Singapore business culture
I’m involved in a research project at a university, for which there are three bosses in three separate departments and about 24 research assistants, all told. Although the three bosses meet regularly, the three departments normally have nothing to do with each other, so it’s important to foster a system of collaboration. Hah! you exclaim – that’ll never work; look at General Motors, where design, marketing and manufacture were in three separate buildings. And indeed you have a point; the bosses of the project have a limited understanding of what’s going on at lower levels, and where the project is going.
Fortunately for the project, the underlings do sometimes speak to each other. They can work together to solve problems, but when they hit a snag, what happens? Do they report to their bosses that something is not workable, that it is incompatible with the aims of the project, or that they need more workers with specific skills? Nope.
For Singaporean workers (and this is probably true of Chinese culture in general), it’s taboo to tell the boss that 1) you can’t do something; 2) the rapid changes the boss demands don’t make sense for the project; 3) something is not working. You could cause the boss to lose face, or to shoot the messenger. You can’t actually cause the boss to do something positive, and thus improve the project’s chances for success. So you keep muddling along, overworked, at a futile task.
Loyalty is to the boss, not to the project at hand. Presumably, the boss’s godlike status will ensure that s/he will magically come to know that there’s something wrong, and will fix it. Or perhaps the boss’s boss will descend from the clouds and correct the boss, who will then be in a position to correct you. In either case, the culture attributes omniscience to the overseers, which is a recipe for lower-level zombie-like behavior and ultimate failure.
So it’s hard to see how any project can succeed in this culture. Maybe there’s a test for all potential bosses to pass, which requires evidence of godly prescience. If so, I’d like to watch!