Daily Lessons from Life 26 February 2010

"AsiaOne Multimedia - 26 February 2010: Firefighters are most trusted

FIREFIGHTERS inspire the greatest trust in Singaporeans.

This is what a survey conducted by Reader's Digest Singapore showed.


Firefighter tops the list of 40 vocations chosen by Reader's Digest"

Well since this is a Friday, I decided to go light!

It is appalling that the most stringent 'trial and tested political leadership selection process' in Singapore did not put the national leaders on the 'Most Trusted People' or the 'Most Trusted Vocation' list!!

Lessons for me are:

1. depending on the situation, I will not just trust someone or some vocation. I will trust a qualified and well trained fire-fighter when I am in a fire and he or she is trying to extract me from harms way;

2. national leaders need to be trusted by the people even though they cannot fulfill every citizen's wishes as a sincere and great leader will communicate the 'why and why not' consistently through his/her words and behaviors. There is no such thing as over-communicating though one must not mixed up 'not making decision and move on' as 'over-communicating'. Leaders make unpopular, but hopefully sound decision, and execute faithfully, efficiently and effectively while continuing the dialogue to explain the 'why and why not';

3. as a Professional Accountant once, I would very much like to see Accountants being in the top 10 of the 'most trusted vocations'. Maybe the sample selected is not as conversant with commercial matters or skewed? In any case, public accountants with great integrity are needed to keep the innovative and creative financial professionals from dreaming up financial instruments that encouraged overly risky bets or hide the 'true picture' like what is happening with the 'off-balance-sheet' Credit Default Swap (CDS) that the brilliant people in Goldman Sach supposed structured for the heavily in-debt Greece's government that the Germany Chancellor labelled it as 'scandalous'!!

Finally, why is Teacher not on the top of the heap of 'Most Trusted People and Profession' in Singapore? Does it tell us something about the educational system and people in it? ;-) Next time perhaps...