It is not a goal oriented society. It is boss oriented. Majority don't care what they do. They do care what the boss says. It does not need to be of quality or good standard or novelty or useful if the boss is happy with it. Many bosses are the same. They also have their key performance indicators that are usually 1D only. People do average or substandard job but if this looks ok from outside then why not? The painted grass is good enough. Do you see any space for passion in this?disenchanted wrote:Now, the key problem with both productivity and the near-mythical 'innovation' here is the mindset of the workforce. I've been temporarily staying in quite a few countries and what strikes me the most about today's Singapore is that almost nobody seems to believe in what they do.
I don't know if we can attribute it more to the commanding parents, the social over-engineering throughout education and NS or both, but the impression I'm getting is that most people only wants to drag it somehow till the end of the day, get the paycheck and screw off. Its like everybody ended up in professions and lives they didn't want on the first place and their passions and interests were suppressed sometime before they even developed. The general apathy Singaporeans demonstrate is pathological and this is the main bottleneck in Singapore reaching its full potential as a truly global, influential city. You really don't need 5 or 7 or 10 million people to do that, you need a workforce that's passionate.
Another factor is the fear of the failure. The same old kiasu thing. People around do preferably things they are sure they can accomplish. This means repeating what they know would work. Nothing new, nothing inventive, nothing exceeding overall rater low standard but widely accepted and proven successful (in their eyes).