New Model, New Thinking

The Global Financial Crisis has certainly stimulated a lot of people, organisations and even nations to re-asses their existing position and how would they move forward into the future.

Malaysia as a developing country is expecting to suffer negative growth this year, the result of the significant fall in demand from our trading partners especially the US, Japan and Europe.

The new Prime Minister has been floating the idea of a new economy model which is based on creativity and innovation, resulting in Malaysians earning higher income level. Well and fine as far as idea is concern, our challenge is to sort out what to do and how to make it a reality?

The future would certainly be more challenging and competitive with Brazil, Russia, India and China leading global growth and absorbing capital. This would certainly be a double-edge sword for Malaysia. Competing with the BRIC countries for capital while being positioned perfectly between China and India.

One different than would help in moving us closer towards being a high-income country is for us collectively to accept the need to compete, domestically and globally. Enterprises in Malaysia irrespective of the structure of ownership should welcome open and fair competition. We need to do the workout to ensure we could be build enough capability and capacity to compete with more able and well-resourced competitors from every corner of the earth.

Unless we change our mindset and move away from the subsidy mentality, we would never be a force to be reckon with, even in the Asean region. As the Asean Economic Comminuty shapes itself and opens more of our border, sustainable business of the future would be anchored by competitive strategy, high quality people, effective operations and delivery, sound financial management and creating value to consumers while continue to innovate.

As much as we hope and pray that our leaders would be able to figure out how we could be better of, it is our collective responsibility to start being creative, consider innovative approaches in delivering value, ensuring good governance and welcome competition as a natural feature of an open economy.

Unless we change, we could end up praying for a very long time.