Everyone wants to be a success. If you look through any given bookshop, 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 a 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 smartphones would catch on.
What is true in business also happens in politics. Long-standing political parties that have become a byword 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. The 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 per cent 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 straightforward. 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 Channel NewsAsia and the advertisers noticed.
If you look closely enough, the problems at SPH are not isolated. The fact remains, the source of our “mandate of heaven” culture – notably the PAP led government. Whilst the PAP has not seen anything resembling the “State Capture” under the ANC led Zuma government in South Africa, it’s been showing a certain level of “tone-deafness” to the needs of 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 a 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).
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 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?
A version of this article first appeared at beautifullyincoherent.blogspot.com