4 organisational truths to keep Singapore growing

“Our companies cannot look at themselves as serving a Singapore market, or an ASEAN market,” says Wee Luen Chia, ServiceNow’s managing director for Asia. “Every individual needs to recognise that we’re serving the world.”

Chia stresses that Singapore has been this way for a while–arguably, the city’s history is built on extending ties to other countries and capitalising on their demand. With digital technologies lowering market barriers, Singaporean businesses that understand the global playing field stand to benefit from that history.

“We used to be constrained by a lack of natural resources and our small size, though that never stopped us growing,” Chia says. “Now, the socioeconomic landscape is even better: a lot of the boundaries [to overseas growth] have been removed by digital adoption, and the world is getting more connected as a result.”

Chia counsels organisational leaders to acknowledge that they’re competing globally, lest they inadvertently cut themselves off from future growth. “You want to embrace exponential, not linear, thinking,” he says. For instance, “not thinking of Singapore as a small country with just 5 million people. You need exponential and non-constrained thinking to stay competitive and relevant.”

According to futurist Charlie Ang, “Over the next 10 years, we’re going to see the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the shift from an information economy to one driven by intelligent technologies like AI, blockchain, and VRs.” At the same time, he says, “you’re also facing geopolitical disorder as emerging and established superpowers clash, as well as the very real impact of the climate emergency.

“We tend to talk about these in a very siloed way, and they’re complex enough on their own to test us, but they’re all converging, colliding, and sending shockwaves through our economies and markets.”

It’s not a pretty picture, but Ang says he challenges leaders to flip their thinking about disruptive events if they want to make the most of the decade ahead. “When I coach companies and leaders, they assume that the more rapid and the higher the magnitude of change, the more likely it is your company will die,” Ang observes. “If we all agree the pace of change will be rapid and transformative, shouldn’t you reorient your planning so that when the disruptions happen your company is the winner?”

Ang calls that an anti-fragile mindset, something he says Singapore has a history of embracing, given the nation’s responses to crises ranging from Singapore’s exit of the Malayan Federation to SARS and various financial shocks. “After every crisis, we’ve risen to new heights,” he says “GDP has gone up, quality of living has gone up. We always take the crisis as opportunity.”