corporate Network last Monday. There were about 40 CEOs and other business leaders, mostly expats but a few Singaporeans. The topic I spoke on was “The Secret to Singapore’s Success?”…complete with the question mark! I had agreed to speak as I thought the topic to be both intriguing and timely, given all the excitement building up on commemorating the 50th year of Singapore’s independence.

Often when visitors come to Singapore wondering what has been the secret sauce for Singapore’s success, they get briefed on the HDB, CPF Scheme, the education system the EDB, and so on – all true, and all relevant, but, in my mind, perhaps not a fundamental enough explanation. So I started off my talk by saying:

“If you look at an atlas of the world, Singapore, the country, fits quite nicely into the letter “o” in its name. Unlike most countries in the world whose names fit well into their boundaries in the atlas, Singapore’s name is much longer than its size. And if you look again at the atlas, Malaysia lies to the north and east of Singapore, while Indonesia lies to the west, south and east. When Singapore became, rather unexpectedly, independent in August 1965, it had to find its own way into the future: the dream of a common market in Malaysia was broken, and Indonesia was still conducting konfrantasi (military confrontation) against Singapore.”

When President B J Habibie of Indonesia referred to Singapore as a “little red dot” in 1998, he had meant it as a disparaging remark. Little would he have expected that Singapore would take it up as a badge of honour, a symbol of success despite the odds.

President Habibie had sought later to make amends by saying he had not meant “little red dot” to be disparaging: he was speaking to an Indonesian youth group, and was challenging them to seek the progress and success of Indonesia by noting that Singapore, even though just a little red dot, had been able to make a success of itself.

Singapore had reached out beyond its immediate surroundings to adopt the whole world as its hinterland, its source of capital, investment, research and technology, management capability, and, most of all, markets. Later came its growth as a global financial centre, potentially the global financial centre in Asia.

Markets are critically the reason for welcoming MNCs to Singapore, because the smallness of Singapore and its economy simply means that no company in Singapore can grow merely by serving the Singapore market: the key to growth and success lies in penetrating overseas markets, mostly in the region but also globally. Of course we would wish as many Singapore companies as possible to have such global reach, but MNCs are what multiply the reach many many times over, without shutting out the Singapore companies.

What explains Singapore’s success in drawing investments from all over the world, where companies sink their money into Singapore and are prepared to wait 10, 15 or 20 years to recover their money through successful production and business operations? What explains the many research centres to discover new knowledge and design new products, where the protection of intellectual property is the name of the game? And what explains a willingness on the part of so many foreigners to park their funds and their wealth in Singapore?

The explanation lies in an ability to trust Singapore as a place where promises are kept, the rule of law maintained, justice is assured, government policies are predictable. Singapore offers reliability, integrity, quality, hard work and trustworthiness. These are what make for long-term relationships.

Trust is the root of relationships, and honour is the foundation of trust, where the people, businesses and government deliver on their word of honour.

Singapore’s place in the community of nations obviously depends not just on trust, but on being able to mobilize talent, synergise the efforts of workers, employers and government, and superior leadership. But honour has to be the starting point and the abiding foundation.

13th June 2014 by Joanne

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