[Vnbiz] Leadership -- Policy making

Mon Jun 25 21:27:26 PDT 2007

>
> CACC and anh Hoanh,
>

I'm a little confused about these grand topics.

You mentioned "training your hearts to be right".  I cannot agree more -
it's likely impossible for one to become a great leader without a great
heart.  My questions, however, are:

- How to do it? (ie how to "train our hearts to be right")  With this
question, I actually bypass another question of how to define "right" and
"wrong" in this increasingly complicated world.  Apart from Buddhism, is
there any other ideology that addresses this matter?  We all know that it's
easier said than done (your message below made this point so clear - what
matters is the means to achieve the goal).  Any one in this forum can share
good/reliable literature on the topic so that we all can learn how to deal
with our hearts the right way?  What I mean is the knowledge that has been
achieved through high quality researches and studies instead of
personal/individual experience.  I must say that Anh Craig has set a great
example on this.  He has load of good info and is always willing to share it
with those who are interested to learn.

- Will it work? (assuming that a leader has a perfectly right heart, is this
a guarantee that his/her citizens will not suffer from policies made under
his/her leadership?)  Was Ho Chi Minh a great leader?  Did he have a
compassionate heart?  And did land reform happen during his time?  Is it
adequate to use "emotion" as a key factor to assess policy's impacts on
people's lives?

That comes to the next question that I'd like to ask.  When we discuss about
the grand/complicated topic of "governance" or "management" or "quan ly nha
nuoc" whatever you call it, what should be the right approach? When I say
the "right approach" I mean an  approach that can shed lights on the
problems we are facing.  Is emotion a sufficient solution for governance
problems?

You've mentioned the needs to have citizens voices/feedbacks on policies.  I
agree wholeheartedly.  But again, how to make make this works is a different
story.  Experience from a number of "public participation" or "grassroots
engagement" projects show us that sometime we need to rethink whether our
definition of "people's needs" are actually what the people needs.  Plenty
of examples are available, but I don't want to get into details here.

I guess that no one would deny the bad quality that Vietnam education is
delivering.  Just wonder how many among 300 thousand students are actually
"suffering"?  Does one suffer when one intentionally cheat?  In other words,
are the students suffering from the system, or are they reacting to the way
the system is set?  Is there anyone who happen to know a good survey on
pupils/students' perspective?  The example of pain caused by touching finger
in boiling water is a close example.  But I guess that biology and politics
are two different areas of sciences that may not always intertwined.

Lien

----- Original Message -----
> *From:* Tran Dinh Hoanh <tdhoanh at gmail.com>
> *To:* vnbiz at vietlinks.net
> *Sent:* Monday, June 25, 2007 1:37 AM
> *Subject:* [Vnbiz] Leadership -- Policy making
>
> [ Vietnam Business Forum ]
>
>  ------------------------------
>
> Dear CACC,
>
> This message is prom ted by the issue involving the "graduation test" this
> year, but I want to bring it here as a separate management issue, so that we
> do not confuse ourselves.
>
> One thing that we have seen repeatedly in public policies in Vietnam over
> the years is the ignoring of public suffering--ingoring the people's
> suffering when a policy is implemented.  Let 's go over some big examples
> that everyone knows:
>
> The land reform and dau to policy in the North in 1945 and later:  The
> goal of creating equality in land ownership was a very good goal.  But the
> dau to policy led to millions of farmers tortured and tens of thousands of
> deaths.
>
> The economic zone policy in the post-1975 South had the goal of developing
> the countryside and relieving the pressure on the urban area.  The forced
> immigration however made this policy a legendary misery event of post-war
> Vietnam.
>
> Along with the economic zone policy was the "danh tu san mai ban" (beating
> the merchants and the property owners) policy, which was supposed to
> eliminate economic abuses, but which broke many lives.
>
> When these polices were in effect, you could not tell them that they were
> wrong.  They would come up with "equality" and "abuse prevention"
> and "economic development" to tell you that those were correct polices and
> everyone just had to do it.  The horrendous errors and great pain and
> suffering of the people are only known and talked about many years later,
> when incredible damage has been inflicted and has affected more than one
> generation.
>
> What is the problem?  The problem is, first, the government tends to think
> that if we have a good *goal*, that would be the license for us to do
> anything we want.  Mind you, if you study criminology, you will realize that
> ALL serial killers have some very lofty reason to kill, such as "I serve God
> to cleanse the world of these sinners."  The *goal* really means little,
> the real thing is the *means* you use to achieve your goal.  Getting rich
> is a good goal, but we all know that there are many ways to get rich, some
> of them are wholly unacceptable, such as robbery.
>
> Second, the pain and suffering of the people are usually NOT taken into
> consideration at all.  Once someone high up in the government thinks that
> something should be done in a certain way, they just do it, even if hundreds
> of thousands of people will be hurt by their decision.  They don't care.
> Their goal is the only thing that counts.
>
> From a management point of view, this is simply stupid, because when you
> are insensitive to pain, you put yourself in danger.  "Pain" is a kind of
> natural feedback for you to know that you are being damaged and you need to
> stop it.  Say, your finger touches boiling water by accident, it immediate
> sends pain signal to your nerves, and the nerves immediate orders the arm
> muscles to pull the finger out of the water.  When you cannot feel pain
> anymore, you are in constant danger of having your fingers, arms or legs
> chopped off accidentally.
>
> In business management, even if you have a God-sent plan for your
> business, but if the plan hurts one third of your employees so badly, your
> company will have a 90-percent chance of going under.  The same effect
> exists in governance, except that the government doesn't go bankrupt and the
> effect cannot be measured immediately in quantity (like money).  So the
> government's mistake is always allowed to go its full course until many
> years later.
>
> In policy making, one of the bad model of policy makings is "The Rational
> Model."  This model seeks the best policy in theory, however, it is not very
> realistic. One has to account for the many constraints reality holds, which
> is not part of such a model.  (Please see Wikipedia at
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_policy#Policy_Formulation).
>
> One of the most significant contraints in policy making is the potential
> damage (pain & suffering) that a policy will have on a group of citizens.
> As a matter of management efficiency, inflicting pain on your citizens is
> always bad.  Unhappy citizens are always bad for the management of the
> country.  As a matter of political philosophy, government exists to serve
> people, not to inflict pain and suffering at will.  All these reasons demand
> that when a policy is formulated, measures have to be incorporated into
> policy, to make the implementation less convenient and less hurtful to the
> citizens as much as possible.  That is why citizens have to be prepared and
> supported well when the government must move them away to do some major
> development projects like building a dam (and not simply forcing them away
> without equate support like the economic zone policy).
>
> You cannot sit in an office and come up with some theoretical solution and
> simply push it, regardless how much pain it creates to your people.  If you
> run a company, your company will definitely go bankrupt very soon.  If you
> run a government, you won't go bankrupt, but your insensitivity to pain as a
> natural protective feedback will blind you to your own mistake and, over the
> years, one after another wrong policy will keep the country poor and
> backward forever.
>
> Citizen's pain and suffering (and citizen's comfort) in dealing with a new
> policy is a critical element of public policy formulation.  In development
> lingo, we call it "stakeholder's interest."  The stakeholders in our case
> are the students, including the 300 thousand flunking students, what has the
> government done to protect their interest, to reduce their pain?  (Or are
> saying that, "Well, only 300 thousand.  We are not talking about 3 million,
> are we?  Besies, they are kids.  Kid's suffering doesn't count"? )
>
> In the above, I use the technical lingo of the policy-making science.  Now
> let me switch gear to a more fundamental language that I have been repeating
> many times on leadership.  To be a great leader, to see clearly what you do,
> you need to train your heart to be compassionate.  You heart has to be so
> compassionate to your people that the first thing it asks in the policy
> making is ALWAYS, "Who will be hurt by my policy?  What should I do to
> reduce their hurt while still achieving my objective?"
>
> If you train your heart to be "right" so that it will always be
> compassionate about other people and always be concerned about other
> people's welfare before anything else, you will always be able to see
> clearly the potential problems of your policy and will always come up
> with the right policy--the policy that will give you what you want while
> making everyone happy.
>
> Train your heart to be right.
>
> Have a great day!
>
> Hoanh
>
>
>
> --
> Tran Dinh Hoanh, LLB, JD
> Washington DC
>
> ------------------------------
>
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