The Buck Didn’t Reach Here.

 

One of the most interesting moments in my years of blogging was to have an article I wrote on SPH get picked up by Independent Singapore. The article went round my professional circle and my employer called me asking me if I was “crazy” because I was risking being sued for stating that SPH failed as a business.

The truth is, I would love for SPH to sue me, an insignificant blogger. At worst, I would be financially ruined and forced to spend whatever’s left of my working life cleaning toilets. The management of SPH would have had to explain in open court how they went from printing money because they controlled virtually all the advertising space in the country to needing government welfare in a country that prides itself in having no welfare.

My perverse desire to be sued by SPH for pointing out the obvious was further enforced by the news that the police had been called in to investigate a scandal where SPH had inflated its circulation figures. In the article, the former CEO, Mr. Ng Yat Chung is quoted to have said, “I note with regret and disappointment that certain individuals in the SPH Media circulation department appeared to have misconducted themselves in relation to circulation numbers during the period of review by the (audit and risk committee).” The extract can be found at:

https://www.businesstimes.com.sg/companies-markets/sph-media-files-police-report-following-investigation-overstated-circulation

 

Given that Mr. Ng is a former artillery man, I guess should be kinder to him. However, while he may have come from the same army formation as me, Mr. Ng has had a habit of demonstrating the reasons why there’s been a sense of dissatisfaction with what one can call the “Singapore Elite.”

The background is simple. Guys like Mr. Ng seem to get parachuted into the type of jobs earning the type of pay that most of us can only dream of. We are told that this needs to happen because guys like Mr. Ng are the best and brightest that Singapore has to offer. If you look at Mr. Ng’s qualifications, they are impeccable. The argument is that people like him are so intelligent that they need to run all sorts of places for the benefit of the nation. It’s been sold that our elite are so elite that they’ll automatically turn everything they touch into gold.

It’s this line of thought that got Mr. Ng his job at NOL despite no proven record of having boarded a ship. When he later became CEO of SPH, he had no record of ever having reported on a story or sold a page of advertisement. Yet, somehow the boards of those companies believed that he had the magical talent to turn things around. When you live in the real world, you’ll realise that the mess at both NOL and SPH were to be expected.

This is not to say that outsiders to an industry can’t run particular businesses. However, the outsider needs to invest considerable time in learning how the industry that he or she has been entrusted to run before they are start doing anything. In such situations, the insiders usually retain a lot of power but at the same time, the person who remains responsible for everything is the guy in the leadership position.

Ironically, the organization that seems to understand this best is the army. If you look at armies around the world, you will notice that officers, particularly junior officers are paired with non-commissioned officers (NCO) who are vastly more experienced. The young officer understands that he needs the NCO to get things done while the NCO knows he depends on the officer for guidance on the mission. A relationship of mutual respect has to develop. I remember asking a former US Army Sergeant-Major who one deals with a superior who could be your son. His reply was “The NCO has a duty to train the young officer to be the best officer possible.”

This clearly didn’t happen at both SPH and NOL. Take one of Mr. Ng’s first decisions at SPH as an example. Within a month of becoming CEO, Mr. Ng conducted a mass retrenchment exercise. Sure, the company’s revenue was falling at the time and he must have assumed that cutting people would have saved cost. Unfortunately, the people he culled were the people who create the product that the business was selling. As such, the media business became weaker and the management was too busy defending a monopoly position that was becoming increasingly irrelevant.

While incompetence is not good, the refusal to acknowledge mistakes was worse. The public may have forgiven the screw ups if Mr. Ng had been the military officer he’s supposed to be and lead from the front. However, in ever instance, Mr. Ng has behaved more like a bullying-bureaucrat hiding behind his desk. Think of his infamous “umbrage” moment when he tore into a reporter for doing her job and asking him a question he had to know was going to be asked.

Now that there’s a scandal, it was someone else’s fault. Sure, nobody expects the CEO of a company that was the size of SPH to know minute detail of daily operations. However, what expects of a CEO is accountability. A boss is paid more than the employees for a particular reason. He or she has far greater responsibilities. Sure, bosses take credit when things go right even if it’s obviously not all their work. At the same time, bosses also get the blame when things go wrong, even if its not their fault.  

That’s clearly not the case that’s happening here. Mr. Ng is now scrambling to distance himself from the things that went wrong during his tenure as CEO. Here lies the problem. Mr. Ng has shown that he’s more than happy to take the perks of top jobs but not the responsibilities that come with it and the only person who seems to think this is OK, is the Artful Arse-licker, who has a talent for thinking of justifying the unjustifiable.

https://www.critical.sg/p/has-ng-yat-chung-failed-as-a-ceo

He is unfortunately for him; a symbol of what people find wrong with our elite. We don’t expect people to make perfect decisions but we do expect leaders to take responsibility. BY refusing to take a shred of responsibility for the failures under his tenure as CEO, Mr. Ng has also made us grateful that we’ve never had to fight a war with him in charge. It says a lot about his character and we cannot expect our elite to make things work if all their interested in is getting the perks of the job without the responsibilities.

As stated, the beginning, Mr. Ng and his management team are welcome to take me to court if they believe if pointing that they did not preside over what can only be called failure of management.