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On Corporate Responsibility

When I graduated, and started my first job in a Fortune 500 oil & gas company (yup, that one lah, mana lagi?) the idea of shareholder value was all the rage. My company had even hired the folks at Stern Stewart & Co to teach our managers the concepts behind Economic Value Added. GE’s Jack Welch was the hotshot corporate hero of the late 1990s / early 2000s, and his book taught us the value of being No. 1 or No. 2, stack-ranking your folks as A, B or C players, and the virtues of being a larger-than-life CEO.

Fast forward 20 years later, and the landscape of corporate thinking has certainly turned a tide. The Global Financial Crisis in 2008 has forced a radical rethinking of business ethics. Milton Friedman’s mantra of shareholder value has given way to a more comprehensive idea of corporate responsibility. We are now told that a balanced approach to business – honoring not only shareholders but others who also lay claim to the corporation – can actually generate value. The Covid-19 pandemic has forced another radical shift, this time amongst workers who begin to question the meaning of work (although it has been pointed out that this is something every generation needs to negotiate in its own time.)

Of course, a signal example of how thinking around corporate values has shifted is the reputation of Jack Welch, that lion of Corporate America. When he retired, the succession of Jeff Immelt was seen as the culmination of a rigorous, almost scientific approach to succession planning. Can the Next Guy emulate the great Jack Welch? It turns out, as William Cohan writes in his latest book, that Jeff Immelt’s career as CEO of GE ended being a long and costly exercise in unwinding the mess that Neutron Jack had left him. Costly, especially because Jeff Immelt ultimately lost the confidence of his shareholders, and lost his job as CEO.

Today, GE is on its way to being split into three entities (much like how our own Sime Darby has been split into plantations, property and motor businesses).

I would not be surprised if, decades from now, the wheels of corporate fads turn yet again, and another generation re-discovers the urgency of putting shareholders first (or solely) in the eyes of the corporation.

(I would also not be surprised if, decades from now, some enterprising investment bank decides that it would be a neat idea to merge the Baby GEs and the Baby Simes back together again. Show me the money!!!)

For now (and personally I hope for some time to come) we can and ought to insist that our corporations remain tethered to the human values that make up the community of people who work for and derive value from our corporations – values of decency, respect, and shared prosperity.

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Tentang Hidup Seorang Melayu Borjuis

Aku selalu bingung.

Aku diajar untuk patuh taat. Ikut perintah ayah. Ikut perintah mak. Ikut perintah guru. Patuh arahan loceng sekolah, patuh pengawas, patuh peraturan sekolah.

Aku ikut. Patuh. Belajar rajin-rajin. Masuk universiti. Dapat degree. Kerja keras. Beli kereta. Beli rumah. Kawin. Dapat anak. Dapat kenaikan pangkat. Kalau untung, dapat gelar Datuk, gelar Tan Sri.

Patuh arahan lampu isyarat, patuh undang-undang, patuh saranan Kerajaan.

Semuanya aku ikut. Jadi kenapa aku masih rasa bingung? Kenapa aku selalu rasa ada benda yang memulas dalam perut, memulas dalam kepala, katanya kenapakausiniapakaunaksiapaengkauapamaksudsemuaini?

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On Humaning

We were walking through the throngs of shopping mall patrons, side-stepping wayward jaywalkers like a crazed penguin computer game, trying not to bump into daydreaming children and their dazed parents.

From behind us, a toddler was bawling her brains out, desperate screams piercing through the mall muzak. Seconds later, we noticed the mother walking briskly past us, her right hand firmly clasped around her child. The kid must have been around three years old, thrashing around in her mother’s arms as she was being carried like an unruly roll of carpet, limbs a-flailing in time with her wailing.

“Parenting is hard,” Kat noted as we saw the mother rush through the crowd. The mother was struggling to keep her game face on, grimly marching forward as onlookers stared at her carrying her banshee child through the mall.

“Humaning is hard,” I said.

“Amen.”

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On Valentine’s Day (My Love, in the Spirit of John Donne)

Roses are red, violets are blue:
'til God strikes me dead, even thence, I'll love you.

For my Love is no casual fling,
it throbs and thrives, a-flowering,
a prayer in the dark of night,
a gust of air 'neath birds in flight.

My Love doth sing in hushed tones,
in tender words it soothes my bones,
it calls to you, in sweetest praise,
it rises with your morning gaze.

My Love flees not the growling seas,
it stays, it braves, my Love and me.
Undaunted by Life's rough travails,
My Love, amidst it all, prevails.

So when they praise the reddest Rose,
and when they mark the Violet blue -
The angels themselves will propose
That Our Love be forever True.

Happy Valentine’s Day to my one True Love <3

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On Climate Change and Human Survival

A few months ago, I was reading Steve Brusatte’s excellent The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs, and it dawned to me that perhaps we are going about this business of climate change all wrong.

We are told that we need to be responsible, to protect Mother Nature. That we need to take pollution down to zero, for the sake of the Planet. That we can all play a role to help save the Environment.

But what if the real ones we need to save are… ourselves?

Think about it: even in the aftermath of that deadly meteorite crash that put an end to the age of the dinosaurs, Life still prevailed. The dinosaurs went extinct, and the mammals – small enough and plucky enough to survive the devastation – came into their own.

Species come and go, but Life itself is resilient enough to survive cataclysm.

So if we persist in how we live, and how we consume resources on this planet, what will likely occur is that surface temperatures and sea levels will rise to the point when human habitation will be deleteriously affected. Like the dinosaurs, we might not survive the fire next time. But Life as we know it is a complex and resilient thing. If Humanity were to work ourselves out of the existence, some other species will likely take our place.

O believers! Whoever among you abandons their faith, Allah will replace them with others who love Him and are loved by Him. [Q5:54]

The Planet will take care of itself. We need to look out for our own survival – as a species.

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On Sleeping

I sleep very well at night, these days. I make my ablutions, I commit to my prayers. I seek His guidance and His mercy. I take a bath – I slough off the detritus of the day’s struggles. Into bed, and into a book – the words and pages and chapters are a benediction. My evening meditation against the defeats and disappointments of a human existence. Then the words lull me into a welcome embrace – it’s alright. Everything is alright.

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Tentang Penjajahan

Ini bukan daerah milikmu lagi. Tanah pamah ini, yang dahulunya kau pijak dan injak – kau tiada berhak lagi. Desir pasir yang kau belai, rerumputan yang kau harung, denyut sungai yang dahulunya kau mudik – kini sudah asing buatmu. Tak lagi memikul beban kehilangan. Tak lagi menzikirkan kepiluan.

Di sini dahulunya kau tanam benih gelisah, maka mekarlah ia, dibajai derita wasangka. Dan seperti setiap sesuatu yang kau tanam – ia menjadi suatu janin yang mati direnggut masa. Tewas tanpa nafas. Kini cuma tinggal nesan yang tersudut sepi – hanya suatu mercu kehampaan yang telah lama aku tinggalkan, telah lama aku kuburkan.

Jangan sangka aku masih terjajah. Aku sudah lama merdeka dari semua sesal lara.

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On Artificial Intelligence

The public debut of ChatGPT will, one day, be a fixture of our history books, much like Edison’s light bulb moment, or that first step for mankind on the moon, or Oppenheimer quoting the Bhagavad Gita as he presided over that first atomic bomb explosion at New Mexico. Seminal moments in human technology and ingenuity that have transformed modern lives beyond what our forefathers could have barely imagined.

No doubt, the ripple waves from this transformation will cascade into our lives, and in unexpected ways. Professors asking their students to quote their ChatGPT prompts in their assignments. Microsoft finally breaking into Google’s effective monopoly for Internet search with chat functionalities. Entire professions – advertising, public relations, accounting, lawyering – which were once the preserve of credentialed white-collar professionals will have to contend with artificial intelligence.

But I think the sense of alarm – watch out, ChatGPT is out to take our jobs! – is exaggerated. Yes, artificial intelligence will change the way we work and live. Yes, the capabilities will undoubtedly improve even more over time.

But have we not seen this before? Didn’t the steam locomotive transform the way we travel, the way we received news? Didn’t the telegraph muster a radical transformation in business, government, in military affairs? Keynes predicted in 1930 that the advent of new technologies would mean that one day we would only need to work for 15 hours a week, at most. (I can almost hear the bitter laughter from my millenial readers.)

The truth is, technology almost always proves the adage that the more things change, the more things stay the same. The white heat of technological advancement in the past century may indeed be transformative, but for as long as those technologies intersect with humans – with human fears and desires and wants – then we will always find some modus vivendi with the new innovations in our lives, however painful that transition process might become.

And if anything, the rise of AI must always remind us to treasure what is most unique about the human experience – our ingenuity, our curiosity, our tenacity, our wilfulness. These technologies will always serve as tools for those very human aspects of our existence.

As we contemplate how AI will change our lives, we cannot be complacent, but neither should we give in to panic. Like all waves of change, they demand that we dig deeper into what it means to be human, and to bring to bear our own unique individual Fitrah in absorbing and adapting to change. Keep calm and carry on – history and technology marches ever onwards, and we will always need to be ready to meet them.

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On The State of the Union

For as long as I can remember, I have been an Americophile (yes, apparently it’s a real word!) No surprises there, I suppose – having been born in the United States (both my parents were studying in Louisiana at the time), I have always had sentimental attachment to the USA, even if my own personal memories of my time there as a child was limited to a handful of photographs of my being a toddler.

Growing up in the Reagan era of the 1980s, it was very difficult not to look at America with a sense of admiration. Coca Cola and McDonald’s and Superman were icons that loomed large in our childhood, and the idea of the American Dream was not yet besmirched by the grime of cynicism and disappointment that has been the American legacy of the post-9/11 era.

I grew up reading Spiderman, watching Batman and Superman on the silver screen, and I remember spending my mornings doing my homework while CNN was playing on the morning television broadcast, watching the entire might of the mighty American military being brought down like a sledgehammer onto Saddam Hussein’s Iraq after the latter’s invasion of Kuwait. America was the almighty behemoth of the world, and once the Berlin Wall had fallen, the USA bestrode the globe as an unchallenged colossus – the one and only superpower of the late 20th century.

Going to college, I fell into student politics, and political biographies became my preferred vein of reading material ever since. I came to know FDR and Truman and Eisenhower and Kennedy through McCullough and Schlesinger and many other scholars of American politics. And when Barack Obama ran for the presidency, my abiding interest for American politics kicked up another notch: I started watching Meet The Press on the weekends, trawled through RealClearPolitics and the New York Times and other news portals to read the tea leaves of the unfolding campaign. Obama becoming President will probably be the high watermark of American esteem and prestige in my lifetime, and I soaked every moment of his time in office. His speeches at Selma and Berlin and Egypt. His announcement of the capture of Osama bin Laden. Those speeches at the White House Correspondents’ Dinners.

And, of course, the State of the Union – that spectacle of American power and pageantry. Ostensibly a report card to be laid open for the American people, but really an annual statement of intent – a manifesto of a president in office and in power.

Biden might not have that same soaring oratory that marked Obama’s time as President. But for this State of the Union address, you will find me eager as always, watching and learning, basking in the theatre of American politics – still, so far, the hub and core of global power in my lifetime.

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On New Beginnings

We often celebrate pivotal moments in our lives – birthdays, holidays, new year’s days – as hinges in history, natural moments in which one page of life ends and another opens anew. Sometimes we are seduced into thinking that change can only happen when such hinges unfold themselves. Not quite realising, of course, that Change can happen at any moment of our choosing – as long as we are ready for that Transformation to sweep in and take us off into new and unexpected adventures.