Ain't this the truth!

[The messanger]

From the Straits times
CREDIT COLLAPSE: 'A blessing in disguise'
THE near collapse of the financial system in the United States last week, threatening to bring down markets around the world with it, quite naturally stirred up a brouhaha from financial experts armed with perfect hindsight. However, there is one important non-financial lesson Singapore can learn from this 'once-in-a-century' crisis created and driven mainly by human greed.
Wall Street in the past decade has attracted more than its fair share of the best and brightest talent in the US to work in its financial institutions. Most of this top talent joined the party truly believing they were masters of the universe and could turn a supposedly random walk in Wall Street into a surefooted ascent to immense personal wealth. This created a stark reality where regulatory officers, who are paid a miserable fraction of those they are supposed to regulate, are not competent to cope with the complex investment derivatives churned out by these financial geniuses. These policing executives were probably awed and intellectually overwhelmed by the likes of Mr Richard Fuld.

Unfettered capitalism assumes we can allocate economic resources, especially top talent, according to market forces. But it would be very sad if all top talent was skewed away from stable careers that focus on improving productivity and quality of lives. The human world needs the best of its kind to seek cures for diseases, to seek the best inventions to slow global warming and to become inspiring leaders to eradicate war and poverty.

Singapore, especially, has to ensure that some of its best talent is in politics, government, teaching and medicine. Therefore, the Government has every right to be proactive to tweak the manpower and talent management system, and implement relevant policies if there is an anomaly in the distribution of top talent in our economy. Singapore is no US - we can easily end up in the abyss like Lehman Brothers.

So, if the financial debacle did inject a much-needed dose of realism into talented people, we can see it as a blessing in disguise. Hopefully, many of these young people, disillusioned with business models driven by fear and greed, will settle down to more concrete economic activity - to create real value in goods and services for the progress of mankind.

Dr Edmund Lam

[Kubes.SG]

What Dr Edmund is missing in his message is the power that "passion" can bring to the success and achievements of individuals and organizations.  Absolutely agree that competence, even brilliance are required, but without the full engagement or the passion of the individuals, the end result will be weak.

What Dr Edmund's is pushing for is already happening in Singapore, so I don't really see what his concern is.  In fact the powers here try to control that allocation of talent.  For example, some years I was talking with one of the local admins in my office and she was lamenting the SGD-AUD exchange rate as it was making the cost of supporting her daughter in AU much harder.  Apparently her daughter was studying Dentistry at Adelaide Uni. She was forced to do this because the powers in SG had decided that she must study Biotechnology/Genetics in SG or on their scholarship overseas.  She was one of the top students in SG that year and the powers did not want her to study Dentistry, only BioTech/Genetics,  Things deteriorated to the point where the powers would not let her study in SG at all unless she did that course.  So she went to Adelaide Uni.  That was her passion.

Needless to say I was stunned at this situation.  I was astounded to see the control that was exerted, then the spitefulness that resulted.  I thought it was a strange way to run an open "first world" country in the 21st century.

Oh, and to add to my point, Singapore employees were rated has having amongst the lowest levels or engagement in the world.