Lunch with the CEO

The executive track of CommunicAsia executive track features spotlights Nicolas Carr, author of the over-rated Harvard Business Review article, “Does IT Really Matter, “ and Phillip Lay, a Chasm Group partner who offers the opposing view. As in the U.S., no one agrees with Carr and I continue to find him tedious.

My highlight comes at lunch, an affair put on for our international gaggle of press, by our IDA hosts in their impressive 14th story offices, where we enjoy an extraordinary view and yet another superior meal. IDA’s charter, the PowerPoint slide says, is “to develop, promote and regulate info-communications” and to develop government IT policy toward the goal of making “Singapore the intelligent island,” which it appears to be.

I’m learning that Singaporeans use the term “IT,” when we Americans would just say “tech.” They say “info-comm.” When we would say, “IT.”

I’m assigned the seat next to Mrs. Ching Yee Tan, IDA’s chief executive officer, and this will prove to be the day’s highlight. Educated at Cambridge and Stanford Universities, she proves to be intelligent, informed and as candid as everyone else I’m meeting despite—or perhaps because of—her high rank.

In Singapore, Mrs. Tan tells us, three-fourths of all homes have PCs and 85 percent of all teens and adults have cell phones. My guess is this beats the U.S. They also have passed the crossover point with electronic filings, with 60 percent of all government filings. Singapore’s port—the world’s second largest (containerized)—was the first to demand electronic bills of lading reducing hundreds of pages of paperwork for each ship.

She also tells us that only five percent of the workforce works for the government, and like any CEO discusses technology efficiencies that may lead to reductions in that work force. Unemployment is coming down in Singapore. In 2001 it reached three percent and the country was feeling the strain. Depending on income, people here pay between 2.5 and 25 percent of their income in taxes, but vices are heavily taxed as is petrol and the price of a new car can be tripled. Income taxes have been steadily coming down for the past 15 years.

But this is not an entrepreneurial place. While unemployment may be consistently low, so is self-employment, she tells us, and the self-employed are professionals and shopkeepers for the most part. W.H. Sim, who was raised in a house that had a dirt floor, built the Creative Technologies (Sound Blaster) empire, and is now among Singapore’s wealthiest citizens, is considered a national hero for his entrepreneurial success.

I ask Mrs. Tan, what it is that has allowed this speck of former jungle to become a world-class player in so many categories. She says, “We are very agile. We can turn on a dime. We’re well-organized, work well as a team and we can move fast.” I tell her it seems to me that she sounds more like a corporate officer than a government official. She smiles, “We are used to the Singapore, Inc. label and we don’t mind it so much.”

I ask her why people don’t mind an authoritarian government known to be sometimes very strict and she says that government is very popular because it has high credibility with the people. It delivers in areas like education, health, public safety. “There is a prosperity that delivers to all classes here,” she says. I have to agree. One thing I’ve noticed, I tell her, is that the poorest people seem the happiest here, in marked contrast to the U.S. I tell her I hear the most discontent from the wealthiest and best-educated people I meet. She agrees, conceding that some of her friends sound the most dissatisfied of the people she knows.

Lunch ends. As I think about Mrs. Tan on the bus ride back to my hotel, I realize that in the U.S., government is about the last place I would find her. But then, we don’t have CEOs in our government. We have bureaucrats. In Singapore, government officials are moved about from one department to another every few years, a remnant of the old colonial British system. In the U.S. she would probably be a serial entrepreneur—and I good bed for the folks on Sand Hill Road.