One of the funniest things about Singapore has been
the fact that its biggest defenders are more often than not, people from
elsewhere. One of the biggest cheerleaders of the Singapore government is the
community of Westerners living in Singapore. Whenever I’m out with a group of
Westerners and mention something less than perfect about Singapore’s system,
they’ll remind me, “At least your government promotes intelligent people unlike
the Australian/American/British government.”
To be fair to my Western friends who have used this
argument, they are actually right. Singapore is obsessed with everything clever.
We pay our ministers a “competitive” salary so that they’ll be ministers
instead of CEOs. We award generous scholarships so that our brightest minds go
to the world’s best universities. We provide generous packages so that the best
and brightest come to Singapore. Our school system is famously challenging
because we are obsessed with producing the best and brightest and our late
Prime Minister, Mr. Lee Kuan Yew infamously tried to create a smarter nation by
trying to get the “educated” to breed but discouraging the same for the “uneducated.”
Our obsession with being clever isn’t just limited to education
and “attracting talent.” We’re also willing to spend on the hardware side. If
it involves the latest technologies, we’re more than willing to shell out. By
way of an anecdote, when I was going to school in the UK in the 1990s,
Singapore looked like “home movie paradise” because we had moved to laser disk
while the UK and still using the VHS.
Singapore’s government spends plenty of research and
development (R&D). If you look at any random government budget, you’ll
notice that the one thing that the government is willing to spend on is R&D
as this article from the Business Times states:
Given the government’s dominance of things in
Singapore, it goes without saying that the private sector takes its lead from
the government. Enterprises in Singapore are given plenty of encouragement to
spend money on making things more efficient and the increase in R&D
spending us not just government related as the following report from the Ministry
of Trade and Industry (MTI) explains:
Whilst all this money being spent on promoting “cleverness”
is encouraging in so many aspects, I actually have to question if we are
actually becoming clever or are we becoming so clever that we’re actually becoming
stupid. What do I mean?
It’s like this, we are a society that is obsessed with
being clever. If there’s anything worse than being poor in Singapore, it is to
be “stupid.” The concept of “Forest Gump” would never be allowed to exist in
Singapore.
The problem with being obsessed is that we ignore certain
realities. The truth is, not everyone can be very clever. However, in a society
that is obsessed with being clever, everybody is under pressure to show that
they’re clever, even when they’re not. As such, when people need to show that
they are clever, they’ll end up making things more complicated than they need
to be.
I take one of the most basic functions of my day job
in the insolvency business – namely the job of delivering letters to banks. In the
early stages of any given liquidation, we need to ensure that the company’s
bank accounts get frozen to prevent anyone from siphoning off the funds. We
have rarely know which bank accounts the liquidated company maintained and so
more often than not, we have to write to all the banks. It goes without saying
that we also don’t know who the relationship manager for company happens to be
and so our letters are often marked to the attention of either the account servicing
department or the legal department.
The job of hand delivery is fairly easy in most cases.
You go to the branch and present the letter and they distribute it to the
relevant department through their internal systems. In the seven-years I’ve
done this, banks like ICICI, Bank of China, HSBC, Bank of India, Maybank, BNPParisbas and OCBC have been helpful. If the branch can’t accept the letter,
they’ll direct you to the mailroom, which will forward it to the relevant
department.
Unfortunately, the two banks that have become so
clever that they’ve actually complicated things, are the two banks that should
be the most efficient – namely United Overseas Bank (UOB) and DBS Bank. These
are the local banks that have been most obsessed with overseas expansion and
competing on the world stage and have hired the best possible talent from their
global competitors (My ex-boss from Citibank runs UOB’s consumer banking
division and the current CEO of DBS is a former Citi banker, as was his immediate
predecessor).
Both these banks have forgotten the basic purpose of a
mailroom. When delivering a letter to UOB, I was rejected by the mailroom, who
sent me up to one of the higher floors of UOB centre, which in itself is
complicated as it has a complex system of lifts (different lifts go to
different floors). When I reached the floor in question, I found that there was
no one there and when I did find someone, their only reaction was “huh – they sent
you here.”
The experience with DBS was similar. Around two months
ago, I merely had to go to the branch and they would accept whatever letter I
needed to send. Then they said that they stopped accepting letters at the branch
and directed me to the mailroom. There was only one problem. The mailroom would
only accept letters that was marked to the attention of a specific person. They
would not accept the fact that whilst I didn’t have a specific person, I had a
department.
So, given that this was the mailroom’s policy, our
team contacted the business hotline, who advised us that it was perfectly
acceptable. I tried also asked someone from the branch who I needed to
attention the letter to, and was duly advised that I could attention it to a
department. Mailroom refused to accept this and even went as far as to tell me
that I needed to tell them which floor of the Marina Bay Financial Centre the department
was located in. It took pointing out that my letter involved an order court for
them to accept the letter.
How is it such that the organisations that have the means
of having the best possible system are unable to do it. Isn’t the basic
function of a mailroom to distribute things? So, why do I need to find out
where a certain department is in a building that I don’t work in for the people
who are supposed to know. Why is it such that the branch, hotline and mailroom don’t
seem to be able to be on the same page when it comes to receiving letters.
These are organisations that we entrust our life savings to and yet they can’t
accept letters?
These are organisations runs by “the best and
brightest” that money can buy. So, how did they make a simple exercise so
complicated? Surely, they could save themselves a lot of money and time thus
increasing operational efficiency if they remembered that the best solutions
are often the most simple.
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