Reflections of a Recycled Bureaucrat: Leadership Lessons from Hon Sui Sen

When I joined the service, my first permanent secretary was Hon Sui Sen. When he died in harness, in the mid-1980s, he was the Minister for Finance, and I was one of the permanent secretaries in that ministry. He was my boss for most of the intervening 25 years. He was, without doubt, the best reporting officer I had, a perception that most of my contemporaries who served under him shared. I have tried to apply his template of leadership and management in the many areas where I have worked, albeit with nowhere near as much success.

Nonetheless, I was fortunate to observe that template at close hand and to try to replicate it. I suppose that is how traditions in an institution are built, and a culture of good governance is fostered. Like most good things in life, the concept is deceptively simple, the application a matter of discipline. It is a distillation of principles and practices that have stood the test of time. But for success, the environment has to be wholesome.

The example must come from the top. If that vital element is missing, good deeds below decks may ameliorate the situation, but cannot make up for that critical deficiency. So, what was it in Hon Sui Sen’s leadership style that many of my contemporaries and I admired?

Without doubt, integrity—not just moral, but intellectual. Some will say, “What is so unusual about integrity?” Surely, leaders must have integrity to get to their lofty position. Integrity is more than keeping the hands off the till, although scary examples in recent times suggest that some leaders cannot even refrain from doing that. Consider Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, Parmalat.

Then, there are shades of grey—ethical issues that do not transgress any law except one’s sense of honour and straight dealing. But intellectual integrity goes further than that. It is a matter of quietly defending your position no matter how unpopular it may be to the institution.

A second outstanding quality of Mr Hon was his ability to delegate a large measure of authority to his subordinates, to leave them to run their show, and to avoid breathing down their necks. Of course, they were held accountable for their actions, and Mr Hon was no namby-pamby when it came to disciplining people. Yet, he would always support subordinates who made an honest error, and did not shield himself by assigning blame to others. He took the rap for anything that went wrong in his bailiwick.

You may well imagine that such behaviour comes from enormous self-confidence, without arrogance. It is the measure of a person’s generosity of spirit, modesty, the even tenor of his ways, and a forgiving nature. At the same time, while Mr Hon was prepared to defend his officers and ministry, he was respectful of authority, following the age-old principle of rendering unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s.

A third, key attribute was his skill in drawing out ideas from his officers through a heuristic approach, gently challenging assumptions, and urging thinking out of the box. He got the best out of his people.

That, in a nutshell, is what characterises an outstanding leader and manager. Textbooks, management consultants, workshops, seminars, and executive courses, all play a role in the effort to learn about management and leadership; or, if you like, in the context of present-day Singapore, creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship. But above all, keep the eyes and ears open. There are always many examples of outstanding leadership around.

The attributes of good leadership are eternal and universal. They stem from traditional norms embellished by sound management-practices that have evolved and been refined with experience.

The starting point is clarification of the mission, based on a realistic assessment of the environment, and courage in pushing the envelope. Strengthen the organisation, paying particular attention to how people are managed and endowed with authority. Encourage openness, do not fear dissent within limits, and allow those now-cherished attributes of creativity and innovation to flourish. Finally, define and know your customer, and respond to his legitimate needs.

When I look back on the institutions in which I have worked, I do not see any fundamental difference in the package of leadership and management skills that contributes to success. Of course, each institution is unique, with its own mission and culture. An adaptable leader can, within reason, certainly function in many environments. The civil service, or at least the administrative service, testifies to that dictum. The key to successful leadership lies in the individual, the experiences he has been exposed to, the environment. Management gurus, seminars, consultants, and so forth, may be useful tools. They cannot substitute for the real thing.

~ JY Pillay, Reflections of a Recycled Bureaucrat, April 2004

Bonuses for top lawyers hit 9 months

More propaganda to stem the loss of talent. It does not say what proportion of lawyers get nine months. Usually 1 or 2.

Straits Times, 29 Dec
Bonuses for top lawyers hit 9 months

Business boom leads to larger payouts this year, with big firms paying 5-1/2 months and upwards
By K.C. Vijayan, Law Correspondent

BIG law firms, buoyed by the business boom, are handing out bigger year-end bonuses this year, with the best payouts breaching the nine-month mark.

The Straits Times understands that top performing lawyers in top-league firms like Drew & Napier and Rajah & Tann are getting high payouts across the board as rewards to recognise good work when the going is good.

Other firms like Harry Elias Partnership (HEP) and KhattarWong also awarded fatter bonuses of between 5-1/2 and eight months to its lawyers.

HEP’s managing partner Latiff Ibrahim said its top performers are in the ‘booming corporate, construction and litigation practices’.

KhattarWong’s Subhas Anandan said the bigger bonuses also spilled to the non-legal support staff, with the best receiving up to 5-1/2 months.

Lawyers generally attributed the fat bonus cheques to the strong economy, increased revenues and the need to pay high performers for ‘all the hard work and all the nights they have put in’.

WongPartnership, one of the biggest firms here, has had an ‘extremely good year’ in terms of the transactions and briefs received, said Mr Chou Sean You, a partner in the firm.

‘We expect to remunerate our lawyers well for all the hard work they have put in throughout the year,’ he said, adding that his firm traditionally declared its bonuses in January.

The upturn has benefited small and medium-size firms as well, especially in conveyancing work, said senior lawyer N. Sreenivasan.

‘Whether the property boom continues into the new year remains to be seen,’ he added.

He said that ‘with expected rental and salary increases next year, law firms will have to be more efficient, to reduce the impact of these increased overheads on the cost of legal services’.

Small firms which may not be able to match the fat bonuses of their bigger counterparts are unfazed, with some noting the hidden toll in work-life balance for those working in the top league.

Said Mr R. Kalamohan, who has run his own firm for more than 18 years: ‘I don’t know how many ‘handicaps’ I have compared to big firms, but when you look at the work-life balance, it is a different issue.

‘I am not constrained to burn the midnight oil every day unless there are exigencies. I do not think income is the main criterion for a good life.’

Give that man a Tiger.

David Viniar

Man in the News: David Viniar
By Ben White in New York
Financial times
Published: December 21 2007 19:41 | Last updated: December 21 2007 19:41

Call up Goldman Sachs and ask to chat with David Viniar, chief financial officer, and this is the first response you will get: “David hates publicity and would probably rather amputate one of his arms than be interviewed.”

Ring up friends and colleagues and the answers will be similar. “I’ll talk to you,” said one former Goldman executive. “But you cannot possibly quote me. David would rather self-immolate” than be the focus of attention.

Yet there is no avoiding the limelight. In a nightmare year for most investment banks, Goldman just set another earnings record. While others tallied ever-bigger mortgage losses, Goldman made an early call to hedge its mortgage exposure and turned a tidy profit in the process. While no one man, woman or child was responsible for Goldman’s golden call (a fact the bank wants no one to forget), Mr Viniar was certainly a central player, along with Lloyd Blankfein, chief executive, and Gary Cohn and Jon Winkelried, co-presidents.

Mr Viniar was the one who convened the now famous meeting on December 14 2006, in which senior members of the mortgage trading desk, the risk department, the controller’s office and others gathered to discuss the US housing market. They decided that it was time to put hedging strategies in place to prepare for a housing downturn given information from the controller’s office and early losses showing up in Goldman’s mortgage book. The call to hedge was a collective one, but as one senior executive put it: “If it hadn’t been for [Mr Viniar], it probably wouldn’t have happened.”

The hedging worked in fits and starts and eventually produced a profit in the third quarter and left Goldman with a net short position against the mortgage market, a fact Mr Viniar took the rare step of acknowledging when the bank announced earnings.

This week, he returned to form and would not say what Goldman’s stance was on the housing market and added it was unlikely he would ever again acknowledge a proprietary Goldman position.

Mr Viniar, 51, is more than a traditional chief financial officer. He is also in charge of Goldman’s massive back office operations, an area referred to within the bank as “the federation”. (The phrase back office is never uttered at Goldman, presumably because it sounds pejorative.) At some banks being in charge of the back office would not be much to brag about. Not so at Goldman, which places enormous value on technical expertise and the power to crunch massive amounts of data.

John Thain, former Goldman president and now Merrill Lynch chief executive, rose to power through the federation after working as a banker. So did Mr Viniar after Mr Thain plucked him out of investment banking in 1992. So by virtue of what he oversees, Mr Viniar, is extraordinarily powerful for a CFO.

“He is the most influential CFO on Wall Street,” says one former Goldman executive who left recently. “That reflects not only his capabilities, which are enormous, but also Goldman’s treating the back office as an equal partner.”

The fact that other banks do not treat the back office in this way may also explain why they ran into so much more trouble with the mortgage crisis.

Like most Goldman executives, Mr Viniar operates almost entirely behind the scenes, save for his conversations with analysts, investors and reporters during earnings season.

Like Mr Blankfein, Mr Viniar was born in the Bronx. He studied economics at Union College in Schenectady, New York, where he played basketball, a sport he follows to this day with informal games near his home in New Jersey that often include other Goldman executives. He donated $3.2m to the college to build a basketball arena that bears his name. The passion and energy he invested in basketball, Mr Viniar insists, helped him get to the top of his career game. He told the student magazine: “I loved the team and my teammates. I was one of the first ones to show up at practice, the last to leave.”

In a rare personal interview three years ago, Mr Viniar told Institutional Investor magazine: “I’m a very slow, very small forward . . . But I can hit the 15ft jump shot.”

Mr Viniar went on to Harvard Business School and joined Goldman in 1980, where he began as a banker in the structured finance department before moving to head the Treasury department in 1992, the year he became a partner. He became co-chief financial officer in 1994 and chief financial officer just before Goldman went public in 1999.

Mr Viniar, who earned more than $30m last year, played a critical role in 1994 when Goldman was losing millions of dollars a day due to bad proprietary trading bets, an experience colleagues say shaped his approach to risk management. “When you go through a war like that it changes you,” said one former Goldman executive who was then in a senior position. “No one had any clue what was going on.”

The experience did not make Mr Viniar risk averse (Goldman is among the biggest risk takers on Wall Street), it just made him more dedicated to consistently monitoring positions and testing for the worst possible scenarios. Mr Viniar is known to say no often to traders who want to take big bets but also to be careful to ensure the bank is taking enough risk to weather downturns in other parts of the business.

He is known as a quiet, self-effacing family man who never missed a basketball game when the youngest of his four children was at high school. “He would always say we are in a marathon, not a sprint, so take vacations, take time with your family,” said someone who worked under Mr Viniar. “He really did the whole work-life balance thing.”

Of course, when he went to basketball games, he would work in the car on the way there and the way back home or to the office.

If there is criticism of Mr Viniar, it is one that also applies to Goldman as a whole and it is that he provides too little information to investors and analysts about how Goldman makes money in its proprietary trading operations, an area of the bank that some refer to as a black box. “They do a horrible job at investor relations. They refuse to take their investors in as partners,” said Dick Bove, analyst at Punk Ziegel in New York. He added that Mr Viniar “is strong-minded and has a clear sense of what he is willing to do and what he is not willing to do. He has some of that Goldman Sachs arrogance about him. But who cares? The job he has done as CFO is impeccable.”

Sim Kee Boon

ST Nov 11, 2007
A keen golfer with a mean swing

By Terrence Voon

MR SIM COULD NOT bear to stay away from golf for more than a week.
THE man who built a world-class golf course from a plot of barren land had a mean golf swing himself.

Mr Sim Kee Boon, who died on Friday at the age of 78, was an ardent golfer who could not bear to stay away from his favourite pastime for more than a week, say his staff and friends.

Even when he headed the civil service and, subsequently, Keppel and the Civil Aviation Authority of Singapore, he still found time to tee off on weekends. One of his favourite putting grounds was the Garden Course at Tanah Merah Country Club (TMCC), which he founded in 1982 at the behest of then-prime minister Lee Kuan Yew.

His interest in the game first developed in the 1970s, when he joined the Ministry of Communications as permanent secretary.

‘He was one of the few perm secs who knew how to play golf,’ recalled TMCC captain Goh Hup Chor, who knew Mr Sim for over 20 years.

Mr Sim’s wife, Jeanette, also a keen golfer, is the club’s current lady captain.

According to his friends, Mr Sim’s handicap was as low as 11. Though it went up to 22 in the past few years, his technique remained as good as ever.

‘He was a short hitter, but he hit the ball straight. He hardly ever got into trouble on the fairways,’ said TMCC events director Edwin Khoo, who used to play a few rounds with his boss.

Mr Sim’s regular golf ‘kakis’ included former finance minister Richard Hu and TMCC president Tan Puay Huat.

‘Whoever won the game would pay for meals after that,’ said Mr Khoo.

Mr Sim played golf the way he ran TMCC as chairman – with precision and a keen attention to detail.

Said the club’s marketing manager, Ms Han May Leng: ‘He once came up to me and told me to fix the signages on the golf course because they were slightly tilted. He wanted them to be straight as an arrow. For him, everything had to be first-class.’

Mr Sim led by example, even picking up litter on the club grounds. He was often seen in a T-shirt or short-sleeved shirt – a dress code he also imposed on all male employees at the club.

‘His reasoning was that if you’re in a shirt and a tie, you would stay in the office and never get out to see how things really were at the club,’ said Ms Han.

Under his charge, TMCC membership rates rose from an initial $20,000 to $190,000 now. The Garden Course was named the No.1 course in Singapore for three years running by the United States-based Golf Digest magazine.

Though he demanded nothing but the best from his staff, Mr Sim also dished out compassion in equal measure. They recalled how he would often ask about their health and their families – a personal touch that made him a popular figure even outside the club.

Said Pan-West retail manager P.M. Samy: ‘Whenever he came to my shop, he would never fail to ask about my work, my family and my life.

‘He was a real gentleman – both humble and approachable – a man who had golf in his blood. His passing is a great loss to golf.’

S’poreans owe pioneer civil servants a big debt: PM Lee
Paying his respects, he says those like Sim Kee Boon saw the country change and made change happen
By Peh Shing Huei


SINGAPOREANS owe the pioneer generation of public servants such as Mr Sim Kee Boon an ‘enormous debt’, said Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong yesterday.

‘There was a certain cut of the people who were of that generation,’ he said, after paying his respects to the former civil service head who died on Friday.

‘They grew up, they saw the country change, they made the change happen.’

They were ‘the last of the Mohicans’: a phrase which another former civil service head, the late Mr Howe Yoon Chong, had used to describe himself and Mr Sim, both of whom were among the founding group of top administrators.

‘In a way, that’s true,’ said Mr Lee. ‘That generation of public servants, we owe them an enormous debt.’ Mr Howe, who was also a Cabinet minister, died three months ago.

Mr Sim was 78 when he lost his 17-year-long battle with stomach cancer on Friday.

MM Lee’s tribute to Sim Kee Boon
MINISTER Mentor Lee Kuan Yew paid his respects to the late Sim Kee Boon last night. He released a condolence letter to Mrs Sim and a tribute to her husband.

Letter to Mrs Sim

After retiring from the civil service in 1984 – which included a five-year tenure as its head – he joined Keppel Corporation as its executive chairman and turned the loss-making outfit into one of Singapore’s leading conglomerates.

From 2000, he was also a director of Temasek Holdings.

Mr Lee, who was accompanied by his wife Ms Ho Ching, said Mr Sim was not just doing a job but was sharing his experience, wisdom and perceptiveness as well.

While paying tribute to Mr Sim’s work in building Changi Airport, Mr Lee also praised him for setting the tone of the civil service and leading it to achieve many things.

‘Not everything was done personally by himself. But the leader’s job is not to do everything by yourself. It’s your job to enable other people to work and to be productive and he achieved that,’ he said.

‘He’s not a flamboyant person. He doesn’t put himself on a high pedestal. He’s very easy to get along with, chatty, gregarious, but very sharp mind, very clear what needs to be done.

‘And if you are dealing with a touchy situation, not just in Singapore but with our neighbours or with some other countries, you can depend on him to understand what the issue is, what the other side is trying to achieve, how we can get what we need and maintain the relationship.’

Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew and several other Cabinet ministers, including Foreign Minister George Yeo and Defence Minister Teo Chee Hean, as well as former deputy prime minister Tony Tan, who is also SPH chairman, were among those at the wake yesterday.

The wake, which continues until Tuesday, is at Mr Sim’s home at 114 Watten Estate Road.

Steve Friedman

If you are not constantly working for constructive strategic change, then you are the steward of something which must erode. Competitors will leapfrog over you, and clients will find you less relevant. If that was your approach, why would you even want the job?

– Steve Friedman, Former CEO of Goldman Sachs

Blue Ocean Strategy

The “ocean” refers to the market or industry. “Blue oceans” are untapped and uncontested markets, which provide little or no competition for anyone who would dive in, since the markets are not crowded. A “red ocean”, on the other hand, refers to a saturated market where there is fierce competition, already crowded with people (companies) providing the same type of services or producing the same kind of goods.

Their idea is to do something different from everyone else, producing something that no one has yet seen, thereby creating a “blue ocean”. An essential concept is that the innovation (in product, service, or delivery) must raise and create value for the market, while simultaneously reducing or eliminating features or services that are less valued by the current or future market.

More info: http://www.blueoceanstrategy.com/downloads/bos_web.pdf

Work is love

Work is Love made visible.
And if you can’t work with love but only with distaste,
It is better that you should leave your work
and sit at the gate of the temple and
take alms of the people who work with joy.

Kahlil Gibran