What is leadership, talents, insight, foresight or all the ivory tower assumptions made in implementing many of our policies like meritocracy or foreign talent? Is our particular leadership working? What are the good and the bad ? Are there more bad than good or more good than bad when only a few top echelon is doing all the planning or sitting around and are they only fond of spewing out wonderful sounding ideas without much actions or results?
Are these talks about leadership and assumptions behind all the policies still working for us or are they working against us and dividing our unity as a people?
Yes, it is easy to agree that leadership is an important and critical element in government.
However beyond this rhetoric, there is nothing tangible or practicable about leadership or how to exercise or implement leadership in particular being too conceptual and difficult of definition/
When leaders talk about leadership, do they have indeed know what they are talking about or are they simply engaging in portraying themselves as good leaders being influenced or prejudiced by a conflict of interest to present themselves as good in their preoccupations.
Will the leaders of government define their role, duties and responsibility as to serve people or will they keep silent and reserve their right to pass themselves and judge their own performance without any comments or views from the people themselves?
Do leaders identify as their challenge to bring about the greatest good of the greatest number or do they only expect people to accept whatever they are doing out of their own narrow-mindedness, self-centredness or face.
If leaders talk about leadership, vision, foresight, insight but refuse to let people be the judge of their performance, and instead only seek way and means to deny problems and justify their own actions and policies after the facts or criticisms or problems are they still capable of objectively exercising good leadership qualities in the actual work place?
What kind of leadership qualities did citizens expect from our leaders today ?
Should leaders be expected to possess leadership qualities as stated in the foregoing or should they be given their divine right of some kind to do as they like despite all the wrongs like the nkf or shin corp ignoring the need for proper accountability, procedures, processes, codes of corporate governance, passion, moral uprightness or nobility of spirit?
It would appear that although there are a lot of talks about importance of leadership and talent everything being done is still very abstract and intangible and unaccountable.
So leaders cannot expect people to understand them as they so far have not defined leadership or leaders' accountability and are seen to be seeking convenient justifications and excuses to cover over their mistakes, negligence or ignorance.
Hence if leaders want to gel with the people and work as one with them they should own up and be more proactive and stop engaging themselves in all the look-good policies, assumptions and justifications of their actions without true implementation abilities.
Despite many years of such rhetorics, what the leaders have been doing is actually legalistic wrangling of laws and regulations aimed at taxing and recovering fullest costs depriving people of essential services in housing, transportation, utilities and medical care.
The ordinary citizens are suffering from dropping wages, unemployments with the domestic economy being heavily squeezed out of their survival by government's getting into businesses of all sorts to compete with its own citizens.
What happen to all the talents of our own citizens or do we have no talents?
The Asian Financial crisis has exposed self-centredness as the ultimate cause of financial instability.
Why is it that after so many crises and despite all the talks about leadership there does not seem to be any real leadership but what we are seeing is only individualism and self-centredness resulting in malpractices in all the NKF going on in so many organizations.
The real challenge is to work out a system of collective leadership processes where all leaders are openly laying out out whatever their policies and actions in attainable work processes capable of being effectively delegated or decentralized to be performed in teamwork and results-oriented manner which involve and motivate all.
In the fast-paced technology and knowledge-based age only when the whole team is in action mode will it be possible for the organization to work with leadership and talents.
What we actually need to lead is in areas of down-to-earth broad-based technology and knowledge application by the masses.
Therefore our leaders will need to go for actions and not all the brandishing of their self-importance.
For them to be action-oriented, they need to translate all their ideas and policies to tangible attainable work processes which will allow staff to take over and exercise their broad-based knowledge application and teamwork.
We will need to recognize shortcomings as stated in the "20 major major government policy errors" as posted to the Feedback Unit since 2002.
We need ministers and civil servants who are well versed in translating all their public statements and policies into whole action processes failing which we will again miss opportunities to restructure the economy to value-adding technology-driven economy talked about for years.