TMI: Moving to the next level.... By Jema Khan

Moving to the next level

By Jema Khan

TMI: December 06, 2010

DEC 6 — The four key strategic thrusts of the New Economic Model (NEM) are continued economic liberalisation, a social safety net for employees, bureaucratic reforms and ensuring social cohesion and inclusiveness. These are all noble ideas but they will remain so unless we can effectively implement what we plan.

To do this, we will need human talent more than anything else and that unfortunately we sorely lack. At the same time, we are driving many of our best and brightest away because we are unable to provide them with an environment that they can feel comfortable in.

We actually turn people off. I list below some of the major things that we as a nation should not be doing:

1. We should not cane women.

2. We should not discriminate based on a person’s sexual preference.

3. We cannot tell people what they should call their own God.

4. We do not say or insinuate that our own people are foreigners when they are clearly not: especially when derogatory words are used.

5. We cannot allow people to abuse the religion of Islam, just so they can get custody of their children when things don’t work out with their wife whom they married under a different religion.

6. We do not abuse other people’s religion by damaging their places of worship.

7. We cannot allow our children to have sub-par education when we know what the world requires of us.

8. We cannot accept that corruption is a way of life.

9. We cannot accept that by being lazy and doing nothing: we have a right because of race, to the wealth of this nation.

10. We cannot be expected to listen to idiots with so-called positions when we are clearly way smarter than they are.

The whole world is chasing talent and many countries are able to provide much better pay, better working conditions as well as a liberal social environment. We can, of course, live in denial and make all sorts of claims about how good and great we are, but if that is the case, we will not be making much progress in attracting talent.

It is really a catch-22 situation with the NEM. For it to succeed we need to have the talent in place but to attract the talent we need for the NEM to be already working. We need companies and institutions that can train our best and brightest to a world class standard and that I fear we sorely lack.

What we need are teams of talented people with some experience abroad to take over the running of our major companies and institutions so that they will be able to change the work culture in these organisations and bring them up to the mark.

Too often, when only one talented person enters a senior position in an organisation to change its culture, it is that person that bends to the existing culture in the organisation and not the other way around. So I advocate a team of talented people going in, having full control of both management and the board of directors, with a clear view to change the organisational culture.

Resistance to change is practically the default setting in most mediocre organisations so there will always be conflicts but so long as those coming in are honest, hardworking and intelligent, they will be able to make the change for the better.

As an example, if we want to better the education system in Malaysia, we do not ask the teachers what they can teach. We tell them what to teach to bring up our standards. If they are unable, we retrain them: if they are still unable, we remove them. The most important stakeholders in this example are the children and their parents: it is their interests and future that are paramount.

We plan to move to the next level up but if we are not realistic in our dire need for the best talent, don’t be surprised if we remain static or even worse move down a level.