Everyone wants to be a success. If you look through any given book shop, you’ll find that the section on how to be a success takes up a good portion of the store. An entire industry has grown around telling people how to be successful. I remember having a former client who gave up an electronics store that had been in the family for generations so that they could move into the “Holistic Books Business.” The reason for this change was, as one of the members of this family explained – “Have you noticed that every motivational speaker is a multimillionaire?”
Having success is wonderful and that’s not just in the
material sense of the word. Successful people are inevitably happy because
success does bring a sense of achievement. People who are “failures” tend to be
miserable because there’s sense of “screwing up.”
Having said all that, there is a caveat, which motivational
speakers inevitably fail to tell you about. Success produces a unique set of
problems. These problems are most visible in family businesses where a “successful”
patriarch screws up by hanging onto long or failing to prepare the heirs for
the reality of life. Recent history has shown that there are businesses that
become so great at what they’re doing that they “own” the space they’re in and
then the next day they’re gone. One only has to think of Kodak, which was the
by-word for film and Nokia, which was effectively “THE TELCO.” Kodak had to
reinvent itself after emerging from bankruptcy in 2013 and Nokia sold its once
dominant handphone business to Microsoft for a mere five billion dollars (which
was a fraction of what it was once worth). Kodak didn’t see people moving away
from film to digital and Nokia didn’t think smart phones would catch on.
What is true in business also happens in politics. Long
standing political parties that have become a by word for the government end
have ended up losing power to “opposition” that was more in tune with what the
electorate wanted. The examples that come to mind are the PRI in Mexico and the
Kuomintang in Taiwan. In a way, these were the lucky parties. Defeat allowed
them to reinvent themselves and make a come-back. What’s worse are the parties
that have become so successful that they simply rot away internally. The most
prominent example that comes to mind is the African National Congress (ANC), which
came to power in 1994 as the “heroic” party of Nelson Mandela. Two presidents
later, the ANC under Jacob Zuma became the party that gave us the term “state-capture.”
Like it or not, we’ve started seeing lots of “successful
problems” in Singapore. In the business world, we had Singapore Press Holdings
(SPH), which once collected over 80 percent of all spending on advertising in
Singapore, having to reinvent itself as a property company, then having to
spin-off the media business into a “non-profit” chaired by a former minister
and the non-media business is the subject of a potential takeover battle.
How did this happen? The answer is pretty straight
forward. SPH was so comfortable in its market leading position that it assumed
that people would always read the Straits Times and advertisers would never
have an alternative. The heads of SPH and MediaCorp used to enjoy arguing over
whether readership or viewership was more important without realizing that
people were not reading the Straits Times or viewing ChannelNews Asia and the
advertisers noticed.
If you look closely enough, the problems at SPH are
not isolated. Fact remains, the source of our “mandate of heaven” culture – notably
the PAP lead government. Whilst the PAP has not seen anything resembling the “State
Capture” under the ANC lead Zuma government in South Africa, it’s been showing
a certain level of “tone-deafness” to the needs to the electorate.
This is particularly strange when you consider the
fact that this is a year after an election that saw the PAP lose a further four
seats (one GRC). Unlike the first time it lost a GRC in the 2011 election, the
government seems to be getting less responsive to what the electorate is trying
to say.
Covid-19 has amplified this. First you have the constant
imposing and lifting of restrictions, which hurt retailers and restaurants.
Then you have the Prime Minister’s wife taking to social media to tell her
husband’s employers to “quit bitching.” The only time the government seems to
have acted in the decisive manner has been in the introduction of the
Protection of Online False Hoods Act (POFOMA) and the Foreign Interference
(Countermeasures) Act (FICA), which give the government an uncomfortable amount
of power.
Then, after all that, we got the news that delegates
at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum (NEF) would be allowed to dine in groups of
five, whilst the rest of the nation was only allowed to dine in groups of two.
The government said a lot about how hosting the Bloomberg
NEF was a wonderful boost of confidence for Singapore’s economy. However, people
thought otherwise and memes of Orwell’s Animal Farm “All Animals are Equal but Some
are More Equal” started circulating. The response from the government was that
the delegates of the NEF had to go through stricter testing measures than the Average
Beng (Singapore’s Answer to the Average Joe.)
https://mothership.sg/2021/10/bloomberg-forum-gan-kim-yong/
Whilst that may be true, it was undoubtedly the wrong thing to say and demonstrates a lack of understanding of the electorate. If you sit in coffee shops (where most non-politicians gather) and trawl through cyberspace, there is one common complaint – namely the perception that there is a set of rules for those in power. This messaging confirmed that. I look back at an insolvency conference organized by Asian Legal Business (ALB, part of Thomson Reuters) in March of this year, when cases were significantly lower. We were not allowed to mingle between tables (which defeats the purpose of a networking event). The only difference between the ALB event in March and the upcoming NEF event is that the delegates are of a higher profile (global CEOs vs regional heads of law firms).
How tone deaf do you need to be to prove a negative
perception correct? Former Worker’s Party Secretary General Low Thia Khiang
once talked about having a co-driver to slap the driver when the driver sleeps.
However, this is clearly a situation where the driver has been slapped but
remains sleeping at the wheel. What can one do about that?
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