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.

TMI: Beyond the economics of merit... By Kapil Sethi

Beyond the economics of merit

By Kapil Sethi

TMI: November 08, 2010

NOV 8 — A new Talent Corporation is to be set up to reverse brain drain. Lots of glitzy new infrastructure projects will be implemented under the ETP. A slew of performance benchmarks will ensure that there are no goof-ups at the implementation stage. All this and more is supposed to move us out of the middle-income trap into a high-growth, high-income trajectory to become developed by 2020.

Are these pipe dreams or an achievable vision of the future? Economic models and projections are just that — models and projections based on hard data. Life,on the other hand, has a peculiar habit of intervening at the most inopportune time to turn the so-called future on its head. It’s called the human factor.

In all kinds of collective human endeavour, for any project to succeed, clear ambition and an even clearer unity of purpose are prerequisites. We have to want to put up a theatre production, and everyone has to play their appointed parts in synchronicity for it to be a success. A corporation has to be hungry for new business, and the sales team has to play their parts to perfection in a pitch to the prospective client for the company to be successful. Even for wars to be prosecuted successfully, a clear enemy and a committed military operating as one are essential.

In our case, the ambition to be a developed nation by 2020 is clear and has been for a while now. Where it breaks down is in the unity of purpose. We all want to be rich, but insist that other races in the country are impeding our path.

Is following the NEP for another 10 years the way to do it? Is emphasising merit also racist, as implied by a senior statesman recently? Does the current government know best and should we give them a chance? Is throwing money after it the solution? Or is using predictive economics the way to go?

It might be worthwhile to step back and understand why we are unable to derive a consensus on how to approach the issue.

In front of a global audience, we are able to forget race. We claim ownership of Lee Chong Wei, Shalin Zulkifli and Nicol David equally proudly. When we visit a nasi lemak stall in London, we introduce it to Mat Sallehs as a Malaysian, not Malay dish. In business especially in the private sector, we treat each other as colleagues in task accomplishment. Love increasingly has no boundaries.

It is actually only in situations that we are surrounded primarily by people of our race that we play up the perceived differences between us. It is after all a very fundamental social characteristic to protect the ones closest to us and repel all others who are identified as the other.

But in the context of our economic ambitions, emphasis on race is a hindrance because it frames the definition of “us” very narrowly, and the “other” too widely. If we aggregate the strengths of all of us, Malaysia has to compete with the rest of the world. But if we emphasise the strengths of only a race, then we have to first compete with other races before competing with the rest of the world.

Whatever be their other shortcomings, the current crop of politicians have not been slow to recognise this. When it comes down to it, both coalitions before deciding which candidate to put up for elections look at “winnability” — a peculiar amalgam of the ethnic composition of the electorate, the loyalty of the candidate to the party, his personality and positions on issues, even her smile.

The appeal of the prospective candidate has to generally go beyond race today. The wider the definition of “us”, the greater the winnability of the candidate. As we have witnessed in several by-elections, once the decision is made and there is grassroots acceptance of the winnability of the candidate, there appears a unity of purpose in the ranks and momentum can be shifted, a no-hoper made a serious contender and vice versa.

This is not to say that we should just bury our racial differences, but in a hyper competitive world we need to widen our definition of “us” in our public lives to accommodate all Malaysians so we can achieve our economic ambitions. This is why the call for a merit- and needs-based model for the future is more in consonance with our ambition than a race-based model.

Expansion of educational and workplace opportunities on the basis of merit and/or economic needs does not need to diminish our racial identity, it just aligns our skillsets to the economic realities of the world. In today’s world, affirmative action needs to support every citizen’s right to opportunity, unhindered by a lack of means.

Race has its place in our private and social lives, but if we want to achieve our economic goals, it should not have any place in school, not in sport and certainly not in business. Race and merit need to co-exist, not compete. Our ambitions need to be aided with an even clearer unity of purpose.

At home though, surrounded by people of my own kind you can always find me with a bottle of whisky in my hand loudly denouncing all those who call us alcoholics.

Kapil is an advertising strategist turned brand consultant based in KL, who likes nothing better than to figure out why people behave the way they do. Naturally this forces him to spend most of his time lounging in coffeeshops and bars. He can be reached at kapilanski@yahoo.com