Disciplined thought process

We’ve heard it before, ‘back to basics’. But the reality is big and successful enterprises never stray from the basics – because they have a very disciplined thought process!

It was ‘in one ear and out the other’ when Lee Kuan Yew told us that what we needed in order to forge ahead was discipline. The heart of discipline is in the mind, our thought process?

People tend to get ahead of themselves and before they know it, they’ve taken the wrong turn? Pictures say a thousand words and so as a consultant, the writer uses pictures to demonstrate the basic principle that a client may be taking for granted, e.g., succumbing to ‘freelancing’. He recently showed to a group of marketing managers the picture of a horse pulling a cart: the horse pulls the cart, it’s not the other way around’. (‘Of course’, they must be thinking?)

‘You want to beat the hell out of competition – then stop freelancing! Stay with the product concept – or what it means to the consumer in the first place . . . and focus on enhancing, magnifying if not upgrading its attributes, making the product more relevant, user-friendly, accessible, i.e., more becoming! And then you will have a sharper image to drive your communication and execution. Freelancing is not necessarily creative-thinking especially if it gives the obvious answers – which competition can also see. You want to keep the competitive edge – and beat the hell out of competition!’

The elections gave us a lot of hope and desire to help the country. And so there is an abundance of ideas. Hopefully the new leadership would not put the cart – it’s poverty, it’s growth, it’s employment, it’s corruption, it’s this, it’s that – before the horse.

They ought to be asking: where’s the horse – where’s the investment and the competitiveness? Manna from heaven doesn’t come every day; we need investments employed productively to produce competitive products and services that will yield the means to address poverty, generate employment and drive growth?

As one economist says, we can’t eradicate poverty – all we can do is to grow at a faster pace. But we can’t grow at adequate levels either given our meager investments nor can we eradicate corruption? Then let’s not define the agenda as such – it puts us back on our carousel, going round in circles?

When we’re talking to an architect or a builder, they will tell us exactly what it takes to build the structure we want. But first they will make sure that we’re talking about the same outcome and attributes – they will show us illustrations of the finished product.

What is the outcome that we want and what are its attributes: a developed economy – one that has enormous investments and competitiveness and thus low in poverty? And to build a developed economy we must aggressively, not passively, seek foreign investments, not only local?

The bottom line: we need a lot of discipline in our thought process? Lee Kuan Yew was not being patronizing when he talked to us about discipline; he was being a good neighbor?