The missing genius? Indeed.

The Straits Times today ran a full page report of an interview with physicist and futurist Dr Michio Kaku. He fingered Singapore's lack of originality, and perhaps a chief limitation to Singapore's success. He said, 'If you want to be a leader, you can't just copy, you have to create'. How true.

So much of what has passed for leadership in Singapore unfortunately has been based on frenetic and often thoughtless copying, instead of true innovation. Leaders are rewarded for how rapidly they can introduce changes based on Western (often US) ideas and developments. To me this is not leadership. I have posted earlier on Dr Goh Keng Swee's exception leadership qualities, as well as the poor simulate of leadership we have currently in our medical environment where we just mindlessly ape US methods, as if those were going to automatically determine success. PAH!!

So often we have seen local ideas and innovations poo-pooed simply because they do not conform to US ideas of how things should be done. Original research ideas are artificially aligned with US ideas of how things should be done, and rejected if they do not match up. Sadly, often we see them resurrected years later only after some US guru suddenly proclaims them to be the latest research fad.

So where's the originality? Where's the creativity? Where's the true leadership?

Indeed, 'if you want to be a leader you can't just copy, you have to create'.

So here's a plea to our would be leaders, ....please lead...please help and facilitate our originality and creativity. Stop going for those low lying fruits. And playing those self gratifying numbers games.