On Leadership and Values: Make Good Things Happen

Mr Lim made his main point loud and clear, “leadership is making good things happen which on their own would not happen. If something is going to happen without you being around, then the biggest favour you can do to people is to ensure that you do not slow down the process.” As I was listening in the audience, I thought Mr Lim’s qualified and nuanced definition of leadership deeply drove home our role as active change initiators and change catalysts in society, instead of passively riding along on the successes of other leaders.

Mr Lim questioned the idea of goodness. Creatively, he conceptualised an updated version of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, which among other newly proposed needs, had the highest need of transcendence – helping others achieve self-actualisation. Given that Maslow’s theory was proposed in 1943, Mr Lim’s emphasis on transcendence, is, to me, a reminder that modern times have allowed us to fulfil lower level needs, and we are now more able to live more for others than ourselves. “We need to move towards other-centredness and away from me-centredness,” said Mr Lim.

Similarly, he contrasted resume virtues and eulogy virtues, concepts popularised by New York columnist David Brooks. According to Brooks, resume virtues are skills we bring to the marketplace; eulogy virtues are ones talked at our funerals. In Brooks’ New York Times column, the Moral Bucket List, eulogy virtues equate to “whether you were kind, brave, honest or faithful. Were you capable of deep love?”

Three Emerging Risks

While Mr Lim had surely lifted the morale and confidence of the audience, he warned that today’s world is plagued with three emerging risks: failure of leadership, lack of thinking, and the rise of relativist secularism.

“The failure of leadership occurs when people who are supposed to be leaders are not leading,” said Mr Lim, citing the example of poor governance in many countries today. Failure of leadership manifests during crises, but good leadership is supposed to prevent crises, or to develop the strength and ability to deal with crises.

Additionally, he expressed that especially in the internet world, there is a large proportion of created content, which can be untrue. “If we ought to be logical about it, we ought to be reacting to what is true. We need to think for ourselves.” Also, he cautioned against confirmation bias – such as by repeatedly looking at websites and topics that we like or agree with. “After some time, we keep talking to ourselves.”

Lastly, the rise of relativist secularism is a concern. Mr Lim described secularism as the phenomenon where standards are not based on the past (such as religious norms and the wisdom of ancient cultures). “These cultures have survived, this is how wisdom is perpetuated, and bad ideas are discarded.”

“Today, people choose what is convenient and comfortable for themselves, and the soundness of standards is relative.” He aptly cited the example of the Libor Scandal, where banks were discovered to have falsely inflated or deflated their rates so as to profit from trades or to give the impression that they were more creditworthy than they were. A bank he questioned said that although its information was false, it was closer to the truth than the other banks. Such a mentality that “it’s okay to cheat/lie as long as you’re not the biggest cheat/liar” is what Mr Lim considered relativist secularism.