June 2007

New Zealand Capability - Lessons from Asia. Part One - Singapore and Malaysia by Dr Lance Beath.

Executive Summary 

This report examines the strategic practices of Singapore and Malaysia as a guide to improving New Zealand’s strategic capability. The question asked is what New Zealand can learn from developing Asian capability and ‘best practice’ in the area of long-range strategy formulation, taking Singapore and Malaysia as being representative of other fast-growing South East Asian economies. At a later stage the intention is to extend the research into North Asia by looking at the state of strategy practice in countries such as China, Japan, Korea, Hong Kong and Vietnam.

The answer is that there are no strategy formulation models unique to Singapore or Malaysia. Rather, their economic success is attributed to a range of other  factors including strong political leadership, vision, ambition, the role of governing elites, openness to overseas ideas, cultural issues and pragmatism.

The issue for New Zealand is whether we can add to our strengths as a well regulated open market economy some of the strengths we see in East Asian models; these strengths come down to the quality of leadership that is available. The whole theme – in Asia as well as in New Zealand – centres on the quality of government. Central to this is the quality of leadership offered by political leaders and by public service chief executives and managers.

Specific issues canvassed in the paper include the desirability of New Zealand moving to a more explicit wealth-creation model along the lines of Singapore’s. This is seen as one of a number of breakthrough strategies needed if New Zealand is to have any realistic prospect of returning to the top half of the OECD per capita income table.

The paper also suggests that New Zealand needs to ask itself whether it is sufficiently transformative and ambitious for the future. In looking at the examples of Singapore and Malaysia, the paper also advocates thinking further about the role of our governing elites. We need to do more to recognise and create a public sector elite, recruited on merit and rewarded for its public service achievements and ideas. Traditionally, we have followed a public sector model based on the idea of egalitarianism and the shunning of elitism. It is time that this is rethought. We have world-class public sector leaders in New Zealand and we need to begin
celebrating their achievements. This would be an important step in lifting New Zealand’s overall performance as a society.

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