Don’t let a culture of corruption corrupt our society

 

The CEO of my former company once said that although the smart people at Harvard have said company culture doesn’t help a company’s success, he chose to ignore it and forge ahead to create a strong one anyway.

The results were spectacular. We gained revenue and especially market share, increased our stock price by over 600% in three years, and tremendously improved employee engagement.

We ate the competitors’ lunch. It was delicious and we had fun while at it.

Many admired our company culture, and wanted to reproduce it. But they often focused on only the visible part of the culture – open offices, flexible working environment and other “fun” stuff.

Who’s your interior designer, they often asked. We happily shared, and then watched as many tried to reproduce our culture, but success was elusive. Many failed outright.

The problem was they fixated on our open offices where the tea ladies and the C-suite sit out in the open on the same designer seats and desks amid lots of windows and lights and pantries and chill-out areas.

These were certainly part of our corporate culture. They were revolutionary in 2004, and aren’t common even now almost two decades later. Those plus the very visible and loud internal and external branding, and parties and events, have become legendary.

But those aspects weren’t the most important part of the culture.

What others didn’t see was the tearing down of old hierarchies of big corner offices, grand job titles, job grades, salary scales and perks and privileges, and the reassigning of unsuitable leaders, and even of letting go of some.

Some left resenting the loss of their entitlements: the titles and perks and offices, etc. They hated the new egalitarianism of having perks identical to what the tea ladies got, and having to sit out there in the open among them.

Some left to other companies where they got to preserve their hard-earned entitlements. Was that a glitch in the system, a failure we didn’t expect? Not at all. Among other things, we saw the new culture as a filter, one that would excite those who fit and attract others from the outside, while keeping out the misfits.

All these thoughts came to mind while listening to some very interesting discussions recently about our national culture.

We often mistake “culture” to only mean the more visible and fun parts of our life, such as arts and crafts, food, songs and dances and festivals and celebrations.

We even have a minister for culture, whose job is to use it as a marketing tool to attract tourists. We’re “Truly Asia” because all the big Asian cultures are represented here. Hooray!

And yet we often blame culture for what is wrong with our country. We certainly know we have to fix more than just the songs and dances and celebrations if we’re to stop our country’s seemingly inexorable slide.

Since we know what culture is not, or what it isn’t just about, then what is it actually?

Simply put, culture is the set of collective values that drive the behaviour of a distinct group of humans, such as society or even a company. These values define how the group interacts with each other, with outsiders, and with challenges and successes and failures. In line with those values, rewards and sanctions, official or otherwise, are set for good or bad behaviour.

The culture of our society is the “operating system” upon which the other more visible aspects – among them arts and crafts (and ministers) – are seen.

Many people pine for the good old days when our culture seemed more chill. Today’s culture, according to many, seems to be one of constant conflict between the various subcultures fighting for dominance, which often manifests itself in corruption, racism and bigotry.

Many feel overwhelmed with a culture of “might is right”, although many others feel emboldened by it. The usual guardrails of checks and balances such as the constitution and laws and rules, or even just basic decency, don’t seem to work so well any more.

Given that the new culture is a creation of politics, it’ll take politics to fix it. That requires political will, which is predicated upon political strength and strong, strategic, courageous and insightful leadership.

The rot has gone quite deep. Corruption, whether the giving or the taking of bribes, has become an accepted part of our national culture. An enforcement officer who accepts bribes to let off speeding motorists will rationalise that the givers are corrupt persons anyway, thus making it OK to accept bribes from them.

The giver of the bribes in turn rationalises away his own profit from corruption by saying the other lot is always corrupt anyway. Or that everybody does it.

This is the most corrosive aspect of this rationalisation. Nobody challenges it. Nobody holds it against their own systems of faith and belief, possibly because they may not like what they see.

That would be inconvenient. Everybody thinks he or she is a victim, which means anything a victim does against the oppressors or aggressors is OK. God, or the gods, would understand.

But while we fight over the larger aspects of culture, we haven’t forgotten about the superficial parts of it either. We constantly police and monitor them, and call out or ban or cancel anything we don’t like.

Some of these bans and cancels have become laws, or seem to have the force of one. It has become convenient for many to focus on the superficial aspects of culture, because it stops us from asking some really tough questions.

Questions such as what has actually gone wrong with our culture that we think it’s driving the country in the wrong direction. And when we do know what’s wrong, what can we do to fix them?

I feel Malaysia had always had the sense to pull back from disaster, even when we went careening close to the brink. But each time we survived, we edged ever closer to the chasm.

Things will change over time, that’s for sure. History goes through cycles. The good will decay, but the bad and the nightmares also don’t last forever.

We’re already in a dark, scary tunnel, but at some point, we’ll also come to the end. But how hard and scary would the ride be? Can we get out without crashing and causing lots of pain and suffering?

A hard crash, where we then have to pick up our burnt and broken bodies to crawl painfully to the light at the end of the tunnel, would leave scars that would take generations to heal.

It’s certainly incredibly difficult to change culture, but it’s possible, with the right kind of leadership. But it also takes those being led to accept the need and the imperative to change; only then can a new, healthier culture can be born.

It’s been done before, in countries and in companies – and it can be done again. - FMT

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.