Difference Makers: Stories Of Those Who Dared - A Collection Of Interview Columns By Susan Long (English Version) : Stories of Those Who Dared - A Collection of Interview Columns by Susan Long 9789812775085, 9789812564535

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DIFFERENCE MAKERS Stories of Those Who Dared

A Collection of Interview Columns by S u s a n L o n g

Susan Long is editor of the Saturday Special Report, a weekly features section within The Straits Times, Singapore's leading national daily newspaper. Over eleven years in the newsroom, she has made her name as a skilled interviewer and profile writer of Singapore's most prominent people in business, politics and government. She has anchored several long-running weekly interview columns including The Susan Long Interview, Movers and Shakers, and Achievers. She has also flown around the world to interview the likes of the late Charles Schulz, Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg and Stan Shih.

To date, she has picked up many industry awards for excellence in writing and published two beslselling books with Prentice Hall. The titles are Grit Success: Stories of Millionaires in Our Neighbourhood (1999) and Grit Success II: The Guts Behind Singapore's Entrepreneurs (2002). She graduated from University of York in England with a second upper honours degree in English Literature in 1994 on a Singapore Press Holdings Scholarship. Insatiably curious, her past-times include asking questions, golf, and painting in oils and acrylics.

DIFFERENCE MAKERS Stories of Those Who Dared

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DIFFERENCE MAKERS Stories of Those Who Dared

A Collection of Interview Columns by Susan Long

D L Publishing

Y l ^ W o r l d scientific

Published by DL Publishing, an imprint of World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd. 5 Toh Tuck Link, Singapore 596224 USA office: 27 Warren Street, Suite 401-402, Hackensack, NJ 07601 UK office: 57 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London WC2H 9HE Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Long, Susan, 1972Difference makers : stories of those who dared : a collection of interview columns by Susan Long / by Susan Long, p. cm. ISBN 981-256-453-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Social action—Case studies. 2. Social reformers-Case studies. 3. Risk-taking (Psychology)—Case studies. I. Title. HN17.5.L65 2005 303.48'4'09049-dc22 2005049433

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2005 by World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission from the Publisher. For photocopying of material in this volume, please pay a copying fee through the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. In this case permission to photocopy is not required from the publisher.

Typeset by Stallion Press Email: enquiries @ stallionpress.com Printed in Singapore by B & JO Enterprise

For Gary "Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, a conviction of things not seen." (Hebrews 11:1)

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Preface

ght after my interview Charles Schulz in Santa Rosa, California, in October 1998,1 was so relieved it was over I downed a big steak. In the flesh, the crabby Charlie Brown creator had lived up to his chronically-depressed recluse reputation. He was stilted, sullen, fretful, his lips perpetually pursed as if in pain throughout the interview. He disliked strangers, interruptions, assenting hums, shifting bodies, questions he had never encountered before. I remember his stricken publicists fluttering around nervously, having run dry of excuses for him. At his boxy, sterile studio at One Snoopy Place in Santa Rosa, everything was so neurotically neat that I only dared to prop my notebook on the furthest edge of his desk, for fear of impinging upon his clearly-delineated private domain. His drawing board, which had turned out almost 50 years of comic strips everyday in 2,620 newspapers across 75 countries, looked out to what must have been one of the most uninspiring views ever. Just an overgrown clump of bushes and a red brick wall, not unlike the one Charlie Brown, Linus, Snoopy, Pig Pen and Lucy often perch on. Yet, come rain, shine, personal struggles, writer's block, intestinal flu or even a heart bypass in 1989, he sat there each day, from 9 am to 4 pm, filling in the white squares of the most widely-syndicated comic strip in history, always ahead of schedule.

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Preface

It turned out that our meeting was one of the last major interviews he consented to before he died a year and a half later from colon cancer. My all-time favourite Schulz quote today remains: "I like my work, not that it is that much fun. People say: 'I know you love your work.' It's not that easy, it's very difficult." For me, it exemplifies a man's consuming dedication to his craft, in spite of his gnawing fears, phobias and suspicion that cartooning was seen by everyone else as a "lowly form of art". As with everyone else in this book, I went away bowled over by their punishing persistence and die-hard doggedness in reflecting, refining and recasting life as they saw it, starting from their own backyards, one weed at a time. Like 77th Street's Elim Chew's one-woman crusade to help youth at risk explore their individuality yet stay safe. The unstoppable learning machine called Irene Ison, who at 75, is still fighting to do a PhD and for adult education rights in general. The quiet perfectionism of Tung Lok Group's Sam Leong, who works 16-hour days to make culinary waves with his food. The unfazed determination of Carlos Ghosn, the gaijin (foreigner in Japanese) Lebanese-Brazilian CEO of Nissan Motor, who changed the way Japanese companies operate forever. Then there is Acer Group's Stan Shih's unshakeable belief that human nature is basically good. Education Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam's insistence on doing his own thinking and making sure the next generation of Singaporeans get the opportunity to do likewise. Barefoot College's Bunker Roy who lives out the spirit of volunteerism on S$76 a month. Dr Everett Worthington's resolutely forgiving spirit, even to the assailants who brutally murdered and assaulted his mother. New York city mayor Micheal Bloomberg's determination to never look back over his shoulder, only forward. Of course there is also outspoken mandarin Mr Ngiam Tong Dow's refusal to believe his own propaganda. Family psychotherapist Anthony Yeo's lifelong crusade to prove that life can be rich without riches. Suicidologist Dr Chia Boon

Preface

IX

Hock's demonstration of his commitment to living by painstakingly studying what drives people over the edge. As well as Singapore's Father of Rheumatology, Professor Feng Pao Hsii, who chose — unglamorously — to make aches and pains his calling because no one else would. I hope that getting to know them better will make a difference in your life, as I know it has in mine. Blessings, Susan Long 2005

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Contents

Preface

vii

Elim Chew. From Dropout Punk to Wizard of 77th Street

1

Charles Schulz: Good Grief

9

Irene Ison: You Lose a Wrinkle Whenever You Learn

19

Sam Leong. Spy Who Keeps an Eye on "The Woks"

29

Vincent Lo: If at First You Don't Succeed in China . . .

39

Carlos Ghosn: From Public Enemy No. 1 to Corporate Hero

49

Ee Tai Ting: Bittersweet Fruits of Hard Labour

57

Diana Young. One Who Got Her Dreams off the Ground

65

Stan Shih: Better to be a Chicken's Head than an Ox's Tail

73

Tharman Shanmugaratnam: Been there, Done that, and Thrived

83

Bunker Roy. A True Volunteer

93

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Contents

Lim Hua Min: Who Says Business is All About Profits?

101

Dr Everett Worthington: The Healer within Dr Forgiveness

109

Phua Kok Khoo, Doreen Liu: Love and Business in an Ivory Tower

119

Liew Mun Leong. CEO Who Enjoys Being Difficult

127

Michael Bloomberg. Business is Personal — Don't You Dare Resign

137

Ngiam Tong Dow. Stop Dancing to the Tune of the Gorilla

145

Anthony Yeo: Life Can be Rich without Riches

155

Dr Chia Boon Hock: Singapore's Suicide Shrink

165

Professor Feng Pao Hsii: Doctor Who Made Aches and Pains His Calling

175

Elim Chew

Purple hair. Grunge clothing. Top 10 from the bottom in school A study in contrasts, Elim Chew gives half her income to church, counsels wayward youth and has a successful streetwear business.

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From Dropout Punk to Wizard of 77th Street

cS he

is Singapore's very own Anita Roddick, except her business-with-aconscience does not champion the environment, like the founder of The Body Shop, but young people teetering on the edge. Ms Elim Chew, founder and managing director of streetwear fashion chain 77th Street, is a consummate do-gooder. She has used the spoils of business to plant more than nine churches in China, India and Indonesia and adopt three abused children from New York's Metro Ministry and another 19 children from World Vision over the years. A long-time member of City Harvest Church, she tithes more than 50 per cent of her salary as well as a sizeable portion of her firm's profits to support its community work. Beneath her lackadaisical exterior, the 36-year-old is as fiercely ideals-driven and frank as her fresh-faced clientele aged 12 to 25. She never lets anyone forget that not too long ago, she was a purple-haired punk who dropped out after Secondary 4, dressed like rock star Cyndi Lauper and roamed the streets listlessly, with people muttering "weirdo" in her wake. These days, the delinquent-made-good has elicited a different kind of attention by clinching a series of trophies such as Her World's Young Woman

First published in The Straits Times, 14 March 2003 3

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Elim Chew

Achiever Of The Year, Montblanc Businesswomen Award 2002 and Association of Small and Medium Enterprises' Most Promising Woman Entrepreneur award in 2001. But her proudest work is her unofficial appointment as spokesman of Singapore youth retailing. She says: "I enjoy being able to front Singapore youth and help the market understand what they are all about." Along with running 11 streetwear outlets here, four in Malaysia, and five boutiques for young working adults, she has several initiatives such as Get A Life, a loyalty-card programme to provide young people with a direction in life and good, clean fun. She has also started the non-profit Young Entrepreneur Mastery programme, to be launched in secondary schools soon, to equip those "like me, who left school without degrees or MBAs" with a template to write basic business proposals, do costing and hopefully spin off viable enterprises.

HARD KNOCKS

She also mentors youths at risk and gives motivational talks to help youths channel their energies more purposefully. As a disgruntled teenager who could not see how school related to her life, she reckons she would have benefited from such practical pep talks herself. A mischievous prankster, she used to smuggle smoke bombs into the school hall to set off the fire alarm and hide her teachers' books to get time off lessons. Since she was 10, she went to school mainly to socialise, sell greeting cards to her classmates and bring up the rear as one of the "top 10 failures" at Fairfield Methodist Girls' School. "While my bank account was growing, my grades were dropping," says the third child of a dispensary manager father and hairdresser mother from a close-knit Christian family. After muddling through her O levels, she got a break when her uncle agreed to sponsor her A-level studies in London.

From Dropout Punk to Wizard of 77th Street

5

But when she arrived in London in 1983, a hitch in her visa application forced her to sign up at a hairdressing school to remain there. After spending two years learning the craft at Vidal Sassoon and Tony & Guy and imbibing a "creativity beyond imagination", she returned to Singapore in 1985, feeling "quite lost" with her rainbow-coloured tresses and funny pointed shoes. Then 19, she shrugged it off as people on the streets pointed at her as though she was a freak. But she remembers crying a lot when she landed her first job at Peter & Guys and was bullied by the shampoo girls and senior hairstylists. Determined to prove herself, she remembers scribbling her ambition on a sheet of paper in her wallet: "Be own boss by 21. Make first million by 25." But she was galvanised into action only when, on her 21st birthday, her father slipped into a coma and died of stomach cancer. Overnight, the family was forced into survival mode and split up to "spread our risks". She stayed here, converted her life savings of $1,000 into chairs, scissors and combs and set up her own one-woman salon at Far East Plaza in 1987. Meanwhile, her sister, Sulim, went to London to work as a mini-cab driver, together with their mother, who found a job as a dishwasher there. The plan was, "either they did well there and I would join them or if I did well here, they would come back". It was make or break. She worked 16-hour days, cramming in bridal hairdos and studio work at night after snipping hair during salon hours. On the side, she made extra selling off some of the studded bracelets, Doc Martens and London streetwear she asked her sister to send over because "I could not find anything here that I wanted to wear". A year later, in 1988, she had scrimped and saved about $15,000 to start a little grunge lair selling leopard-skin shoes, rock band T-shirts and ripped Levis 501s out of a cramped 180 sq ft outlet at Far East Plaza and hired part-timers to man it.

6

Elim Chew

In between haircuts, she recalls snipping magazine pictures of underground brands and mailing them to Sulim to source in London. As the punk-rock movement took off with Boy George and the Sex Pistols, so did the miracle of 77th Street, which grew into a coming-of-age haunt for adolescents here. In 1994, she sold off her hair salon to explore the streetwear business properly and summoned her mother and sister back to help her. At the beginning, she and her sister, both greenhorns in business, ran smack into one setback after another. In the school of hard knocks, they learnt lessons from negotiating rentals with cut-throat landlords, paying cash on overseas buying trips for stock that never arrived, and betting on the wrong brands. Fortunately, they brought in enough hit brands like Red or Dead, Shelleys, Fubu and low-hanging baggy jeans — "which everyone laughed at but today, almost every teenager owns one" — that eventually helped them more than break even on the losses incurred by inexperience. During the teething years, the sisters subsisted on a $400 salary a month. When they went on buying trips to America, Europe and Asia, they flew on the cheapest airlines, slept at train stations, stayed in "crummy motels" and ate bread — "everything else was so expensive". Like most small businesses, they suffered staffing problems. She watched aghast as her Generations X and Y employees skipped work to attend barbecues, overslept after a late-night party or quit abruptly to go on holiday. Even now, in this patchy job market, she is convinced there are enough jobs to go around — if only more Singaporeans are willing to sacrifice their nights, weekends and public holidays to work in sales. She experienced their aversion to sales jobs firsthand when only two people applied for 10 sales positions she advertised recently. These paid $1,300 a month, not including commissions. Yet both failed to turn up for work the next day. In contrast, more than 500 people applied for the one data clerk job she offered, even though the pay was $200 less.

From Dropout Punk to Wizard of 77th Street

7

Ms Chew says with a sigh: "A lot of people are not willing to leave their comfort zone and work beyond a five-day week. But to be successful, you have to make sacrifices. If you want a body like actress Halle Berry, you must be willing to work out three hours three times a week."

MORE TO GIVE That has certainly come to pass for her. Last year, her streetwear chain, which will expand to 18 outlets here by the end of the year, turned over more than $12 million. She has also diversified into the manufacturing and export of Elvie's Grace skin-care products and beauty salons in Singapore, Malaysia and Shenzhen, China, with a projected revenue of $20 million by the end of the year. "A lot of people tell me, 'Wah, 77th Street very good, now you are making money'. But they forget the 15 years we struggled, cried and lost sleep," says the single woman who still works 16-hour days, seven days a week. On Sundays, right after "bus-ing" eight people to church in her Toyota Picnic and attending service, she heads back to office. She allows herself two days' break each year — as her office at Serangoon North is closed dufing Chinese New Year. Because of her frugal start-up years, she says she has become comfortably low-maintenance. She disdains fine dining, flies economy class, quaffs 60-cent kopi and considers $2 wanton mee a treat. Her sole extravagance is her ever-expanding collection of Star Wars toys, TY Beanies and godchildren (she has three now). As for boyfriends, they are not a priority. "If it happens, it happens," says the woman who shares an English-style townhouse with her mother and sister in the Bedok area.

8

Elim Chew

In the meantime, she is busy brewing plans to lead the streetwear revolution in China. She cannot wait to plant her 77th Street flag in Beijing in April next year at a 150,000 sq ft store called Young City, located near the Forbidden City. "The reason I strive for bigger things in my business is so that I can have more to give back," she says. Does she ever feel bad that her money is made from the hard-earned cash of parents of consumerist youth? "Not really, I've been through that phase where I want things. It's part of growing up," she says. "Even if I'm not in business, they'll spend it on gadgets and 1900 calls." Postscript In 2004, 77th Street became the first Singapore retailer to set up a shopping mall in China. 77th Street Plaza is a 400,000 sq ft cutting-edge underground shopping complex at Xidan Cultural Centre located in Beijing.

Charles Schulz

Charles Schultz, 77, the chronically depressed recluse, is funny, serious, awkward and crabby in person, as Susan Longfindsout in his home in Santa Rosa, California, in a rare interview.

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Good Grief

KJ harles Schulz has the agonised look of a man going through a tooth extraction. The recluse, who turned 77 last week, is enduring this rare interview, a procedure which he deems painful evidently, but necessary to launch the world's first Snoopy Place restaurant, which will open in the freshly-upgraded Plaza Singapura next month. He does not fathom what all the fuss is about, why anyone in the world would consider making Snoopy a restaurant centrepiece. "I worry about people putting in all this time and money. I hope it's worth their while," mutters the world's most famous cartoonist, furrowing his brow. He is truly bewildered about the dividends of fame, or why anyone would "bother" to fly across the Pacific to ask him questions. "I never do anything, I just hang around drawing funny pictures," deadpans the man, who long ago amassed enough money to do whatever he wants. We are sitting in his spartan container-style studio in Santa Rosa, California. It looks out to a clump of overgrown bushes, and the walls are clean of selfcongratulatory items. There are only a few framed pictures of his five children and grandchildren next to his drawing board, which has a well-scuffed patch in the middle.

First published in The Sunday Times, 29 November 1998

11

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Charles Schulz

"The plainer the better, really. Less of a distraction," about sums it up. Everything about Schulz is muted, clean and spare. He does not waste a movement or mince words. He is not at all jocular nor ink-stained as most people imagine cartoonists to be. He is agonisingly neat. His hair is pomaded away from a steep forehead. He enunciates his words with an academic's precision and dresses like a golfpro — in pastel, zig-zag patterned sweaters, dark trousers and white, square-toe shoes. His strongest expletive is "Good grief" and his heartiest term of endearment is something lukewarm like "with appreciation". His values are typical Mid-Western American — pared-down thrift, backbreaking toil, family-togetherness — and would sit well in Singapore. With these same values, for almost 50 years, Schulz has churned out daily instalments of Peanuts, the most widely-syndicated comic strip in history — without ever busting a deadline. From its humble debut in seven newspapers in 1950, it now runs in over 2,620 newspapers in 75 countries and is translated into 31 languages. (Snoopy in Italy is Snupius and Charlie Brown, Carolius Niger). He has about 100 books and 30 TV specials to his name, which is listed in the dictionary under "US cartoonist creator of comic strip Peanuts". His name trails that of Michael Jackson and Steven Spielberg on the list of the 10 richest entertainers in the world and he has confirmed he makes more than US$1 million (S$1.64 million) a month. But this is cold comfort for Schulz, veteran of a war with a depression that has dogged his entire adult life. He feels misunderstood. "That what I do is not really art. That I'm involved in what is regarded as a lowly form of art. That's difficult to make people understand," he laments.

Good Grief

13

I'M CHARLIE BROWN, PERPETUAL LOSER "A cartoonist doesn't know what position he is in — some people don't even read the comic sections. It doesn't mean anything to them. It's hard to be really good at something that doesn't mean anything." He loves to fret — about nothing in particular. He is a crochety old man with a million pet peeves, which he habitually prefaces with "I hate". He says he hates coconut; being "sketched" by other cartoonists; how people without pens shove him soft toys to autograph; young girls who smoke; and how comic strips are "treated like a necessary evil" by newspaper editors today, among others. He gripes about how he has played golf for more than 50 years and never made a hole-in-one. He is fond of catalouging grim trivia like how Leo Tolstoy's wife copied and recopied his manuscripts for War and Peace 7 1/2 times by hand. "Later on, he divorced her," is how the one-time divorcee likes to end this morbid story. He is Charlie Brown. Serious, melancholy and awkward. And both he and his round-headed character — who still cannot fly a kite or kick a ball properly or get near the little red-haired girl — have spent their lifetime perfecting the art of being insecure, losing and rejected. Except that Schulz is also a hostage of his own unrelenting fame and fears. He owns a private jet but cannot abide long-distance travel and public places. He abandons airplanes just before take-off, cancels engagements time and again and never travels alone. The doctors call it agoraphobia, which means anxiety in strange places. "Just the mention of a hotel makes me turn cold. When I'm in a hotel room alone, I worry about getting so depressed I might jump out of a window," he once said, although his second wife of 24 years, Jeannie, an accomplished pilot and poet, loves travelling.

14

Charles Schulz

In another sense, he is just a queasy old man dislocated from the new world. He says he does not care or know anything about the Internet. He has not seen what a Teletubby looks like. He has not been to Asia, not even Japan, his largest fan base where Snoopy is idolised. And no, he does not want to think about the day when newspapers no longer are the predominant news medium. He just believes insistently that "people stay pretty much the same, although I talked to a teenage psychiatrist recently and he was amazed at how depressed young people are today". He is sometimes likened to Sigmund Freud — which makes him beam — and grandfather of the introspective cartoon genre which managed to tap the murky human psyche and its growing pains. But he tells you he has no patience whatsoever for the wallowing culture of the angst-ridden 1990s or its fondness for talk-shows. "We live in a TV-dominated society that unfortunately makes people think the world is different from what it is. There's no value whatsoever. "People who sit at home every evening to watch TV are under the illusion that is what life is. The attention that people like Oprah Winfrey are getting is just nonsense. Just Hollywood talk. It doesn't mean a thing," he dismisses in a sermonising tone, wagging a finger. So Schulz might be celebrated for his talky cartoons pregnant with sophisticated witticisms and intelligent conversation about the meaning of life, but he still adheres to the definition of a cartoonist as "someone who draws funny pictures". Drawing comes before philosophy, because that is what fascinated Sparky (his boyhood nickname, after a racehorse called Sparkplug). His father was a barber in small-town Minnesota who worked six days a week clipping countless haircuts at 35 US cents apiece. His only break was cleaning his three-chair barbershop on Sundays, then devouring the comics with his only son.

Good Grief

15

Sparky was a sensitive child who spent half the time worrying about all sorts of improbable things and the rest doodling pictures of Mickey Mouse and Popeye in his notebooks. He avoided the school art club because he was "too shy" although he admits submitting some cartoons for a high school annual once. Tremulously, he waited for it to be published, but his drawings were not in there. He never asked why. By then, his academic career in high school had faltered and he had grown into a gangly, pimpled kid with big ears whom the girls shunned although they did not mind him decorating their folders. MUM DIED THE DAY I WAS DRAFTED

Art became his ally. That was when he noticed a newspaper ad for an Art Instruction Schools correspondence plan and decided to learn lettering, perspectives and cartooning by mail. But his studies were disrupted in 1943 when he was drafted into the army and sent to fight against Germany. That same night, his mother died from cancer. "I remember crying in my bunk that evening," he says in his biography Good Grief. After the war ended, he almost accepted a job lettering tombstones but was hired eventually by his alma mater, Art Instruction Schools, to correct student lessons returned by mail. Living above a drugstore with his father, he tried to sell gag cartoons to newspapers (although he got more rejection letters than cheques) and pursue a red-haired girl (although he played second fiddle to her boyfriend whom she eventually married). In 1950, the 27-year-old made some headway when he boarded a train in Minnesota for New York, a portfolio of cartoons tucked under one arm. The

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Charles Schulz

offices of the United Feature Syndicate bought his idea for a strip on little folks with big heads and bigger vocabularies. He came home, ate a steak to celebrate his new status as a bona fide cartoonist, though not entirely happy with the name Peanuts, which the establishment had insisted on (to him, it meant "insignificant"). Whenever anyone asks if he thought Peanuts would endure, he retorts: "Sure, I thought it would last. In fact, when I started out, I thought 'I'll be drawing this the rest of my life'." It took three years for Charlie Brown, Lucy, Linus and Marcie to grow on people. After that, the syndicate's salesmen did not have to sell the strip anymore. They simply took orders. But he is sorry his mother never lived to see his success. He wipes away a tear. "She'd be proud of me. She said once years ago: T don't believe anyone anymore, the only person I believe is Sparky' My Dad went: 'You mean you don't believe me?' She went: 'No, I only believe in Sparky' So she liked me and we got along well." "That's all I want. For people to like me like they did my father," he adds later. And "like" seems to be the ultimate end, the common denominator of Schulz's aspirations and fears. So, to that end, he toils, filling his white strip of paper every day — come rain, shine, writer's block, intestinal flu or even a heart bypass in 1989. He prepared for surgery by drawing three months of strips and while in hospital, doodled a series of Snoopy murals on the wall. And no, he is not appointing a successor to his strip. Of his five children, there is a mule ranch farmer, a Mormon missionary, a pilot, an aspiring novelist and an actress, but no cartoonist.

Good Grief

17

He works alone — always 10 days ahead of his syndicate's deadline — lettering every word, drawing every line, thinking up every idea. He has no need for assistants. "You don't work all your life to get to do something so that you can have time not to do it," he is fond of snapping when asked about retirement. He lives in a world he has drawn for himself — unassailably secure — its lines dark and indelible. Right is right and wrong is "foolishness". If in doubt, he stays home to draw funny pictures. Otherwise, his familiar universe is One Snoopy Place, where he built the Redwood Empire ice skating ring in the 1960s because he always wanted a "perfect sheet of ice" to skate on. He shares this and a baseball diamond field with the citizens of Santa Rosa and keeps it going at an estimated loss of US$1 million a year. He exercises in an aerobics studio upstairs and has his meals (usually meat-loaf or tuna melt) at the same "Reserved" window seat at the ring's Warm Puppy cafe every day. Then, he thuds briskly across a footpath to his studio, where he keeps regular 9 am to 4 pm hours five days a week. He can draw a daily strip in an hour and up to six a day, if he has to. If his daily dose of drawing can be interspersed with an ice hockey game, a chat with his good friend Cathy Guisewite (creator of the Cathy strip) and some reading (especially crime novels in which "the hero beats up people and shoots them"), it spells a good day for Schulz, who then gets into his red Jaguar and drives about 18 minutes to his home overlooking Sonoma Valley. "I look forward to evenings when I don't have to do anything, coming into the office to see what is in the mail, if I can be left alone. I envy people who can build a new fence or work on their garden," says the author of Happiness Is A Warm Puppy.

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Charles Schulz

Abruptly, he decides to look on the black side of life. He laments: "I was very sad when my dog Andy died. Every morning, he would put his paws on my bed when I woke up. Now he's gone . . . "I like my work, not that it is that much fun. People say: 'I know you love your work.' It's not that easy, it's very difficult." He becomes inconsolable again. If there is such a thing as good grief, Schulz must be living proof. His wellspring of sadness supplies him his piercingly clear look at life's foibles. The worse he feels, the more heart he pours into work, and the better it is. His loss becomes the world's gain. You're a good man, Charlie Brown. Postscript Charles Schulz died in February 2000 from colon cancer, after drawing the popular Peanuts comic strip for 50 years. He was 77.

Irene Ison

Against all odds... She did her O levels in her 40s, her A levels in her 50s, a bachelor's in her 60s, and a master's in her 70s. Meet Irene Ison, who is now working on a PhD.

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You Lose a Wrinkle Whenever You Learn

y

ou are old only if somebody calls you old and you no longer bother to argue. Ms Irene Ison believes that and makes mincemeat of anyone who dares to allude to her vintage. At 72, she cuts a deceptively diminutive, slightly bent figure with a snowhaired halo. But up close, her mind is sprightly, her wit caustic and her sense of humour wicked. Instead of enjoying her dotage, the British grandmother has just finished an MA course in photography and is hoping to do a PhD. She wants to do a thesis on creativity and eccentricity in old age. "My contention is that as you age, you get more intelligent — although people say you keep forgetting things — because you've more brain cells," she says. So far, most of the universities she has approached have rebuffed her as a doctoral candidate because she will be pushing 80 when — and if — she finishes it.

First published in The Straits Times, 15 November 2002

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Irene Ison

But the tough-talking woman, who struggled single-handedly to bring up three children, as well sit for her O levels at 42, her A levels at 52 and her degree at 62, is not easily discouraged. "This will not stop me, they can't stop me," she declares. "My son says when I die, they will have to turn my gravestone sideways to get all my degrees in." She was invited to take part in a lifelong learning forum at the Singapore Learning Festival, which was organised by the Ministry of Manpower and Reed Exhibitions. It was her first time in Asia, her first long-haul flight and her first overseas speaking engagement. Her ankles were swollen but her spirits were high. During the question-and-answer session, when asked what drives her insatiable quest to master new areas, she quips: "Learning is the fertiliser which makes your cells grow. It makes you younger. "Forget all those beauty shops and creams. Every time you learn something, you lose a wrinkle." Laughter erupts at her parting shot: "By the time I finish learning, I'm going to be younger than you lot."

SINGLE MUM'S RULE She recounts without sentimentality how education restored to her what poverty and World War II wrenched away. Out of seven children born to a teacher and seamstress in Birmingham, she was the only one who made it to grammar school after the war broke out. The bookish girl, who dreamt of becoming a great writer someday, was taken out of school when she was 14 because her family could not afford her textbooks. Her father told her: "Those who don't work, don't eat." "I resented it and vowed to myself that I would get an education when I could," she recalls.

You Lose a Wrinkle Whenever You Learn

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To earn her keep till she was 18, she bandaged stumps at a hospital amputee ward, minded children in a nursery and worked at an aircraft factory. On the day of her mother's funeral, her family decided that there was not enough room in the house and turned her out. After cooling her heels at the YWCA, she bagged a job as a salesgirl in a fashion store, met a "lovely man" at work, married him at 20 and moved to Coventry with him. Trouble first set in when his well-off family, who ran a funeral business, disapproved of her penniless background. Then, three children later, her husband was diagnosed as schizophrenic, which explained his strange mood swings and disappearances throughout their marriage. When her eldest child, Erica, was 13, Carl, eight, and Tania, three, he finally walked out on them. "Because my husband's life was so bizarre, I knew I had to be a constant for the children," says the single mum, who was left to foot the bills alone. Convinced that "a one-trick pony doesn't last long in the circus", she diversified her sources of income. She picked potatoes at a farm each morning before packing the children off to school, then doubled as a fortune-teller so that she could be at home when they returned, and moonlighted as a croupier in a nightclub after putting them to bed. On weekends, she escaped into her own fantasy world by penning romance stories, which were published by women's magazines such as Good Housekeeping and Women's Weekly for £70 to £90 each. "Fortune-telling put the bread and butter on the table, but writing paid for the cake," recalls Ms Ison, who learnt to read palms from her gypsy mother. She made sure her children complied with her house rule of compulsory further education to make up for her own deprivation.

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Irene Ison

By the time she turned 42, Erica was enrolled at Oxford University and Carl was admitted to The London College of Printing to do a design degree. He urged her: "Mum, you've done it for us. Now it's your turn." When she plucked up the courage to sign up for her O levels, he escorted her to the community college to make sure she did not chicken out. 0 LEVELS AT 42

The hardest part, she says, was making that first journey — one plagued by selfdoubt and fear — to the community college. After that, it became easier and she educated herself "one bite at a time". After finishing her O levels, she returned to full-time work to put her youngest daughter through university before embarking on her A levels at 52. She saved up for several years before she enrolled at Warwick University to read literary and cultural studies at 62. On her first day on campus, she walked into a class and was told that interviews for the cleaner position were next door. She noticed that many tutors made the annoying assumption that the old were either deaf or stupid. "They say something to the students, then repeat it for you. I always tell them, T remember getting old but not stupid,'" she vents. At the close of the first semester, struggling with the bias and workload, she wanted to quit. But she changed her mind when she was nominated for and won the Outstanding Adult Learners Award for Britain's Central Area in 1992. While at Warwick, a play she wrote about acid-tongued American writer Dorothy Parker, Dottie, picked up a £1,000 award, was produced in London and went on tour around Britain. In 1995, armed with a second upper-honours degree, she gave her mind a break and returned to reading palms for £30 a session, when her estranged husband suddenly returned to a nearby cottage in Coventry.

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25

He was stricken with cancer and she nursed him for three months until he died. To help her cope with bereavement — "mostly guilt because I had not been there for him when he was in and out of hospital over the years" — her son bought her a Minolta camera to tinker with. Soon after, she decided to pursue her lifelong love affair with photography formally at Tile Hill College in Coventry. "My time at Warwick was very positive and supportive so I was totally unprepared for the treatment I received there," she recalls. From day one, she suffered verbal abuse from her delinquent 16-year-old classmates, who were mostly enrolled in the two-year vocational photography course because dole payments started only at 18. Because of her habit of taking her arthritic feet out of her shoes during lectures, they called her "smelly old cow" and stomped on her pictures. "There was little point in telling the tutor. He encouraged it and barred me from his lectures. A student was stationed at the door to keep me out," she relates. So she went home in a huff and complained to the administering body, which kindly sent her the teaching material for her courses and an external invigilator for her examinations. Two years later, she scored five distinctions, adding with a curl of her lip that "the rest of the class got two distinctions between them". She progressed on to diplomas in illustration, community teaching and video, and recently finished her master's degree in photography at DeMontford University in Leicester. The next course she is taking is in digital photography because she disapproves of the medium ("I don't think it is right to put Marilyn Monroe in bed with anybody") and wants to know her enemy well enough so she can defeat it. Then the prolific playwright and poet is down for a creative writing course with the London Museum in January.

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Irene Ison

GOOD ROAD BLOCKS Although she has exceeded her own academic expectations, she says the road to adult learning is still full of obstacles in a greying Britain. Student grants are reserved for the young and getting a study loan is nearly impossible beyond one's mid-50s because "they think you're going to die before you pay it back". She has exhausted her life savings on learning and reckons, "I was born poor and will probably die poor". On numerous occasions, she has gone begging at universities for bursaries, with varying degrees of success. "It all depends on how you flirt with the person giving out grants," she says with a wink. She relates how an interviewer once asked her point-blank: "What happens if you die before you finish the course and you've taken the place of somebody younger who could have completed it?" Her reply? "I told him he'd die before I did," she says tartly. But all these road obstructions, she says, only prodded her to press on. More than anything, she confides that she clings on to the learning lifeboat not to remember but to forget. "Education is the saviour of old age. As long as you keep learning, you keep living. You realise there are things you didn't know. You're thinking of tomorrow, not yesterday. "Reminiscence closes you down. Yesterday is a good place to visit but not to live," she says with a sigh. She lives alone in her Coventry cottage with a 17-year-old cat, Harry. She reads voraciously, answers fan mail from other mature students and lectures at the community library. Most of all, she looks forward to visits from her three grandsons and her three children, who have made her proud. Erica is now a medical research fellow,

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Carl is a design associate director and Tania, who went to drama college, now teaches, writes and directs plays in London. At 72, she says she is much too old for tears or regrets. "I have room only for laughter and learning in my life. So long as my children remember to put a book in my coffin, I shall be all right," she says, then hastily adds: "And of course, a brochure of any likely courses there are in the hereafter." Is there any book she would like in particular? "Well, as long as I haven't read it, but if I have, I will get up and shout," she warns with a twinkle in her eye. Postscript After applying to 10 universities and getting rejected each time, Irene Ison, is now doing her M Phil/PhD in photography in war and peace at Coventry University. She also does a stand-up comedy routine called Positive Ageing With Comedy, for which she asks to be paid in book tokens. She turned 75 in June 2005 and says she is "still in there punching".

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Sam Leong

He has been hailed as the best Asian ethnic chef in Singapore. He was cited in Parliament as an example of a successful knowledge worker although he lacked a degree. Susan Long meets the man who is making culinary waves.

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Spy Who Keeps an Eye on "The Woks"

Sam Leong keeps the secret of his success close to his chest. Whenever the chef is in his Jade restaurant kitchen at Fullerton Hotel, he has a steel spoon and melamine chopsticks nestling in his front pocket. During each lunch and dinner feeding frenzy, when woks fly, oil sizzles and tempers fray, the beady-eyed director of kitchens stations himself impassively at the end of the assembly line of churned Chinese dishes. Ever so often, he rearranges the garnish or dips in to sample a sauce. At 35, he is known as a tough quality-control taskmaster who has no qualms about sending back dishes not up to the mark, followed by a terse admonishment later. "No good, don't just send it out, do a new one. By the time the customer complains, it will be too late," he is often heard hollering. The "systems man" has a digital camera trained on the kitchens and linked to his office laptop so he can spy on staff to make sure that they are not doing anything wrong during rush hour. He also uses a digital camera and laptop to record and file recipes of his creations to help train chefs in visualising new dishes.

First published in The Straits Times, 13 July 2001 31

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Sam Leong

Whenever a new chef arrives, he is given a thick training manual containing do's and don'ts pictures of what a self-respecting chef should look like and other operational details. But the chef who bagged the Best Asian Ethnic Chef trophy at Singapore's inaugural World Gourmet Summit Awards of Excellence this year walks his talk. His starched chef's uniform is always pristine, his white clogs spotless and his white baseball cap never askew. In fact, the Singapore permanent resident is so proud of his chef's allwhite ensemble that he hardly ever sheds it — even when he is taking the MRT to meetings. "Before, cooks were not so well-recognised — so dirty, no knowledge, backward, always gambling. Now, it's considered a respectable profession with a bit of status," he says with obvious pride in a smattering of English and Cantonese. But beneath his zeal, he is a reluctant chef. He confides midway during the interview: "If I had the chance to go back in time and choose, I wouldn't be a chef even if I knew I would become this famous. "For the past 15 years, I leave home by 8 am and come back around midnight almost every day. I would rather study hard — work in the office, with half-day on Saturday, off on Sunday, and have a normal life." He lets on that he hardly sees his children in the flesh but copes by catching up with his two sons, Yew Choong, 11, and Yew Jhow, eight, on the phone five times a day. He rarely gets a day off on weekends. On some Sundays, when he is almost out of the door for a family outing in Sentosa, the phone rings and he is recalled to work because some staff member has been taken ill. "Nobody knows your sacrifice. It's just your job," he says, sounding all choked up.

Spy Who Keeps an Eye on "The Woks

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Soya sauce, oil and steam run in his veins. He was born in Kuala Lumpur, the middle child of Malaysia's King of Shark's Fin, the late Leong Mun Soon. His father was the chef and co-owner of the popular Tai Thong Restaurant, which has since grown into a flourishing chain with branches all over Malaysia. As a boy, his one unwavering desire was to be a policeman, "hold a gun and chase thieves". He had a knack for seeking out trouble, loved football and hated school. His housewife mother used to carry his schoolbag and escort him to his classroom every day till he was in Secondary 2, just to make sure he attended class. After school, she would hover outside the school gate, watching him worriedly like a shadow, even if it was to look on while he played badminton with his friends. "I feel very embarrassed now when I think I made her so worried when young," he says. In 1980, his father decided to set up a Tai Thong branch in Singapore and relocated his family here. His studious elder sister and younger brother were enrolled effortlessly in good schools here. However, he scored kosong (zero in Malay) in several entrance examinations before "hitting lottery" with Clementi Town Secondary School, which took him on as a Secondary 1 student. His mother hired two tuition teachers to coach him in English, starting from ABC and basic grammar. Still, he failed in most subjects. Three years later, he lost his student permit and his right to remain in Singapore. So, at 16, his fate to cook for a living was sealed when his father declared: "You are coming to work with me in the kitchen".

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Sam Leong

WORK, WORK WHILE FRIENDS PARTIED His father gave up his business in Singapore and took him to Johor. There, they set up a hawker stall, serving exotic Cantonese delights such as wild boar, snake, dog and tiger meat in the Pelangi area. For the next two years, his strict apprenticeship started every day at noon and ended at 3 am. His father oversaw operations and supervised the chefs. He worked cheek by jowl with three other stall helpers, peeling vegetables, scaling fish and washing plates. On weekends, he watched wistfully — his eyes welling with tears — as his friends went to discos while he slaughtered snakes, dried out carcasses, cleaved innards and manned the roast pit. He felt very confined. "Work with father, cannot go anywhere . . . I was not allowed to hang out with the other chefs even after I finished my work in the kitchen," he says, recounting how his father would make him stay behind and practise wok cooking. Two years later, in 1988, both father and son got job offers — his father as Chinese chef and he as assistant chef — at Kuching Hilton in Sarawak. They cooked companionably side by side there for 1 j years before moving on together to Novotel Bangkok's Chinese restaurant in Thailand in 1989. Just as he was inching closer to his father, a series of life-changing events happened in the fateful year of 1990. His father was diagnosed with lung cancer and died shortly thereafter. While mourning his father, he took over as Novotel Bangkok's executive chef at the age of 24, which made him one of the youngest Chinese gourmet chefs in the world. The next year, he married a Thai dessert chef, started a family and became the sole breadwinner.

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After five years in Thailand, he returned to Singapore in 1993 to help the Raffles Company set up Wang Jiang Lau at Clarke Quay because he wanted his children to grow up here. A year later, he moved on to Four Seasons Hotel as executive chef to launch its Chinese restaurant, Jiang Nan Chun. Despite spending the first couple of years battling image problems — "I'm not a Hongkong chef but from Malaysia" — the modern Chinese cuisine restaurant became one of the busiest and most profitable here, thanks to lavish corporate spenders. Then, in 1996, he had a culinary epiphany on his mother's 55th birthday when he took his whole family to Jiang Nan Chun for dinner. It was a novel experience for him because "as chef, I never eat in my own restaurant". The chefs had prepared painstakingly a dragon-carving centrepiece for the first cold-cut dish. But it was enjoyed for a mere minute before the contents were ladled perfunctorily, according to the whim of the waitress, onto individual plates and then carted away. It set him thinking: "Why not do individual portions in the kitchen so everyone gets the same presentation, deboned, sliced equally, garnished the same way and looking less messy?" His idea for Western-style presentation of Chinese food seemed more of a miss than a hit at first.

EPIPHANY TAKES TIME TO CLICK The chefs complained they had to do more work, the manager cited revenue loss because portions had to be priced cheaper and Singaporean diners, long used to having a steamed fish head peer up from their plate, wondered aloud what was amiss.

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Sam Leong

But, after a while, Jiang Nan Chun's unique portioning and haute cuisine dishes, laced with Western ingredients such as foie gras and caviar, cottoned on and became the talk of gourmand town. His fusion dishes, such as Coffee Pork Ribs which won him acclaim when he became the first chef from Singapore to be invited to the Wolfgang Puck Food and Wine Experience in Los Angeles in 1998, became so famous that they were mentioned by Manpower Minister Lee Boon Yang in Parliament in 1999. He was cited as an example of how a knowledge worker need not have a doctorate or even a university degree to innovate successfully. Last August, he was head-hunted to join the Tung Lok Group as director of kitchens. His signature dishes are all elaborate affairs such as Steamed Crab Claw Stuffed With Shark's Fin and Lamb Shank with Garlic Foam in Martini Glass but he really is a man of simple tastes. Give him chicken rice any time and he will tuck into it contentedly. At home in his four-room HDB flat in Clementi, he makes it a point not to cook, preferring to go out for hawker meals with his family. His comforts in life are sipping Starbucks coffee, fighting for the Playstation with his sons and surfing the Internet. Besides his late father who "taught me to be a man", he says the person he admires most is his understanding wife, Aranya, 30, who, even after 11 years of marriage, waits up uncomplainingly for him to come home every night. Every morning, she takes him on her bicycle to the neighbourhood coffeeshop where they sharefishballnoodles or roti prata together, then she drops him off to catch a train to work. He rides pillion when the stretch ahead is straight and takes the riding seat whenever it veers uphill. He always figured that once his toil was done and his children were grown up, he could revisit those disco days he missed out on.

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But a few years ago, he and his wife spent a night out at Zouk and felt out of place. He concludes sadly: "My generation has passed. No mood to party any more. The disco is not our place any more." Postscript Sam Leong, Tung Lok group's director of kitchens, released his own book of recipes, A Wok Through Time, last year. He was named Asian Ethnic Chef Of The Year at the World Gourmet Summit in Singapore in 2002, as well as in 2004.

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Vincent Lo

They call him the King of Guanxi Shui On Group chairman Vincent Lo is Hongkong's biggest investor in China and a confidant to its top brass. The property billionaire tells Susan Long why Singapore's Suzhou Industrial Park failed and why Singapore businessmen often lose their shirts in China.

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If at First You Don't Succeed in China . . .

.Vhe maestro of guanxi is wielding his monied wand over a ballroom crammed with CEOs. They hang on to his every word, nuance and pause as he describes how he successfully penetrated China, the hottest market on earth today. At 54, the dapper chairman of Hongkong's Shui On Group, which deals in construction and hotels, is one of the mainland's biggest and best-connected investors. The Hongkong property billionaire's business acumen is held in such awe by China's key decision-makers that he is a member of the Ninth National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference. In 1999, he was even made an honorary citizen of Shanghai. In Singapore to accept a Visionaries and Leaders award from the International Herald Tribune and address a sell-out conference, he was asked for his assessment of China's new leadership after President Jiang Zemin. He replies in crisp English: "The best thing is they are a known entity and you can be sure they will follow the exact same Constitution. Where else on earth would you have leaders being groomed for 10 years?"

First published in The Straits Times, 22 November 2002 41

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Vincent Lo

The room choruses: "Singapore!" He laughs but continues smoothly that economic development has been enshrined into the Chinese Constitution as its No 1 priority and that its proactive business focus is unmatched anywhere else these days. "I always tease my official friends in government that you guys better deliver on your bottom line or you'll never get promoted," he peppers his point. While other Hongkong developers are reeling from the territory's depressed property market, Mr Lo is riding high — as high as the skyscrapers he is building all over Shanghai that are being devoured by an emerging generation of Chinese home buyers. His brainchild, Xindianti, a 52 ha mixed development in the heart of Shanghai's central business district, is paying significant dividends. Often likened to London's Soho or Hongkong's Lan Kwai Fong, it features renovated traditional buildings which are the trendy shopfronts of cafes, boutiques and restaurants. The new Chinese middle class gather there to quaff US$3 (S$5.30) Starbucks coffee and queue up outside Paulaner Brauhaus pub for a US$8 pint of beer. But the champagne was not always flowing for the man crowned Businessman of the Year at 200 l's Hongkong Business Awards. He made his share of expensive mistakes when he first ventured into China in 1984 as a mid-sized developer whose only experience was building flats for the colonial government. His assumption that "if you build it, they will buy", which had worked in asset-driven Hongkong for decades, fell flat in the mainland market. He found that from Shanghai to Hangzhou, purchasing power, as well as the preference for apartment designs, varied vastly.

If at First You Don't Succeed in China ...

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CHINA CHAMP So he picked up the habit of doing his own market research. Each time he explores a new city in China, he visits its department stores to see what people are buying, what is available and at what price. "The best way to understand the market is to go and see how people are spending their money. The thing to remember is you have to have a thorough appreciation of the place and people, and understand the point of view of the decision-makers you're dealing with," he says. On a visit to a Chongqing supermarket, he noticed that although the bulk of the area's 30 million inhabitants work in agriculture, most of its packaged food items are imported from south-east China. His voice rises an octave: "They produce so much agriculture, but how come there are so few local brands? Isn't that an obvious opportunity?" He advocates this general rule of thumb: the more backward the place, the more the opportunities. That is why when everyone else moved their manufacturing facilities en masse to China's Pearl River Delta in the 1990s, he bucked the trend and went inland instead. Before the Chinese government announced plans to develop its mid-west region in 1995, he had started investing heavily in high-grade cement manufacturing in Chongqing. As the economic disparity between the eastern coastal cities and the rest of China widened, he envisaged that the government would need to maintain social stability and narrow the gap by building infrastructure in the inland provinces. Cement would also be needed, as levels of affluence grew, to build new homes.

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Vincent Lo

Homing in on the fact that 80 per cent of cement produced by the Chinese was not good enough for roads, bridges or high-rise buildings, he figured that cement production would be in line with the administration's policy. He proved prescient. His plant enjoyed official approval and now accounts for 65 per cent of total production in Chongqing. Till today, the trailblazer looks to China not just as a manufacturing centre but as a huge domestic market. "I've never exported anything from China — everything I've done there is for internal consumption," he says. If he were a young man foraging for his fortune all over again, he says he would leap onto the Chinese government's Go West programme, which offers lush incentives for those willing to venture into the inland provinces. The founding president of the Shanghai-Hongkong Council for the Promotion and Development of the Yangtze dishes out this advice: "If you are a young entrepreneur starting out today, if you have confidence in yourself, go and do it. "In Singapore and Hongkong, everybody is so depressed these days. They don't see the future and don't know where to turn. Go to China — it's a oncein-a-lifetime opportunity." Years from now, he predicts that many Hongkong enterprises, which enjoyed an early-bird advantage, will become world-class corporations because of their successful forays into China. But does he have any consolation for the many burnt by China fever? What about Singapore's famous Suzhou Industrial Park impasse? "That is typical of a lot of major investments in China, not just for the Singapore Government. You reach an agreement to do something with the central government, but when you go down to the province or city, the local people are not involved. "You cannot restrict them from competing with you unless it was discussed and agreed on right from the start."

If at First You Don't Succeed in China ...

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He says he himself had trouble figuring out the workings of the multiple bureaucratic layers and Chinese legal system when he first ventured there. That was despite having more than a decade dealing with mainland officials when he sat in Hongkong Special Administrative Region preparatory committees prior to the 1997 handover. He sympathises that the mental transition is tougher for businessmen from a more legalistic culture. "Even if it's a big project, the contract is really no more than a few sheets of loosely-worded paper. The signing of the contract basically signifies the spirit of cooperation. The details are ironed out as and when they appear and if market conditions change," he notes. These days, the Shui On Group, which employs over 8,000 people in China, works hard at building "understanding, knowledge and trust" at various official levels. "Relationships are the same all over the world, whether in China or Singapore. You need people to understand you, appreciate you and support you. Otherwise, you won't get anywhere." But he insists he has never leveraged on his longstanding, close guanxi with China's rulers. "I meet them frequently but my policy is never to go to senior leaders to ask for favours. That way, they are not afraid to see me," he says. Asked why he thinks Singaporean companies have a largely lamentable track record in China, he comments that they "tend to be a bit rigid". Also, most Singaporeans do not relocate to run the business themselves in China, unlike Hongkong entrepreneurs, who base themselves there or take frequent day trips to check on things. Mr Lo, who goes to Shanghai thrice a month, says: "Localised decisionmaking is important. You will have a better grasp of the local market sentiments and conditions if you are there, instead of thousands of miles away."

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Vincent Lo

If he has to pare down the secret of his success in China to one thing, he says it is taking a long-term view and trying to contribute, instead of hoping to make the proverbial fast buck and run. "I always believe I'm going to be there forever. I train up local people as a strong demonstration of my commitment and identify charity projects to plant my flag there," he says.

THE COOLIE SON Besides looking for possible investments to add to a New York project he has entered into with American tycoon Donald Trump and travelling all over to sell China's potential these days, the president of the Business and Professionals Federation of Hongkong is also busy brainstorming ways to reinvent Hongkong for the knowledge-based economy. He blames his father, Mr Lo Ying Shek, the founder of Hongkong property developer Great Eagle Holdings, for his obsessive work ethic. Back on vacation from studying economics at University of New South Wales, he recalls, he would wake up at 5 am every day to go with his father to work by tram and bus. Upon graduation in 1969, he was dispatched by his family to work as a coolie in a Hongkong textile mill for HK$300 (S$67) a month and learn the business, without letting on who he was. At 22, he realised he would never become his own boss as his elder siblings were hogging the top positions in the company. So he took a parental loan of HK$ 100,000 to start his own construction firm in 1971 and parlayed it into a property conglomerate with interests in Hongkong, China and North America. His company's logo is that of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, the gull that yearned to fly.

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"The most important thing in life is to reach out and touch perfection. I know I'll never get there but I'll try," says the father of two children aged 14 and 20. "I'm definitely on an energy overdraft. I'm concerned that it might be called back," he quips, before dashing off to cut another high-powered deal en route to the airport.

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Carlos Ghosn

Brazilian-born Carlos Ghosn speaks no Japanese, but as CEO of Nissan Moton he reversed the car maker's slide towards bankruptcy and steered it on a path to profitable growth Susan Long caught up with the high-octane man when he swept into Singapore to accept a Visionaries and Leaders award from the International Herald Tribune.

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From Public Enemy No. 1 to Corporate Hero

A

othing fazes Mr Carlos Ghosn. Not bombs, not bureaucracy, not near-bankruptcy. Last Friday, the celebrity CEO of Nissan Motor revived into town with guns blazing, oblivious to "high-risk" warnings because of SARS. Leaning forward in his armchair, the 48-year-old confides: "I lived part of my childhood in Lebanon. I know a lot about terrorists, fights and civil wars. You have to manage danger and risks in your life. Frankly, when I read that Singapore is in a risky region, I take it with a smile." Then he laughs a deep, full-throttle laugh. This was the same derring-do the Brazilian-born, French-trained CEO packed with him when he was dispatched to Japan to overhaul a debt-ridden Nissan Motor in March 1999. The former chief operating officer of French car maker Renault was sent there to oversee a major alliance in which Renault had assumed US$5.4 billion (S$9.6 billion) of Nissan's debt for a controlling stake in the sputtering Japanese motor giant. When he arrived, Nissan was about to be towed away to the scrapyard. It had been bleeding for seven years, was over US$11 billion in debt and had been

First published in The Straits Times, 1 November 2002 51

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Carlos Ghosn

steadily losing market share for 27 years. There was too much focus on chasing competitors and too little on customers, excessive hierarchy layers and a lack of urgency. When he laid out his ambitious Nissan Revival Plan, sceptics scoffed that the non-Nissan, non-Japanese gaijin (foreigner) was clueless as to what he was up against. They predicted that his attempts to force Western-style restructuring on Japan's tradition-bound corporate world would be mired in the same resistance that had crippled Japan's economic reforms for the last decade. But everyone underestimated the Ghosn effect. Three years later, the compact man with an uncanny resemblance to comedian Rowan Atkinson — minus the facial twitches — has engineered one of the most dramatic turnarounds in Asian business history. He swept into Singapore a day after announcing another year of recordbreaking profits, to accept a Visionaries and Leaders award from the International Herald Tribune. To date, the iconoclast known for ignoring business practices that stand in the way of profits has trimmed 21,000 jobs at Nissan plants worldwide, shut down five domestic factories and successfully demanded 20-per-cent savings from his car-parts suppliers. He has also controversially pared down the number of keiretsu companies tied by cross-stock sharing to Nissan and sold off their stock to free up capital. In a particularly unjapanese piece of poaching, he even lured rival Isuzu's senior designer over to soften the hard edges of Nissan's car design. He went on to break more taboos when he introduced unprecedented stock options to key company staff, based promotion on performance rather than age and rank, and substituted consensus with quick decision-making. These days, he blithely breaches Japanese business etiquette by shaking hands with every employee he meets, instead of just top managers.

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Last Friday, before addressing a sell-out CEO breakfast conference, he did not wait to be served at his VIP table but broke away from his minders to help himself to the buffet table. He cuts straight to the chase. "My first principle is give your best and don't settle for anything less," he intones with a thick French accent. He was born in Brazil in 1954, the product of a Lebanese airline agent and French mother. At age six, he moved to Lebanon with his family to attend a French Jesuit School. Ten years later, he was one of 300 top students selected out of 6,000 applicants to make it to the elite Ecole Polytechnique in France. After finishing a postgraduate engineering degree from Ecole des Mines de Paris, he joined French tyre-maker Michelin and was dispatched to Brazil as CEO by the time he was 31. Four years later, he relocated to South Carolina to oversee Michelin's North American interests and its tricky merger with Goodrich Uniroyal. But knowing he would never advance to the top jobs at family-run Michelin, he defected to Renault in 1996 as its executive vice-president. There, he earned the nicknames Le Cost Cutter and The Icebreaker for his hardline executive decisions to close down factories, cut staff and terminate contracts with uncompetitive suppliers. Three years later, when Renault decided to expand outside Europe by bailing out Nissan, it came as no surprise that he was tapped for the "repair job".

NO IFS, NO BUTS In 1999, he arrived in Tokyo with a sense of "do or die" urgency but no game plan and no idea of Japanese language or culture. "Asia was a mystery land to me. But it was a good thing I started out with a blank sheet of paper and no preconceived notions," he says. His first week, he recalls, was spent "making primal adjustments" like locating the elevator and learning how to make international calls.

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"It was my first time in a place where I didn't speak the language and couldn't read the signs," says the man who speaks French, English, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish and is learning Japanese these days. After he found the WC, he got down to the business of mobilising Nissan's managers to identify problems and come up with a workable rescue plan within three months. "When you're getting people to do things they don't like to do, you have to give them ownership so that even though they feel it is going to stretch them, it is a vision that belongs to them," he says. When he laid out the Nissan Revival Plan in October 1999, he also laid his job on the line — declaring that he would quit if any of the targets were not met. It was an act of commitment, he notes, which "really touched a core in Japanese society". Another secret of his turnaround success was his strong sense of vision, which he shared not just with top management but also every single Nissan staff member. "A vision has to be clear, simple, quantified and shared. It has to move people to action," he says. "The only language everyone understands is numbers and time frames." Once targets were set, they were cast in stone. If the market winds moved in Nissan's favour, good. "If not, it just meant we had to work harder to achieve

it," he says. He adds with emphasis: "I didn't want to hear what couldn't be done, only what could be done." He also put first things first and refused to trade in long-term potential for short-term gain. On the ongoing car wars between the Toyota Corolla and Nissan Sunny to be Singapore's most ubiquitous vehicle and the fact that Toyota seems to

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be forging ahead at the moment, he insists he is "very happy" with Nissan's distributor Tan Chong Motors and is "not moved" by market share at all. "Frankly, being No. 2 is not as relevant to me as sales growth and profit. Sometimes, manufacturers get very childish. To be No. 1, they destroy a lot of value. Nissan's strategy is not to get involved in this kind of battle," he says, alluding to Toyota slashing prices to gain market share here. "I want people to buy cars, not deals," he says. "Customers know if you have to offer so many incentives to sell a car, maybe it's not such a good car." Now that Nissan is almost back in the black, he is busy retooling the brand to make its image an "enhancement" rather than a "liability" to its cars. Eventually, he hopes people will buy Nissan not just because it is a "rational buy of reliable quality and low price" but because of other "more emotional aspects" like design and status.

JAPAN'S MR 7-ELEVEN

Today, the outsider, who was once Public Enemy No. 1 to many Japanese traditionalists, has become the nation's own corporate folk hero. And Nissan has also become the shining recovery template and beacon of hope for the moribund Japanese economy. On Japan's prospects, he says if a lumbering blue-chip giant like Nissan can embrace change and extricate itself from 27 years of decline to become one of the world's most profitable companies in three years flat, there is hope yet for Japan Inc. His diagnosis: "The main challenge for Japan is Japan itself, not China or anything else. It has to bite the bullet by undertaking some necessary reforms. It just has to do it, not just talk about it."

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The turnaround artiste is slated to leave Nissan in 2005 to take on the post of super CEO overseeing both Nissan and Renault, which would make him just about the most powerful auto executive on earth. But right now, he has hit the international speaking circuit to tell the Nissan story to packed auditoriums. The crowds come, he reckons, because it has all the "spicy ingredients" of a potboiler — the sexy car industry, quick action and a V-shaped recovery. What he neglects to add is that he is easily Japan's most oft-quoted businessman today and has been garlanded with numerous business awards. He is also the subject of a dozen books examining the Ghosn effect on the second largest economy in the world. There is even nationwide speculation on where Mr 7-Eleven — as the Japanese have nicknamed him for his long working hours — gets his haircut, spectacles and flair. They lap up details of his personal life, such as how he starts his day eating breakfast with his four children at 6.30 am. In a recent opinion poll, Japanese women even named him a top candidate they would love to have father their children. As the family man sees it, all this attention suits his business purposes fine. It is another chance to talk about Nissan's new products while the going is good. He adds with an enigmatic smile: "You buy cars from somebody you like."

Postscript Carlos Ghosn was promoted to CEO of Renault in 2005. In his new role, he will still be responsible for Japan's second largest car-maker, Nissan.

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E e Tai Ting

One ofnumerous Singapore's entrepreneurs who have ventured overseas successfully Mr Ee Tai Ting is a Primary 4 drop-out who became a legend in business circles as the Asian Fruit King. In an emotional interview, the chief executive of listed fruit distributor FHTK Holdings tells Susan Long why he embraces hardship.

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Bittersweet Fruits of Hard Labour

Growing up, Mr Ee Tai Ting cried himself to sleep many nights. He wept for his lost childhood, which ended abruptly when he turned nine. That year, 1948, his father, a trishaw rider, hurt his leg in an accident and could no longer support his wife and eight children. From then on, as the eldest child, he woke up at 3 every morning to descale fish for a fishmonger. His payment was a few unsold fishes. He would sell a couple at the market and take the rest home for food, before he rushed off to school. In the evenings, he did his homework in between serving customers at a banana wholesale shop. But his juggling act came to an end when he was kicked out of school at Primary 4 due to unpaid fees. After that, he resigned himself to working as a fruit stall assistant and hovering around funerals at night. If he was lucky, he was hired to carry the coffin for $5 or wail for $1.60. By 16, his skinny shoulders were hunched with the gravity of a responsibility far greater than his years. Still, it failed to prepare him for the day his father died.

First published in The Straits Times, 14 February 2003 59

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Choking back tears, he says he will never forget the "raw fear" he felt when he learnt his father had left them penniless. At 16, he had become the family's sole breadwinner by default. As he absorbed the devastating implications, he remembers fainting on the way home from the hospital. But worse was to come. There was no money for a proper burial. The landlord threw them out of their zinc-roofed shack. They managed to rent another place. Most nights, he sobbed into his pillow, worried sick over how his family would eat the next day. When dawn broke, he galvanised himself into action to pay the rent, keep his siblings in school and keep together their tattered dignity. With so many mouths to feed, he decided to sell fruit for a living. "I had no choice. The margins are better in doing business than working for others," says the chief executive of FHTK Holdings in Mandarin at his Harbour Drive office. To raise his capital, he worked as a coolie carting charcoal from ships in the port or carrying bricks at construction sites for $7 a day. Each day, he put away $2 to $3 for more than a year till he saved up enough for his own push-cart. Desperate to make it on his own, he would get up at 3 am, buy a cart-load of cheap, over-ripe bananas from a wholesaler, then peddle as fast as he could to Rochor Market. Throughout the day, he tirelessly criss-crossed the island, changing locations at least five times to catch the crowds, and doubled back and forth to replenish his stock in between. His day ended at 11 pm in Tanjong Pagar, where pier workers would grab the still-unsold bananas, fit only for "immediate consumption" which went for just 10 cents a bunch. Then he staggered home to catch four hours of sleep, before repeating the same drill the next day.

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At 18, he moved on to his own make-shift fruit stall outside Majestic Cinema. With $1,000 in hand, he could afford to buy and sell "regular, no longer over-ripe" fruit such as papayas, oranges and pears. At first, he remembers he had such an entrenched "inferiority complex" that he did not dare approach the big fruit distributors but got his supplies from small wholesalers on cash terms instead. Later, when a distributor trusted him enough to extend him a credit line, he was so touched he cried. HARVESTING BUSINESS SUCCESS

At 20, he lost his heart to a hardworking fruit-seller down the road. The most giddy-headed thing he reckons he did was to marry Madam Foo Oi Fuen even though he already had a clutch of siblings to support. After marriage, the couple worked nights, weekends, and holidays, opening earlier and shutting later than other stalls. Just a day after each of their four children were born, his wife was back peddling fruit beside him on the street. Then, his one abiding thought was: "I've gone through so many hardships, I don't want my children to suffer." The grind paid off. Before long, he stashed away enough to buy the family's first bungalow at Serangoon Gardens in 1965, the same year Singapore gained its independence. Having secured a roof over his head, he decided to free himself from the uncertainty of unlicensed hawkering. "Anytime, the police can chase you off," he reasons. So with $10,000 in hand, he set up a 65 sq m wholesale fruit shop off New Bridge Road named Fook Huat Tong Kee (meaning continual growth and enterprise). As Singaporeans grew more affluent and healthy lifestyles more popular, they ate more fruit and vegetables. By 1977, his $10,000 venture had morphed

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into a $1 million private limited business. By the 1990s, it was Singapore's third largest fruit and vegetable trading company, worth some $30 million. By then, he could send his four children to university in the United States. Now in their 40s, his two sons have master's degrees, speak Spanish and Japanese, and work with him. His eldest daughter is a piano teacher and the other runs a related garlic trading business in the US. But while FHTK was still minting money, he became convinced that the glory days of trading were over. As technology started edging out the middleman, he knew the company had to remake itself or face certain death. So instead of retiring at 55, he decided to integrate backwards into the supply chain and became a global fruit and vegetable grower, processor and distributor. In 1993, he invested US$30 million (S$52.8 million) to set up an industrial park in Longkou city, Shandong, to do distribution, cold storage and packaging of fresh produce. Back home, he succeeded in listing FHTK in 1997. Alas, his jubilation was short-lived. The company's over-aggressive expansion in China ran smack into the Asian Economic Crisis. Shortly after, the banks cut their credit line and FHTK almost skidded to its end. Then pushing 60, the grandfather of four spent the next four years retooling the business, servicing debts and ironing out the many teething problems of operating in backward Longkou. It was only in 2002 that FHTK Holdings waded out of the red and reported a net gain of $91.5 million, reversing a previous loss of $121.3 million. Today, the firm, which owns the hip and snazzy SunMoon fruit retail franchise here, sells an ever-expanding array of greens and fruits to over 40 countries including the US, Japan, Europe, South Africa and Saudi Arabia. Its main business is now based in China, where it employs over 1,400 employees. Now among the world's biggest fruit producers, it has over 2,000 ha of orchards in Shandong growing grapes, peaches, cherries, plums and

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Fuji apples. It also has a dehydrated garlic processing plant, runs a plant tissue culture laboratory to cultivate fruit seedings, and recently set up a carton manufacturing factory in China.

STRICTLY FOR THE STRONG-MINDED ONLY AT 64, the squat, weather-beaten man they call the Asian Fruit King has come to accept life's bittersweet lot and expect no concessions. "I take set-backs as paying school fees. But while others just pay the price of experience without learning the lesson, I'm very determined to earn my fees back. I am after all a businessman," he says. Although fruits were not his choice commodity, circumstances conspired to make them his "way of life". After he had made his pile, he confesses, he could not bear to move on to other products. "I didn't have the same feeling of familiarity or affinity for anything else," he sighs. He is just as convinced today as he was at 16 that fruits remain a sunrise industry. "The sun will always shine on fruits," he insists, but he is no longer under any illusion about how tough it is. "It involves four 'thousands' — thousands of hardships, thousands of words, thousands of miles and thousands of ways and means. "First, there is no night and no day, so you must have an iron will to endure thousands of hardships. Then, you've to exhaust thousands of words to convince farmers to accept new growing methods. "After that, you've to walk thousands of miles around the countryside to supervise the harvesting. Plus find thousands of ways and means to overcome thousands of problems from a short shelf-life to ever-changing tastes. "If you're not strong-minded, keep away from the fruit business," he warns.

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His own life is marked by discipline and led strictly by example. He never entertains beyond 9.30 pm and is in bed by 10 pm. He is up by 5 am and spends two hours jogging around his bungalow in the West Coast area and lifting weights in his home gym, before heading for work. When in Longkou, the boss brisk-walks around his sprawling 400,000 sq m industrial park. He eschews suits for jeans and makes it a point to greet his workers at the door in the morning, then see them off in the evening. Though he puts his executives up at the 52-room Hotel Singapore he built in Longkou in 1995, he himself stays in the industrial park's dormitory with his workers. A firm believer in the adage that it is better to live poorly than too well, his diet is composed strictly of fruits, vegetables, soups, fish and a little lean meat. He says his role model is Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew, who "must have felt the same quiet desperation I did when I was 16", when in the 1960s he shouldered the burden of a turbulent Singapore, the split with Malaysia and withdrawal of the British troops. "His willingness to sacrifice moved me. Till today, he works harder than most young people," he notes. He similarly intends to toil right up to his last hour. His heart still aches — and sometimes he cries openly — when he recalls his traumatic past. But he has learnt to shove regret aside. "Having been through so much, I now know that behind every problem is a solution waiting to be discovered. If you can endure the toughest conditions, you will live on to appreciate better times."

Diana Young

Dream big and settle for nothing less. Ms Diana Young, the chief executive officer of Mil-Corn Aerospace, tells Susan Long why she lets nothing, not gender bias, debts or slammed doors, stand in herflighttrajectory

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One Who Got Her Dreams off the Ground

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from her five-foot frame, there is nothing diminutive at all about Ms Diana Young. Under her cloud of flowery fragrance and lullaby tones, there is the unmistakeable glint of steel. Inside her pastel office dressed with fur rugs and frivolous soft-toys, the chief executive and president of Mil-Corn Aerospace goes about business with no-nonsense focus, flair and finesse. With old-world graciousness, she serves clients from a well-stocked larder of juices, confections and soups, while she cuts big, handsome deals. In her spare time, she reads about inspiring women, collects business degrees and dreams imposingly macho dreams. Impatient with gender glass ceilings, the sky was always the limit for the 45-year-old who could not wait to grow up and "stand on my own two feet". Born No. 6 in a family of six girls and one boy to a shipping superintendent and housewife, her family's preference for boys spurred her from young to "do as well as boys". It also fuelled her to earn a taekwondo black belt and yearn to fly.

First published in The Straits Times, 21 February 2003 67

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Her family, who lived in a three-room flat in Queenstown, could not afford air travel. But while sending relatives off at the airport, she used to press her face against the glass panes of the departure hall and marvel at the engineering which enabled such heavy planes to soar above the clouds. In secondary school, she was ecstatic when she was selected for training at the Singapore Youth Flying Club. But she was disqualified when a test showed her to be colour-blind. "I was devastated," she remembers. She was asked to sit for a re-test but, disconsolate, refused to try again. It was a decision that she lived to regret. "From that, I learnt never to give up hope. At least do your best and exhaust all options before giving up," she intones sagely at her Changi North Industrial Estate office. THINKING BIG To earn her own pocket money, the Raffles Girls' Secondary School student started giving tuition to neighbourhood children at age 14. But even then, she thought big and "in terms of'scalability'". She was all of 16 when she struck up a deal with a group of Vietnamese married to American expatriates here to teach them English for $240 each — if they could rustle up a class of 10. They did, and she became "the richest schoolgirl around then", with a monthly income of $2,400. Her appetite for independence whetted, the 19-year-old landed her first job as minute secretary of the Singapore Island Country Club after her A levels. It gave her a chance to observe up close "the thought patterns of top civil servants and corporate honchos and see how they behave, think and manage situations" when she sat in at all the meetings. Afterwards, she joined a bank while earning her bachelor's degree in business administration through distance learning, and later topped it off with a

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part-time master's degree in finance. By 23, she was promoted to administrative manager, looking after the bank's accounts, new branches and recruitment. Seven years later, she was deployed to look after the bank's private investments across Hongkong, Australia and Malaysia. At age 32, she became the group general manager of 16 companies belonging to the Malaysian-owned conglomerate, which had interests in finance, rubber, manufacturing and aviation. Her brief was to consolidate the disparate pieces, do mergers and acquisitions, and sell off non-profitable parts. But what she found most satisfying was the stint she spent in East Malaysia reviving an ailing aviation company and getting its old, disused 19-seater plane up in the air. For nine months in 1988, through day and night, she and her enthusiastic technical team pored over aircraft manuals and studied the regulatory requirements of taking flight. The day the plane's engine clicked and sputtered to life, amid loud cheers, she figured out what to do with her own life. Shortly after, when the directive came to sell off the aviation company, which was up and running by then, she decided to quit, return to her first love and start her own aerospace company. "Running on your own, you take all the risks but you also enjoy greater challenges and get to set directions for whatever you believe in," she rationalises. So at 37, she gave up her company car, business class travel and plump pay cheque. To fund her venture, she also mortgaged her Serangoon Garden semi-detached home, which she had bought in 1988 for $400,000, for $800,000 in 1994. She started out selling commercial aircraft parts. It was humbling work. Overnight, the "red carpet treatment" she was used to as a corporate honcho was pulled out from under her feet. She had to make cold calls and knock on doors as a "seller of services".

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"I learnt about true beauty and ugliness, about people in high positions who are arrogant and keep you waiting for a long time. I promised myself that one day when I'm in that position, I won't do the same thing," she vows softly. At the close of the first year, she was $360,000 in the red. By her second year, her anxieties mounted while her debts soared to a staggering $600,000. TAKING FLIGHT But faith and fear of losing her family's home made her plug on and revise her business plan. Instead of being a "commissioned agent", she upped the ante, hired six engineers and worked towards becoming an aircraft engineering and support services outfit. She soon found out that the odds were stacked against a small, inexperienced company when it came to getting any jobs from the big boys in Singapore. So, desperate for any breakthrough, she chalked up many air miles traversing India and Malaysia. It came late in 1995 when she won her first contract from an Indian carrier to retrofit a fleet of 10 aircraft. Upon completion, she was handed a cheque for $500,000 and her company's first glowing referral. By the end of 1996, she had covered her losses and made her first million. Since then, Mil-Com has gone on to retrofit more than 100 aircraft in the region for a client list which includes Singapore Airlines, Malaysian Airlines, EVA Airways, British Airways and Philippines Airlines. It also designs airport security systems and has earned at least one patent for its encryption processes. Today, the revenue from its group of 15 companies, which includes a technology arm, engineering unit, support services and training centre, averages $30 million a year, half from overseas. Its staff strength of over 700 is dispersed

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throughout offices in Singapore, Malaysia, Hongkong, the Philippines, Australia and soon, China. She credits her earlier struggles with helping her stay "cool and collected" as the aviation industry took a sharp dive after the Sept 11 terrorist attacks. As business slowed to a standstill and eroded a third of her revenue overnight, she channelled her high-octane energy to pursuing the aerospace training centre she had always wanted. In late 2001, a time when training almost seemed an absurd notion as most airlines were talking about cut-backs and retrenchments, she approached Flight Safety Boeing — tentatively at first — to ask if they would partner her to start a training centre here. To her surprise, they said yes. "In good times, they would probably have partnered with only a big company or airline," says the mother of two teenagers. Her husband, Eugene, is Mil-Com's senior vice-president. Since the Aerospace Training Centre was ready in Changi last May, it has trained over 150 students in aviation engineering. By June, she will have two new training centres up and operational in Manila and Shenzhen. Last year, Mil-Corn, short for "military and commercial aircraft", was ranked No. 11 on the Enterprise 50 list of the most promising privately-held companies here. In the market these days, Mil-Corn is often called "that million commission company", a label she takes as the highest compliment. But she has never forgotten those bumpy days when haughty multinationals here spurned her advances. A believer that every cause needs a champion, she devotes herself these days to levelling the runway for smaller players. When serving her term as the first woman president of the Association of Small and Medium Enterprises (Asme) three years ago, she spawned the SME Tech Venture Fund to help new businesses grow. Last year, she also spinned off the

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SME Corporate Board, which has so far helped at least six troubled companies tide over the tough times. Her advice for struggling entrepreneurs is: "In business, it's good to be passionate. But if one approach doesn't work, don't be sentimental about staying on course. Take a different path that ultimately leads you towards your goal." That is, after all, how the girl who failed to fly conquered the skies as a woman.

Postscript Diana Young died in September 2004 after multiple injuries from a car crash in China. She was 45.

Stan Shih

Mr Stan Shih, the 55-year-old chairman and founder of the Acer Group, the world's No 3 computer maker, tells Susan Long why he is barring his children from joining his conglomerate and why he will retire at 60 to prove he is dispensable.

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Better to be a Chicken's Head than an Ox's Tail

Stan Shih is one of those quiet radicals. Underneath his buttoned-up suit and unassuming manner, the chairman and founder of the Acer Group is a career contrarian. Most of his life, he has tried not to play by boring rules. His autobiography is entitled aptly, Me Too Is Not My Style. Unlike other Chinese businessmen, the 55-year-old has no dynastic ambitions. To make his point, he banned his three children from joining Acer. "I don't want to run a family business. It is unfair to my colleagues, children and investors," he says in an interview with The Straits Times. He also plans to retire in five years at the age of 60. This is to set a "good example" for other Chinese bosses not to outstay their welcome, and to prove to the world that "without me, Acer can grow even bigger". He was in town to attend the inaugural meeting of the Nature Conservancy's Asia Pacific Council, which seeks to promote economic prosperity through conservation in the region, and to promote his new book Z.O, which stands for Internet Organisation.

First published in The Straits Times, 11 August 2000

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He speaks a stilted but serviceable English, which he says he learnt entirely through business dealings. The widow's son who started life early helping his mother sell duck eggs at a roadside stall says his one "advantage" is that he did not read widely during his childhood. "I don't have others' knowledge, just my own," he explains with his characteristic spare and matter-of-fact logic. "I had to create my own understanding because my mind was not occupied by others' concepts." However, he confesses a deep admiration for other revolutionaries before their time. His favourite is the late Sony chairman Akio Morita, who defied the traditional Japanese way of consensus, went global and remained relentlessly innovative throughout his life. In the same way, he says Acer has tried to break away from the constraints of Chinese society, since it set up shop 24 years ago. For one, it invested heavily in branding and technology, discarding popular practice and conventional wisdom. For another, contrary to the centralised Chinese management style, Mr Shih is a vocal proponent of super decentralisation, delegation and "sharing everything" with employees. His belief in constant retooling and evolutionary change has turned Acer into the world's No. 3 computer maker, behind IBM and HP, and one of the oldest new-economy powerhouses in Asia. His business philosophy, which still draws cynical chuckles, is based on the belief that "human nature is basically good". In many ways, the man is a dreamer, yet a realist. Even as he dabbles in employee-empowerment schemes, he notes in the next breath that most people "don't like to take risks and responsibilities but prefer asking for instructions".

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Although, he goes around the world crusading for the high-tech lifestyle, he concedes "no-tech" and "high-touch" is really how most of the planet's inhabitants live. While he tries to drum up the prestige of the Made-in-Taiwan label, he admits its cachet is limited to "low- to middle-end products within the B2B trade and business environment". In shops, sadly, he notes the label has to be hidden from consumers.

MISSES OLD DAYS At his Taipei office, he sits in a small, unadorned room. The door always hangs open. He says he misses his start-up days. "Big is not necessarily enjoyable," he laments. "Especially in the new economy, big can be a burden." Minting money, strangely enough, bores him. He prefers to "develop" rather than "own" things. Long before stock options became fashionable, he sold and transferred 70 per cent of Acer stock to his employees so that they could "improve their quality of life and buy house, buy car", as he puts it. The Shih-family stake is said to be down to 10 per cent these days. And nothing, he says, excites him more than fresh business models which "show others the way forward". His proudest achievement is that Acer has cultivated more CEOs and spinoffs within the group than any other company. Today, the computer giant, which has 34,000 employees and yearly sales of US$8.4 billion (S$14.3 billion), has more than 120 different standalone businesses under its belt.

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They are run by some 200 CEOs and general managers and operate independently like Internet start-ups, even though some rake in as much as US$100 million a year. As soon as they come of age, a beaming Shih escorts them down the IPO aisle, pleased that he has "duplicated yet another entrepreneur". In 1998, he re-organised the Acer group to reflect the Internet, with a myriad of small and independent business units linked to a virtual headquarters. In his book, I. O, which he is pitching as a blueprint for other companies, he explains that he wanted each unit to "really focus" on what it is doing, respond to changes quicker and manage people better. This strategy also helped create more head room at the top, important in a fiercely-entrepreneurial country like Taiwan, where 95 per cent of companies are small and medium-sized enterprises. Asked why Taiwan churns out more patents and entrepreneurs consistently than Singapore, he refers to an old Chinese adage: It is better to be the head of a chicken than the tail of an ox. Most managers in Taiwan, he notes, believe it is better to be the boss of a small company than an employee in a large organisation. Also, he notes that the Taiwanese government is not so powerful or protective as in Singapore. "So the private sector has to find its own way to survive," he reasons. One of his new survival strategies is to transform first, Acer, then the island of Taiwan, from a giant PC and chip-making factory into a software giant. Four years ago, Acer was repositioned as an "Internet-enabler" and sat down to conceptualise nifty Internet appliances and services. Already in the pipeline, the boss reveals, are 10 different trendy gizmos, such as a digital recipe book and portable equities monitor, aimed at those who want cheap access to the Internet.

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Priced at about US$300 to US$500 apiece, he hopes they will give Sony, with its knack for whipping up cool, wallet-friendly lifestyle products, a run for its money. Over the next 13 years, Acer is pumping US$1 billion to nurture a few hundred Taiwanese software start-ups to realise that vision. Recently, it also took a 40-per-cent stake in a US$260-million venturecapital fund which shops for promising start-ups in the US and Asia.

The man's money is where his mouth is. MATHEMATICS WHIZ Born in Lukang, 180 km south of Taipei, Mr Shih's father died when he was three. To support themselves, he and his mother ran a roadside stall hawking duck eggs, melon seeds and stationery. After years of counting out change, he grew up into a mathematics whiz and set his mind on becoming a college professor. But after graduating with an engineering masters' degree from Taiwan's National Chiao Tung University, he got married and settled down as research chief at Qualitron Electronics. In 1976, the company went bankrupt. Having little to lose, the then 32-year-old Shih and his finance-trained wife Carolyn banded with a group of friends and, scraping together US$25,000, founded a company called Multitech, which made electronic components for the big boys like Texas Instruments and Siemens. Bitten by the microprocessor bug, which Mr Shih was convinced would soon be in machines used by people everywhere, Multitech launched Taiwan's first locally-made PC in 1983.

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Three years later, it had chalked up sales revenues of US$165 million. The company, which had grown up making computers for others, decided it was time to launch its own trademark, Acer, in 1986. Two years later, Acer Corporation was listed on the Taipei Stock Exchange. It went on to become one of the world's biggest PC players and Taiwan's most famous export. Today, even though the corporate strategist sees change as a constant, much about Mr Shih's life has remained the same. He still views the world as a great weichi board, a game of Chinese chess in which players start at the corner and aim steadily to take over the centre. His game plan: To place Acer products, whether CD-ROM, memory module or LCD panel, inside every brand-name PC, just like Intel. He still lives with his mother, aged 77. His wife continues to oversee financial operations at Acer. She is the only concession to his rule that family and business should not mix. His rationalisation is that she was there in the beginning as co-founder, so it is too late to boot her out. Their two sons, aged 26 and 27, and daughter, 25, are all pursuing graduate degrees in electronic engineering, information engineering and chemistry respectively. When they have completed their studies, he plans to help them carve out their own business niche. To fulfil his childhood dream of standing before a classroom, he spends two hours a week lecturing at his alma mater, National Chiao Tung University, on entrepreneurship. He still eschews fine dinning and expensive suits. To unwind, he jogs and plays golf. He is still enamoured with technology's wonders.

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His latest project is the 172-ha Aspire Park, a privately-funded industrial estate outside Taipei, which has a creation-and-innovation centre, green space and homes. It is Taiwan's answer to Malaysia's Multimedia Super Corridor, which he could not wait for his government to build. Although he had to undergo an angioplasty procedure for heart trouble two years ago, he works as if he were just starting out — minimum 12-hour days. How does he keep it up? "Life is about contribution to others," he says, quoting another famous revolutionary, Dr Sun Yat Sen. "To enjoy your life, you have to serve others first." Postscript Stan Shih, 60, confirmed he will be retiring from Accer in 2005 and is setting up a new firm, iD Soft Capital, to undertake venture capital investing and consulting.

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Tharman Shanmugaratnam

Moving from monetary policies to politics, Mr Tharman Shanmugaratnam tells Susan Long how, despite fooling around in school, he has actually been preparing for his new job all his life.

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Been there, Done that, and Thrived

Tharman Shanmugaratnam has always been the quintessential rebel. He believes it is better to be "challenging than cynical". The status quo never interested him. Instead, he enjoys digging deep and thinking hard about the way the world could be. He runs full throttle on conviction. He eschews half measures and prefers to get "totally consumed" by things. His remarks are polite but pointed. As the 44-year-old former managing director of the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) puts it: "I think people have to speak their minds if they think something is right or wrong." He also likes it if you answer back. "I don't particularly like people who come in and say how much they agree with me or write very articulate defences of what already exists. "I operate by getting alternative views openly and squarely," says the newlyappointed Senior Minister of State for Education and Trade and Industry. Since young, the third child of emeritus professor K. Shanmugaratnam, a pathologist, has always had an independent streak.

First published in The Straits Times, 14 December 2001

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At Anglo-Chinese School, he was "totally uninterested" in his studies, enjoyed needling his teachers and had an "awful reputation for indiscipline". Uncomfortable with his middle-class roots, he always sat in the last row in class. Although he was a top student in primary school, his best friends throughout his school days were the troublemakers and dropouts. He took to sports — hockey, football, cricket and athletics — with great passion, playing a match or practising almost every day, until he developed severe iron-deficiency anaemia and, as a result, a heart abnormality when he was 17. For the next five years, he was popping 25 pills a day. So he decided to get intense about something else. During his National Service years, politics chose him. In the 1970s, issues concerning radical student leader Tan Wah Piow's trial, workers' retrenchment and political imprisonment fired his imagination. "As a middle-class youth, you could either sit back and watch with disinterest, or you could try to find out what's happening and if there's a better way," he recalled. Uncomfortable with the politics of the People's Action Party (PAP) then, he began his search for a "better alternative political and economic model". He started reading leftist literature, made friends with student activists here and even chose to study at the London School of Economics (LSE) because he heard that it was a "left-leaning" institution. Once enrolled to read economics at the LSE, the young man balanced his time between two pursuits — one as an intellectual studying alternative economic models, and the other as an activist, joining others to spur a generation of Singaporeans and Malaysians studying overseas to get interested in social issues. Put off by the university's standard economics course, he decided to devise and pursue his own degree programme — combining the economics of socialist economies with the sociology of developing countries. The tutors allowed him and several of his friends to do their own "very unusual programme".

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But most of his learning was extra-curricular. He combed through journals, attended activist meetings and debates. He and a group of Singaporeans, including Tan Wah Piow, also formed a study group to discuss Singapore issues and alternative economic models. He stresses: "It wasn't just idealistic fancy. It was a feeling of commitment — even if a little exaggerated — that you, as someone who's equipped to understand these things, better find out if there are good alternatives and see if something

can be done." Activism, for him, meant lugging a battered green leather bag stuffed with magazines around London's subway stations and bus stops and approaching anyone who looked vaguely Singaporean or Malaysian. He would warm them up with a chat and try to sell them a magazine questioning policies back home. "If they couldn't pay, we gave it to them free and asked them to attend the next function. It was that sort of activity, something one did continuously for a few years," he says. Despite his efforts to keep a low profile, he found his passport impounded by the immigration authorities at the airport when he returned to Singapore in 1982. He was also hauled up for questioning by the Internal Security Department (ISD). During the 1987 Marxist Conspiracy, he was again questioned, "day and night for one week", by the ISD. Several of his friends from his activist days, however, had to face more than questioning; they were detained for allegedly subversive activities under the Internal Security Act. Till today, he still disagrees publicly with their arrests. "Although I had no access to state intelligence, from what I knew of them, most were social activists but not out to subvert the system," he says, still visibly aggrieved. In 1982, he applied and got a job as an economist at the MAS and worked his way up to become a director of the economics department.

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Just when all seemed calm again, he got into trouble in 1992 for bringing a report containing flash estimates of economic growth into an MAS meeting with private-sector economists. Someone at that meeting saw the figure, leading to its publication later in The Business Times. He was charged with breaching the Official Secrets Act (OSA). He disagreed with the charge, put himself on the witness stand and spent 1 ^ years contesting it in a highly-publicised case. In the end, he was fined $1,500 for endangering the secrecy of classified documents. "It was a setback in life, but not a major blow," he says with a shrug. In 1995, he resigned from the MAS to join the elite administrative service. He saw the job offer as "vindication" that the Government did not hold the OSA case against him. After spending three years at the Education Ministry, where he played a key role in designing reforms and introducing IT to classrooms, he returned to the MAS in 1997, as deputy managing director. Despite being a non-scholar in the administrative service, and that glaring OSA glitch, he had the highest grade among his cohort by the time he left this year to stand for election. Over years of studying alternative models, working as an economist and later as a civil servant, he says he has morphed gradually into a PAP convert. He says he stayed on with the civil service because he felt his contrarian views were never curbed there. "The interesting thing about the Government is that there's a remarkable internal debate. The challenge is to extend that internal debate into the public arena." During his university years, he saw that socialist and mixed economic models not only failed to deliver but also stifled growth and initiative.

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Over time, he arrived at this dictum: In economics, try not to interfere with the market. "It can be harsh at times, but it delivers the best outcomes for the majority of people," he says. But although the Right won in the economics realm, he feels strongly that the social compact cannot be left to the market. "Ultimately, I think the failure of both the Left and Right was that they focused too much on what divided people in society and not enough on what would create a community of common interest," he says. He notes that stakeholder capitalism, or the "Third Way" which British Premier Tony Blair has been advocating, is what Singapore has been doing for a long time. "We've been trying to create this community of common interest. It's not done perfectly but, basically, it's a model which gives everyone a stake and a sense of belonging," he says. When the PAP approached him recently to stand under its banner, he felt it was the "responsible thing to do" and agreed. "We're at an inflection point in our history. It made me realise that if I can contribute, I should go in now," he says. "Keeping Singapore going economically is a political and social enterprise. It's not just about renewing our economic strategies. The other side of the coin is preserving our social capital. "You can't sit back and expect that someone else is going to do it," he adds. The sacrifice he makes as a result: Spending less time with his four children, aged five to 10, and his lawyer wife Jane Ittogi. Pictures of them laughing line the shelves of his spartan office at The Treasury, which he moved into recently.

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"Most of the time, we go running or just relax together. There's a certain amount of ridiculing all around the shop. It's important for them to grow up self-deprecating," he says with a shy smile. Asked about his biggest lesson from the last General Election, he says after some thought: "I think we have got the minds of the young, but I'm not sure we have won their hearts. "The next time round, getting the minds of the young will be less easy, because the confluence of factors in this election won't be there with the same force." The party's biggest challenge, as he sees it, is to engage the young, "not as a matter of image-building and political posturing", but as a political necessity. Engaging their idealism, getting them to feel that they can and want to contribute, requires a "tolerance of alternatives", he declares, "because you cannot force the young to agree with you". "The passion of the young comes about because they do not want to accept the status quo immediately and they don't want to take what the Government says on faith. "They should arrive there on their own from a meaningful questioning of what exists and the alternatives. "There will be a bit of risk in this freer play which we must manage. Each generation does not start with a blank page, but has to understand how we got here and what it takes to go forward. "But they have to be bold and do their own thinking, if we are to produce a generation of committed, not cynical, Singaporeans," he says. Been there, done that, and thrived, he should know.

Postscript Tharman Shanmugaratnam has since swiftly risen through the political ranks to become Senior Minister of State for Education and Trade and Industry, then

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Acting Education Minister and Education Minister. He has hogged the headlines with series of sweeping changes to overhaul the learning of Chinese language, broaden the benchmarks of success in the school ranking system and nurture more questioning students.

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Bunker Roy

Mr Sanjit Bunker Roy grew up rich but now he is poor. He makes 2,000 rupees (S$76) a month as founder of India's renowned Barefoot College, which trains the illiterate poor to become solar engineers, hand-pump mechanics, teachers and health-care workers in their own villages. In Singapore to spread the word about the importance of social audits and best practices for charities, Mr Roy, 59, tells Susan Long about his work.

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A True Volunteer

Q. How did your name become synonymous with the push for accountability in the social sector? A. In the 1980s, an official document of the government of India's Planning Commission brought up the need to decide on a code of conduct for the voluntary sector. I said publicly that this was what the code should include: First, a simple lifestyle. No one in the voluntary sector should get more than the minimum wage of the state. You shouldn't get exorbitant salaries working in the name of rural poverty. Next, observe the laws of the land. That means don't pay less than minimum wage; don't exploit your own labour; observe equal remuneration for men and women. It just blew up nationally. My proposed code of conduct caused a big controversy and became a national debate from 1984 to 1998. It split the voluntary sector right down the middle. All the rich charities were against it, all the poor ones for it. Those who were scared the code of conduct would become adopted as law called me all kinds of unkind names, including "government lackey". They said any such code for the voluntary sector must be voluntary.

First published in The Sunday Times, 1 August 2004 95

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I said no, it can't be because look at these guys making the salary of private sector chiefs who are supposed to be working for the rural poor. They have no leg to stand on. Where are their ethics? So, it became a debate on disciplining the voluntary sector and making them more accountable. Q. There are many contending views on what social enterprise means today. What's your own definition? A. A social entrepreneur, to quote 19th-century English poet William Blake, can see the world in a grain of sand, heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of his hand and eternity in an hour. He has to have patience, compassion and tolerance to be able to relate with his constituents. These are qualities you acquire not in university but by interacting with people who live on less than $1 a day. His job is to show innovative ways of doing something simply, which is community-managed, controlled and owned. For instance, at Barefoot College, we train illiterate women to become solar engineers in six months. After that, they can solar-power their own villages and become technically and financially self-sufficient. In the past five years, more than 200 villages all along the Himalayas have become solar-powered, technically and financially self-sufficient this way. A social entrepreneur's role is to seize workable opportunities that showcase rural entrepreneurship qualities in the community, which show you don't have to be dependent on the government or donors. He shouldn't be in a hurry. Of course he has to make money but, more importantly, social entrepreneurs should be answerable to the community they serve. This is where the governance issue comes in. He must provide leadership qualities, be first among equals but he cannot be apart from the constituency he serves.

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Q. What does this mean? A. It means going by train and by bus like everyone else. I go from my village to Delhi twice a week by bus. It takes me nine hours each time. I don't go by air even though that takes only 20 minutes. The Barefoot College is very Gandhian. I type my own proposals, do my own filing and running around. No secretary, no personal car, nothing. No one gets more than US$100 (S$170) a month. Every two years, each of the 400 staff have to evaluate themselves and one another in front of the entire college. Depending on the results, our salary can go up or down. Every five years, we do a thorough social audit on how we get the money, how we spend it and show all our accounts to the community. Q. Are these social audits heated events? A. Oh yes. Several thousand people come to listen and ask questions like "How much salary does Bunker Roy get?" and "Why must he travel so much?". I have to answer all these questions in public. But this is where the power of the Barefoot College comes. We are completely transparent and accountable to the community in whose name we collect money. Some charities just bring out an annual report and accounts statement but that's not enough. You can fiddle around with that. The community must know how much money has been spent in their name and why and how. During the social audit, we put everything in front of the community and say, according to my books, I put 10 handpumps in your village and count the 10 handpumps to show where the money has gone. At all other times, our accounts are made available and accessible to the community. Anyone can ask any question anytime, anywhere, about the organisation or me. They can ask: "I want to see the books of this village and

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how the money has been spent." And we say "All right, give us 5 or 10 rupees (S$0.20 or $0.40) for the time taken to process it, and we will give it to you." Nothing is confidential. It's everybody's business to ask me what salary I get. It's not a personal question because I'm a public servant. I'm not a private citizen. I'm dealing with public money and every member of the public has a right to know how the money is being spent. Q. On that note, how much is your salary? A. I get 2,000 rupees (S$76) a month. I'm paid somewhere in the middle in the organisation. Why should the boss get the highest amount? I go through the same evaluation process like everyone else. If my community contact points — and we measure this by initiative, innovativeness, integrity and honesty — are low, my salary goes down. After that, we put on a notice board who gets what salary. Q. What about the argument that individuals who work for non-profits, too, deserve privacy? A. None of your business — this was precisely the same argument they used in India years ago. But of course it is my business. If you take public money, you're open to public scrutiny. No one can say this is personal and an intrusion on their fundamental rights. Why are you doing something in the name of society yet not open to society? It shouldn't be. Q. You also don't believe in spending money to make money or raising as much as you can . . . A. No, it's important to remember that too much money can spoil you. You have to limit it. So many people are prepared to give, give, give but you've to say No, No, No. I refuse more than I accept because too much money compromises the voluntarism of a sector.

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The question is: What do you do with it? You should take less and show that you can spend it better. I could probably take 10 times more than I take. But our budget at Barefoot is about US$2 million (S$3.4 million) a year, which supports 400 people. About 30 per cent of our budget is from earned income. The rest we get from the Indian government, Swiss corporations, international foundations and German and Dutch donors. Our administrative budget is less than 15 per cent. We don't spend on publicity, newspaper ads, circulars, fliers or fund-raising. If your work is good, the Bush Telegraph spreads it around. People read about it on the Internet and get in touch but often, we refuse money. Q. You also refuse to hire anyone with a degree and scoff at foreign t a l e n t . . . A. The practical skills of the rural poor and local wisdom are more practical, user-friendly, sustainable, acceptable, credible, respectable and far superior to anything you can pick up from university and the World Bank and the United Nations. No question. At Tilonia, our definition of "expert" is "an ordinary man from another town". VIP means "very ignorant person" to us. A professional is a person with competence and confidence in his work. But who decides? Does a paper decide or a community decide? For me, given a choice, I would call a water diviner a professional, rather than a geologist or geophysicist, because his degree of success is just as good. A traditional midwife is more competent than a nurse just out of nursing college. These are the ones who should be valued and respected in our community because they have real skills. But they don't stand a chance in the developing world. In India, they send professionals like doctors, engineers, teachers from the cities to the rural areas, who end up disgruntled and unhappy to be there. So why?

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Q. Your world view is contrary to everything modernity holds dear. Is it tough being a maverick? A. I think it is everyone else who is contrary. I don't think of myself as a reformist but reflecting the spirit of volunteerism. It is others who have distorted it and interpreted it badly, not me. This is volunteerism as it should be, but the tragedy is that it isn't. Let me ask: How do you define a volunteer? Can I be a volunteer for life? What is volunteerism? A volunteer gets a living wage instead of a market wage. I can volunteer to work for life on a living wage that way. How much do I need to make my ends meet? That much I'll take. If I take what I'm worth, I cease to be a volunteer. But if I'm worth $20,000 and I take $500, I'm a volunteer. Why do I have to observe the norms of society if what I need is one tenth of what I'm worth in the market? It all depends on your perception. If you're truly a volunteer, you will take only what you need. As Mahatma Gandhi said: "The earth provides enough to satisfy every man's needs, but not every man's greed."

Lim Hua Min

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In a rare interview, Lim Hua Min, chairman of Phillip Capital, tells Susan Long why good enough is never good enough and why he cant help but keep building his business.

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Who Says Business is All About Profits?

Lim Hua Min has no sense of fashion and is proud of it. He steers clear of the fads and foibles of the newest business models, and is befuddled by the current trend of building companies only to sell them. He does not understand why profit forms the primary motive for most businesses today. He prefers "continuous pruning", and frowns on retrenchments as a "quick, convenient fix" he has "never indulged in". "The easiest way to change is to use a new set of people. But the more arduous route to take — and the real challenge for a leader — is to change your existing people," says the chairman of Phillip Capital, which has 2,000 employees globally. The 56-year-old with metal-rimmed glasses loves nothing better than staring down a challenge. For him, good enough is never good enough. Today, his is one of the few independent local brokerages that survived the ferocious bear market and industry consolidation that whittled the number of stockbroking houses here from more than 30 to less than 10 in two years. Recently, to reflect his company's expansion beyond the securities business, the holding company, formerly known as Phillip Securities, was renamed Phillip Capital. .

First published in The Straits Times, 28 February 2003 103

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Despite scoring many firsts, such as being the first local broker to offer an online trading system called Poems in 1996 and the first brokerage in Singapore to sell its own unit trusts in 2001, he has not paused to uncork the celebratory champagne bottle. "If you look at life as a process, then awards are just a passing phase," he dismisses with some impatience at his 4,645 sq m office at Raffles City Tower. Over the years, the former general manager of the Singapore Stock Exchange has remained as low-profile as his firm, never granting any personality profiles, until now. Throughout the two-hour interview on Monday, he refused to dwell on stockbroking's money-minting past, waving it away as "valuable but also a stumbling block". He is loathe to reminisce about the distant days of BMW-driving brokers and sky-high transactions and commissions. Instead, he prefers to grapple with the current gritty challenges of deregulated commissions and the convergence of the banking, insurance and stockbroking businesses, which will intensify competition further. If he had his way, everyone would live squarely in the present, rather than the sentimental past. But it has been a tough-sell to convince his brokers to move beyond the old transaction-oriented paradigm of stock tips and commissions to providing more holistic financial solutions for clients. "Change is never comfortable. We all have vertical mindsets; our reasoning and basis of right and wrong are based on the past. "What makes it worse is that when a generation of people have enjoyed success, it is even more difficult to change them. It requires lots of coaxing, convincing, even stepping on the toes of people who have a vested interest," he notes.

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He walks his talk, and even competitors who call his goals "airy fairy" acknowledge the steps he has taken — even if small and conservative — have kept Phillip out of the red in all its 28 years of business. His employees attest that lofty philosophical abstractions notwithstanding, their boss is as much involved in the greasy nuts and bolts of business as he is a futuristic visionary. As opinionated and candid as the research his firm churns out, he also subscribes to an unfashionable though benign dictatorship. As he puts it himself: "You have to operate on the basis of conviction rather than what others tell you. What others tell you is only half the story. They tell you only what they want rather than what they need." His favourite term: "Non-negotiable". His favourite line: "Our reference point is ourselves". And his favourite quote comes from billionaire financier Warren Buffet: "You are neither right nor wrong when others agree with you. You're only right when your facts are right and your reasoning is right." The visionary financier grew up deeply impressed by his father, who ran a tyre shop by day, pulled a trishaw by night and supported his housewife mother and nine children singlehandedly. By the time he graduated from Victoria School in 1965, his father could afford to ship him to the University of Surrey in England to do a degree in chemical engineering. Four years later, he returned with a master's in operations research and management studies from London's Imperial College and joined Shell as a chemical engineer. From age 23, he started a slew of businesses on the side, including a housing agency in People's Park, an accountancy training school at Raffles Place and a credit information bureau fashioned after United States-based financial information provider Dun & Bradstreet.

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The net analysis of his early ventures was that he lost money — about a couple of months' salary each time — when they closed down or were sold. But undeterred, he refused to see them as failures. They were works-in-progress "that will be successful when the time is right". Predictably, he lasted only three years in the "mature" oil industry and quit after it was intimated to him that he could only become a manager at 40. He moved to the Stock Exchange as a research manager for three years, before he plunged headlong into business by taking over a broking firm, which had gone into receivership, with three partners in 1975. The stock market was in the doldrums in the mid-1970s. Still, he did not hesitate in withdrawing his personal savings of $100,000 and borrowing $100,000 from the bank and $50,000 from his father to buy a 12.5 per cent stake in the company. Over the years, his partners fell by the side, leaving him to steer the ship alone as it crested in tandem with Singapore's economy. He plays down his role during the golden years, saying: "If the tide is taking you along, do you need to swim very hard?" Phillip ventured out of Singapore in 1984, despite "adverse climatic conditions" in which it was considered "almost disloyal" to invest overseas because the prerogative then was to build Singapore up first. His first stop was Hongkong. Despite the trials of starting from scratch, adjusting to a "new environment, ethos and culture" and bleeding money the first year, Phillip's Hongkong operations pressed on to become a giant player, with a swanky 2,787 sq m downtown office and 300 employees today. Phillip went on to acquire companies and take on partners in Thailand, Japan, England and Australia. To boost its presence outside Singapore, it recently bought British bond broker King & Shaxson Bond Brokers from South African financial services firm Old Mutual.

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In Singapore, Phillip grew big on the coat-tails and pockets of the small investor, a fact it has never quite forgotten. As otherfirmsanalysed glamour stocks, it went for the "undiscovered value" in listed small and medium enterprises. Since 2000, it has been the first to set up investor centres in the Housing Board heartlands of Ang Mo Kio, Bukit Batok and Toa Payoh to cater to the working class. Mr Lim wants to reinstate the "relationship and trust" elements in financial services — instead of offloading more glossy, impersonal brochures on people — and hopes his investment centre managers will become "figures of respect and authority in the neighbourhood as investment counsellors, just as much as the village doctor or pastor used to be". Today, Phillip Capital hires more than 2,000 employees across 10 countries in Asia and Europe. With total shareholder funds exceeding US$200 million (S$347.1 million), Mr Lim says the profitability of privately-held Phillip is "comparable with the listed local brokerages" such as GK Goh, Kim Eng Ong Asia and UOB-KayHian. These days, the millionaire many times over, who is married to a lawyer and has four grown-up children, confides he no longer works for reasons as banal as earning a living. But he is no less fervent about building a business that will last long after him. His reasons are almost primal: "It's a myth that the primary motivation of business is to make money. You do it because of what you are. Otherwise, you vegetate and lose your sense of purpose."

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Dr Everett Worthington

Peacemaking among primates. Reconciliation among nations, American psychologist Everett Worthington speaks to Susan Long about building bridges between fighting factions.

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The Healer within Dr Forgiveness

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forgive is not only divine, it is human too. That is the unflinching belief of Dr Everett Worthington, who has made studying forgiveness his life's work. The noted clinical psychologist is executive director of A Campaign For Forgiveness Research, which has been monitoring and measuring the physiological effects of forgiveness and its benefits since 1997. Over the years, the non-profit, United States-based corporation he chairs has raised more than US$6.7 million (S$12 million), which it uses to fund research projects by top scientific laboratories and international scholars worldwide in the field of forgiveness. Some of these include studying how long chimpanzees and other primates hold grudges, whether the genetic propensity to forgive others differs in identical twins, the reconciliation process in previously fragmented South Africa, northern Ireland and Rwanda and the effects of forgiveness on the nervous system. At 55, the chairman and professor of Virginia Commonwealth University's department of psychology is also living proof of his own assertion that forgiveness can be humanly achieved.

First published in The Straits Times, 21 June 2002 111

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Seven years ago, just after his book, To Forgive Is Human: How To Put Your Past In Your Past, was published, his own mother was brutally murdered during a burglary gone awry. His voice thickens as he recounts the event which sorely tested his own ability to forgive. It was New Year's Eve, 1995. Two youths had stumbled on the darkened, empty driveway of his mother's house in Knoxville, Tennessee. Assuming that the occupants were out carousing at a New Year's Eve party, they broke in through the window using a crowbar. Then they ransacked the place in search of valuables. The noise roused his mother, who lived alone, from her sleep. When she appeared in the hallway, surprising the intruders, one of them struck her down with the crowbar and hit her head repeatedly until she died. "It was a bloody scene," he adds softly. "As she lay dying, they also assaulted her with a wine bottle in a sexual way." His mother never regained consciousness. Justice was never served. Her assailants were never caught. When Dr Worthington learnt the details of the crime, his first instinct was cold rage. "I remember pointing to a baseball bat and declaring: T wish whoever did it was right here. I would beat his brains out until he's dead.'" That night, venom coursing through his veins, he paced around, unable to go to sleep. At 3 am, he sat down to pen a eulogy to his mother. As he contemplated what her life meant and all that she had poured into her three children, the irony of it all hit him. The culprit, he believed, was "a kid who could not stand what he had done". "Every mirror, every single reflective surface in my mother's house was broken, even in the rooms that were not thrashed. I flashed back to earlier that day when I wished I could beat the kid to death and thought: "Whose heart is darker?"

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"Is it this kid who responds in the heat of the moment out of fear and frustration that his perfect crime has gone wrong? Or me, Dr Forgiveness, who's had all day to think about it and done all this research, yet has not thought of forgiveness even once today? "Who did I write this book for? Was it for everyone else but not me?" He decided to try his own medicine. He took his own prescribed steps down the road to forgiveness, which involves recalling the hurt, empathising with the assailant and publicly committing to forgive him. Once he set his heart to it, forgiveness, he estimates, took all of five hours. But grieving his mother's loss took a few years more. "It takes time to adjust to your shattered world view when you lose someone important to you. You're going to have pain, no matter what," says the Virginiabased academic in his Southern drawl. His latest book, Five Steps To Forgiveness, was published by Random House in 2001. He was in town recently to present his research findings on forgiveness to the National University of Singapore's department of psychology and the National Institute of Education, and to conduct a counselling course at Wesley Methodist Church. Accompanying him was his wife, Kirby, a child development specialist, with whom he shares four grown-up children, one grandchild and the love of ballroom dancing. In his free time, the rod-thin man with a gentle, whimsical sense of humour also plays competitive tennis, hikes and conducts strange experiments on campus which have earned him strange nicknames. Like Dr Spit. His latest and most unsavoury project was to break down the saliva content of 40 people, half of whom were in professedly happy marriages, the other half recently divorced or disenchanted with their partners.

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He asked them to chew on cotton swabs while thinking about their relationships, then did a detailed analysis of the chemicals found on their saliva-soaked swabs. The laboratory results showed that personalities who were less forgiving tended to produce the stress hormone called Cortisol. This reinforced earlier findings by his foundation that the human body responds negatively to unforgiveness and '"people get sick if they hold on to grudges for years", says the man who used to head Virginia's Mental Health Planning Council. But if America's Dr Forgiveness had a say, he lets on with a laugh, his preferred label would not be Dr Spit. So what would it be? He pauses. A little later, he confides almost with contrition: "To use a trite metaphor, I want to be a bridge-builder. I believe I have a mission in life to bring forgiveness to every willing heart, home and homeland. This is my life's calling and it took me years to find it."

Q&A Q. Why is there a sudden interest in forgiveness today? A. The late 1980s saw the destruction of the Berlin Wall and the fall of communism. Suddenly, countries which were traditionally enemies had to think about getting along. This contributed to political interest in the concept of forgiveness. On the social level, the 1970s was the decade of divorce in the United States. For first marriages, the divorce rate rose to an all-time high of 58 per cent. In the 1980s, the rate levelled off to about 50 per cent when people got tired of divorce.

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Since then, most people have stopped thinking of how to get out of a relationship and are instead thinking of how to stay in one. So at both the political and personal levels, forces have been working in the same direction to create a good climate for researchers to investigate forgiveness. Q. Tell us about your latest findings on forgiveness. A. Recent findings show that there are health implications to harbouring unforgiveness. In a study we conducted on more than 300 people in Virginia Commonwealth University, we wired up 60 people who had been robbed and used physiological measuring devices to monitor their heart rate, blood pressure, sweat and skin conductants and facial muscles. We wanted to measure their reaction if they received a note of apology or their money back from the thief. We found that when restitution is made for a wrong, for example, when they get back the money that was stolen and some extra for damages, as well as a strong apology, it really helps them to forgive. Overall, the effect of cash back plus damages was almost equivalent to a strong apology along the lines of "I'm really sorry, I feel like a worm for doing this to you". A weak apology such as "Oh yah, I'm sorry" was as good as no apology at all and made some people swear a lot. Q. How do you define unforgiveness and forgiveness? A. When you are offended or violated and respond with anger or fear of being hurt again, that is not unforgiveness. Unforgiveness is when you ruminate on the meaning of an event like a late night re-run of a very bad movie. Eventually, you become resentful, bitter, full of hate and hostility.

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I believe there are about 30 ways to get rid of feelings of unforgiveness without actually forgiving someone. They range from retaliation, civil justice, personal restitution, appealing to divine justice, a belief in karma, forebearance and moving on. But in my book, forgiveness is the emotional replacement of negative unforgiving emotions with positive other-oriented emotions, based on empathy for the one who hurt you. Q. What is the hardest thing about forgiveness? A. The first is hard-to-handle hurts, where the wound is a whole bunch of severe losses. Think Sept 11, an attack, a gross violation, a betrayal or a divorce. These are events that cause you to lose your sense of safety and security. You lose your sense that the world is just. You lose your sense of pride and ego. All of a sudden, all that you held to be truth is shattered. These are hard to deal with because it is not just a matter of forgiving but dealing with losses, which require grieving. And it takes a long time to put together a new world view that accommodates all these. The second type of hard-to-handle hurts are the repeatedly-inflicted ones. No matter what you do, it doesn't seem to make things better. Like the Palestinian situation, where almost every day there is yet another suicide bombing and yet another Israeli attack in retribution. From both sides' perspective, it is almost as if there is no getting away from continual hurts and repeated violations. You lose track of how many hurts have occurred because they take place so often. Q. So can the US ever forgive Osama bin Laden? A. Yes, eventually. But right now, the nation is a long way from forgiveness. It is still working on the justice aspect. As more measures of justice happen,

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for example, more terrorists are caught or maybe someone apologises, that takes away some of the unforgiveness. Eventually, this question will be no different from the one asked in the past: "Can the US ever forgive the Japanese for Pearl Harbour?" It's still a sore point but over time, we've gotten over negative sentiments and restored relations with Japan. Postscript Dr Everett Worthington published a new research compilation called the Handbook Of Forgiveness in 2005.

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Phua Kok Khoo, Doreen Liu

Good taste, good insight and social responsibility The couple behind World Scientific Publishing tell Susan Long how they set up their business out of indignation and turned it into a venture that industry heavyweights want to buy oven

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Love and Business in an Ivory Tower

^ / e is the archetypal absent-minded, crumpled and jocular professor of theoretical physics. Professor Phua Kok Khoo likes to declare that he is first and foremost a scientist and motivated by passion, rather than profit. At 60, he is lauded for his first-class mind, has many Nobel laureate friends but cannot read a balance sheet to save his life. His wife, Ms Doreen Liu, is a textbook study in contrasts. At 58, she is meticulously manicured, decked in diamonds, skilled in management and as bottom-line-conscious as most trained economists. She takes care of the company's finances, administration and production schedules, while fitting in yoga and raising their two children. He is chaotic, creative and conceptual; she is prim, precise and pragmatic. Throughout the two-hour interview at their book-lined Toh Tuck Link office, the couple cut into each other's thoughts, joust verbally and finish each other's sentences. The two distant cousins, who were childhood sweethearts, got married some 30 years ago. And the strength of their unusual coupling gave rise to one

First published in The Straits Times, 7 March 2003 121

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of the world's leading publishers of science, technology and medical texts and journals. Today, their baby, World Scientific Publishing, has managed to plant itself and Singapore on the international map of high-quality scientific publishing, a field dominated by century-old heavyweights such as Oxford University Press and Reed-Elsevier. World-renowned scientists such as Stephen Hawking jostle to write for their company, along with some 20 Nobel laureates who are on their authors' list. The $30-million-a-year business publishes more than 400 books and 80 professional journals in physics, engineering, mathematics, management, computer science and medicine each year. It has more than 200 employees worldwide and was ranked No 41 on The Business Times' Enterprise 50 award list in 2002.

INSIDER'S INSIGHT The Phuas' business was born out of shared indignation. Incensed with the "subtle discrimination" against Asian academics and their research, the couple set about breaking what they saw as Western domination of the publishing and dissemination of scientific information. In late 1980, they forked out $200,000 to start World Scientific Publishing out of a 1,000 sq ft Bras Basah Complex shop. While it was the husband's convictions, credentials and contacts that set lofty benchmarks and earned them the rights to publish many tomes, it was the wife's smarts and adaptability that helped the small Singaporean outfit muscle into the scientific publishing scene. A year later, Ms Liu, who was born and raised in Hongkong in a family of successful businessmen with trading operations throughout Asia, quit her

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job as an economist with Singapore Telecom to become the start-up's managing director. The former econometrics lecturer, who has economics bachelor and master degrees from the University of Birmingham, spent the early years driving a van, producing leaflets and packing books with her five employees. Meanwhile, her husband continued his day job as a physics professor at the National University of Singapore and moonlit as the company's chairman and editor-in-chief. His academic links gave them the insider advantage of insight. It helped that he knew many of the world's top physicists, the same authors whose works publishers vie for access to. It also gave their publishing house a "better feel" of the scientific community than most others, which are "run by lawyers and accountants". "Love for something other than money is very important. It takes one to know one. We scientists are very idealistic, naive and sincere people," says Prof Phua, who grew up steeped in Chinese culture in Singapore before he read physics at Imperial College and the University of Birmingham. Following the example of his late father, Mr Phua Chye Long, who had written several books in Chinese and ran a Chinese publishing business for a time, he took unpaid leave from teaching in 1989 and eventually quit to develop his venture full-time. But the physicist-turned-publisher insists it was not an unnatural leap. "Physics and entrepreneurship are both about exploring unknown frontiers and trying new things," he says. However, he remained an honorary adjunct professor at NUS and kept abreast of the latest developments at the cutting edge of science. To hone his trend-spotting instincts on what will make "hot titles", he devours the news in everything from the New York Times to Apple Daily.

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Staying in close touch with his writers and not running the business like a business ironically proved to be little David's edge over the many Goliaths out there. "I didn't have enough money to pay someone like Stephen King US$1 million in advances. But I learnt that small is beautiful. It allows you to build relationships and loyalty with authors," he says. The company went beyond courting the usual suspects among North American scientists, to seek out worthy researchers from Russia, Eastern Europe and Japan. The Phuas also did away with the rigid pricing policies of the trade and extended a 25 per cent discount on books sold to developing countries to promote science. From Day One, the world was their market. They set up their first overseas office in New York in 1987. Today, they have offices in London, Hongkong, Taipei, Bangalore, Shanghai and Singapore. The bulk of their market remains abroad: the United States accounts for 40 per cent, Europe, 30 per cent, followed by Japan and the rest of Asia. Singapore contributes only about 1 per cent. Currently, the profit margin of the privately-held firm, which is branching out into organising scientific conferences and digitisation of content, is about 10 per cent of its $30 million turnover. But the most ego-boosting endorsement of their venture, say the Phuas, is that all the big boys in scientific publishing have at one time or another expressed interest in buying their company. They have never dared to ask how much though, "in case we got greedy". Besides keen insight, the couple advocate "good taste" and scrupulously high standards as a business essential. Instead of trading in their reputation for a fast buck, World Scientific Publishing has refused to descend to publishing "TV programmes, women's

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magazines or horse racing news" like some of their competitors have done to scrape through bad times. "In science, you want to win the Nobel prize; in business, you want to be like billionaire tycoon Li Ka Shing. He's the most successful Chinese businessman in the world who has never neglected his social responsibility," says Prof Phua. The "gambling mentality" of many Singapore businessman who "descend like a drove of bees on the newest honey pot" disconcerts the couple greatly. Many businessmen here seem to be perpetually looking to see what their neighbour is betting on, instead of working on their own competitive strengths, notes Ms Liu. "That is a very low level of entrepreneur ship. Why don't they do the thing they like instead of doing what their neighbour seems to be doing well?" she says. She is convinced that Singapore needs to see a new breed of entrepreneurs of choice — rather than of circumstance — because "those with good minds can go much further". LIFE IN TANDEM

The Phua partnership, which proves eloquently that ivory tower scholars can ace business too, has also yielded a painting collection, a love for classical music and two grown-up children. Daughter Nee, 31, heads their London office, while their son Max, 29, takes care of business development here. Sure, there have been clashes when negotiating their relationship, both as partners in life and in business. "It's a bit difficult but I've gotten used to it. He has the final say because he has the stronger character. Only when it might be detrimental to the company, then we discuss it further," says the wife. Prof Phua has a tendency to hand out books free, she notes, rolling her eyes with the stoicism of one long inured to living with an eccentric.

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He also has a tendency to set grandiose targets by plucking figures out of the sky, which she then brings down to earth by factoring in a "discount". So, although the Phuas' world of science has no borders, no politics and no racial discrimination, it has a bottom line.

Liew Mun Leong

CapitaLand chief executive Liew Mun Leong is living proof that bureaucrats can make good businessmen. He wants the property giant to be known as one that drives a hard bargain when it buys services, but also gives its best to customers.

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CEO Who Enjoys Being Difficult

f o r m e r civil servant" is a label that Mr Liew Mun Leong wears with indignant pride. The civil engineer by training started life developing military camps and infrastructure for Mindef, then led the construction of Changi Airport. After 22 years in the civil service, he joined the private sector in 1992, as group managing director and CEO of the then-largest engineering and construction firm, L&M Investments, amid niggling doubts over whether a bureaucrat could cut it as a businessman. Three-and-a-half years later, he had transformed the company and doubled its share price. Still, the naysaying persisted as he took on his next job as president of Pidemco Land and Singapore Technologies Properties in 1996. In 2000, a merger between Pidemco Land and DBS Land created CapitaLand, South-east Asia's biggest property player, and he was named CEO, again amid some scepticism. It has taken more than a decade, but these days, he is finally recognised as an astute businessman and deal-maker who has taken the government-linked property giant global. CapitaLand now has operations in 78 cities with more than 65 per cent of earnings coming from overseas. In the last four years, it has successfully

First published in The Sunday Times, 31 October 2004 129

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monetised S$7.6 billion of assets, despite weak market conditions, and grown revenue by 31 per cent, from $2.9 billion in 2000 to $3.8 billion last year. The irrepressible 58-year-old lets rip on rebranding CapitaLand, why he only sends A-graders abroad and how he enjoys being difficult.

Q&A Q. You are proof that bureaucrats can make good businessmen. But it took awhile to convince others. Why do former civil servants get such flak in the market? Are you the exception or the norm? A. In the civil service, I was always arguing, asking why can't we do this and that and breaking the rules. So that was my preparation for the business world. When I left, former permanent secretary Ngiam Tong Dow told me: "You've never been a civil servant." I agree, though there is nothing wrong with being one. The civil service gave me a lot of values, such as integrity, discipline and respect for law and order. You learn to be systematic and administratively correct so you do not have situations where records are missing or end up with deals which are shady. A lot of people think civil servants can't be good businessmen, but I roundly refute that. To all the above, just add entrepreneurship. Senior civil servants have a lot of plus points. Being familiar with rules and regulations and having gone through the big machinery of government, they fit in well with public-listed companies. Many of these large companies are even more bureaucratic than the civil service and have even thicker instruction manuals. Q. When you first took over Pidemco Land in 1996 and took a few years to venture overseas, people said: "Typical, humming and hawing and studying all reports like a bureaucrat." Why are you glad you took your time?

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A. Surefootedness cannot be interpreted as being bureaucratic. It just means doing due diligence. Before the Asian Crisis in 1997, everyone talked about a second wing. Almost every property player went to Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Hong Kong and the Philippines. They came to see me with huge artists' impressions of 1,000-hectare townships they were building. But I'm glad we examined ourselves and did not follow them. They were looking at things from a supply perspective, without studying demand. Sure, you can build it but who's going to buy? No one could answer me. Would you consider that being bureaucratic or sensible? So we don't believe in parachuting into a foreign country and developing a project. We want to be much more sure-footed. We started out in Shanghai, then moved on to Beijing and now Guangzhou. When we start out in a new place, we post a chap there to acclimatise himself for a year. He literally lives as a Cantonese, doing nothing but recceing the place, meeting people, until he knows more than the officials do. Our return is his knowledge of the city and local operations. That is how we have done it. Today, we operate in 78 cities. Now we've gained momentum, we can go faster. Q. In internationalising CapitaLand at this bruising pace, what has been your toughest challenge? A. Finding the right people to send overseas and making sure they have cultural intelligence and affinity for the city they are operating in. I've learnt a lot from watching other multinationals do it. For example, for a first posting, Japanese companies usually send their people to more neutral, easy-to-assimilate cities like Singapore and Sydney, before sending them on to New York, Paris or London. Singapore, in particular, is a popular "deculturalisation" city for them to learn English, understand Western culture and orientate themselves. Then,

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after they finish their tour of duty after 15 to 20 years in the West, they are rewarded again with a short stint in Singapore, where they can play golf, eat Chinese food and feel comfortable, before they go back to Japan to become president or senior vice-president. The other extreme is the American model, which tends to be less successful because MNCs throw them into the deep end, without much preparation. Sometimes, they appear too confrontational, brash and transactional, especially in Asia, because the distance between them and the culture they are operating in is too far. Q. Your policy is to send only your best performers overseas. Why? A. Yes, we always send A-graders. We don't send B- or C-graders because this is not an exile exercise. Besides having competence and integrity, you must trust them, because they are operating thousands of miles away and creating a miniature CapitaLand. A lot of companies make the mistake of sending someone who is not good enough. Others prefer to keep A-graders at home and recruit from outside. Big mistake. Even if you hire an outsider who already has a good network and proven record of success in China, they won't understand your products, services, corporate value systems and idiosyncrasies. That is why we always choose a promising insider who has spent a few years working with us. After a stint overseas, they come back to a good position. Everyone knows that whoever wants to take over my job as CEO has to have worked overseas for a minimum of three years. Q. What about the other common areas companies often flounder in their internationalisation efforts? How have you avoided them?

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A. Many global companies just want to find a cheap place for production, but retain their command and control back in London, Tokyo, Paris, New York or Sydney. But we run our overseas outfits like multi-local operations, instead of globalising outwards from Singapore. They have their own command and control and operate like local companies, with their own board of local directors. But when in Japan, we behave like the Japanese, in Australia, like the Australians and in China, like the Chinese. But, of course, we retain our Singaporean value systems, such as no bribing. Q. Singaporeans' inability to grease palms is often seen as a big disadvantage, especially when operating in developing countries. How does CapitaLand get around it? A. Our typical project size in China is $2 billion to $3 billion, yet we don't pay a single yuan of bribe. Our principle is: If we have to bribe, we won't do business. But you can establish a relationship with your country host in a personal, helpful way, without the contamination of bribery. Two years ago, the wife of one of our partners in China died but he dared not tell his daughter, who was then studying in Cornell University in the United States. Every time she called back asking for her mother, he lied that the latter had just stepped out. We felt things could not go on like this and took the heartfelt initiative to help him, since he had never travelled out of China and could not speak English. We made the arrangements and sent someone along with him to the US to help him get through immigration, check into a hotel, break the news to his daughter, then bring him back to China.

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Another example is when we built the Sheraton hotel in Suzhou, we organised and financed a week-long trip to Europe for our partners from the Chinese tourism board to see how Sheraton hotels operate there. As a consequence, our partners travelled with us, learnt with us, and ended up better educated on international practices. During the trip, they also became our friends. If our partners sometimes need a space for a cultural art exhibition in one of our hotels, we don't charge them. If they have difficulty getting a visa in Singapore, we help them. If they have sons who just graduated from Yale University, we employ them. Anyway, we have plenty of hotels that could use such talent. But if they want money, we say "No". Q. What's your ultimate dream, besides seeing your masthead across every major city's skyline? A. Besides that, my goal is to have more than 75 per cent of revenue coming from overseas, even though we are in the very local and old business of property development. In this business of building homes, offices and malls, we deal with all stratas of society — the rich, famous, eccentric and the masses. How many sectors have such impact? So we want to show we are a lasting, reputable brand that builds iconic symbols of Singapore Inc. Right now, our Raffles City Shanghai mall is the best advertisement that Singapore can have. Q. CapitaLand has moved upmarket from its unglamorous days of building utilitarian government projects to, these days, luxury projects like The Loft. How did you make-over the brand? A. By being very detailed. I still review and approve every building's design. Sometimes, I throw some out. I make sure the people managing our projects are very hands-on.

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The problem with Singaporeans is, after some time, they think they are big managers and delegate. Many get promoted too fast and don't spend time on the job getting to know the details. As they go higher, they know more and more, yet less and less. They generalise. But if you don't understand detail, you can never build a brand. A brand promises quality, which means artistry, function and reliability, within costs. In building a condominium project, I make sure buyers get the best value for their money. If the budget allows for it, I'll ask my designer to change to high-end German kitchen equipment. We don't tou gong jian Xiao (cut corners in Mandarin). We pay our contractors on time and don't squeeze them. We also don't do open tenders but pre-qualify a panel of good quality contractors and negotiate prices with them. We have a long-term relationship with them so they dare not cheat us. Q. So you don't subscribe to the Government's practice of open tendering? A. No, it's not a clever model. The problem with tendering is that contractors choose you, you don't choose them. Why? Because if they tender cheap, they will get your contract. But I want to choose them. So I don't do bidding. When I first came to this company, I was horrified that it asked for bids from engineers, lawyers and architects. I stopped it and started inviting proposals from the good ones we want to work with, then settling costs with them. I was a contractor before so I know the costs and can't be bluffed. Q. In time, what do you want people to associate CapitaLand with? A. That we are very difficult people!

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If we are buying services from you, we're very tough and drive a hard bargain. But if we sell to you, we'll give you the best. Postscript

CapitaLand Group has since secured a pipeline of 28 retail malls in several cities across China. Wal-Mart, the largest retailer in the world, will anchor 20 of these malls. The Group is now in 88 cities around the globe.

Michael Bloomberg

Ifs not easy to get the sack at Bloomberg. But ifyou quit, Michael Bloomberg won't shake your hand, much less wish you well And certainly no goodbye party

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Business is Personal — Don't You Dare Resign

Michael Bloomberg is the worst, yet best, boss anyone can have. He runs a tight ship. He works people hard. He is blood-curdlingly blunt. He minces his management style down to this: "I listen to a lot of people and I make a decision. It's not a democracy in that we don't take votes, it's not a dictatorship in that I listen to other opinions." At Bloomberg, dishonesty at any level gets you the sack. "Instantly, no discussion, end of story," the self-made entrepreneur added for emphasis. "Laziness gets you a warning, next time, you get thrown out of the door." But short of that, employees have a tough time getting themselves fired, says the 57- year-old founder and CEO of the Bloomberg multi-media empire, which includes online wire services, radio, television and print media. "The way I look at it, if we hired you and you work hard, we owe you a job. Our job is to take care of you to the best extent we can. I wouldn't bankrupt the company, but I would reduce the profits to zero to help you out," he said in an interview at his Clifford Centre office.

First published in The Straits Times, 24 June 1999

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He was here to bond with his 80 employees and sign a collaboration deal with Radio Corporation of Singapore to work together on a digital radio project. For him, business is personal. A note of warning, the man is militant against re-hiring. If you quit on him, you can forget the frosty politesse and bumbling farewells most other bosses retreat to. His world is delineated clearly between Us and Them. He reserves a disdained low-life category for Them Who Used To Be Us-people, who by leaving his employment, have contravened his code of loyalty. He will not deign to shake your hand (if he can help it). He will not permit a goodbye party. His policy is to look you in the eye and utter "Okay". No more, no less. "That's the end of the conversation. Then I sit there. If they want to stagger on for a couple of minutes and tell me why, that's fine," he said cryptically. "If you want to raise a child, I understand that. I'll ask: 'Are you sure?' and wish you well. If you want to quit to work for somebody else, you're trying to hurt us, so why wish you well?" he asked rhetorically. "You have a right to do it but it doesn't mean I have to be happy about it. Why should I say good luck when I don't mean it? I'm not a believer of mouthing meaningless, hypocritical things." Strangely, Bloomberg does inspire the loyalty he so craves. Staff turnover in his 5,200-strong corporation is under 10 per cent, shockingly low for the financial industry. This low rate has also been pinned on the minimally-bureaucratic, egalitarian environment he tries to create in his offices worldwide. He does not allow walled partitions. There is no dress code, no executive dining rooms to denote privilege. There are also no designations on business cards so no one can ever give the excuse "Not my job description".

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Everyone, himself included, gets same-size desks, is paid from the same revenue stream and has to wear a mandatory employee tag with the employee's first name in bold. And he earns a lot of goodwill by paying himself a salary of US$19,000 (S$32,300) a year. Of course, he also pockets 80 per cent of Bloomberg's profits. In each Bloomberg office, there is a free-for-all snack bar that resembles a mini-mart. It is re-stocked daily on the house. According to the staff, if they underspend their munching budget, they get reprimanded for under-eating. At the Clifford Centre office, I spied shelves crammed with Lay's potato chips, granola bars, Sunmaid raisins, chocolates, Japanese crackers, a many-tiered fresh fruit basket, tea, coffee and even Haagen-Daz ice-cream in the fridge. Lucky us. No wonder they say at Bloomberg, people gripe about waistlines rather than welfare. JUST CALL ME BRAD PITT Interviewing Mr Bloomberg is like riding a roller-coaster. At first, the ride is deceptively lulling, with conservative lurches. They leave you quite unprepared for the disarming ferocity of his convictions, his screaming and his thrill-obsession. At 57, he still fancies himself quite the bon vivant. As he relates in his 1997 autobiography Bloomberg By Bloomberg, he has always lived like a big-expenseaccount bachelor. "I had a girlfriend in every city, skied in every resort, ate in every four-star restaurant and never missed a Broadway p l a y . . . There was never enough time in the day to do it all — but I always did," he said.

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The bachelor by divorce still stages legendary parties for several thousand employees at his house in New York, roller-blades in Central Park, flies his own plane and dives out of helicopters to ski in the winter. He likes to brag with locker-room laddishness about "being pursued by gorgeous women". Everywhere he goes, he still wears his favourite look — that of sardonic disenchantment. In a world where most people eschew directness, he prefers to present the unvarnished truth. If he is bored, he fazes out and lets you know it. If his curiosity is engaged, he asks you questions about yourself. When he thinks, a muscle tweaks in his left cheek. And he whips around in his chair, like a propeller blade on the verge of take-off. A lot of this outspoken idiosyncrasy is showbiz. He is the first to admit it in his book: "I would become Colonel Sanders of financial information services, that target for clever barbs from acerbic columnists, but simultaneously the one whose company and product would be on everyone's lips." And indeed, injecting his vivid personality into his company made for great PR. "I was Bloomberg — Bloomberg was m o n e y — a n d money talked. Perfect!" he wrote. I decided it was time to test out the suavely-orchestrated mayhem. He has been labelled everything from Fox of financial services to Big Swinging Trader. Which was the most complimentary so far? True to form, the man reacted like a loose cannon. Brad Pitt, he pounded out drolly, barely missing a beat. "A lot of people have called me that. I can understand why they make the mistake. Actually, I'm more Leonardo's DiCaprio's age." He is also capable of being endearing. He still calls his mother, who is pushing 90, first thing every morning at work.

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What do they talk about? He looked vaguely embarrassed, but did not deny it. "How are you? Are you all right?" he cited. Then, he delivers a pared-down update on the business since she is only "mildly interested". But ever conscious that I would be left without a kicker, he adds for good measure that whenever people ask housewife Charlotte Bloomberg if she is related to him, she denies it flatly. "She doesn't want to be asked to get their grandsons a job or a donation for their pet charity. My Mum puts it all in perspective," he said.

ME RETIRE? NEVER Only very rarely, when he thinks no one is looking, does Mr Bloomberg look tired. Otherwise, the avid jogger describes everything in adrenalin rushes. In his book, he calls his dismissal at age of 39 from bigwig securities trading firm Salomon Brothers "the thrill of getting fired". In 1981, at the height of Wall Street stardom, the clerk who worked his way up to general partner was fired for his "wise-ass" outspokenness after 15 years on the job and shoved US$10 million in compensation. He went out and bought his wife a sable fur coat simply because the luxurious gift seemed to denote: "No sweat. We can still eat, we're still players." His style is short, sharp and staccato. He said: "I never look over my shoulder. Once finished: Gone. Life continues." The wife reassured, he withdrew US$300,000 and started Bloomberg in a one-room office the next day. The rest, as he likes to put it, is "work in progress". The son of a Jewish bookkeeper, born in the blue-collar town of Medford outside Boston, has little patience for slackers.

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He said: "You can never have complete mastery over your existence. You can't choose the advantages you start out with, and you certainly can't pick your genetic intelligence level. But you can control how hard you work." He went to Johns Hopkins University on a National Defence college loan and started working life counting stock certificates by hand and squinting through reams of papers for historical stock prices. He finally became a partner in 1972 by making sure he worked longer and harder than everyone else. He was the first to arrive at the office each morning at 7, right after Mr Billy Salomon, the firm's managing partner. "When he needed to borrow a match or talk sports, I was the only other one in the trading room, so he talked to me," he recounted candidly in his book. "Woody Allen once said that 80 per cent of life is just showing up. I believe that." So, fatigued or not, Mr Bloomberg still shows up. "Yes, I'm tired and yes, it's hard work but I like what I do. I get to vacation every Monday morning," he said. He still thinks the perfect day is one where he is "hopelessly overscheduled". A jog early in the morning, getting in to work by 7 am, wading through meetings, phone calls, e-mails, visiting clients, video conferences, interviews and a couple of harried business lunches in between. Any chance of him giving up the reins in this lifetime? "I don't think I'll ever retire," he confided. "I'd get a nervous breakdown, I can't seem to sit still. Once I played golf three days in a row. It almost killed me!"

Postscript Michael Bloomberg left his financial news and data company in 2002 to become New York City Mayor. He is expected to seek a second four-year term as mayor this fall (2005) and still owns 72 per cent of New York-based Bloomberg LP, which has about 8,000 employees.

Ngiam Tong Dow

Since Mr Ngiam Tong Dow retired from the civil service in 1999, affairs of state have weighed heavily on his mind. The highly respected former Permanent Secretary worries about Singapore's long-term survival and the kind of society the next generation will inherit

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Stop Dancing to the Tune of the Gorilla

66, the HDB Corp chairman Mr Ngiam Tong Dow insists he is "no radical", just a concerned Singaporean with three grandchildren, who wonders "whether there will be a Singapore for them in 50 years' time". In this interview, he gives a candid appraisal of the civil service, and his prognosis of what the lack of an alternative political leadership means for Singapore.

Q&A

Q. With all this pessimism surrounding Singapore's prospects today, what's your personal prognosis? Will Singapore survive Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew? A. Unequivocally yes, Singapore will survive MM Lee but provided he leaves the right legacy. What sort of legacy he wants to leave is for him to say, but I, a blooming upstart, dare to suggest to him that we should open up politically and allow talent to be spread throughout our society so that an alternative leadership can emerge.

First published in The Sunday Times, 28 September 2003 147

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So far, the People's Action Party's tactic is to put all the scholars into the civil service because it believes the way to retain political power forever is to have a monopoly on talent. But in my view, that's a very short-term view. It is the law of nature that all things must atrophy. Unless SM allows serious political challenges to emerge from the alternative elite out there, the incumbent elite will just coast along. At the first sign of a grassroots revolt, they will probably collapse just like the incumbent Progressive Party to the left-wing PAP onslaught in the late 1950s. I think our leaders have to accept that Singapore is larger than the PAP. Q. What would be a useful first step in opening up? A. For Singapore to survive, we should release half our talent — our President and Overseas Merit scholars — to the private sector. When ten scholars come home, five should turn to the right and join the public sector or the civil service; the other five should turn to the left and join the private sector. These scholars should serve their bond to Singapore — not to the Government — by working in or for Singapore overseas. As matters stand, those who wish to strike out have to break their bonds, pay a financial penalty and worse, be condemned as quitters. But it takes a certain temperament and mindset to be a civil servant. The former head of the civil service, Sim Kee Boon, once said that joining the administrative service is like entering a royal priesthood. Not all of us have the temperament to be priests. However upright a person is, the mandarin will in time begin to live a gilded life in a gilded cage. As a Permanent Secretary, I never had to worry whether I could pay my staff their wages. It was all provided for in the budget. As chairman of DBS Bank, I worried about wages only 20 per cent of the time.

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I now face my greatest business challenge as chairman of HDB Corp, a new start-up spun off from HDB. I spend 90 per cent of my time worrying whether I have enough to pay my staff at the end of the month. It's a mental switch. Q. What is your biggest worry about the civil service? A. The greatest danger is we are flying on auto-pilot. What was once a great policy, we just carry on with more of the same, until reality intervenes. Take our industrial policy. At the beginning, it was the right thing for us to attract multinationals to Singapore. For some years now, I've been trying to tell everybody: "Look, for God's sake, grow our own timber." If we really want knowledge to be rooted in Singaporeans and based in Singapore, we have to support our SMEs. I'm not a supporter of SMEs just for the sake of more SMEs but we must grow our own roots. Creative Technology's Sim Wong Hoo is one and Hyflux's Olivia Lum is another but that's too few. We have been flying on auto-pilot for too long. The MNCs have contributed a lot to Singapore but they are totally unsentimental people. The moment you're uncompetitive, they just relocate. Q. Why has this come about? A. I suspect we have started to believe our own propaganda. There is also a particular brand of Singapore elite arrogance creeping in. Some civil servants behave like they have a mandate from the emperor. We think we are little Lee Kuan Yews. MM Lee has earned his spurs, with his fine intellect and international standing. But even Lee Kuan Yew sometimes doesn't behave like Lee Kuan Yew. There is also a trend of intellectualisation for its own sake, which loses a sense of the pragmatic concerns of the larger world.

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The Chinese, for example, keep good archives of the Imperial examinations which used to be held at the Temple of Heaven. At the beginning, the scholars were tested on very practical subjects, such as how to control floods in their province. But over time, they were examined on the Confucian Analects and Chinese poetry composition. Hence, they became emasculated by the system, a worrying fate which could befall Singapore. Q. But aren't you an exception to the norm of the gilded mandarin with zero bottomline consciousness? A. That's because I started out with Economic Development Board in the 1959. Investment promotion then was all about hard foot slogging and personal persuasion, which teaches you to be very humble and patient. I learnt to be a supplicant and a professional beggar, instead of a dispenser of favours. These days, most civil servants start out administering the law. If I had my way, every administrative officer would start his or her career in the EDB. Q. Your idea of creating an alternate elite is not new. What do you think of the oft-mooted suggestion of achieving that by splitting ranks within the People's Action Party? A. Quite honestly, if you ask me, Team A-and-Team B is a synthetic and infantile idea. If you want to challenge the Government, it must be spontaneous. You have to allow some of your best and brightest to remain outside your reach and let them grow spontaneously. How do you know their leadership will not be as good as yours? But if you monopolise all the talent, there will never be an alternative leadership. And alternatives are good for Singapore.

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Q. In your calculation, what are the odds of this alternative replacing the incumbent? A. Of course there's a political risk. Some of these chaps may turn out to be your real opposition, but that is the risk the PAP has to take if it really wants Singapore to endure. A model we should work towards is the French model of the elite administration. The very brightest of France all go to university or college. Some emerge Socialists, others Conservative, some work in industries, some work in government. Yet, at the end of the day, when the chips are down, they are all Frenchmen. No member of the French elite will ever think of betraying his country, never. That is the sort of Singapore elite we want. It doesn't mean that all of us must belong to the PAP. That is very important.

Q. What do bad times mean for the PAP, which has based its legitimacy on providing the economic goods and asset enhancement? Is its social compact with the people in need of an update? A. Oh yes. And my advice is: Go back to Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew's old credo, where nobody owes us a living. After I had just taken over as the Housing Board's chairman in 2000, an astute academic asked me: "Tong Dow, what's your greatest problem at HDB?" Then he diagnosed it himself: "Initially, you gave peanuts to monkeys so they would dance to your tune. Now you've given them so much by way of peanuts that the monkey has become a gorilla and you have to dance to its tune. That's your greatest problem."

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Our people have become over-fed and today's economic realities mean we have to put them on a crash diet. We cannot starve them because there will be a political explosion. So the art of government today is to wean everyone off the dispensable items. We should just concentrate on helping the poorest 5 to 10 per cent of the population, instead of handing out a general largesse. Forget about asset enhancement, Singapore shares and utility rebates. You're dancing to the tune of the gorilla. I don't understand the urgency of raising the Goods and Services Tax. Why tax the lower-income, then return it to them in an aid package? It demeans human dignity and creates a growing supplicant class who habitually hold out their palms. Despite the fact that we say we are not a welfare state, we act like one of the most "welfarish" states in the world. We should appeal instead to people's sense of pride and self-reliance. I think political courage is needed here. And my instinct is that the Singaporean will respect you for that. Q. So what should this new compact consist of? A. It should go back to what was originally promised: "That you shall be given the best education, whether it be academic or vocational, according to your maximum potential." And there will be no judgment whether an engineer is better than a doctor or a chef. My late mother was a great woman. Although illiterate, she singlehandedly brought up four boys and a girl. She used to say in Hainanese: "If you have one talent which you excel in, you will never starve." I think the best legacy to leave is education and equal opportunity for all.

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When the Hainanese community came to Singapore, they were the latest arrivals and the smallest in number. So they had no choice but to become humble houseboys, waiters and cooks. But they always wanted their sons to have a better life than themselves. The great thing about Singapore was that we could get an education, which gave us mobility, despite coming from the poorest families. Today, the Hainanese, as a dialect group, form proportionately the highest number of professionals in Singapore. Q. You say focus on education. What is top of your wishlist for re-making Singapore's education system? A. Each year, the PSLE creams off all the top boys and girls and dispatches them to only two schools, Raffles Institution and Raffles Girls' School. However good these schools are, the problem is you are educating your elite in only two institutions, with only two sets of mentors, and casting them in more or less the same mould. It worries me that Singapore is only about "one brand" because you never know what challenges lie ahead and where they will come from. I think we should spread out our best and brightest to at least a dozen schools. Q. You advocate a more inclusive mindset all around? A. Yes, intellectually, everyone has to accept that the country of Singapore is larger than the PAP. But even larger than the country of Singapore, which is limited by size and population, is the nation of Singapore, which includes a diaspora. My view is that we should have a more inclusive approach to nationbuilding. We have started the Majulah Connection, an international network where every Singaporean — whether he is a citizen or not, so long as he feels for Singapore — is included as part of our diaspora.

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Similarly, we should include foreigners who have worked and thrived here as friends of Singapore. That's the only way to survive. Otherwise, its just four million people on a little red dot of 600 sq km. If you exclude people, you become smaller and smaller, and in the end, you'll disappear. Q. What is the kind of Singapore you hope your grandchildren will inherit? A. Let's look at Sparta and Athens, two city states in Greek history. Singapore is like Sparta, where the top students are taken away from their parents as children and educated. Cohort by cohort, they each select their own leadership, ultimately electing their own Philosopher King. When I first read Plato's Republic, I was totally dazzled by the great logic of this organisational model where the best selects the best. But when I reached the end of the book, it dawned on me that though the starting point was meritocracy, the end result was dictatorship and elitism. In the end, that was how Sparta crumbled. Yet, Athens, a city of philosophers known for its different schools of thought, survived. What does this tell us about out-of-bounds markers? So SM Lee has to think very hard what legacy he wants to leave for Singapore and the type of society he wants to leave behind. Is it to be a Sparta, a well-organised martial society, but in the end, very brittle; or an untidy Athens which survived because of its diversity of thinking? Personally, I believe that Singaporeans are not so kuai (Hokkien for obedient) as to become a Sparta. This is our saving grace. As a young senior citizen, I very much hope that Singapore will survive for a long time, but as an Athens. It is more interesting and worth living and dying for.

Anthony Yeo

*T

-*:>*?

Enough of rags-to-riches entrepreneurs who measure success by turnover, profits, pay and the acquisition of status symbols, Susan Long talks to a different kind of entrepreneur, one whose undertaking is to help people gain mental health rather than material wealth.

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Life Can be Rich without Riches

^ h e Singapore Dream of accruing assets leaves him cold. Mr Anthony Yeo is unpatriotically bereft of any aspirations to own the middle-class trappings of Singapore life, whether it be landed property, country club membership or luxury car. All his life, he has lived in public housing without air-conditioning, renovation work or expensive furnishings. He does not even carry a mobile phone — that standard Singaporean accoutrement. At age 53, the clinical director of Counselling and Care Centre earns less than $6,000 a month, "less than most young professionals", he reckons. Considered one of the best in his field here, he has spent the past 30 years in social service as a family therapist. Despite attractive offers to go private, he has steadfastly refused to stray, preferring to prove quietly to himself that "life can be rich without the riches of life". "This is my contribution to promoting and enhancing the well-being of society. My belief is that people matter more than anything else.

First published in The Straits Times, 7 June 2002

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"We are not just human beings, we are also spiritual beings with a soul dimension to our existence. Touching lives is my way of acknowledging, appreciating and accepting this dimension," says the man with a greying goatee which seems to grow longer as he ages. It gives the self-styled socio-political commentator, who has penned countless strongly-worded letters to The Straits Times Forum Page over the years, the appearance of a wizened sage. Opinionated yet open-minded, emphatic yet empathetic, the father of two has made the Singapore family his lifelong cause and calling. With his signature anti-materialistic stance, he hits out regularly at the authorities whenever economic imperatives threaten the family as an institution here. "I want to make a statement that life can be worthwhile, fruitful and meaningful without being materially endowed. "As I've learnt over the years, it's possible to live comfortably with less. Life can still be elegant without being expensive, exquisite without being extravagant," says the counsellor who is married to Soo Lan, 53, a part-time breastfeeding consultant at Mount Elizabeth Hospital. They have two sons, Lucius, 26, who is studying production and film in London, and Eugene, 22, who is serving National Service. Home is a Housing Board maisonette in the east, decorated DIY-style with knick-knacks scoured from overseas family vacations and recycled stuff. They get around in a three-year-old Mitsubishi Lancer. "I do not see it as a sacrifice but a way of life . . . My sons were never deprived of material comforts. I do not impose my lifestyle on them and try to be as generous as possible so they do not have to grow up with a complex that they have been deprived," says the family man who enjoys theatre, baking bread and the occasional glass of wine.

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He is a strong advocate of enjoying one's children and having "minimal expectations" of them. He recalls that his blood pressure remained constant even when one of his sons went through the Normal Stream. He refuses to put any pressure on them academically but leaves them to decide "what they want to do with their lives and get there in their own time". Up till today, he and his wife still "pak tor" (date in Hokkien) and catch a movie, play or concert once a week. The whole family does its supermarket shopping together, hangs out on Sunday nights and takes a vacation together at least once a year. "We try not to make money an issue. If we can afford it, we spend it. Money should be a means to enhance life and relationships," he says. HE FAILED 0 LEVELS TWICE He developed his social consciousness when he saw how generous and hospitable his odd-job labourer father and housewife mother were, although they had little. During his growing-up years, their one-room Serangoon rental flat was always open to any relative or friend. The pint-sized boy with a giant inferiority complex was nicknamed "the last boy" in school, because he flunked his examinations with such alarming consistency that he was dropped from three different primary schools. He failed his O levels — not once but twice — at Victoria School and had to study for his A levels through night classes, while working as a land-use surveyor for $5 a day. Those early failures gave the introspective man "a sense of empathy for those who struggle with the painful experiences in life" and set his heart on the "people business".

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It made him decide to major in social work at the then-University of Singapore. In his final year, he was offered a bursary by the Counselling and Care Centre, which was then known as the Churches' Counselling Centre and run by Western missionaries. Upon his graduation in 1972, he became the first Singaporean to be employed at the centre which helped mainly English-educated people deal with stress-related emotional and psychological problems. After garnering a master's degree in counselling from an American theological university and going for psychotherapy training in New York, he returned in 1981 to pioneer formal training for counsellors here to reduce Singapore's dependence on visiting Western family-life gurus. Through the years, he authored eight books on counselling, marital and stress-related issues, such as A Helping Hand and Shadow Of Death. His was always a hoarse, sometimes lone, voice, calling for more marriage preparation and family-life education courses here. Long before the notion of globalisation was popular, the social entrepreneur was traversing Asia and exporting his brand of counsellor training seminars to many social and religious bodies. The key reason he was able to concentrate on service to others, he says, was that he managed to "move preoccupation with money out of my priority list". Does he ever wish for a bigger bank balance? "I'm not immune to all this. I do think about it," he confides with his usual candour. "But if I'm not careful, I'll be selling my soul, so I prefer to stay focused. "If I were to earn more money, how would that enhance my quality of life? I don't think I need more money. I don't think I feel more deprived or less fulfilled than anyone else right now." He becomes transfixed by the question posed to him, "If you had a million dollars, how would you spend it?"

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After a thoughtful silence, he says with a regretful smile: "I would rather not have a million dollars for fear that I would use it too much on myself and my family. I prefer not to be put in that kind of dilemma." Q&A Q. What peeves you about the way the Government has been promoting marriage and procreation? A. At the end of the day, are we talking about human beings? In the 70s, then Health Minister Toh Chin Chye wanted to sterilise women who were schizophrenic. It got me riled up. How can you do this kind of inhuman genetic engineering? What proof do you have that schizophrenic mothers will surely produce schizophrenic offspring? Family policies here have always been motivated by economic ends. Since the Great Marriage Debate in the 80s to get graduate women married off because of their gene pool, the bottomline has always been the economic survival of the nation. It still is. The Government has not changed its tune, so I'm not going to change mine. It is still not interested in people, who are treated like economic products and cogs in the machine. Q. What would you say was absent on the Remaking Singapore priority list? A. Channelling more resources to develop human resources here. I'm not so concerned with the fact that we're not replenishing our population, because that is a worldwide phenomena in developed countries. Q. But what are we doing with what we have? A. If we look at certain segments of the population in Singapore, they are still producing children. I wish we would spend more resources to develop this

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poorer sector, who are mostly Malays, instead of channelling so much to the elite sectors. Q. Do you have any concern about Singapore's value system today? A. In the last General Election, I read about two top surgeons supposedly making a lot of sacrifices to go into public service. To me, it's no sacrifice if you have already had so much all your life, a million dollars in the bank and a private property, then decide to give it up to earn less. You're giving up nothing, you are just giving up having more. It troubles me that this is the Singapore notion of sacrifice. Q. What is the latest issue upsetting you today? A. The Health Ministry's decision not to allow an organ transplant from a nonrelated donor in the case of Miss Selvarani Raja, who died after her liver collapsed. How can the law be above life? When someone is dying, those who make the law must be prepared to suspend protocol and transcend rules, then review it afterwards. I must applaud surgeon K.C. Tan for making the decision to go ahead and try to save her life. We talk about remaking Singapore where everyone matters, but some people obviously matter more, especially if they are media celebrities like Andrea De Cruz. The ministry's approval for her case came so fast because of "strong emotional ties" between her and her actor-boyfriend Pierre Png, who gave her part of his liver. But how can you measure emotional bonding? How do you even know if their relationship is going to last? Altogether, it just gives people the impression that Andrea was a celebrity so her life was saved, but Miss Raja, who was she?

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Q. Why are you not afraid to voice your strident views? A. I don't harbour any political ambitions. But I think I've as much stake in Singapore society as anybody else. Why shouldn't I be concerned? What I speak about is not seditious in anyway, even though it is critical, so I do not see why I should get into trouble. Even if I do, I've discussed this with my wife long ago, we are prepared to pay the price for it. Q. Do you feel discouraged when your views are treated as just background noise? A. Well, the prevailing view here is that when the Government says "We'll listen", they've already made up their minds. But I think we should still influence people, if not the policy-makers, to think differently. Q. If you could choose your own label, what would it be? A. A voice of conscience in a materialistic society reminding people that there are other things more important than money. Q. What's with the goatee? A. Singapore is such an orderly place where everyone is expected to conform. I guess you can call it my own little assertion of uniqueness. Postscript Anthony Yeo has since written two more books and is now penning one on weathering the tsunamis (crises and other disasters) in life. Since the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, he has been busy trying to alert people to value life and not take it for granted.

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Dr Cfiia Boon Hock

Meet Dr Macabre. He is Singapore's resident suicidologist who has spent his lifetime poring over coroner reports and trying to demystify what drives people over the edge. Today Dr Chia Boon Hock, 68, a psychiatrist in private practice, is a walking repository of data and research on the motivations, methods and meanings of suicide. In a rare interview, the low-profile doctor opens up to Susan Long about this grisly spectre that haunts Singapore's high-rise landscape and claims at least one life here everyday

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Singapore's Suicide Shrink

Q. What drove you to specialise in suicide? A. As a young boy, I was very fat and a loner. I fell in love in university, had my heart broken, failed my examinations and had a lot of emotional problems. Because of my own struggles, I got interested in psychiatry as a medical student and was one of very few who chose to specialise in it. Then, becoming a shrink or head doctor was considered the Cinderella of medicine, airyfairy and woolly. In 1968,1 became the first psychiatrist to go into private practice here. I quickly discovered that one of the greatest patient hazards is suicide because most psychiatric patients are healthy and don't die from natural diseases. But there was no suicide data available then. I never thought of the topic as macabre. A doctor's main purpose is to save lives. According to the World Health Organisation, there are about a million suicides a year in the world each year. So in 1969,1 decided to pursue a doctorate on suicide in Singapore with the University of Singapore's social medicine department. In the subsequent years, I spent my lunch-time at the coroner's court. I would grab a sandwich and rush there from work four times a week to

First published in The Sunday Times, 4 April 2004 167

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examine the police, medical, post-mortem and pathological reports in each and every file involving unnatural death. It was a laborious process. My methodology was primitive and I groped in the dark. But I'm an obsessive character who never lets go and I became a fixture there until I got my doctorate in 1980. Since 2000, through the Samaritans Of Singapore, where I'm a consultant and member, I've returned to the coroner's court to continue my research. Today, collecting data on suicide has grown into a hobby. Q. What are some misconceptions about suicide you want to dispel? A. One of the widely held myths is that you should never ask about suicidal intentions. Doctors fear it will instigate patients and give them ideas. Not true. You must ask if they plan to commit suicide both indirectly and directly in order to assess suicide risk. But a lot of therapists hesitate to ask because if the answer is Yes, it means more work, feeling threatened and not knowing how to proceed. Also, patients don't like to talk about it. They are prone to deny suicide intent. So doctors have to be trained how to ask about it. But first, they have to conquer their fear and find out more. Another common problem is that most social workers only ask for the psychological pressures that lead to suicide. But suicide is really a very complex psycho-social, mental and physical problem. From the thousands of cases I've studied, there is never a single neat, simplistic solution. For the young, what pushes them over the edge tends to be a combination of psycho-social life stresses, such as relationship, financial, work, social and legal problems. For older people, it is often prolonged pain and suffering due to physical illness, coupled with dwindling finances and not wishing to be a burden.

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For both age groups, mental illness such as personality disorders, or drug and alcohol abuse, also play a part. Q. The recent rash of dramatic suicides gives the impression that suicide is more prevalent here than ever. True or false? A. There tends to be small peaks just after a recession, when financial problems, unemployment and hopelesses take their toll. Singapore experienced a few of these peaks during the depression from 1906 to 1910, the anxiety-ridden pre-war years from 1936 to 1940, postrecession in 1986 and just after the Asian economic crisis in 1999. We may be experiencing another peak now. But otherwise, the suicide rate has not increased or decreased over the years but remained stable at about 10 to 12 per 100,00 people per annum. How does that compare internationally? Out of 50 countries worldwide, Singapore ranks a middling 28th for male suicides but a slightly high 14th for female suicides. Among Asian countries, Singapore's suicide rate trails behind Japan, Korea, Hong Kong and China. Q. What worries you most about suicide trends here today? A. In Singapore, as well as internationally, suicide among older people aged 45 and above has dropped in the last 10 years, but younger victims aged five to 44 are now making up for the fall. In 1950, studies showed that the old committed 60 per cent of all suicides worldwide and the young, 40 per cent. But by 1998, the young accounted for 55 per cent of all suicides and the old, down to 45 per cent. One reason for this is better healthcare today, which helps relieve the discomfort of age-related diseases, as well as better treatment of mental illnesses. Also, most of Singapore's first generation of unsuccessful immigrants,

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who were poor and had no relatives here, already ended their own lives in the late 50s and early 60s. But disturbingly, more young people are taking their place and killing themselves, especially young females. Among Singapore's student population, 2.8 males committed suicide to every one female in 1995. But by 2002, the ratio was 0.7 males to every one female, which showed that young women had overtaken young men in the suicide stakes. In fact, the rate at which Singapore's females aged 15 to 24 are committing suicide is now among the highest in the world. In the same age group, Singapore's young suicidal males ranked a more moderate 33rd position. In particular, Malay female suicide rates appear to be shooting upwards from a very low base previously. It's always tragic to see young people end it all. Most do it because of family problems, inability to cope with bereavement of loved ones, stress in school or national service. Some of their suicide notes, which tend to be longer and more expressive, detail their regret of not making it to Raffles Girls School, playing too much before PSLE or not being able to "stand the army". Q. Which other groups are you watching closely? A. Taxi drivers. More than 30 have killed themselves since 1995, the year I started collecting their suicide rates. From just one suicide in 1995, the toll went up to nine in 2000. I have a feeling it will go up further as a lot of them lost jobs during the recession, and are reduced to driving taxis to support themselves and struggling to cope with diminished circumstances. Another profession I'm monitoring is army personnel because of the stress of their highly structured and disciplined working environment. My figures show that at least 18 of them have committed suicide since 1995.

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But most vulnerable of all are probably our Indonesian foreign maids. Many come from impoverished rural villages, are painfully young and barely educated. Unlike their Filipino counterparts, they know less English and are less aware of their rights. Like lost souls, they find it difficult to adapt to this strange new land. Some cruel Singaporean employers make them work from dawn to midnight without proper rest and food. But they know they can't go home because their poverty-stricken families have mortgaged their house and incurred huge debts to send them here. Driven to desperation, at least 30 of them have killed themselves in the last three years alone, leaving behind heart-rending suicide letters. Q. Have suicide methods changed with the times? A. In the earlier days, Singaporeans downed pesticides. Over the years, jumping has become more popular, following the increase of Housing Board flats. In the United Kingdom, gassing used to be a popular means of suicide until the government there made their gas less poisonous. The suicide rate dropped because people don't usually bother to look for alternative ways to kill themselves. Q. How does it feel to be Singapore's resident suicide shrink? Is that an honour you'd rather not have? A. About 90 of my patients have killed themselves out of the 5,180 I've treated over a 20-year period. No matter how much I know about suicide, even now when one of my patients jumps, I still feel uncomfortable for at least three days. I can't sleep and need to take sleeping tablets. I start to wonder: Have I done this or that right or not? It takes a while for the unease to dissipate.

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So I try my best to make sure they don't kill themselves. But assessments are not foolproof, circumstances change, there are so many variables and information I've no access to. It's hard. Q. How then do you maintain your own peace of mind? A. By being very committed to living. I've never stopped studying, keep up to date and have plenty of interests. I'm a classical pianist, a multi-medal golfer, a keen horticulturist and, as you know, an avid reader of suicide books. I have two children, both doctors, who have given me three grandchildren to play with. I believe in carrying a light burden. I live in a small shophouse in Joo Chiat and rent out my bungalow. Although I can afford a car, I go around by bus. I eat simply and exercise frequently. In order to survive in Singapore, you've got to be harsh on yourself. Q. What bothers you most about the mental health of Singaporeans? A. We live in a very stressful society where the costs of living are sky-high. Life is hard because we have to compete in everything and be extra good to get anywhere. All these subtle stresses add up. Singapore is a great place to live if you are young, intelligent, rich, successful, capable and healthy. But the average person isn't all that. Society seems to send out a message that once you're old, they don't want you anymore. But every Singaporean should be acknowledged as important, even the less able. Finances seem to play a disproportionately large role in suicides here. About 30 per cent of Singaporean men and 12 per cent of women committed suicide from 2000 to 2002 because of financial problems, ranging from debts,

Singapore's Suicide Shrink

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losses, gambling, unpaid credit card and medical bills and being hounded by violent loan sharks. Between 1995 and 2002, there were also 79 gamblers who committed suicide. That's another reason why I think the new casino is not a good thing for Singapore at all.

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Professor Feng Pao Hsii

Professor Feng Pao Hsii is well-known to elderly Singaporeans sujfering from rheumatism. He tells Susan Long about the joys of an unglamorous calling.

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Doctor Who Made Aches and Pains His Calling

cS ingapore's

Father of Rheumatology, Professor Feng Pao Hsii, will tell you frankly that his specialisation is unglamorous, largely geriatric and not the most cutting-edge. The rotund, 66-year-old consultant emeritus with Tan Tock Seng Hospital makes jokes about it regularly. "The Chinese call rheumatology fong sap, which means 'wind and rain' or 'dampness' in Cantonese. No mother wants her son to be interested in dampness. They prefer their son to be a doctor of the heart or the brain. "When her friends ask what her son is doing and she goes, 'Oh, doing fong sap\ they will say, 'My God, must be a stupid fellow!'" he says, guffawing away at the imagined exchange. "It doesn't bother me at all because I like it. If you think it is not glamorous, and you want a more glamorous specialisation, go ahead. To each his own." Prof Feng was one of two persons to be presented with the Lee FoundationNational Healthcare Group Lifetime Achievement Award, for more than 40 years

First published in The Straits Times, 16 August 2002

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of contributions to health care here. The other recipient was Bioethics Advisory Committee chairman Lim Pin. Uncomfortable with accolades, Prof Feng shrugs off the award gruffly. It was pain, not platitudes, which drove him to specialise in rheumatology as a young doctor, he says. Returning to Singapore in 1964, fresh from a Colombo Plan scholarship to the University of Glascow in Scotland, he noticed a glaring lack of specialists in rheumatic diseases. Yet, in the hospitals, there were long lines of elderly patients suffering from rheumatoid arthritis. "All these old fellows were in pain and their fingers were crooked. Nobody seemed to know what to do with them. So, they hopped from one doctor to another," he recalls. Noticing that a good number of the rheumatic drugs used in Britain were not used here because no one knew how to use them properly, he decided to "look into it". He spent the next few decades attending rheumatology conferences in Britain and the United States — mostly at his own expense — getting to know experts in the field and inviting them to give lectures in Singapore. He even convinced the Shaw Foundation and the Singapore Turf Club to part with $250,000 so that he could build a small rheumatology laboratory in an old, disused ward at Tan Tock Seng Hospital. Through the years, he penned impassioned letters to the Health Ministry, outlining his plans to start a rheumatology department. Each time, it replied saying there were not enough specialists to justify forming a department. It was — and still is — an uphill task attracting younger doctors to his chosen field.

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"Young doctors all want to do cardiology, gastroenterology and other procedure-related disciplines. With procedures, you can make more money," he laments. Still, he ploughed on, doing research and contributing papers profusely to medical journals to build more interest in the specialisation among younger doctors. Bit by bit, he cobbled together his dream of starting a full-fledged rheumatology department here. His mantra, then and now, is: "Build on your own. I decide. If there's a need, I do it. Like Nike says, 'Just Do It'. If you wait for other people, nothing will happen." Finally, at the age of 60, he opened the doors to the first and only department of rheumatology in Singapore, at Tan Tock Seng Hospital, and became its first head in August 1995. That done, he wasted no time in establishing links with international rheumatology associations and placing Tan Tock Seng on the map as a regional training centre. To date, he estimates that he has mentored and trained at least 15 rheumatologists here today. Fondly referring to them as his "boys and girls", he says he tells them to dump the rules and get involved emotionally with their patients. "I like to ask my young doctors, 'If she were your grandmother or your mother, how would you treat this patient?'" "Doctors are taught not to get involved emotionally with patients. But I think you must have empathy and know how your patient feels, or else you cannot do your best," says the doctor who has known some of his patients for 35 years.

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Then, suddenly, he wisecracks, as is his habit: "I'm not saying go dancing with them and all that. That is a different kind of emotional involvement." WAR STORIES

He was always fat, even as a boy. Quiet, serious and bookish, he shied away from all sports. "Whenever I ran, I always came in last, so I decided I might as well not play sports. If I can't win, there's no point," says Prof Feng, who applied his energies to his studies instead, and usually finished first or second in class at Anglo-Chinese School. His late father, a Shanghai-born optician, harboured hopes of him becoming a doctor, and shipped him off to Hongkong University to take up medicine. "They asked me, 'You want to be doctor?' I said, 'OK.' That was it," he relates in his swift, staccato manner. After three years in Hongkong, his father died and his family could no longer afford to support him overseas. So he returned to continue his medical studies at the University of Malaya (Singapore division), and graduated in 1960. He remembers he was in no hurry to be a specialist or to settle down for a long time. Gulping down his coffee at the Toa Payoh Hospital one morning in 1970, he chanced upon an application form on the staff notice-board for a World Health Organisation fellowship in nephrology in Israel. At a loose end as both his parents had died by then, he signed up. To his "horror", he got it. He was later told he had been the only applicant, because Israel was then at war with Egypt. When he arrived in Tel Aviv, he found out that the majority of people there spoke only Hebrew and no English at all, and that pork — the self-confessed gourmand's staple meat dish at home — was banned for religious reasons.

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The year he spent at the military hospital in Tel Hashomer was busy because of the number of war casualties. One incident is seared into his memory: One night, after fierce fighting in the Sinai desert, a badly burnt Egyptian soldier was evacuated by helicopter to his hospital. When his kidney collapsed, the nephrology team, headed by an Iraqi Jew, gave him the best dialysis available and spent four hours trying to resuscitate him. "To me, it looked very strange. This was actually the enemy they had been fighting. Yet, they spent the night trying to save him. When he eventually died, the nurses cried for him," he recalls. That episode became his personal template of how his profession should be. "Medicine doesn't respect where you're from, or whether you're foe or friend. The aim is to save lives, no matter whose they are," he says. He returned home a year later and continued researching his wide-ranging interests, including lupus, which afflicts mostly young females in their reproductive years. This resulted in a landmark publication in the British Medical Journal in 1973, and he became one of the first doctors in the world to use cyclophosphamide to treat the disease. While doing kidney biopsies for his thesis on lupus, he remembers bringing a thermos flask from home, filling it with ice, placing the biopsy specimen in a small tube inside, and then taking it to the Singapore General Hospital personally for a pathologist to examine. He did this more than 150 times. What inspired him to keep going over the years was really the stoicism of his patients, especially those who suffer pain and disability for decades, yet still raise children and carry on working till they cannot work any more.

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"If you talk to them, it's as though nothing had happened. They are still very optimistic. I always think that if I were like that, I would have committed suicide. But these people have great courage."

LOSING PATIENTS A bachelor till his mid-40s, he lived contentedly in unpretentious staff quarters at Toa Payoh Hospital, smoking as many as 60 cigarettes a day, working over Christmas and New Year public holidays, uncomplainingly on call virtually 24 hours a day. Even today, he is so besotted with work that he does not bother with hobbies, beyond watching gangster movies and surfing medical websites. "I hate to put balls into holes; I think it's stupid. Hobbies waste a lot of time," he declares. He consented to procure a semi-detached house in Bukit Timah, as well as kick his nicotine habit, only when he tied the knot with Alice some 20 years ago. He confesses he applied the same grim determination to his personal life as he did to his professional one, courting his wife, a former air stewardess from Ipoh, with "guerilla warfare" tactics and by "getting rid of the opposition" for a long time before she consented to marriage. The moral of the tale: "You want something, you must persist. Never give up." Then he chuckles and clams up, refusing to say more except that she is now a housewife. They have no children and dote on two pedigree chow-chow dogs called Champion and Winner. He brushes away thoughts of retirement, which he calls a "dirty word". "It means giving up the ghost and waiting for the inevitable. Surely, if you continue to breathe and have some of your senses intact, you're not ready for that," he proclaims with mock horror.

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Anyway, taking a leaf from Newater, he says he has found a new calling, which is to create the New Patient, one who is "health-literate", can take charge of his own disease and be a partner to the doctor. This, he hopes, will help right the patient-doctor relationship, which he observes has soured over the last few decades as money became a bigger part of the equation. "When I first entered the profession, people looked up to doctors. The doctor says, 'You take that. You finish it. Go out.' Like a servant, you take the medicine, without knowing what you are taking." These days, however, medicine has become big business, with cost considerations and cynical customers bent on getting their dollars' worth. Patients, once grateful, are now demanding, non-compliant and confrontational. "Some don't listen to you, challenge you on the diagnosis, and doctor-hop. For this group of patients, the trust between doctor and patient is gone, so it's very difficult to manage," he laments. He intends to kick off his New Patient project by holding a series of three-hour public lectures at the National University of Singapore, to "demystify medicine" and make those who suffer from chronic diseases like diabetes, arthritis and hypertension more medically-sawy about their illnesses and treatment. "If doctors want patients to be our partners in the fight against diseases, one of the important things to do is to explain medicine in layman's terms," he says. Flush with plans to start a website on his lectures by next year, he muses: "This is one of my projects, but I don't know . . . it's going to take many years. I'll be very old by then." Then, shaking off that thought abruptly, he declares "Finish", and darts off for lunch.

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Postscript Professor Feng Pao Hsii is now the chairman of the National Arthritis Foundation. He is now working at organising a World Arthritis Summit, as well as writing a textbook for family physicians, trainees and medical students on rheumatic diseases.

Who Dared is a different sort of book. It features many big names from corporate titans to ministers to social entrepreneurs. But it is not just a compilation of feel-good success stories and minting millions. It is a celebration of the human spirit, of daring, drive and doggedness to make a difference. The endeavours within will make you tear, chortle, sigh, reflect and renew your faith that all things are possible. It is guaranteed to make a difference to your life.

DL Publishing World Scientific www.worldscientific.com 5912 sc