A hotel worker striding across one of the many cavernous interiors in the Emirates Palace Hotel.

 

On the 45-minute flight from Doha to Abu Dhabi, I sat next to a Somali who worked in an international development organisation based in the Gulf. Somewhere amidst our heated discussion on models of political economy, M asked me why I left the public service. Now, he is of course not the first person who has asked me this question. But for some reason, I gave him an answer that I had hitherto kept to myself.

 

I said that while I believed in the Asia and Singapore growth stories, I was equally convinced that the public sector would not be the same driving force for the next phase of Singapore’s growth. As an economist, M understood my point that diminishing marginal returns meant that it would be increasingly difficult for the public sector to have the same positive impact that it had had over the last 40 years. And the change to a networked, knowledge-based society would further curtail the effectiveness of top-down approaches.

 

 

As the thud of the aerobridge connecting to the door of our plane brought an end to our discussion, I was also reminded of a conversation that I had with an ex-civil servant. He lamented that the public service now only had cookie-cutters and bean-counters, and had no room for the heretics who broke rules. He might have over-generalised but I personally find the roles of the heretic and pioneer much more rewarding than the process-men, which MBA programmes seem to produce by the thousands.