Futures Group

The LKY School of Public Policy just released its Singapore Competitiveness Report for 2009. You can download it here.

Youth are our literal future.

I just came back from TED India in Mysore, and I saw examples of how Indian youth, using the array of mobile communications, Internet, social networking tools etc available, have been able to build businesses and also fulfill their social responsibilities. In their own way, they are pushing forward their vision of a new India.

How much does the leading edge of youth tell us about the future? In Singapore’s case, what does the leading edge of youth tell us what to expect of Singapore’s future? Futures Group just completed a study that I’ve posted in greater detail which you can download here.

How can Singapore tap on the leading edge of youth of Asia to help them fulfil both their career and social aspirations? What are their commonalities? I may not have articulated so explicitly before, but I believe that the city/nation that is able to tap on the creative energies of Asia’s leading youth stands in good stead to create a vibrant future.

Late last year, Futures Group did a video presentation – “Rise of the Rest”. So we reckon that if the Future lies here in Asia, wouldn’t it be interesting to learn and understand how Enterprises in Asia, especially those in China, India and even Indonesia, are evolving? How different are these Enterprises today as compared to 10-20 years ago and what they will look like moving forward?

Hence in May this year, we embarked on the first leg of our Future of Enterprise project focusing on Chinese Enterprise, and here’s the slides on some of the trends observed.

Note: This is a synthesis of ideas from more than 100 people (Including business leaders, academia, entrepreneurs, bloggers, etc. in both Singapore and China) interviewed over the past 3 -4 months.

Chinese enterprises have long enjoyed a low-cost structure, and after decades of being labeled “Factory of the World”, the Chinese understood that apart from manufacturing and/ or producing copies/ imitations, they would have to innovate in order to differentiate themselves from the competition. In addition, we also learnt that it is not always about product innovation, but the ability to adapt foreign ideas or create new hybrids to fit local context as well as the ability to monetize it (Example of Facebook Vs QQ). Another key observation is the need to understand State Policies – We learnt how state policies can affect and even create new industries in China (example of One Child Policy and its impact on education, healthcare and internet industry as well as removal of licensing requirement which led to the boom in Shenzhen’s cottage phone industry).

As China prepares herself to be a dominant force in the global economy, what are the opportunities and threats faced by Singapore and our enterprises? Well, something to mull over while we continue phase II of our project – India. Here We Come!

Some quotes on the rising trend of intense religiosity in Singapore. The article is targeted at brand/marketing managers on learning best practices from the marketers of salvation. Full article can be found here.

“Religion’s biggest allure is that it gives consumers values they can live by. The values that religions preach are open to interpretation, allowing followers to make it their own. In this way, they don’t feel like they are buying blindly into something, but rather adopting a belief system that they genuinely aspire to and abide by in their daily lives.”

- McCann’s Tan.

“Like it or not, an uncomfortable truth is that Singaporean culture has a value system linked to materialism. Religion helps people in their quest for a deeper level of fulfillment. This is their secret. Brands take note.”

- Sunshine, Robert Campbell

Singapore brands are making their way across Asia, or so this AFP report says. It’s great to see some positive publicity for our local companies in the international press, but what’s interesting is that there’s nothing inherently local about any of the products that have made it successfully across the region. Is there anything culturally unique that can make it as the next big Singapore brand?

From New Yorker’s Malcolm Gladwell, an article on overconfidence, full article worth your few minutes reading here. Winning sometimes brings hubris, we say,  and we guard against this as a deadly personality trait. This is especially so for those who make decisions that affect a society. The article points out that overconfidence is a state as much as a trait. Ability makes a difference in competitions of skill, and we make the mistake of thinking it must also make a difference in competitions of pure chance. As novices we don’t trust our judgement. When we get to the top of our game, we succumb to the trap of thinking there’s nothing we can’t master.

The article uses the example of bridge and the real world. In bridge, there are rules and boundaries and situations that repeat themselves and clear patterns that develop – and when a player makes a mistake of overconfidence he or she learns of the consequence of that mistake almost immediately. In other words, it’s a game. But running a society is not, in this sense, a game: it is not a closed world with a limited set of possibilities. It is an open world where one day a calamity can happen that no one dreamed would happen, and where you can make a mistake of overconfidence and not personally feel the consequence for years.

The world post-crisis feels the same on a day to day level, but the quality of it is different. You can feel it in the fringes. Many things don’t make sense. My worry is that we have existed in a Chimerica world and one-way globalisation for so many years that it’s become a game. We come up with the same solutions of productivity, talent topping up etc almost automatically. It’s not so much that I am saying those solutions are wrong or misguided. But I am uneasy that we are not approaching this with a novice’s mind and watching with great concern and dread how the new world emerging in front of us truly is.

I am good at globalisation 3.0 doesn’t mean I must be good at globalisation 4.0, too.

Spoke with Jason Wee several weeks ago, and I am happy to get a softcopy of his article written for SGX’s Pulses Mag on securing Singapore’s future in the next ten/twenty years. I particularly like the emphasis on narrowing the divide and securing religion as a source of growth and stability.

Nassim Taleb on the real evil of the current crisis …. too much debt, the article here deserves to be read in full.

Some quotables “Bubbles and fads are part of cultural life. We need to do the opposite to what Mr Greenspan did: make the economy’s structure more robust to bubbles.” and “the complexity created by globalisation and the internet causes economic and business values (such as company revenues, commodity prices or unemployment) to experience more extreme variations than ever before. Add to that the proliferation of systems that run more smoothly than before, but experience rare, but violent blow-ups.”

The imbalances from Chimerica that led to the current crisis have not really been solved, just papered over with lots of hot money/stimulus. The ‘rise of the rest’ continues as the west is propped up for now, but are they able to withstand the violent blow-ups that are to come? Resilience is an overused word, but it bears repeating that in wounded beast scenario, how does Singapore cream the top of the globalisation wave, while dampening the lows? Specifically, are our social systems strong enough to handle the more extreme ups and downs to come?

Last quote “Asking the economics establishment for guidance (particularly after its failure to see the risk in the economy) is akin to asking to be led by the blind – instead we need to rebuild the world to make it resistant to the economist’s mystifications.”

We appeared on the Singapore Business Times’ Editorial page, total surprise when I came across it in the morning.