“I enjoy reading these articles, heh
they are definitely not very nutritious
but it’s like reading a children’s book
if you know what I mean
it’s very cute”- IM chat from a friend

What my friend finds cute though, I find drenched in naïveté.1 How else could one characterize an article entitled “How to produce a Steve Jobs“? Is there some magic formula à la Frankenstein to churn out billionaire-grade entrepreneurs? I mean, seriously, like, you know. We-ird!

And the actual content - oh. my. gawd. In a mere 775 words, Loh Chee Kong manages to embed no less than the following bizarre statements written in what appears to be English:

  1. If the Apple iPod is held up in global higher education circles as the Holy Grail, for its perfect blend of engineering genius, design expertise and marketing savvy, then Apple chief Steve Jobs is the prototype universities clamour to produce.
    • Nobody will deny the iPod’s phenomenal design, but the engineering is hardly “perfect”. As Sim Wong Hoo famously ranted once, the iPod wasn’t even as sophisticated technologically as Creative’s own Zen player when it was launched. I’m not sure that iPod is really the trifecta of unimprovable achievement that it is made out to be in this sentence. And in what “global higher education circles”, precisely, is it considered a Holy Grail? There is more to higher education than IT business. You know, stuff like math, science, architecture, or even (gasp!) English…
  2. Much has been made about the middling academic achievements of Mr Jobs, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, and here at home, Creative Technology chief executive Sim Wong Hoo./ But Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin — who met each other at a Stanford doctoral class — are proof that formal education is not antithetical to entrepreneurship. It is now widely accepted that entrepreneurship can be taught and developed, given the right environment.
    • Business skills can be taught, to be sure, but it is incredibly difficult to impart an appetite for risk to someone who doesn’t already have a natural affinity for it. Just as not everyone is into hang gliding, bungee jumping or parachuting, not everyone is cut out to be an entrepreneur.
    • Larry Page and Sergey Brin almost certainly did not enroll in the Stanford CS PhD program thinking, “This is so going to make me an entrepreneur.” Rather, IIRC the story was more about bringing an idea to fruition when it became clear that the academia (then, at least) wasn’t the ideal nurturing environment for The Next Big Search Engine. Neither did Bill Gates or Steve Jobs drop out of school just to be entrepreneurs. Gates just wanted to write software, and Steve dropped out of college because he felt he was wasting his parents’ money, and without any plan except the hope that things would work out for him. In other words, Gates was passionate about his hobby (writing code), and Jobs has an enormous appetite for risk. How many Singaporeans would be comfortable trying to emulate that?
  3. Singapore’s next lap revolves around the big “I”— Innovation. But while research and development had begun more than a decade ago, the hunt is now on for ideas that sell, literally, for the Republic to step up to the top league.
    • Is it me, or is there still that entrenched notion of the research pipeline in that statement? It’s a popular notion in upper management, but any researcher who does anything knows that R&D is an inherently unpredictable process. Sometimes one strikes gold and finds a new technology or scientific phenomenon that ends up in patents, papers and awards; many times, R&D will go nowhere, and that’s just a fact of life.
  4. There has been growing interest worldwide in creating an enterprise culture with higher education as the key enabler, even as an entrepreneurial education is felt by some to be a threat to traditional academic values.
    • This statement, of course, totally ignores the existence of entrepreneurship that isn’t focussed solely on the hi-tech industry. Also, none the success stories paraded out in this article - the triumvirate of Apple, Google and Microsoft, plus the model Singapore company, Creative2 - owe their success to higher education, let alone university programs dedicated to entrepreneurship. And “a threat to traditional academic values”? Academic values are things like autonomy, commitment to the nurture of critical thinking, mutual governance between students, faculty and administrators, and the right to award diplomas as recognition of academic achievement. How exactly is “entrepreneurial education” a threat to any of these?
  5. The American higher education system, given its breadth and synergy with Silicon Valley, is seen as the model to strive for.
    • I like to call this the “small America” fallacy. Silicon Valley is a minuscule fraction of the US landmass, and yes, companies in the Valley do hire from many universities around the US (and beyond), but this statement manages to lump large public universities, famous private colleges, specialized trade schools, small liberal arts colleges, community colleges, and everything in between into the same category. The US has thousands of institutions of higher learning, and it is impossible that Silicon Valley would have strong relationships with any but a chosen few elite schools. In reality, Silicon Valley has the strongest ties with universities near it: most notably, Stanford and Berkeley. Then there are relations with other schools that are wicked strong in science and engineering programs most relevant to Silicon Valley: Carnegie Mellon, Georgia Tech, Illinois, MIT and perhaps two dozen others. I’d be surprised if other schools even register on the hiring radar for Silicon Valley companies, let alone want to fund research in. Of course, these elite few are precisely the schools that form the near totality of US higher education in the typical Singaporean’s mind, so perhaps I shouldn’t be so surprised.
  6. Apart from pedagogy, the structure of the new university has to be designed with sufficient spillover mechanisms between basic and applied research, so that knowledge from the former can be turned into money-making spin-offs. Such mechanisms have to involve the entire network of venture capitalists, industry leaders and researchers.
    • There a bizarre conflation of entrepreneurship and R&D; Loh seems to not get the difference between the two. And again in the R&D context, the fallacy of a factory-line production style of generating research permeates this paragraph, though Loh actually is talking some sense that a network of such people must exist in order to facilitate the transition of a technology from a scientific curiosity to billion-dollar industry. However, as I’ve said many, many times before, science does not work in a “build it and they’ll come” fashion. The two most important resources by far are competent scientists and an environment tailored to foster the free, unencumbered debate and exchange of scientific information. As clearly outlined by the various examples of messy divorcés of Famous Names from Singapore’s R&D efforts, competent scientists alone are hardly sufficient to guarantee success, and it is glaringly obvious that Singapore simply lacks the necessary soft infrastructure for scientists to do good science unhindered by key performance indicators, unreasonable scholarship contracts, restrictions on the rights to free speech, estimated ROIs and the excessive egos of upper management.

To be fair, Loh makes some reasonable statements, namely:

  1. that it’s easier to start afresh with a new university than to aim to reform the establishment at an existing school (and unintentionally or otherwise lambast all the existing universities with accusations of failure in churning out entrepreneurs by the hundreds - ha!),
  2. that business plans are not all there is to entrepreneurship (while failing to mention the single greatest determinant necessary - if not sufficient - to entrepreneurial success - a generous risk appetite),
  3. that entrepreneurs learn at a practical level, in doing, learning what’s necessary to get things done, and inevitably making mistakes and learning from them (ignoring, of course, the risqué topic of how one would even conceive a pedagogical strategy to expose the notoriously risk-averse Singaporean to all these elements without them fleeing in terror from the thoughts of risk failure),
  4. that an entrepreneur could have any background, not just from an elite class (although these sentiments are embedded in a morass of mumbo-jumbo such as “inculcat[ing ] empathy with entrepreneurial values” and the oxymoronic desire to “[inculcate] intuitive judgments…”), and
  5. that talent is an increasingly rarefied commodity in today’s highly globalized economies.

However, I’m not sure that that can redeem this sorry excuse for informed writing beyond anything other than the poorly thought-out ramblings of a naïf.

The fundamental issue I have against all this is simple. If entrepreneurs are good at anything, they must be good at failing. And I don’t mean that in a bad way - good entrepreneurs have to be able to dare to try something new and untested, most likely fail, and then shake off the failure, learn from it, and go try something else again. It is going to be exceedingly difficult for Singaporeans bred in a culture that values safe and “correct” options to break out of that mold. If the education system is a pipe that takes in six-year-olds and churns out JC, poly and ITE grads, which are then piped into universities, then the least one has to do to even make entrepreneurship programs have even a chance of working is to deemphasize this notion of conforming to the safe, tried-and-tested experiences of teachers as role models for their students to follow blindly without any exposure to other options. Otherwise, there’s going to be a tragic mismatch of  student expectations and harsh reality.

And the irony! to parade Steve Jobs as an exemplar for Singaporeans to follow. Jobs has the one great characteristic of an entrepreneur - his damn-it-all let’s-risk-everything attitude - that is most sorely lacking in the Singaporean population. How many Singaporeans would rather drop out of school with no plans and no concerns other than not wasting his or her parents’ money on tuition?

I most probably wouldn’t have the cojones to do that, and I’d be surprised if there were more than a rare few with the necessary stomach to see it through amidst the thousands who would doubtless throng to major in this Next Big Thing After Petroleum, Information Technology, Infocomm Technology and Life Sciences. I’d be happy if the Next Big University will simply turn out to not be the Next Big Waste of Tax Dollars. We all know that we have enough NBWTDs already.

Reference

  1. Loh Chee Kong, Today, “How to produce a Steve Jobs“, 2008-03-05.
Footnotes
  1. Yes, it does call for the ostentatious accents.↩
  2. The sarcasm here is not intended in any way to denigrate the achievements of Creative Technologies, merely to scorn on the way Creative has been singled out - again and again and again - as the poster-child of Singaporean entrepreneurship. It’s actually rather tragic that we have so few companies like Creative that even exist.↩