Sustainable luxury in Singapore 2014

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View from the Marina Boulevard paseo, Singapore.
Text & Photo © JE Nilsson, CM Cordeiro, Marina Bay Sands, Singapore 2014

If there was a favourite place to withdraw when in Singapore, it would for the moment be the expansive Marina Bay area overlooking the waters, marked by an urban space that lacks a crowd during office hours. The slowly undulating movements of the river water taxis navigating the bay lends a different rhythm to the adrenaline rush of the skyscrapers. This difference in bio-rhythms is a contrast in symbiotic urban city living that I find interesting.

In asking for directions to get from Raffles Place (steps away from Collyer Quay) to Marina Bay Sands (MBS), I was advised by more than one person encountered, to take a taxi. I smiled and nodded and proceeded to find my way on foot, to the Marina Boulevard paseo.
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The Hadza and the Swedes: leadership, social governance and sustainability; an unlikely comparison

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Cheryl-Marie-Cordeiro-by-Alen-Cordic-2012-158This article contains reflections at the intersection of several disciplines under Management & Organization that include leadership, organizational evolution, governance systems and sustainability. The background literature broadly follows from studies in the fields of Swedish management / leadership [1, 2], human nature [3, 6] and organizational evolution [4, 5]. An unlikely comparison of societal organizational characteristics is drawn between these two highly different social systems, the Hadza and the Swedes. The ideas are in contemplation towards a search for a congruent management of social structures that bridge the levels of socio-economic and political realities.
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Swedish management and Gothenburg: a Nordic journey of discovery

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Gotheborg III

The Swedish East Indiaman Gotheborg III Ship.
The city of Gothenburg has been home of the Swedish East India Company since the 1700s till today.
Photo: Ulrik Hasemann for SOIC.
Text © JE Nilsson, CM Cordeiro 2014

Abstracts from a presentation for Carthage College, Kenosha Wisconsin, USA. 20 Jan. 2014.
Centre for International Business Studies (CIBS)
School of Business, Economics and Law
University of Gothenburg, Sweden.

1. Introduction

This presentation is entitled “Swedish management and Gothenburg: a Nordic journey of discovery”, where I will share some insights into Sweden and Swedish management characteristics. Here, you will need to take the word “Nordic” as a broadly defined term because even within the Nordic countries grouping, Sweden pretty much has a niche of its own.

Inglehart Welzel Values Map

World Values Survey, Inglehart-Welzel map.
Ref: Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel, Modernization, Cultural Change and Democracy New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005: page 63.

2. Sweden – the most secular country on the globe

Sweden for example, ranks as the world’s most secular country with a Gallup poll of 88% indicating they are non-religious. At the same time, it is also a country that seems to allow greatest self-expression and individual autonomy.

The reason for the country’s high secularism could be explained by its history. Continue reading “Swedish management and Gothenburg: a Nordic journey of discovery” →

The strategy of ‘Twin Faces’ in state governance and positioning

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Raffles Place, Singapore.
Text & Photo © JE Nilsson, CM Cordeiro 2013

A number of years ago, I decided to focus my doctoral thesis on cross-cultural leadership in Swedish led organizations in Singapore. The idea was to identify elements of the Swedish management style and how this in that case would work out in Asian organizations. The study led to numerous interesting observations of which a selection of ideas were developed into my thesis.

For some time now I have come to look into Sweden’s positioning within the European Union (EU), and in a comparative study, Singapore’s positioning within the Association of Southeast-Asian Nations (ASEAN).

The issue of Sweden’s overall positioning towards European integration has been much considered and debated in the Swedish political arena and by interested members in academia.

Cheryl Marie Cordeiro by JE Nilsson, Raffles Place, Singapore

Studying modern business architecture in Singapore’s Central Business District, in 2013.

“Sweden: the Twin Faces of a Euro-Outsider”

In an article that appeared in the peer reviewed Journal of European Integration entitled “Sweden: the Twin Faces of a Euro-Outsider” in 2005, authors Rutger Lindahl and Daniel Naurin, postulated that Sweden, about ten years after full accession and a few years after the public rejection of Swedish proposed membership of the Euro currency in a referendum in 2003, had developed ‘twin faces’ as regards to their participation in European integration (Miles 2011).

Duo-levelled positioning

The authors explicitly outlined Sweden’s duo-levelled positioning towards issues of European integration, that was (i) the internal / domestic establishing of a firm national position towards the EU in general, which proved a challenge for the Swedish government, due to a general skeptical Swedish public who were wary of the implications of further European integration, and (ii) the external / regional (thus international) politics of positioning Sweden’s ‘euro-outsider’ status within the EU, where Sweden would want to be perceived as a country pursuing a ‘mixed’ policy portfolio.

The general skepticism towards deeper European integration from the Swedish public distinctly constrained the movements of the Swedish government. Further intra- and inter-political party division, also meant that a consensus across the Swedish party system regarding participation in the euro remained elusive.

But in brief, the ‘twin-faces’ of Sweden, its duo-levelled strategy of state governance and maneuvering of its internal, largely euro-skeptical political arena, was not to be confused with its primarily pro-EU yet anti-euro, external positioning towards the EU (Lindahl and Naurin 2005:66).

Two broad strategies

In reconciling and managing Sweden’s anti-euro, but pro-EU position, the Swedish government apparently followed two broad strategies.

The first was to adopt the politics of low visibility, where Swedish officials engaged in quiet networking with a ‘best in class’ behavior in Brussels combined with a low degree of Europeanization of the domestic political debate.

The second was to advocate conscious outsidership as regards to the euro, combined with a determined effort to be an ‘insider’ in EU decision-making. These strategies were managed in large by putting as priority, the country’s EU membership status in both elite/public discourse whilst backgrounding (playing down), to a limited extent, the question of Swedish euro-adoption, so that it would give time for the majority of the Swedes to come to terms with the country’s pro-EU position.
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Lateralizing of influence between states as a means of preserving power

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The evening’s contemplation… the opening paragraph of Joergen Oerstroem Moeller’s article, “Economic Integration: the Future for Asia” in the Diplomatist’ special issue published on the occasion of the ASEAN-India mid-December 2012 meeting in New Delhi.

His article addresses what in my view is the need for a heterarchous organizational structure in state / regional governance, as a system to manage heterochronous developments within and between states. Where and how heterarchy can be effectively accomplished and operationalizable is a discussion point.

Throughout his numerous articles, Moeller’s perspective is consistent – lateralization of decision-making may on the outset seem a dissipation of power, but in reality, it could be the only way to preserve power. What is perhaps needed is a re-conceptualization of ‘power’ in the contextual understanding and recognition that the world shares one destiny.

“Over the last half century economic transactions have jumped out of the nation-state box and take place globally, while the political systems put in place to control economic activities are still mainly national and domestic. This schism between international economic transactions and national political systems exposes the impotence of policy-making and thereby undermines the legitimacy of the political system in the eyes of the citizens. This spills over into scepticism about the advantages of economic globalisation. The choice for politicians is to share decision-making with other nation-states or to lose influence, which is difficult to explain as it looks as giving away powers while in fact it is the only way to preserve power.” ~ J.O. Moeller, 2012.

Joergen Oerstroem Moeller is Senior Fellow, Singapore Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Diplomatic Academy. He was former Danish Ambassador to Singapore, Brunei Darussalam, Australia and New Zealand. He is also author to one of my favourite reads, How Asia Can Shape the World -From the Era of Plenty to the Era of Scarcities (2011, ref. video panel discussion of the book at SMU Singapore, chaired by Kishore Mahbubani).

Managing complexities, extending Singapore’s national defense strategy of “auftragstaktik” to its socio-cultural fabric.

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I read with interest, Peter Ho’s RSIS working paper no. 248 on “Governing for the future: what governments can do”.

It is a paper based on an adaptation of his speech delivered at the Australia-New Zealand School of Government (ANZSOG) Annual Conference 2012 in Wellington, New Zealand on 26 July 2012. Mr. Peter Ho is Senior Advisor to the Centre for Strategic Futures and Senior Fellow in the Civil Service College. He serves as an Adjunct Professor with the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies. He is a Senior Fellow of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, and was formerly the Head of the Civil Service in Singapore.

In brief, Ho outlined in his paper, how accelerating changes in the 20th century, for example such as population growth, rapid urbanisation in combination with technological innovation has come to result in complex interconnected environments that in turn give rise to unpredictable trajectories and “wicked problems” (Horst and Webber, 1973) or interesting problems that have no immediate / obvious solution.

Globally, there are many international diplomatic talks that revolve around “wicked problem” issues such as climate change, food, water and energy supply, all preferably within a sustainable economic development framework. At a local level in Singapore, Ho cited the example of the complex nature of extremist religious pursuits that led to the need for new warfare strategies that counter forces both material and cognitive in order to keep the nation secure and how Singapore was under the constant challenge to disarm extremist ideologies.

But whether facing global political-economic environmental changes or ideological extremism, Ho’s point was governments that have the agility and capacity to act swiftly in such circumstances will benefit and thrive in today’s complex environments. And my perspective is that it is in this aspect that Singapore’s regional geo-political position and albeit seemingly contradictory socio-economic policies have most of the time benefited the country and its people on multiple levels.

As a national security strategy in coordinating counter-terrorism for example, Singapore has continuously worked towards and adopted a multi-layered, integrated and holistic “Whole-of-Government” (WOG) approach, leveraging on the diverse strengths of existing agencies and ministries at various levels from strategy and policy to operations.
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Gödel’s theorem and executive education: reflections from the Chinese automobile industry’s strategy in talent management

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Part of what makes being in academia so exciting for me is the very incompleteness of each project as expressed in Gödel’s theorem, here not referring strictly to its origins in mathematical logic of incomplete axiomatic systems, but rather used in a general linguistic sense of how research by definition, lies in a perpetual state of unfinish, the completion of which would warrant it redundant.

It is this continuous dialogic and dialectic process of thought, creativity and innovation of ideas, a journey that continuously reveals and uncovers what was previously obscure or even unknown that I find oddly comforting – finding familiarity in the unfamiliar, a constant in the flux of things.

As part of a collaborative publishing effort with friends from the IESE Business School in Barcelona from the International Faculty Program (IFP) of 2011, where colleague Peter Zackariasson was an editor, I contributed a chapter to the book entitled, New Perspectives in Management Education (Amann et al. eds, 2012) entitled “Chinese Wisdom. World Quality” Looking East for brand innovation and change management: reflections from a study on Geely automobile 2007-2011. It was a paper that reflected upon brand innovation and change managment in China’s Geely automobile from the years of 2007 to 2011. It was also during this time that Geely acquired Volvo Cars from American Ford in 2010, landing China the single largest foreign acquisition, at the same time (McDonald 2010, Wang 2011) setting up several technological and knowledge platforms for China that lent support to the country’s efforts in the aggressive acquisition of knowledge in general.

Although American owned, Volvo Cars continued to carry a strong Swedish heritage in quality and branding where many of their engineers continue to sit in Sweden today. This meant that the acquisition of Volvo Cars by Geely was under sharp and curious observation both East and West, not in the least by Swedish academics and researchers from the disciplines of management science and international business (IB).

Having previously studied the Swedish management style in comparison to the Singapore Chinese management style (Cordeiro-Nilsson 2009), a hypothesis of mine with regard to Geely’s acquisition of Volvo Cars was that the strict vertical hierarchy and authoritarian leadership style of the Chinese might end up severely clashing with the more lateral, egalitarian and consensus seeking leadership style of top level Swedish management, even if under the steering of American Ford. It made interesting observation to see how these differences in management ideology of which one had its roots in centuries of authoritarian dynastic rule, compared to the more individualistic developments of the occidental cultures, might be construed and subsequently manoeuvred in a cross-cultural setting.
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Singapore needs a more mature perspective to sex education

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On July 4, 2012, AsiaOne News ran an online article entitled “Social media drives MOE to revise sex education”.

In the past few days, news of sex education in Singapore had hit the international scene, crossing both geographical and virtual boundaries. Having only read some about this happening, I can share here that I remain ambivalent on the choice and use of words between “sex education” rather than “sexuality education”, the distinction of which might seem inconsequential but shows a general attitude and level of comfortability / approachability to the subject, AsiaOne indicating greater comfort in managing the topic than Singapore’s Ministry of Education (MOE), the very institution responsible for the education policy planning and general dissemination of knowledge of the subject at hand to promising young individuals upon whose shoulders Singapore will need to depend upon for its future success.

In today’s world of the Internet savvy where information is literally at one’s fingertips, and where search retrieval results act as general classifications, associations and even branding of identity, what is perhaps more important than a false sense of modesty is the accessibility and availability of information retrieved.

A google search and retrieve (dated 10 June 2012) for the terms “sex education” and “sexuality education” renders 661,000,000 hits in under 20s to the former and about 45,700,000 hits in about half a minute to the latter.

On the perspective of branding by association, the term “sexuality education” in contrast to the more direct “sex education”, carries ambivalent connotations. While the term is used by UNESCO under its efforts on improving prevention on HIV/AIDS, it at the same time appears in retrieved searches that tend towards the ultra-conservative in political views. From The Huffington Post, for example, a news article entitled “Abstinence-Only Sex Education Bill in Utah Prohibits Teaching Contraception” (posted Feb 2012) appears close in searches retrieved with Singapore’s MOE pages. Utah is one of USA’s most religiously homogeneous state, with approximately 60% of the population reportedly belonging to the Mormon Church that greatly influences their culture and daily life. Other closely associated results retrieved with the search terms “sexuality education” include videos, one of which is a cartoon version of “sexuality education” from Belgium targeted at children aged 6.

At MOE’s website under “Education > Programmes > Social and Emotional Learning > Sexuality Education > Scope and Teaching Approach of Sexuality Education in Schools”, readers will find find in the opening paragraphs (retrieved Tuesday, 10 July 2012, 22:40 hrs):

Sexuality Education

Scope and Teaching Approach of Sexuality Education in Schools

Abstinence before marriage is the best course of action for teenagers. Sexuality Education teaches students the possible consequences of sexual activity and that pre-marital sex is not desirable as there are inherent risks.

To reduce the incidence of STIs/HIV and teenage pregnancies among our young, a practical approach is adopted. Sexuality Education teaches students facts about contraception, repercussions of casual sex, and the prevention of diseases from a health perspective. This is in addition to teaching teenagers about building healthy relationships and how to say “no” to sexual advances.

Sexuality Education teaches students what homosexuality is, and the current legal provisions concerning homosexual acts in Singapore.

Both teachers and MOE-approved external speakers should respect that they are in a position of trust with respect to students and ensure that schools are not used as arenas for advocacy on controversial issues.

A quick discourse analysis of the text uncovers the Singapore governmental institution’s underlying sense of Victorian values and lack of ease with the subject of sex education. The opening paragraph that outlines the “scope and teaching approach” of sex education in Singapore schools raises a few questions due to inconsistencies in conceptual definitions (defining “secular” vs. “mainstream” values in multicultural, multi-religious Singapore) and logical fallacies, one of which is faulty correlation that the discourse tries to equate facts (how STIs are spread) with social values (preferred abstinence from pre-marital sex).

One wonders what kind of cat and mouse game teachers and students would play during class on the topic of sex education, or on whom the blinkers will lay when “abstinence before marriage” (a material act of individual choice) is considered “the best course of action for teenagers” (a social value hegemonically advocated in this discourse) that is also “a practical approach” (begs the question, from whose perspective and for which party concerned – the teachers, the parents or the teenagers?). Even the Roman Catholic Church in their long history of struggle and balance of politics and power, where abstinence, the result of which was a purposeful lack of heirs that dissolved assets in their division amongst many, was deemed a necessary measure of wealth building, power retention and consolidation for the institution and regime of the Church, has had trouble keeping their ordained leaders chaste.
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Leadership as a dependent variable – brief round table reflections

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Tonight’s read: “The Work of Managers: Towards a Practice Theory of Management”, edited by Stefan Tengblad, 2012. Oxford University Press.
Text and Photo © JE Nilsson and CM Cordeiro 2012

It was Professor Sune Carlsson who first published the book Executive Behaviour in 1951 that earned him recognition as one of the founding fathers of the field of Scandinavian management studies, his perspective being that management work is more an art rather than an applied science. The compilation of articles that Stefan Tengblad has put together in this book follows through on Carlsson’s point of view where managerial work that is often thought of as rational, organized and planned that numerous theories on management behavior have thus far argued for since the mid-1900s, is really revealing itself to be a process that is much more social and serendipitous in action and solutions to problems. And while the study of management lends itself to scientific analysis, what researchers in Sweden have found is that good managerial practices develop also rather independently from management science. It is also just about here that I realize again, how useful the Swedish fika as a session can be when it comes to even managerial work practices.

There is also a point of view of an effort to move away from the use of the word “leadership” in the Swedish academic circles of management studies, since the idea of studying leadership is much like studying the ethereal – the study of leadership does not come from studying ‘leaders’ or top managers of organizations per se but rather from the variables of the surrounding context that contribute to the concept. For example, a group of middle-managers tended to attribute ‘leadership qualities’ to the person in top management who was perceived to have made good decisions for the group as a whole. And a person in top management who was trustworthy with perceived sound judgement by the group with whom s/he worked was also attributed qualities of charisma.

This book reflects generally, a Nordic perspective and a Scandinavian tradition of management research that very much includes qualitative aspects of management science grounded in narratives, organizational symbolism, mythmaking and ‘the irrational of decision-making’ where formal rationality often times limits the ability to understand organizational life and behavior.

The Swedish culture of denial

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For the part of the world who have found it a point to notice that there is such a country as Sweden – at some distance easily mixed up with Switzerland – Sweden might appear as somewhat of an ideal state of equality, untroubled by racial riots and religious taboos.

On close encounter a different picture emerges that speaks about a state of denial that have grown into a culture of its own. In a time when globalization is increasingly becoming a non-issue, when through the Internet Syria is as close as Malmö, this phenomenon might become a problem. The problem, being that the wider meaning of the word ‘culture’ in Sweden has been obscured and cemented into oblivion so much that there are almost no words there to talk about the fact that values, beliefs, religions and various ideas about what is right or wrong are different in different parts of the world.

Defining culture

In the early 2000s when I began to prepare my research for my doctoral thesis in the field of managing across cultures and leadership across cultures, it appeared that almost every author touching upon the topic of culture had come up with a definition of their own. Already during the 1950s, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn had compiled a list of 164 definitions. The definitions spanned fine arts and humanities, pattern of human knowledge, beliefs and behavior, shared attitudes, values, goals and practices. Everything from cultivating small societies of bacteria in a Petri dish to my favourite, Geert Hofstede, who defined culture as a ‘collective programming of the mind’. It appeared that the only common ground was the agreement that there was such a thing as culture and in its broader sense all were the creations of man to fit in between them and what was given by nature to make just about any place on earth inhabitable. Thus, of course, any “culture” would vary with the places and be whatever served its purpose best at that place.

This wider definition made for three simple observations:

  1. There is such a thing as culture
  2. They vary with their geographical location
  3. Their usefulness will vary since what is useful in one place will be plain stupid in another

What we arrive at in the most secular country in the world is however, the contradiction that the Swedes do not believe in the thesis of Greek philosopher Protagoras, that “man is the measure of all things” but would much rather go with the Old Testament’s belief in absolute truths, that what is true to one man is true to all.

When I went on in the course of my research and talked to Swedish top managers about their “management style”, asking if they felt that their ‘style’ would broadly correspond to the “Swedish culture and values” most Swedes would have it that there did not exist any particular Swedish management style, and certainly no framework of a Swedish national culture that influenced this non-existent “Swedish management style”.
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