Ethos Issue 7, Jan 2010
Singapore: The Apple of Nations—
A Conversation with Peter Schwartz
Featuring MR PETER SCHWARTZ, Futurist and cofounder of Global Business Network;
MS QUAH LEY HOON, former Director, National Population Secretariat, Prime Minister’s Office;
MR KWEK MEAN LUCK, Deputy Secretary (Industry), Ministry of Trade and Industry
(then Director, Industry Division)
The ETHOS Roundtable brings together thought leaders and
practitioners to discuss key issues of interest to the public service.
In this session, renowned futurist and Global Business Network cofounder
Peter Schwartz discusses Singapore’s prospects as a young city-state
in a future where talent and innovation will determine success.
ON SINGAPORE’S PASSION
AND PROSPECTS
SCHWARTZ: Can a place or an
organisation that is new and self-created
have what I think of as soul—the kind of
soul you find in Paris, with its thousand-year
history, or even New York, with
several hundred years of layered
development and immigration?
There was a book published a
number of years ago called The Soul of
a New Machine by Tracy Kidder, about a
group of engineers trying to build a new
computer a day with an enormous sense
of passion. In the new and self-made
world of high tech, that passion is the
equivalent of soul. There are clearly
analogues to Singapore.
In my view, Singapore is the Apple
Computer of nations. You go to Apple
headquarters and you feel their passion
for building something astonishing
that will transform the world. If you go
to an Apple store, it hums, it’s electric,
there’s passion, there’s juice. Everybody
who works there wants to be there. Apple
reinvented the computer and then the
music and telephone industries. The
CEO, Steve Jobs is a brilliant leader,
reputed to be irascible and difficult to
work for, but with a very clear sense of
vision and purpose.
The difference between Apple and
Singapore is that the people of Singapore
don’t know how good they have it. They
don’t know just what a remarkable
entity has been created here. They don’t
share yet that sense of passion that the
people at Apple do.
You have to convey to your people,
and to your customers and visitors, that
you share the same sense of passion for
your country. And this is an astonishing
country. It is the city of the future, but
you need to tell the world. You want
people going home from Singapore and
say "I want my city to be like Singapore!"
There is a sense that what is possible
here is not yet fully realised. It isn’t that
people are unhappy. Instead, there is the
sense that not only are things good, but
they have to be better. That is also true at
Apple. They keep pushing the frontiers,
like in Singapore.
The passion of the people of Singapore
is an underutilised resource. Part of the
brilliance of your founders is the creation
of the civil service, which embodies and
keeps alive the values, dynamism and
behaviour that make Singapore succeed.
In that sense, the single most important
institution in your future is the Civil
Service College.
In many ways, I think city-states
are the future of the world. It doesn’t
have to be a formal arrangement. The
San Francisco Bay Area and New York
City are quasi city-states, with a life
and management of their own. The
great cities of the world are really the
engines of change. Already, eight of the
ten biggest cities are now in Asia, which
is the way it was a thousand years ago.
This is where the juice is.
KWEK: Can Singapore be the Apple of
commerce and industrial economies,
particularly in terms of design and
attractiveness? We are building up
Singapore not just for tourism but also
to draw people, particularly high-end
global talent, for at least one to two years
and, if possible, to anchor some of them
for the long term. Related to this and the
question of soul is whether Singapore is
importing too many ideas from overseas:
Formula One, Integrated Resorts, the
Singapore Flyer, attractions which are
not intrinsically Singaporean. Do we
need our own intellectual property (IP),
so to speak, perhaps something that
represents the best of both Asia and
the West?
SCHWARTZ: But you do have the IP: You
know how to run a country! Singapore
is a made-up country with a colonial
past and without much deep history,
unlike many countries in the region.
Up until independence, this place was
only moderately interesting; it was not
by any means the centre of things. Since independence, however, it has become
incredibly interesting because of what
you’ve done here. But the thing about
great world cities is that they bring the
world into the city.
II |
