“Now of course, PM Lee Hsien Loong will not use A-level grades as his sole selection criterion [for his successor]. But the fact that he uses A-level grades as a selection criterion at all is quite shocking.” - Mr Wang

Thanks to chiao for the heads-up to this article in the Financial Times (London) discussing the need for leaders to be sensitive to the specific nature of situations before deciding what to do. In other words, good leaders need the skill of meta-decision: to decide how to decide.

Sounds obvious when expressed this way, doesn’t it? Yet somehow people tend to forget that leadership, like intelligence, is not one-dimensional. Joseph Nye at Harvard writes:

Understanding context is crucial to effective leadership. Some situations call for autocratic decisions and some require the opposite. There is an infinite variety of contexts in which leaders have to operate, but it is particularly important for leaders to understand culture, the distribution of power, followers’ needs and demands, time urgency and information flows.

[...]

General Electric prides itself on producing leaders, but half of its high-flyers who went on to become chief executives of other Fortune 500 companies had disappointing records. Why do some leaders succeed in one context and fail in another? A common answer is “horses for courses”: some run better on a dry track and some in mud. Many a good CEO turns out to be a dis­appointment when appointed as a cabinet secretary.

The application of this argument in the Singapore context is trivial. We qualify the Future Leaders of Tomorrow by awarding them prestigious government scholarships to world class universities; these put them on the fast track to the upper echelons of bureaucracy, whereon they are then expected to make their mark. We hand out scholarship on the basis on academic merit, specifically their ‘A’ level results. We therefore get leaders chosen on the basis of the outcome of a single battery of examinations at a specific and narrow time window.

Our government therefore employs the approximate extrapolation that the ability to perform well in a very small array of examinations in a particular point is equivalent to a candidate’s ability to make good judgments in a large variety of decision-making contexts. The absurdity of this approximation has been discussed at great length by several people, including myself, and most recently, Mr Wang.

Assuming, for rhetorical reasons, that this actually holds. Then consider this examination question for Future Leaders of Tomorrow:

If good leadership means good meta-decision, what does picking government leaders based (partly) on ‘A’ level chemistry results say about the quality of leadership in our country?

Your essay must be at least 500 words in standard English. You have 40 minutes. Write only on the back side of your foolscap sheets. If you use multiple pages, you must tie them together with standard-issue white thread. Write your name, candidate number, and sexual preferences on every sheet of paper you submit.

P.S. I’m getting my PhD in chemistry, goddamnit I can run a small country too!

References

  1. Joseph Nye, Financial Times (London), Good leadership is deciding how to decide, 2008-03-31.
  2. Mr Wang Says So, The search for political leaders, 2008-04-07.