Wednesday, May 24, 2023

Working Balls and the Meaning of Meritocracy

 

One of the biggest points that gets raised in Singapore whenever there is a debate on the cost of living and wages, is the fact that Singapore is a proud meritocracy where people get promoted according to their abilities rather than their race, religion or gender.

If you look at Singapore on the surface level, you’ll believe this to be true. I remember the renowned journalist Tom Plate gushing about how Singapore had come up in the world many years ago because it treated its women so well. Mr. Plate had completed a series of interviews at MediaCorp where he had been interviewed in connection with his biography of the late Mr. Lee Kuan Yew by a couple of ladies and felt that this experience gave him an incredible insight into the way Singapore ticks.

However, if you look beyond the headlines and actually live in Singapore, you’ll notice that meritocracy is a very loaded word. Yes, if you compare us to some other places, you’ll notice that gender, race and religion play a relatively minor role in promotions. However, what does play a major role in things is academic qualifications. As long as you are from the right junior college, scored significantly well in your exams and went to the right university, you are considered a person who has achieved “merit.”

The paper qualifications imply that you are not an idiot. Places like the Oxbridge universities or the American Ivy League to demand certain standards and you could say that our top people (who inevitably go to those places) must have some brains to get good degrees from such places.

However, as everyone who works in the productive sector (non-government) of the economy will tell you – just because a person has the right papers, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re any good at the actual job they’re assigned to do.

Funnily enough, one of the most prominent examples where this plays out is in the military. We have generals who get the top jobs in their early 40s. None have seen any form of action. All have great paper qualifications. Are our generals clever? The qualifications our generals have, imply that they have brains. However, are those brains good at leading men in a war front? Nobody knows because nobody as been tested.

This on its own would be bad enough. However, what makes it particularly bad is the fact that proving that you have the abilities to be a good military leader might actually be detrimental, especially if you don’t have the right papers. Case in point, Major-General Tan Huck Ghim, who lead a task force in Timor Leste and was praised by everyone, including the Australians and New Zealanders he led. His reward was to get knocked down to Brigadier-General on his return to Singapore. As far as our ministry was concerned, he was “old.” Second case in point was Rear-Admiral Bernard Miranda who led a task force to combat piracy in the Gulf of Aden. Everyone said he did a fantastic job. That is everyone except the bureaucrats in the Ministry of Defence who saw to it that the Rear-Admiral got bumped back down to colonel and retired from active service as soon as possible.

Here were two men who proved that they had “merit” to do the job that was assigned to them but they failed to meet the official definition of merit and so they were actually demoted.

Meritocracy is a wonderful idea on paper. If you think about it, why shouldn’t things be run by the best and brightest. Our scholarship system is often praised by everyone else outside Singapore because the idea looks good on the outside.

We, the people, are a little less enamoured with the idea because the results are well, a little less desirable.

The problem here is not only the definition of merit but the fact that system tends to waste brains by placing them in bureaucratic silos. Scholars who proved their intelligence and ability to study are essentially placed in environments that ensure they never have to face challenges. The brain, like the other muscles in the body, has way of rotting when its not challenged. In military terms, good officers are never placed anywhere near problematic platoons and get promoted half-colonel within six-years as long as they sit there and behave.

Bureaucracy has a way of stifling the desire to be better and when you have situations where its about climbing up the ladder and position becomes a sign of godhood, you get the worst of many worlds. Yes, there’s a meritocracy of sorts but its not necessarily the meritocracy of ability to the job.

If you think of the outsized role that the government has in our economy, you’ll understand that many private enterprises end up trying to model themselves on the government bureaucracy, which is essentially the main customer. I think of someone in the construction industry who made the point that one of the most important things in the business was ensuring that you had a “Godfather” in the organisation above you. The skill that becomes essential in business is “Por Lamba,” or “Angkat Bola” (the Hokkien and Malay, which roughly translates to “carrying balls”)

https://sg.wantedly.com/companies/wantedly_sg/post_articles/197850

 


Now, as one of the smoother operators I’ve known once said “it doesn’t cost me anything to say nice things,” and one has to accept that every relationship needs to be greased. An ego stoked boss is bound to be more malleable when the ego is pumped.

However, the problem sets in when the man on top only values the skill of ego pumping. There are, for example times when the man on top needs to be told that his idea is downright suicidal. When I worked freelance, I had to make the clients feel good. However, I also needed to have enough respect from the client to tell them when they were being ridiculous. I am pleased to say that I had clients who respected that.

If you, for example, depend on a boss who is more interested only listening to praise than in what you actually want to do to make business better, sooner or later you’re going to find that its actually better for you just to sit there and smile and nod at whatever the boss says, regardless of how idiotic.

Is Singapore like that? Again, let’s go back to the issue of foreign worker dormitories. Activist like Jolvan Wham have spent years trying to raise the issue of conditions in the dormitories. Nobody wanted to listen. In fact, the activist were often wacked with all sorts of lawsuits for being trouble makers. Why? The activists were trying to tell the powers that be that things were not hunky dory on the ground. The construction industry on the other hand were talking about how great things were. What did the government want to hear?

So, I guess you could say that we are a meritocracy – it’s just a question of what we are actually good at that matters.

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Maira Gall