7/25/2006

singtel may be looking for foreign ceos

In the paper's headline today, Singtel may seek foreign CEO. This is probably the wisest and most sensible thing to do since there is no local talents left after Hsien Yang vacated his seat. He was there for 12 years and was too busy expanding the business that no one was groomed to succeed him. Don't they have any good local talents left? I did asked earlier about Ngiam Tong Dow's criticism of getting foreign CEOs to run local companies. I think he was joking. We truly, really, don't have that kind of talents that can earn US$200 mil a year. See, talent is measured by how much one can command. We have seen so much praise to a local talent who earned peanuts. The second notch international talent should be asking for US$50 to 60 million. Third notch maybe US$30 mil, and 4th to 5th notch maybe asking fot US$10 mil. These are still far more talented than all our local CEOs who are talented only up to US$3-5 mil. So maybe we get a 6th to 7th notch foreign CEOs should do the trick. It is actually quite disappointing that after so many years we still don't have top notch CEOs. Not even in the top 5 levels. It is high time we employed someone who is really top notch and pay him US$200 million. Then we can showcase to the world that we have world best top notch CEOs. For the time being we shall be content with our 10th notch local CEOs and quickly replaced them when some foreign 6th or 7th notch CEOs are available. But better check which universities they graduated from, if they did graduated as claimed.

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