Friday, March 22, 2024

Still Wanna F**K with Me – Mike Tyson

 

The latest buzz in the world of boxing is the fact that Mike Tyson, once regarded as the “Badest Man on the Planet” is coming out of retirement to fight Jake Paul, a 27-year-old YouTuber turned boxer.

In normal circumstances a physical contest between a fit and active 27-year-old and a 58-year-old coming of retirement shouldn’t be allowed. Although Mr. Paul has only started boxing publicly in recent years, he’s had success against some credible opponents like Anderson Silva and Nate Diaz:

https://news.paddypower.com/boxing/2024/03/19/jake-paul-next-fight/

 


 However, this isn’t “normal.” Back in his hey-day, Mr. Tyson was known for his brutal destruction of opponents. He only discovered defeat when he discovered partying and underestimating opponents. His physical power and speed were legendary. Whilst Mr. Tyson isn’t the youthful force of explosive power that he once was, clips of him training show that he’s still someone that most normal people wouldn’t want breathing at them when he’s in a foul mood. As famed combat sports podcaster Joe Rogan says, “I don’t care if he’s 55, he can still hurt you.”

In a way, this fight is what boxing, a sport that is primarily funded by the fans, needs. There hasn’t been an “electrifying” and “charismatic” champion that drew people in since Mr. Tyson’s hey day in the 1980s. Both fighters are undoubtedly going to make a huge amount of money.

This is, in many ways, a clash of “visions.” Mr. Paul is a young upstart in the world of boxing. Talk to enough boxers and you’ll find that many of them want Mr. Tyson to teach Mr. Paul a good lesson because as far as they are concerned, Mr. Paul is a young upstart who hasn’t paid his dues. As far as many professionals are concerned, Mr. Paul is soaking up the monied fights based on the fact that he’s gained fame as a YouTuber.

While there’s something tempting about smacking up the face of a young, rich kid who thinks he can’t be touched (think “My uncaring elite face” in Singapore), young upstarts are, from a social perspective, a good thing. Reason being – they’re more often than not, the guys who think of something quirky that upends a system, thus creating the disruption and innovation that is a hall mark of progress. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were, as far as the high-powered executives of IBM were concerned, young upstarts who ended up revolutionizing computing. Now, its guys like Evan Spiegel of Snapchat who are upending our relationship with cyberspace.

Say what you like about Mr. Paul but he’s interesting. People who might never had watched boxing are now tuning into watch him fight and in fairness, he’s actually won a number of fights. He can actually fight.

However, there’s one slight problem. Mr. Paul is a nice boy from a well to do family His father is a realtor and his early career was on YouTube playing pranks. Boxing comes across as a hobby to him. In fairness, he’s been relatively successful at it and he’s won fights that nobody expected to him to win. I can sympathise with Mr. Paul in as much as he may be a “rich kid” trying to show that he’s actually got some merits of his own.

However, whilst Mr. Paul has won fights, he’s never really faced anyone who had a hunger to “kill him.” Sure, Nate Diaz and Anderson Silva are good fighters in their own right. However, both were not “angry killers.”

Mr. Tyson is a different story. If you read Mr. Tyson’s biography “Undisputed” truth, you’ll see that here is a guy who may well have been murdered in gang violence had he not found boxing. For Mr. Tyson, smacking people up is the core of his being.

Sure, the current 57-year-old Mike Tyson has mellowed. He’s no longer the angry 21-year-old who became the world’s youngest heavy weight champion. Back then, being heavy weight champion and knocking down everyone in his way was the only thing he had to love for. These days, he’s having fun on his cannabis farm.

However, whilst age can mellow you, it doesn’t really take away who you really are deep inside. Many of the training videos that have been leaked, show that Mr. Tyson still has speed and power. Sure, he may not be as explosive as he was – but he’s still powerful enough as Roy Jones Junior states:

https://www.google.com/search?q=jake+paul+vs+mike+tyson&sca_esv=1f6968c2800695af&source=hp&ei=IgD9ZZDlIqLi1e8PlK-

Mr. Tyson’s last fight was an exhibition in 2020, where he was in it for fun. However, this fight has awakened something in Mr. Tyson. It’s not just his physical conditioning that people notice but his intent to make a point. His hunger to hurt has been awakened as anyone who looks into his eyes from this training montage will realise:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9VaIbFTQHU

 


 If Mr. Paul thinks that the 58-year-old Mike Tyson is going to be a case of fighting his grandpa, he will be in for a nasty surprise.

In a way, this comparison between Jake Paul and Mike Tyson is the one that best illustrates the point when I talk about competing people who are less educated and from less privileged backgrounds. In the last decade of being in a working professional environment, I’ve noticed that working professionals have one major flaw – namely the fact that they think their professional status gives them some magical status. This is especially true when they face people who are less “qualified” than them.

I remember being on a project many years ago involving Nestle. The marketing manager of the division we were working with had started out as an office boy. I remember he had something to a business partner who felt aggrieved enough to complain about it to me. My partner dismissed him as “just an office boy.” I shuddered - anyone who climbs from office boy to marketing manager isn’t someone you want to mess with.

Likewise for the people who kept complaining about my ex-wife being an uneducated Vietnamese. This girl clawed her way up from a home town. She came to Singapore, became a business owner and then a beauty queen at the international level. After years in Singapore, she’s setting up in the USA. I think the only person who understood this is my partner in the Chubby Tiger venture who said, “This woman is no joke.”

So, when we talk about what gives people the edge, we’ll talk about things like education, connections, family background and so on. This is where people from comfortable middle class professional backgrounds get lulled into a false sense of superiority. The most crucial fact that everyone seems to over look is will, or desire. You could call it “killer instinct.” Look at Mr. Tyson who trains at inhuman levels (500 daily pushups among many others). He’s focused and the only thing that matters is flattening the other guy. I think of my ex, who entered a beauty contest because she had that ultimate goal of getting into the USA and became a global champion. I think of her focus and the work she put in. It’s that drive that gives people the edge. It’s just too bad HR can’t measure it.

 

Monday, March 18, 2024

Cracked


I’ve finally changed my phone. It turns out that my phone contract was up for renewal and I managed to pick up a new iPhone 15plus, which is sleek and sexy. It’s the first time in over a decade when I’ve actually picked up a new phone from a contract renewal. Huong, used to recontract all our lines early so that she could pick up phones at a discount and sell them onto her friends. The phone I had been using previously was a hand-me-down from her.

 


 My New Indulgence

I got to admit that the last few hours playing the new phone. The battery is solid, the face ID feature works and I’m only just getting used to the fact that this is a phone where the volume works sufficiently enough for me not to need to have all my conversations on loudspeaker.

One might ask why it took me so long so change phone. The phone was a second hand from Huong who had a way of changing phones rapidly. It was with me for four years and I am, as a rule of thumb – rough. In a way, I held on because, I didn’t see the need to change the phone. It still functioned and did all the things I needed it to do. It functioned as a phone and the apps that I use worked well enough. I never saw the need to spend money on a new phone because it worked and as my favourite gym instructor likes to remind me - “real men carry cracked phones.” However, the charging jack has been going slowly but surely. It used to be that I would have to hold the charger at an angle, then one day it only charged when put on an air charger. A phone dying on me when I needed a phone most looked like a very real prospect:

 


 Bro-Phone

I talk about my recent phone purchase because there are apt parallels with life, particularly in the employment market, particularly in a day and age where there is a big worry that society is getting older and by extension, there is a worry about what do with the labours force.

Let’s face it, everyone wants sexy, sleek things that function at optimal performance. I love my new phone because its sleek and sexy. Its battery life is resilient and all its functions are in tip top condition. Filling it with new apps and data is not an issue.

If I look at my relationship with my phone, I get why employers are keen to snap up fresh graduates. They come into the work force fresh. They’re enthusiastic and their minds are functional. Everything is new to them and they approach task with energy that their more experienced counterparts treat as routine. The best part is that you can fill their heads with the way you want them to work.

There is, however, one problem with this. Whilst I do get why hiring the kids is fun, the definition of old becomes rather relative. When people are looking for sleek and sexy things, they tend to dump the current sleek and sexy thing the moment they see something else which they may consider even more sleek and sexy.

My soon to be ex-wife and dad do that with phones. The moment there’s a new model, they’ll be out trying to make sure they have it. Given that new models come out on a yearly basis, they’ll happily brave the crowds to get hold of the latest new model.

Think about it, our youth may be young and enthusiastic to work. They may be the sexy and sleek things. However, before they’re ready to mature and be really productive, they get discarded by the kids from elsewhere who are hungrier and willing to work for less or by a technology.

To an extent my old phone was lucky in that, there are people who are more than happy to take “second-hand” goods. For me, the phone that I inherited was not the latest and greatest but it did all the things that I needed it to do. As long as it functioned in the way that I needed it to function, I had no reason to change the phone. My need to change the phone only came about when there was a question of its mechanical longevity.

So, if our policy makers need to look through the fact that while the number of sexy and sleek things may dwindle as people don’t have babies, we have plenty of people who are still functional. Let’s look how we can make use of this growing legion of “cracked” people who are still functional. Sleek and sexy fades according to trend. Functional last a lot longer and you can do more with it. Surely, that point should not be lost on our policy makers.

 

Saturday, March 16, 2024

Budget Buses

 There was a time when there was an issue about transporting workers from South Asia or the proverbial “Darkies” who are exploiting Singapore by doing the jobs Singaporeans won’t do. A few “aged lefties” (In Singapore, they’re inevitably aged – the kids are too busy trying to be successful in cubicle land to care about the rest of the world), got upset that the construction companies were jamming the workers in backs of lorries that had no seat belts or any form of safety during accidents:

 


 




If I remember correctly, there were one or two traffic accidents and I believe one or two “Darkies” were killed. Singapore’s aged lefties were up in arms that human beings could be transported in such a fashion and wrote many social media post about this.

However, whilst there was a hue and cry about this and the government did make one or two noises about promising to look into things, nothing actually happened. Around two-years after the din of needing to treat dark skinned South Asians who do actual work, nothing was actually done. The reason was simple. The construction lobby made the point that it would be prohibitively expensive for them to actually provide things like buses to get their workers from point A to point B.

To be fair, to the government, only the aged lefties seemed upset by the issue and sine aged lefties aren’t inclined to vote for the government anyway, the government decided to do what it does best – pay attention to those who can be reminded to vote “properly.” As far as that segment of the population is concerned, the Darkies should just be grateful for whatever they’re getting and one shouldn’t force “prohibitively” expensive things onto the employers like wages, accommodation and let’s not forget the levy for foreign workers.

Then, as was once pointed out to me, Singaporeans used to ride around in a similar fashion and were perfectly happy with it. So, why should one impose “unfair” expenses on the construction industry (which is inevitably government funded) when everyone was perfectly happy with such methods of transportation.

I’ve come round to accepting that there may be a point here. Instead of calling for the ban on putting workers in lorries, we should expand this and create a new form of mass market transport.

Look, many us complain about how the bus and MRT services have become more expensive in recent years. I am guilty of this. I notice that a decade ago, it was possible to travel around for a week on $10. These days, $10 last you a day or so. What I can do about it? The answer is utterly jack all because mass market transport in Singapore is a duopoly run by the same people. They can charge whatever they want and the masses like myself can either learn to walk longer or die if we don’t want to pay the fares.

So, what’s to be done. Well, the answer is lies in the taxi market. At one stage, driving a metered cab was to exclusive purview of a few big companies. Then Uber came along made it such that anyone with a car could be a taxi driver. Uber was eventually booted out and replaced by Grab in Southeast Asia but the point remained – everyone with a car was suddenly giving rides. Metered taxis were forced to get creative because the ride hailing platforms were actually competing with them.

The same thing happened in the telco market. Along came Starhub and M1 and before you knew it, SingTel, the elephant of the market was forced to cut prices (especially on long distance calls) and look beyond Singapore for growth.

I am very sure that there are plenty of people yearning for an alternative to the bus and MRT. You just need to let entrepreneurs fill this niche. A guy with a lorry can become a bus operator of sorts. Just figure out a route and I’m sure enough people will be willing to cram onto a lorry to get from the housing estates and head to say the centre of town for half the cost of a standard bus ride.

I’ve sat in the back of lorries. Happens when I used to hitch a ride with the guys helping me move things. When I was married to Gina, we’d ride in the back of my then father-in-law’s lorry, which he would use for egg delivery. It was one of my few happy memories of that period.

So, let’s remember that we once used to move around the way foreign workers move around. Let’s see if we can return to that era and think of how happy our local population would be.

Saturday, March 09, 2024

“You Do Believe in God; But Never Listen to Him”

I had to do a day trip to Dubai on Wednesday, which meant that I had to sit on a plane for several hours. Since I left on the morning flight, I thought I would make the most of the inflight entertainment system and went on a movie binge all the way up to Dubai.

One of the gems in this movie binge was a Bollywood flick called “Thank God,” which tells the story of Ayan Kapoor, an arrogant debt-fueled businessman who finds himself in limbo after a car accident. He meets the characters of the spiritual realm who involve him in a game show where the “sins” of life are played with him.

One of the best scenes comes when the CG the game show host gets a call from Lord Hanuman (the Hindu Monkey God and the good the main character is a devotee of.) The main character assumes that “his God” is getting him off the hook because he’s been making plenty of offerings, only to find that he gets drenched and sweets get stuffed into his mouth and he finds out that “His God” is “p****ed off with him.” CG explains to him that “You do believe in God: But Never Listen to him,” and then explains that God is not interested in your offerings and rituals but in your humanity. It turns out that in his effort to prove his devotion to Lord Hanuman by buying offerings, he p****es on a beggar and her grandson, which leads to her death and the abandonment of the child.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-sgnhYJGOA

 

 


 


 


That line stuck with me because we live in an age where there are many distractions from the things that are important to us. In human relationships this usually comes into the form of the people we spend time with. Many of us chase those with “power” and “money” or both because we believe it helps us get ahead. However, we end up becoming so busy trying to be around money and power that we neglect the people who really matter and forget our real friends in our quest for wealthy friends.

In the spiritual realm, it often comes in the form of an obsession with rituals. Regardless of religion, you find people get focused on the rituals and motions of the faith they practice. Payer becomes like a transaction where you ask the almighty for some magic pill to make your problems go away in return for your good behavior.

However, as just about every religious text known to man points out – the almighty is interested in what’s inside you rather than what you try and show on the outside. In the Christian Gospels for example, Jesus talks about the “Parable of the Widow’s Mite” and teaches us that God values the poor widow’s mite more than he does the vastly superior number of coins donated by rich merchants.

Even if you discount the “illogical” nature of faith, there is a logic there. Why would a higher power be interested in our earthly things like money and offerings when they could get whatever they wanted with a simple thought? If anything, a higher would probably prefer us to be “nicer” people to each other.

What is the point of going to a church, temple or mosque on a daily basis and proclaiming your faith and devotion to the almighty when the moment you leave, you promptly kick the poor tissue paper seller in the face and try and get her arrested for disturbing your day?

While I can’t claim to speak for the Almighty, I suspect the Almighty would prefer it if people spent more time raising up their communities instead of trying to out pray each other. I think of the Catholic Priest who told his congregation that “It is not in the beauty of our liturgy or the buildings but in our compassion.” I think of the Muslim driver who said “Islam is not the first religion of man – the first religion is Salaam – shake hands and make friends that is the first religion.”

I am not disputing the importance of faith and the rituals. Prayer is a wonderful source of solace and there are times when “talking to” the Almighty helps provide one with the fortitude to get through tough times.  However, rituals without action are pointless and prayers need to be backed by sincerity. As said in the movie, we’re so used to trying to show we believe, we forget to listen to the message.

Friday, March 08, 2024

Doing the Right Thing doesn’t Really Pay?

 

At the end of last month, I had the honour of being invited to a seminar conducted by Rajah & Tann, one of the larger local law firms. The seminar was around the topic of knowing your customer and the perils of money laundering and terrorism financing. It was clear from the presentation that Singapore has a very comprehensive set of laws to deal with “doggy money.”

 


 If you were to look at the set of laws dealing with things like money laundering and terrorism financing, you will be undauntedly impressed by the legal tools in which the government has given itself to catch the bad guys. You will also admire the fact that the various sets of laws place responsibility on getting things right where it should be – on senior management.

There is, however, one slight flaw to our legal system when it comes to financial nasties. It assumes that people on the top are automatically responsible and decent people who will always be responsible. Hence, the trick to making everything work like clockwork is make senior management responsible for everything.

There is one slight fallacy with this. This situation only existed in the wettest dreams of Confucius. While it does take a lot of positive qualities for someone to get to a high level, being “always moral,” simply isn’t one of them and we need to remember that the law in practice and the law as it is written are not necessarily the same thing. You can have all the laws in the world but if there’s no ability to detect and enforce those laws, then the laws are pointless.

In theory, Singapore law states that if an employee knows his or her employer is guilty of something or other, they have a legal obligation to report it. However, let’s be honest, how many of us would be willing to report the source of our livelihood to the authorities when there is a risk of losing your job and never being hired and the potential for vengeance from an employer who may get acquitted whereas you only have the reward of knowing you did the “right thing”?

Let’s look at one of the most famous “whistleblowers” in recent years – Lieutenant Colonel (LTC) Alexander Vindman, who famously reported his “Commander-in-Chief,” then President Trump for trying to shake down Ukrainian President Zelensky into conducting an investigation into Hunter Biden.

What was LTC Vindman’s reward? The President Trump was acquitted in the Senate Trial and took no time in disposing of everyone who got him impeached. LTC Vindman, a decorated war hero was labeled “insubordinate” by his “Commander-in-Chief,” not something which any military officer wants to be known for. The man fought for his country and has been rewarded with the hatred of a good percentage of it:

https://news.am/eng/news/559243.html

 


 Sure, LTC Vindman has now gotten himself a new career as a celebrity of sorts. However, let’s remember that this happened in America which has laws and rewards for whistleblowers:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5azzC0ZS9yM

 


 At the time of writing, America is the only major economy that rewards whistleblowing. A good portion of the EU economies do not have strong laws protecting whistleblowers let alone having a reward program, specifically in the financial sector.

When I attended an International Fraud Group (IFG) conference in November of last year, the question of whether more countries should implement a whistleblower reward program along the American model. The general consensus was no. The Eastern Europeans had scars of the Soviet era and argued that nobody wanted to be know as the “informant” and a lot of the attendees from the developed world argued that it would incentivize frivolous information. Only the boss of an NGO that deals with human trafficking argued that whistleblowing was necessary to reduce human suffering.

This sentiment wasn’t particular to the group. The Bank of England’s Financial Conduct Authority and Prudential Regulation Authority, henceforth (FiCA & PRA’s), writes in a note for a UK Parliament Committee that “There is as yet no empirical evidence of incentives leading to an increase in the number or quality of disclosures received by regulators” (PRA and FiCA 2014, p.2, italics in original).

Now, if this is the sentiment of regulators in the “democratic Western,” world, what can be said of Asian countries where the culture remains focused on the importance of the “patriarch.”

Going against “your boss” or the person who has power over you and in cultures where authority figures are venerated, its even more difficult. However, the fact remains that you’re not going to get fraud punished if you don’t get it reported and you’re not going to get it reported if people are fearful of doing so. Going against someone who has the power of an organisation involves serious risk. Let’s face it, one can say “it’s only money,” but its different story when it means you can’t feed yourself or look out for your family.

One might event ague that whistleblowing is not necessary or that it encourages “frivolous” complaints. However, if you look at the UK where there is a system of rewarding whistleblowing in the health care sector, it was found that 41 percent of fraud causes were detected by employees.

Whistleblowing or getting people who are under the power of others to report crimes is good for the system. While government’s might be hesitant to get involved, there are at least private sector companies willing to step in. One example is Omni Bridgeway, a litigation funder, which has argued that whistleblowing takes “courage”

 

It also understands that being a whistleblower means putting yourself in financial harm’s way.

 


While Omni Bridgeway does have a system that funds whistleblowing suites, it only offers the service in the US market, where whistleblowing has financial rewards. Would Omni Bridgeway or companies like Omni Bridgeway be allowed to work in other markets? Just because governments may be hesitant to take on rewarding whistleblowers, there’s no reason why they can’t encourage the private sector to step in.

Whistle blowing takes courage but it’s shown that it is an essential part in combating things like corruption, money laundering and terrorist financing. These are things that societies need to deal with if they are to grow in every sense of the word. Isn’t it time we stop talking about combating financial crimes and lauding people’s courage and actually protect and reward people for doing the right thing and being serious about combating crime?

Tuesday, March 05, 2024

Giving Under Siege

 

Went to a talk by the Ukrainian Ambassador to Singapore, Her Excellency (HE) Ms. Kateryna Zelenko at Duane Morris & Selvam LLP. The talk centered two years into the war between Russia and Ukraine.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February of 2022 was what you could call a pivotal moment in world history. This was what you could call the first invasion of a sovereign state by another on European soil since the Second World War. For the first time since 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, we actually had world powers looking at a conflict and helping “by proxy” rather than getting involved.

However, thanks to the Israeli invasion of the Gaza strip, the global focus and the questions about international law have inevitably moved from Ukraine to the Middle East. However, whilst the focus of global attention may have shifted from Ukraine to the Middle East since October 2023, the key issues that the world faces today haven’t gone away and they’re particularly visible in the war in Ukraine.

The key issue that the war in Ukraine and the war in the Middle East has thrown up, is the question of food security. The need to eat is an equalizer between social classes and ethnicities. While everyone is busy talking about the latest development in this and that when it comes to growing the economy, the reality is that the most basic industry and the backbone of any society is ultimately food production. Simply put – no point having a lot of money if there’s no food.

So, it goes without saying that in war situation where one party is trying to annihilate the other, the first thing they will do is to try and remove the ability of the other party to feed itself. One of the key issues of the Israeli invasion of Gaza is the fact that people in Gaza no longer have the ability to feed themselves. The same is true in Ukraine, where the Russians have attacked Ukraine’s ability to feed itself:

 


 There is a background to Ukraine and agriculture. The country is famously fertile and it was known as the “breadbasket” of both the Czarist Empire and the Soviet Union. According to the World Economic Forum (WEF), the Ukraine was the in the top five global for exporting sunflower oil, corn and wheat in 2021:

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/07/ukraine-s-food-exports-by-the-numbers/


Again, agriculture tends to get overlooked when we talk about the industries of the future. However, the importance of agriculture to a society and an economy becomes apparent when the industry is no longer there. Hence, if you look at history of conquest, you will notice that one of the first things an invader does is to burn the farms in order to make them unusable. Once the farms are out, there are no crops and there’s no food.

So, what have the Ukrainians done. It was a surprise to find out that the Ukraine had a program called “Grain from Ukraine,” which was started in November 2022, or over ten months after the Russians invaded. The idea behind “Grain from Ukraine” is for the countries donating to the Ukraine to bring Ukrainian grain and send it to the parts of the world that need it. Details on the “Grain from Ukraine” program can be found in the following URL:

https://mfa.gov.ua/en/grain-ukraine

 


 In a way, you could say the idea of a country that is under invasion by a larger power giving away its grain to be insane. One might argue that the Ukrainians should be doing everything to keep their grain to themselves.

However, you could also argue that this is strategically brilliant. Work on the understanding that countries only help out when they have an interest to do so. By getting donor countries to export Ukrainian grain to the “needy” parts of the world, Ukraine is reminding the world why it should have an interest in helping the Ukrainians keep Ukraine, Ukrainian. This is a country that plays an important part in global food security. Ukraine is telling the world that it tries to use its agriculture power to keep the food flowing and that we want a reliable partner in the global food supply chain rather than one who could happily blackmail the rest of us if he had control over so much of the world’s grain production.

Let’s face it, Ukraine has held out for so long because its had help. Russia is the vastly larger power and Ukraine does need all the help it can get. In the initial stages of the war, there were a lot of emotional reasons to support Ukraine. However, when the war in Gaza started, the emotions turned to the Middle East. However, when the “Grain from Ukraine” program, there is a very rational reason for outsiders to ensure that the Ukraine is able to hold its own and keep control of its vast agricultural production.

Being a “good guy” particularly when you’re not in the best position to do anything for yourself let alone the rest of the world is tough. However, the Ukrainians might have just proven that doing good whilst they are under siege is not just morally correct but smart. The rest of us can learn from that.  

Sunday, March 03, 2024

The World is Big Enough

 One of the things that I remember most about starting out was being asked if I was interested in trying to write for the Today Newspaper. The person who asked me, was a senior writer in the Straits Times and she made the suggestion when I went to visit her in her office. She had to make this offer in hushed tones.

There was a reason for this. Back in the days when there was “media competition,” the top management of both media houses (SPH and MediaCorp) took the competition personally. The team that went to the Today Newspaper were from The New Paper and considered “traitors” to the management of SPH. The same was true for those who went from MediaCorp TV to help set up SPH MediaWorks.

I found this attitude strange. I had grown up in the UK where business and political competition were a fact of life. Sure, companies would “compete” and try and come up with things to win consumers over and to keep good staff. However, I never heard the phrase “too small for competition” until I moved back to Singapore nor had I heard of top management taking it personally when staff left to join a competitor.

However, as life required me to come up against the political system more frequently, it became clear where this attitude amongst out top business people came from. In the 2006 election, we got the hear the argument that Singapore was too small to support a two-party system. To anyone outside Singapore, this is a strange idea to put forth, especially when it seems like the governing party in question has done a decent enough job. Why would an institution in a position of strength be so keen to try to convince people that natural laws did not apply to it.

In fairness, this isn’t something that is particularly unique to the PAP or Singapore. If you listen to American politicians talk about China, you’ll notice that the superpower has developed something of a weird fascination with the aspiring one. Take the following from two diplomats:

 


 Sure, the People’s Republic of China does not have a good record of accepting competition to its power. The Chinese Communist Party, particularly under Xi Jinping has become even more monopolistic in its attitude to power. However, in this case, the Chinese have a point. The world is large enough for America and China and while China’s economic rise has been impressive, the fact remains, the average American remains richer than the average Chinese and whilst China’s military has been “modernizing,” it’s been modernizing from the 1950s whilst the American military is preparing for the space age.

So, here’s the reality of life – no one is above the laws of competition. If you study nature, you’ll notice that animal and plant species are designed to compete and everyone in the eco-system has a purpose. The same is true for business and politics. The dominant species only remains dominant as long as it remains strong and has enough food.

In the case business and political economic systems, its clear that the dominant beast are dominant as long as they give the market what it wants or they create markets for their products and services. The problem only steps in when the dominant beast starts to believe that its position of dominance is “God-given.” Again, the story of Singapore’s media giants is instructive.

SPH and MediaCorp went to the government and got the government to restore their monopolies. Everyone seemed happy and secure and the top management spent their time gripping on each other’s platforms about whether readership or viewership was better. What nobody noticed was the fact that the general public got bored with both of them and turned to the internet and a host of “alternative” sites run by people who were motivated by things other than money. The advertisers who were paying the media monopolies noticed it to and moved their money accordingly. Revenue figures dropped and eventually, SPH, a company that that effectively had a license to print money ended up becoming a “non-profit” dependent on government handouts.

Competition exists to keep everyone on their toes. If you look at nature, you’ll notice that even the biggest animals have to stay on their toes or they become a meal for predators. No animal gets the idea that its survival, particularly at the top is a given. So, human institutions need to understand the same is true for them. A dominant player is there because it serves the market rather than being served by the market. Top nations, top companies, top political parties and so on need to remember that they are servants to ordinary folk rather than the other way round.  

© BeautifullyIncoherent
Maira Gall