by Dinesh Senan: Published: The Straits Times, Singapore: 5 May 2002
DPM Lee has done the best that can be done, within our country’s limits, to prudently prime our business cost environment, to set the stage for economic recovery. However, the immediate next challenge is for us to see what we can do to build a strong top-line revenue generating capability thereon. This involves all of us, collectively, and especially the private sector, whose main responsibility in the private-public sector partnership must be to help generate new top-line wealth.
If the private sector is to be our principal means of delivery of new wealth, it needs to be strengthened. To achieve this will call for a certain degree of introspection, by all, and a willingness borne of determination, to raise and to critically examine potentially sensitive issues. The private sector will have to ask itself if it is sufficiently bold and ready to take the risks necessary to build a better future for our country. The public sector will also have to ask itself if it is truly ready to work to support, synergistically, the efforts of the private sector.
I believe we have an important challenge to address. We have perhaps paid more attention thus far to building a public sector par excellence, since strong, pragmatic administration of resources was indeed most necessary when we first needed to solve our basic issues of food and shelter for our nation (as per Maslow’s hierarchy of needs). We have, consequently, though perhaps unwittingly, skewed our allocation of human capital and talent far more towards the public sector, than towards the private sector. We must re-examine this precious allocation of talent now, when we most need to recognise that our brightest economic future will materialise when we are led by a hard-driving, creative and confident private sector that aggressively rises to the challenge of delving deep into the abundant global growth opportunities at the top-line.
The key questions arising are: Is our private sector, (the engine of our future top-line wealth generation), ready and able to lead in such a capacity, and further, is our larger public sector fully supportive of such leadership?
Re-examining our brain-flow resource allocations:
Let’s spread ourselves out across both public and private sectors more evenly– it’s for our own good
The issue of an even spreading of talent across both the public and private sectors needs to be addressed first. In this respect, I would submit that we need to work towards the accomplishment of two things internally : to try to even out the brain flow across these sectors and to try to foster a closer degree of ‘synergising’ between our public and private sectors.
For example, we need to re-look at the number of new scholars being drawn into the public sector, and we should also re-examine the surprisingly large numbers of senior ex-public sector officers who migrate into our GLC’s (in this paper, I look upon our GLC’s as being public sector ‘extensions’ into the commercial playing field). We must aim to have more of these good people move to join and strengthen the ranks of our private sector players as well.
Moving beyond this, we need to ask if we these two sectors of our economy are operating with optimal synergy. In this regard, it is important to note that true synergising between any two parties requires there to be two pre-conditions : a healthy regard for what one party can do by itself and an equally healthy regard for what the other party can do by itself, such that bridges will then actively be sought to be built by both parties towards each other, complementarily.
What has happened here is that, owing to the inadvertent skewing of the talent-allocation over the years, our private sector has weakened, (both in terms of its own competitive and creative drive, as well as in terms of how much actual support it gets from the public sector, especially when its players are neither linked to the MNC’s nor to the GLC’s), whilst our public sector, (via its reach into the commercial world via the GLC’s), has grown to feel that there is virtually nothing it cannot do by itself! A public sector that grows to believe this, will therefore sincerely justify ‘doing it by itself’, (through its sister GLC’s), rather than to have the private sector players do it, as the returns then come back to the state. However, in the larger economic picture, this thinking is erroneous, as it is always a healthy private sector that leads the way to greatest sustainable employment and highest economic returns for nations.
As true synergising may only happen when parties genuinely believe that one has strengths and weaknesses in areas where the other has corresponding weaknesses and strengths, we therefore have a problem in seeing clear and effective levels of synergising between our two overlapping sectors. Our private sector has to be bolder and more proactive, in seizing the mantle of revenue generating leadership, whilst our public sector has also to be more genuinely supportive of the private sector as it strives to lead in such areas. By the same token, the respect of the private sector by the public sector must be earned, and cannot be mandated or demanded.
Unless we take steps to spread out our talent in the first place, to be nurtured and tempered by the distinct worlds of the private and public sectors, we will never rid ourselves of the inward belief, (whether consciously or subconsciously held), that our greatest talent resides mainly in the larger public sector, where consequently respect for the competence of the private sector may not be felt.
A Different Type of Talent ?
A deeper question then arises : is there a fundamental difference between the two sectors, when both are attacking the same, overlapping objective of commercial activism?
I would submit that the answer is yes. It takes a different ‘type’ of talent to thrive in the rough and tumble of the private sector world of ever-intensifying competition. Private sector ‘savvy’ and its particular form of prerequisite ‘EQ’ are derived only from direct immersion in this rigorous playing field. For example, having worked for Richard Li of the Hutchison / Pacific Century Group, I have marvelled at how quickly business decisions are taken in his private sector realm, and with so much personal concern and direct human accountability attaching to the moneys deployed for success. Such private money is treated literally like the owner’s very life-blood…..money simply will not be deployed with any trace of laxity at all, at any level. These traits will see such persons end up making the largest deals, (necessarily suffering painful experiences along the way, no doubt), and finally yielding the very highest levels of new wealth imaginable. As another example, let’s take a look at how the Taiwanese have ventured into mainland China. They have, inter alia, completely dominated the global keyboard manufacturing sector, via their private sector ventures, which now occupy very large industrial zones on mainland China. Very aggressive, very nimble and very successful.
The growth of this different type of talent, I would submit, needs to be fully encouraged and facilitated. More than that, it needs to be recognised and respected as being a critical ingredient in the recipe for success, by the larger public sector. Only then can true synergising take place. True synergising involves an admission not only of strengths, but also of one’s own weaknesses, such that healthy complementarities may be respected and then embraced. Without the underlying respect for the different skills or talents, no such synergising can take place. This will be to the detriment of our country’s overall wealth-generating prospects.
Having spent more of our energy, on balance, in developing our public sector competence thus far, we must now painfully admit that we may be lagging behind many of our neighbours in this particular private sector form of talent, and must start the process of making the necessary adjustments immediately.
Why Synergise? Striking a balance…
Some overlap in the commercial playing field may be healthy, as competition should always be welcomed, and will be good for us. But it must be said that it makes no sense if we find our public and private sectors competing against each other too much. We need to strike a balance here, or we may lose the prospects of developing sincere, trust-based ‘win-win’ thinking and relationships between our two sectors, let alone true synergising. And the most lamentable thing which may arise, heaven forbid, if left unchecked by us, is that whilst there’s huge competition beyond our shores, in the world at large, we’re potentially killing ourselves off at the starting blocks by fighting each other internally!
A strongly synergised public and private sector ‘partnership’ will see the public sector lead the way in playing a strong catalytic role in the facilitation of business growth opportunities, (eg physical infrastructure, optimally controlled operating cost environment, pro-business fiscal policies, seed funding for new private sector ventures, etc), whilst the private sector exercises the initiative to boldly dream and to risk working to build and operate new businesses for us, forging strong global partnerships, to generate wealth. The knowledge economy of the future represents an unlimited source of wealth for any country, big or small, including us.
True Synergy – Our Main Hope
In truth, we are currently standing at the threshold of a step upwards on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. We are about to move into higher value-adding and consequently, higher-operating-cost economic activities (hence it is no surprise that our costs seem high relative to our neighbours….that’s because many of them are still playing at lower value-adding levels, as may be appropriate for their current stages of economic development, and hence their relative costs are lower). But as with all change, there will be pain…not least of which is the pain of breaking out from mental inertia. The challenge is to start letting go of old paradigms, which served us well previously, and to enthusiastically embrace new ones. We are already blessed with a very strong and supremely competent public sector. We also have a business cost environment that’s been prudently calculated to set the stage for our mid-to-longer term growth. Now let’s bring forth our principal players onto this new stage, to act together to usher in a new era of private and public sector synergising, setting new standards of economic growth for the sake of our nation.
The Pragmatic Idealist 