Lessons in leadership
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KrKdj50mPkIn 1942, the Japanese rounded up all Chinese men in Singapore.
They were filtering out the healthy young ones to execute.
Lee Kuan Yew was 18. A guard pointed at him and said: "Go to that lorry."
He knew what that meant. The lorry went to the beaches. The beaches meant machine guns.
He asked: "Can I collect my other things?"
They said yes.
He walked away, found his family's gardener, and hid in his quarters for two days.
When they changed the screening inspectors, he tried again. This time, he got through.
The ones sent to that lorry were taken to the beaches and shot. Somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 didn't survive.
60 years later, he sat down at Harvard to explain how he built Singapore from a tiny island into one of the wealthiest nations on Earth:
On what the war did to him:
"We lived in happy, placid colonial Singapore in the 1920s and 30s. The British Empire would have lasted another thousand years, so we thought."
Then the Japanese came. In less than one and a half months, the British collapsed.
"Three and a half years of hell. Butchery. Brutality. Many didn't survive. I was fortunate. I did."
"But it changed us."
"What right did they have to do this to us? Why did the British let us down so badly?"
When the war ended, Lee went to Cambridge to study law. But he was watching with different eyes.
"Can they govern me better than I can govern myself? Because they scooted when the Japanese came in. And why shouldn't I be running the place?"
On learning languages to lead:
Lee was the best speaker in English. But only 20% of Singapore spoke English.
The masses spoke Hokkien, Mandarin, and Malay.
"So every day at lunchtime, instead of having lunch, I would sit down with a Hokkien teacher and laboriously and painfully learn to convert my Mandarin into Hokkien."
"Had I not mastered that, the battle would be lost by default."
His first speech in Hokkien, the kids laughed at him.
"I said, please don't laugh. Help me. I'm trying to get you to understanding."
By 6 months, he could get his ideas across. By 2 years, he was fluent.
"Believe it or not, at the end of two years I could speak better than most of them."
"That came respect."
It showed two things: how determined he was, and how sincere. Here was a man doing all these other things and still learning their language just to talk to them.
On fighting the Communists:
The Communists had been organizing since 1923. The year Lee was born.
"Here we were in the 1950s trying to beat them. And they are professionals at organization."
They had elimination squads. Guerrillas in the jungle. Killer squads in the towns.
Lee stood up and said no.
"They denied that they were Communists. 'We're just left-wing socialists.' So I did a series of 12 broadcasts to set the scene. And I made it in three languages."
English. Malay. Mandarin. 20 minutes each.
"When I finished each broadcast, the director of the station couldn't see me. Went into the room and found me lying on the floor trying to recover my breath."
"But it was a fight for survival. Life or death."
On where trust comes from:
"It's difficult to establish trust in times of calm. You just say, 'Well, it's an argument, therefore I'm a better guy than you.'"
"But when the chips are down and you can get eliminated in a very unpleasant way and you show that you're prepared for it and you'll fight for them, it makes a difference."
"Without that trust, we could not have built Singapore."
On IQ vs EQ:
Harvard asked him: would you prefer high IQ or high EQ in a leader?
"IQ, you can get beautiful paper done. Complex formulas worked out. Elegant solutions."
"But when you've got to get a team to work and put that formula into practice, you're dealing with human beings."
"If you're not good at EQ, you can't sense that A doesn't get on with B, and you put them in the same team. It's no good."
He rated his own EQ as 7 or 8 out of 10. His IQ as "maybe 120."
But he had colleagues who could sense a person instantly.
"He shook hands with the man and said, 'I recoiled when I felt his palm. Evil man.' And he was. How does he know? I don't know."
"So I learned whenever I had to do interviews to choose people, I would get people who are very good at seeing through a candidate."
On corruption:
Singapore in the 1950s was full of deals, bribes, and organized crime.
"When we took over, we decided that this was the critical factor. If we did not make it so that every dollar put in at the top reaches the ground as one dollar, we're not going to succeed."
"We came in and made a symbolic act. We dressed in white shirts, white trousers, and said we will be what we represent."
He put the anti-corruption bureau under his personal portfolio.
"I gave the director the authority to investigate everybody and everything. All ministers. Including myself."
One of his own colleagues took half a million in bribes. When the investigation started, he asked to see Lee.
"I said, if I see you then I'll be a witness in court. So best not see me. Better see your lawyer."
The man committed suicide. Left a note saying: "As an oriental gentleman who believes in honor, I have to pay the supreme price."
"It's a heavy price. But it reminds every minister that there are no exceptions."
On consistency:
Lee had three journalists analyze 40 years of his speeches.
He asked them: what was the dominant theme?
All three said the same thing: consistency.
"What I said at the beginning, throughout all that period, the theme stayed loud and clear."
"That made it simple. Because you know where you stand with me. And you know what I want to do."
On delivering results:
"We deliver the homes, the schools, the jobs, the hospitals."
"Today, 98% of our people own their own homes. The smallest would be about $100,000 US. The biggest about $300,000."
"Once you own that amount of assets, you are not in favor of risking it with a crazy government. Your assets will go down in value."
"But that was planned."
Why? Because Singapore is small. Everyone does national service. If you're going to fight, you better be fighting for something you own.
"So we give everybody a stake."
On changing culture slowly:
Lee wanted Singapore to speak English. But he couldn't force it.
"Had I passed a law and said you will all learn English, we would have had mayhem. Riots."
Instead, he let parents watch who got the best jobs. The jobs were already there, from the multinationals and banks. They all used English.
"They watched and saw who got the best jobs. And they switched."
It took 16 years.
"I did not want to have said 16 years. Because in those 16 years I lost 20,000 Chinese graduates who had poor jobs. I wanted to make it shorter. I couldn't. I would have run into flack."
On whether leadership can be taught:
Lee quoted Isaac Singer, the Nobel Prize winner for Yiddish literature.
Someone asked Singer: "Can you make a writer write great literature?"
He paused. Then said: "If he has the writer in him, I will make him a good writer in a shorter time."
Lee's version:
"Can you make a leader of anybody? I don't think so."
"He must have some of the ingredients. He must have that high energy level. He must have the ability to project himself, his ideas. He must have the desire, almost instinctively, to say 'let's do something better.' Of wanting to do something for his fellow men and not just for himself and his family."
"You can't teach those things. He's either got it or he hasn't got it."
"But if he's got that, then you can save him a lot of trouble."
On sustaining yourself:
Harvard asked how he managed despair over decades of leadership.
"If your message is one of despair, then you should not be a leader. You must give people hope."
"But there are moments when you feel very down. Either because you're physically down, or emotionally down, or because the world has turned adverse against you."
"When you are in that condition, the first thing you do is get a good night's sleep. Then get a swim or chase a ball. Get the cobwebs out of your mind."
"If you're not fit, you're going to make mistakes. Physically fit. You must stay physically and mentally fit."
In his later years, he learned to meditate.
"At the end of 20 minutes to half an hour, my pulse rate can go down from 100 to about 60. You can feel yourself subside. You still your mind. You empty your mind."
"Then when you are rested, you resume quietly. You still got the same problems. Maybe you sleep on it. Come back. Look at it for a few days. Then decide."
This 2 hour Harvard interview will teach you more about leadership than every business book you've read combined.
Bookmark & give it 2 hours this weekend, no matter what.
Fr my Singaporean friend : as an update, home prices quoted in LKY’s earlier speeches referred to govt housing, These r no longer $100,000 to $300,000. Secondary market transactions for bigger govt flats r > $1m. Private Bungalows go for $35-$75 million each. Housing is expensive
We didn't cut and run. My relative walked off a ship, fought like hell for 3 days, ran out of water & bullets. Was captured and spent 2yrs on the Burma Railway before dying an agonising death. As 10's of thousands did. Maybe a little gratitude wouldn't go amiss for his sacrifice
The British did not ‘scoot’ when the Japanese invaded Malaya. They fought to defend it, including the island of Singapore. The British were defeated and large numbers surrendered. It was one of the worst defeats endured in the history of the British military, but they did not scoot. Civilians had been evacuated, but that was a sensible precaution.
I’m literally reading his memoirs right now and he’s either lying in this interview or lying in the memoirs because they don’t match up.
According to the history that I read, the British were either over-confident or unprepared for the war with Japan, and were overwhelmed, as they were preoccupied at the time defending their homeland against Hitler's Germany.
Approximately 80,000 British, Indian, and Commonwealth troops were captured during the fall of Singapore on 15 February 1942. Of the total Allied forces captured in the Malaya and Singapore campaign, only about 6,000 survived until they could be liberated.
Transcript of interview
Lessons in Leadership – Lee Kuan Yew
(Interview at the Harvard Kennedy School with David Gergen, Professor Ronald Heifetz, Dean Williams, and John Thomas)
Hello, I'm David Gergen here at the Kennedy School at Harvard, and we're with Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore. We'll be asking him about leadership, and perhaps I should introduce the other members of our panel as we begin. To my right is Professor Ronald Heifetz here at the Kennedy School. Senior Minister, as you know, Dr. Heifetz has taught leadership courses here and was really the one who laid the foundations for the study of leadership at the Kennedy School, having been here for over 15 years. To his right is Dean Williams, who joined our faculty and has been teaching a very popular leadership course over the past year. Dean has worked in Singapore and his wife is Singaporean, so we're delighted to have him here. At his right is John Thomas, who runs the university's program on Singapore, travels there regularly, and also works with the National University of Singapore as well.
Now, Senior Minister, our thought today is that you have written two extensive books of memoirs. I find that in talking to people in China, many of them look to you as a model of personal leadership. We'd like to begin by asking you: as you look back upon your years, what do you think were the essential elements of your own leadership?
Well, to understand what made me and my colleagues become the people we did become, you've got to understand the history, because we went through a harrowing period that either broke us or tempered us. We lived in a happy, placid, colonial Singapore in the 1920s and 30s. We grew up there thinking the British Empire would last another thousand years. Then the war broke out in Europe. I had been wanting to do law, which could only be done in Britain, but to mark time because France had fallen, I joined the local Raffles College at age 18 to do a humanities course in economics, English literature, and mathematics.
In our second year, in December 1942, although the signs were there, the overconfidence was overwhelming; we never believed the Japanese dared attack. On the 8th of December, they came over and dropped bombs—it was a total shock. Then the war began, and in less than one and a half months, they moved right down the Malayan Peninsula on bicycles and tanks. They were at the gates of Singapore while all our guns were pointing out in the wrong direction. We saw the total collapse of the British Raj within a month and a half. The painting of the Japanese capturing the British was symbolic—there was the tall, gangling Lieutenant General Percival with a white flag and the Union Jack, and there was Tomoyuki Yamashita with his big sword looking dominating.
The Dark Ages just closed in on us: three and a half years of hell, butchery, and brutality. Many didn't survive. I was fortunate I did, but it changed us. It was just the luck of the draw because they picked up all the healthy young men on the basis that they were likely to cause trouble, aiming to polish them off. Anywhere between 50,000 to 100,000 were taken to the beaches, lined up, and just shot. Three and a half years of privation and reflection changed us. What right did they have to do this to us? Why did the British let us down so badly? Churchill decided it wasn't worth the sacrifice because he was concentrating on the Middle East. Two atomic bombs saved us, otherwise we would have been destroyed. Towards the end of 1945, when the Japanese knew they were losing, they built trenches into every hillock in Singapore and had every intention to stay until they were incinerated, but that big bomb and the Emperor’s speech made them meekly surrender.
When the British came back, happy times didn't immediately return because they lacked shipping, medicine, and food, though it gradually improved. My generation then resumed our studies. I went to England, studied law at Cambridge for three years, and spent one year in London. But I was watching them with different eyes: Can they govern me better than I can govern myself? They scooted when the Japanese came in, so why shouldn't my colleagues and I be running the place? That was the beginning.
We went back and sought to build mass support. Here we were, a group of armchair politicians who used to talk revolution while crawling from one British pub to another. When we came back, we decided to start with the trade unions because there was considerable dissatisfaction with low wages and bad conditions. We spent several years working voluntarily as honorary advisers—I worked as a lawyer for free—and we built up a whole host of unions that formed the basis upon which we could launch a political party. By 1954, my colleagues and I—a group of about six—formed a party, and the Communists joined us against our common enemy, the British. They were not all hardline Communists, some were just left-wingers, but that was the beginning of a life-and-death struggle.
The fight with the British was actually the easiest because they were not putting up a fight; they just wanted to make sure power was handed over to a group that wouldn't ruin the place and ruin their interests. The real fight was with the Communists, who wanted a completely different system. To defeat them was an uphill battle because Singapore was 70% Chinese, and at the time, they all believed Communist China was a tremendous success based on the glorious pictures of huge steel mills and ships coming out of the country. So we proposed to rejoin the peninsula and merge into a bigger Federation. We thought that with a demographic mix of 40% Malay, 40% Chinese, and 20% others, the Communists wouldn't be able to win. But when we joined, the Malayan leadership was not keen on this kind of multi-racial ideology; they wanted a clear Malay majority to win. After less than two years, they told us to leave or there would be bloodshed. A snap decision had to be made, so we decided to have a go on our own and left.
Suddenly, we had this tiny little island—24 square miles at low tide—which had been the center of the British Empire in Southeast Asia. It was a military base, a commercial hub, and the administrative capital from which they governed Malaya, Borneo, and various islands. But now we had a heart without the body. All we had was the heart; where was the circulation coming from? That was the beginning of our ultimate challenge.
Dean Williams then asked about the immense danger of that period: "Talk a little bit about the challenges of mobilizing competing factions to get the British out, and that alliance you had with the Communists. Had they won, they could have just finished you off."
Lee Kuan Yew responded: It was the sweet innocence of youth. We believed they couldn't all be hardline Marxists; they looked like ordinary people and idealists who could be won over to our cause. We believed Communism couldn't permanently win in a multi-racial society because they couldn't win over the Malays, so we were hopeful. In retrospect, however, we initially underestimated how deeply they had penetrated the Chinese schools, clan associations, Chambers of Commerce, and alumni networks. Dennis Bloodworth, The Observer correspondent, once asked me why we didn't just get rid of them. I told him they were like radioactive dust—to get rid of it entirely, you have to vacuum the whole place out, which risks removing all your activists and leaving only inert gases. We had to take a tactical chance.
Fortunately, their leaders lacked an understanding of the outside world. They understood the internal dynamics of conspiracy and cell structures, but they didn't realize that under semi-self-government, the British were still ultimately in charge and could call the game off and bring the troops back. As a lawyer, I understood constitutional practices completely, whereas they did not. I intentionally arranged constitutional advances so that ultimate sovereignty remained temporarily with the British. I told the British, "You keep ultimate sovereignty. If I lose to the Communists, you will have to deal with them. If I win, I will take over." That was a vital backstop because I did not yet feel fully confident that we could win on our own.
There were severe moments of doubt. In 1961, just before May Day, the Malayan Prime Minister announced he would consider a merger with Singapore, but only alongside Sabah, Sarawak, and Brunei as a balancing dowry. This greatly excited the Communist underground because they knew they would be cornered in this larger Federation. The leader of the underground sent a message through my wife’s law office asking to see me secretly. This was a massive dilemma; I was now the Prime Minister, so how could I hobnob with a man wanted for arrest? I knew it was a risk, but I agreed to meet. I was directed through a series of checkpoints, picking up a little girl with pigtails at a roundabout who led me to an uncompleted public housing project with no electricity.
We sat down by candlelight. He told me, "We’ve been misunderstanding each other. We want to cooperate. All we want is space for cultural and union activities—you do it your way, we do it ours." I thought to myself, If I give you that space, you will get stronger and put a tightrope around my neck. So I told him, "You have your agenda and I have mine. If we have to part company, let's do it in a friendly way, but I cannot guarantee your freedom of action." A few days later, he instructed the open-front leaders to destroy our government, they broke off, and the open fight began.
I wasn't sure we were going to win because all their sleepers in the unions, Chinese newspapers, and school management committees suddenly came out with fiery statements denouncing me as an imperialist lackey. We fought for the vote via a public referendum on the merger with Malaysia. I campaigned for a whole year and gave them no easy options because they had historically agreed that independence lay through a merger. They called for a blank protest vote, but they only got 30% while I carried 70%. If Singapore had received independence straight away without going through this trial by fire, we would not have succeeded. The population was fractured and riotous, but going through this awful clash with dark forces taught the people that governance was a very serious business, and we earned their trust.
David Gergen then asked: "Do you feel that you were born a leader, or were there episodes in your youth that shaped you?"
I don't think I was born a leader; I was born an activist. I was never a school prefect or school captain; I was always full of exuberance and up to some mischief. What made me a leader was that when the time came, our core group decided I should lead because I was the best speaker. However, I was only a good speaker in English, whereas the mass of the people spoke Hokkien, Mandarin, and Malay. English was only understood by about 20% of the population in the 1950s. I furiously started learning Mandarin and Hokkien. Every day at lunchtime, instead of eating, I would sit down with a Hokkien teacher and laboriously learn to convert my thoughts. Mastering those languages was crucial; otherwise, the battle would have been lost by default. It also showed the people how determined and sincere I was, and within two years, I could speak better than most of them, which commanded deep respect.
To get across to people, you cannot just make a clever, superficial speech; you must have a deep message delivered with total conviction. When facing a dire crisis after a riot, I had to tell them, "You're worried, and so am I. But if we stay united, there are limits to what they can do to us. The arithmetic is simple: we have a fighting chance." The people knew our leaders weren't going to cut and run.
My personal test of fire between life and death occurred during the Japanese occupation. The Japanese coralled all the Chinese into concentration camps to filter out healthy young men to execute, punishing the Singapore Chinese for supporting the war fund against them in China. When it came to my turn to pass the screening inspection, an instinct told me that being directed to a particular line meant trouble. I asked the guard if I could step back to collect my remaining belongings, and he allowed it. I smartly walked back and hid in my gardener's labor quarters for a couple of days. When they changed the screening inspectors, I tried my luck again and got through. The young men sent to that first line were taken to the beaches and machine-gunned. That wasn't necessarily "guts"; it was survival instinct.
Professor Heifetz then brought up the shifting nature of authority: "In the West, there is growing ambivalence toward authority, especially post-Watergate and Vietnam. Could you give us insights into the sources of your authority, both formal and informal, like credibility, trust, and respect?"
Lee Kuan Yew explained: When I started, I was just a sympathetic lawyer working for unions free of charge, winning their cases in arbitration and charging them nothing, which made me a popular figure. But the critical factor in establishing true trust and confidence was standing up to the Communists when they had elimination and killer squads in the towns. It was a test of both physical courage and political skill.
In 1961, I did a series of 12 radio broadcasts in three languages. I peeled back the situation onion by onion, revealing how the underground worked. It was exhausting; after recording each 20-minute broadcast in English, Malay, and Mandarin back-to-back, the station director would find me lying flat on the floor just trying to recover my breath. But after we stood up to the extremists, the populace knew we were not quitters, and trust was permanently established. You cannot easily establish that depth of trust in times of calm through mere academic arguments; it happens when the chips are down and you show you are willing to get eliminated fighting for them.
Furthermore, we knew that any personal indiscretion or misdemeanor would be used by our opponents to smear us and destroy our character. We had to be extremely careful never to give hostages to fortune. If we became dishonest, ostentatious, or lived well at the public's expense, that hard-earned trust would fritter away. We operated strictly as trustees, not owners, of the country.
The second half of authority is that you must deliver. We delivered homes, schools, jobs, and hospitals. We gave the people land for free and charged them only for the construction of their apartments, docked incrementally off their monthly salaries. Today, 98% of our people own their own homes. Once a citizen owns a substantial asset like that, they are not in favor of risking it with a reckless government that will destroy property values. We also planned this because we have a small nation with mandatory national service. If you ask young men to fight merely to protect the big estates of a few wealthy people, that is not a compelling idea. We gave everybody a stake in the nation to defend.
John Thomas then brought up a conversation he had with a close colleague of Lee's who listed his top leadership traits: determination, broad vision, context mastery, priority management, continuous reading, and attracting opposing views until a decision is made. Thomas asked Lee to expand on the concept of Emotional Intelligence (EQ) versus Intellectual Capacity (IQ).
Lee Kuan Yew noted: With a high IQ, you can write beautiful academic papers and elegant formulas. But when you have to get a team of human beings to put that formula into practice, you need EQ. If you lack EQ, you won't sense internal friction, like Person A not getting along with Person B, and your team will fail. I had an incredibly brilliant deputy, Goh Keng Swee, who had a powerful mind and was a spectacular economist, but he consistently made mistakes in judging personal character. He would praise a candidate, appoint him as a secretary, and then return six months later saying the man was no good because he lacked real judgment. He couldn't inherently feel or read a person.
On the other hand, I had colleagues like Lim Kim San and Hon Sui Sen who possessed an uncanny ability to see right through people. In a one-hour interview, despite all the flawless academic records on paper, they could accurately discern a candidate’s true capabilities and integrity. No leader can last long if their EQ is weak, because you must depend on others to do the job; if you are hoodwinked by the wrong people, you are in deep trouble.
John Thomas observed that Singapore relied on highly talented lieutenants over rigid initial organizations, pointing out that when the World Bank demanded a Five-Year Plan for a loan, Goh Keng Swee famously sat down over a single weekend and produced it by Tuesday, securing the money.
Lee Kuan Yew agreed: We did not inherit strong institutions from the British; they left basic fundamentals but not much else. Education was very limited before and immediately after the war, so we lacked a deep pool of local talent and had no think tanks. Our natural solution was to identify the few individuals with outstanding, creative minds who could think outside the box to solve our problems. Within a few years, we identified our key players, and they built the institutions. Hon Sui Sen built the Economic Development Board (EDB) to market Singapore globally, developed the Jurong Industrial Park, and formed the Development Bank of Singapore (DBS) because traditional commercial banks weren't accustomed to long-term manufacturing loans. Formal institutions as independent entities came later, as a second-stage process once we had generated enough experienced talent to spare.
David Gergen then asked about how Singapore successfully wiped out corruption and organized crime, which were systemic features of the city in the 1950s.
Lee Kuan Yew replied: You cannot alter a culture of corruption in one dramatic move; it is a relentless, ongoing drive that never stops. When we took office, we recognized that if we didn't ensure that every single dollar put in at the top reached the ground as exactly one dollar, we would fail. We made a symbolic act by dressing entirely in white shirts and white trousers to represent what we stood for. We were sickened by the venality of other nationalist leaders globally who took power only to run their countries down while living it up.
We changed the rules to ensure complete transparency, removed arbitrary administrative discretion, and placed the Corrupt Practices Investigation Bureau (CPIB) directly under my personal portfolio. Everyone knew I was leading the drive personally, and I gave the director authority to investigate absolutely anyone, including all ministers and myself.
To eliminate the Triads (organized crime syndicates), who extorted businesses and had historically been used by opposing politicians to buy votes, we gave them a public warning during the election: "This is your last chance. When we win, you are out." Once we won, we utilized the Criminal Law (Temporary Provisions) Act, which allowed us to detain suspects for two years with the clearance of a special advisory committee when witnesses were too intimidated to testify openly in court. Within two years, we cleaned them out entirely.
Maintaining this is a hard slog. The most difficult experience to stomach was when a close colleague of mine, a brilliant architect and organizer who built our public housing system, yielded to temptation and accepted a half-million-dollar bribe from a developer to clear an extra plot of land. When the investigation caught up with him, he wanted to see me to resolve it. I refused, telling him that if I met him, I would become a witness in court, and that he should talk to his lawyer. He subsequently committed suicide, leaving a note stating that as an oriental gentleman of honor, he had to pay the supreme price. It was a heavy, tragic price, but it created an unyielding climate of public opinion that views graft in high places as totally devastating to society. It serves as a permanent reminder to every minister that there are absolutely no exceptions.
John Thomas then asked if there are unique dimensions to public leadership within an Asian context, citing concepts like family values and respect for the head of the household.
Lee Kuan Yew responded: There are certain cultural forms you cannot break without deeply upsetting people. By and large, there remains a baseline respect for authority because the population understands that the system cannot function if the leader is constantly delegitimized as a crook. However, styles of leadership across Asia are in deep flux due to satellite media, cable television, and the internet. Taiwan, for instance, has become highly Americanized and riotous in its media style, aggressively poking fun at its leaders to prove it is a "real democracy," though I am not certain this serves democracy well in the long run if it permanently undermines necessary social authority. Leadership must always be exercised within the unique cultural context, habits, habits, and values of the specific society it operates in; otherwise, it simply doesn't make practical sense.
David Gergen noted: "It is unusual in many countries for a leader to step down voluntarily; your contemporaries usually die in office or get thrown out. In 1990, you stepped back to become Senior Minister to manage the transition."
Lee Kuan Yew explained: I had a profound responsibility to ensure that the system would survive after me, especially since there were widespread public doubts that it could. I could have easily stayed on as Prime Minister for another five or ten years, but that would have been a disaster for the country. A long-serving leader customizes the government to their exact configuration, like adjusting a car seat perfectly to their own hands and fingers. If you don't step out voluntarily to let the new leader reconfigure that driving seat while you are still around to help them, you risk a catastrophic crashing of gears.
The new team does things differently because they are dealing with a younger generation, changing technology, and a vastly different environment. I watched Indonesia's President Suharto go down in 1997 and thought to myself that if only he had stood down a few years earlier, he would have preserved his status as a truly monumental figure in Indonesian history.
We also had to change deep-seated societal mindsets, such as the historic Chinese aversion to military service. When we became independent, our only two military battalions were 60% Malaysian and commanded by a Malaysian officer. The population was terrified of being bullied by external neighbors, so I used that fear as an advantage to emphasize that a defense force was mandatory for survival. To make military service respected, we formed a symbolic platoon where all Members of Parliament and political leaders took military training on weekends and marched in uniform on National Day. We set up school cadets so the police and military would be viewed as the community's own children rather than enemies. I also sent my own sons into the army for eight years. Gradually, the public began to associate the officer corps with absolute academic and practical excellence. Today, five out of our fifteen cabinet ministers are former high-ranking military officers.
The more deep-seated and emotional a problem is, the slower it is to resolve. Language is a prime example. We had a population speaking four major languages and dozens of distinct dialects. Had I passed a law by dictat mandating that everyone must immediately learn English or Chinese, there would have been uprisings and total mayhem. Instead, we allowed all schools to continue but mandated bilingualism. Then, we let the economic market dictate the outcome. Parents quickly noticed that multinational banks and international corporations utilized English, meaning the best jobs went to those fluent in English as a first language and their mother tongue as a second language. It took from 1965 to 1981, but by letting parents choose based on incentives rather than force, we successfully transitioned the entire national education system and university teaching into English without a single riot.
Leadership has a massive improvisational element; you must constantly watch how far you can push an initiative without snapping societal loyalties. Our grand strategy was to create a First World oasis in a Third World region. Building physical infrastructure like world-class airports, ports, and telecoms is relatively easy if you hire the best contractors. Changing human behavior is the real battle. When people moved from shanty towns into our new high-rise apartments, some would initially urinate in the elevators out of sheer old habits. We had to install engineering traps that sensed urine, causing the elevator to lock down immediately until the police arrived to catch and publicly expose them. When people learned to stand outside the doors and urinate inward to avoid getting trapped, we installed external cameras. It is a constant, unyielding fight to lift habits to First World standards, but you must have that unshakeable vision and sell it continuously to the populace.
David Gergen asked: "At the Kennedy School, we focus on developing leadership. Do you believe leadership can truly be taught?"
Lee Kuan Yew recalled: I once watched an interview with Isaac Singer, the Nobel Prize winner for Yiddish literature. The interviewer asked him if his creative writing courses at Columbia could turn anybody into a great writer. Singer paused and replied, "If he has the writer in him, I will make him a good writer in a much shorter time." That is exactly my view on leadership. You cannot make a leader out of just anyone. A person must naturally possess certain foundational ingredients: a very high baseline energy level, the ability to project themselves and their ideas, and an instinctive, visceral desire to improve the condition of their fellow men rather than just looking out for themselves and their family. You cannot teach those innate traits. But if a candidate has those raw ingredients, formal training can save them an immense amount of time and error by teaching them what traps to actively avoid.
I constructed my own private global tutorial by traveling extensively and deliberately studying the failed experiments of other decolonized nations. Absolutely let someone else pay the heavy price for a lesson. If you are foolish enough to repeat a demonstrably failed policy yourself, you are squandering your country's future opportunities.
Professor Heifetz asked about the personal management of crisis, exhaustion, and despair, and how Lee sustained himself over decades.
Lee Kuan Yew concluded: If your central message to your people is one of despair, then you should not be a leader; a leader's fundamental duty is to provide credible hope. Of course, there are inevitable moments when the world turns adverse and you feel profoundly down, either physically or emotionally. When that happens, the very first thing you must do is get a proper night’s sleep, go for a swim, or chase a ball to entirely clear the cobwebs out of your mind. If you are not physically and mentally fit, you will inevitably make major tactical mistakes, which is entirely disastrous. I exercise every single day. For the last ten years, I have also practiced meditation for 20 to 30 minutes a day to calm my mind, lower my pulse rate, and empty my thoughts. When you are fully rested, you can return to the exact same problems with a quiet mind, look at them from new angles, consult your trusted friends, and execute a better way forward.
