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National Transformation from a Theory of Everything based on Advanced Simplicity and Sophistication Emeritus Professor Han Chun Kwong Phd (Cambridge)

Faculty of Economics and ManagementUniveristi Putra Malaysia

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Han Chun Kwong, Professor (VK6) from the Faculty of Economics and Management, Universiti Putra Malaysia, has a PhD in information technology from Cambridge University’s Engineering Department. Since 2012,

Han has been Emeritus Professor, Techno India University. His managerial experiences include stints in Multimedia

Development Corporation (Borderless Marketing), Centre for Research on Information Management and Policy

Action, and Electronic University at Universiti Putra Malaysia. He played a key role in government policy initiatives

including the drafting of national and state-level ICT blueprints. He is the Founding President of Customer

Relationship Management and Contact Centre Association of Malaysia, and Management Science/Operations

Research Society of Malaysia. He was President, Association of Asian Pacific Operational Research Societies from

2007 to 2009. His research papers have appeared in key local and international journals.

National Transformation from a Theory of Everything based on Advanced Simplicity and Sophistication

Postgraduate Studies MBE speaks to Professor Han Chun Kwong, senior professor from the Faculty of Economics and Management

University Putra Malaysia, about approaching national transformation from the perspective of “theory of everything”.

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Four years ago, the government announced it was taking a new approach by applying the “transformation” tag to all its initiatives. The Government Transformation Programme was initiated in 2009, followed by the New Economic Model and Economic Transformation Programme (and subsequently political and rural transformation) in 2010; and recently, the Transformation Budget 2012 announced the National Transformation Policy. Actually, “transformation” has been a recurring pervasive principle among all the Malaysian public sector initiatives — beginning with the Multimedia Super Corridor in the mid-1990s, then the knowledge-based and innovation economies, and subsequently the regional development corridors in the 2000s. My professorial inaugural lecture in 2003 - entitled “Transformation or Business as Usual?” - was about transformation at the national-level mega project through the

Q1. In your abstract in several international conferences, you say that the Government has been taking a radically new approach to national transformation

in the past three years. How is their approach different from yesteryear’s?

At this stage, transformation can be perceived as at the inception stage; implementing the various programmes will be a long continuous journey to achieve the target of a developed country by 2020. Inception is characterized by acts of birth, evolution, inspiration and illumination.

Under the leadership of Dato’ Seri Najib Razak, affirmative action has been re-evaluated. It is now deemed obsolete and needs to be demolished. Many oppressive colonial-era laws, such as the ISA, were repealed. Liberalizing reforms were made with the strategic intent of achieving 1Malaysia in order to promote a multi-ethnic Malaysia. Various transformation initiatives were introduced to break out from the middle-income trap.

Transformation implies drastic and critical major changes. It is a long-term progressive journey to 2020. The recent re-election of the Barisan Nasional enables the various transformation programmes to be continued and reap the benefits to the nation over the next few years.

Pemandu, with the help of an international consulting company, designed the new transformation model, which we know as Vision 2020. To help the public understand transformation policy and programmes, Pemandu has been heavily educating the public through various media channels. In the ELLTA conference in December 2012, his presentation was “Again, Transformation or

Business as Usual?”

Multimedia Super Corridor, state-level K-ICT Blueprint in Penang and industry-level outsourcing and contact centres. The concepts sounded radical and new because implementation occurred in a conventional manner - given the extant institutional framework – and success was on a modest scale, rather than great.

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Q2. What is your view on national transformation?

Q3. You’ve chosen the movie Cloud Atlas as the framework to explain your theory. Why?

The strategic intent of the National Transformation Initiative was to ensure that the country will achieve the status of a developed nation by 2020. The transformation programmes were developed for a time frame of 10 years.

Presently, we are at the inception period. This conclusion is based on the recent 2012 annual progress reports, in which the initial successes were benchmarked against the achievement of KPIs and set targets.

“Theory of everthing” (ToE) is a concept that had been used in the management studies and social sciences in the last two decades. However, whenever I write or speak about the need of a theory of everything for National

Transformation, people get confused about the terminology. So I created a new slide to inform people through the movie “Cloud Atlas” based on David Mitchell’s 2004 novel and released in November 2012 via the reference

Eakin, E., (2012). Cloud Atlas’s Theory of Everything, The New York Review of Books, 2 November.

The theoretical model of Pemandu that underpinned the transformation programmes is the “Doing and

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Q4. How can academic institutions play their roles more effectively in producing thought leaders - as opposed to

robotic followers - for the nation?

Being” or Yin Yang Model. But practitioners implementing the programmes are influenced by their prior experiences and theories-in-use besides espousing the Doing and Being principles. As an academician, I offer another way of seeing and doing transformation using a ToE based on simplicity and sophistication.

The extant national transformation model of Doing and Being or Yin Yang is a model of simplicity. As Malaysian academicians, we have a significant role to provide thought leadership in developing a theory of everything by combining the Doing and Being with a sophisticated model based on an understanding the complexity of human behavior.

I am providing a model of sophistication based on an enhanced framework of critical practice. We define critical practice

Thought leadership is a management terminology first coined by Joel Kurtzman in 1994 when he was founding editor-in-chief of the Booz Allen Hamilton magazine, Strategy & Business. Kurtzman was also once the Editor-in-Chief of the Harvard Business Review. There are 2 categories of thought leadership, namely academic thought leadership and practitioner thought leadership.

To provide thought leadership, we first need to be critical, per

as an iterative reflexive process, firstly by developing knowledge-for-understanding from a sophisticated model of reality based on the practitioners’ thoughts, actions, processes and structures.

Secondly, we provide a critique of underpinning assumptions and presumptions whereby the constraining conditions of the status quo and emancipation become knowable and explicit, that is, knowledge-for-evaluation.

Thirdly, we re-create, re-define, re-design, re-imagine, re-invent and re-vision the pragmatic, doable and implementable programmes from knowledge-for-action. This theory of everything provides a new vigorous theoretical model to review and redesign the practical methodology for implementation success of the national transformation programmes.

Note that a ToE is generally a sophisticated model, and hence using any of the ToEs have been difficult, even in the West. To the best of our knowledge, there is no user in Malaysia or any other Asian countries of any of the theories in our ToE.

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“ The strategic intent of the

National Transformation

Initiative was to ensure that

the country will achieve the status

of a developed nation by 2020

my definition of critical theory and practice above. Doing and Being of the Pemandu’s Transformation Programmes is a model of simplicity. Doing and Being needs to be complemented by the sophisticated model of being

critical. Being critical can only be accomplished by understanding one’s own interpretive schemes or model, social intelligence, emotional intelligence and cultural intelligence, and the institutional structures that enable implementable actions.

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Q5. A recurring grouse is that Malaysian students

don’t have a global mindset. What’s a short term and long-term remedy to this

conundrum?Q6. It’s been said that academicians live in a ivory tower detached from the real world. What is your

response to that?

The education system has been about getting all As. Hence students focus on academic excellence, rather than nurturing an interest that is not directly to their examinations. But today, social media provides an easy vehicle to develop a global mindset.

Getting promoted in the academic world is based on getting published in top-ranked academic journals. But business schools need both professors in the traditional academic sense and practice professors, a title currently used

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At GeGF 2012, Prof Han explained how he combined the Korean idea of “Advanced Simplicity” from Prof Sung Joo Park, Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) with a Model of Sophistication based on Critical Practice. Korea has been ranked No. 1 in e-Government in the world.

in some top business schools. Practice professors are high-level practitioners in the business community who would share their experiences in the real business world, rather than concepts from textbooks.

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“We need both professors in

the traditional academic sense and practice professors