I refer to TCS's April 1, 1997 report that on LHL's exhortation that the CIVIL SERVICE MUST CONTINUE TO INNOVATE. The spiel is that the Civil Service must continue to innovate as boldly as before. LHL said its key task was to ensure Singapore's survival and security by contining to innovate and adapt imaginatively to new circumstances. 'In a rapidly changing world, we must do better than we did before and also better than others are doing,' LHL said.
LHL wanted new ideas to come from all levels of the civil service and noted there had been criticism that the bureaucracy was inflexible. LHL said the admin service's management culture must encourage good ideas from within the organization to surface, to be developed and followed through. It must also systematically gather and respond to feedback from outside the service, both positive and negative.
Sadly, I think that the culture and environment of Singapore & inherent in all aspects of organized Singapore activity (namely the civil service) cannot tolerate such innovation because innovation requires fresh, bold & usually alternative views. Such views may be practical but ideologically not in sync with the ruling party's philosophy. Such contrarian views are likely frowned upon and criticized. The Japanese have a proverb, that I guess is equally applicable to kiasu Singapore - deru kui wa utareru - which means that the nail that sticks out, gets hammered the first.
I'm sure that there are many civil servants out there who can empathize with the nail that is the first to get hammered on. It is strange as I recall Dr. Tony Tan also exhorting the Admin Service in the late 1980s to pay heed to Barbara Tuchman's seminal thesis, The March to Folly. I'm generously paraphrasing Tuchman's totem in that ancient kingdoms (like Troy & the Trojan horse) & modern governments (the US in the Vietnam War) should not pursue a policy that is flawed and have the courage to change it. I guess that our civil servants need to get into the latest Dilbert Management buzzword.
There is great societal pressure to conform and this has an adverse impact & I would be cautiously optimistic that technocrats & bureaucrats can innovate. In any institutional structure that I think the bureaucrats will conjure up I believe that it will be a system made by bureaucrats for the bureaucrats. Bureaucrats breed bureaucrats & create bureaucratic structures to support further bureaucratic initiative ... you know what I mean.
I can picture the Admin Service personnel submitting a proposal to their respective Ministers. There are bound to be mission statements, performance appraisal reports and other institutional checks and controls inherent with bureaucratic set-ups. Good for cost control but not much helpful for igniting the spark of innovation.
This dependance on bureaucrats is unhealthy & this is all too visibly clear from the Japanese MITI experience. Once mighty MITI was viewed as the organ that can do no wrong & work wonders for the Japanese economic juggernaut. Now, it is reviled (justly or unjustly is not the point here) & blamed for the morass that is choking Japan's economic development. The point is that there should not be too much faith in the bureaucrats nor the bureaucrats that run the GLCs or quasi- GLCs. I'm sure that I'm not the only one that remembers that those can't do, teach; those that can't teach, administer.
Another teething problem that I see is that for all that Superscale salary & perks for Singapore's top civil servants, you would have thought that someone should have handled the damage control of the notorious Johore comments more adroitly than. Instead, we see the inept bungling & even aggravation of the matter. We don't really Batman or Robin but some superhero compassion & respect to your fellow man could do the trick. Unless the civil servants in the respective ministries are also disavowing what the Ministers did were on a frolic of their own or against civil service advice, I think the blame should be on our bureaucrats. Maybe its time for the respective civil servants to take a refresher course in International Relations 101. Or perhaps our MFA people are resting on their laurels at taking pot-shots on how decadent are the West, that they have forgotten how to tend their own backyard. I suppose that getting notice & reviews from western media is much better than doing more than the cocktail circuit in KL.
BG Lee waxes lyrically, almost Toffleresque, about the rapidly changing world but one dominant perspective on relations with Malaysia, I believe, is frozen in a mind set that has not shaken off since the late 1960s & 1970s. Perhaps such a view has resulted from the machinations of the villain in the latest Batman movie, Dr. Freeze played by Arnold Schwarzenegger.
If there is anything, Singapore needs to have a radical paradigm attitudinal change in relations with Malaysia. By the same token, it takes two hands to clap & I guess the Dr. Mahatir & heir apparent Anwar needs to be open to such a dialogue.
If there is an overweening sense of not wanting to rock the boat or establishment and this is ingrained from day one, we will not have Thomas Edisons but more bureaucrats and technocrats administering and not innovating.