Leadership Lessons from the Red Dot
I’ve noticed
that whenever something is critical about the top three champions of
Covid-Mismanagement (Donald Trump of the USA, Narendra Modi of India and Jair Bolsonaro
of Brazil), there will always be someone who will retort that the macho man
brought great prosperity to the nation and is not responsible for the obvious
failure of Covid mismanagement. Of the three, Trump was the most vocal. Reporter
would say something about the USA having the greatest number of daily infections
and instead of talking about what he was even imagine about the situation, he’d
say it was all China’s fault. – Yes, we know the virus is supposed to have
started in a lab in Wuhan but the point is the pandemics are on your soil and its
your job to solve the problem that is screwing up your country.
What’s even
more disturbing is when the followers of such impotent leaders proceed to make
these excuses for their “leader,” and its particularly disturbing when the said
follower making the excuse is someone highly intelligent and in a high-level
leadership position. For Americans it was “Trump led us to the best prosperity
ever and it’s the fault of the Covid explosion is the fault of the state governors.
Trump is not responsible for the mess.” Now that Covid Central has moved to
India, you hear the things that were once said about Trump being said about
Modi. The only thing one is tempted to say to these people is “What is the
point of having a President or Prime Minster if all they’re going to do is to
outsource national problems but take credit when things are going well?”
It’s not like
places like America and India don’t know what leadership looks like. India invented
non-violent protest under Gandhi and kicked out the British without firing
shots. America had Abraham Lincoln, the Roosevelt cousins and there was Harry
Truman who succeeded Franklin Roosevelt just before the end of the Second World
War. Truman famously kept a sign “The Buck Stops Here” on his desk.
How did
leadership go from this to?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOcY3XlzPzs
This?
As a Singaporean,
it pains me to say that, the painful decline in leadership standards in the
significant powers could have started here in little Singapore. Our Prime
Minister might have set a horrible example for future leaders beyond Singapore’s
shores. Narendra Modi is known for his admiration of Lee Kuan Yew and was one
of the main foreign dignitaries at his funeral.
Ever since Lee
Kuan Yew stepped aside in 1990, he created a lucrative side-gig as a
consultant, going round the world telling people how to run their countries.
Given that that the late Mr. Lee had left Singapore in a very prosperous state,
leaders of developing nations thought it was worth imitating Mr. Lee.
Unfortunately,
while Mr. Lee’s model had its moments, there were flaws, namely the fact that
Mr. Lee started creating a culture of elitism or a culture where the top genuinely
believed that it was entitled to be there and therefore entitled to claim all
the glory and outsource the problems.
For me, nothing
illustrated this as clearly as the 2007 escape of Mas Selamat, our “Osama-type”
terrorist. How did the government react to an “Osama-Type” terrorist waltzing
out of a highly-secured facility? Well, Wong Kan Seng, the Minister of Home Affairs
proceeded grin like an ape for the cameras and apologized that “This had to
happen.”
How not to
react when an “Osama-Like” terrorist waltzes out of a Highly Secured Facility
The grand result
of an inquiry that revealed massive incompetence in the Ministry of Home Affairs
was the fact that two Gurkhas got deported but both the Minister of Home Affairs
and the Head of the Internal Security kept their jobs.
The two great
highlights of the whole incident came from our most famous export on management
– Lee Kuan Yew, who proceeded to berate the electorate for being complacent
(yes, its our fault that we expect you to do the job that we pay you for) and
funnily enough from our Prime Minister, who was very present in the moment of
winning the hosting of the inaugural Youth Olympics but notably absent when the
news of Mr. Salamat’s leisure stroll broke out. Our Prime Minister proved that
he could, when pushed to, be an exceedingly good and impassioned orator. Was he
making a case of national unity and trying to gather the nation together to
catch an evil terrorist? His passion oratory started to flower in the defense
of a minister who had failed a “moment of truth” test.
He was there to celebrate our moment of global triumph. Where did he go to when a terrorist went for a stroll from highly secured facility?
How did the
Prime Minister get so impassioned about this particular minister who failed so
spectacularly at the moment of truth? We, the general public, thought the minister
should have been sacked as can be seen from this clip of reaction to his nomination.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fX48D2KsIHA
Things seemed
to get better for Singapore after 2007 and it seems that everybody took the “leadership
lessons” from Singapore to heart. Follow Singapore’s example – grab the glory
and keep telling people that you are the direct cause of prosperity. However,
whenever a problem arises, always find someone else to blame, especially if it’s
the people who are paying you to solve problems.
Apparently, this
is how nations are supposed to leap frog into prosperity. Unfortunately for
Americans, Indians and Brazilians, this model of Singapore leadership has been
taken quite literally and executed (forgive the pun) on a massive scale.
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