Singapore and Resilience

After getting some distractions out of the way, it is time to hit the blogging trail again.

A while back, Steve DeAngelis at the Enterprise Resilience Management Blog posted on the resilience of Singapore. His first post, from August 25 titled "Singapore's Resilient Strategy" posited the following:

"No one can doubt that Singapore's economic miracle has become permanent. Its resilient strategy is positioning Singapore for an emerging future rather than trying to get the country to cling only to those sectors that made it successful in the past, like electronics and finance. It jump started its strategy by importing world-class scientists, building world-class facilities, and ensuring that its standards are as high as any around the globe. It's a great lesson in resiliency."

This conclusion was arrived at via a look at an article by Wayne Arnold in the New York Times. For more on Steve's train of thought, visit the full post as titled above.

In response to some feedback by Singaporeans and others, Steve did a second post on August 29 titled "Singapore Revisited" to further look at his initial post and highlight the feedback towards further enhancing the discussion:

My blog concerning Singapore's Resilient Strategy has received more comments than most posts. One pundit, Nimble Books Publisher W. Frederick Zimmerman, decided Singapore's is a fragile not a resilient strategy. He wrote:

Unfortunately for Singapore, it is a classic example of a single point of failure. I respect Steve D. & Enterra, but in the proliferated 21st Century, resilient assets must be distributed assets. Singapore, by definition, isn’t.

Zimmerman's point apparently refers to Singapore's small size and location -- a geostrategic fact of life learned last year by New Orleans. As noted below, however, geographical location has good points as well as bad. My entire point was that Singapore is trying to expand into more economic sectors (beyond electronics and finance) in order to avoid setting itself up for an economic "single point" failure.

See the rest of the post for the Singaporean perspective. Later, however, in a more recent post from September 13, Steve goes a bit further on the distributed assets concept and this is where I want to focus. Coincidentally, on September 13 I was attending the 2006 Asia Pacific Logistics Federation gathering where I heard a Mr. Roger Lee speak. Mr. Lee is the Director of the Singapore Institute of Materials Management in addition to being an active entrepreneur and book writer, but focused his presentation on "The Evolution and Application of Knowledge Management in Logistics."

Having at the point already read Mr. DeAngelis's first two posts, I began to realize that most people were focusing on Singapore's reslience in terms of its physical presence--Singapore the island, Singapore the people. However, as I have covered thoroughly in an explanation of my FAR Matrix (Flows-Architectures-Resiliency), we can frame the four flows Thomas Barnett covers in describing facets of globalization--economic, political, security, and people--in terms of the five architectures of high performance supply chains--physical, financial, informational, relational, and innovational.

Amongst the above five architectures, most of those responding to Steve focused on the physical architectures, which are admittedly hard to distribute outside of Singapore as an island unless it is buying large swaths of similar land in strategic locations within proximate reach. But looking at the other four architectures, these can be much more easily distributed and Steve touches on distributing informational architecture in the example of data back-up centers. But Singapore can just as easily distribute its financial architecture, as well as relational and innovational architecture.

These architectures can easily house the distributed "DNA" of the physical architecture models Singapore has put in place so that, in the case Singapore the island is significantly impacted by natural disaster, these architectures can refeed the post-disaster area with the distributed financial, informational, relational and innovational resources required to rebuild. In this case, we are not focused on Singapore's resilience as an island but as a replicative concept around the world--Singapore as a resilient concept or idea--that transcends the physical fixation on the island's fragility.

As in the FAR Matrix, an Enterprise Resilience Framework as Enterra intends to deploy is the glue that brings these architectures in sync, and which houses the triggers that would signal which distributed resources to redeploy to a post-disaster Singaporean island. At the same time, those utilizing the island with regularity as a supply chain node/hub would be assisted in knowing where, when and how to reroute supply chain flows via linkage to this ERM.

Whether Singapore will be able to eventually transcend the physical constraints of being an island state is to be seen with time. But after the presentation by Mr. Lee, I believe Singapore does have the minds and talent that could eventually push it in that direction as a coordinated strategy.

Comments

[China Law Blog]

A number of my firm's high tech and biotech clients either love Singapore or are looking there. They view it as a nice place to be, cheaper than HK, and less problematic (with respect to language, IP, etc.) than China. Almost a perfect middle ground.