Thursday, February 02, 2017

Improvements through good leadership

When Lee Kuan Yew was the prime minister, he ordered his assistants to monitor the feedback in the newspapers.

If there is a letter pointing out about an issue that is causing problems or a suggestion to improve an existing process, he would ask the permanent secretary of the ministry for his views.

That's all that he needed to do.

The permanent secretary would, in many cases, realize that the existing process is wrong and take steps to implement the improvement.

This was how Singapore made a lot of progress during the old days.

A lot of improvements can be made when the person in charge is aware of the faults and ask for an explanation. The person in charge could not explain away the bad process and has to make the correction.

Our current prime minister could follow the example of Mr Lee Kuan Yew.

There are many bad, inefficient and wasteful processes that can be corrected. We only need the leader to pay attention and ask for an explanation.




1 comment:

Yujuan said...

They say travel is education in motion.
Singapore folks like to travel to developed countries like S. Korea, Hongkong, Europe and US, etc.
We should travel to undeveloped and developing countries, and you could gauge the changing attitudes, competitive hunger for success, and you would realise why Singapore is regressing backwards.
The policy of staffing former SAF personnel and Govt Civil Servants into CEO positions of GLCs and former Govt Institutions into private Corporations like PSA, NOL, Surbana, etc is the greatest mistake our Govt under LHL has ever made. These CEOs are trained to operate on orders from above, not trained to think out of box, and easily got outsmarted in international arena.
Selling NOL is a bad move, as Singapore is a strategic Port and we need our own Shipping Company to complement PSA, foreign MNcs operate on the bottom line, now NOL could bypass Singapore and use the straightest route thru the Kra canal if constructed, or the West Coast to East Coast ports in Peninsula Malaysia. APL of NOL just sold in less than a year or so, and we lost control of the shipping of Terrex vehicles.

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