Welcome to the ‘instant everything’ world : Sidek Hassan

October 3, 2011

What is bluntly clear is that if we do not move with the times we simply open ourselves to absolute extinction, says Chief Secretary to the Government Sidek Hassan.

By Sidek Hassan

Ninety days ago if someone had said – the credit rating of the United States of America would be downgraded by its own credit rating agency S&P, the Italian economy would be worse than the states of Spain, Greece, Portugal and Irish economies put together, the safest country in the world, Norway, would face one of its worst terrorist attacks, England would experience on its own streets a breakdown of the very values it once preserved and exported around the world, Einstein’s 1905 Theory of Relativity which defined the entire bedrock of physics may be obsolete with new findings in Switzerland where a certain sub-atomic particle can travel faster than light, and Malaysia would repeal its ISA and Emergency Ordinances – we would perhaps have said – DAH!

But these events did happen and they are defining our morning papers, not least our national policies. As the arc of economic and financial crises extends from California to Barcelona, there continues to be much debate on the role of governments in societies.

The rising influence of the Tea Party in the United States of America, and Prime Minister David Cameroon’s call for “Big Society” in the United Kingdom for instance, is a call on public to assume their responsibilities.

Not leave it to a set of institutions. Not to a bunch of out-of-touch bureaucrats. Or a bundle of policies drawn by those in Ivory Towers. Yet we see a rising China across the Atlantic, doctrined by a central institution.

Jeff Immelt, the CEO of General Electric recently said this to Fareed Zakaria on his CNN GPS Programme when asked of the role of government: “for generations, more than a hundred years, the government (USA) has been a useful catalyst to drive this great capitalistic system. It just so happens that the biggest competitor in the world today (China) has a system where the government fundamentally runs the play. So we now have a new competitor who runs a different play. And so I think we need to be reflective”.

Execute or be executed

We live in times where yesterday’s headlines are passé today – as they say in French. What is bluntly clear is that if we do not move with the times we simply open ourselves to absolute extinction.

Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loon did not mince his words when he said, “We have to remake Singapore. Our economy, our education, our mind-set, our city. It must be a totally different Singapore. Because if it’s the same Singapore today, we’re dead”.

Our Prime Minister, Najib Tun Razak, articulated the same message albeit more curtly when sharing the Progress Updates of our Economic Transformation Plan (ETP) this July. He said, “I must execute or be executed”.

The challenge though isn’t about ideas. We are never short of them. I am certain you will agree there are many voluntary and only too happy commentators in our homes, locally and abroad. The challenge really lies in knowing which ideas work for the resources we have optimally.

But this much is obvious in the many crises unfolding before us – the brand of bureaucracy born by our institutions can no longer operate in its form. It will self suffocate itself in the “reality TV world”.

There is a brilliant scene that portrays the effects of institutionalisation in the 1994 film drama “The Shawshank Redemption”. The movie you will know is about how two men in prison, Andy Dufresne and Red bond over a number of years finding solace and eventual redemption through acts of common decency.

There is a scene where Red comments about Brooks, a long time inmate, who threatens to kill another inmate because he’s afraid to leave the Shawshank Prison when his parole is approved.

Red would say and I quote, “He’s just institutionalised…The man’s been in here fifty years, Heywood, fifty years. This is all he knows. In here, he’s an important man, he’s an educated man. Outside he’s nothin’ – just a used-up con with arthritis in both hands.

“Probably couldn’t get a library card if he tried. ..these walls are funny. First you hate ‘em, then you get used to ‘em. Enough time passes, it gets so you depend on ‘em. That’s ‘institutionalised’…”

The pressure to reinvent public sector will continue to be imminent. The question isn’t so much the reinvention rather what the model should be. Or rather which model has continued to work? Whilst we once benchmarked to the UK and the USA as the most efficient, we now find them struggling with their own institutionalised anxieties.

Today’s standards

When the Moguls built the Taj Mahal, 20,000 labourers worked night and day for twenty years. The budget was unlimited and no man-hours were placed on the project. We saw the same when the Zheng He flotilla was built, as was in the construction of the Forbidden City in Beijing.

When the St. Basil’s Cathedral was built in the Red Square of Moscow, there is an account that says Tsar Ivan had its architects’ eyes removed so that they could never create something of comparable beauty.

Imagine doing any one of these in today’s climate.

By that I mean executing a project with no pressure to care for time, resources or governance.

The politicians will ravage you, the online world will waste no time in dismantling your brand, your employers will promptly hand you a well written “Good bye and please don’t return” notice.

Standards that built greatness once, is not always applicable when building greatness for a different time.

Malaysia is working very hard to restructure its institutions and economy through our Economic Transformation Programme (ETP) and Government Transformation Programme (GTP). The vision is to reinvent Malaysia into a market-led, regionally integrated, entrepreneurial, and innovative country.

Watch this space

There is a lot we can share with Singapore in these areas and learn from your own experiences in reinventing your public sector.

Whilst we continue to compete with one another, we often learn the most from those closest to us. The public sector in the region must get together to exchange ideas and insights even as we compete.

Further we must seriously consider opening these interactions beyond the top tier of our public service.

We could open the interactions to other games such as football, badminton and chess for instance. We should consider similar interactions at the second and third tiers of our organisations.

I am often reminded that the face of civil service is not defined by the Chief Secretary to the Government or the Secretaries General, but the person who serves at the front counter of our offices. Those are the people who determine all the moments of truth!

With all the doom and gloom in the economic world, one news made it in most if not all international media outlets. REM, the American rock band decided to disband after being together for some 30 years.

Many of their fans were devastated. But what was of significance is that they notified their fans via a message on their Facebook. That’s like breaking up with a Post-It message.

Welcome to the “instant everything” world. If we think the instant everything world can’t get any more atypical, I’d say as they say in the world of media – “watch this space!” There is more to come. We just need to be as agile.

Sidek Hassan in the Chief Secretay to the Government. This is an excerpt of his welcome remarks at the opening ceremony of a joint seminar and games for the Malaysia and Singapore public sector leaders on Oct 1, 2011.