I believe that the preference to hire foreign professionals starts from the top (Find out why firms prefer to hire foreign professionals, Feb 27).
Whenever a foreign head or senior manager is hired, he would naturally have his trusted lieutenants and right-hand men join the company as well. This is a result of unconscious bias and is present in everybody, not just foreigners.
A domino effect is triggered, in which the trusted lieutenants and right-hand men would also have their own trusted lieutenants and right-hand men.
Given that our sovereign wealth funds are invested in many world-class companies, surely there is a means to send some of our talents to these companies for exposure and valuable experience.
Just as swimmer Joseph Schooling's exposure gave Singapore an Olympic medal, and now the Quah siblings are replicating that formula.
The Singapore talents who have gained overseas exposure can then be brought back to head some of our largest companies which can embark on acquisitive growth to accelerate the creation of world-class companies in Singapore.
To do this, we need to benchmark ourselves with the leading countries in the world. Switzerland features high in the list, given that former prime minister Goh Chok Tong set a target in 1994 to reach the Swiss standard of living by 1999. However, there are other benchmarks that the Swiss have set and are worth emulating.
Switzerland has a population of 8.6 million, not much bigger than Singapore, and yet it boasts a host of large world-class institutions in many industries, including UBS, Credit Suisse, Nestle and Chubb.
I cite the example of Mr Tan Hock Eng, who was born in Penang, and became the chief executive of Broadcom. He was the highest-earning CEO in the United States in 2017.
Mr Tan had experience in large corporations like General Motors and PepsiCo before leading Broadcom. I believe the exposure to large corporations honed his skills and brought him to where he is today.
We need to groom Singaporean business leaders to build world-class institutions to take care of our own workforce.
Charlie Tan Keng Lai
