March 27, 2015
They expected him to fail. But fifty years later while we remember the man, Harry Lee Kuan Yew, who transformed Singapore from a British colonial outpost into a prosperous, global city-state, we must not overlook some of hiskey lessons in leadership.
After separation from Malaysia, the future of Singapore looked bleak. Lee inherited a toxic mix of racial unrest, an unemployment rate of thirty percent, domestic instability, and economic uncertainty. Singapore could have followed the path of some of its neighbors: increasing nationalist rhetoric, racial division, economic instability, communist insurgency, and continued unrest. Lee could have followed the path of Sukarno, Marcos, or even Diem. Lee concluded otherwise.
Lee Kuan Yew fundamentally understood that people are everything. Long before the era of corporate strategists, new age gurus, or smooth-talking politicos, Lee saw that the development of the people of Singapore--its core natural resource--was the key to long-term economic growth, social development, and national prosperity. It helped that Singapore was located in one of the key global maritime choke points but its long-term ability to seize such opportunities rested on the skills of its labor force and ambition of its nascent middle class. Lee and his ministers carried it out by following three general principles.
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