Singapore Business Culture II: Rules
Before we came here, a friend told us, “Singapore is a country of rules. But the rules can change.” Here’s an example of how it can work, admittedly from a government-run university, but I think it’s applicable to the wider business world, since the Singapore government has its finger in most pies:
A non-Singaporean professor at Nanyang Technical University was encouraged to recruit bright Ph.D. students, and given two scholarships to dole out to the best candidates. The professor duly sought out very good students (who were I think from India and China), told them to take the TOEFL and other exams to meet the candidacy requirements the prof. had learned about through the department co-chair, and all was going according to plan. The students took the exams, did well, etc. One week before the deadline for awarding the scholarships, word came down from the vice-dean of the school: a reminder of a change in the rules some weeks previously, whereby those candidacy requirements were deemed too easy, and now only those students would be awarded scholarships who in masters’ degree classes had maintained a GPA a full point higher than current Ph.D. students need to keep their scholarships.
The professor could not ask the vice dean, as one could in an American institution, “WTF?” To do so would make the co-chair look bad for not promulgating the rule change in the first place. (So why can’t this place do what my university in Taiwan did, and publish a book of rules and policies? That would obviate the blame game.) Nor does anyone in the department, including those who have been here for years, advocate asking the vice dean why the rule exists in the first place, or what might be the rationale for those particular requirements. I am not sure why this is so, but have a feeling it might cause a loss of face for the vice dean. At any rate, the direct approach is taboo. That leaves the professors with only two courses of action: 1) Tell the students they can’t come to the university on scholarships, after all (which the prof duly did, honorably and in person, with great distress on both sides); 2) huddle with other faculty and try to figure out why the rules were changed. Was it to improve the quality of grad students? If so, why not make existing Ph.D. students maintain a GPA as high as the masters-level candidates needed? Or is it something else – did the school suddenly run out of money, with the cessation of scholarships the only way to save moola?
Either way, the rule change remains unquestioned, and profs are reading the tea leaves, trying to figure out what their administrative superiors are really trying to do, but not trusting them to answer direct questions honestly.
Does this remind you, as it does me, of people operating under dictatorships? Remember how everyone used to try to read between the lines of Pravda before Gorbachev? Or how carefully you have to read the Chinese People’s Daily? Always trying to figure out the government agenda and its relation to the reported facts…. Evidently Singaporean culture is ripe for dictatorship – we just have to hope that crooks and nincompoops are kept from attaining positions of power by the meritocracy. Lotsa luck, folks!