Newspaperese
#5448: Slot editor: “My pen just ran out of ink. I’m going home.”
A: Designer’s version: “My page just ran out of space. I’m going home.” :D
B: They still let your newsroom buy pens? Wow.
C: What’s a “slot editor?”
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Singapore has yet to emulate Japan’s productivity culture, but can make up for it in other ways, MM Lee Kuan Yew said yesterday.
Two key elements to this culture are still alien to Singaporeans, he said at a dialogue with participants at a Singapore National Employers Federation summit.
First, Japanese workers start at the bottom rung and therefore understand the workings of a company at every level.
In Singapore, by contrast, “if you send someone down to the factory floor, he feels demeaned”, said MM Lee.
Second, Japanese workers cooperate and feel a bond towards the company. They stand in for sick colleagues and, back in the days of lifetime employment, they tied their future to the company’s.
MM Lee was inspired by the Japanese to launch Singapore’s first productivity drive in the 1980s and even took them on as consultants. But it’s still a work in progress.
“We’ve been trying every since,” he said. “Can (we) equal the Japanese? Very unlikely. Can we be competent? Yes. But we don’t have the culture.”
Instead, Singapore could succeed in supporting productivity growth with its more Western orientation and its openness to foreign talent.
This, to MM Lee, meant developing a “Singaporean brand” — making Singapore an attractive place to live, with security, good infrastructure and communications and a local culture that foreigners could adapt to easily.
Singapore could also capitalise on other strengths, such as its complex manufacturing industries, its research and development infrastructure, biomedical services and water technology.
It could also position itself as a base for Asian companies to expand, due to its global outlook, he added.
Japan, by contrast, loses out by being more insular.
“They try to become a financial centre, but they don’t have an English-speaking population, they don’t embrace the foreign workers who go there,” he said.
“These are areas where we have made up for what is special in Japan, which unfortunately I don’t think we can recreate. We can’t change the culture of a people so easily.”
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Read Philippe Legrain’s Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them. It’s good stuff.