Ethics – an asset to justice

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Getting judges to publicly declare their assets is a significant step towards improving the integrity of our judiciary and changing the perception of the bench.

DARE to declare! That seems to be the slogan of the moment, in the wake of the move by Penang Chief Minister Lim Guan Eng and his state executive council to declare their assets publicly last week.

Based on the list of properties, investments and cars along with the loans taken, Penang is being run by a motley crew of wealthy and not-so-rich politicians.

Lim owns two shop lots in Malacca, worth RM435,000 and RM530,000 respectively and has taken RM650,000 in loans to pay for them.

He has RM298,785 in fixed deposits, with more than RM53,000 in earned interests besides investments in Amanah Mutual Bhd and Public Mutual Fund.

But there were no clues about the assets of the spouses and relatives, though. When asked about this, the CM was reported to have replied that the pledge was only for the assets of its leaders to be disclosed.

In the case of Selangor, the declaration of assets by the Mentri Besar and exco members in 2009 was basically in the form of their current earnings in salaries and allowances.

They decided not to include assets owned before the exco members held office, on the grounds of not being able to assure security for them or their family members.

Excos disclosed their assets privately to the MB’s office. The information, however, can be released for legitimate reasons, subject to conditions set and approved by the Special Select Committee on Competence, Accountability and Transparency or Selcat.

For political parties, Parti Sosialis Malaysia (PSM) holds the record for being the first to deliver the promise of declaring the assets of its elected and appointed representatives.

Since 2008, it has made public statutory declarations about what they own.

PSM’s sole MP, Michael Jeyakumar Devaraj – who unseated MIC supremo Datuk S. Samy Vellu in Sungei Siput – has been quoted as saying: “Once you become an assemblyman or MP, you must reveal the assets of yourself, your wife and your immediate family every year.”



An increasing number of countries have adopted similar ethics and even have anti-corruption laws requiring public officials to declare their assets and income, in addition to that of their spouses and dependant children.

In the US, for instance, the main law governing this is the Ethics in Government Act of 1978.

Based on last year’s declaration, President Barack Obama has assets worth at least US$4mil (RM12.48mil).

The amount includes book royalties, retirement funds, US Treasury bills and notes and other holdings.

In Malaysia, would all elected representatives from both sides of the political divide agree to be subject to such scrutiny?

As it is, many of our YBs are seen to be extremely well-heeled. They always claim to champion the cause of the rakyat but live in mansions worth millions and lead luxurious lifestyles.

Of course, they can always declare that they were already rich before being elected or appointed.

So, instead of waiting until they are elected, why not make it mandatory for all nominated candidates for Parliament and state seats to disclose their wealth and means of income and those of their immediate family?

Perhaps one way to ensure this is through compulsion – by an Act of Parliament.

One wonders if there would still be many people clamouring to be elected representatives or appointed representatives under such rules.

But we are at least making progress when it comes to the judiciary.

Chief Justice Tan Sri Arifin Zakaria has made a laudable move towards getting judges to declare their assets.

It is indeed a significant step towards improving transparency and integrity of our judiciary and changing the current public perception of the bench.

“I’m sure all of you have nothing to fear, so we have to work together with the MACC on this matter,” the CJ said at the judges’ conference last week.

The MACC has since set up a task force to identify the process under the civil service for the implementation.

The CJ has also told judges to maintain the independence of the judiciary and not to put up with any interference, including from their spouses, when making their decisions.

According to Transparency International’s Bribe Payers Index of 2008, the judiciary was perceived by surveyed business executives to be one of the most corrupt institutions in the country.

Business executives surveyed by the World Economic Forum Global competitiveness Report 2010-2011 identified the judicial system as being under enough influence of members of government, certain individuals and companies to constitute a competitive disadvantage.

They also found the efficiency of the legal framework for private companies to settle disputes and challenge government actions and/or regulations as another disadvantage.

The CJ’s move to boost the integrity of the judiciary is noteworthy in view of such negative perceptions.

The country cannot afford to have a judiciary perceived to be ethically compromised. It would be a millstone around the neck of any anti-corruption strategy.

As such, it needs the full support and cooperation of the people, members of the Bar, the Attorney-General’s Chambers and more so from the political leaders.

> Associate Editor M. Veera Pandiyan likes to share these wise words of Gandhi: “There is a higher court than courts of justice and that is the court of conscience. It supercedes all other courts.”

Too many holidays in Malaysia?

Are workers getting too many holidays?

Question Time By P. GUNASEGARAM

Instead of griping about days off, employers should focus on improving productivity – and benefits.

Click on graphic for larger view.

ASK any person who employs other people and they will say their workers get too many days off and public holidays. Ask the workers and their answers will be exactly the opposite.

That was the scenario played out recently when employers and their associations clamoured for less public holidays while workers and their representatives demurred strongly.

Objectively, it is simply too much to expect public holidays to be reduced, especially when many private sector employers are remiss when it comes to giving workers decent pay and benefits, including leave. A few examples will illustrate this well.

Take the five-day working week. The Government has adopted this for some years now but there are many firms in Malaysia, particularly those which are Malaysian-owned, which do not practise this.

This is despite the fact that it is easy to make up the hours for a Saturday half day by working just half an hour to 45 minutes more on the other working days.

Why many private firms continue to do this when they can so easily make up for the hours lost is a mystery and just shows plain unwillingness to grant workers better benefits even when it costs the company nothing.

The number of public holidays in Malaysia is about 18, not counting state holidays which may account for one or two more. But those who don’t work a five-day week work 26 days more in a year.


The Government should just mandate a five-day week for everyone like it is done in many other countries.


Next, guess who is opposing vehemently a current proposal to raise the retirement age to 60 and which may be legislated this year if all goes well. Yes, private sector employers.

The life expectancy over the last half century has increased by over 20 years to 75 but the retirement age still stays at 55.

Many countries already have a retirement age of 65 and some don’t even have a retirement age and here we are baulking because of employer opposition.

Why is the private sector behaving like that? It wants to get rid of staff and get new ones at lower pay or retain the old ones on yearly contracts and with reduced benefits, saving costs.

The broader interest will be served by increasing the retirement age so that the useful lives of all citizens can be extended, they are better able to take care of their needs in older age and their accumulated knowledge and expertise used.

If we look at the way employers treat foreign workers, it is appalling to say the least.

The construction industry, for instance, is almost entirely dependent on foreign workers. Often they are paid a daily rate and they get no pay when there is no work. Is that any way to treat a worker?

Imagine how much the wages for local labour is depressed because of the cheap availability of foreign labour, often illegal.

For a long time, even local plantation workers never got a monthly salary, only being paid when they went out to work. They were forced to take lower salaries when prices of rubber and palm oil dipped but had little benefit when prices rose. They remained abjectly poor despite the manyfold increase in commodity prices over the years.

If you ever wondered why our currency is weak – and therefore we pay high prices for all manner of products with imported content – look again at export manufacturers and how they lobby strongly to keep their costs down, including asking the Government to keep the currency at “competitive levels” and encourage cheap imported labour.

It seems like the rest of us have to keep on subsidising the exporters through a weak currency and lower wages so that they can make money.

The question is why can’t the employers raise productivity so that everyone can contribute and earn more and thereby do their bit towards becoming a high-income nation and making all our lives, instead of a few, better.

If management thinks 10 days of annual leave is too much for workers, ask how much top management gets – the norm is 30 days, but of course they will argue that they work all the time. Anyway, don’t some workers too?

Any which way you look at it, Malaysian employers are mollycoddled. They want wages to be low, the currency to be weak, employees to take less leave, imported cheap labour to be plentiful, the retirement age to be low and workers to work long hours.

But they do very little to be more productive – spend a bit more in terms of training and equipment to produce more with less and in less time.

Germany is moving to a four-and-a-half-day week, France has a seven-hour work day, Australians value their leisure as do many others. How come they are all so much more productive than Malaysia?

And, finally, the most ironic part. Many workers actually employ people – yes, maids.

And what do a good proportion of them think when it comes to their own servants. No leave! They will get into mischief if they get out of the house. And so one strata of society exploits the next and the next the ones below and it goes all the way down to the lowest economic strata.

No wonder there’s such a scramble to get to the top and do all the exploiting!

If only everybody thought of others as themselves and focused on giving decent wages for good work done and not making enormous profits at somebody else’s expense, we all can have a good life together.

Ever wonder why developed countries are developed and everyone who wants to work has a place under the sun and moral values – in its true sense – are much higher in these places?

> P. Gunasegaram enjoys his holiday as much as the next person and wishes there were more of them even if he knows there is a limit to it.

Employers to feel the brunt with workers taking long festive breaks

By P. ARUNA and ISABELLE LAI newsdesk@thestar.com.my  Jan 5, 2012

 PETALING JAYA: The year-end holiday season may be over worldwide but not in Malaysia where the festive mood continues as a second wave of public holidays looms.

Employers are bracing for a hit in productivity as huge numbers of workers are expected to take long breaks in January and February.

Malaysians enjoy over 50 national, school and state holidays a year and ranks in the top 10 countries with the most public holidays. This is apart from the minimum of 14 days of annual leave a worker is entitled to.

Worse for employers this year, various state and national holidays come on the heels of Chinese New Year, which falls on Jan 23.

These include Federal Territory Day (Feb 1), Prophet Muhammad's birthday (Feb 5) and Thaipusam (Feb 7).

Also, it is a common practice among Malaysian workers to take their annual leave, before and after a festival, to enjoy an even longer break.

Federation of Malaysian Manufacturers small and medium industries committee chairman Tan Sri Soong Siew Hoong said the many public holidays affect the ability to remain competitive in business and “make employers cry”.

“I think there are too many paid public holidays for the private sector. And yet various sectors still want to lobby for more holidays,” he said.

Soong also expressed his unhappiness that public holidays were brought forward to weekdays if they fell on weekends, deeming this unnecessary.

He suggested that religious holidays be declared a personal choice so employees could celebrate on their own while colleagues of other faiths work as usual.

Malaysian Employers Federation executive director Shamsuddin Bardan said productivity would be affected during the holiday period with working days in between.

He said companies would not be able to operate at optimum levels as many workers would be taking leave.

“The alternative is for them to declare a shutdown through the whole period as the overhead costs will be very high. If they can't stop work, then they have to absorb the impact,” he added.

Shamsuddin said the Special Task Force to Facilitate Business had suggested that MEF and the Malaysian Trades Union Congress come up with a formula for employers to “buy back” annual leave days, adding that discussions were ongoing.

Federation of Chinese Associations Malaysia economic research committee chairman Kerk Loong Sing said the large number of public holidays would “naturally result” in higher production costs.

“Of course, too many holidays are bad. It will affect productivity, especially for industries which cannot afford to stop production. Employers also need to pay higher wages during public holidays,” he said.

However, MTUC vice-president Mohd Roszali Majid strongly disagreed that the number of public holidays be trimmed down as “employees deserve their holidays”.

“It doesn't affect productivity because they can work on public holidays if they want to. Employers can also convert their unused annual leave to cash and increase their income,” he said.

Related Stories:

MPC: Don't misuse public holidays to take long breaks

Diversity Vital For Innovation!

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Why Is Diversity Vital For Innovation?

Steve Denning, Contributor

The recent Stoos gathering identified diversity as one of the pillars of the organization of the future. Why?

It’s an appropriate question to ask on the holiday honoring Martin Luther King Jr. at a time when the country has come a long way towards becoming color blind and realizing his dream that his “four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

At the same time, the Stoos gathering recognized that it’s also good to celebrate difference. Why? In his wonderful book, The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies, (Princeton, 2007) Scott Page shows in detail and with considerable intellectual rigor when diversity does lead to better outcomes and how and why, as well as when it doesn’t.
His short answer is that in some circumstances diversity doesn’t lead to better outcomes:

“… if a loved one requires open-heart surgery, we do not want a collection of butchers, bakers and candlestick makers carving open the chest cavity. We’d much prefer a trained heart surgeon, and for good reason.”

But in other circumstances, particularly complex problems, such as constructing a welfare policy, cracking a secret code or evaluating post-heart attack treatment, diversity not only merits equal standing with ability.

Diversity Trumps Ability?

Page goes beyond the conventional wisdom that other things being equal, diversity trumps like-mindedness. Page makes the startling claim that diversity often trumps ability. In some situations, a group of ordinary people who are diverse can defeat a group of like-minded experts. Page backs up his claim with detailed arguments and evidence.

The prediction markets also show the power of diversity in their ability to make better predictions about the outcome of presidential elections than the experts.

When are two heads better than one? When do too many cooks spoil the broth? Clearly all great restaurants have many cooks. So having lots of cooks won’t spoil the broth, if they are all following the same recipes. The chaos comes if they start to follow different recipes at the same time. In fact, having lots of cooks is essential to running a great restaurant. And when it comes to solving a difficult problem, like coming up with a better way to make coq au vin, having cooks with different points of view will usually help.

Unpacking the idea of diversity

One of the useful things Page does in The Difference is to unpack the notion of diversity. He focuses on cognitive differences between people, not identity differences like race, gender, ethnicity or religion. He suggests that cognitive diversity has four dimensions: perspectives, interpretations, heuristics, predictive models.

• Diverse perspectives: people have different ways of representing situations and problems; they who see or envision the set of possibilities confronting them differently.
• Diverse interpretations: people put things into different categories and classifications. To some people, I might be someone who worked at the World Bank. To others, I might be an leadership storyteller. To others, I might be an author about radical management. All are true. They are different interpretations of the world.
• Diverse heuristics: People have different ways of generating solutions to problems. Some people like to talk through their thinking about problems; others prefer to write out his solutions first and then talk
• Diverse predictive models: Some people analyze the situation. Others may look for the story)

This enables Page to explore exactly how these kinds of diversity might help to solve difficult problems or make better predictions.

Why is diversity vital for innovation?

A second thing about the book is the simile that he uses in comparing the solving of problems with climbing rugged landscapes. If our object is to climb as high as possible, our chances of accomplishing that depend on which mountain we decide to climb. If we climb a local hill, we might consider yourselves doing well, because we have never seen the Rockies, let alone Mount Everest. While we’re climbing up one mountain, often we can’t really see how high it is, or how it compares with other neighboring mountains, until we’ve already climbed it. Climbing the highest mountain may entail descending the mountain we are on, and moving to a completely different mountain range.

The image of what it’s like to solve a difficult problem is illuminating in showing how and why having people with different perspectives might enable a group of diverse people to do better than a group of like-minded experts who think they know they are on climbing the highest mountain.

Cognitive vs identity diversity

A third virtue of the book is his summary of the evidence as to whether diversity leads to benefits, including comparisons of cognitive diversity and identity diversity. Cognitive diversity doesn’t improve performance when it comes to routine tasks, like flipping burgers. But when we are dealing with complex tasks like engineering problems, or tasks requiring creativity and innovation, or managerial issues, cognitive diversity is a key explanatory variable in levels of performance.

By comparison, the impact of identity diversity is mixed. One part of this is due to the fact that routine tasks are better done by individuals. A second part of it is due to the fact that identity diversity doesn’t necessarily lead to cognitive diversity. The whole idea of medical training, for instance, is to get medical students thinking alike, i.e. like doctors. It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that doctors who are diverse in identity terms are cognitively alike, and hence may do no better than doctors who are not diverse in identity terms. A third part is due to the fact that getting the benefits of diversity depends people being able to work together. We would expect that some people who are diverse in identity terms find it difficult to work together effectively.

Diversity offers “super-additivity”

The fourth good quality of the book is when Page goes on the offensive and addresses the question of: so what? Given what we have learned, what should we do differently? Page points out that diversity offers not merely the advantage of a diverse stock portfolio where different stocks do better in different conditions, adding up to an overall average that does reasonably in all conditions.

Diversity in teams offers what he calls super-additivity. When a collection of people work together, and one person makes an improvement, the others can often improve on this new solution even further: improvements build on improvements. Diverse perspectives and iverse hueruistics apply sequentially: one gets applied after the other and in combination. As a result, one plus one often exceeds two.

What does this imply? Page has several suggestions that bear on the issue of creating high-performance teams:

• Bring in outsiders with different, relevant perspectives. But be careful! Outsiders don’t stay outsiders for long. If outsiders become insiders, they will cease to think differently. And be careful of brining in “highly paid consultants in fancy suits to add credibility to decisions that directors have already made—‘Look, McKinsey agrees with me!’” And the diversity must be relevant to the task at hand: you don’t ask villagers from Papua New Guinea to advise on the implementation of Sarbanes-Oxley.
• Encourage inter-disciplinary efforts: When faced with difficult problems, requiring innovation and creativity, the advantages of having cognitively diverse people working on them are overwhelming.
• Diverse preferences can be beneficial: If we agree on the goal then disagreements about different ways to reach the goal can be helpful in expanding the array of solutions. But diversity in terms of fundamental preferences can also help. Although solving problems of fundamental differences will often require compromise, diversity in terms of fundamental differences may lead to improvements: Gwen and Tess may disagree on goals, but if Gwen and Tess are cognitively diverse, Gwen may find a solution that Tess improves on, which they both like better.
• Diversity needs to be a factor in recruiting: If the work is mainly done by individuals or is routine, cognitive diversity is unlikely to lead to improved performance, although it might be pursued for other reasons. But where people have to work together on difficult problems, cognitive diversity should be very important in hiring. Page praises Google [GOOG] for trying to hire people with diverse interests and skills while also requiring that the recruits have basics skills in fields relevant to Google, i.e. computer science and mathematics.

• Recruiters should assess the cognitive aspects of diversity: Identity diversity correlates to a certain degree with cognitive diversity. Since it is easier to assess identity diversity, that may be a first rough approximation of cognitive diversity. But it is also possible to test for cognitive diversity directly, and Page encourages firms to do so.

Overall, this is a terrific book—one of the best management books I’ve read. It takes a complex subject, moves beyond metaphor and mysticism and politics and places the claims of diversity’s benefits on a solid intellectual foundation. Using precise definitions, rigorous analysis and clear conclusions, Page tells you everything you need to know about this subject. His book is well-written and has many interesting apercus and examples, although, given the effort to be rigorously, it’s not always an easy read. Yet it’s a book that tries hard to make us think clearly and what more can we ask than that?

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