e pur si muove

“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.

~sigh~
how ignorant
there is something wrong with the attitudes we are imparting to our children

- a fellow Singaporean PhD student on IM

I see that in the few years since I’ve graduated, things at my alma mater have gotten ever more mad.

And yet, some things haven’t changed.

Like this:

Once these Raffles Junior College students, the creme de la creme from Singapore’s most pedigreed secondary schools, receive their result slips, their worries break into relief, grins and high-fives.

But a handful dissolve into tears, as if their perfect world has crashed. In between sobbing, most admit that, all things considered, their results are good - sullied perhaps by one B or C. But they fear that the results are not good enough to secure the most coveted scholarships.

Scholarships are not to the only way forward.

I’ve already beaten this dead horse too many times; go search the Meritocracy archives. If only teachers would tell their students about the Incomplete Guide to Financial Aid for Singaporeans!

And this sidebar:

WORKING AT IT

‘I am not the only one. Everyone in my class is doing it as well. I don’t know what I would do if I don’t get a place to study medicine.’

SUSAN, 18, who is working in a free clinic to improve her chances of getting into the National University of Singapore medical faculty

Not to pick on Susan, 18, in particular, but how many of those students would be volunteering at a clinic if it didn’t help their admissions package?

But by far the most disturbing sentence was this one:

Read the rest of this entry »

“People in the industrialised world don’t know very much about Singapore other than the trivial and the silly stuff like the banning of chewing gum and your homosexual laws” - Peter Schwartz, Chairman, Global Business Network

TODAY ran a very interesting article about Singapore’s image problem from Peter Schwartz, co-founder of the Global Business Network, a business consulting firm. Based on my personal experiences, I can heartily agree this perception to be broadly true. In fact, that much seems to be true of much of my personal experiences with people from the world over (not just the rich West), perhaps with some smattering of “Oh, I know a friend who got a scholarship to study in Singapore” to boot. (Yes, that means that I know friends of prospective Foreign Talents.)

It seems that Schwartz was involved in a discussion on how Singapore can grow along all sorts of cultural dimensions. That in itself is interesting (as it the lack of any further elaboration in the article), but what caught my eye was another quote, ostensibly from the discussion:

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Are Singaporean students all wunderkinder compared to their lazy, stupid American counterparts? This article in the Washington Post appears to beg to differ:

If Singaporean eighth-graders sat for our [National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP] science test, what proportion would be labeled “proficient or better”?

[... Answer:] Fifty-one percent.

The article really is an indictment of the NAEP test rather than claiming that American kids somehow trump Singaporean ones. However, it might be useful to someone trying to pull a fast one by showing this as an example of how even exam-smart Singaporean students can be shown to perform poorly when you use the wrong metrics and a poorly worded test.

Reference

1. Gerald W. Bracey, Washington Post, “A Test Everyone Will Fail“, May 8 2007.