Productivity: Senior Minister, is it that simple?

March 6, 2010 by admin
Filed under: Dr Wong Wee Nam 

By Dr Wong Wee Nam
5th March 2010

At a Post-Budget 2010 Feedback Session held at Marine Parade Community Club recently, Senior Minister Goh Chok Tong revealed what it takes to be a productive worker. He used two cases to make his point.

First he used the example of a popiah skin maker who could only make 50 skins per hour. When his skill improves the next year he might make 100 skins per hour. This, as he explained, means the productivity has increased by 100 percent.

In another illustration he showed the difference between the typist who could only type with 1 finger and needing 20 minutes to type a page and one who could type with 10 fingers and could finish a page in half a minute.

In other words, if we could make a 70 year old toilet cleaner work twice as fast, our elderly hawker centre helper clean more tables in a given time and our taxi drivers double their speed, all of them would be very productive.

If working faster is basically what productivity means, then we are doomed for another period of the same economic malaise that has struck us. Though I am not an economist and have never studied economics in school, I do know that productivity does not simply mean doing a task faster. It would be, in the old industrial age prior to the advent of computers and the internet. It would be, if we still kept competing with third world countries using third world technologies to produce similar kinds of goods. But aren’t we in the First World now?

Though the government keeps talking about productivity, creativity and innovation, it looks as if our mentality is still stuck in the industrialized age.

The Meaning of Productivity

What then is productivity? French political economist, futurist and philosopher, Bertrand de Jouvenel, believed a man must be willing to change his way of working if he wants to increase wealth.

He said, “If he were always to proceed in the same way, he would always produce the same amount in the same time and thus fail to do his share to increase the flow of commodities.”

Furthermore he added, “An increase in the total flow of commodities is not, and cannot be, achieved by simply multiplying by a certain constant each of the specific currents of which the total flow is composed at a given moment.”

Finally he said, “Increasing production demands continual changes in the way the labour force is divided.”

Thus, to be productive, our workers must be mobile and adaptable. They must also have some independent thinking skills so that they will be able to identify and solve problems. However this does not mean just getting them better educated. This is because however educated a person may be, if he is conditioned to be passive and submissive he will always have this unconscious habit of waiting for instructions and cues from above in order to move.

Therefore, to produce creative and innovative workers, we need a nurturing climate. There must be the freedom to express without fear and the room to initiate action without psychological inhibitions. This is because a controlled environment will destroy peoples’ initiative, motivation, instinct and sense of purpose. It can only breed workers who can only be slotted into the various niches in society and just do the work required of them. This is the problem with Singapore. There is no culture of inquiry, debate and research that can make us become a nation of innovative and creative people.

A Better Example of Innovation and Productivity

The story of Ida Rosenthal should be an inspiration to the small person running a humble business. Ida Rosenthal was a dressmaker in a small shop in New York in the early 1920s. At that time women wore corsets and chemises as undergarments. To improve the fit for her customers, Mrs Rosenthal started to experiment with undergarments and finally came out with the first brassiere. Soon the brassiere became a permanent accessory to her dresses. It became so popular that she decided to devote herself to manufacturing brassieres. She later found a company called Maiden Form, the first bra-making company, and very soon all the women in the world were “dreaming in a Maidenform Bra” as an advertisement then went. This is real productivity.

It is not that Singapore does not have productive people. The very fact that our forefathers were prepared to uproot themselves and move to Singapore to start a new life from scratch shows we do have the productivity “genes” in us. It is just that these “genes” have been suppressed by the stifling climate and have not been allowed spontaneous expression.

This is one reason why our film industry has lagged behind the Korean film industry. All along I had thought that Korean serials only attract young girls until I had dinner with a university professor and a specialist doctor. During dinner, both of them were animatedly exchanging stories of the Korean videos they had watched. The university professor told me the Korean videos are watched all over the world including US, Europe, Japan and the whole of South-East Asia. The spin-off from the popularity of the serials is the increasing attraction of Korea as a tourist destination.

The university professor also told me that when she went to Korea for a visit, she insisted the guide brought her to all the Bay Yong-joon concerts and to the condo where he stays where she delighted herself taking photographs of his mailbox and all the fan mails in there (as the mailbox was not locked).

She also told me about another retired professor who not only owned all of Bay’s videos but who would also wait patiently at a hotel to catch a glimpse of him when he was in Singapore. Talk about the fanatic Filipinas and Japanese fans of Bay.

The love for Korean dramas is not confined to the lay person. I once asked an ex-TV actress why she preferred to watch Korean dramas. She said the Koreans are very good storytellers. When I commented that the local dramas are not as good because the acting is not on par, she said that we cannot blame the actors because sometimes the scripts do not allow them to act. I asked if that was because the scripts needed to be politically correct and she answered the question with a laugh which said it all.

No wonder the baddies and gangsters in our local productions do not look or behave like crooks and all the characters look and behave like one another.

Goebbels, the Reichsminister of Propaganda who adored the film Gone With The Wind, had these words for his filmmakers. He said, “If I saw a film made with conviction, then I’ll reward its maker. What I do not want to see are films that begin and end with National Socialist Parades.” To him, if you want to make films, make them entertaining.

What Needs To Be Done?

We are living in an era of vast information and knowledge where rapid changes can make demands on the individual’s ability to change and adapt. The need for the personal development of our students, therefore, becomes even greater. Where difficult decisions need to be made between unclear alternatives, the need for personal integrity and moral courage becomes even more important. This must be the basis of educating our young. Not only will such a person adapt well, he will also likely to have better work ethics.

We are now facing the problems of a developed country and the high costs will affect our competitiveness in many ways. What we really need to continue growing is to have people who can create new goods and services. Only innovating economies can expand and develop. We can no longer keep on churning out economic digits fit for an industrialized society.

However, we can only create new goods and services if we have creative and innovative people. We cannot have creative and innovative people if the climate continues to stifle us. We cannot have creative and innovative people if a lot of our people are just waiting for the government to dispense wealth in the form of upgrading and pre-election shares and rebates.

Our economy can no longer just depend on the few large corporations. In a city economy, it is vital that we have plenty of small and medium size businesses with a possibility of coming out with new ideas to create innovative work and services.

There may be other views on how to turn Singapore into a home of creative and innovative people. However it is hard to imagine that an innovative and creative population can be created by just making all the motherhood statements of higher skills, higher productivity and higher wages without giving people more mental space to dream and allowing more alternative voices to be heard.

For the policy makers and the people who run this country, it would be good for them to watch this video featuring an excellent talk by Sir Ken Robinson, who is an internationally recognized leader in the development of innovation and human resources, to get an idea of what we are facing and what needs to be done:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY

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Comments

8 Comments on Productivity: Senior Minister, is it that simple?

  1. anon on Sun, 7th Mar 2010 4:41 am

    2. off topic, but in weak connection to the video by Sir Ken Robinson (which i posted on facebook a few months back), you can also read up on the book Conspiracy of the Rich to understand why schools teach the way that they do.

  2. Political SalesMaN on Sun, 7th Mar 2010 8:12 pm

    3. Y don’t we farm better peanut & can sell at a better, after that productivity is concern of money. In Paliament there are a lot of productivity, come to Minister pay adjustment, they vote with their two Hands & Two Legs.

  3. The Singapore Daily » Blog Archive » Daily SG: 8 Mar 2010 on Mon, 8th Mar 2010 11:39 am

    4. [...] On The Red Dot: Productivity & Wages – Which Is The Cause & The Effect – Sgpolitics.net: Productivity: Senior Minister, is it that simple? – Gerald Giam: Low Thia Khiang: It should not be all about economic benefit – Tan Kin Lian’s [...]

  4. daft local born stranger on Mon, 8th Mar 2010 12:58 pm

    5. It is unbelievable that Singapore have a obscenely paid senior minister that speaks so simplistically. It is one thing to make a complex thing simple for its daft citizens to understand, but it is another to use simple things to propagate myths and falsehoods. I am not at all surprised if we are laughing stock of the world, and perhaps we deserve it.

  5. DavidSeeLeongKit on Mon, 8th Mar 2010 8:40 pm

    6. >> UNIQUELY SINGAPORE Political Acronyms:

    TCM = Talk Cock Minister [not Traditional Chinese Medicine]

    PC = Political Clown [not Personal Computer]

    PM = Pathetic Minister

    SM = Senile Minister

    MM = Muddle-headed Minister

    SG = Screwed-up Gabra-men [not Singapore Government]
    MSG = Money-Sucking Govt [not Mono-Sodium Glutamate]
    BUG = Bloody Useless Govt [not H1N1 flu bug]

  6. 'Mat on Tue, 9th Mar 2010 1:08 am

    7. Lky is not stupid.

    He did not name him Woody for no reason.

  7. LN on Thu, 11th Mar 2010 6:11 pm

    8. Overheard converstaion from Pinnoys whilst travelling in MRT
    Singapore Politics = Singapore Pools as follows:
    MM = 1st Prize
    SM = 2nd Prize
    PM = 3rd Prize
    MP = Starters Prizes
    NMP = Consolations Prizes.

    The General Public are the punters!……anyway it is uniquely a Singaporean Affairs…….The Punters are always looking for lady luck to smile!

  8. The Singapore Daily » Blog Archive » Weekly Roundup: Week 11 on Sat, 13th Mar 2010 10:20 am

    9. [...] “We can no longer keep on churning out economic digits fit [only] for an industrialized society.” Wong Wee Nam [...]

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