Lee Kuan Yew on Leadership: The Harvard Interview

hello i'm david gergen here at the kennedy school at harvard and we're with senior minister lee kuan yew of singapore uh we'll be asking him about leadership and perhaps i should introduce the other members of our panel as we begin to my right is professor ronald heifetz here at the kennedy school senior minister as you know dr heifetz has a background he's taught here in leadership courses at the kennedy school and has really been one who laid the foundations for the study of leadership at the kennedy school he's been here for over 15 years to his right is dean williams who has his teaching a leadership course now but he joined us at the faculty and has had a very popular course on leadership uh over the past year i guess it's been nadine and who has worked in singapore as you have just heard and his wife is singaporean so we're a lot of him here have him here and at his right is john thomas who runs the program on singapore here at the uh at the university and is uh travels regularly to singapore and has also worked for the national university there as well now senior minister our thought today is that you have written extensive two extensive books memoirs i guess is there another one still to come after this or is this it that depends on how long i live brother well in that case supposed to be the second of four volumes if i live another 50 years exactly so we might ask you for starters if we might if you would uh i find that in talking to people in china many of them look to you as a model of personal leadership and we'd like to begin by asking you what as you're back upon your years what did you think were the essential elements of your own leadership well to understand what made me and my colleagues become the people we did become we've got to understand the history because we went through a harrowing period that tempered us we are that either broke us or tempered us we lived in the happy placid colonial singapore in the 1920s 30s we grew up there and the british empire would have lasted another thousand years so we thought when the war broke out in europe and i was i've been wanting to do law which could only be done in britain so to mark time because france had fallen i was 18. i joined the local college raffles college to do a humanities course economics english literature and mathematics my generation did that then in our second year in december 1942 although the signs were there but the overconfidence was overwhelming never believed that the japanese did attack and on the 8th of december which was 7th your dateline about 4 pm 4 am they came over and dropped bombs utter shock ah then the war began and in less than one and a half months they were right down from the peninsula from saigon where they had based themselves on to peninsular on bicycles and tanks came right through at the gates of singapore all the guns were pointing out in the different direction then the bombardment started and we saw within one and a half months the total collapse of the british raj and the painting that the japanese captured was symbolic i mean there was this tall gangling lieutenant general it's actually possible archibald's possible top of his class in staff and command college in cambodia with a white flag and a union jack and there was this tomoyuki yamashita with his big sword looking dominating and the dark ages just closed in on us three and a half years of hell butchery brutality many didn't survive i was fortunate i did but it changed us i don't know why i was bad just the luck of the draw because they picked up all the healthy young men on the basis that they're likely to cause trouble to polish them off and anywhere between 50 to 100 000 were taken to the beaches lined up and just shot three and a half years of privation reflection changed us what right did they have to do this to us why did the british let us down so badly churchill decided it wasn't worth the sacrifice he was concentrating on the middle east well two atomic bombs and we were saved otherwise would have been destroyed i mean it was the end 1945 when they knew they were losing and they were retreating all the way from the arakan coast down they built trenches into every hillock in singapore liberans and they had every intention to be there until the flamethrowers incinerated them but that big bomb and the emperor's speech and the meekly surrendered some committed suicide oh british came back happy times didn't return because you they lack shipping they lacked medicine they lack food but gradually it improved uh my generation then resumed our studies i went to england studied in cambridge to do law spent three years there took my degree and one year in london but i was then watching them with different eyes can they govern me better than i can govern myself because they scooted when the japanese came in and why should i be running the place my colleagues and i so that was the beginning we went back built up mass support how to build up my support here we were a group of armchair politicians talking revolution and british pubs crawling from one part to the other when we came back we decided let's start up with the unions because there was considerable dissatisfaction with low wages and bad conditions so we spent several years working voluntarily as honorary advisers as a lawyer as for free and we built up a whole host of unions that form the basis upon which we could base the party which we did by 19 four years later i started in 1950 by 1954 my carricks and i were about a group of six or so we formed a party and the communists joined us says common enemy the british they were not really communists they're just left-wingers but some were and that was the beginning of a life and death struggle first of all with the communists the fight with the british was the easiest because they were they were not putting up a fight they just wanted to make sure that power was handed over to a group that wouldn't ruin the place and ruin their interest the fight was with the communists who wanted a different system than to defeat the communists because of the demography of singapore and 70 chinese and all of them believed that china was in communist china was a tremendous success all the glorious pictures coming out of huge steel mills and ships and plants it was an uphill fight so we said let's join up with the peninsula rejoin them then it'll be 40 malays 40 chinese 20 others so the communists can't when win joined the malaysians at the malays they were not keen on this kind of safology they wanted 50 or 60 malays and they win so after less than two years they said leave or there will be bloodshed it was a fine judgment whether they were threatening us not really wanting to have bloodshed but just wanting to get rid of us or maybe the old tonku who was then in charge was really out of control and the young turks were determined to rough us up a snap decision had to be made so we decided okay let's let's have a go on our own so we left and we have this tiny little island 214 square miles at low tide center of the british empire in southeast asia military base commercial base administrative capital from which they govern malaya borneo cocos islands christmas islands in the indian ocean but now we got a heart without the body all we had was the heart how do we live where's the circulation coming from that was the beginning of the challenge that's uh if we might rather than going through the elements of leadership for the moment why don't we come back to the formative years of formative experiences we want to pursue that yeah could you talk a little bit about the challenges associated with trying to exercise leadership mobilize i guess the competing factions to deal with the challenges of getting the british out of singapore malaya and that alliance you had with the communists because potentially that could have been well it was threatening to you and if had they won in any way they could have just killed few would have been finished off yeah well it was the sweet innocence of youth we believe that you know they can't all be communists they look so ordinary people they were just idealists maybe a few were diehard marxist leninists why not win them over to our course because anyway communism can win in a multi-racial society you've got to win over the malays and they're not going to be won over by communism so we were hopeful that we could win them over and indeed we won quite a few of them over so that encouraged me enormously but in retrospect we didn't have a chance we did not know the depths to which that penetrated the chinese schools the clan associations the chinese chambers of commerce the school management committees alumni associations dennis bloodworth was then the observer correspondence for southeast asia covering singapore and vietnam asked me he says can't you get rid of these fellows so i said yeah like radioactive dust how do you get rid of it you got to vacuum the whole place out and with it will go all the activists and you've got all the inert gases left so we had to take a chance uh in the process we were lucky in that their leaders lacked an understanding of the outside world they understood the dynamics of conspiracy you know that we are on the same side this cell takes orders from that cell and so on and if you break the rules bond but they didn't understand that if you can't get sovereignty if you've got only semi-self-government semi-independence the british were still in charge and they could call the game off and bring the troops back so that was my advantage i was a lawyer i understood completely what constitutional practices were they didn't so i arranged it such that when we made constitutional advance i i left unchallenged ultimate sovereignty in the hands of the british i said you keep that if i lose you'll have to deal with this if i win then i'll take over i think that was the first wisdom that i did not feel confident that i could win so i had that backstop were there moments of doubt when you were wondering whether at all you could succeed in the face of this this challenge well when they opened the in 1961 just before mayday may the first the prime minister of malaysia came out as a speech the foreign correspondents association says yes he will have merger with singapore but not with singapore alone but with malaysia sabah sarawak and brunei that's the dowry for taking in troublesome singapore so the communists underground were greatly excited because then they would be cornered in this bigger federation so the leader of the underground who had met me secretly before i was prime minister sent a message to my wife in her lawyer's office to ask to see me this was quite a dilemma the last time i saw him i was just an mp so i took him to the to the legislature and if anything happened i said well i was just meeting a constituent but this time i was the prime minister what am i hop knobbing with a man who has to be arrested on site i thought it over i said he's also taking a risk because i could have a posse of police quietly tailing me and surround the whole place and we've captured the leader of the underground but then he might bump me off and bump himself off so i said now let's let's go let's see what the what the score is so i picked up a little girl with two pigtails at the roundabout and she directed me to the house we were going to meet and i was filled with admiration at the careful planning it took me to an incompleted public housing project nearly complete everything ready except power and electricity so nobody is in charge nobody's an occupation you can't claim you habit this man there he was candles beer glasses sat down he is we've been misunderstanding each other we want to cooperate with you all we want is space for cultural and union activities you do it your way we will do it our way but we must have space i thought to myself space to get stronger than you have a big tight rope and you put it around my neck i said to him well you have your views and your agenda i have to do what i have to do so you do what you have to do and if we have to part company that's part in a friendly way but i can't guarantee your freedom of action in this way few days later he saw the open front leader and says destroy the pap government then they broke off and the fight began and i wasn't sure we're going to win it because all of a sudden all their sleepers and all the unions and the newspapers chinese newspapers particularly school management committees chambers of commerce came up with fiery statements denouncing me as a lackey of the imperialist and tool of the feudal leaders in malaysia and so on and so on and so on and then the fight began for the vote because i had a referendum and propose a referendum to join or not to join malaysia when we campaign for a whole year we won it they're lost i gave them no choice because they had agreed with me that the future of independence lay with merger with malaysia with malaya and i said all in the written document so they can't back off so i said in that case we will have merger either style 1 or style 2 or style 3. they say no you must have anti-merger i said no you never wanted anti-merger so they called for a blank vote to protest they got 30 blank votes i carried 70 so we went into malaysia but in the process this is where we i mean if singapore had got independence straight away we would not have succeeded it was a fractious strike blown riotous kind of people quite irresponsible they're just angry with the world but having gone through this awful clash with dark forces that would engulf us a huge massive rallies which the communists could mount to intimidate people they decided that this was a very serious business and that we were not unworthy of their trust that we were prepared to fight then having got to malaysia the malays malaysian mounted riots against us to browbeat us and at that time the police and the army were in the hands of the malays we stood up and said no you stop it let's have a commission of inquiry and put the tonku the prime minister of malaysia on the defensive i wonder if i could go back a bit and then we'll resume the story to understand more fully what made you personally a leader of your people do you feel that you were born a leader or were there uh episodes in your in your youth that shaped you as a leader and allowed you to move forward in the way you did gave you the confidence to move forward i don't think i was born a leader i was born an activist yes i was not the ideal well-behaved boy in class i never became a school prefect i never became the school captain i was always up to some uh mischief of my own you know poking fun at some other student or whatever there was a certain exuberance in me what made me a leader was that when the time came the group of us who were the call the leadership said you better lead because i was the best speaker you're the best speaker i was the best speaker i was the best speaker in english but then the mass of the people who spoke hawkeye and mandarin and malay that was sort of chinese language right yeah so english was understood then in the 1950s by about 20 percent of the population so i furiously started learning malay i was quite good at because i grew up with malay uh students so i could easily use bazaar malay not not polish malay could easily make myself understood but i then learned mandarin the chinese language of the educator then discovered that only 20 30 percent of the population's book understood mandarin that the vast 70 percent spoke a variety of dialects and the most understood dialect was hokkien what taiwan uses so every day at lunch time instead of having lunch i would sit down with a hokkien teacher and laboriously and painfully learned to convert my mandarin into hawker and had i not mastered that the battle will be lost by default but because i mastered that we were able to get our message through and what was more important i think in the course of the fight when i started speaking in hokkien this was in the 1950s this was in the 1960s 61. that was a by-election the kids just laughed at me because it was comical so i said please don't laugh help me i'm trying to get you to understand by six months i was able to get my ideas across by a referendum in two years i was airborne and so came it had two advantages one it showed to them how determined i was and how sincere i was because here i am doing all these other things and learning this language to talk to them and secondly believe it or not at the end of two years i could speak better than most of them that came respect you said in the book your second volume that your greatest asset was your strength at the podium your capacity to speak yeah that's really what helped to single you out early and then and and then to gain the attention and the following and then where did that come from it was just that was a natural-born capacity or is that something you learned in when you were i think if you asked me it it must have been innate i i wanted to be a lawyer why because my parents told me they had suffered with a depression in the 1930s and their friends who were lawyers or doctors or engineers didn't suffer so badly because they had a profession so they told me get a profession so i wasn't keen on being a doctor i thought an engineer was a hard life making machines and so on why not be a lawyer you're just lucky and i wasn't bad at that so i took part in debates in school and became a regular debater and chairman of the debating club but that was that's not decisive i've seen later on in the cambridge union society people make clever speeches it's a useful technique but to get across you must have a deep message which you must be able to put with total conviction then they believe you and those the formative experiences that came in form your convictions came out of the war and then what you saw after the war out of the war out of working with the communists fighting them after going into malaysia and finding that we were ambushed by the malay extremists who wanted the malay dominated country and we had to fight them and said no what does the constitution say we are equal citizens then they try to browbeat us blood will flow but at that moment when the troops were malay police were malay the people were greatly relieved and took comfort that here was a group that was prepared to stand up for them and say we are not scared okay over our dead bodies you kill us and take the consequences because at that moment british australian and new zealand troops were defending them against indonesia's confrontation and if they bumped us off there'll be a tremendous round the british parliament where i had many friends in the australian parliament where the prime minister robert menzies was also a friend and in new zealand so they had to weigh the odds of having a mighty big row with the three protectors against socano's forces or settling in accordance with the constitution come back to this point you made it's not enough to make the clever speech that anybody can do that but what is important is the conviction that goes with it why is that why do you distinguish between the two well because one is just a clever speech they listen to you and they say well smart fellow but when you are facing a dire crisis and we say as after a riot i have to say you're worried so am i i'm worried too but let me tell you this if we stay united there are limits to what they can do to us let's have a solidarity movement throughout malaysia all the towns and there are 40 percent chinese 40 percent 20 percent indians and others that's 60 we are the majority and we might get some malays to join us too so that arithmetic simple vivid they said yes we have a fighting chance this is not a hopeless fight we've got leaders who are not going to cut and run and they also knew that i had direct line to harold wilson who was a personal friend of mine from europe from my labor days as a labor labor club member in cambridge university and i have friends who were students in cambridge and in the labour party research department with whom we kept in contact so they said well let's stay let's not quit so you you must have a you must have a message which is credible which is sincere and at the end of the day they say yes it can win if we have the courage to stay put and not run and they did had you come through personal tests of fire before you became a leader of your people i'm not sure our personal testifier i mean my only test of between life and death was a bit of quick witness the japanese corraled us all all chinese into concentration camps for filtering out to pick up healthy males whom they want to polish off they wanted to punish the singapore chinese for supporting the china relief fund helping the nationalist government fight them so i was kept with my family in a red light district they just corralled us i think just they just drew a circle say there you are and as i was walking out if you are clear they'll chop a japanese character a chinese character meaning examine chain it's either on your body then you don't wash it a child keep it for as long as you can on your shirt in which case you preserve the share when it came to my turn as i was passing through carrying my little belongings he said go to that lorry i thought this is trouble if you go to the lord you might be killed instinct told me that yes yes i was bad i said can i collect my other things they said yes go ahead i then ripped smartly back my gardener was a workshop who pulled my brothers and sisters to school had his labor lines there he he shed a dorm there so i hid in his place for a couple of days then when that changed the screening inspectors you know people with hooded eyes and so on they decide who you who gets through who doesn't get you i decided to try my duck and went out again this time i got through the ones that were sent to that larry was sent to the beaches and machine gun so have i had a brush with death yes i was wondering whether it gave you the kind of courage that you've shown through life you're known for having guts to sort of see through very tough i'm not sure his guts is just instinct the other way i thought well this is sure sure death let's try looking my meecus i said my things to collect said all right people uh have become increasingly ambivalent in the uh in the west in the last 30 years 40 years ambivalent about authority you could say that the united states was built upon this ambivalence in the way we constructed a government with with separate institutions sharing power so that no one could do too much damage and the fear of investing authority in anyone to too far but certainly since the era in this country of vietnam and watergate the degree to which people are willing to invest someone with authority is been reduced the credibility of people in authority is reduced i would like to understand i'd like to learn from your experience in in developing your own bases of authority it's already informative the way you've talked about learning the languages that people speak uh connecting with people in the outside world so if you could give us up your insights into the sources of your authority both your formal authority as well as your informal authority credibility trust respect that might be very helpful put simply when i started i was just a sympathetic lawyer who worked for unions free of charge i won their cases went to arbitration charged them nothing so i became a popular figure i became adviser to about 30 40 unions so i was a good guy but just as a technician my test came when i had to back the government first the british but that was easy the british i knew all the rules of the game i could i could out debate them in parliament i could tweak their noses in court if they charged my clients for submission and they were getting tired of their empire they were they they wanted a way out they just wanted to make sure that whoever took over could run the place and what wouldn't destroy their interests what was critical in establishing trust and confidence was when i stood up to the communists and fought them at that time and that was a very dangerous thing to do because their elimination squads they got guerrillas in the jungle they got killer squads in the towns and we stood up and said no and it was a test of both courage to stand up to them and political skills they denied that they were communists were just left-wing socialists so i did a series of 12 broadcasts to set the scene and i made it in three languages can you give us a year on when this this was 1961 when we broke so i explain how we as english educated students unable to speak to the mass of the people formed got together to build this party and then ran into this well well-organized group which had enormous following says wonderful let's go fishing in that pond we might find some good fish they had no intention of allowing us to poach their fish but when they said we are honest sincere coming uh socialist just like you i then revealed onion by onion i peeled off broadcast and i described how i met the plan chief who said he was going to work with me and so on and it was convincing because when i met the plan he said we'll work together you win you release our people from jail i said yes i have to do that so i said how do i know you are the boss he said you have to take my word for it i said well i believe this city councilor is one of your men and he has penetrated david marshall who was a safadi jew very bright fellow a lawyer non-communist and he formed the workers party i said you get him to resign then i will believe you are the boss three weeks later when i was in london conferencing with the british i opened the straits times and the child had resigned god here was a man whom i had when i became prime minister i went to the special branch and looked up the files and there was his picture wanted on site and deep in the underground chased by the police he could send a message to this fellow he did not know and the man resigned so when i disclosed all this credibility was established the fight was on you in three different languages when i finish each broadcast the director of the station couldn't see me i went into the room and found me lying on the floor trying to recover my breath so each speech was interesting oh yes english malay mandarin and you try that how long did you speak about 20 minutes each but it was a fight for survival life or death but after that and when we stood up to the malay extremists there can be no question that they knew we were not quitters and trust was established without that trust we could not have built singapore so your authority was based on that trust that you were able to develop with people in crisis in crisis it wasn't i think it's difficult to establish it in times of calm and just you say well you know it's an argument therefore i'm a better guy than you but when the chips are down and you can get eliminated in a very unpleasant way and you show that you're prepared for it and you'll fight for them it makes a difference after that do you think the person who steps forward in that situation as you did does so by instinct what is there that brings forward certain kinds of people in crisis i can't explain it i got them into this trouble nobody asked me to go and chase the british out into something visceral my friends and i decided to do it then we've landed ourselves in a fight with a communist had we been rational had we known that they had been digging away building up since 1923 the year i was born the first common turn agents were sent from shanghai to singapore 1923 and here we were in the 1950s trying to beat them and they are professionals and organizations through the gambit too of joining with malaysia yes yes that was the gambit that was the game with this because you couldn't beat them head-on in a referendum in singapore but we did oh over the joining that's right because they had committed themselves i got them to commit themselves now other people have gained a great deal of credibility with their people in times of crisis like in the philippines with marcos and many other places the founders of their or founding people in the uh decolonializing period and then somehow after 10 or 20 years they lose their sources of authority and they try to rely on their military as their major source of authority can you tell me give me some sense of of how your own sources of authority evolved or how you continue to nurture along your own credibility so that you did not become subjected to a people's war or to uh well put simply this way we knew we had a vicious opponent in the communists any piccadillo any misdiscretion any misdemeanor and they will smear you in the coffee shops and destroy your character the fact that i sleep in an air-conditioned room is a debit look at him look at us we sleep with you on the hard union mentions every night we are with the people but look at this softy so we were very conscious not to give hostages to fortune that if we became dishonest we became ostentatious we lived well at the people's expense that was going to fritter away all this trust that we had gained that was one half the other half was to deliver yeah so we delivered the homes the schools the jobs the hospitals homes literally that they own today we gave them the land for free and charged them just for the building of the apartment docked off their monthly salary and today 98 of our people will own their own homes and the smallest home would be about three rooms would be 100 us thousand dollars and the biggest would be about 300 000 u.s that's not once you own that amount of assets you are not in favor of risking it with a crazy government your assets will go down in value but that was planned we planned that for two reasons one we had to have the children fight because it's a small nation so everybody does national service and if you're gonna fight for all the wealthy people's biggest estates that's not a good idea so we gave everybody a stake so not losing our sense of purpose and place not abusing our power that we were trustees and not owners of the place that was crucial and the other to deliver let me uh i wanted to come to you john thomas because it goes back to he's talked to one of the people who's closest to you about elements of your leadership could you pursue that now yes first of all let me thank you senior minister for spending this time with us uh you said yesterday that uh in some ways you were here because uh having visited harvard and spent a brief sabbatical with us in 1968 you felt some sense of it was an opportunity to repay what you had gained at that time and i think your notion that 32 years later you still are prepared to to reward to thank us in this way is very significant and so we want to thank you for this but i had the opportunity to have a long lunch with a colleague of yours someone who's worked with you very closely and i asked him in that conversation what are uh the characteristics of the senior minister as a leader what what would you point to as the five or six things that really characterize him and make him stand out as a leader and i'll be happy to share his comments with you in a minute but i'd be very interested in hearing what you think are the personal characteristics that really typify this is subjective i can't look at myself in the mirror and i can describe my my appearance i can take a picture but how do i describe my inner motivations my proclivities if you want me to have a goal i would say i'm consistent i don't say one thing today and another tomorrow and change again day after tomorrow it's not that i'm inflexible there are circumstances where the situation has altered and i'm prepared to say well this no longer applies but i on the whole i stay consistent and if you i had three journalists write up a book of my speeches and i asked them at the end what was the dominant theme you found and the three of them said consistency throughout all the 40 years in public life what i said at the beginning throughout all that period the team stayed loud and clear that made it simple because you know where you stand with me and you know what i want to do two i'm quite determined i may not be able to do it this way but don't believe i've given up i will think of some other way to get there i think it's necessary because if you do if you lack that determination then you're not going to achieve you'll not be you will not be able to deliver third i am able to get ideas across to people in simple ways and persuade them to my point of view if not the first time then the second the third the fourth line i don't give up eventually i swing them around fifth i am true to my friends and colleagues i don't place trust in people who don't deserve it but those whom i feel are trustworthy i give them total authority i give them total mandate to do it that way it's part of a chinese saying use man don't distrust distress man don't use say that again use a man don't distrust him if you distrust him don't use it and i would say i've been fairly good at sensing who i should not trust is part of the eq problem i don't think any leader could last for long if his eq is weak because you've got to depend on other people to help you do the job and if you are hoodwinked and you place trust in people who are not sharing your views you're in trouble what did what is this what did this man tell you all will be revealed six points and i i emphasize that these are i wrote these down in my own words sometime after the conversation but the first one uh one you made and said he has a very strong sense of determination once he starts something he will see it through he persists he will not fail and everyone knows that that helps second was he develops a broad vision of where he wants to go and he connects things he sees the implications much more fully than most people third was he has an unusual grasp of the environment he understands context and what is possible he knows where opposition will appear what people want such as security or opportunity he understands hopes and he understands history fourth he understands the relationships between politics and policies he understands priorities preparation what can be done when and how to do it he reads extensively and he connects things that he has read at different times sometimes widely separated in time to get a deep understanding of a particular situation and the last one he gets the best people whether they are friends or enemies he always welcomes opposition and opposing views until he makes a decision who knows where he is he must be a great supporter of mine i think that's weird senior minister could we come back to this question of emotional intelligence it was so interesting that you raised that because uh as dr hayfus was just pointing out to me you're known as a man of brilliance and as a man of extremely rational careful thought uh and yet you raised the question you said you know without emotional intelligence you can't survive as a leader could you sort of balance those two qualities off iq and eq well iq you can get uh beautiful paper done complex formulas worked out simple elegant solutions in the end but when you've got to get a team to work and put that formula into practice you're dealing with human beings and if you're not good at eq you can't sense that a doesn't get on with b when you put them in the same team it's no good i had a very brilliant deputy he's a powerful mind very sharp pen good economist good at anything he spends his time on but he keeps on making mistakes picking the best people he wants and and twos about somebody so wonderful he put up a paper for me then he says i want him as my secretary six months later he'll come back to see me and says oh job's no good lacks judgment change he's unable to sense and feel a person i had another man of the same generation with gokengsheim also bright became a teacher became a builder and a manufacturer of ships then in his 60s i persuaded him to be the chairman of our public services commission that recruits people for the public service and interviews potential officers or young students for scholarships to top universities abroad and nobody but nobody pulls any wool over his eyes he sees through the person each time and when he sends me a man that says this is a good man he turns out to be a good man he's got this uncanny neck i have another friend also a colleague he was a manufacturer of uh sago flower he invented a machine that would thrash the sago out of the fiber i got him to build houses the first few houses practical i was very good at that when when he shook hands with a former special branch officer who hated us he didn't know that a chinese who when we took office switched and worked for malaya and he shook hands with the man he says i recoiled when i felt this bomb evil man and he was how does he know i don't know i think his body language his eyes his sense of feel of the other person so i learned whenever i had to do interviews to choose people i would get people like lim kim san tantik tree the people who are very good at seeing through a candidate and in one hour we will have the papers before us records achievements various tests degrees etc but in that one hour exchange is yes or no and they were very good i would rate myself as a score one to ten i'd give myself seven maybe eight but uh this chap was chairman of our psc i'd give him ten that's on eq yes on eq and if you had to rate yourself on iq 1-10 that's easier you can put me to s-80 and i've never been through one but i would say maybe 120. what was that 120 maybe 120. i like you story maybe i don't know must have been tailing off over the years as the neurons die and so in looking for someone to to a point to a position of high authority or to if you're looking toward a leader would you prefer a high iq or high eq you what i think i hear you saying is have a good enough iq but then have a high eq that depends on the job supposing i wanted somebody to run the institute of cell and molecular biology and running run a research project then i would say well even if his eq is not that good but he will chase this thing down the time of until he finds what was the gene or what was the little thing that is needed then i'd go for his iq but that would be an exception but if i'm going to get a chap man to do a job that handles other people a department or a team he should have enough iq to be able to master the details so he understands the total project but good eq so he knows who to appoint to what particular sector and who will work with whom because if you can't get a good team going then it's a failure because he can't do it himself he's got to get a team to work for him senior minister singapore more than in most countries you relied on a group of highly talented and trusted lieutenants more than organizations i remember at a time when countries were having planning commissions and writing five-year plans the world bank came to you and said we're going to give you a loan you have to do a five-year plan and then go kang suey's memoirs he writes about sitting down on friday and working through the weekend and by tuesday having the five-year plan you got the loan from the world bank and you proceeded as as you had planned but but far more than most countries you and singapore uh depended on a group of highly talented individuals would you say why you did that why you did didn't follow the path that other countries were following focusing more on what are the correct institutions for this country well first we did not inherit strong institutions the british had the fundamentals but not much more we didn't have all that much talent when the british left because education was limited in the years before the war and in the years after the war it was a crash course to produce as many local administrators and doctors and dentists and so on so we had to make do with the best we can given the civil service as it was the university is pretty rudimentary teaching only the basic subjects no think tanks and the natural solution would be out of this lot who have got outstanding minds creative can think the unusual and help us solve this problem by about three years there are not very many of them by about three years you've gone through about 20 or 30 of them and you you've decided that uh these six are your key players and they built the institutions right uh for instance huntsville said he was a very talented administrator a friend of mine older than me by about six or seven years he was very good at picking winners all the the present prime minister he picked he introduced him because the present prime minister gosham had worked for him he was a young officer who had gone to williams college came back and he said here's the shipping line is in the red you turn it around and he turned it around it became profitable and he could meet with shipping magnets in hong kong and never got tainted i mean in shipping you pass each other golf clubs with instead of golf balls you have a nugget of diamonds or pearls or whatever i mean that's commonplace so he picked another one who was a banker whom he met as minister of finances now deputy prime minister and minister for defence so he had this uncanny ability to say this is a good man and he built institutions he built the economic development board that had offices around the world to sell singapore and bring investments in he developed jurong industrial park and hived that off into a whole company he developed the development bank of the development bank of singapore because our banks were not accustomed to lending money on on manufacturing projects that may not yield returns for four five six years so he formed this bank got the other banks to contribute but we took the lion's share so he created those institutions and so did the others i mean lim kim san started the housing and development board and from there a whole series of other subsidiary balls making sand making concrete making doors standard doors and so on but institutions as such came later when we had more talent to spare than you say right we'll have the institute of public policy and you put six or seven bright people under one practical man or woman and say look study this or institute of defense policy and by then we had a retired diplomat who was head of intelligence is now our president and he started that but it's a second stage a second stage process after you've developed enough talent and people had experienced talented people with experience in specific fields then you institutionalize them again i'd like to follow up i like to go to the question of corruption you've made some references to it in terms of what everybody needs to be clean of golf balls in hong kong etc singapore in the 50s was a place of deals and corruption and sort of a free-wheeling port city in which everything happened however you came in and you wiped this out you have made singapore probably the least corrupt nation in the world you also got rid of organized crime in singapore i'm told i'd like to ask you about this also i'm told there is a famous film clip from the singapore broadcasting corporation the early days when you went to the studio and you had the uh a couple of members of the triads rounded up and brought into the studio and you confronted them directly and told them that either they were going to leave singapore or you were going to leave singapore but i'd like you to talk about the various ways in which you change altered this very fundamental fact of singapore life and and it such an exemplary you can't alter it in one dramatic set of moves this is an ongoing push drive push drive never stops but when we came in corruption had already begun was to creep i mean the government ahead of us was formed first by david marshall who was an honest man a very able lawyer and he didn't need to be corrupt then when he resigned a less able man called lim new hawk took over and under him was a very fractious government that was only held together because there was loot so for about three and a half years it was beginning to get crummy and affecting the whole administration this was one of our problems we didn't feel strong enough to fight the communists to take over but if we didn't fight to take over and we blocked the communists and we left this government for another five years then we'll inherit a civil service that's corruptedness then you've got weakened instruments blunted instruments so that forced us to take over and when we took over we decided that this was the critical factor if we did not make it that every dollar that was put in at the top reaches the ground as one dollar we're not going to succeed because we we have few dollars and the communists will just kill us look at it another corrupt bunch so we came in and we made a symbolic act we dress in white shirts white trousers and said we will be what we represent we were also of course sickened by the hypocrisy and the reality of so many nationalist leaders that took power and within a short number of years just were living it up and running their countries down so we had to be different we knew the communists would kill us if we were not careful and we had the incentive to want to see that every dollar reaches the ground so we changed the rules made it transparent no discretion everything was open so if you do something unusual your subordinate or your peers will notice then we also i also put the anti-corruption corrupt practices investigation bureau under my personal portfolio so that everybody knew that i'm personally going to lead this drive so i gave the director the authority to investigate everybody and everything all ministers including myself uh the first job was to get rid of the triads because they are part of singapore society from time immemorial they came from china and they they lived off extortion and just as in taiwan when they go into elections they can intimidate or they can buy votes for you in taiwan they call it black gold and i was determined that because we were in the opposition and the new hawk used the triads we told them during the election campaign this is your last chance when we win you're out so do your worst you're not scaring us but of course by that time groundswell was so solidly on our side they knew that we were most likely to win and we will deal with them so having won we just polished them off we had special laws which the british had passed called criminal law temporary provisions act where you can't have evidence against a criminal because of his stray outlinks or drug smuggling or whatever you can lock him up for two years and he goes to a special advisory committee where evidence is placed not necessarily enough for a conviction in court so within two years we cleaned up the lot and many moved off to malaya and other places and they never came back i had the had we got them back because police and the army was attacking the populace so we used them to fight them i think then they would have grown which was what happened in other other parts of the world but after that it's just one hard slot to make sure that the renality is a failing which sometimes it's difficult to explain i mean i have the most difficult of all to explain was when my own colleague who built up all these beautiful houses she is an architect very able organizer called chang one i've covered him in one of my chapters he could have made a fortune outside just as a architect but for some reason he yielded to the temptation of taking half a million dollars for adding an extra piece of land on a land sale so that the developer has a neat little completed plot then he did that for another one and years later it copped up and the investigations had to start he wanted to see me to solve the problem i said if i see you then i'll be a witness in court so best not see me better see your lawyer he committed suicide he left the note and said as an oriental gentleman who believes in honor i have to pay the supreme price die and the family left because we had created by then this was 18 85 86 we had created in singapore a climate of opinion which considers bribery especially bribery graft in high places as totally devastating to the society and the economy but it's a heavy price but it reminds every minister that there are no exceptions let me follow up with a slightly different question you have spoken at times of the importance of asian values uh i wanted to ask you if you think that the asian environment shapes the exercise of leadership in asia and for instance it's often said that family values which suggest that you can oppose the head of the household within the family within the family but not outside is also a paradigm for for public leadership uh we talk about wyoming and shadow puppets are there unique dimensions to leadership exercise in the asian context well there are certain forms which you don't break without upsetting people i'm not sure that it will always remain that way because all these societies are now open to american television and british and all the other external media but by and large there is a certain uh respect for authority because you've got to give respect to authority otherwise the system won't work i mean if every time you have a man elected president or prime minister's or he's a crook you can't believe the system won't run you've got to say well he's the prime minister he may not have been the ideal wellness she has the authority let's see how he works how he exercises his authority i am doubtful if having watched how it's changed in japan that it can remain unchanged in the rest of asia i think it will slowly change but but you will not reach a stage where you can caricature you know what you do here and al gore goes to makes a speech and then the next day he watches a caricature a satire of himself and next debate he he gets inhibited because of that i think that would be thought by the majority of the population as unbecoming okay so you know that he has got his quirks but let's let's wake here is no longer in office then we can poke fun but when he's in office it does not become us to to diminish him i think it's changing because of the impact of interconnectivity cable vision satellites soon broadband on tv but by and large if you see i i watch on cable uh taiwan and beijing television taiwan has gone riotous allah america so funny spoke to the president caricatures and so i i think it's sort of force fed you know i want to show the americans that we are a real democracy and we are acting like that i'm not sure that this is doing a service to democracy in the long run in taiwan because it's going against the grain of the society and undermining authority then you look at the mainland there's a certain formality i mean a certain stiffness in which the leader presents his views to the populace of course you get an exception like premier churungchi where he will sit back and you can bounce any questions of him with a smile give you a full complete and sometimes a stinging reply all done in good humor but they are far and few between but i can i think we are in a state of flux slowest to change will be the mainland fastest to change will be taiwan out to show that they are americanized japanese also next slowest to change in indonesia is gone a little haywire when president suharto was in charge it was a stern article he says very few things and very seldom what he says you have to study very carefully because they're going to be implemented then it went to habibi president habibi and he wanted to be a cuddly teddy bear and he met the press every day and in the process made the presidency a very different kind of institution so now you've got abdulrahman wahid president very accomplished speaker of english french dutch arabic is his eyesight not so good but he's trying to go back to the suharto darfic oracle can't go back the place has changed the media is wide open habibi had encouraged it or couldn't stop it so i think they're in for a very open season everything sold real news false news i don't know whether it's true or untrue but there's a picture of the of a woman sitting on the president's lap with a president's arm around her and in suharto's time i think the whole publishing house would have been captured and burnt but now you have this attractive uh titillating picture being reproduced by all the others and the woman was encouraged and produced more pictures so it keeps the story going so i think this these are countries where the style of leadership is undergoing a transition we have students from around the world in our leadership classes and other classes do you think that we ought to try to make distinctions between leadership as it's exercised in one part of the world another leadership has to be exercised in the context of the society it is in without that context it doesn't make sense i mean if you take uh i it's very difficult when i'm talking of living beings if you take let's take past leaders margaret thatcher could only operate in the way she did and operated effectively during the years of a prime from 1979 to 1990 because of the context i mean the society had been in a malaysia successive tory labour governments couldn't get the country going and she was determined to change it and she was a grossest daughter and they tory blue bloods determined not to allow the people to forget them but she said well so what change it i think had it had it been in australia she would not have faced that kind of social snobbishness which made a job more difficult so leadership has to be exercised in the context of your society of a particular society the values the habits the patterns of behavior of that society i'm not sure that if you get uh mr mori to go to taiwan and lead the taiwanese people i think he wouldn't fly because he immediately he'd be put on camera and says five questioners and that's not the way the leadership is resolved there you meet quietly and mr obuchi passes his view on his as he was ill on his deathbed and says please settle this and so mr maury emerged but he can only govern in that society would you say that for yourself as well certainly in singapore some singaporeans would say oh if only prime minister lee were heading china or india or even the united states for that matter it'd be significantly different ceos change companies all the time so essentially what you're saying the contexts are too radically different you can change ceos with within companies sharing the same culture so you can take two french companies you can change ceos i mean uh theory gamma ray of total took but they are all on the similar culture when jurgen shrimp took over daimler took over chrysler that's a cross-border merger mr eaton resigned after a short while and there's still an incomplete job of fusing the two cultures so it's not comparable i mean and countries are very different from each country is more different from the other than one company from another are there some values that are that that are go across cultures that will be respected your consistency for example or your or your authenticity because you spoke from conviction there must be some of these that are fairly universal but may change on the margins within a different context well but not i will not be able to be as effective and because they will not identify with me i mean let's put it this way i was in malaysia for two years 64 65 and at the time i left many people identified my views as their interests they have seen how singapore have lived up to those viewers but a younger generation has grown up in malaysia having to comply with a different framework and within which they can grow now if i want to go back and make the same speeches or an updated speech of what i made say in 1965 they'd be terrified say god we'll have another riot because they would now be conscious of the fact i mean they have accepted their dominance and just the other day i mean somebody suggested that perhaps it was time not to have the special economic privileges for malays the boomi portraits and there was a tremendous uproar from amnoral youth so you know reminding everybody of the bloodshed in 1969 so the context has changed so once these values may still be admired the consequences of implementing those values in the new situation uh would be quite disturbing for them what about with singapore today where they the context is changing and i think uh in 1990 was it where you let go of the reigns and moved from the foreground to the background as senior minister was that had something to do with the shifting context that you felt like you could no longer be as effective personally as you wanted to be or there was a need to manage the transition to ensure that there was a new capable and committed group of leaders running the country because it's unusual in many countries people your contemporaries would either be thrown out or die in office in their old days but i had a responsibility to make sure that the system would work after me and as you know there were serious doubts as to whether the system would survive me my simple calculation was thus let me carry on for another five years i won the election what does that prove that i i'm vigorous that i'm still agile i still can get things done so what and the country has got to cross this watershed of a long-serving leader who had customized the way in which he runs the government you know it's like one of these motor car seats and steering wheel where everything has been configured to your shape of your hands your fingers and when you press the button and reset your way or should i get out allow the system to loosen up get the new leader to reconfigure a government reconfigure the driving seat help him so that there are no crashing of gears now between the two one i've only proved that i'm still healthy two i would have done an immense benefit to the country to the government and to myself that i've got a government now in place that can do without me i was useful for the first two years three years but they soon got the hang of it and they did things slightly differently at the beginning now more and more differently because they're dealing with the younger generation and a changing environment changing technology it has to be different and i think let's say i've i've hung on for another 10 years it would be a disaster i watched so hard to go down in 1997 and i thought to myself you know if only he had stood down a few years earlier he would have been a great figure in indonesian history senior minister you writing your book about one of the major challenges you had early on was to change the attitude of the chinese and you're in singapore about military service so that they would be more embracing of it and and you could form an army and you had faced other challenges like that about moving the population moving their attitudes changing their views how does the leader do that how do you take cope with the problem that's very large for your society and you want to change habits and attitudes of the population uh we faced and the people knew we faced a diet threat when we became independent our two battalions which had been formed during british days had 60 percent malaysians and the commander was a malaysian because the forces had been integrated and the tonku intended that they should stay there so the population was fully aware alive to the fact that if we don't have a force to defend ourselves we'll always be bullied so how do i change this well first i had the advantage of that if we don't have this we are in trouble second we formed immediately more symbolic than any additional to our military capabilities we formed a special platoon or company where all mps and political leaders took military training and weekends and march passed during national day bold brave soldiers then we formed school cadets both for boys and girls and school police cadets so that the police will not be treated as enemies they are your own children they're going to look after you so over five ten years their attitudes towards people in uniform changed these are their own children in the schools learning how to be good soldiers and good policemen and we used to have them uh gathered together for send off during when they were called up speeches were made then after the first basic training they meet their sons in the camp shaven crew cut and so on after three months the suns came back more sturdy and better and standing more upright over five ten years attitudes change and this is now 30 plus years uh my view is is accepted as a way of life and uh we have built new camps for them and their camps look like resort hotels so uh but they still got to do some rigorous training i mean you know there are hot showers and everything which they didn't have in the old days but when you do an obstacle course you do an obstacle course and when you do a 30 30 mile walk with a 30 20 pound pack that's still got to be done but it's been accepted that could you step back from that experience and talk more generally about then how as a leader one approaches a change you know you see that the country's got this real problem it's too soft or it needs a military or integration or culture or it needs integration of cultures how one then sort of thinks through what's the process by which you change a culture as a leader well i'm not sure we can change all cultures we can change cultures at the margins i think basic cultures you can't change it's very difficult it comes from mother to child we changed the attitude towards military service and police service uniformed services by making them respected and honorable that they are not thieves they are not people who are going to rob you they are going to defend you so i had my sons do it i mean i had two sons they went through of course just like everybody else and but unlike everybody else they had the full glare of publicity then they signed up to stay in the army for eight years they won a scholarship and they went on to university in cambridge one did mathematics another did engineering but during the vacations they came back for military training or went with the british army on exercises on the rhine or in canada and when they finished uh they came to your thought sale of hot level work to learn staff and command or artillery or whatever so gradually the people began to associate military and the officer call with excellence and indeed of the cabinet this younger cabinet of 15 there are five who are military officers who ended up as my son was one who was a bigoted general that's a georgio also regular general that's jiochi hyun he was a real admiral that's lebron kyung he's a colonel with uh that's uh he was i think a major but you know the public now associates the officer call with excellence these are people who have gone through the academic process top scores done well in the army reached staff grade and now our ministers so perceptions have changed and we did that deliberately we have a fast flow through in the army in the armed forces because it's it's always a young force so by about when they sign up they know that by the time they are 30 plus they can start a second career and we usually send them off to business school or you know harvard stanford or whatever and then they start a second career were you thinking in the long term back then oh yes indeed yes realizing you're gonna have to it's gonna take you know decades yeah to shift values and change mindsets yeah but we had to start but we have done we have shifted the values but we have some problems now because parents are wealthy so they say why should my son serve a bond for eight years let's make it four years or i'll pay for my son so it's a changing situation but they no longer think that soldiering is a demeaning or low level job many people in top positions of political power imagine that they can make a major change in social attitudes either through the use of their formal authority or through the expert fashioning of some brilliant policy piece of engineering uh in either case that the work can get done quickly and authoritatively and expertly for example president clinton tried in his first year of office to change a seventh of the nation's economy in health care which affects every single person's own deep anxieties about the care of their parents and their children and themselves and deepen economic investments very quickly through the through policy instruments rather than seeing the need to so on the one hand you've been from the west some people worry about your authoritative capacity and yet you keep describing the the pacing at which your the uh the slowness the use of these various vehicles to work the public working issues at a rate that people can take so can you speak about the uses of because there must at some time given how much authority people were willing to give you there must have been a deep impulse to wish that you could simply fix this problem quickly no no some problems can't be the more deep seated emotionally a problem is the slower it is to resolve you you take language language and religion that deeply held beliefs we had to change people that spoke four of four major languages and many different dialects into one working language or we will never succeed now had i passed the law and said you will all learn english or you will all learn chinese we would have mayhem riots so what i did was okay you can go to all these present schools and there are chinese schools english schools malay schools tamil schools but you will learn if you are in a chinese school you learn english english school you learn chinese if you are chinese or tamil if you're indian or malay or so on so you you will all learn two languages then by a process of who gets the best jobs the parents soon decide that they will send their children to the schools teaching english as a first language and chinese or malay or tamil the mother tongue was the second language there was no force used had i did that by dictate there would have been a serious uprising rejection of me as a in great and forgotten where i came from and i lost my chinese rules but they watched and saw who got the best jobs and they switched and i finally it took a long time from 1965 to 1981 and in 1981 i was able to get everybody into the english schools english meaning english first language mother tongue second language and i was able to change the university teaching in chinese into teaching in english but you must have set up incentives for the people to get to make sure that the people who got the best jobs had to speak no no no there were noise the jobs were there the jobs were already there the jobs were from the multinationals from the banks our banks and multinational banks whether they are japanese multinationals or german or european or germans or french or british or americans they all use english you picked english because that would play to the market yes of course that's right dovetailed with reality yesterday so there's also a way in which in retrospect it looks as if you were a brilliant master strategist being able to see over 16 years in the case of the language what steps needed to come before the next but i wonder how much of it is really an improvisation in which you run an experiment and then you smell and and sense what's next depending on the outcome of that experiment i did not want to have 16 years because in those 16 years i lost 20 000 chinese graduates who had poor jobs i wanted to make it shorter i couldn't i would have run into flak so to what degree do you think that your leadership has had a strong improvisational oh very much so you have to watch what how far you can go without snapping loyalties i mean one of our strategies was to make singapore into a first world oasis in a third world region the physical infrastructure is easy you get best contractors best designs you've got best airports best container port telecoms whatever good buildings but you've got to change the behavior of people they have been living in shanty towns you know soap boxes and a zinc roof and a hole in the ground for their water closet now when they move to these high rises they are still either for mischief or some unexplained reason to be a nuisance to their neighbors they would urinate in the lifts just to be a nuisance when they've got proper toilets at home so we had to put traps so that when you urinate the lift will stop and you're trapped inside so really we'll catch you and we'll show you up there's such an engineering yes yes we we have installed them but let me add how clever they are they open the lift door they stay outside and pee into the left and it stops but there's nobody inside so we installed a camera that would catch the person outside so it goes on you tell me it's easy to change habits i think it's not but we were determined that they should behave in first world standards and not as if they still got a hole in the ground i'm not saying that it's all stopped but it's much very much less but it's a constant fight yeah but you had to start with the vision oh yes yeah you had you had to have a sense of where you wanted it yeah and you got to sell that vision and say look if you want people to come here and park their families here then you must have clean roads green gardens safe environment good health recreational good schools good hospitals and good nurses in the hospital so this will get us there now you can't carry on in the old way why some leaders are very are visionary and others many others are not how can we help prepare people at the university level to become strategic visionaries to have that longer view well it depends on what is it that motivates them what do they want to be i mean i take this present generation you know the preoccupation with wealth they open fortune 500. all the billionaires they open forbes is oh so many multi-billionaires so many dot-com chaps have made billions out of nothing they are just completely swept away by all this so we've got young administrative officers who have served six seven years can i take no pay leave i'm good once the dot com companies are hot i want to try and we have said okay go try the motivations are different if i were now 20 years old i might be joining the dot-com venture capitalist yeah and i probably make make a million or two million i'm not sure that i'll be wanting to do this job but it so happened that i was born in that period went through that kind of a life and started questioning why are these chaps doing this to me and what right are they and that i don't know tempered fuse something in me and a group of us and we became different but the problem now is you say give them a vision how well i have given the second generation that i have brought into office as much of a transfer of data historic perspective so that they understand the responsibility is now with them and as i wrote in my epilogue the fact that we have succeeded in the last 35 years does not mean we're going to succeed in the next 35 years the fact that these things were done that way and succeeded does not mean it will be done the same way you got to start thinking you got to start adjusting you got to make use of new technology new methods seize new opportunities but i think what i have succeeded in doing what my colleagues and i have succeeded working with them for the last 15 20 years is that they have that sense of trusteeship that if they give up then four million people will just come to nothing they'll be lost within five years ten years so they gotta hold this place together make it work keep on recruiting good people seizing good opportunities change course when necessary and seek success where success can be found but what is the new vision of singapore what would the new vision be and who how will somebody come up with i don't think that's my job now i did not foresee this present singapore when i started in 1965 is the result of so many factors changes in technology that makes that has shrunk oceans you can just take a an airplane ticket like you take a bus ticket uh could i have a seen that from a back water we now have five star hotels that will serve you food from anywhere in the world because we are we have airlines coming in from 80 cities around the world every day you can have texas state you can have california in 1965 is the result of so many factors changes in technology that makes that has shrunk oceans you can just take a an airplane ticket like you take a bus ticket could i have a scene that from a back water we now have five star hotels that will serve you food from anywhere in the world because we are we have airlines coming in from 80 cities around the world every day you can have texas state you can have californian state you're at the kennedy school where they were focusing on training and developing people to exercise leadership do you think it can be taught as you reflect on your experiences and the lessons you've learned along the way uh i once watched isaac singer a nobel prize winner for writing in yiddish literature i was in new york time on my hands and he was being interviewed and he said you teach writing at columbia or some university says yes i do can you make a writer like great literature he paused he looked at the interviewer he says if he has the writer in him i will make him a good writer in a shorter time so if you ask me can you make a leader of anybody i don't think so he must have some of the ingredients he must have that high energy level he must have the ability to project himself his ideas he must have the desire almost instinctively to say look let's do something better i want him to do something for his for his fellow men and not just for himself and his family you can't teach those things it's either got it no he hasn't got it but if he's got that then you can save him a lot of trouble so don't do that do it this way i tell you that if you do that you're going to waste a lot of time and that's what i did with the team that we recruited and you fashioned for yourself your own private tutorial didn't you and flying around the world and learning the lessons that had been to be captured from the failed experiments of some of your comrades in the colonized period absolutely crucial let somebody else pay for the lesson if you are stupid enough to go and do exactly what he's done and you're paying for it then you are losing your opportunities i just go watch and say oh that's so that's that's a no-no so how important uh is the travel portion of learning absolutely i i give you this example it's better now i can judge the state of an economy of a country by the state of the guesthouse yes by the seat of the guesthouse i went to egypt cairo first time in 1962 and i stayed in one of farooq's palaces beautiful brookies linen with f on top deep carpets super bathtubs wonderful place i went back then they got caught in the seven day war by the last visit in the 1970s when sadat was there the linen had gone and has cotton the curtains had also been in a state of disrepair and when you flush the toilet instead of going down by the way it came up this way well i i have not been back so i'm quite sure that now with development things have improved but i don't have to go out so when i started when the days before we had hotels i told our controller of the household i said before the guest comes in you better stay there make sure that every process works that the air conditioning works that if it's too cold you've got you you can adjust it to make it warm or whatever and that nothing breaks down because they're going to judge us and invest or not invest depending on how they see we run this place crisis has been very much part of singapore's history and you clearly were able to use crisis to move the country forward i wonder if you would just reflect on on crisis as both a a challenge and an opportunity for leadership well it is because a crisis puts a whole people on tenterhooks i mean when the british said in january 68 you know we've just become independent 65 and we were worried how do we defend ourselves when were the british leaving we wanted them to stay as long as possible then they devalued the pound in 67 and 68 january and in spite of all my friendship with wilson party they say we are off in 71. so unions were who worked for the british were going to be disbanded so you have a sense of crisis so that gave us a chance to say look let's retrain let's get new jobs let's convert all these engineering workshops to civilian workshops let's get this naval base shipyard dockyard and make it a civilian dockyard so we went into negotiations with the british and i had a very good officer my former finance minister honshu said put him in charge he dealt with the british british were i suppose guilt-ridden because they let us down and they handed us the dokya before they were ready to leave in 71 gave it to us in 68 we brought in swan hunters a british dockyard to reach to recast it as a civilian dockyard and today is one of the successful shipyards of the world and the reamy workshops electrical workshops and so on then first we used the buildings that were there and made them into temporary factories for making shoes garments whatever now they've been demolished rebuilt high-rise factories and hewlett-packard texas instruments you name them they're there you can galvanize people easier when they are in a state of fight one of the one of the dispositions we try to teach our students is to be able to face failure every day so that they can learn from their tactical errors even how they had a conversation that they spoke with this person in front of that that they failed to be articulate about this so that then they can take corrective action the next day now it would be very helpful to have our students know something about some of the failures that you experienced they might be tactical failures ways in which you regret that you handled the situation this way perhaps you were more fearful than you needed to be or or failed to take into account this stakeholder and and their interests and and then stepped on a booby trap unwittingly but some something about how you would analyze some of the some of the mistakes that you've made and then how you try to take corrective action oh so many mistakes we start off with so the equipment we bought and the british were leaving they gave us like the dockyard they couldn't be moved then they had bloodhound missiles 50 broughton missiles they will shoot aircraft down at 50 000 feet it was going for cheap because otherwise they've got to bring them home should we buy them my finance my defense minister go cancer who was finance minister very able man i made him defense minister he says the chances are they're going to come in low and bomb us from a very low height we need something to get them at 3000 feet i thought it over i said okay we buy that but we also buy this 50 000 feet bloodhounds i wanted to do it for two reasons one i wanted to keep the links to the british and get them to stay for as long as possible two it was going for cheap so why not keep it and my my my potential enemies may not know that these things are not effective against no flying aircraft anyway they look very formidable bristling away but that was a mistake we lost money there for no rhyme or reason refurbished it i think we should have just bought the rapiers and later on the ihop which we bought and now we've got the improved eye hawk how about in the politics of it and the management of people in the management world most of my mistakes were made in an eagerness to overcome difficulties we had a nice harbor there was a vacant land beside the harbor our mean harbor and a japanese oil company said we'll build a refinery there if you give us that site because it's very convenient they can sell diesel to the ships there my harbour people absolutely oppose it because there's a fire hazard my same finance minister who's a very good man he says beggars can't be chosen better get this chaps here and get some jobs created i yielded 50 years i was still there and another 15 years to go there's a mistake we should have had more confidence and say no you go there and they might have gone there what does a leader do when he realizes he has made a mistake how do you then get out of what's the best way to deal with it then write it off as quickly as you can cut your losses yeah cut your losses acknowledge them as well yeah yeah surely we went and made bottles we went to a glass industry but to make good glass you need good silica sand we don't have silica somebody should have told us that but the people who wanted to sell us the machinery say oh you've got enough sand after that we had to buy silica and that increased the cost so we cut it and says sell it you rely heavily upon lieutenants as you talked about your trusted lieutenants when the mistake is made who accepts responsibility i do you do because i appointed him and i gave him authority so it's my mistake but if he makes too many mistakes then i change him but you publicly take response oh yes of course i mean the buck stops with me otherwise i'm not the boss could i link what uh this conversation to the earlier conversation about context and ask you about singapore's experience in suzhou which you called a chastening experience in your memoirs you would reflect on that the attempt to transfer singapore's experience into a very different culture and what you might do differently if you were doing it again or if you would even consider it again well it was difficult to have avoided the mistake because sucho was such an attractive place it was run down when we saw it but it could have been revived and made into a venice again you know canals beautiful gardens and i had a deputy prime minister then who was an architect and a bit of an artist and he said we could do this we can make it a lovely place but we build this industrial center outside the main town don't ma the main town do it on a green side green field 100 square kilometers or 70 square kilometers and we'll teach them it wasn't a financially profitable job there were two aspects to it one was business where our developers will go in build factories and get investors to operate in these factories and invest the other was a g2g technical assistance how to run a successful industrial township complete with housing shops markets schools etc greenfield because they came this they saw our industrial site they were attracted by it and we reached agreement at the very top and they were extremely and they sent teams of people to study us and we said okay we want your management we want your planning we want your labor management we don't want your politics that's fine the idea was they will learn how to run it straight no favoritism no underhand kickbacks or whatever each project to be assessed on its merits but there are four layers between preaching we reached this with chiang zamin and before championing with deng xiaoping's son who got his father to say this is a good job do it we'll refurbish this place but from peaching it goes to nunching the provincial capital it goes to sucho then it goes to this new authority for the industrial side four levels by the time it gets down there the people on the job their interest is not to go and learn how to do this and replicate it in a hundred cities in china they didn't see that as a work a task that would get them glory what would get them glorious many many new buildings and factories and jobs all of a sudden using our brand name and our capital so we should have known that we thought we spoke chinese they smoked chinese we eat rice with chopsticks they eat rice with chopsticks we will get on fine it was totally wrong would you do that again would you similar would you you decided to pull out no we have there's some real elements of success there at least measured in chinese terms yeah but we are not pulling out completely we are handing it over to them yes we are just staying on to hold their hands and say look perhaps you ought to be doing it this way but would i do it again not at four levels if i have to do it again i'll do it in pitching right there where the boss is in charge i want to just ask you a little bit about listening and learning i mean you described yourself yesterday as a lifelong learning and obviously learning has been very critical to get a sense of what would work or wouldn't not what would not work but in singapore itself what has been the nature of your own personal learning in particular in using people who have very different even radically different perspectives on policy or on issues that could include opposition or dissident voices or the press because at times you've been considered at least some observer observers have said that you're particularly harsh with the press or some opposition members from a leadership perspective why did you operate that way is there a role for very dissident and different and complaining voices in the realm of leadership to harness and use yes of course you will never get 100 consensus in you in a multi-racial situation like singapore you're lucky if you can get 70 percent my best score was 82 when the british were about to withdraw and the country was so terrified that they decided to vote 82 for us now we listened to opposing voices opposing point of views very carefully including those written say by the economist or fortune or whatever because these are investors if they have this point of view we have to look into them and say well we got to put this right but where you have a newspaper that sells in singapore like the asian wall street journal or the international herald tribune and they want to create news in singapore to increase their leadership now i demand the right to reply i can't allow you to skew my news create controversy at my expense and deny me the right to apply i don't block you out i mean if you read my chapter asian wall street journal had a foolish young man who said we are doing this in order to sell off that companies to our own people well that's a very serious charge so we wrote a reply they refused to publish it so we say look don't you think you owe us an apology because you are making a serious charge no they wanted controversy so we said well in that case you will we are interested in truth they said i said all right you're not interested in selling your paper no right then you sell your paper without advertisements and we'll let it through they said no no we our advertisements go with our people so in other words you want to sell your advertisement now print my reply so that standoff stood for two months and they decided they'll print a reply so they are circulating but because we are able to print our right of reply all this clever story is twisting our tales have diminished you've got to consider carefully whether or not we are capable of tweaking your years you can twist our tails we might prick your ears so how important are these opposing voices no that's all right that's useful but it must be two way not one way not you quantificating and telling me what a dud i am yeah you've talked about the importance of context and how americanized a place like taiwan is becoming and how the press is changing things would you advise the coming generation to handle the press and opposing voices differently ah i think the position is changing so rapidly with the internet and broadband they have to rethink their position you know there's so much rubbish on the internet there's one side devoted to knocking me down but it doesn't carry much credibility because it's not truthful i believe on this this is now no longer my job these are the computer savvy generation that's got to solve this problem internet service but i i told them that i believe the critical factor for them now is credibility that we must have our portals our media able to command confidence and people will watch and read and listen if you don't have credibility you have lost the game because nobody will be listening to you that today we've got 50 channels on cable television why should you be watching the prime minister talking so we got to have credible news credible good features so that when the prime minister speaks has to speak people will watch so it's a different challenge now whereas say 20 years ago when i made an important speech all three channels carried me and they had whether they liked it or not they listened to me but not now uh just a final question uh i've been working on a book right now uh called staying alive and it's about what to do when you're attacked or marginalized as a leader one of the aspects that intrigued me has to do with the management of despair because there are moments when one inevitably feels that despairing or and it would be helpful to know for example you and david were joking at the very beginning about playing golf but some people don't take time for themselves they don't manage themselves as a resource you know to be deployed properly and to be so it would be helpful to know how you have sustained yourself given all of the stresses and exhaustion and moments of despair how do you recover do you have daily practices like like gangs or other other modes of practice that keep you in the game for year after year after year if your message is one of despair then you don't you should not be a leader you must give people hope hope of improving their condition there are moments of course when you feel very down either because you're physically down or emotionally down or because the world has turned adverse against you i think when you are in that condition the first thing you do is to get a good night's sleep then get a swim or chase a ball get the cobwebs out of your mind i believe and i practice this for all these years in politics that if you're not fit you're going to make mistakes physically fit you must stay physically and mentally fit i exercise every day i used to jog swim play golf golf more for relaxation just just to get away from the smoky conference rooms and it's part of the balance you keep now i cycle i swim even when i travel and since the last 10 years or so i've learned to meditate because it's one way of calming yourself it takes practice i i had a doctor teach me he was a buddhist and he retired and he spends his time helping people to meditate especially those with terminal illnesses you know to take life calmly and i think at the end of say 20 minutes to half an hour my pass rate can go down from 100 to about 60. i mean you can feel yourself subside i mean you still your mind you empty your mind then when you are rested you resume quietly you still got the same problems maybe you sleep on it come back look at it for a few days and decide maybe there's a better way of solving it or talk to some friends get some ideas if you are not in good shape you're going to make mistakes and that's disastrous how do you keep yourself mentally fit uh well my wife tells me i'm a bit of a workaholic when i've had enough i read for relaxation because you can't just switch off and go to sleep oh i if my eyes are too tired then i was surf the television and see what's going on what what's the driver they're putting out that other people are watching but i find reading is probably the best entity it takes you into a different world for a while history uh history yes but contemporary what's happening why us why are these things happening it's not my problem i mean but it's interesting to know that other people have more severe and pressing and dangerous situations you get a kind of slide and proud luckily i'm not in his shoes i have one thank you yeah senior minister i i wonder if you could uh cast your mind around a an issue that we're wrestling with here at the kennedy school because you have such creative solutions we've been we've talked here about the training of young people for and preparing them for leadership positions we're also considering the possibility of ways to bring in emerging world leaders uh people are perhaps in their 30s or perhaps early 40s who have begun to distinguish themselves in their own cultures and bring them together here at the kennedy school and work with them both here and through the internet i i wonder how what you might think of such a program how it could be most productive and the ways in which people like you who have had these enormously distinguished careers how they how you might contribute in some fashion to helping this next generation come up spotting a talent spotting a political leader is more difficult than talent spotting a ceo talent spotting in politically is more difficult than talents planning a ceo yeah the ceo here you have more finite requirements he just needs to run the company show profits when you want a politically political leader you've got to get somebody with the right motivation if he wants to make a name for himself and a fortune then he should be a political leader it is in the wrong vocation so you've got to be very careful about motivation when i recruit a person to be an mp and then toss him in the deep end of the pool before he he makes it to a minister i try to fathom what is it that drives him why does he want to do this fame glory importance everybody has a bit of that i mean as herman khan once said to me god glory gold he summed it up quite easily but you must have something maybe god do some good without that you are not a good leader when you face setbacks you give up but if you believe you've got a mission when you face setbacks you take a deep breath you subside you think it over you're murdered over yours turn the egg upside down head down and finally you try i couldn't have said uh i could have picked those leaders when they were 18 or 19 or 20. in my book i chose to put in three young officer cadets whom we chose and there are three top ministers today it was a marvelous batch talented people and dedicated how just the luck of the draw but we spotted them they showed promise we nurtured them to spot them is easier when they are in their 30s than in their 20s when they're in their 20s they're a bit more frisky know they've got great ideas about what they can do here they're everywhere in their 30s they're beginning to settle down they're thinking of marriage and just got married children and it's become a serious business life means continuity and that is the time which i like to pick them if we were to let's take your three ministers now who have moved in they've shown that promise they're fulfilling that promise if we were to say to one of those ministers the first year why don't you come join an emerging leaders program and we will have people like you from say 20 other countries and we would like to bring you together to work with you what could we most productively and most constructively do to help that young minister fulfill his promise for singapore depending on the field of interest i think first to be able to network with good men here in harvard whom they can reach and develop a relationship and get ideas from over the years and to network with people who are likely to go into high places in their own countries and therefore have an easy relationship whether they're going to make good ministers or not really depends on the motivation i mean if they just want to be important people that's not going to be helpful they must want to achieve something and in the case of singapore it must be one to make this very vulnerable nation less vulnerable and in spite of his vulnerabilities and the problems in the region to ensure its continued prosperity and growth and a secure future for the people you must have that as your major motivation otherwise otherwise you just back up make your million and settle in california or or the gold coast in south in brisbane or whatever and just sit back enjoy the the surf or the coral reefs and have a good life you must have that drive without that drive you can't do the job if we were to establish such a program would you be willing to meet with these once in a while if i'm coming to this part of the world you

Channel: HarvardCPL

Views: 1,217,553

Keywords: leadership, cpl, harvard, kennedy school, government, Harvard University (College/University), Lee Kuan Yew (Politician), John F. Kennedy School Of Government (College/University), Ron Heifetz, Dean Williams, John Thomas, David Gergen

Id: _KrKdj50mPk

Length: 156min 19sec (9379 seconds)

Published: Tue May 05 2015

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