Kishore Mahbubani on Singapore’s ‘secrets’ to success and why he annoyed Lee Kuan Yew

Pragmatism was about the willingness to learn best practices from any source anywhere in the world. Goh Keng Swee said to me, “Kishore, no matter what problem Singapore encounters, someone somewhere has encountered it before. Let’s find out how they solved it. Then we can adapt their solution for Singapore.” As I told the students, Singapore had succeeded by becoming the best copycat nation in the world.

The Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy also succeeded by copying other schools’ best practices. McKinsey had kindly shared many of them with us, and we continued learning more. Quite amazingly, we succeeded so well that within less than a decade, we were admitted into the premier leagues of sister institutions like the Global Public Policy Network (GPPN) and the Association of Professional Schools of International Affairs. Getting into the GPPN wasn’t easy. We had to sign “double-degree” arrangements with the founding schools of Columbia University, the London School of Economics, and Sciences Po.

Before the Lee Kuan Yew Schoo of Public Policy came along, many Singaporean university institutions had succeeded in signing double-degree program arrangements only by paying a premium. We were probably the first to sign a double-degree program arrangement with an Ivy League institution without paying a fee. In short, our academic standards were validated by some of the best institutions in our field.

Honesty was always the hardest principle to implement. As I had written in an essay titled “The Ten Commandments for Developing Countries in the Nineties” in 1990, “Thou shalt acknowledge that corruption is the single most important cause for failures in development.” The three founding fathers of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, Goh Keng Swee, and S. Rajaratnam, were exceptionally incorruptible. Therefore, they set very high standards of probity that we were all expected to follow.

To explain how things worked in Singapore, I told the students what had happened when I was leaving Li Ka-shing’s office after securing a S$100 million donation. Per Hong Kong practice, Mr Li gave me a gift of a Mont Blanc pen. I groaned secretly. I knew that if I decided to keep it, I would have to pay NUS about S$500 for the cost of the pen. Since I didn’t need a Mont Blanc pen, I was tempted to surrender it to NUS and not retain it. However, I considered the possibility that Mr Li would visit my office someday, as he did a year later. When he did, I proudly showed him the pen he had given me. I didn’t tell him that I’d had to pay NUS S$500 to retain his gift from him.

High standards of honesty have served Singapore well. However, they are not easy to implement. I heard a sad story of what happened to a graduate of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy when he returned to his Central Asian country. He had decided to implement the principle of meritocracy in an organization that he was chosen to lead. He promoted the best officers, and he released a few nonperformers. Unfortunately, one of the nonperformers he released was related to the country’s president. As a result, this graduate of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy lost his job because he had tried to implement the “secret” formula of Singapore’s success in a society that did not recognize the core principles behind it.

This story of one failure has to be balanced against the hundreds of stories of those who were able in one way or another to implement the lessons in good governance they learned at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. By doing so, they were in turn improving the lives of thousands, if not millions, of people.

One graduate of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, for example, helped many people by using the lessons from Singapore to eliminate long queues in a Philippines hospital. Going to see a doctor became less strenuous. Knowing that my work as dean was, through the talents of the school’s graduates, essentially improving the lives of many other people proved to be a source of great satisfaction.

Recognition as a key narrator of Asia’s rise

The deanship of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy also helped to open another meaningful chapter of my life: the publication of several books, which had some impact in terms of changing global opinion. Tony Tan had said when he offered me the deanship that to improve my credibility with the academic community, I should publish a book. Fortunately, I made this comment while I was still in New York in 2003. I started right away and found a New York publisher, PublicAffairs.

Indeed, PublicAffairs has published five of my books, including this one. In some ways, it was remarkable that PublicAffairs kept publishing me after the first book, titled Beyond the Age of Innocence, which was not a financial success: the total royalties I received came to less than the advance, so the publisher probably lost money. The book probably failed because its goal was to offer advice, from a non-American to Americans, on how the United States could better handle its relations with the rest of the world. The may have been good (I believe it was, and it was certainly offered in the spirit of wanting the United States to succeed); However, I came to realize that Americans don’t really want advice from non-Americans.

I assumed that my publishing career with PublicAffairs might be over. Fortunately, they gave me a second chance. The New Asian Hemisphere appeared in 2008 and proved to be successful. This time, the book more than earned back its advance and was translated into many languages, including Arabic, Mandarin, Dutch, French, German, Bahasa Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, and Vietnamese. The most spectacular launch of the book took place in Cairo, Egypt, against the backdrop of the pyramids.

The book also led to many speaking engagements that were quite lucrative. With this book and the speaking opportunities that came from it, I emerged as one of the main narrators of the greatest story of our time: the return of Asia to the world stage. This in turn led to my inclusion in several exclusive lists of the world’s most influential global public intellectuals: the Financial Times gave my global standing a huge boost when it included my name in a short, exclusive list of 50 individuals who would “shape debate on the future of capitalism” in 2009. The list included global luminaries like Barack Obama, Wen Jiabao, and Angela Merkel.

Similarly, Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines included me in their 2005 lists of top one hundred public intellectuals. I was chuffed to see my works and my writings included among those of such global luminaries. I thought that only good would come from this and that the boost to my global intellectual standing would only help my work as dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy.

Sharp put-downs from Lee Kuan Yew

Little did I know that I was planting the seeds of my self-destruction. Some people in the Singaporean establishment were not happy with my increasingly visible profile. I should have picked up the hint from The Straits Times, which, if I may be permitted an understatement, is extremely sensitive to the views of the Singaporean government. It sends out accurate signals of approval and disapproval. It was therefore significant that The Straits Times was reluctant to report any inclusion in these multiple global lists, even though newspapers in other parts of the world, such as India, made a big splash about them.

Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines may have inadvertently done me a big disfavour by including me in their inaugural lists in 2005 and then including Lee Kuan Yew in their second lists in 2008. At the time, I didn’t make much of this. Mr Lee was still a towering figure, both in Singapore and in the world. I was, at best, a little-known dean or author. I didn’t think any of this would hurt my relationship with Mr Lee.

Yet some strange things did happen. Around that time, at a small dinner hosted by Mr Lee at the Istana, Mr Lee sharply put me down when I asked him a question. My friends around the table noticed this and pointed it out to me. I was given an even sharper put-down by Mr Lee when I posed a question to him at a subsequent event. More of my friends noticed this.

Still, these appeared to be small, isolated events against a larger backdrop in which things were seemingly going swimmingly well, both for the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy and for me. The global standing of the school continued to rise. Similarly, my personal standing continued to grow. I was invited to attend the annual Davos meeting of the WEF every year. The founder of the WEF, Klaus Schwab, even included me in the exclusive Global University Leaders Forum (GULF), which comprised mainly university presidents and only two deans: the dean of the HKS and me, the dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of PublicPolicy.

When Larry Summers suddenly had to step down on February 21, 2006, as one of the two presidents of GULF, Klaus Schwab had to find a replacement. Instead of turning to another Ivy League university president, Klaus asked me to become the co-leader of GULF. It was a great honor to be recognized by this august group.”

Excerpted from Living the Asian Century: An Undiplomatic Memoir by Kishore Mahbubani, published by PublicAffairs, an imprint of Hachette Book Group. Available at local bookstores.