Lee Kuan Yew on Leadership: The Harvard Interview (Fixed Audio)

Hello, I'm David Gurgen here at Kennedy School at Harvard, and we're with Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore. Uh, we'll be asking him about leadership, and perhaps I should introduce the other members of our panel as we begin. Uh, to my right is Professor Ronald Heifetz, here at the Kennedy School. A senior minister, as you know. Uh, Dr. Heifetz has a background. He's taught here in leadership courses at the Kennedy School and has really been one who laid the foundations for the study of leadership at the Kennedy School. He's been here for over 15 years. Uh, to his right is Dean Williams, uh, who is teaching a leadership course now. He joined us at the faculty and has had a very popular course on leadership, uh, over the past year, as it's been now deemed. Uh, and who has worked in Singapore, as you have just heard, and whose wife is Singaporean, so we're delighted to have him here. And at his right is John Thomas, who runs a, uh, program on Singapore here at the, uh, at the university and has, uh, travels regularly to Singapore and has also worked with the National University, uh, there as well.

Uh, now, Senior Minister, our thought today is that you have written, uh, uh, extensive, two extensive books, memoirs, I guess. Is there another one still to come after this, or is this it?

>> That depends on how long I live.

>> Well, in that case, this will be the second of four volumes.

>> If I live another 50 years.

>> Exactly. So, we might ask you, for starters, if, if we might, if you would. Uh, I find that in talking to people in China, many of them look to you as a model of personal leadership. And we'd like to begin by asking you, as you look back upon your years, what do you think were the essential elements of your own leadership?

Well, to understand what made me and my colleagues become the people we did become, we've got to understand the history, because we went through a harrowing period that tempered us. That either broke us or tempered us. Uh, we lived in happy, placid colonial Singapore in the 1920s, '30s. We grew up there, and the British Empire would have lasted another thousand years, so we thought. Uh, then the war broke out in Europe, and I was, I've been wanting to do law, which could only be done in Britain. So, to mark time, because France had fallen, I was 18. I joined the local college, Raffles College, to do a humanities course: economics, uh, English literature, and mathematics. My generation did that. Then, in our second year, in December 1942, although the signs were there, but the overconfidence was overwhelming. Never believed that the Japanese dared attack. And on the 8th of December, which was the 7th, your date line, about 400 p.m., 4:00 a.m., they came over and dropped bombs. Utter shock.

Then the war began, and in less than one and a half months, they were right down from the peninsula, from Saigon, where they had based themselves, onto Peninsula Malaya, on bicycles and tanks. Came right through at the gates of Singapore. All the guns were pointing out in a different direction. Uh, then the bombardment started, and we saw, within one and a half months, a total collapse of the British Raj. And the painting that the Japanese captured was symbolic. Coming. There was this tall, gangling Lieutenant General A.E. Percival, top of his class in Staff and Command College in Camberley, with a white flag and the Union Jack. And there was this Tomoyuki Yamashita with his big sword, looking dominating. And the dark ages just closed in on us. Three and a half years of hell, butchery, brutality. Many didn't survive. I was fortunate I did. But it changed us. I don't know why I was spared. Just a luck of the draw, because they picked up all the healthy young men on the basis that they're likely to cause trouble, to polish them off. And anywhere between 50 to 100,000 were taken to the beaches, lined up, and just shot. Uh, three and a half years of privation, reflection. Changed us. What right did they have to do this to us? Why did the British let us down so badly? Churchill decided it wasn't worth the sacrifice. He was concentrating on the Middle East. Well, two atomic bombs, and we were saved. Otherwise, you would have been destroyed. I mean, towards the end, 1945, when they knew they were losing, and they were retreating all the way from the Arakan coast down, they built trenches into every hillock in Singapore. Liberators. And they had every intention to be there until the flamethrowers incinerated them. But that big bomb and the Emperor's speech, and they meekly surrendered. Some committed suicide. Uh, British came back. Happy times didn't return because, you know, they lacked shipping, they lacked medicine, they lacked food. But gradually, it improved. Uh, my generation then resumed our studies. I went to England, uh, studied in Cambridge to do law, spent three years there, took my degree, and, uh, one year in London. But I was then watching them with different eyes. Can they govern me better than I can govern myself? Because they scooted when the Japanese came in. And why shouldn't I be running the place? My colleagues and I. So that was the beginning. And we, we went back, built up mass support. How to build up mass support? Here we were, a group of armchair politicians talking revolution in British pubs, crawling from one pub to the other. When we came back, we decided, let's start up with the union, because there was considerable dissatisfaction with low wages and bad conditions. So we spent several years working voluntarily as honorary advisors. House of lawyers for free, and we built up a whole host of unions that formed the basis upon which we could base a party, which we did. By 19, four years later, I started 1950. By 1954, my colleagues and I, we were about a group of six or so. We formed a party, and the communists joined us. Says common enemy, the British. They were not really communist. They're just left-wingers, but some were. And that was the beginning of a life-and-death struggle, first with the communists. The fight with the British was the easiest, because they were, they were not putting up a fight. They just wanted to make sure that power was handed over to a group that wouldn't ruin the place and ruin their interests. The fight was with the communists, who wanted a different system. Then, to defeat the communists, because of the demography of Singapore, you're 70% Chinese, and all of them believed that China was a tremendous success. All the glorious pictures coming out of huge steel mills and ships and plants. It was an uphill fight. So we said, like, let's join up with the peninsula, rejoin them. Then it'll be 40% Malays, 40% Chinese, 20% others. So the communists can't win. When we joined the Malaysians, other Malays, they were not keen on this kind of suffrage. They wanted 50 or 60% Malays, and they win. So after less than two years, they said, "Leave, or there'll be bloodshed." It was a fine judgment whether they were threatening us, not really wanting to have bloodshed, but just wanting to get rid of us. Or maybe the old Tunku, who was then in charge, was really out of control, and the young Turks were determined to rough us up. Uh, snap decision had to be made. So we decided, okay, let's, let's have a go on our own. So we left, and we have this tiny little island, 214 square miles at low tide, center of the British Empire in Southeast Asia. Military base, commercial base, administrative capital from which they govern Malaya, Borneo, Cocos Islands, Christmas Islands in the Indian Ocean. But now we got a heart without a body. All we had was the heart. How do we live? Where's the circulation coming from? That was the beginning of the challenge.

>> Let's, uh, if we might, rather than going through the elements of leadership for the moment, why don't we come back to the formative years, formative experiences, being you want to pursue that?

>> Yeah. Could you talk a little bit about the challenges associated with trying to exercise leadership, mobilize, uh, I guess the competing factions, to deal with the challenges of getting the British out of Singapore and Malaya, and that alliance you had with the communists, because potentially that could have been, well, it was threatening to you, and if they had won in any way, they could have just killed, you would have been finished off.

>> Yeah.

>> Well, it was the sweet innocence of youth. We, we believed that, you know, they can't all be communist. They look so ordinary people. They were just idealists. Maybe a few were die-hard Marxist-Leninists. Why not win them over to our cause? Because anyway, communism can't win in a multi-racial society. You've got to win over the Malays, and they're not going to be won over by communism. So we were hopeful that we could win them over, and indeed, we won quite a few of them over. So that encouraged me enormously. Uh, but in retrospect, we didn't have a chance. We did not know the depths to which that penetrated the Chinese schools, the clan associations, the Chinese chambers of commerce, the school management committees, alumni associations. Uh, Dennis Bloodworth, who was then the Observer correspondent for Southeast Asia, covering Singapore and Vietnam, asked me, he says, "Can't you get rid of these fellows?" So I said, "They're like radioactive dust. How do you get rid of them? You've got to vacuum the whole place out, and with it will go all the activists, and you'll have all the inert gases left." So we had to take a chance. Uh, in the process, we were lucky in that their leaders lacked an understanding of the outside world. They understood the dynamics of conspiracy. You know, that we are on the same side. This cell takes orders from that cell, and so on. And if you break the rules, bomb. But they didn't understand that if you can't get sovereignty, if you've got only semi-self-government, semi-independence, the British were still in charge, and they could call the game off and bring the troops back. So that was my advantage. I was a lawyer. I understood completely what constitutional practices were. They didn't. So I arranged it such that when we made constitutional advance, I, I left unchallenged ultimate sovereignty in the hands of the British. I said, "You keep that. If I lose, you'll have to deal with this. If I win, then I'll take over." I think that was the first wisdom, that I did not feel confident that I could win. So I had that backstop.

>> Were there moments of doubt when you were wondering whether at all you could succeed in the face of this, this challenge?

Well, when they opened the, in 1961, just before May Day, May the 1st, Tunku, Prime Minister of Malaysia, came out at a speech to the Foreign Correspondents Association, says, "Yes, he will have merger with Singapore, but not with Singapore alone, but with Malaysia, Sabah, Sarawak, and Brunei." That's the dowry for taking in troublesome Singapore. So the communist underground were greatly excited, because then they would be cornered in this bigger federation. So the leader of the underground, who had met me secretly before I was Prime Minister, sent a message through my wife in her lawyer's office to ask to see me. This was quite a dilemma. The last time I saw him, I was just an MP. So I took him to the legislature, and if anything happened, I said, "Well, I was just meeting a constituent." But this time, I was the Prime Minister. What am I hobnobbing with a man who has to be arrested on sight? I thought it over. I said, "He's also taking a risk, because I could have a posse of police quietly tailing me and surround the place, and we've captured the leader of the underground. But then he might bump me off and bump himself off." So I said, "No, let's, let's go. Let's see what the, what the score is." So I picked up a little girl with two pigtails at a roundabout, and she directed me to the house where we were going to meet. And I was filled with admiration at the careful planning. It took me to an incomplete public housing project, nearly complete, everything ready except power and electricity. So nobody's in charge, nobody's in occupation. You can't claim that you have this man there. He had candles, beer, glasses, sat down. He says, "We've been misunderstanding each other. We want to cooperate with you. All we want is space for cultural and union activities. You do it your way, we will do it our way. But we must have space." I thought to myself, "Space to get stronger than you have a big tightrope and you put it around my neck." Uh, I said to him, "Well, you have your views and your agenda. I have to do what I have to do. So you do what you have to do. And if we have to part company, let's part in a friendly way. But I can't guarantee your freedom of action in this way." Few days later, he saw the Open Front leader and says, "Destroy the PAP government." And they broke off, and the fight began. And I wasn't sure we're going to win it, because all of a sudden, all their sleepers in all the unions and the newspapers, Chinese newspapers particularly, school management committees, chambers of commerce, came out with fiery statements denouncing me as a lackey of the imperialists and tool of the feudal leaders in Malaysia and so on and so on and so on. And then the fight began for the vote, because I had a referendum and proposed a referendum to join or not to join Malaysia. And we campaigned for a whole year. We won it. They lost. I gave them no choice, because they had agreed with me that the future of independence lay with merger with Malaysia, with Malaya, and they said all in a written document, so they can't back off. So I said, "In that case, we will have merger either style one or style two or style three." They said, "No, you must have anti-merger." I said, "No, you never wanted anti-merger." So they called for a blank vote to protest. They got 30% blank votes. I carried 70%. So we went into Malaysia. But in the process, this is where we, I mean, if Singapore had got independence straight away, we would not have succeeded. It was a fractious, strike-blown, riotous kind of people, quite irresponsible. They're just angry with the world. But having gone through this awful clash with dark forces that would engulf us, huge, massive rallies which the communists could mount to intimidate people, they decided that this was a very serious business, and that we were not unworthy of their trust, that we were prepared to fight. Then, having got to Malaysia, the Malays then mounted riots against us to browbeat us. And at that time, the police and the army were in the hands of the Malays. We stood up and said, "No, you stop it. Let's have a commission of inquiry." And put the Tunku, the Prime Minister of Malaysia, on the defensive.

>> I wonder if I could go back a bit and then we'll resume the story, to understand more fully what made you personally a leader of your people. Do you feel that you were born a leader, or were there, uh, episodes in your youth that shaped you as a leader and allowed you to move forward in the way you did and gave you the confidence to move forward?

>> I don't think I was born a leader. I was born an activist. Yes. Uh, I was not the ideal, well-behaved boy in class. I never became a school prefect. I never became the school captain. And I was always up to some, uh, mischief of my own, you know, poking fun at some other student or whatever. There was a certain exuberance in me. Uh, what made me a leader was that when the time came, the group of us who were the, uh, called the leadership said, "You better lead," because I was the best speaker.

>> You're the best speaker.

>> I was the best speaker. In English. But then the mass of the people who spoke Hokkien and Mandarin and Malay.

>> That was sort of Chinese language, right?

>> So English was understood then, in the 1950s, by about 20% of the population. So I furiously started learning Malay. I was quite good at it because I grew up with Malay students. So I could easily use bazaar Malay, not not polished Malay. Could easily make myself understood. But I then learned Mandarin, the Chinese language of the educated. Then discovered that only 20, 30% of the population spoke, understood Mandarin. That the vast 70% spoke a variety of dialects, and the most understood dialect was Hokkien, Fuzhou, what Taiwan uses. So every day at lunchtime, instead of having lunch, I would sit down with a Hokkien teacher and laboriously and painfully learn to convert my Mandarin into Hokkien.

>> And had I not mastered that, the battle would be lost by default. But because I mastered that, we were able to get our message through. And what was more important, I think, in the course of the fight, when I started speaking in Hokkien,

>> This was in the 1950s?

>> This was in the 1960s. Uh, '61, there was a by-election. The kids just laughed at me because it was comical. So I said, "Please don't laugh. Help me. I'm trying to get you to understand." By six months, I was able to get my ideas across. By the referendum, in two years, I was airborne. And so came. It had two advantages. One, it showed to them how determined I was and how sincere I was, because here I am doing all these other things and learning this language to talk to them. And secondly, believe it or not, at the end of two years, I could speak better than most of them.

>> That earned respect.

>> Yeah. You said in the book, your second volume, that your greatest asset was your strength at the podium.

>> Your capacity to speak.

>> Yeah.

>> That's really what helped to single you out early and then, and then to gain the attention and the following.

>> Yeah.

>> Where did that come from? Was it just that was a natural-born capacity, or is that something you learned when you went?

>> If you ask me, it must have been innate. I, I, I wanted to be a lawyer. Why? Because my parents, uh, told me they had suffered with a depression in the 1930s.

>> Mhm.

>> And, uh, their friends who were lawyers or doctors or engineers didn't suffer so badly because they had a profession. So they told me, "Get a profession." So I wasn't keen on being a doctor. I thought an engineer was a hard life, making machines and so on. Why not be a lawyer? You just,

>> Argue.

>> You argue. And I wasn't bad at that. So I took part in debates in school and became a regular debater and chairman of the debating club. But that's not decisive. I've seen later on in the Cambridge Union Society, people who make clever speeches. It's a useful technique. But to get across, you must have a deep message which you must be able to put with total conviction. Then they believe you. And those formative experiences that came in form of your convictions came out of the war. And then what you saw after the war, out of the war, out of working with the communists, fighting them, out of going into Malaysia and finding that we were ambushed by the Malay extremists who wanted a Malay-dominated country, and we had to fight them. And said, "No. What does the constitution say? We are equal citizens." Then they try to browbeat us. "Blood will flow."

>> But at that moment, when the troops were Malay, police were Malay.

>> The people were greatly relieved and took comfort that here was a group that was prepared to stand up for them and said, "Look, we are not scared. Okay, over our dead bodies, you kill us and take the consequences." Because at that moment, British, Australian, and New Zealand troops were defending them against Indonesia's confrontation. And if they bumped us off, there'll be a tremendous row in the British Parliament, where I had many friends, in the Australian Parliament, where the Prime Minister Robert Menzies was also a friend, and in New Zealand. So they had to weigh the odds of having a mighty big row with the three protectors against Sukarno's forces, or settling in accordance with the constitution.

>> Go back to this point you made. It's not enough to make the clever speech that anybody can do that. But what is important is the conviction that goes with it. Why is that? Why do you distinguish between the two?

Well, because one is just a clever speech. They listen to you and they say, "What? What a smart fellow." But when you're facing a dire crisis, and we say, as after a riot, I had to say, "You're worried. So am I. I'm worried too. But let me tell you this: If we stay united, there are limits to what they can do to us. Let's have a solidarity movement throughout Malaysia of all the towns. And there are 40% Chinese, 40% Malays, 20% Indians and others. That's 60%. We are the majority, and we might get some Malays to join us too." So that arithmetic, simple, vivid. They said, "Yes, we have a fighting chance. This is not a hopeless fight. We've got leaders who are not going to cut and run." And they also knew that I had, uh, a direct line to Harold Wilson, who was a personal friend of mine.

>> From your?

>> From my Labor days as a Labor club member in Cambridge University, and I have friends who were students in Cambridge and in the, uh, Labor Party research department with whom we kept in contact. So they said, "Well, let's stay. Let's not quit." So you, you must have a, you must have a message which is credible, which is sincere, and at the end of the day, they say, "Yes, it can win if we have the courage to stay put and not run."

>> And they did.

>> Had you come through personal tests of fire before you became a leader of your people?

>> I'm not sure. Uh, our personal test of fire. I mean, my only test of between life and death was a bit of quick-wittedness. The Japanese corralled us all, all Chinese, into concentration camps for filtering out to pick up healthy males whom they wanted to polish off. They wanted to punish the Singapore Chinese for supporting the China Relief Fund, helping the Nationalist government fight them. So I was, uh, kept with my family in a red-light district. They just corralled us. I think they just drew a circle, say, "There you are." And as I was walking out, if you are clear, they'll chop a Japanese character or Chinese character meaning "examine." Jen. It's either on your body, then you don't wash it, try to keep it for as long as you can, or on your shirt, in which case you preserve the shirt. When it came to my turn, as I was passing through, carrying my little belongings, he said, "Go to that lorry." I thought, "No, this is trouble."

>> If you go to the lorry, you might be killed.

>> Instinct told me that was bad.

>> Yes, it was bad. I said, "Can I collect my other things?" They said, "Yes, go ahead." I then nipped smartly back. My gardener, who was a workshop worker, who pulled my brothers and sisters to school, had his labor lines there. He, he shared a dorm there. So I hid in his place for a couple of days. Then when they changed the screening inspectors, you know, people with hooded eyes and so on, they decide who gets through, who doesn't get through. I decided to try my luck and went out again. This time I got through. The ones that were sent to that lorry was sent to the beaches and machine-gunned. So, have I had a brush with death? Yes.

>> I was wondering whether it gave you the kind of courage that you've shown through life, that you have, you're known for having guts to sort of see through very tough situ.

I'm not sure guts is just instinct. The other way. I thought, "Oh, this is sure death. Let's try looking my meas." I said, "I think things to correct." Said, "All right. People have become increasingly ambivalent in the, uh, in the West in the last 30 years, 40 years. Uh, ambivalent about authority. You could say that the United States was built upon this ambivalence in the way we constructed a government with separate institutions sharing power so that no one could do too much damage, and the fear of investing authority in anyone too far. But certainly since the era in this country of Vietnam and Watergate, the degree to which people are willing to invest someone with authority has been reduced. The credibility of people in authority is reduced. I would like to understand. I would like to learn from your experience in, um, in developing your own bases of authority. It's already informative the way you've talked about learning the languages that people speak, connecting with people in the outside world. So if you could give us your insights into the sources of your authority, both your formal authority as well as your informal authority, credibility, trust, respect, that might be very helpful.

>> Put simply, when I started, I was just a sympathetic lawyer who worked for unions free of charge. I won their cases, went to arbitration, charged them nothing. So I became a popular figure. I became advisor to about 30, 40 unions. So I was a good guy. But just as a technician, my test came when I had to buck the government. First, the British, but that was easy. The British. I knew all the rules of the game. I could out-debate them in Parliament. I could, uh, pick their noses in court if they charged my clients for sedition.

>> And they were getting tired of their empire.

>> They were, they, they wanted a way out. They just wanted to make sure that whoever took over could run the place and wouldn't destroy their interests. What was critical in establishing trust and confidence was when I stood up to the communists and fought them at a time when that was a very dangerous thing to do, because they had elimination squads, they got guerrillas in the jungle, they got killer squads in the towns. And we stood up and said, "No." And it was a test of both courage to stand up to them and political skills. They denied that they were communists, were just left-wing socialists. So I did a series of 12 broadcasts to set the scene, and I made it in three languages.

>> Can you give us a year on when this?

>> This was 1961, when we broke. So I explained how we, as English-educated students, unable to speak to the mass of the people, formed, got together to build this party, and then ran into this well-organized group which had enormous following. Says, "Wonderful, let's go fishing in that pond. We might find some good fish." They had no intention of allowing us to poach their fish. But when they said, "We are honest, sincere comm, uh, socialists, just like you," I then revealed, onion by onion, I peeled off,

>> In 12 broadcasts.

>> And I described how I met the plan, the chief, who said he was going to work with me and so on, and it was convincing. Because when I met the plan, he said, "We'll work together. You win, you release our people from jail." I said, "Yes, I have to do that." So I said, "How do I know you are the boss?" He said, "You have to take my word for it." I said, "Well, I believe this city counselor is one of your men, and he has penetrated David Marshall, who was a Safari Jew, very bright fellow, a lawyer, non-communist, and he formed a Workers Party. I said, 'You get him to resign.'" Then I would have believed you are the boss. Three weeks later, when I was in London conferencing with the British, I opened the Straits Times, and the chap had resigned. I thought, "God, here was a man whom I had, when I became Prime Minister, I went to the Special Branch and looked up the files, and there was his picture, wanted on sight, and deep in the underground, chased by the police. He could send a message to this fellow he did not know, and the man resigned." So when I disclosed all this, credibility was established. The fight was on.

>> You, in three different languages. Those broadcasts?

>> When I finished each broadcast, the director of the station couldn't see me. Went into the room and found me lying on the floor trying to recover my breath.

>> Each speech was in?

>> Oh, yes. English, Malay, Mandarin. And you try that.

>> How long did you speak?

>> About 20 minutes each.

>> But it was a fight for survival, life or death. But after that, and when we stood up to the Malay extremists, there can be no question that they knew we were not quitters, and trust was established. Without that trust, we could not have built Singapore.

>> So your authority was based on that trust that you were able to develop with people through?

>> In crisis. In crisis. It wasn't, I think it's difficult to establish it in, uh, times of calm. And just you say, "Well, you know, it's an argument, therefore I'm a better guy than you." But when the chips are down, and you can get eliminated in a very unpleasant way, and you show that you're prepared for it, and you'll fight for them, it makes a difference after that.

>> Do you think the person who steps forward in that situation, as you did, does so by instinct? What is there that brings forward certain kinds of people in crisis?

>> I can't explain it. I got them into this trouble. Nobody asked me to go and chase the British out. It was something visceral. My friends and I decided to do it. Then we landed ourselves in a fight with the communists. Had we been rational? Had we known that they had been digging away, building up since 1923, the year I was born, the first communist agents were sent from Shanghai to Singapore in 1923. And here we were in the 1950s trying to beat them. And they are professionals at organizations. You beat them through the gambit, too, of joining with Malaysia.

>> Yes. Yes.

>> Malaysia. That was.

>> That was the gambit. Yes.

>> Because you couldn't beat them head-on in a referendum in Singapore.

>> But we did.

>> Oh.

>> Over the joining.

>> That's right. Because they had committed themselves.

>> I got them to commit themselves to us.

>> Now, other people have gained a great deal of credibility with their people in times of crisis, like in the Philippines with Marcos, and many other places, the founders of their, or founding people in the decolonizing period, and then somehow after 10 or 20 years, they lose their sources of authority, and they try to rely on their military as their major source of authority. Can you tell me, give me some sense of how your own sources of authority evolved, or how you continued to nurture along your own credibility so that you did not become subjected to a people's war, or to, well, put simply this way, we knew we had a vicious opponent in the communists. Any peccadillo, any indiscretion, any misdemeanor, and they will smear you in the coffee shops and destroy your character. "The fact that I sleep in an air-conditioned room is a debit. See, look at him. Look at us. We sleep with you on the hard union benches every night. We are with the people. But look at this softy." So we were very conscious not to give hostages to fortune, that if we became dishonest, we became ostentatious, we lived well at the people's expense, that was going to fritter away all this trust that we had gained. That was one half. The other half was to deliver.

>> Yeah. So we delivered the homes, the schools, the jobs, the hospitals. Homes literally that they own today. We gave them the land for free and charged them just for the building of the apartment, docked off the monthly salary. And today, 98% of our people will own their own homes. And the smallest home would be about three rooms, would be $100,000 US. And the biggest would be about $300,000 US. That's not, once you own that amount of assets, you're not in favor of risking it with a crazy government. Your assets will go down in value. But that was planned.

>> We planned that for two reasons. One, we had to have the children fight, because it's a small nation, so everybody does national service. And if you're going to fight for all the wealthy people's big estates, that's not a good idea. So we gave everybody a stake. So not losing our sense of purpose and place, not abusing our power, that we were trustees and not owners of the place. That was crucial. And the other, to deliver. Let me, uh, I wanted to come to you, John Thomas, because this goes back to, he has talked to one of the people who's closest to you about elements of your leadership. Could you pursue that now?

>> Yes. First of all, let me thank you, Senior Minister, for spending this time with us. Uh, you said yesterday that, uh, in some ways you were here because, uh, having visited Harvard and spent a brief sabbatical with us in 1968, you felt some sense of an opportunity to repay what you had gained at that time. And I think your notion that 32 years later you still are prepared to, uh, to reward, to thank us in this way is very significant. And so we want to thank you for this. But I had the opportunity to have a long lunch with a colleague of yours, someone who's worked with you very closely. And I asked him in that conversation, "What are the characteristics of the Senior Minister as a leader? What would you point to as the five or six things that really characterize him and make him stand out as a leader?" And I'd be happy to share his comments with you in a minute, but I'd be very interested in hearing what you think are the personal characteristics that really typify your leadership.

>> This is subjective. I can't look at myself in the mirror and I can describe my appearance. I can take a picture. But how do I describe my inner motivations, my proclivities? If you want me to have a go, I would say I'm consistent. I don't say one thing today and another tomorrow and change again day after tomorrow. It's not that I'm inflexible. There are circumstances where the situation has altered, and I'm prepared to say, "Well, this no longer applies." But I, on the whole, I stay consistent. And if you, I had three journalists write up a book of my speeches, and I asked them at the end, "What was the dominant theme you found?" And the three of them said, "Consistency throughout all the 40 years in public life. What I said at the beginning, throughout all that period, the theme stayed loud and clear." Uh, that made it simple because you know where you stand with me, and you know what I want to do. Two, I'm quite determined. I may not be able to do it this way, but don't believe I've given up. I will think of some other way to get there. I think it's necessary because if you do, if you lack that determination, then you're not going to achieve. You will not be able to deliver. Uh, third, I'm able to get ideas across to people in simple ways and persuade them to my point of view. If not the first time, then the second, the third, the fourth time. I don't give up. Eventually, I swing them around. Uh, fifth, I am true to my friends and colleagues. I don't place trust in people who don't deserve it, but those whom I feel are trustworthy, I give them total authority, given total mandate to do it that way. Uh, it's part of a Chinese saying: "Use a man, don't distrust. Distrust a man, don't use." Say that again.

>> Use a man, don't distrust him. If you distrust him, don't use him.

>> And, uh, I would say I've been fairly good at sensing who I should not trust. It's part of the EQ problem. I don't think any leader could last long if his EQ is weak, because you've got to depend on other people to help you do the job. And if you are good-wing, then you place trust in people who are not sharing your views, you are in trouble. What did, what did this man tell you?

>> All will be revealed. Six points, and I emphasize that these are, I wrote these down in my own words sometime after the conversation. But the first one was, you made, said he has a very strong sense of determination. Once he starts something, he will see it through. He persists. He will not fail, and everyone knows that.

>> That helps.

>> It seems stubborn. Second was, he develops a broad vision of where he wants to go, and he connects things. He sees the implications much more fully than most people. Third was, he has an unusual grasp of the environment. He understands context and what is possible. He knows where opposition will appear, what people want, such as security or opportunity. He understands hopes, and he understands history. Fourth, he understands the relationships between politics and policies. He understands priorities, preparation, what can be done, when, and how to do it. He reads extensively, and he connects things that he has read at different times, sometimes widely separated in time, to get a deep understanding of a particular situation. And the last one, he gets the best people, whether they are friends or enemies. He always welcomes opposition and opposing views until he makes a decision. Those were his.

>> Must be a great supporter of mine.

>> I think that's fair to say.

>> See, Minister, could we come back to this question of emotional intelligence? It was so interesting that you raised that, because, uh, as Dr. Heifetz was just pointing out to me, you're known as a man of brilliance and as a man of extremely rational, careful thought. Uh, uh, and yet you raised the question. You said, you know, without emotional intelligence, you can't survive as a leader. Could you sort of balance those two qualities off, IQ and EQ?

Well, IQ, you can get, uh, beautiful papers done, complex formulas worked out, simple, elegant solutions in the end. But when you've got to get a team to work and put that formula into practice, you're dealing with human beings. And if you're not good at EQ, you can't sense that A doesn't get on with B, and you put them in the same team, it's no good. Uh, I had a very brilliant deputy, King, a powerful mind, very sharp pen, good economist, good in anything he spends his time on. But he keeps on making mistakes picking the best people he wants you and tools about somebody. Say, "Oh, wonderful, he put up a paper for me." Then he says, "I want him as my secretary." Six months later, he'll come back to see me and says, "Oh, chap's no good. He lacks judgment. Change. He's unable to sense and feel." I had another man of the same generation, Goh Keng Swee, also bright. Became a teacher, became a builder and a manufacturer of ships. Then in his 60s, I persuaded him to be the chairman of our Public Services Commission, that recruits people for the public service and interviews potential officers or young students for scholarships to top universities abroad. And nobody, but nobody, pulls any wool over his eyes. He sees through the person each time. And when he sends me a man and says, "This is a good man," he turns out to be a good man. He's got this uncanny knack. I have another friend, also a colleague. He was a manufacturer of sago flour. He invented a machine that would thrash the sago out of the fiber. I got him to build houses, the first few houses. Practical. He was very good at that. When he shook hands with a former Special Branch officer who hated us, he didn't know that a Chinese who, when we took office, switched and worked for Malaya. And he shook hands with the man and says, "I recoiled when I felt his palm. Evil man." Said, "And he was." How does he know? I don't know. I think his body language, his eyes, his sense of feel of the other person. So I learned whenever I had to do interviews to choose people, I would get people like Lim Kim San, Teh Chieng, people who are very good at seeing through a candidate. And in one hour, we'll have the papers before us, records, achievements, various tests, degrees, etc. But in that one hour exchange, as yes or no, and they were very good. I would rate myself as score 1 to 10. I'd give myself seven, maybe eight. But this chap, Chairman of our PSC, I'd give him 10.

>> That's on EQ.

>> Yes. On EQ. And if you had to rate yourself on IQ 1 to 10?

>> That's easier. You can put me through SAT and, uh, I've never been through one, but I would say maybe 120.

>> What was that?

>> 120.

>> In an IQ?

>> An IQ. Maybe. I don't know. Must have been tailing off over the years as the neurons die. And so in looking for someone to, to appoint to a position of high authority, or to, if you're looking toward a leader, would you prefer a high IQ or of high EQ?

You, what I think I hear you saying is, have a good enough IQ, but then have a high EQ. That depends on the job. Uh, supposing I wanted somebody to run the Institute of Cell and Molecular Biology and run a research project, then I would say, "Well, even if his EQ is not that good, but he will chase this thing down the tunnel until he finds what was the gene or what was the little thing that is needed." Then I'd go for his IQ. But that would be an exception. But if I'm going to get a chap, a man to do a job that handles other people, a department or a team, he should have enough IQ to be able to master the details, so he understands the total project, but good EQ so he knows who to appoint to what particular sector and who will work with whom. Because if you can't get a good team going, then it's a failure, because he, he can't do it himself. He's got to get a team to work for him.

>> Senior Minister, Singapore, more than in most countries, you relied on a group of highly talented and trusted lieutenants more than organizations. I remember at a time when countries were having planning commissions and writing five-year plans, the World Bank came to you and said, "We're going to give you a loan. You have to do a five-year plan." And in Goh Keng Swee's memoirs, he writes about sitting down on Friday and working through the weekend, and by Tuesday having the five-year plan. You got the loan from the World Bank and you proceeded as you had planned. But far more than most countries, you and Singapore depended on a group of highly talented individuals. Would you say why you did that? Why you didn't follow the path that other countries were following, focusing more on what are the correct institutions in this country?

>> Well, first, we did not inherit strong institutions. The British had the fundamentals, but not much more. Uh, we didn't have all that much talent when the British left, because education was limited in the years before the war and in the years after the war. It was a crash course to produce as many local administrators and doctors and dentists and so on. So we had to make do with the best we can, given the civil service as it was, uh, the university as, uh, pretty rudimentary, teaching only the basic subjects, no think tanks. And the natural solution would be, out of this lot who have got outstanding minds, creative, can think the unusual, and help us solve this problem. Uh, by about three years, there are not very many of them. By about three years, you've gone through about 20 or 30 of them, and you've decided that, uh, these six are your key players, and they built the institutions. And, for instance, Hon Sui Sen, who was a very talented administrator, a friend of mine, older than me by about six to seven years. He was very good at picking winners. All the, the present Prime Minister, he picked. He introduced him because the present Prime Minister, Goh, had worked for him. It was a young officer who had gone to Williams College, came back, and he said, "Here's the shipping line is in the red. You turn it around." And he turned it around, became profitable, and he could meet with shipping magnets in.

Hong Kong and never got uh tainted. I mean, in shipping, you pass each other golf clubs with, instead of golf balls, you have a a nugget of diamonds or pearls or whatever. I mean, that's commonplace. So he picked another man who was a banker, whom he met as minister of finance, is now deputy prime minister and minister for defense. So he had this uncanny ability to say, "This is a good man," and he built institutions. He built the Economic Development Board that uh had offices around the world to sell Singapore and bring investments in. Uh, he developed Jurong Industrial Park and hived that off into a whole company. He developed the Development Bank of Singapore because our banks were not uh accustomed to lending money on on manufacturing projects that may not yield returns for four, five, six years. So he formed this bank, got the other banks to contribute, but we took the lion's share. So he created those institutions, and uh, so did the others. I mean, Lim Kim San started the Housing and Development Board, and from there, a whole series of other subsidiary boards making sand, making concrete, uh, making doors, standard doors, and so on. But institutions as such came later when we had more talent to spare. Then you say, "Right, we'll have the Institute of Public Policy," and you put six or seven bright people under one practical man or woman and say, "Look, study this," or Institute of Defense Policy. And we, by then, we had a retired uh diplomat who was head of intelligence. He's now our president, and he started that. But it's a second-stage pro, a second-stage process after you've developed enough talent and people had experience, talented people with experience in specific fields, then you institutionalize them.

Again, I'd like to follow up on, like to go to the question of corruption. You made some uh references to it uh in terms of everybody needing to be clean of golf balls in Hong Kong, etc. Uh, Singapore in the '50s was a place of of deals and corruption and sort of a freewheeling court city in which everything happened. Uh, however, you came in and you wiped this out. Uh, you have made Singapore probably the the least corrupt nation in the world. Uh, you also got rid of organized crime in Singapore. I'm told. I'd like to ask you about this also. I'm told there is a famous film clip from Singapore Broadcasting Corporation, the early days, when you uh went to the studio and you had the a couple of members of the triads rounded up and and brought into the studio and you confronted them directly and told them that that either they were going to leave Singapore or you were going to leave Singapore. I'd like you to talk about the various ways in which you ch altered this very fundamental fact of Singapore life and and made it such an exemplary.

>> You can't alter it in one dramatic uh set of moves. This is an ongoing push, drive, push, drive, never stops. But uh, when we came in, corruption had already begun to to creep. I mean, the the government ahead of us was formed first by David Marshall, who was an honest man, a very able lawyer, and uh, he didn't need to be corrupt. Then when he resigned, a less able man called Lim Yew Hock took over, and under him was a very fractious government that was only held together because there was loot. So for about three and a half years, it was beginning to get crummy and affecting the whole administration. This was one of our problems. We didn't feel strong enough to fight the communists to take over. But if we didn't fight to take over, and we block the communists, and we left this government for another five years, then we'll inherit a civil service that's corrupted us. Then you've got weakened instruments, blunted instruments. So that forced us to take over. And when we took over, we decided that this was the critical factor. If we did not make it that every dollar that was put in at the top reaches ground as $1, we are not going to succeed because we we have few dollars, and the communists will just kill us. Look at it. Another corrupt bunch. So we came in and we made a a symbolic act. We dressed in white shirts, white trousers, and said, "We will be what we represent." We were also, of course, sickened by the hypocrisy and the reality of so many nationalist leaders that took power and within a short number of years just were living it up and running their countries down. So we had to be different. We knew the communists would kill us if we were not careful, and we had the incentive to want to see that every dollar reaches the ground. So we changed the rules, made it transparent. Uh, no discretion, everything was open. So if you do something unusual, your subordinate or your peers will notice. Then we also, I also put the Anti-Corruption, Corrupt Practices Investigation Bureau under my personal portfolio so that everybody knew that I'm personally going to lead this drive. So I gave the director the authority to investigate everybody and everything. All ministers, including myself. Uh, the first job was to get rid of the triads because they are part of Singapore society from time immemorial. They came from China, and they they lived off extortion, and just as in Taiwan, when they go into elections, they can intimidate or they can buy votes for you. In Taiwan, they call it black gold. And I was determined that because we were in the opposition, and Lim Yew Hock used the triads, we told them during the election campaign, "This is your last chance. When we win, you're out. So do your worst. You're not scaring us." But of course, by that time, the groundswell was so solidly on our side. They knew that we were most likely to win, and we will deal with them. So having won, uh, we just polished them off. Uh, we had special laws which the British had passed called the Criminal Law Temporary Provisions Act, where you can't have evidence against a criminal because of his stray out links or drug smuggling or whatever. You can lock him up for two years, and he goes to a special advisory committee where evidence is placed, not necessarily enough for a conviction in court. So within two years, we cleaned up the lot, and many moved off to Malaya and other places, and they never came back. Had they had we got them back, uh, because the police and the army was attacking the populace, so we used them to fight them. I think then they would have grown, which was what happened in other count, other parts of the world. But after that, it's just one hard slog to make sure the the venality is a failing which sometimes is difficult to explain. I mean, I have, most difficult of all to explain was when my own colleague who built up all these beautiful houses, he is an architect, very able organizer, called Toh Chin Chye. I've covered him in my, one of my chapters. He could have made a fortune outside just as an architect, but for some reason, he yielded to the temptation of taking half a million dollars for adding an extra piece of land on a land sale so that the developer has a neat little, uh, completed plot. And he did that for another one. And years later, they had cropped up, and the investigations had to start. He wanted to see me to solve the problem. I said, "If I see you, then I'll be a witness in court. So best not see me. Better see your lawyer." He committed suicide. He left a note and said, "As an oriental gentleman who believes in honor, I have to pay the supreme price." Died. And the family left. Because we had created by then, this was '85, '86, we had created in Singapore a climate of opinion which considers bribery, especially bribery grafted in high places, as totally devastating to the society and the economy. But it's a heavy price. But that it reminds every minister that there are no exceptions.

Let me follow up with a slightly different question. You have spoken at times of the importance of Asian values. Uh, I wanted to ask you if you think that the Asian environment shapes the exercise of leadership in in Asia. For instance, it's often said that family values, uh, which suggest that you can oppose the head of the household within the family, within the family, but not outside, is also a paradigm for or public leadership. Uh, we talk about "why young" and shadow puppets. Are there unique dimensions to leadership exercised in the Asian context?

>> Well, there are certain forms which you don't break without uh upsetting people. Uh, I'm not sure that it will always remain that way because all these societies are now open to American television and uh British and all the other external media. But by and large, there is a certain uh respect for authority because you've got to give respect to authority, otherwise the system won't won't work. I mean, if if every time you have a man elected president or prime minister, says, "Oh, he's a crook. You can't believe the system won't run." You got to say, "Well, he's the prime minister. He may not have been the ideal. Well, let's he has the authority. Let's see how he works, how he exercises his authority." Uh, I am doubtful if having watched how it's changed in uh Japan that it can remain unchanged in the rest of Asia. I think it will slowly change, but but you will not reach a stage where you can caricature or, you know, what what you do here and Al Gore goes to makes a speech and then the next day he watches a caricature, a satire of himself and next uh debate he he gets inhibited because of that. I think that would be thought by the majority of the population is unbecoming. Okay. So, you know that he has got his quirks, but let's let's wait till he's no longer in office, then we can poke fun, but when he's in office, it does not become us to to diminish him. Uh, I think it's changing because of the impact of interconnectivity, cable vision, satellites, soon broadband on TV. But by and large, if you see, I I watch on cable uh Taiwan and Beijing television. Taiwan has gone riotous, ala America. So fun is poked at the president, caricatures, and so I I think it's sort of force-fed, you know, "I want to show the Americans that we are real democracy, and we are acting like them." I'm not sure that this is doing uh a service to democracy in the long run in Taiwan because it's going against the grain of society and undermining authority. Then you look at the mainland, there's a certain formality, I mean, a certain uh stiffness in which the leader presents his views to the populace. Of course, you get an exception like Premier Zhu Rongji, where he will sit back and you can bounce any questions of him with a smile. He'll give you a full, complete, and sometimes a stinging reply, all done in good humor. But they are far and few between. But I can, I think we are in a state of flux. Uh, slowest to change will be the mainland. Fastest to change will be Taiwan, out to show that they are Americanized. Japanese also next slowest to change. In Indonesia, has gone uh a little haywire. When President Suharto was in charge, he was a stern oracle. He says very few things, and very seldom what he says, you have to study very carefully because they're going to be implemented. Then it went to Habibi, President Habibi, and he wanted to be a cuddly teddy bear, and he met the press every day, and and in the process made the presidency uh very different kind of institution. So now you've got Abdul Rahman Wahid, president, very uh accomplished speaker of English, German, French, Dutch, Arabic. His his eyesight not so good. But uh, he's trying to go back to the Suharto, Darthic oracle. Can't go back. The place has changed. The media is wide open. Habibi had encouraged it or couldn't stop it. So I think they're in for a very open season. Everything sold. Uh, real news, false news. I don't know whether it's true or untrue, but there's a picture of the of a woman sitting on the president's lap with the president's arm around her. And in Suharto's time, I think the whole publishing house would have been captured and burnt. But now you have this attractive uh titillating picture being reproduced by all the others, and the woman was encouraged and produced more pictures. So it keeps the story going.

>> So I think these are countries where the style of leadership is undergoing uh transition. We have students from around the world uh in our leadership classes and and other classes. Do you think that we ought to try to make distinctions between leadership as it's exercised in one part of the world or the other?

>> Leadership has to be exercised in the context of the society it is in. Uh

>> Yes.

>> Without that context, it doesn't make sense. I mean, if if you take, it's very difficult when I'm talking of living beings. If you take, let's take past leaders. Margaret Thatcher could only operate in the way she did and operated effectively during the years of her prime from 1979 to 1990 because of the context. I the society had been in a male successive toy labor governments couldn't get the country going, and she was determined to change it, and she was a grocer's daughter, and the Tory blue bloods determined not to allow the people to forget them. But she said, "Well, so what? Change it." Uh, I think had it had it been in Australia, she would not have faced that kind of social snobbishness which made her job more difficult. So leadership has to be exercised in the context of your society, of a particular society, the values, the habits, the patterns of behavior of that society. Uh, I'm not sure that if you get uh Mr. Lee to go to Taiwan and lead the Taiwanese people. I think he wouldn't fly because he immediately he'd be put on camera and says five questioners, and that's not the way the leadership is resolved. There you meet quietly, and Mr. So-and-so passes uh his view on his as as he was ill on his deathbed and says, "Please settle this," and so Mr. Moy emerged. So, but he can only govern in that society.

>> Would you say that for yourself as well? Certainly in Singapore, some Singaporeans would say, "Oh, if only uh Prime Minister Lee were heading China or India or even the United States, for that matter, it'd be significantly different."

>> CEOs change companies all the time. So essentially, what you're saying, the contexts are too radically different.

>> You can change CEOs with within companies sharing the same culture. So you can take two French companies, you can change CEOs. I mean, uh, the Damare of Total took Elf Aquitaine, so it became TotalFina, then took Elf Aquitaine, so it's Total Elf, TotalFina Elf. But they are all of a similar culture. Uh, when Jürgen Schrempp took over Daimler, took over Chrysler. That's a cross-border merger. Mr. Eaton resigned after a short while, and there's still uh an incomplete job of fusing the two cultures. So, it's not comparable. I mean, and countries are very different from each other. Each country is more different from the other than one company from another.

>> Are there some values that are that that are go across cultures that will be respected? Your consistency, for example, or your or your authenticity because you spoke from conviction. There must be some of these that are fairly universal but may change on the margins within different contexts.

>> Well, but not I will not be able to be as effective and because they will not identify with. I mean, let's put it this way. I was in Malaysia for two years, '63, '64, '65. And at the time I left, many people identified my views as their interests. They have seen how Singapore has lived up to those views. But a younger generation has grown up in Malaysia having to comply with a different framework within which they can grow. But if I were to go back and make the same speeches or an updated speech of what I made say in 1965, they'd be terrified. Said, "God, we'll we'll have another riot," because they would now be conscious of the fact, I mean, they have accepted a day dominance, and just the other day, I mean, somebody suggested that perhaps it was time uh not to have the special economic privileges for Malaysia, and there was a tremendous uproar from AMNO youth. So, you know, reminding everybody of the bloodshed in 1969. So the context has changed. So whilst these values may still be admired, the consequences of implementing those values in the new situation uh would be quite disturbing for them.

>> What about with Singapore today, where the context is changing? And I think uh in 1990 was it where you let go of the reins and moved from the foreground to the background as Senior Minister? Was that had something to do with the shift in context that you felt like you could no longer be as effective personally as you wanted to be, or there was a need to manage the transition to ensure that there were a new capable and committed group of leaders running the country? But it's unusual in many countries, people your contemporaries would either be thrown out or die in office in their old age. That uh I had a responsibility to make sure that the system would work after me, and as you know, there are serious doubts as to whether the system would survive me. My simple calculation was thus: Let me carry on for another five years. I won the election. What does that prove? That I I'm vigorous, that I'm still agile, I still can get things done. So what the country has got to cross this watershed of a long-serving leader who had customized the way in which she runs the government. You know, it's like one of these uh motor car seats and steering wheel where everything has been configured to to your shape of your hands, your fingers, and and you press the button and reset your way uh, or should I get out? Allow the system to loosen up. Get the new leader to reconfigure the government, reconfigure the driving seat, help him so that there are no crashing of gears. Now, between the two, one, I've only proved that I'm still healthy. Two, I would have done an immense benefit to the country, to the government, and to myself that I've got a government now in place that can do without me. I was useful for the first uh two years, three years, but uh, they soon got the hang of it, and they did things slightly differently at the beginning, now more and more differently because they're dealing with a younger generation and a changing environment, changing technology. It has to be different, and I think let's say I've I've hung on for another 10 years, it would have been a disaster. I I watched Suharto go down in 1997, and I thought to myself, you know, if only he had stood down a few years earlier, he would have been a great figure in Indonesian history.

Senior Minister, you um write in your book about one of the major challenges you had early on was to change the attitudes of the Chinese in your in Singapore about military service so that they would be more embracing of it and and you could form an army. Uh, and you had faced other challenges like that about moving the population, moving their attitudes, changing their views. How does a leader do that? How do you take cope with a problem that's very large for your society and you want to change habits and attitudes of the population?

>> Uh, we faced, and the people knew we faced a dire threat when we became independent. Our two battalions which had been formed during British days had 60% Malaysians, and the commander was a Malaysian because the forces had been integrated, and the Tunku intended that they should stay there. So the population was fully aware, alive to the fact that if we don't have a force to defend ourselves, we'll always be bullied. So how do I change this? Well, first, I had the advantage of fear that if we don't have this, we are in trouble. Second, we formed immediately, more symbolic than uh, any addition to our military capabilities. We formed a special platoon or company where all MPs and political leaders took military training on weekends and marched past during National Day. Bold, brave soldiers. Then we formed school cadets, both for boys and girls, and school police cadets, so that the police will not be treated as enemies. They are your own children. They're going to look after you. So over five, ten years, their attitudes towards people in uniform changed. These are their own children in the schools learning how to be good soldiers and good policemen. And we used to have them uh gathered together for send-off during uh when they were called up. Speeches were made, and then after the first basic training, they meet their sons in camp, shaven crew cut, and so on. But uh, after three months, the sons came back more sturdy and better and standing more upright. Over five, ten years, attitudes changed, and this is now 30-plus years. Mind you, it is accepted as a way of life, and we have built new camps for them, and the camps look like resort hotels. So, but they still got to do some rigorous training. I mean, you know, the hot showers and everything, which they didn't have in the old days, but when you do an obstacle course, you do an obstacle course, and when you do a 30-30 mile walk with a 30-20 lb pack, that's still got to be done.

>> But it's been accepted. That could you step back from that experience and sort of talk more generally about then how as a leader one approaches a change? You you see that the country's got this real problem, it's too soft, or it needs a military, or

>> Integration of cultures.

>> Or it needs integration of cultures. How one then sort of thinks through what's the process by which you change a culture as a leader?

>> Well, I'm not sure we can change all cultures. We can change cultures at the margins. I think basic cultures, you can't change. It's very difficult. It comes from mother to child. Uh, we changed the attitude towards military uh service and police service, uniform services, by making them respected and honorable. That they are not thieves, they're not uh people who are going to rob you, that they're going to defend you. So I had my sons do it. I mean, I had two sons. They went through, of course, just like everybody else. And uh, but unlike everybody else, they had a full glare of publicity. Then they signed up to stay in the army for eight years. They won a scholarship and uh, they went on to university in Cambridge. One did mathematics, another did engineering. But during their vocations, they came back for military training or went with the British army on exercises on the Rhine or in Canada. And when they finished, uh, they came to uh, your Fort Sill or Fort Leavenworth to learn staff and command or artillery or whatever. So gradually, the people began to associate military and the officer corps with excellence. And indeed, of the cabinet, this younger cabinet of uh, 15, there are five who are military officers who ended up as my son was born with a brigadier general. That's uh George also brigadier. He was a rear admiral. That's Lee Hsien Loong. He's a colonel, but that's Lim Hng Kiang. He was, I think, a major. But you know, the public now associates the officer corps with excellence. These are people who have gone through the academic uh process, top scores, done well in the army, reached staff grade, and now are ministers. So perceptions have changed, and we did that deliberately. We have a fast flow-through in the army in the armed forces because it's it's always a young force. So by about when they sign up, they know that by the time they are 30-plus, they can start a second career, and we usually send them off to business school or, you know, Harvard, Stanford, or whatever, and then they start a second career.

>> Were you thinking in the long term back then?

>> Oh, yes, indeed.

>> Yes. Realizing you're going to have to, it's going to take you know, decades, yeah.

>> To shift values and change mindsets.

>> Yeah. But we had to start. But we have done. We have shifted the values. But we have some problems now because parents are wealthy. So they say, "Why should my son serve a bond for eight years? Let's make it four years," or "I'll pay for my son." So it's a changing situation. But they no longer think that soldiering is a demeaning or low-level job. Many people in uh top positions of political power imagine that they can make a major change in social attitudes either through the use of their formal authority or through the expert fashioning of some brilliant policy piece of engineering. Uh, in either case, that the work can get done quickly and authoritatively and expertly. Uh, for example, President Clinton tried in his first year of office to change a seventh of the nation's economy in healthcare, which affects every single person's own deep anxieties about the care of their parents and their children and themselves and deep economic investments, very quickly through the through policy instruments rather than seeing the need to. So on the one hand, you've been from the West, some people worry about your authoritative uh capacity, and yet you keep describing the the pacing at which you're the uh the slowness, the use of these various vehicles to work the public, working issues um at a rate that people take.

>> Yes.

>> So, can you speak about the uses of because there must at some time, given how much authority people were willing to give you, there must have been a deep impulse to wish that you could simply fix this problem quickly.

>> No, no. Some problems can be, the more deep-seated emotionally a problem is, the slower it is to resolve. Uh, you you take language, language and religion. They're deeply held beliefs. We had to change people that spoke four of four major languages and many different dialects into one working language, or we'll never succeed. Well, had I passed the law and said, "You will all learn English," or "You will all learn Chinese," we would have had mayhem, riots. Uh, so what I did was, "Okay, you can go to all these present schools, and there are Chinese schools, English schools, Malay schools, Tamil schools, but you will learn, if you are in a Chinese school, you'll learn English. If you are in an English school, you'll learn Chinese. If you are Chinese or Tamil, if you're Indian, or Malay, or so on, so you all, you will all learn two languages." Then by a process of who gets the best jobs, the parents soon decide that they will send their children to the schools teaching English as a first language and Chinese or Malay or Tamil, the mother tongue, as a second language. There was no force used. Had I did that by dictate, there would have been serious uprising, rejection of me as an ingrate and forgotten where I came from and I lost my Chinese roots. But uh, they watched and saw who got the best jobs, and they switched. And I finally, it took a long time, from 1965 to 1981. And in 1981, I was able to get everybody into the English schools. English meaning English first language, mother tongue second language. And I was able to change the university teaching in Chinese into teaching in English.

>> But you must have set up incentives for the people to get to make sure that the people who got the best jobs had to speak.

>> No, no, no. There were no in the jobs were there.

>> The jobs were already there.

>> The jobs were from the multinationals, from the banks. Our banks and multinational banks, whether they are Japanese multinationals or German or European or Germans or French or British or Americans, they all used English.

>> You picked English because that would play to the market and opportunities dovetailed with reality.

>> That's right. So, there's also a way in which, in retrospect, it looks as if you were a brilliant master strategist being able to see over 16 years in the case of the language, what steps needed to come before the next. But I wonder how much of it is really an improvisation, in which you run an experiment and then you smell and and sense what's next depending on the outcome of that experiment. I did not want to have said 16 years because in those 16 years, I lost 20,000 Chinese graduates who had poor jobs. I wanted to make it shorter. I couldn't. I would have run into flak.

>> So to what degree do you think that your leadership has had a strong improvisational?

>> Oh, very much so. You have to watch what how far you can go without snapping uh loyalties. I mean, one of our strategies was to make Singapore into a first-world oasis in a third-world region. The physical infrastructure is easy. You get best contractors, best designs. You got best airports, best uh container port, telecoms, whatever. Good buildings. But you got to change the behavior of people. They have been living in shanty towns, you know, soap boxes and a zinc roof and a hole in the ground for their water closet. Now, when they move to these high-rises, they still either for mischief, for some unexplained reason, to be a nuisance to their neighbors. They would urinate in the lifts just to be a nuisance when they've got proper toilets at home. So, we had to put traps so that when you urinate, the lift will stop, and you're trapped inside. So, we'll we'll catch you and we'll show you up.

>> They're such an engineering.

>> Yes. Yes. We we have installed them. But let me add how clever they are. They open the lift door. They stay outside and pee into the the lift, and it stops. But there's nobody inside. So we installed a camera that would catch the person outside. So it goes on. You tell me, uh, it's easy to change habits. I think it's not. But we were determined that they should behave in first-world standards and not as if they still got a hole in the ground. I'm not saying that it's all stopped, but it's much, very much less. That is a constant fight.

>> But you had to start with the vision.

>> Oh, yes. Yeah.

>> You had you had to have a sense of where you want to be.

>> Yeah. And you got to sell that vision and say, "Look, if you want people to come here and park their families here, then you must have clean roads, clean gardens, safe environment, good health, recreational, good schools, good hospitals, and good nurses in the hospital. So this will get us there. Now, you can't carry on in the old way."

>> Why some leaders are very are visionary and others, many others, are not. How can we help prepare people at the university level to become strategists, visionaries, to have that longer view?

>> Well, it depends on what is it that motivates them. What do they want to be? I mean, I take this present generation, you know, the preoccupation with wealth. They open Fortune 500. All the billionaires, they open Forbes. Oh, so many multi-billionaires. So many dot-com chaps have made billions out of nothing. They are just completely swept away by all this. So we've got young administrative officers who've served six, seven years, is "Can I take no-pay leave? I'm whilst the whom companies are hot, I want to try." And we have said, "Okay, go try." Uh, the motivations are different. If I were now 20 years old, I might be joining the dot venture capitalist.

>> Particular being a mischievous.

>> Yeah. And I probably make make a million or two million. I'm not sure that I'd be wanting to do this job. But it so happened that I was born in that period, went through that kind of a life, and started questioning why are these chaps doing this to me, and what right have they? And that I don't know, tempered, fused something in me and the group of us, and we became different. But the problem now is, you say, "Right, give them a vision." How well? I have given the second generation that I have brought into office as much of a transfer of data, historic perspective, so that they understand the responsibility is now with them. And uh, as I wrote in my epilogue, the fact that we have succeeded in the last 35 years does not mean we're going to succeed in the next 35 years. The fact that these things were done that way and succeeded does not mean it will be done the same way. You got to start thinking, you got to start adjusting. You got to make use of new technology, new methods, seize new opportunities. But I think what I have succeeded in doing, what my colleagues and I have succeeded working with them for the last 15, 20 years, is that they have that sense of trusteeship that if they give up, then 4 million people will just come to nothing. They'll be lost within five years, ten years. So they got to hold this place together, make it work, keep on recruiting good people, seizing good opportunities, change course where necessary, and seek success where success can be found.

>> Well, what is the new vision of Singapore? What would the new vision be? And who, how will somebody come up with?

>> I don't think that's my job now. I did not foresee this present Singapore when I started in 1965. Uh, it is the result of so many factors, changes in technology that makes that has shrunk oceans. You can just take an airplane ticket like you take a bus ticket. Uh, could I have foreseen that uh from a backwater, we now have five-star hotels that will serve you food from anywhere in the world because we have airlines coming in from 80 cities around the world every day? You can have Texas state, you can have California. In 1965, uh, it is the result of so many factors, changes in technology that makes that has shrunk oceans. You can just take an airplane ticket like you take a bus ticket. Uh, could I have foreseen that uh from a backwater, we now have five-star hotels that we serve you food from anywhere in the world because we are, we have airlines coming in from 80 cities around the world every day? You can have Texas state, you can have California state.

>> At the Kennedy School, they were focusing on training and developing people to exercise leadership. Do you think it can be taught? As you reflect on your experiences and the lessons you've learned along the way?

>> Uh, I once watched Isaac Singer, the Nobel Prize winner for writing in Yiddish literature. I was in New York, time on my hands, and he was being interviewed, and he said, "You teach writing at Columbia or some university?" Says, "Yes, I do. Can you make a writer write great literature?" He paused. He looked at the interviewer. He says, "If he has the writer in him, I will make him a good writer in a shorter time." So, if you ask me, can you make a leader of anybody? I don't think so. He must have some of the ingredients. He must have that high energy level. He must have the ability to project himself, his ideas. He must have the desire, almost instinctively, to say, "Look, let's do something better," of wanting to do something for his for his fellow men and not just for himself and his family. You can't teach those things. He's either got it or he hasn't got it. But if he's got that, then you can save him a lot of trouble. So, don't do that. Do it this way. I tell you that if you do that, you're going to waste a lot of time. And that's what I did with the team that we recruited.

>> And you fashioned for yourself your own private tutorial, didn't you? Flying around the world and learning the lessons that have been

>> To be captured from the failed experiments of some of your comrades in the decolonized period.

>> Absolutely crucial. Let somebody else pay for the lesson. If you are stupid enough to go and do exactly what he's done, and you're paying for it, then you're losing your opportunities. I just go watch and say, "Oh, that's so that's that's a no-no."

>> So, how important uh is the travel portion of learning?

>> Seems like it's critical to your own life.

>> Absolutely. I I give you this example. It's better. Now I can judge the state of an economy of a country by the state of the guest house. Yes. By the state of the guest house. I went to Egypt, Cairo, first time in 1962, and I stayed in one of Farouk's palaces. Beautiful brocades, rich linen with F on top, deep carpets, super bathtubs, wonderful place. I went back. Then they got caught in the 7-day war. By the last visit in the 1970s, when Sadat was there, the linen had gone, and the cotton, the curtains had also been in a state of disrepair. And when you flush the toilet, instead of going down that way, it came up this way. Well,

>> But I I have not been back. So, I'm quite sure that now with development, things have improved. But I don't have to go out. So, when I started in the days before we had hotels, I told our controller of the household, I said, "Before the guest comes in, you better stay there. Make sure that every process works, that the air conditioning works, that if it's too cold, you got you you can adjust it to make it warm or whatever, and that nothing breaks down because they're going to judge us and invest or not invest depending on how they see we run this place. Go ahead."

>> Crisis has been very much part of Singapore's history, and uh, you clearly were able to use crisis to move the country forward. I wonder if you would just reflect on on crisis as both a a challenge and an opportunity for leadership.

>> Well, it is because a crisis puts a whole people on tenterhooks. I mean, when the British said in January '68, you know, we've just become independent '65, and we were worried, how do we defend ourselves? When were the British leaving? We wanted them to stay as long as possible. Then they devalued the pound in '67 and '68, January. In spite of all my friendship with Wilson, Labor Party, they say, "We're off in '71." So unions who worked for the British were going to be disbanded. So you have a sense of crisis. So that gave us a chance to say, "Look, let's retrain. Let's get new jobs. Let's convert all these engineering workshops to civilian workshops. Let's get this naval base shipyard dockyard and make it a civilian dockyard." So we went into negotiations with the British, and had a very good officer, my former finance minister, Goh Keng Swee, said, "Put him in charge." He dealt with the British. British were, I suppose, guilt-ridden because they let us down, and they handed us the dockyard before they were ready to leave in '71. Gave it to us in '68. We brought in Swan Hunter, a British dockyard, to re to recast it as a civilian dockyard, and today it is one of the successful shipyards of the world. And the REI workshops, electrical workshops, and so on. They first, we used the buildings that were there and made them into temporary factories for making shoes, garments, whatever. Now they've been demolished, rebuilt, high-rise factories, and Hewlett-Packard, Texas Instruments, you name them, they're there. Uh, you can galvanize people easier when they are in a state of fright. One of the uh, one of the dispositions we try to teach our students is to be able to face failure every day so that they can learn from their tactical errors, even how they had a conversation that they spoke with this person in front of that, that they failed to be articulate about this, uh, so that then they can take corrective action the next day. Now, it would be very helpful to uh have our students know something about some of the failures that you experienced. They might be tactical failures, ways in which you regret that you handled the situation this way. Perhaps you were more fearful than you needed to be, or or uh failed to take into account this stakeholder and their interests, and and then stepped on a booby trap unwittingly. But some something about how you would analyze some of the some of the mistakes that you've made, and then how you tried to take corrective action.

>> Oh, so many mistakes. We start off with, say, the equipment we bought when the British were leaving. Some they gave us like the dockyard. They couldn't be moved. Then they had Bloodhound missiles, 50 Bloodhound missiles. They will shoot aircraft down at 50,000 feet. It was going for cheap because otherwise they got to bring them home. Should we buy them? My finance, my defense minister, Goh Keng Swee, who was finance minister, was a very able man. I made him defense minister. He says, "The chances are they're going to come in low and bomb us from a very low height. We need something that could get them at 3,000 feet." I thought it over. I said, "Okay, we buy that." But we also buy this 50,000-foot Bloodhound. I wanted to do it for two reasons. One, I wanted to keep the links with the British and get them to stay for as long as possible. Two, it was going for cheap, so why not keep it? And my my the my potential enemies may not know that these things are not effective against low-flying aircraft. Anyway, they look very formidable, bristling away. But that was a mistake. We lost money there for no rhyme or reason. Refurbished it. I think we should have just bought the Rapier and later on the IHAWK, which we bought, and now we've got the improved IHAWK.

>> How about in the politics of it, in the management of people and the management?

>> Well, most of my mistakes were made in uh in an eagerness to overcome difficulties. We had a nice harbor. There was a vacant land beside the harbor, our main harbor. And the Japanese oil company said, "We'll build a refinery there if you give us that site because it's very convenient. They can sell diesel to the ships there." My harbor people absolutely opposed it because it's a fire hazard. My same finance minister, who is a very good man, he says, "Beggars can't be choosers. Better get these chaps here and get some jobs created." I yielded. 50 years, and still there, another 15 years to go.

>> What?

>> There's a mistake.

>> We should have had more confidence and say, "No, you go there," and they might have gone there.

>> One of What does a leader do when he realizes he has made a mistake? How do you then get out of what's the best way to deal with it?

>> Write it off as quickly as you can.

>> Cut your losses.

>> Yeah. Cut your losses.

>> Acknowledge the mistake.

>> Yeah. Yeah. Surely. We went and made bottles. We went to a glass industry. But to make good glass, you need good silica sand. We don't have silica sand. Somebody should have told us that. But the people who wanted to sell us the machinery said, "Oh, you've got enough sand." After that, we had to buy silica sand. That increased the cost. So, we cut it and say, "Sell it."

>> You rely heavily upon lieutenants, as you talked about, your trusted lieutenants. When the mistake is made, who accepts responsibility?

>> I do.

>> You do?

>> Because I appointed him and I gave him authority. So, it's my mistake. But if he makes too many mistakes, and I change him.

>> But you publicly take responsibility.

>> Oh, yes, of course. I mean, the buck stops with me. Otherwise, I'm not the boss.

>> Mhm.

>> Could I link what uh this conversation to the earlier conversation about context and ask you about Singapore's experience in S. Joe, which you called a chastening experience in your memoirs? Uh, if you will reflect on that. Uh, the attempt to transfer Singapore's experience into a very different culture, and how what you might do differently if you were doing it again, or if you would even consider it again.

>> Uh, well, it was difficult to have avoided the mistake because such was such an attractive place. It was rundown when we saw it, but it could have been revived and made into a Venice again, you know, canals, beautiful gardens. And I had a deputy prime minister then who was an architect and a bit of an artist. And he said, "We could do this. We can make it a lovely place. But we build this industrial center outside the main town. Don't mar the main town. Do it on a green side, green field, 100 square kilometers or 70 square kilometers, and we teach them." It wasn't a financially uh profitable job. There were two aspects to it. One was business, where our developers will go in, build factories, and get investors to operate in these factories and invest. The other was a G2G um technical assistance. How to run a successful industrial township, complete with housing, shops, markets, schools, etc. Greenfield because they came, this they saw our industrial site.

They were attracted by it, and we reached agreement at the very top. And they were extremely, and they sent teams of people to study us. And they said, "Okay, we want your management, we want your planning, we want your labor management. We don't want your politics." That's fine. The idea was they will learn how to run it straight. No favoritisms, no underhand uh kickbacks or whatever. Each project to be assessed on its merits.

But there are four layers between Beijing. We reached this with Jiang Zemin, and before Jiang Zemin, with Deng Xiaoping's son, who got his father to say, "This is a good job, do it. We'll refurbish this place." But from Ping, it goes to Nanjing, the provincial capital. It goes to Suzhou, then it goes to this new authority for the industrial site. Four levels. By the time it gets down there, the people on the job, their interest is not to go and learn how to do this and replicate it in a hundred cities in China. They didn't see that as a a work, a task that will get them glory. What would get them glory? Many, many new buildings and factories and jobs, all of a sudden, using our brand name and our capital. So, we, we should have known that. We thought we spoke Chinese. They spoke Chinese. We eat rice with chopsticks. They eat rice with chopsticks. We will get on fine. It was totally wrong.

Would you do that again? Would you, similar? Would you decide to pull out? No, we have there's some real elements of success there, at least measured in Chinese terms. >> Yeah, but we are not pulling out completely. We are handing it over to them. We, yes, we, we are just staying on to hold their hands and say, "Look, perhaps you ought to be doing it this way." But would I do it again? Not at four levels. If I have to do it again, I'll do it in Beijing, right there where the boss is in charge.

>> I want to just ask you a little bit about listening and and learning. I mean, you described yourself yesterday as a lifelong learner, and obviously learning has been very critical to get a sense of what would work or would not, what would not work. But in Singapore itself, what has been the nature of your own personal learning, in particular, in using people who have very different, even radically different perspectives on policy or on issues? Uh, that could include opposition or dissident voices or the press, because at times you've been considered, at least some observers have said that you're particularly harsh with the press or some opposition members. From a leadership perspective, why did you operate that way? Is there a role for very dissident and different and complaining voices in the realm of leadership to harness?

>> Yes, of course. You will never get 100% consensus in you. In a multi-racial situation like Singapore, you're lucky if you can get 70%. My best score was 82% when the British were about to withdraw, and the country was so terrified that they decided to vote 82% for us. Now, we listen to opposing voices, opposing points of view very carefully, including those written, say, by The Economist or Fortune, or whatever, because these are investors. If they have this point of view, we have to look into them and say, "Well, we got to put this right." But where you have a newspaper that sells in Singapore like the Asian Wall Street Journal or the International Herald Tribune, and they want to create news in Singapore to increase their readership. Now, I demand the right of reply. I can't allow you to skew my news, create controversy at my expense, and deny me the right to reply. I don't block you out. I, if you read my chapter, the Asian Wall Street Journal had a foolish young man who said, "We are doing this in order to sell off that companies to our own people." Well, that's a very serious charge. So, we wrote a reply. They refused to publish it. So, we say, "Look, don't you think you owe us an apology because you are making a serious charge?" No, they wanted controversy. So, we said, "Well, in that case, you will, we are interested in truth." They said, "I said, 'All right, you're not interested in selling your paper.'" "No," then you sell your paper without advertisements, and we'll let it through." They said, "No, no, we, our advertisements go with our paper." So, in other words, you want to sell your advertisement. Now, print my reply. So, that standoff stood for two months, and they decided they'll print our reply. So, they are circulating. But because we are able to print our right of reply, all these clever stories twisting our tails have diminished. You got to consider carefully whether or not we are capable of twigging your ears. You can twist our tails. We might twig your ears.

>> Are these opposing voices?

>> No, that's all right. That's useful. But it must be two-way. Not one way, not you pontificating and telling me what a dud I am.

>> You've talked about the importance of context and how Americanized a place like Taiwan is becoming and how the press is changing things. Would you advise the coming generation to handle the press and opposing voices differently?

>> Uh, I think the position is changing so rapidly, uh, with the internet and broadband, they have to rethink their position. You, there's so much rubbish on the internet. There's one site devoted to knocking me down. It doesn't carry much credibility because it's not truthful. I believe, or these are, this is now no longer my job. These are the computer-savvy generation that's got to solve this problem. Internet-savvy. But I, I told them that I believe the critical factor for them now is credibility. That we must have our portals, our media, able to command confidence, and people will watch and read and listen. If you don't have credibility, you have lost the game because nobody will be listening to you there. Today, we've got 50 channels on cable television. Why should they be watching the prime minister talking? So, we got to have credible news, credible good features, so that when the prime minister speaks, has to speak, people will watch. So, it's a different challenge now. Whereas, say, 20 years ago, when I made an important speech, all three channels carried me, and they had, whether they liked it or not, they listened to me. But not now.

>> Uh, just a final question. Uh, I've been working on a book right now, uh, called Staying Alive. Uh, and it's about what to do when you're attacked or marginalized as a leader. Uh, one of the aspects that intrigue me has to do with the management of despair, because there are moments when one inevitably feels that despairing, or, uh, and it would be helpful to know, for example, you and David were joking at the very beginning about playing golf, but some people don't take time for themselves. They don't manage themselves, elves, as a resource, you know, uh, to be deployed properly and to be so it would be helpful to know how you have sustained yourself, given all of the stresses and exhaustion and moments of despair. How do you recover? Uh, do you have daily practices, uh, like like games, um, or other other modes of of practice that keep you in the game for year after year after year?

>> If your message is one of despair, then you don't, you should not be a leader. You must give people hope. Hope of improving their condition. There are moments, of course, when you feel very down.

>> Yeah.

>> Either because you're physically down or emotionally down, or because the world has turned adverse against you. I think when you are in that condition, the first thing you do is to get a good night's sleep, then get a swim or chase a ball. Get the cobwebs out of your mind. Uh, I believe, and I've practiced this for all these years in politics, that if you're not fit, you're going to make mistakes. Physically fit. You must stay physically and mentally fit. Uh, I exercise every day. I used to jog, swim, play golf. Golf more for relaxation, just just to get away from the smoky conference rooms, and it's part of the balance you keep. Now I cycle, I swim, even when I travel. And since the last 10 years or so, I've learned to meditate, because it's one way of calming yourself. It takes practice. I, I had a doctor teach me. He was a, a Buddhist, and he retired, and he spends his time helping people to meditate, especially those with terminal illnesses, you know, to take life calmly. Uh, and I think at the end of, say, 20 minutes to half an hour, my pulse rate can go down from 100 to about 60. I mean, you can feel yourself subside. I mean, you still your mind, you empty your mind. Uh, then when you are rested, you resume quietly. You still got the same problems. Maybe you sleep on it, come back, look at it, few for a few days, and decide maybe there's a better way of solving it, or talk to some friends, get some ideas. But if you're not in good shape, you're going to make mistakes, and that's disastrous.

>> How do you keep yourself mentally fit?

>> Uh, well, my wife tells me I'm a bit of a workaholic. When I've had enough, I read for relaxation. Because you can't just switch off and go to sleep. Oh, I, if my eyes are too tired, and I surf the television and see what's going on, what's the dri they're putting out that other people are watching. Uh, but I find reading is probably the best entity. It takes you into a different world for a while.

>> History?

>> Uh, history, yes. But contemporary, what's happening? Why are why are these things happening? It's not my problem. I mean, but it's interesting to know that other people have more severe and pressing and dangerous situations. You get a kind of schlide and fraud. Luckily, I'm not in his shoes.

>> You have I have one question.

>> Thank you.

>> Yeah. Uh, Senior Minister, I, I wondered if you could cast your mind around a u an issue that we're wrestling with here at the Kennedy School, because you have such a creative solution. We've been, we've talked here about the training of young people for and preparing them for leadership positions. We're also considering the possibility of uh ways to bring in emerging world leaders, uh, people are perhaps in their 30s or perhaps early 40s, who have begun to distinguish themselves in their own cultures and bring them together here at the Kennedy School and work with them both here and through the internet. I wondered how what you might think of such a program, how it could be most productive, uh, and the ways in which people like you, who have had these enormously distinguished careers, how they, how you might contribute in some fashion to helping this next generation come up. Spotting uh talent, spotting a political leader is more difficult than talent spotting a CEO.

>> Talent spotting a political leader is more difficult than talent spotting a CEO.

>> Yeah, the CEO here, you have more finite requirements. He just needs to run the company, show profits. When you want a politically political leader, you've got to get somebody with the right motivation. If he wants to make a a name for himself and a fortune, then he should be a political leader. He's in the wrong vocation. So, you've got to be very careful about motivation. When I recruit uh a person to be an MP and then toss him in the deep end of the pool before he he makes it to a minister, I try to fathom what is it that drives him. Why does he want to do this? Fame, glory, importance. Everybody has a bit of that. I mean, as uh Herman Kahn once said to me, God, glory, goal. He summed it up quite nicely. But you must have something. Maybe God, do some good. Without that, you are not a good leader. When you face setbacks, you give up. But if you believe you got a mission, when you face setbacks, you take a deep breath, you subside, you think it over, you mull it over, you turn the egg upside down, head down, and finally you try. Uh, I couldn't have said, uh, I could have picked those leaders when they were 18 or 19 or 20. In my book, I chose to put in three young officer cadets whom we chose, and there are three top ministers today. It was a marvelous batch, talented people, and dedicated. How? Just the luck of the draw. But we spotted them. They showed promise. We nurtured them. To spot them is easier when they are in their 30s than in their 20s. When they're in their 20s, they're a bit more frisky. Well, they got great ideas about what they can do here, there, everywhere. In their 30s, they're beginning to settle down, and they're thinking of marriage, and just got married, children, and it's uh become a serious business. Life means continuity, and that is the time which I like to pick them.

>> If we were to, let's take your three ministers now who've moved in, they've shown that promise, they're fulfilling that promise. If we were to say to one of those ministers, the first year, why don't you come join an emerging leaders program, and we will have people like you from say 20 other countries, >> and we would like to bring you together to work with you. What could we most productively and most constructively do to help that young minister fulfill his promise for Singapore?

>> Uh, depending on the field of interest. I think first to be able to network with good men here in Harvard whom they can reach and develop a relationship and get ideas from over the years. And two, network with people who are likely to go into high places in their own countries, and therefore have an easy relationship. Whether they're going to make good ministers or not really depends on the motivation. I mean, if they just want to be important people, that's not going to be helpful. They must want to achieve something. And in the case of Singapore, it must be one to make this very vulnerable nation less vulnerable, and in spite of its vulnerabilities and the problems in the region, to ensure its continued prosperity and growth and a secure future for the people. You must have that as your major motivation. Otherwise, otherwise you just pack up, make your million, and settle in California or or the Gold Coast in South in Brisbane or whatever, and just sit back, enjoy the the surf or the coral reefs, and have a good life. You must have that drive. Without that drive, you can't do the job.

>> If, if we were to establish such a program, would you be willing to meet with these young?

>> Uh, once in a while. If I'm uh coming to this part of the world, we send them to