Daily Lesson from Life 15 January 2009

"PM donates $500k to fund

Latest donation comes from the salary increase of $1.04 million he received last year. -Thu, Jan 15, 2009 The Straits Times

This latest donation to the fund comes from the salary increase of $1.04 million that Prime Minister Lee received last year as a result of the salary adjustments announced in April 2007. He has donated the rest of last year's increase to a range of community, grassroots, arts and welfare organisations.

Mr Lee had forgone the pay rise announced in 2007, saying at the time that would be donating the increases to charity for the next five years."

In normal situation, this generous deed would have been lauded unreservedly as S$500k, or actually S$1.04m/year, is a lot of money especially in this economically challenged time! However, some Singaporeans still expressed the feeling that the PM has not done enough. e.g. why asked for the S$1.04m increment in 2007 when he is already paid more than S$2m/year when signs that the subprime meltdown will impact the world economy though not as severe as we are experiencing now.

Anyway, lessons for me are:

1. as leaders, we are cursed! By that I meant we cannot please everyone when we made decisions. But when our decisions generated a lot of negative or concerned feedback, maybe we need to revisit the decisions and decide if we should even admit mistake of implementing those decisions and reversed course. Of course, this is normally difficult if we are going to 'overturn' an establish principle that has served us well in the past!;

2. the role of a public leaders take on an even sterner demand. That the voices of the people, especially the reasoned voices, need to be listened to. An established and well serving principle may need to be tweaked or CHANGED if the people felt that it is no longer relevant and valid! Singapore's 'pay for talent to prevent corruption' is a very good principle in the initial stage of development of Singapore (actually this principle was adopted only when Singapore has enjoyed certain economic development and not during the 1st generation nation builders like Mr Lee Kuan Yoke and his team). However, it is very hard for the establishment to reconsider changing or even replacing it with 'pay reasonable for talent with higher weightage to altruism and sense of duties to do good for the nation and people'! Talent is a given! Qualified technically to rule the nation is a given!;

3. when the good deed that we do as leaders are misunderstood or belittled as in this case, we must be true to our basic values: if I am doing a good deed there is no need to get everyone to say that I am great and good! In giving it is about me wanting to give and not how other perceived me to give for certain motives.

Leaders are watched by people. People draw their own conclusion about why we do what we did. So, we must be vigilant in making sure that we will explain and explain again if there were misunderstanding of our intent.

I thank PM Lee for honouring his words on foregoing the S$1.04m salary increase awarded in 2007 for the next 5 years. I also sincerely hope that he can, or try to, understanding why some citizens felt that he has not done enough.