1. The Contextual Paradigm: Assumptions about the Role of Government in Economic Development

The contextual paradigm consists of six interlocking and interrelated shared basic assumptions that reflect the mental models of the early leaders of Singapore and are largely taken for granted today. These assumptions are shared by Singapore’s government in general and thus provide a cultural context within which the EDB operates. At the same time they are assumptions held by leaders and members of the EDB itself and thus influence more directly how the EDB operates. These assumptions led to the creation of the EDB and provided the espoused values that influenced how the EDB would define its mission and organize itself. We have here a case where the espoused beliefs and values are congruent with the observed artifacts—the work of the EDB.

1a. “State Capitalism.” Singapore’s leaders and the EDB assumed and took for granted that government could and should play an active entrepreneurial role in economic development and should therefore exercise leadership through a quasi-governmental statutory board such as the EDB.

1b. Absolute Long-Range Political Stability. A closely connected second core assumption that came to dominate Singaporean thinking and action is really a cluster of three interconnected assumptions that can be stated as follows. Singapore’s political leaders assumed (1) that economic development must precede political development, (2) that long-range successful economic development could occur only if there was political stability, and (3) that political stability could be achieved and maintained only by firm but benign government controls that steer all segments of the society.

This was, of course, the most critical assumption to understand because it was the basis of the observed dictatorial regime that was set up around political and civil behavior. For example, severe punishment for littering or urinating in an elevator was justified on the grounds that Western businessmen would feel more confident working in a squeaky clean city. The rules and the heavy punishment were visible artifacts, but few observers really understood that there was a deep economic development assumption behind the rules and their implementation. The basic assumption that economic development justifies social control was never challenged as long as Singapore was succeeding in its development efforts.

1c. Collaboration among Sectors. Singapore’s political leaders assumed that economic development could succeed only if business, labor, and government actively collaborated with each other in fulfilling the common goal of building the nation (“Singapore, Inc.”).

Interorganizational collaboration was considered vital to provide the incentives and infrastructure needed to develop the manufacturing and service sectors—that is, roads, communication facilities, land, financial support for investment and training, a well-trained and motivated labor pool, housing, and so forth. One of the most notable aspects of this way of thinking was the decision to give the trade unions some responsibilities as owners and managers by having them own and operate one of the taxi companies and one of the insurance companies in Singapore. Some industrial-relations analysts might regard this as co-optation and undermining of the labor movement, but from Singapore’s rulers’ point of view, getting labor on their side was paramount, especially in view of the proximity of a communist China to the north.

1d. An Incorruptible, Competent Civil Service. Singapore’s political leaders assumed that favorable economic conditions for investors would be guaranteed only if the government and civil service were competent and incorruptible and operated with an open and consistent set of rules that were vigorously enforced.

Here again we see nesting in that this assumption reflects the Chinese cultural legacy that rulers must be exemplars of virtue, the British traditions of a “clean civil service,” and the early recognition on the part of Singapore’s leaders that overseas investors would be attracted only to a developing nation in which there was not only political stability but also a competent government, a clear set of rules, and an absence of corruption.

1e. Primacy of People and Meritocracy. Singapore’s leaders assumed that the only resource they had were its people and their potential; it must, therefore, pick the best of them and develop them.

Out of these assumptions grew the political decision to provide everyone with jobs and housing, to mandate English as the official language, and to create a lucrative government-sponsored scholarship program that would send the best students overseas to the best universities in exchange for a number of years of government service at salaries that were competitive with those offered by private industry.

1f. Strategic Pragmatism. Taken together these five assumptions describe what might best be labeled “strategic pragmatism” in that there was a clear long-range strategy reflecting Chinese cultural biases, but the implementation was thought through on a pragmatic daily basis and expressed in very detailed rules of how life was to be lived. This attention to pragmatic detail seemed more Western and was, in any case, aimed to attract Western business.

Singapore’s leaders assumed that the survival of the city-state required a very long-range plan but that the implementation of that plan had to begin immediately on a very practical level with the creation of the EDB.

These long-range aspects included the decision to stabilize Singapore by attracting businesses that would make major capital investments and, therefore, would be committed to remaining. The leaders were very aware of how vulnerable city-states are that depend only on their port and shipping.

2. The Cultural Paradigm of the EDB as an Organization

The culture of the EDB as a separate organization nested within the contextual paradigm is a set of paradoxes and anomalies from a Western point of view, but its basic assumptions are consistent with each other and enabled the organization to function effectively. This paradigm is best described in terms of six basic assumptions that came to dominate daily activities and the way the EDB organized itself.

2a. Teamwork: Individualistic Groupism. The EDB assumed that the best kind of leadership is to build a team and that the ultimate responsibility of team members is to contribute to the maximum of their ability.

The EDB employees seemed equally comfortable working competitively with each other in producing results while being completely dedicated to the team, the EDB, and the nation-state. One sees here a cultural legacy from Confucian principles of concern for family combined with a Western concept of individual achievement. Underlying this assumption was the reality that the EDB always had to function as a team because it was a small organization in which members therefore had to help each other. However, this pragmatic reason for teamwork was also supported by a cultural tendency to be comfortable in a team setting, a kind of comfort that is noticeably absent in many Western teams. At the same time, all of the officers were educated in settings where individual achievement was highly valued, and they were constantly exposed to multinational company managers who lived by individualistic competitive rules and were encouraged to develop their individual careers within the EDB.

The organization attracted very strong individualists who did, in fact, compete with each other and noticed it when someone was promoted ahead of them. The competition was mitigated by the fact that they were all kept so busy that they had very little time to worry about each other’s accomplishments. If you were too individualistic or political, you very quickly lost credibility with your colleagues and found yourself unable to do very much. So the two major distortions that could occur in the communications system—sitting on information or, at the other extreme, hyping up information and exaggerating what you know—were both mitigated by the need to maintain credibility and trustworthiness. To get anything done you had to build support, and to build support you had to maintain your credibility. Everything in the EDB had to be highly coordinated.

To be a successful performer in this kind of high-pressure family-team required a complex ability to collaborate with others and be a true team player while, at the same time, exposing individual talents and skills for purposes of promotion and career progress. This kind of balancing act was facilitated by the ability to think clearly, articulate clearly, write clearly, and be able to convince others to “join one’s team” in support of a project. In other words, individual talent showed up most in the individual’s quality of thinking and communicating, which was then tested in one’s ability to create and work in a team. Individual achievement was recognized with awards and other forms of recognition.

The EDB’s view of itself as a team and practically a family was partly based on everyone knowing everyone else. This level of acquaintance was maintained through many informal activities such as the weekly Friday afternoon teas; company functions such as picnics and sports outings that families were encouraged to attend; the monthly newsletter entitled “Network,” in which a variety of personal news items, especially awards and individual accomplishments were given publicity; and the encouragement of romantic attachments among employees symbolized by the great pride in the number of married couples who had met each other as EDB employees and remained in their jobs.

Also supportive of this team spirit was a set of very flexible personnel policies that allowed part-time assignments or jobs in which one would not be required to travel if family responsibilities made travel difficult. The work of the EDB was so intrinsically motivating that there was never any question of loss of work motivation. Rather, the EDB tried to accommodate the needs of each employee because each was viewed as being valuable.

2b. Cosmopolitan Technocracy. If Singapore’s fate rested on its ability to attract overseas investors, the EDB had to be able to deal with many other cultures and their officers had to be what sociologists have called “cosmopolitan” in their orientation. At the same time, to bring in the right investors and provide good services for them once they were in Singapore, the EDB had to staff itself with a cadre of people who would be both competent marketers or salesmen and entrepreneurs.

The EDB leaders and managers, therefore, had to be comfortable and knowledgeable in the global multicultural arena and at the same time very much in touch with the situation in Singapore and the potential of synergy between the multinationals and local industry. Their cartoon version of themselves depicted them as supermen and superwomen. To make all of this work required a particular personnel philosophy that could best be stated in terms of the following basic assumptions, many of which were explicitly espoused. The EDB assumed that it could only succeed if it recruited

1. The “best and the brightest” based on scholastic performance.
2. Officers with a “cosmopolitan orientation” based on overseas education and interest in working with and in overseas business settings.
3. Officers who were technically oriented and trained because the kind of businesses that were to be promoted were usually technically based.
4. Officers who had high levels of personal initiative that enabled them to work in unpredictable and uncharted business and government arenas.
5. Officers and managers who were team oriented and had high levels of interpersonal skill to deal with multiple cultures, with multiple hierarchical levels, and across organizational boundaries of all kinds.

Many of the qualities that were sought in the “officers” were already present in the leaders who created the EDB because they had grown up in a multicultural environment themselves—British, Malay, Tamil, and Chinese. Many of them had technical backgrounds and biased the education toward engineering and science from the outset, once again reminding us that the culture of the EDB was nested not only in the Singaporean culture but in the many other cultures that the early leaders brought into the picture.

2c. Boundaryless Organization: Modulated Openness. The EDB emphasized timely, accurate, and widely dispersed information as essential to decision making, often describing itself as a “boundaryless” organization. Two basic assumptions operated behind this principle, one referring to internal operations and one linking back to the contextual assumption about sector collaboration.

The EDB assumed that the only way it could fulfill its function effectively was for all managers, officers, and other relevant employees of the organization to be fully informed about all projects at all times. The EDB assumed that the only way it could fulfill its function was to develop and maintain open channels to the other sectors of the government as well as to private and labor sectors.

For the EDB to make quick and valid decisions about investments and investors, it believed that it was necessary for all relevant information for any given project to be available to all members of the organizations who might have an input to the decision, and certainly to the higher-level decision makers. This assumption resulted in the extensive global communication system that the EDB set up; its willingness to spend money on communications, travel, and meetings; and a standardized reporting system that allowed information to be efficiently centralized. Everything had to be written down, training was provided to employees in written communication, and, perhaps most important of all, the norm was articulated that “one must pass on all relevant information truthfully and not use information as a personal source of control or power.”

The “modulated openness” referred to the potential problems of simultaneously working with many investor clients, many of whom were competing with each other. For example, Hewlett-Packard and Digital Equipment Corp. were both considering setting up manufacturing plants in Singapore. If highly confidential plans were revealed, it was not always clear even within the EDB whose interests could be hurt by too much exposure of such plans. EDB officers therefore had to be very situationally careful while espousing maximum openness.

2d. Non-Hierarchic Hierarchy: The Boss as Patron, Coach, and Colleague. The EDB culture implicitly assumed that managers could succeed only if they had a strong sense of autonomy in performing their task, a willingness to initiate decisions through formal proposals up the hierarchy, a willingness to be open and frank in revealing information up the hierarchy, a willingness to go around the hierarchy when tasks required it, and the ability to work with higher levels of management in the client organizations.

At the same time they assumed that managers had to show suitable deference to superiors when appropriate (particularly in public), to seek and accept guidance from above in revising proposals and in making decisions, to show good judgment in keeping their superiors fully informed when going around the hierarchy, and to show appropriate humility when being coached and guided by superiors and when dealing with higher-ranking managers in client companies.

The best way to characterize this set of relationships is to note that EDBers were expected to perform as one would in a boundaryless Western organization in which hierarchy is downplayed while performing as one would in an Asian (Chinese) organization in which deference and hierarchy are dominant. What the young senior officer had to learn in entering this organization was how to do that—how to develop the judgment and interpersonal skills to perform according to both sets of norms.

Interpersonal skills were especially relevant because, on the one hand, boundaries were nonexistent in the sense that one could always walk into a senior executive’s office and talk very frankly to him. On the other hand, EDB officers knew that department heads might feel at a disadvantage when their subordinates went around them. Consequently, one of the important interpersonal skills was knowing how to keep the department heads feeling sufficiently secure so that they would not feel threatened if either a subordinate or a superior went around them. The implication is that one of the most important aspects of being socialized into the EDB was to learn the rules and develop the skills of being open and nonhierarchical without threatening the hierarchy.

2e. Extended Trust Relationships: Clients as Partners and Friends. One of the important distinguishing features of the EDB was its conception that the overseas investor was to become a friend and partner and that the relationship was to be a long-term one that would be of mutual benefit to the company and to Singapore. Implicit in this concept was not only the long-range strategic goal but an extension of the Chinese philosophy of guanxi, or building trusted connections that can be used in the future. Whereas in the old Chinese system such connections were limited by personal acquaintance and patterns of mutual obligation that extended out from the family and clan, the EDB concept was a much more Western notion of forging strategic alliances and partnerships with investing companies to create the kind of industrial system that the strategy envisioned.

The EDB had set aside considerable investment funds to make such partnerships real by allowing itself to be an equity partner as well; the purpose was not to invest to make more money, but to ensure that the enterprise would succeed. Once a business was a going concern, the EDB always intended to sell off its share to make the money available for the next project. This general philosophy rested on two basic assumptions.

The EDB assumed that it could succeed only if it fully understood the needs of its clients (potential and present investors) and collaborated with them in solving their problems efficiently but without compromising its own basic goals, plans, or rules (strategic pragmatism). The EDB assumed that Singapore’s long-range mission could be fulfilled only if initial investors continued to invest and became committed to transferring technology and training to Singapore’s labor force. Such continued investment could be achieved only if the EDB became friends and partners with its initial investors.

It was never enough just to bring the investors in. Once they were in, they inevitably developed new needs and problems, and it was the EDB officer whom they would call when they needed help. Such help often laid the groundwork for further investment and an expanded relationship with Singapore. In that regard, possibly one of the most important dimensions of the EDB and Singapore culture was the attitude toward time. On the one hand, there was a lot of emphasis on long-range planning and figuring out how to create a set of incentives and activities that would encourage the investor, who was thinking about the long haul. On the other hand, there was tremendous pride in being a good host and doing whatever it took to help a foreign investor succeed in the short run. EDBers thought of themselves as instant problem solvers.

At the artifactual level, the long-range point of view was evident in the willingness to spend large amounts of money on training and education. The educational establishment was charged with offering the kinds of curricula that would fit the long-range needs of the country. Evidence for the short-run pragmatism comes from the frequent changes in social policy that the government was willing to undertake when a given policy did not accomplish what was intended. Singapore as a state and the EDB as an organization both displayed the ability to change course rapidly if their analysis indicated a need.

Singapore was neither a long-range planner like Japan nor a short-range pragmatist like Hong Kong or many Western countries that are driven by a monthly or quarterly business model. It is both, and it manages somehow to combine the two by having clear long-range goals and visions that are widely circulated throughout the nation-state and, at the same time, a sense that those goals and visions cannot be achieved if the daily problems of helping the industrial establishment are not solved immediately. The key to this combination is the building of relationships with investors so that their long-range interests will coincide with Singapore’s. The day-to-day solving of problems ensures the solidity of the long-range partnership and friendship.

2f. Commitment to Learning and Innovation. Just as “strategic pragmatism” served as a kind of integrative assumption around the contextual paradigm, the commitment to learning and innovation serves to tie together the assumptions of the organizational paradigm. In a sense, commitment to innovation is also paradoxical because so much cultural analysis of Asian societies emphasizes a fatalistic view, acceptance of harmony with nature, and commitment to stability and harmony within the social structure. Clearly Singapore has blended whatever Asian legacy it has with a more Western proactive stance that anything is possible, symbolized in Singapore by the often-heard phrase “dare to dream.” In assumption form this can be stated as follows:

The EDB (and the government of Singapore) assumed that the only way it could fulfill its vision of development was to learn from others and its own experience, and to continuously innovate in dealing with whatever problems were discovered to stand in the way of achieving the vision.

This attitude goes back to the early leaders’ willingness to learn from other countries and from various non-Singaporean advisers; it was most clearly demonstrated in the continuous changing and refining of social policy. It is true that the policies are viewed by many as excessively controlling and a real restriction on the freedom of the individual, but in that perception one may miss the equally important point that the policies are constantly changing in response to new data. One of the important roles of the EDB is to stay in touch with what is going on in the rest of the world, which they did through a vast network of offices in all the major industrial centers. The knowledge acquired in this network became a major source of feedback to the government and provided the data needed to adjust government policy.

Various corporate seminars on marketing and strategic planning put on by the EDB became visible manifestations of the desire to stay open and learn. The EDB openly embraced the concept of the “learning organization,” using Peter Senge’s The Fifth Discipline and concepts of systems thinking (Senge, 1990).