The Benefits of a Slap

 

Say what you like about the slap that Will Smith gave to Chris Rock but it was a very necessary respite from news about the war in Ukraine and the Covid-19 pandemic. Instead of talking about people dying from horrible things, they started talking about celebrities behaving like school children. The moment that gave us a break from the Russian-Ukraine War and Covid can be found at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dQ5ibKPRAQ

 

By turning himself into a talking point, Mr. Smith saved the Oscars from becoming an irrelevance. Viewership had been steadily declining and you could say that the Oscars were becoming an event for industry insiders to indulge in moments of self-congratulatory masturbation. Whilst the viewership for this year’s event was the second lowest in history, the viewership figures increased by 58 percent. That means that for every 100 viewers last year, there were another 58. The story can be found at:

https://variety.com/2022/tv/ratings/oscars-ratings-2022-academy-awards-1235210795/

 

Let’s put it this way, Mr. Rock mocking Mr. Smith’s wife for losing her hair was not friendly and Mr. Smith’s slap was “unacceptable,” the entire event somehow managed to reignite interest in the Oscars.

Whilst Mr. Smith’s now infamous slap is currently the most talked about slap on the planet, its not the only one and the lesson that we need to take from this is the fact that “bad things” and “arseholes” have a role to play in the scheme of things. The old adage being that the problem is not failure but success.

Who does not want good times? Who does not want to be healthy and wealthy? Since a good portion of us are usually not healthy or wealthy, we spend our time wondering how those of us who are live. The entire self-help industry depends on people aspiring to the good things. Nobody wants bad things to happen to them and just as much as we try to be healthy and wealthy, we work to avoid being poor and sick.

Whilst success always feels better than failure, there is an adage that says that problems don’t come when you are a failure but when you succeed.

Being down and in the s***house should provide “real” people with the drive that they need to get out of a bad place. Just look at the “Leader of the Year,” the Ukrainian President, Mr. Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who has become the living embodiment of every ideal of leadership. He’s united the Ukrainian people against a much more powerful enemy. He’s stayed in a situation where the risk of being wiped out is very real. He’s not hiding in a bunker but goes to the front line and the results have been good. He’s managed to hold off a much larger military force. Russia is not waltzing in and taking control.

Prior to the Russian invasion, Mr. Zelenskyy was what you’d call on the verge of being a disappointment. He was elected as an outsider, who wanted to end a conflict and tackle corruption. He failed to end the conflict in the Donbas region and as to tackling corruption, the main claim to fame was being featured in the Pandora Papers.

Thanks to the bad situation given to him by his Russian counterpart, all that his forgotten. After getting the proverbial slap from his Russian counterpart, Mr. Zelenskyy has stepped up in ways that nobody imagined. Getting a slap brought out the best in Mr. Zelenskyy.

By contrast, success makes one complacent. Success has a way of deluding people into believing their own propaganda. It’s a case of “How I can be wrong when I’ve managed to achieve so much.”

I live in Singapore, which is the epitome of success being a problem. Its famously proclaimed that “Singapore went from fishing village to metropolis in a generation.” Everyone seems to love us. I think of the Dutch expat who looked at me and said “Singapore – where else in the world would you possibly want to be.” Our first Prime Minister, Mr. Lee Kuan Yew spent his post-prime ministerial life as a “development consultant” and “sharing his vision” in a column in Forbes.

That’s all well and good but as a native, I’ve started to note a “decline” in governing standards. I remember a friend who said, “Have you noticed that ever since the Old Man died, there have been more potholes on the roads.” Its not to say that our roads a bad by any standard but they are getting worse – not better. Instead of fixing the proverbial potholes, we’re told that we should just trust the powers that be because they helped grandpa out of the village into the metropolis.

Instead of seeing success a goal to work towards, it become something that is bestowed upon people. Take our “best and brightest.” We send them to school and nurture them for national leadership. The reality is that we spend our time ensuring our best and brightest never face a serious challenge thereby ensuring the best brains rot in a deluded cloud of self-entitlement (“I am successful” because of something I did 20-years ago not because I am constantly working at it).

The government has been slapped with the loss of two GRCs in the last three elections. Yet instead of analysing why they got slapped and how they can learn from it, they work to stop the electorate from slapping them – think of defamation suites, laws on “fake news” that give power to certain individuals” and closure on alternative sources of media.

This is a problem of success. You think that just because you succeeded and did a brilliant job in the past that you will continue doing so. It gives you the false sense of belief that all you need to do is to stick to the proven formula. You see failure is something that doesn’t happen to you. These are all problems brought around by success and when they’re not addressed, this becomes the point when success turns to failure.

“Facts are Not Enough” – Bill Bernbach, founder of Doyle, Dane and Bernbach (DDB)

 Say what you like about Donald Trump but he is an exceedingly successful politician. For all his obvious faults (the management chaos helped boost the sales of newspapers and wrote material for comedians), the man inspired passions and somehow every issue in the world’s most significant nation became all about him.

Even with his criminally inept (the world’s most advanced country having significantly more Covid cases and deaths than India and Brazil – which are both developing nations. Incidentally, when someone wrote a Linkedin post about how Singapore needed to ban people from places like India and the Philippines, I replied that we needed to ban white Americans for spreading misinformation along with the disease – my comment was deleted by Linkedin for “bullying” – but apparently it was OK to talk about banning people from Indian and the Philippines even if White Americans are more likely to give you Covid than an Indian or Pilipino) management of Covid-19, he still managed to get more votes than anyone else in history and one can say that the 2020 election was not so much a case about Biden winning but Trump losing – a case of more people voted against him rather than for Joe Biden. Furthermore, one cannot rule out the possibility that should he run again in 2024, he may well be back in the White House.

I will undoubtedly come under fire for what I’ve just written and its worth understanding why people whom you might deem a rational and decent would cheer on a man who openly targeted an ethnic group (the one that actually does work in the USA – or as one Mexican guy said “the group that actually makes love to women”) and didn’t seem to find anything wrong with the fact that Neo-Nazis and members of the KKK felt so embolden during his stint in the White House.

So rather than talk about his policies, let’s look at why he’s managed to inspire so much passion. The answer lies in what the man is – which is a brilliant sales man. The Donald instinctively understands that humans are essentially emotional and when it comes to buying products and services, how feel about the said product or service is perhaps more important than the dry details of that product or service’s benefit. If you look at what Donald Trump did in 2016, you’ll notice that what he was doing was creating feelings about himself rather than reeling off product benefits. He made it such that his opponent, a known “policy wonk” turned out to be dry and well, the less said the better.

Sure, we live in an environment where marketing has become “left brained” where data analytics and research consultants have grown in stature at the expense of creative agencies. Whilst the more technical side of marketing communications may be on the rise, some of the best drivers of sales have come from advertising that brings out feelings.

David Ogilvy famously said “When I write an advertisement, I don’t want you to tell me that you find it ‘creative.’ I want you to find it so interesting that you buy the product.”

Bill Bernbach, the legendary creative director of DDB went further and made the point that “Facts are not enough.”

https://notrelienquotidien.com/2014/06/17/bill-bernbach-on-datas-facts-are-not-enough/   

 

 A great salesman needs to tell a story and Trump did tell stories that people wanted to hear. He was fact checked and for the most part found to be lying or to use his words “telling truthful hyperbole.” What fact checkers forgot was that Trump had made it such that facts were not really relevant.

When I was an intern in Citibank back in 1999, my then boss, Mr. Eddie Khoo would tell us that “there is no sale without a story.” Trump told stories and people could feel whatever he was saying, regardless of the facts.

Let’s look at the comparison in Singapore. Our ministers are good at reeling of statistics. If you talk about open door policies on immigration, they will inevitably reel of a bunch of statistics on how that benefits you, the voter.

However, even if those statistics are true, they don’t tell a believable story, especially if you’re talking to a forty something year old retrenched PMET who can’t get a job and has a mortgage to pay and all he notices is that the HR manager in ever company he’s applied to happens to be from a particular nationality.

Which tells a more believable story? One that reiterates statistics or the one that people can relate to from their gut?

Yes, facts are important. You have to be truthful and not lie and mislead people. However, just telling facts on their own won’t do the trick. You need to make the facts relevant.

Credit where credit is due. The Donald told stories that people could relate to and made it such that dry facts on their own didn’t matter.

This is something that people need to remember. Having data is good. Having facts on your side is good. However, you’re not going to get very far if you can’t make the data relevant to your audience.

The Importance of the Sporting Story

 

I’m not much of an athlete. My “sporting” career was something of an accident in as much as I simply enrolled in the school karate club and persevered until the club couldn’t maintain its numbers and ended up closing just as I was starting my A-levels.

However, whilst I’ve never been much of an athlete, I’ve always loved watching sport and following the drama of great sporting events. Growing up in England meant that I ended up in the centre of great rivalries such as the annual Five Nations (Now known as Six Nations) Rugby tournament between the home unions (let’s remember that the United Kingdom isn’t a single country but four and this is the chance for Wales, Scotland and Ireland to stick to England – I am young enough to remember the 1990 Scottish Grand Slam) and France (the English and French have been at it since 1066 when the Normans took control of England), England versus Germany for football (The English like to remind the Germans they won the war and Germans remind the English that they’ve won four world cups to the solitary won for England) and England versus Australia in cricket. These rivalries also extended to individual sports where you had Edberg versus Becker at Wimbledon and Formula One in those days was about the late Ayrton Senna versus Alain Prost and Nigel Mansell.

These sporting rivalries are perhaps one of the most important developments in the last century because they provide an important outlet for nationalistic feelings. This is particularly true in Europe, which was in the early part of the 20^th century, the centre of rivalries that got played out in two world wars. I think of former British Prime Minister, Sir John Major (Born in 1943) who said that whilst his predecessor, the late Baroness Thatcher (Born in 1925), grew up in a Europe that could not conceive of peace on the continent, he was from a generation that could never conceive of war taking place in Europe (excluding Eastern Europe, which was only just emerging from Soviet domination).

How did Sir John Major’s words come about? A large part of it has to do with the creation involves the creation of the European Union (EU) or the European Economic Community (EEC) as it was then known. European countries started trading together and realised that if they gained prosperity from trading together, there was no reason to go to war. The driving force behind the EEC or EU was to ensure the Franco-German rivalry that was at the heart of two world wars would become a Franco-German partnership to create prosperity for each other.

Whilst economics was important driving force in bringing former enemies together, the importance of sports cannot be underestimated. Just as there was an idea that trading together would disincentives war, sport got people to "play together” and the potential for “nasty-nationalism” got channeled onto the sporting pitch rather than onto the battlefield. In the 1930s it was all about keeping Germany down. These days, the English and Dutch are trying to beat the Germans on the soccer pitch.

There are lessons for the rest of the world. Here in Asia, we have several flashpoints like North-vs-South Korea (which could turn nuclear-nasty), India-vs-Pakistan (also potential to nuclear-nastiness) and let’s not forget China-vs-Taiwan. With the exception of India-vs-Pakistan, these rivalries consist of people who don’t “play together.”

 

 Copyright – NDTV Sports – This is inevitably much better than:

 

 Copyright – Energy Intelligence – This

Whilst nobody has yet to conduct a study, I would argue that cricket matches between India and Pakistan have helped tame the tensions and potential for war between two nuclear armed countries.

Getting people to play together is the best way of ensuring that peace is secured. Tensions between nations, just as tensions between people, will always be a constant. Just exercise allows individuals to channel aggression, sporting events allow nations to channel feelings of aggression onto the sporting pitch instead of the battle field.

I believe that Singapore should look into this and see how we can host events that get the world’s rivals to duke it out in the national stadium. Sure, we’ve been good at some grand gesture politics like getting Xi-Jinping and Ying-Jeau or Donald Trump and Kim Jong-Un to shake hands in Singapore. However, we can do more. We have what you call the right ingredients in as much as waring parties want to behave when in Singapore.

Can you imagine if we hosted an annual football tournament between Israel and the Palestinian Authority? We share a bond of being two small non-Muslim nations between larger Muslim nations with Israel but we also have a sizeable enough Muslim population to make the Palestinians feel at home.

By hosting sporting events between some of the most bitter rivals on the planet, we can really be a powerful force for good. The diplomatic and commercial benefits are enormous. Its something our Ministry of Foreign Affairs needs to look into.

The World is Opening Up – And I Feel Fine.

 

Have started watching a reality show called “Young, Famous and African,” on Netflix. As the title of the show illustrates, this is a reality show based around Africans, who are exceedingly wealthy, young and famous. The show is shot primarily in Johannesburg, South Africa. However, the participants in the show are not limited to South Africa. The show’s power couple is from Nigeria and one of the more colourful characters is from Tanzania. Think of this as Africa’s answer to “Bling Empire.”

This show is what you’d call an eye-opener and hopefully one that will open the rest of us to the opportunities available in a world of increased nationalism and covid restrictions. If you talk to enough people in Singapore and beyond, you’ll find that their image of Africa is limited to a single monolithic block filled with starving black people being screwed by dictators mollycoddled by China.

Whilst much of Africa is poor and filled with starving people ruled over by some of the worst brutes in history, there are parts of Africa that are growing their wealth. Whilst the middle class in Sub-Saharan Africa remains small compared to many parts of the world, the fact remains, there is such a thing known as a “Consumer Market” in Africa and wealth is being created outside what is considered the only economic activity in Africa (looting natural resources) – the participants in this show, for example are made money from movies and music.

https://www.scmp.com/magazines/style/celebrity/article/3171460/who-queen-bling-khanyi-mbau-netflixs-young-famous-and

 

 Copyright South China Morning Post – An African Queen of Bling, who doesn’t “own” a resource rich nation

https://gandalebs.com/top-of-the/zari-hassan/zarinah-hassan-biography-age-husband-fashion-and-family-work-cars-and-net-worth?content

 

 Copyright GANDAlebs – Another African Queen of Bling who proves that a woman with brains can go far in a “Dark Continent”

Seeing a “Prosperous” Africa is a powerful reminder to the rest of us that the world that we grew up in is changing. Singapore like the other Asian Tigers (Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea) got rich by manufacturing more cheaply and selling to the developed world of the West and Japan. Wealth was generated in one part of the world and the rest of the world acted as a contractor. Hence, the early development of Asia was in manufacturing of “cheap” goods.

However, things have changed since then. The developing Asian giants of China and India disrupted this model of development. China’s economy went from USD178 billion (smaller than Canada, Spain and Brazil – let alone Germany and Japan) to USD 14.72 trillion (Only the USA has a larger economy and the talk as about when rather than if China becomes the world’s largest economy).

Suddenly, the world economy had a few more engines and economic prosperity in the developing world has brought along social changes. French cognac producers, for example, no longer kick up a fuss when people mix cognac with soft drinks. The reason is simple – the largest market for cognac is Asia or more superficially China, which is filled with people who mix their cognac.

Furthermore, the traditional model of development has changed. Innovation for example, used to be regarded as a uniquely Western thing, with a lot of economic growth in the developing world coming from people brining in Western things into Asia. This is strictly speaking no long true. China, which had a brand name in low end manufacturing is trying to get rid of low-end manufacturing and high-end technology companies like Tencent and Alibaba. The mid-tier Indian companies that did things cheaper than their Western counterparts make the distinction of being “product” companies that create things rather than do things cheaper.

This is not to say that developing countries are the cure all for everything. Just as China and India have a middle class bigger than most countries have people, the vast majority in both places live in awful poverty. Americans in particular needed to reminded that China will only be the largest economy because it has more people. Even when China becomes the largest economy in the world, the average American will be more prosperous than the average Chinese. Migration flows will continue to flow out of developing countries. As has been pointed out, the American Born Chinese (ABCs) still call themselves Americans of Chinese descent rather than Chinese with American passports.

However, the point remains that the world is opening up and in areas where nobody expected it too. A former colleague has, for example, found the joys of driving a jeep made by Mahindra Automotive. This is a revelation in as much as India didn’t get manufacturing in the same ways that the Chinese didn’t get software.

 

Again, I’m not saying that dealing with people from the less developing world is going to be easy. However, the point is that the developing world is actually developing, which means opportunities in a variety of industries are being created. Africa, for example is also producing music as well as natural resources. We cannot stop hungry people from getting the things we take for granted. One of the best ways to commit financial suicide would to willingly become a prisoner of our parent’s world view.

 

Making Sure the Future Looks Like Today

 

Around a week ago, the former interim CEO of SPH Media Trust, Mr. Patrick Daniel delivered a lecture on Stewardship Of The Singapore Media: Staying The Course, at the Institute of Policy Studies' (IPS). In his lecture, the veteran of the Singapore media scene outlined what he believed needed to be done in order for SPH Media Trust to become financially independent by 2045. The full report on what Mr. Daniel said can be found at:

https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/former-interim-ceo-patrick-daniel-sets-out-what-sph-media-trust-must-do-to-be-successful

 

 Mr. Daniel touched on many important points. He rightfully argued that the newsrooms needed to look at new technologies like Artificial Intelligence and Data to drive innovation. He correctly pointed out that the news needed to be delivered on digital platforms and newspapers would have to become e-newspapers. His lecture was “sensible” in the most Singaporean of ways.

Whilst his lecture may have sounded sensible, one couldn’t help but feel sorry for Mr. Daniel for being placed in that most unfortunate of situations. It was as if he had finally been allowed to say what everyone else knew to be true – which is the fact that Mr. Daniel and the industry he was a part of had been operating in a time-warp that kept him in the 1960s and he would only be able to operate as people do in the 2020s in 2045. Take the statement that content would be delivered by digital formats and print newspapers would become e-newspapers by 2045 as an example. He was saying, that he would deliver content in 2045 the way people are currently receiving content.

How did Mr. Daniel end up in this very sad position? The answer is simple – the organisation he once worked for was so obsessed with defending its turf that it failed to realise that its turf was no longer relevant. The bosses at SPH celebrated when they took a 40 percent stake in the Today Newspaper because it ensured they would still have a dominant share of every eyeball (and let’s not forget advertising dollar) on every newspaper printed. What the management at SPH failed to notice was that eyeballs were shifting elsewhere along with the advertising dollars.

The fact that SPH was a big organisation in a small pond should not be an excuse for the failure to pay attention to shifting trends, especially when you consider the fact that far organisations like Shell Oil for example, have been actively preparing for a world where their current business may no longer be relevant.

 

 How has been such that a company like Shell has been able to anticipate the future while SPH was not able to. The answer is simple – Shell operates like a normal business. It faces some form of competition from the likes of say Exxon Mobile or Total. Competition means that the management of Shell Oil needs to look at the needs of everyone driving into a Shell Station and to anticipate how they’ll be spending money in the future. Shell Oil has to pretend to respond to environmental pressure groups. For Shell Oil, electronic cars may be a “fad” today but they’re likely to be the norm in the future.

By contrast, SPH and its sibling, MediaCorp have never really operated like normal businesses. The needs of the consumer never mattered because the consumer had no choice. Singapore’s all-powerful government has consistently reminded journalist that they operate a “special” type of business, where profit takes a secondary role to a social mission (which one might cynical enough to conclude that this mission was to remind the people that they needed the big and powerful).

Just look at the way the media business has been restructured. It has gone from being a “for-profit” business to a “non-profit.” Say what you like about the “profit-motive” and “shareholder” demands but for-profit companies are forced to respond to consumers. History has shown that for-profit companies that don’t innovate end up as a footnote in the history books. Think of Nokia, which defined the mobile phone business in the 90s. It made solid phones (only charge the battery every three days) but failed to observe and anticipate consumer behaviour and didn’t give the consumer what they wanted. Nokia’s phone business was sold at a fraction of what it was once worth.

A for-profit media business would not be waiting until 2045 to deliver what the consumer wants in a way that the consumer wants. A non-profit by contrast accounts to donors rather than consumers. SPH is where it is today because it failed as a business. It is now SPH Media Trust and therefor has no need to do anything that the consumer wants as long as donor(s) are willing to fund it.

The history of shielding people and institutions from market forces is pretty miserable. In car terms, one only has to look at the Lada and the Trabant, which vanished the moment they had to face competition from the likes of Volkswagen and Toyota. The Singapore government needs to understand this if it wants to a viably local media. Better to anticipate change and prepare for it than to be blown away by it.

Characters of the Tank

 One of the better parts of the loosening up of Covid restrictions is the fact that restaurants are hiring again and I managed to get my side gig at a restaurant I was helping out at. This is Korean restaurant that serves Korean Sashimi.

As with all places that serve “fresh” seafood in this part of the world, the highlight of the whole restaurant is the fish tank. Whenever I get the chance to, I like to take a peek at the inhabitants of the tank – namely the abalone, the halibut and the octopus. These three have managed to enforce a few truisms about life.

The first is pretty obvious, which is the fact that no matter what you do with your life, you’re going to end up in the same place as everyone else – the cemetery (or since I live in Singapore and our culture says cremate – the columbarium). The halibut, the abalone and the octopus’ live life at a very different pace inside in the tank but sooner or later they end up in the same place – on someone’s dinner plate:

 

 Whether you live life at a fast pace or you take it easy – you’re going to end up as dinner to a “higher power.”

The second point is that life can be very interesting depending on how you choose to live it. You can be like the abalone, who finds a spot and stays there. The abalone is pretty chill with his place in the tank. He waits for time to pass and when its his time to end up on the dinner plate, he’s considered a delicacy. I guess you could say that if the abalone was a human being, he’d be the guy in the corner, who is happy with his lot in life and he ends up becoming a “delicacy” to the rest of us because he’s simply so agreeable. It’s hard to think of bad thoughts against this delightful character.

Then there are the halibuts in life, who pile upon one another and stay there. Once in a while, one of them flaps around but then returns to his or her spot. Then, when the halibut is turned into sashimi, you find that the best in the halibut appears with a bit of bean sauce.

If you think about it, most of us (especially if you live in a densely populated place like Singapore or Hong Kong), are like the halibut. We find a spot in life and only shift into something more comfortable when someone else puts “sauce” into our lives. We’re constantly on the look out for things to make our lives feel a little bit better. Think of the way men look at fast cars and dream of how their peers will envy them for driving something so sexy. Or think of women at an expensive shoe shop. We condition ourselves into staying in the same spot but unlike the abalone who is happy to stay there, the halibuts in life are waiting for things to happen to them in the hope that it will make life better.

 

 Wait – sooner or later something will happen

The most interesting character in the tank is the octopus. Of all the characters in the tank, the octopus alone makes an effort to explore the place. Whilst the other two have taken to lying there and awaiting their fate, the octopus swims around, stretches itself or hides in a corner. There are times where this character ends up banging its head against the wall of the tank but It somehow continues to move along and around the tank.

If you think about it, those of us who are swimming around and trying to make sense of life, do end up banging our heads against things, whether they are geographical limitations (I live in a small island and as I was reminded by an immigration officer – there’s only so much to see in Singapore) or social. Whatever you do, you’re going to end up banging your head against something sometime or another:

 

 You’re going to hit your head against something if you're always on the move

Whilst the octopus is the only one of the three that hits the wall from time-to-time, it’s also the only the only one that seems to be making the most of its life and it’s probably fitting that the octopus is a delicacy when its eaten live. If you think about it, this is a fitting analogy of life. We talk about, read about and think about the characters who have actively moved to change their lives. The Elon Musk and Steve Jobs of the world are so fascinating because they’re always on the move and trying to change things. Sure, they often end up banging their heads once in a while but they are also the ones who end up changing your life as well as their own.

No character is perfect. In a way, all three are only doing as nature has programmed them to be. However, the next time you look at a fish tank, it might be worth asking yourself which character you would like to be your role model.   

He’s An Honest Man ……Ah, that could be a Problem

 

My latest indulgence on Netflix is “Servant of the People,” a Ukrainian political satire about how a simple school teacher gets propelled into the presidency after one of his students films him ranting about the corruption in politics. The show stars Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who would interestingly enough, become President of Ukraine.

 

 Copyright – Netflix

One of the most interesting scenes comes at the start of the second episode, when the ancient Greek philosophers, “Plutarch” and “Herodotus” are discussing the main character’s plight in his dreams. One of them states that he’s become president and he should be happy because he and his children and children’s children will be rich. The other says “he’s an honest man” and the reply to that is “Ah, that could be a problem.”

This exchange sums up what makes the show so addictive – namely the fact that it touches on a very universal theme – the corrupting influence of power. The main character of the show is what you could call someone who is too nice for his own good. He’s pushed around by everyone, including his 18-year-old niece who won’t let him use the toilet in the morning. However, once he becomes president, everyone becomes exceedingly nice and miracles happen. He’s told by the bank manager that his loan was written off in a miraculous lottery. He's not the only one to strike it lucky with his propulsion to the presidency. His parent’s home gets miraculously renovated and when they think they need to spend the father’s savings on new dresses, the shop keepers insist on giving them more than what they wanted.

The story of otherwise normal people being corrupted by overnight power and money isn’t new. The world is filled with lottery winners who went broke in a matter of months or the number of child stars who are now working ordinary jobs because they couldn’t handle overnight success.

Whilst I don’t believe that people are intrinsically dishonest, it takes a pretty strong character not to b affected by power and wealth and because the temptations of power are particularly strong and addictive, you’ll find that the discussions on power and preventing abuses of power tend to be focused on the individuals in that particular position. The hidden oligarchs in the show make the point that they should let the main character be president because even honest men start to enjoy the perks of being head of state. Being an honest man who genuinely wants to reform things is tough.

When you discuss things like abuse of power, you’ll find that the laws are focused on the individual in position of power. In presidential systems, the office holder can be impeached. In parliamentary systems there no confidence votes. There are also courts of law and courts of public opinion (formed by the free press), which are meant to keep office holders on their toes. In Singapore, where we take great pride in being “transparent,” we have a system of high rewards for office holders (so that there’s no temptation) with harsh penalties (God help you if your hands are caught in the cookie jar).

However, as is seen on the show, the affects of power aren’t limited to the individual but also to the people around them. The “conventional” wisdom being that it pays to be nice to the president is also applied to the people around the said president.

With probably the exception of perhaps the Trump siblings, people who are related to the people in power, tend to lie low. Would anyone know who Hunter Bidden was, had his name not been brought up by Donald Trump?

There is a reason for this, which is the fact that influence tends to be used behind the scenes are than overtly. Overt use tends to lead to embarrassment of the person in power, which in turn leads to the diminishing the brand name. Think of “Roger Clinton” who was given the code name “headache” by the Secret Service during his brother’s administration.

Somehow, relatives of the well to do or powerful, seem to do pretty well for themselves. One only has to think of the Suharto Children in Indonesia and managed to accumulate the best bits of the Indonesian economy for themselves when Daddy was president. Nobody needed to pay the president a bribe as long as they were business with one of his children or friends.

The Suharto’s are just an example of people around benefiting of someone else’s power in an obvious way. Here in Singapore, we are officially far more transparent than our larger neighbour and handing over envelopes with cash to public officials is a sure way to end up in jail. As a current senior minister once said “What you see is what you get.”

However, that does not necessarily mean that those related to office holders are not using it to their advantage. If anything, this is merely institutionalised in Singapore. As anyone who has been through national service can tell you – there is a white horse system, where sons of anyone prominent are marked out and identified for certain purposes (which there are officially two versions – one being from a former Ministry official claiming that it was to prevent special treatment). No bribes are paid but certain people seem to get certain jobs.

Quite often, it’s the people closes to us who have the power to screw us up. Let’s look at what happened when Lee Kuan Yew died. The siblings started slinging mud at each other. The late Mr. Lee held on to keep his children and the family from the things that rip families apart and given the influence the family has on the nation, his family troubles would have inevitably affected the nation.

Sure, its important to keep people in power honest. However, being an honest individual in a position of power is not enough. You have to ensure that the people around you remain honest too.

How we F** Our Women

 

You got to admit that it’s been an “interesting” time for women. Ever since a certain US presidential candidate bragged about “Grabbing them by the p***sy,” the world headlines have been filled with stories of how men in power have been abusing women. The rich, powerful and famous like Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby and Kevin Spacy have all been felled by charges of sexually abusing people. This momentum against sexual harassment is known as “#MeToo” and only those living under a stone would not have heard of it by now.

It's good that these abuses are coming to light. Nobody should be subject to being harassed at the work place and people who abuse their position to get “sexual services” should be treated in the same manner as people who abuse their said position for money.

However, while the Harvey Weinstein cases of the world grab headlines, the real issue that is screwing up women lies closer to home and the Harvey Weinstein’s of this world are merely large symptoms of the problem rather than the problem itself. The real enemy that all women have are their mothers. Philip Larkin’s “They f** you up, your mum and dad, they don’t mean to but they do,” has never been more apt when it comes to what our parenting does to our girls.

There is an argument to say that this is cultural. There is a common argument in anthropology that states that societies are based on the exchange of women. For example, daughters are inevitably married off to build alliances. One of the hallmarks of “marriage” that most traditional of institutions is the establishment of the ownership of the children in the marriage to the man’s family. The man is “head the household.” Traditional family structures have it such that men go out to earn the household income and women stay at home to look after the house. If you look at household income, its usually the man who makes more. In this scenario, it was understood that a man could “relax” at home because he was the one who “supported” the family and in “traditional” families, education of boys was a priority because it was an investment in the chap bringing home the proverbial bacon whilst the girl was going to marry out anyway.

However, women have been playing a greater role in earning the family income. In Singapore, we’ve gone from a situation where a wife who stays at home is now luxury rather than the expectation within a generation. However, whilst the woman’s contribution to the household income has grown, the same is not necessarily true of the man’s contribution to the creation of a good home.

I take a former brother-in-law as an example He is the pride and joy of the family because he managed to get himself a good job with one of the statutory boards and throughout his career, he’s been sent on all sorts of courses. He is, what you’d call the ultimate Singapore success story.

However, this is a guy who can’t clean up after himself. You’re talking about a guy who will happily much on his MacDonald’s meal at home and leave the wrapping on the table for someone else to put into the dustbin, which happened to be located behind him. All he had to do was to twist his body and drop it there.  

My former brother-in-law’s inability to put his trash into the bin should be blamed on my former mother-in-law who did everything for him and the counter argument is – why I am bothered because he’s managed to get an “iron rice-bowl” with the government. My former mother-in-law, can argue that whilst she may have pampered him, she saw to it that he became a “good guy” who could bring home the bacon.

This a mild case. If you look at many of the societies that are stuck in poverty, you’ll notice that one of the key reasons why they’re stuck in poverty is because the “development aid” has been focused on men, when it is in fact the women using the income for productive things like food an education. I think of a non-related Vietnamese girl I know who stopped giving money to her brothers because they were spending it on booze. Then, she had to stop giving money to her mother because her mother was giving it to her brothers.

The question remains, why do parents (particularly mothers) focus on giving so much to the boys when the truth is that it’s the girls who are taking care of them. This has not been good for society at large as can be seen in the following article:

https://aquila-style.com/blue-eyed-boys-why-do-many-mothers-spoil-their-sons-even-into-adulthood/

 

 Gender bias is culturally ingrained in so many societies and the problem is not so much that men are intrinsically sexist against women but that women are not raising their sons to expect women to “serve” them and “daughters” to be servants. Other stake holders can step in. Corporations can do good by directing their brand communications to enforce this message. Take this ad by Ariel Detergent for the Indian market:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QDlv8kfwIM

 

Whilst having more women reach the top can serve as an inspiration for other women, its ground up initiatives like this ad that work towards clearing gender bias in the work place and beyond. When you have top-down solutions you risk creating “Drawing up the draw bridge syndrome” where the few women at the top end up making life more difficult for women on the way up in order to preserve the status as “the only girl at the table.” However, when you have ground-up solutions like this, you create a culture where men and women are willing to share the load in the house and work place. When men and women share the load, a lady becoming CEO is a “so-what,” because it becomes normal to people at large. Ending gender bias is not a sprint – it’s a marathon.  

Leadership on the Quiet

 It’s International Woman’s Month and it was International Woman’s Day a few days ago (8 March) and aside from covering the ongoing crisis in the Ukraine and the Covid pandemic, the world’s media has been focused on women and the achievements of women in a number of fields. The Economist even went as far as to run a story that “Societies that treat women badly are poorer and less stable.”

https://www.economist.com/international/2021/09/11/societies-that-treat-women-badly-are-poorer-and-less-stable

 

 Given that I live an advanced economy, much of the conversation on women, centered around the need to continue shattering the glass ceiling. In my Linkedin feed, most of the stories on “women” were from women in corporate positions who were either talking about how they were either treated as nothing better than the secretary or stories about how people assume they’re most junior person in the room when they are in fact the most senior.

To give credit where credit is due, women in Singapore have made great strides in the corporate sector. Whilst my grandfather’s generation considered degrading for the husband if the wife worked. In my generation, it’s understood that both parties hold jobs and only those earning extreme amounts of money can afford to have wives that don’t work. So, in modern Singapore its understood that women will earn their own money. When we talk about women in work force, its more of a question of providing opportunities for advancement rather than opportunities per se.

In an advanced economy, the issue is about getting used to the idea that women can be bosses. One of the tragedies of Covid is that it didn’t force us out of the assumption about women not being able to lead, despite the obvious fact that places run by women (Germany under Angela Merkel, New Zealand under Jacinda Ardern and Finland under Sanna Marin) did considerably much better than places run by men – specifically the chest thumping macho variety (Donald Trump in the USA, Narendra Modi in India and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil.) Despite the obvious, there are people who still see “bluster” as “strength.” Modern global culture tends to prioritize the show of strength rather than actual strength. Hence, you get a system where weaklings yell and scream to show strength but flee the moment cat meows in their direction.

Whilst women are generally expected to “look pretty,” they are spared the expectation of having to create a lot of noise. Hence, women, when given the chance to, get to focus on getting things done. Interestingly enough, this is most obvious in developing countries. I take Vietnam as an example. Walk along the streets of Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City and you will notice a hive of entrepreneurial activity. Every street corner will have noodle stall or a mini-spa. Upon further observation, one will note that all this entrepreneurial activity is done by women:

 

 Copyright – World Travel Connector

I don’t believe this is particularly unique to Vietnam. If you watch enough travel videos, you will notice that it’s the women trying to make a living in the market place in most developing nations.

Telling generations of women to look after the household has also extends beyond the material. As anyone who has traveled from Singapore into Malaysia accompanied by someone with a non-Singaporean or Malaysian passport will tell you, you will run the risk of being shaken down for a bribe on the Malaysian side of the border. The people doing the shaking down are inevitably men. The women, particularly the ones wearing the “Tudong” (Headscarf worn by devout Muslim women) never ask for a bribe.  

 

Copyright – The Phnom Penh Post

This is not to say that women are intrinsically more honest. As any Bangladeshi or Pakistani will tell you, women in power like the two Begums of Bangladesh or Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan are capable of corruption.

However, it seems that at the ground level, it’s the women who do their jobs and earn their money without taking short cuts. It’s often stated that the Malaysian officers are tempted to look for bribes because they’re not paid very much and are placed in a position of power of traveling Singaporeans who inevitably earn much more (a bribe is around RM 50, which is around SG$16 – the cynical might call this a win-win – a decent subsidy for the Malaysian officer and pocket change or the thrill of being able to use money to solve problems for the Singaporean without being punitive). However, one has to wonder. The women face the same temptations as their male counterparts yet they are never the ones to shake you down for bribe?

It's been said that for women to advance the corporate ladder, they need to become more “showy” or openly “aggressive” in the same way that men are supposed to be. Think of the “successful” women leaders like Margaret Thatcher and how masculine hardness is prescribed to her (“Iron Lady.”)

Whilst there is some truth to this in the short term, the more sustainable way to promote women is to recognize them for the qualities that they bring to the table. If you look at Mrs. Thatcher as an example, you’ll find that her behavior was not that of a “macho-man” but that of an effective housewife. One could argue that her success as Prime Minister came from the fact that she ran the country like how she ran the household.

Instead of trying to make women more like men, we should be promoting women for being very good at what they do as women. Women have shown themselves to be good at doing things like holding down a job and keeping the house in order at the same time. We should be celebrating these qualities and promoting them rather than pushing women be more like men.  

Dialing the Wrong Number

 

Was having a beer with the guys who have rented my spare room last night, when they suggested that I watch PK, a lovely Bollywood sketch staring Amir Khan as the titular character, PK an alien that ends up stranded on earth.

The crux of the story is simple. The alien gets stranded on each and finds out that “God” is the only person whom earthlings look to solve their problems. So, in order to solve his problems, he ends up looking for God by practicing every religion in earnest so that he can meet God and ask God for help. The alien’s spiritual journey brings him into conflict with the head of a large Hindu sect who labels him a “Muslim Extremist.” Every time the “Holy Man” talks about doing miracles, the alien tells him that he is “dialing the wrong number to God.”

One of the best scenes in the entire movie comes when he gets people to dress up in different religious costumes and challenges to the Holy Man who identify them. When the Holy Man fails to identify people correctly, the alien shows us that when we see a man with a turban, we assume he’s a Sikh, then when the turban is removed, that man is a Hindu and when his moustache is removed, he becomes a Muslim. The scene can be seen below:

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

 

The alien in the movie makes the point that many of the labels of religion and politics that we used to identify ourselves with, are in fact man-made. There is even a scene in the movie when he he’s caught in ward looking for the label of religion on a new born baby. After discovering that the baby does not have a label to identify itself as belonging to a certain religion, he challenges people to strip naked to see if they have a label that compels them to be followers of any particular religion and he comes to the conclusion that the religious leaders are using fear to get people to donate to the “God created” by the religious leaders rather than the “God that created humanity.” The alien in the movie keeps calling the “Holy Man” for “dialing the wrong number to God.”

This is probably one of my favourite Amir Khan movies in as much it makes a very valuable social point through comedy and the phrase “Dialing the wrong number,” makes me wonder if we are consistently dialing the wrong number. Furthermore, instead of questioning whether we’re dialing the right number, we insist on carrying on the conversation instead of checking if we’re in the right conversation in the first place.

The most prominent example of this always comes up during budget day, especially when there’s the imminent prospect of an increase of a tax of sorts. The standard conversation that the government has is that it needs to increase tax in order to pay for welfare programs. Our current finance minister, Mr. Lawrence Wong has repeatedly stressed that any increase in the Goods and Services Tax (GST) will not hurt the poor because they will receive all sorts of subsidies. The opposition will then point out that the government is has plenty in the reserves and does not need to raise tax.

This is, in fact the wrong conversation on the topic. I believe that the right conversation should be on whether people should be receiving any subsidies in the first place. Unfortunately, if we started on that conversation, we may get plenty of answers that would make people uncomfortable – saying you are giving a subsidy to help people is just so much easier to say than the fact that you’re encouraging employers to look for the cheapest possible option when it comes to salaries and admitting that the poor might be bearing a higher brunt of the tax burden than the well to do.

As the alien in the movie points out – fear of the unknown is a very powerful tool in keeping people in order. Think about it – we accept certain truths without questioning them because a world without those truths can be frightening. Let’s look at another constant in Singapore – namely the reminder of the benefits of one-party rule or “why a two-party system won’t work in Singapore.” Let’s just look at who is using this line and question why they’re using this line.

It's been comfortable sticking to “the conversation” on many of the hot topic issues of the day. However, between the internet and Covid, we’re signs that we’ve been dialing the wrong number and been indulging in the wrong conversation. However, instead of admitting that we’ve dialed the wrong number, we’re carrying on in the wrong conversation.

Look at our traditional model of looking at pay. When it comes to white collar work, we pay top dollar for people like politicians, bankers, stock traders and so on. We argue that it’s all about attracting talent. However, when it comes to people like street sweepers and rubbish collectors, the argument as that we can’t pay more because it would be uncompetitive.

Covid showed us that we need people to collect rubbish. It also showed us that having the world’s billionaires buy expensive property didn’t really make life better for the rest of us. We should have known that we had dialed the wrong number.

However, the only admission that we’ve dialed the wrong number has been the formation of government committees to look into raising the wages of poor people.

Questioning established norms isn’t unpatriotic. Its common sense. Constant questioning is how you ensure that the path you’re on is the right one and if you’re not, how do you get on the right one. Let’s stop sticking to the wrong number and look to get the right one.

These People Are…..

 

As someone who writes commentaries, it pains me to admit that one of the best things about the “Age of Trump,” was the discovery that comedians were more often than not the best social commentators. I found that people like John Oliver and Trevor Noah, often made their points better than the people in the news.

That discovery remains true, even after Donald Trump left the White House. For example, the most effective comment on the Russian invasion of the Ukraine comes from John Oliver, who described Russia’s events as “inexcusable” and he made the point that you know things aren’t quite right when the reply to the question “Why should we let you stay as an apologist for slaughter,” is “Good question.” The clip can be found at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JRs4ColOMo

Mr. Oliver has hit the nail on the head. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has caused bloodshed and devastation. There is no excuse for it and the fact that the Western Powers (specifically the USA) do equally bad things (invasion of much of the Middle East and South America) doesn’t make the Russian invasion any better.

So, as Trevor Noah argues in his sketch of the Ukrainian crisis, its actually quite heartwarming to see the European nations step up and provide assistance to Ukrainians fleeing the war. However, as Mr. Noah observed, the Europeans who are now welcoming Ukrainian refuges, were less welcoming when it came to welcoming Syrians fleeing a war. The reasons as, Mr. Noah has observed, were essentially racist and the efforts to disguise it have not been exactly subtle as can be seen by this quote from the Bulgarian Prime Minister:

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

 

 The double standards on display are awful. Why are Syrian’s fleeing war less worthy of compassion than Ukrainians fleeing war? In an ideal world, we should work on the principle that all human life is worthy of compassion.

However, modern politics isn’t an ideal, particularly when it comes to problems. More often than not, a problem is only a problem when it happens to people like you. As far as Europe was concerned, the war in Syria was about brown people killing each other in a far away place. As far as politicians in Europe were concerned, Syrian refugees were Middle Eastern problems brought to Europe. Solution – keep them out.

Ukrainians on the other hand look like the average EU citizen and they happen to be right next door. Hence, what happens in Ukraine is not far away problem coming to the neighbourhood – it’s a problem in the neighbourhood.

Let’s put it this way, if you live in Europe, the problems in the Middle East that you read about are just that – they exist only in news print or on the TV. You can condemn Bashar Asad for doing what he does in Syria as long as the results of his work don’t end up on your door step. It’s a different story when the war is in the country next door. One only has to look at a map to get the idea that the Poles and Hungarians must be wondering if they’ll be next on Mr. Putin’s list. Ukraine, for Europe, isn’t a problem that exists in the news. It’s a problem that exist in reality.

Singapore, as an island, is blessed in certain respects. Our branding as the stable hub for the region has been strategically as well as economically sound. Indonesia, for example, has less incentive to seek a destabilizing armed conflict with us when Indonesia’s power elite park a portion of their funds in Singapore’s banks.

Hence, we often take a more commercial view of things like poor people from elsewhere. The one time the SAF got some “active experience” was in the 1970s, when we sent gun boats to keep out Vietnamese boat people. I remember, a former OC from my SISPEC (now known as SCS) days talking about how he was sent to deal with them in the 1970s as part of the Commando unit and ended up wondering why “these people never stayed to fight” (erm, they had just seen the world’s strongest military run away).

 

 Here's what an active threat to Singapore Looks like – Copyright South China Morning Post.

The government of the day regarded the boat people as a “threat” and that they would somehow crowd out the natives of Singapore’s limited land space.

Whilst the government felt threatened by poor people with nothing to lose and everything to gain from being in Singapore, it has taken a very different policy when it comes to opportunist from the more refined but not less unscrupulous parts of the world. Like the first group, this lot take up space in land scarce Singapore and they use valuable resources (oxygen) which might otherwise have done to people in need. However, whenever this point is raised, the government inevitably states that these people are a “necessity” because they create wealth for Singaporeans by selling products made by Singaporeans or services delivered by Singaporeans to Singaporeans.

 

 The one on the right is a necessity to Singapore – He makes you rich by playing with your money.

Whilst you can decry Singapore for being commercial in how it treats people from the rest of the world, one can also argue that we’re not doing anything that other people aren’t doing. Why bring in “troublesome” boat people when you can have rich people buying up over priced alcohol on a regular basis?

However, whilst the tangible difference might be obvious, its actually the unseen intangibles that make the difference. People with money can always leave when things get uncomfortable. Just look at how Mr. Casey reacted when the locals expressed their displeasure with him on social media. He suddenly found the ability to make Usain Bolt look like a snail.

Its people off the boat or in Donald Trump speak “S**hole” places that stay because they don’t have elsewhere to go. They have the hunger to make the host country succeed. Let’s remember, skills can always be trained. The heart to stay and fight is a different story.