‘Who can we copy now?’: Seasoned civil servant Lim Siong Guan’s new book offers lessons for future

SINGAPORE – Mr Lim Siong Guan may not be a familiar name for many Singaporeans today, but the seasoned civil servant and permanent secretary of multiple ministries has helped lay the foundations of the Republic.

Literally, for post-university in 1969, he started in the sewerage department. An offer to pursue a doctorate at the University of Cambridge was turned down by the Public Service Commission because “we kind of desperately need you back in Singapore”.

“There was no sense of angst,” the civil servant of nearly 40 years and former mechanical engineer remembers of this far-from-glamorous posting. “I had a bond, and it was an issue of honour. You’ve taken something, so you don’t think of anything else. You do your best in each situation.”

The 78-year-old was speaking to The Straits Times for his new biography, Lim Siong Guan: The Best Is Yet To Be, compiled by his daughter Joanne.

Like many of the memoirs recently produced by Singapore’s pioneer civil servants, it is an understated, pragmatic handbook. There is little appeal for recognition, merely documentation and an effort at distilling lessons for the young.

There is even a suggestion in bold in the introduction: “If you have no time to read the entire book, just read the ‘Key Sharings’ pages.”

Flip to these and one finds life advice in bullet point form: “Help your boss/colleagues/subordinates get their work done well” or “Learn fast, and cut your losses early”. If Mr Lim could have his way, these would be still shorter – or even acronymised, like so many of Singapore’s public schemes.

“We have to boil it down to principles, because application is always very contextual,” he says. “When diplomats like Tommy Koh and Kishore Mahbubani speak, they always talk in terms of three points. Beyond that, people can’t remember.”

Throughout a public service career which took Mr Lim from first principal private secretary to then Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, to permanent secretary of the Ministry of Defence, the Prime Minister’s Office, the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Finance, and finally to chair of the Economic Development Board and group president of sovereign wealth fund GIC, he has come to be known among his subordinates for his pithy distillations of wisdom.

So much so that a then young officer at the Ministry of Finance, Mr Lawrence Wong, mistakenly attributed to Mr Lim the slogan: “The only way to avoid making mistakes is not to do anything.” This, Mr Wong later found out, was cribbed from Mr Lim’s one-time boss at the Ministry of Defence (Mindef), Dr Goh Keng Swee.

But even within this short biography, what comes across powerfully is just how formative Mr Lim’s experience at Mindef was – first in his early years, then as permanent secretary from 1981 to 1994. It was there that he gleaned lessons on imposing block budgeting and talent management that he would take to his other posts.

As permanent secretary of Mindef, he visited Shell’s headquarters in London to study its formula for identifying the leadership capacity of employees early – a test still applied in the civil service to promote those deemed to have more potential.

It was also at Mindef that he began “scenario planning”, a way of visualising and preparing for possible futures, which has helped him pre-empt public policy needs before ministers vocalised problems.

“Mindef is just a place where you can experiment and have freedom to decide. Because of the hierarchy and command structure, the most critical thing is to speak to the senior leadership and convince them. Then it will be done,” Mr Lim says.

“When you go out to the general civil service, I can assure you a whole lot of people are going to tell you why it cannot be done or it shouldn’t be done. They argue for all the ways it might go wrong. So having done it in Mindef, they have to argue why it cannot work outside of Mindef – which is a more difficult argument to make.”

On top of that, Mindef is a “mini-government” where every function of government can be found.

Does this justify the plucking of high-ranking generals – as well as permanent secretaries – to fill the Cabinet?

Mr Lim is wholeheartedly supportive: “Because they attend a lot of the same training, they have an intrinsic sense of how the ministries interact. You need people who almost instinctively know who will be impacted, who you need to consult, whose opinion you can ignore, whose opinion you have to take seriously.”

He adds another way the careers of military men and senior civil servants have vitally prepared them for political office: “They understand the threats to Singapore and her vulnerabilities. A lot of training in administrative service is talking about these. There is very little done, really, from the technical point of view.”

Mr Lim himself neither expected nor desired a switch in tracks.

Once approached by then Deputy Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong and then Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew to run for political office, he demurred as he believed he could better influence the direction of government policy as a top civil servant. He writes: “I got the feeling that I disappointed him (Mr Lee) and had wasted his time. I was never approached again.”

Looking at Mr Lim’s easy smile now, one may be hard-pressed to discern a senior civil servant who once struck fear in his subordinates, but repeated swift flicks of his fingers to snap his glasses back in place hint at some of his former force of will and no-nonsense authority.

Yet, even he was once cowed by Dr Goh into re-writing a proposal to suit the minister’s conclusion, only for Dr Goh to insist that he re-instate his original differing opinion. This second-guessing of what his boss wanted makes for another lesson learnt, again in bold in the book: “This is how organisations lose imaginative and innovative staff: through ignoring their brains and undermining their courage.”

Mr Lim has always been forward-looking – as an early adopter of technology, his first e-mail to his staff as permanent secretary to the Ministry of Education in 1997 sent them scurrying to retrieve their passwords from the tech department.

Now, he is worried that first-world Singapore no longer has models to copy. “Because we were then third world, it makes a lot of sense to just copy and improve. You’re copying people whose quality of life and whose capabilities are a whole generation ahead of you.

“Now, the critical question to my mind is, ‘Who are you copying?’ Probably someone who is at most five years ahead. Can we feel comfortable with that?”

And, so, he turns to soft skills and culture: “There’s a huge distinction between innovativeness as opposed to innovations. There’s always a temptation to be efficient and focus on the output.

“When we are dealing with a national character of innovativeness, we are talking about the engine. The nurse is innovative, the lift attendant is innovative. It becomes a frame of mind.”

His daughter says Mr Lim was always busy when she was growing up, and that putting the book together has helped her see clearly that his time was always spent on others and not on himself.

Ms Lim says: “He’s always obsessed with Singapore’s survivability and success.”