Advice for students
Building a Culture of Sustainability
Career and experiences in Singapore prior to joining SMU
Designing SMU-X Building
Developing SMU into an Internationally recognized University
Goals as President
Grasping Opportunities
Increasing SMU's visibility within the community
Maintaining SMU’s Competitive Edge
Renovating Campus Green
Renovating Prinsep Street Residences
SMU as a 'School for Business'
SMU Research and its Impact on Society in Singapore
SMU-X Building
Support from the Government
The educational scene in Singapore
Words of wisdom
-
Advice for students
-
Building a Culture of Sustainability
-
Career and experiences in Singapore prior to joining SMU
-
Designing SMU-X Building
-
Developing SMU into an Internationally recognized University
-
Goals as President
-
Grasping Opportunities
-
Increasing SMU's visibility within the community
-
Maintaining SMU’s Competitive Edge
-
Renovating Campus Green
-
Renovating Prinsep Street Residences
-
SMU as a 'School for Business'
-
SMU Research and its Impact on Society in Singapore
-
SMU-X Building
-
Support from the Government
-
The educational scene in Singapore
-
Words of wisdom
I’ve been telling our students, because I have regular lunch with a smaller group of students and they always ask me that question, “Professor, given your— they don’t say, given your age—they say given your experience what do you have to tell us?” And my answer is a university education is something that we build together. A university offers opportunities. A student has to take some of the opportunities but also shape those opportunities in what he or she wants to do with it. We’re not a restaurant where you sit and you see a buffet and you can just take and eat. We are more a restaurant where you still have to do a bit of the cooking yourself, where you have to shape your own education yourself.
And so my advice to students has always been three-fold. First of all, we are not a cookie-cutter training machine that will turn out or churn out identical students every year. But what we are is an environment in which there are lots of opportunities, there’re probably too many opportunities, and you will have to make trade-offs, but choose those things that you feel make a good education for yourself.
Secondly, I tell students that my personal experience is that my student years were the years where I could experiment with leadership on a very small scale—in the clubs or the political organisations I was in as a student. You can make mistakes, you can experiment, you can simulate what leadership, taking on responsibility, really means. And when I look back—and of course I have evolved a lot over the years in the way I look at the world, the way I look at organisations, I’ve gotten a totally different perspective by being a president obviously again—but fundamentally some of the values I have about leadership go back to the time I was at university when I could try out things. So that’s my second advice, that is make sure that if you are four years at this university, that you grab the opportunity to hone, maybe honing is too strong, but at least to develop a little bit your leadership skills. Try out what your style of leadership could be. So that’s my second advice.
The third advice is undergraduate education is not preparation for a job—even professional schools like the law school or the accounting school, where yes, you go into a particular profession—it is still to a large extent the preparation that opens up your mind, that creates options for you, that enables you to do many different things. I studied engineering and yet I am not in a job that is an engineering job. But I still think when I was studying engineering, I had a very broad view of what I wanted to do, and the engineering studies I did—I saw it more as an opportunity to create options for myself.
So that’s the advice I would give to students. That is, education is something you make yourself, and there will be trade-offs to be made. You can’t do everything here and don’t be worried about it. We offer you opportunities, build your own education. Two, it’s an opportunity to hone your leadership skills, and three, see an undergraduate education as broadening your options, not as narrowing yourself down to one particular job.
So while at the same time I refer to the building, the Tahir Connexion, the Tahir Foundation Connexion Building that will be zero net energy, we also will put photovoltaic cells on the other buildings, on our other roofs so that we can reduce our electricity bill. We’ve actually been very careful with water, and we consume a lot less water than we did in 2010. But, at the same time, I felt that there was a need for an attitude change, and that’s where Bernie Toh raised again to the challenge of coming up with this idea of ‘Grow’, having an urban garden where you involve students and staff in sort of tending the garden. Bringing perhaps some people from the neighbourhoods around us to that garden, and have an interaction between students and some of the elderly people that live in our close neighbourhood. But also the ugly foods market, convincing Kofu to get rid of the plastic straws and replacing them with other straws or no straws whatsoever. These are all very small little things, but they add up to a different view of what sustainability is and how we use planet Earth. And I hope that that will continue after I leave because I think that a university should have a leadership role in sustainability.
I have also stimulated very strongly our own faculty to start thinking about, can we form a centre around sustainability management. And we’re not going to go as a management university, we’re not going to study technical solutions, but perhaps we can think about how do we do sustainability management, and how do we change attitudes. And hopefully then in the coming months or in the coming years, we will be able to create a centre around sustainability management, that again will be an interdisciplinary centre that brings together the competencies from the different schools.
My earliest contact with Singapore was in 1984. I used to work for an institution called INSEAD, which is a global business school located in France. And INSEAD had a Euro-Asia Centre, small centre that was doing both teaching and research in Southeast Asia mainly, in those days.
Then because of my interest in Asia, at some moment in time in 1995, the institution asked me to become the director of that Euro-Asia Centre, that particular centre that I was referring to before, which then brought me very often to this part of the world.
And that’s when I started coming here more than on an occasional basis to do a bit of teaching or a bit of research. But when the board asked me to do a feasibility study for INSEAD—of what to do with these activities of the Euro-Asia Centre and with the activities of INSEAD in Asia—I remember in 1996 I took on that task from the board to do that feasibility study. I spent a lot of time in this part of the world, visited eleven cities, talked to the equivalents of the Economic Development Board in the different countries here, to try to figure out what to do.
It all took a bit more time than we had hoped for, but in September 1998 we signed a deal between EDB, as a representative of the Singapore Government, and INSEAD to set up a campus of INSEAD here. So I came to live here, in December of 1998, so that sort of gives my first exposure to Singapore.
Design - it is going to be very interesting design for three reasons. That first of all, together with BCA, and I should say that the Building and Construction Authority of Singapore has been a very good partner in a sense that they challenged us and then also helped us. But with the help of BCA, we decided that we wanted to look at a different type of construction. We use a lot of wood, mass engineered timber, and that had enormous impact on the design of the building because contrary to normal construction here in Singapore, everything for a mass engineered timber building needs to be produced in the factory in Europe. So you have to have your design—up to the smallest detail—ready because when it arrives, it’s like a Meccano or a Lego-type of a building, you just assemble it, and you can’t change it anymore. So it is a very different way of thinking about a design of the building with that mass engineered timber. The big advantage for us and one of the many reasons why I am full heartedly behind it is that it will go much faster in terms of building, and there will be far less people on the site and will be far less noise. And given the fact that building is to be built just in between our School of Accountancy and our School of Law, I’m very happy that I can reduce the time of building and noise. In other words, nuisance for both neighbouring schools.
But there are many other reasons why I’m happy to do that. It is also a way of construction that has far less impact on the environment, and I believe strongly in sustainability, so that’s another reason why I like this building. Leads me to the second point why this building is very different. We again rose to the challenge of BCA to make this a zero net energy building. In other words, we need energy, it’s not that there is no energy needed for air-conditioning or for lights or whatever. But we will produce all of our energy with photovoltaic cells on top of the building and the covering of the passage that we have next to it. So, but that of course, also not only required photovoltaic cells, but also a very different design of the building because you need to actually first of all make sure that your building requires less energy. So it requires a different type of façade. It requires a lot more natural ventilation in the public spaces, as we already did in our School of Law. It requires a different design to ensure that we consume far less energy. I’m happy that our architect raised to the challenge also and was willing to collaborate with us because for them it’s also very new because they had never designed the building this mass engineered timber. They have never designed really a building that had zero net energy. So it’s a good partnership between them and us. That’s the second element of the design that is actually very interesting. And I hope that once we are there, we will be the first building that is net zero energy in the central business district.
The third element of the design is that it’s actually a very flexible building. In fact, we built only open floors, and then we create the interior design through furniture. Of course, you need to have the bathrooms and the showers and whatever, and that needs to be fixed. But all the rest is flexible. So we will not build walls, but what we’re going to build is panels that can be moved. We will work with furniture to create special areas in the building. So it’s going to be a very interesting and very flexible building. If, after five years, we discover that the way students interact with each other, learn is changing, we will be able to have the flexibility to adjust the building to the changing needs of our students.
I remember that I had a conversation with Ho Kwon Ping, fairly late in the process that we were interacting with each other and where I basically said, and I paraphrase it a bit, I don’t know the exact words of the conversation anymore, but what I basically said, I don’t understand why you recruit me because SMU is an undergraduate university serving Singapore, and my whole career is about graduate business schools at a very international level, whether it was INSEAD or whether it was Cambridge Judge Business School. So I don’t seem to be the right person for this job. And I still remember that he, again paraphrasing, answered me, that’s precisely why we want to have you because we know how to run an undergraduate program in Singapore, but we want to develop the university and make it a more internationally recognized university, and we want to build the postgraduate programs. So I knew what my quote-unquote marching orders were. I was also convinced that to be a good, if not a great university, that SMU needed to increase its portfolio of programs—that included postgraduate master’s programs, that included the PhD program and that includes also continuing education in its many different forms, and of course also research, but we can probably talk about that later.
Postgraduate programs, I would say that I was in a sense lucky that Raj, our former provost, was also very much convinced about the role of postgraduate programs. And he brought in Phil Zerrillo, who is the academic entrepreneur by definition I would say. And we basically said, look, let’s grow, let a thousand blossoms bloom. There were a few existing programs. There was the Masters of Information Technology in Business, Banking in in those days. There was a very small MBA program that was struggling, and there were a few other small programs in finance, in economics. It’s not that there were no programs, but all of them, perhaps with the exception of MITB, were basically struggling and underperforming. Phil, or Dr Z, as everybody calls him, but Phil took on the challenge and grew. He’s a grower. Raj [Prof Rajendra Srivastava] was very much supportive of that. Howard Thomas—who also came from Warwick at about the same time as I came here, six months earlier, but who in Warwick had actually been growing the master’s programs, the specialized master’s programs, the pre-experience programs—he came in with the same sort of enthusiasm and willingness to grow these programs. And so there was this confluence of several people that together as a team said, let’s grow these programs.
The challenge is that we, in order to grow, we just couldn’t only rely on doing marketing, publishing a few advertisements or whatever. We actually needed to have pipelines of incoming students that probably came from other universities, and that’s where I decided to open up channels in China. We did have an existing channel with Xiamen University where we had signed an agreement, I think in 2007, for our Masters of Applied Finance. And when I looked at that, and understood how that worked, I thought this model must be able to work with other universities too. So in 2012, I decided to go to China, open up the doors there with many different universities and basically offer them the idea of a joint or double degree program, whereby they would send us a number of Chinese students into our programs. That has been actually quite successful.
Challenges today, I would say we’ve grown fast, and I think we are now going through a consolidation phase. Not so much growth in numbers anymore, but growth in quality of the intake. In the meantime, we’ve actually been able to submit these programs to some of these rankings. We’ve gotten a few good rankings for some programs and that has given us visibility, that has given us credibility, I would say. So, the sales of the programs internationally has become a lot easier. And so, I think, we are now in the right position to say we have a good size type of program. Let’s now still grow it, but maybe not at the frantic pace that we had in the beginning, but at a slower pace. But let’s focus on quality. Let’s make sure that we also find good jobs for the people that graduate from our programs. Yes, I think those are the three elements that I would highlight. That is a team that was willing to grow it, an opening up to China that has been quite successful, and then the rankings that have been actually helping us in achieving visibility.
First of all, I believe that a president is only a first among equals at a university. To some extent, a university is an organization or even an organism I would say, sort of an ecosystem where many people take individual decisions, have their own creative ideas. And in very, many cases, they don’t even need to have a lot of KPIs and objectives, they know what is needed to be done. They’re intelligent people. Our faculty, our senior management—they know what to do. What I believe is my role is ensuring that they know where we go, sort of having—I don’t even call it a strategy—I call it a vision, and that’s the Vision 2025 that guides their decision-making, that gives them the broad context in which they have to move and where they have to go. And so I hope that over the years, by repeating my Vision 2025, by putting the incentives sometimes there where I can nudge people to go in that direction, that I have been able to succeed in growing this university in the right direction. It could have grown in all kinds of ways, but that it has grown in the right direction to become a great social sciences university in this part of the world. So that’s my first point, that is as a president for the university—I think it’s very different from a CEO of a company, where you go for a very detailed strategy and that is then translated in all kinds of sub-objectives and sub-strategies and KPIs, and I personally don’t believe too much in that for a university. As I said, I believe in that broad framework.
The second driver in my management of the university is that I hope that people find this a pleasant place to work and all people. Now I know, I look at some of those websites that tell us of how displeased people are sometimes with their employers. I know that some people leave us and are unhappy. I always see that a failure for the university. We should create an environment in which people feel welcome and feel that they can develop themselves, and that they can actually use their best competencies in the best way. So, I hope that we can create that environment for our staff and faculty here at the university.
The third principle that I have is that I hope that people will collaborate. Now that is not easy at SMU. Universities all over the world are organized in a functional way—per school, per discipline. It’s actually the nature of how we are organized. We are, if I would exaggerate a bit, we are universities—I say not SMU in particular, but all universities—we tend to be organized in silos, and it goes to the DNA of what a university is all about. But this is reinforced at SMU by our architecture where all the schools are in different buildings. And where, if you’re in the School of Law, and I’m talking about faculty and staff now, they very rarely probably get into the School of Social Sciences and Economics at the other side of the campus. Perhaps, students move a bit more around because they take classes in different buildings and whatever. But overall, our architecture tends to reinforce this silo. So there is a big challenge, and I’m not sure I’ve always been very successful in ensuring that people collaborate across the different departments in the different schools.
But those I see as my three goals, that is clearly creating a vision, so that people can take initiative can be intra-preneurs, internally to the organization, ensuring that people know where they have to go and setting a vision. Secondly, ensuring that employees who come here feel that this is a welcoming environment, where they can deploy their capabilities and their competencies. And thirdly, hopefully working closely together with each other.
Advice, for our alumni, yes, it’s what I always say to the students when they come for the sandwich lunches. Very often, they sort of ask, one way or another, the question whether I planned to be president of a university in Singapore by the time I graduated from my engineering studies. And I always have to tell them, I never wanted to work in academia, and when I graduated in 1976 as engineer, I don’t think I really knew where Singapore was. So, when I look at my own career, it’s more one of grasping opportunities. Saying yes sometimes before you’re fully ready to take on a new job. But, yes, be adaptable, continue to learn, continue to inform yourself and grasp the opportunities. And in particular, do what you like to do—that’s my only advice.
We have the enormous advantage of being a city campus, being here in the centre of the city and thus being a visible presence of an academic institution. Visible for everybody, everybody knows the buildings of SMU at the end of Orchard Road. Perhaps we haven’t really exploited and leveraged that position as well as we could, in terms of having impact on the business community. We are a university for the world of business. We’re not a business school—we’re a university, but for the world of business with the different components that I referred to a little bit earlier. We can make a difference in the way people manage, whether it’s in business, whether it’s in government, whether it’s in NGOs. For example, in NGOs, what the Lien Centre is doing is very important, in my opinion, in trying to influence the quality and the professionalism of management in NGOs. And I hope that in the long term we will be successful in influencing them.
My first point about society and SMU is that we need to take our research and see how relevant that is to businesses and see how we can influence the way they think and they work. That’s not going to happen automatically. We need to make a serious effort in communicating that. And that’s one of the reasons why I come back to that—we haven’t probably leveraged our closeness to business or to government or to some other organisations here around us, that we haven’t completely fully leveraged that to influence them, to communicate what we’re doing in terms of research. We also need to use much more social media to communicate the results of our research. And not only from the faculty but also some of the great ideas that some of the students have. I’ve seen some student papers that I was really very impressed with and I thought—we need to make sure that this is known by the community around us. So that’s the first point, that is, communicate better through our physical presence, but also through social media and anything else that can help us communicate better, the results of our insights of our research.
The second way that we relate to society is through our students’ and staff’s and faculty’s community service. As we all know, our students are required to do eighty hours of community service but many of them do a lot more. And we celebrated in September a million hours of community service, which is when you think about it, impressive as a university, a small university. But I would hope that through that community service and what students learn there, they get an attitude of helping the communities in which they work for the rest of their life, so that we can educate our students in continuing their education, so that they feel that as citizens they have a responsibility to the society in which they work and have to give back to the community. And this goes beyond our students. It’s faculty, staff, but also our alumni. And I would be very happy and I see that some of that is already, happening, where alumni and the students are working together on some of these community service projects. So I hope that, that again is something where we can influence society.
And the third one is something about the holistic experience that we provide to our students. Our educational system is one where we provide a holistic experience to the students, where we tell them, yes, you’re studying accounting or you’re studying business or information systems or law, or whatever you’re studying that—but then at the same time you should understand what’s going on, a little bit of what in the other schools is going on. You should understand how your domain fits in the broader world of business. And at the same time we stimulate our students to participate in the CCAs [co-curricular activities], do some cultural work or some sports or whatever. So we provide a holistic experience. I would hope that students go away from here and keep that holistic attitude and that I think that will have an influence on society, that society is not a collection of a bunch of silos but society’s about interaction, integration. And I would hope that one of the ways SMU can influence society is through our alumni who will keep that attitude of thinking broadly, thinking in an integrated way and perhaps influencing the way their colleagues and their organisations in their communities in which they work.
When I go back to 2010-2011, that first academic year, where I had to learn a lot about the university, one of my observations was that probably the undergraduate program had gone through a cycle and was at the end of its success cycle. The way I say this is that when I came here, everybody was enthusiastic about the model, and I will not repeat it, but we all know about the small class sizes, the holistic education etc. And everybody was enthusiastic and say “Oh, we’ve been successful because our students find good jobs”. But when I was listening around, I got more and more signals that people were saying, “Yes, but you’ve lost your edge, NUS and NTU are catching up.” And yes, it was a great model but they have changed. And it’s true, they moved actually much more to an American system also.
So the feeling I started having after a few months is that we were at the end of a cycle in the sense that we had come up with something totally new. In the beginning, probably our colleagues had neglected what was SMU doing; then suddenly they discovered that our students got good jobs and higher salaries on the average. And they reacted as one would expect to do, and they gave us the biggest compliment that one can give you by copying what we had been doing successfully. And thus, there was sort of this perception in the market—and I got it very strongly from some employers who said yes, but you’re losing the edge, you’re losing that differentiation that you had vis-à-vis the other schools, the other universities here in Singapore. So I felt that there was a need for a, I call it a second cycle, but maybe it’s just giving it a second impetus. Yes, doing something with the program—not because it was bad but because it was losing its edge, let me put it that way.
So I worked with the teams because the undergraduate is not something that is directly my responsibility as the president. I have to work with the Provost and with Vice Provost for undergraduate education. But I mean it took a bit of time to have the institution realize that we shouldn’t become complacent, let me put it that way, right. And so, what I tried to stress is that this holistic education was still very good, but that we had to complement it with other things. And over the years, Provost and Deans have actually reacted quite well to it. So that I believe that today, our program again is much more recognized as being a differentiated program, offering something very different to our students. Things that have contributed to that would be the introduction of SMU-X in the experiential learning, would be the more interdisciplinary degrees or majors such as PLE—Politics, Law and Economics, the Smart- City Management and Technology, more recently the Health Economics and Management. So bringing in new tracks that are aligned with what the industry and employers want to have, the hundred percent overseas exposure that we have decided. Again, it’s not that we really transformed completely the undergraduate program, but we got into a mode of innovating every year. And I think that’s what really was needed.
I’m actually very happy that when Lily Kong, our Provost came on board that she took actually the bull by the horns and said we’re going to actually look at the composition of our core program, something that we knew had become a bit stale after 15-16 years. She took the bull by the horns and actually said we are going to review and revise that core program. Again, significant innovation that will be rolled out over the coming years, and I think that maybe, I put it a bit black and white, but I think that we went from a mode where we said we have something that works very well, we can’t touch it, to a mode of yes, we have something that works very well, but we need to innovate every year, and we need to improve every year, and we need to change every year.
The two other ones that I personally invested a lot in and is that one, I felt that our Campus Green was not very well used. In fact, it was told to me by many other people that the original idea of putting SMU in the centre of the city was to create a buzz in the city. And people were saying, but we never see anybody on your Campus Green. There is no buzz, they are all underground. And so I took it as a sort of a challenge to respond to people who had actually believed in SMU, in the centre of the city and hoped that it would create a buzz. I took it as a challenge and said what can I do to bring the students above ground? I actually talked a lot to students about why they didn’t get above, and the answers were quite straightforward—that is, there is air conditioning below and there is nothing above. But, actually, more importantly, they basically said look at the Campus Green, it’s very uneven. There’s a little slope from Bras Basah Road to Stamford Road, so you can’t even do really sports on it. As soon as it rains, it is a big mud pool. This is not really a useful Campus Green.
So, as you know, we invested about $20 million in renovating a number of existing buildings and the Campus Green. At the same time, we created a number of study spaces for students, and we revamped a little bit, the library. So it was a whole project of having a second look at our campus, and say, with the experience of six, seven years on the new campus, what can we do differently here? I remember that when I went walking with Mr Sim, who was in that time in charge of operations, among other things, that we went walking through the campus and said, where are their spaces that are unused and what can we do with them?
And so, for example, in the School of Social Sciences and Economics, that particular building, there was an inner garden, sort of an atrium that was never used by anybody. Why not cover it and make it a study space, right? Or turn it into lecture theatres? And we went through the campus, and there was a whole renovation project that had to do with how can we use the square meters that we have—these very expensive square meters that we have here in the centre of the city—how can we use them better? And in that context, we had the whole revamp of the Campus Green.
I am particularly proud of a decision that we took to make sure that the Campus Green was very well-drained. And, as many people will know when they look very carefully, we actually have artificial turf there. Why not grass? Because artificial turf and with good drainage is dry within 30 minutes after a rain. So it can be used, as opposed to become a mud pool. Grass is not necessarily the best thing for a tropic climate. So that’s the second renovation. And it has actually had impact in many different places in the campus. It was a relooking at what we had and say how can we use it better?
The third infrastructure change was of, course, the renovation of the Prinsep Street Residences. We have these residences with about, in those days about 270 beds. But when I went to visit them, I thought that the buildings looked very nice, but when I went into the apartments, I was not very much convinced about the way that they were equipped and organized. And, frankly speaking, after about 10 years, they were up for some renovation because the rooms looked very tired. I was very happy that our Provost had this idea of saying, if we do the renovation, can we do this at the same time with a totally different look at how we use these residences. Not just dormitories, but actually make them active living, learning and working spaces where students have a real community and work as a community for the community around them. So again, it’s a good example of collaboration of different groups in the campus. Of course, the Dean of Students who took charge of it, Provost who give the impetus to it, OCIS, the Office for Campus Infrastructure and Services who took it up on them to do the renovation. And I’m very happy that in about six months’ time, we could do the renovation of the Prinsep Street Residences.
Let me backtrack a little bit to answer that question and go back to the last twenty years of business education. Now we focus on business education. I keep on saying that between the late ’80s and 2008, let me decide to put it that way, business schools all over the world have had a ball. Nothing could go wrong for them, for many reasons. But probably the most important one is that we have seen in the ’80s in many countries—but perhaps the most visible with Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan in the United States—a transformation of society, whereby business became more important, and where business was seen as the leader in society. I’m old enough to have studied in the ’70s of the previous century and I remembered that in those days, business was not that good. My own family, my own father—when I told him that I was going to study business—looked quite worried. And he was a civil servant and he was convinced that service for government was what one needed to do, and going into business or studying business was seen or looked upon with a sort of hesitation.
We’ve seen this major transformation in the ’80s whereby society as a whole—and again I put as black and white—but society in whole had a lot more belief in what business could achieve, believe very strongly in entrepreneurship, saw business as a role model and was in many cases saying the way we organise government should be similar to the way businesses are organised with objectives and key performance indicators, and the way you organise government—society can learn from how business is organised. So it became natural that business schools were good for you. And that the best and the brightest wanted to go and study in business schools. And that business schools could charge almost anything as tuition fee because it was almost sure for people who would graduate out of a good MBA programme that they would have the right return on investment. We have had a ball.
This has changed over the last two, three years, precisely because of the financial crisis and some of the excesses that we’ve seen in business. And perhaps because not all of the ideas that came out of business worked so well in government—and I lived the last four years in the UK and I’ve seen what Tony Blair has and then his successor have tried to do in the government. And maybe not everything that they’ve tried to do, in terms of having a business orientation in government, has worked that well. But it’s clear that the financial crisis has put some question marks around the value of business for society and today we need to much more justify the role of business in society. For business schools that means that quite a few people have asked questions about business schools and the role of business schools. And how come that business schools, who were seen as being the training ground for the elite, then produce people who seem to get victims of these excesses and do things that you shouldn’t do et cetera. There have been a number of questions there.
But equally important is that because we were so successful as business schools, we isolated ourselves. We thought that we knew what society needed. And thus we define business as a combination of marketing and operations and finance and accounting and a bit of strategy and whatever and say, “This is what business needs to know and this is what society needs to know.” And I think business schools have in general not listened enough to what society really needs or even what businesses really need. And that’s the reason why I use this phrase, “We need to move from being a business school to a school for business.” And what I mean by a ‘school for business’ is listen much more carefully to what society needs or organisations need and try to come up with solutions. Even if these solutions are not in the traditional disciplines of a business school.
And I take an example, which I only know from the press so I have no privileged insights in it, but when we take the example of the major oil spill of BP in the Gulf of Mexico, it was interesting for me to see how BP originally defined it as a technical problem— “We can’t stop the well”—and didn’t see that it at the same time was a societal problem, an environmental problem, a big PR issue. It was a relationship of a British company—it was interesting to see how BP suddenly was called British Petroleum again—so they had a geopolitical issue in United States. And then it was a much more complex issue. The solution for that problem—which is a very difficult one and I’m not saying that I have a solution for it or that I would have been better at managing it—but it was clear that the solution, the leadership that was required to manage that problem needed to find ideas in sociology, in political science, yes, in the technology, but also in pure management and leadership. That they needed to have components of solutions that would fit together, that could be assembled together, and that—in terms of where it had to come from—went much beyond what a traditional business school is doing.
Now that’s where SMU is sitting in a great place, because we have many of the building blocks that are needed to respond to issues around energy, sustainability, global warming, diversity in the workforce, or all kinds of other issues that organisations are confronted with. By the combination of social sciences, economics, information systems, pure business management, and accounting and law, yes. We have many building blocks whereby if we listen carefully to society we can come up with integrated solutions. That’s the reason why, if you would look at some of the early speeches and early interviews I gave as a president, I have been hammering on interdisciplinary efforts. I always am careful, I believe in disciplinary research, and I believe that you can do very good research based in the disciplines and, but there is a lot of value in bringing these building blocks together and providing answers to society that recognise the complexity of the problems and don’t try to bring it back to one single item of what we have to offer. So SMU is uniquely well-positioned if we can keep that integration between the different schools that we have to be a leading institution in the world.
And that brings me back to an earlier question that you had about the change in educational scene here in Singapore. I think we had had a watershed, and it’s a bit of an easy word to use, but until now, the Singapore educational institutions could learn from their counterparts elsewhere in the world. They were—I’ve sometimes used the word, apprentices—of what was happening elsewhere in the world. And it’s clear for, example, that SMU has learned a lot from Wharton, and that we’re still learning a lot from CMU, from Carnegie Mellon, in information systems. At the same time, I also see that NUS has learned a lot from MIT, from its collaborations with other institutions, and I could go on like that. We have been, when I talk about SMU and I will limit it to that, we’ve been an apprentice. But we’ve learned a lot, and there’s a moment where you have to take your responsibility and say, “We’ve now become a partner that can contribute to others in the world.” And that is a subtle but very important change in the educational environment here in Singapore. That is that we’ve become partners for the rest of the world, partners for some of the best institutions in the world, and we will have to develop together what the university of tomorrow is.
And that’s where my ‘from business school to school for business’ comes in. A new view on what a business school can be, a new view on how you respond to the challenges and the questions that society has and how we as educational institutions, higher educational institutions and universities, react to it. We are in the…we have become a university that’s in the driver seat, that has to come up with its own ideas.
I had after a few months that I was here at a lunch with Tommy Koh, and he may not remember it anymore, but he asked me during that lunch, “Does SMU do any research?” And I was a bit taken aback by that question and sort of probably answered at that moment, “Yes, look at all the academic publications and all the A-journals that our faculty are publishing.” But frankly speaking, he said “I’ve never seen anything of that in Singapore.” Sometimes these sort of simple remarks that people make stick with you and say what was he really telling there. And what he basically was saying, it may be great what kind of research you are doing as an institution, but we in Singapore don’t benefit from it.
So I have been hammering over the last eight years—hammering is maybe a strong word, right?—say I’ve been repeating several times that yes, we need to do top-quality research, but it does have to have impact on Singapore society. I have to say that the Deans be it, Bryce Hool in Economics, Steve Miller in IS [Information Systems], Gerry George and before him, Howard Thomas, in the Business School—I should mention them all—Cheng Qiang or Goh Yihan in Law School and in Accountancy, they have all taken on the challenge of; we need to have larger scale research projects, we need to be more interdisciplinary and we need to look at what it is in our research that can be of relevance to the society here. So we see that today, compared to 2011 or 2010, the number of external grants that we get from the government has risen very significantly, that the type of research is now much more a portfolio of topics. Yes, still for our young academics, they need to build a reputation in the international academic world, so they publish about their PhDs and in top journals. But at the same time, we have now large-scale research projects that are of relevance to Singapore. I can mention that all the programs like iCity or LARC or whatever in IS, I can mention the CREA—the Centre for Research on Economics of Ageing in Economics. But also more recently, the retail centre in the Business School, or the real estate applied research activity in the Business School together with Economics, or what Yihan has been doing in the School of Law, with governance of artificial intelligence. These are topics that are directly responding to the needs of the Singapore society.
And now, we did the ground-breaking a few weeks ago of what will be the SMU-X building which we will call the Tahir Foundation Connexion. Why that building? Well, as you know, a few years ago, I came up with this idea of stimulating experiential learning in the undergraduate program. I should be honest, this was not my idea. This is the idea of some faculty who were doing this on a small scale. What I did was basically saying this is a great idea for our undergraduate students. What can we do to scale it up? As opposed to be some small activity that we do in some of our postgraduate programs, in some courses in the undergraduate program. How can we make this a major component of the undergraduate experience at SMU? Mr Sim, who was very enthusiastic about the idea—he actually believed in it—he sort of came up with the idea that this building, that the former MPH building, Vanguard building that that building was available for rent. And whether it would be a good idea for us to try out, whether, with a different type of infrastructure, we could stimulate and support the SMU-X pedagogy. I have to say that, again, I was lucky to have a good team, that Tan Gan Hup as project manager rose to the challenge. We went around the world to see how other universities organizes that. And with a real shoestring budget, they revamped the MPH building and made it into SMU Labs, as we know it, where there is a lot more support for group work, interaction between students, etc.
This has been a good pilot project for us. We’ve learned a lot from how students use that building. I’m very grateful, I should say, that at some moment in time, Ascott saw what we were doing thought it was a very good idea to collaborate with us, to test out what Millennials really want to have in terms of environment to work in. So that we could actually after two years take some of the very tired furniture out of that building and replace it with some new ideas. Again, testing out some funky ideas. But we’ve learned a lot from that experiment or that pilot. So that by the time, we were ready to build a new building of about 8,000 square meters, we knew what we needed to do to support that different type of pedagogy that we call SMU-X—of experiential learning, active classrooms, active learning classrooms, different types of meeting rooms and project rooms. We will also house our Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship incubator there. So it will be the building where students can learn in a different mode from what we do elsewhere in the schools, and it will be a nice complement to what we are doing through our holistic education.
In that building, we probably will be a world leader in what we provide as support for active learning. I’m not saying that nobody else in the world is doing this. There are other universities that are experimenting with different types of infrastructure. I believe that we are probably the only one who is doing this sort of active learning, experiential learning on such a large scale in an undergraduate program. There are lots of examples that I know in graduate programs on smaller scale, but not the large scale that we are embarking on. Having 3,000 students going every year through this type of projects, and experiential learning, 150 to 200 partners, 500 projects—that scale is quite a challenge, I have to say.
Frankly speaking, SMU would not be where it is after 18 years, if it would not have been for the unwavering support by the government. Yes, they are challenging and they have their own objectives and their own expectations. But overall—and I travel a lot —there are very few governments in the world that have such an unrelenting commitment to education. And not only at the university level, but also at other levels. Of course, that unrelenting commitment is translated in resources, the financial resources that the government makes available per undergraduate student, not for the masters students which are all full fee-paying, but per undergraduate students there’s a significant commitment by the Ministry of Education and by the government as a whole.
Secondly, I am quite impressed by the willingness of the Ministry of Education to let us experiment and to let us be different. This whole concept of an autonomous university whereby we are, on paper, a private company—I mean a company by guarantee that has the right to grant degrees by an Act of Parliament and where we have a performance and a policy agreement with the government—it’s a very interesting way of organizing universities because it ensures that universities are aligned with the goals of the country. But at the same time, it gives the management of universities sufficient freedom to run the place the way the management wants to run the place.
I will answer that question on the educational scene and on the larger scene. So if I take first the larger environment—and I have been asked this question several times since I am back now for four months here in Singapore—I have boiled it down to four main differences. First of all, there’re many more people here. The country has grown in number of people. And you feel that. I find it personally—I’m a city person—I find that actually attractive, that there is more buzz, there is more activity, there are more people around.
Secondly, you can see the investment in infrastructure, the physical appearance of Singapore has changed. And I’m not only referring to Marina Bay Sands or what’s happening on Sentosa, but actually SMU, in the middle of the city, is a major change in the visual appearance of Singapore.
Third difference is something with which I have an ambivalent attitude to. That is, visually you see that this has become a richer country. You see more display of wealth. Is this because the country has become more wealthy or because people have become more conspicuous consumers? It’s probably a little bit of everything, but that’s my third observation.
And the fourth observation is that it has been a place with a lot of buzz. There’s a lot more cultural activity, arts activity, and of all types. It’s not only that I like classical music, but it’s not only that the SSO [Singapore Symphony Orchestra] has improved in its performances, but it’s at the same time, there is much more jazz. Some of the top singers of the world pass through, partially because of the casinos I suppose, but there are all kinds of activities. And also the investment that the Government makes in education for arts, it has changed considerably. So that is very different. And this last remark leads me then to focus more on the educational scene.
The three universities, SMU, NUS [National University of Singapore] and NTU [Nanyang Technological University] have changed dramatically. SMU, obviously, from nothing to what it is today. But also NUS and NTU have transformed themselves into clearly world-class institutions, or institutions that play on the world’s scene whose research is recognised by people elsewhere in the world. It’s interesting for me to see how eager some academics are to come and work here, something that was not the case in 1998, 1999, when I had to convince faculty from INSEAD to come and work here. But now it’s much easier to say, why don’t you come and spend part of your career as an academic in Singapore? So there’s been a dramatic change in the educational scene. And obviously the creation of the fourth university, SUTD [Singapore University of Technology and Design], and then the fifth institution, SIT [Singapore Institute of Technology], that attracts foreign universities here—it all builds up into a much more vibrant and forward-looking educational scene. I was saying earlier that in the ’90s, I thought that the higher education here was relatively middle-of-the-road, good quality, but to train local people at middle level, and the elite were going abroad. What I see now is the elite from elsewhere coming to study in Singapore. Some of the elite researchers in bioengineering or mechanical engineering, or whatever, nanotechnology—they’re coming here to Singapore. It is a dramatic change in the educational scene which I think is very good for us as SMU.
I would hope that students go away from here and keep that holistic attitude and that will have an influence on society, that society is not a collection of a bunch of silos but society’s about interaction, integration. I would hope that one of the ways SMU can influence society is through our alumni who will keep that attitude of thinking broadly, thinking in an integrated way, and perhaps influencing the way their colleagues and their organisations in their communities in which they work.
So that’s the advice I would give to students. That is, education is something you make yourself, and there will be trade-offs to be made. You can’t do everything here and don’t be worried about it. We offer you opportunities, build your own education. Two, it’s an opportunity to hone your leadership skills, and three, see an undergraduate education as broadening your options, not as narrowing yourself down to one particular job.
Professor De Meyer became the fourth president of SMU in September 2010. A leader and well-known scholar in management studies, his research interests include manufacturing and technology strategy, management of R&D and innovation, management under conditions of high uncertainty and for novel projects, management and innovation in Asia, the globalisation of Asian firms, and e-readiness in Europe. He publishes widely in academic journals and books.
For twenty three years, Professor De Meyer was associated with INSEAD where he held various senior academic and administrative positions, including founding dean of INSEAD’s Asia campus in Singapore. In 2006, he became director of the Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge (UK) where he was a Professor of Management Studies. Professor De Meyer has been a part-time professor at the University of Antwerp and Ghent in Belgium, and was a visiting professor at the University of Kiel (Germany), Waseda University in Tokyo, Keio University in Tokyo, and the Birla Institute of Technology in India.
Professor De Meyer has been a consultant to a number of companies throughout Europe and Asia. He was a member of the Singapore Economic Review Committee (2002–2003), and board member of the Infocomm Development Authority (2000–2003) and Sentosa Island Corporation (2001–2002). His current external directorships include board member of the National Research Foundation (Singapore), Singapore International Chamber of Commerce, Temasek Management Services (Singapore), and Dassault Systèmes SA (France).
Professor De Meyer has a master of science in electrical engineering, master of business administration and PhD in management from the University of Ghent (Belgium).
