I wrote my speech before that fateful day. There will be a choppy time ahead. Every flying aircraft can turn out to be a devastating missile and not just in America. Human ingenuity must find counters to this. The answers may not be foolproof but enough for life and air travel to carry on as it was, but with time lags and higher costs for security. We must assume that the terrorist organisation or organisations capable of such complex planning and co-ordination will have other operatives already in place in America and other countries, to hit again after the inevitable punishment is inflicted upon their leaders and sponsors. Meanwhile the technological advances that are already globalising the world economy will continue notwithstanding such shocks. Therefore I have not re-written my speech.

This Forbes Global CEO conference is on entrepreneurship, technology and business leadership in the 21st century. I ask myself: What is the difference between these factors in the past and at present. In their fundamentals, I believe, neither entrepreneurship nor business leadership has changed. What has changed, and changed beyond recognition, is technology. Technology has required entrepreneurs and business leaders to think and act global. They cannot avoid collaborating with, or competing against, others internationally. An entrepreneur wins or loses in competition against all others in his line of business, whether they are national or foreign players, because all players will be able to enter his national domain and compete against him.

As long as competition was confined within national boundaries, each country was able to nurture its national champions, and they developed different styles of entrepreneurship and business leadership, resulting in different corporate cultures. This was what the Japanese did after 1868, during the Meiji Revolution. They learned from the west, especially from Germany, France, Britain and America, borrowed institutions, absorbed knowledge, copied and adapted corporate practices, and developed manufacturing capabilities in textiles, steel and arms. By the 2nd World War they were able to produce aircraft carriers, fighter planes and bombers to become a world-class fighting machine. They also developed their own corporate structures and culture.

In today’s globalised environment brought about by the IT revolution and WTO, is this now possible? I believe it is infinitely more difficult for nations to create incubators for nurturing such national champions. The Koreans were following the Japanese model, but found they were already late. Now they have to restructure their chaebols in the aftermath of the Asian financial crisis. And several chaebols have taken in foreign partners or been bought over. Transportation, communication technology and IT have made for an integrated global marketplace under WTO. It is now easier to develop national champions in collaboration with world champions. This presents deep dilemmas to countries like China and India. How do they build a strong auto industry? Can they ever build an aircraft industry when the Japanese have not succeeded in doing so? Can they build a computer hardware industry to catch up with Japan and the US? Perhaps, with the inputs from Taiwan. Can they build an IT software industry? Maybe, as in Bangalore, because this sector is not yet so deeply entrenched although it will be no easy task to catch up with Microsoft.

It should now be clear to Europeans and Japanese that the American corporate model is the most productive and competitive. A study of US companies and how they have come back after losing ground to the Japanese and Germans shows that the top American companies have found the way to survive competition. The US Treasury and Federal Reserve Bank have also shown how a country should run its economy, with a level playing field and more competition between all players. Return on investments is measured separately for each section of a company. The Americans encourage enterprise and competition and prevent monopolies through strong anti-trust laws. The smallest upstart can topple the most established giant. The biggest change has been brought about by the globalised capital market. Big global fund managers allocate their monies so that capital goes to the most productive and profitable companies world-wide. They also decide which start-up entrepreneur has the most viable products and gets venture capital support.

What has made the US economy pre-eminent is its entrepreneurial culture: entrepreneurs can raise capital from IPOs and from venture capital companies who also provide management support to bring their products to market. They, entrepreneurs and investors alike, see risk and failure as natural and necessary for success. When they fail they pick themselves up and start afresh. The Europeans and the Japanese now have the task of adopting these practices to increase their efficiency and competitiveness. But many American practices go against the grain of the more comfortable and communitarian cultural system of their own societies - the Japanese with life-long employment for their workers, the Germans with their unions having a say in management under co-determination, and the French with their government supporting the right of unions to pressure businesses from retrenching, by requiring large compensation to be paid to laid-off workers. These practices are rooted in a communitarian culture that makes for a more equitable and cohesive society. But they result in a less productive use of capital and labour, and in poorer profits and loss of competitiveness. Before globalisation the differences in competitiveness between American, Japanese and European corporate cultures and practices were masked and muffled because they were not competing across the board on a level playing field. Each had its own playing field favouring its own national companies.

IT and WTO have enabled all companies to compete in one global market. Unless European or Japanese national champions adopt American practices, they will lose out even in their home playing field. Like the Americans they will have to constantly reconfigure their corporate architecture and learn to exploit IT to achieve maximum productivity and competitiveness or they will lose. They have to make decisions on real time information. They have to maximise on their corporate knowledge base, cut transaction costs, reach out to and capture new markets, and make feasible new production and delivery systems. In other words, use technology, capital and labour to maximise returns on capital. The American model has proved that it is the most productive.

The adoption of the American model by European and Japanese companies will cause conflicts between the old systems that had worked well for them in the past, and the American system that will work better. In any case, the American model will be brought into European and Japanese playing fields by American companies. This will aggravate the conflict between the generations in Europe and Japan where older managers who are more set in their ways are usually unable or unwilling to change and adapt quickly. They will find themselves at odds with their younger colleagues, who are more familiar with IT, aware of what their American counterparts are successfully doing, and eager to catch up.

What do these changed circumstances mean for developing countries like Singapore? The going will be tougher. Singapore has been a good host to MNCs. We have used these global players as our partners to bring in new technology and create new products and services.

We want to encourage a vibrant and effervescent mix of companies, big and small, local and foreign, to compete with and complement each other, to grow, thrive and spawn. We have a good base to build on – the existing 6,000 MNCs and a growing number of strong local companies. We are investing in, and building, a strong science and technology base through manpower development and R&D promotion.

We have made co-investments with MNCs in promising projects. We have spent US$3.6 billion on our national science and technology plan and are investing another US$4 billion over the next 5 years. Our research centres funded under these plans have been active in collaboration with the MNCs. Corporate R&D centres have been set up that are responsible for world charter products, engaging in the entire spectrum of idea conceptualisation, R&D, prototyping, manufacturing and marketing to global markets. We have nurtured a venture capital industry. Many US venture capital firms have opened their Asian offices in Singapore. The VC industry in Singapore now manages a total fund size of about $11.5 billion. This money will move to where inventiveness is high in the region. To succeed, every developing country in East Asia has to boost its intellectual capital to nurture entrepreneurship and innovation.

We are nurturing new industry sub-clusters such as photonics, infocommunications and media. The most significant investments are in the Biomedical Sciences. After 15 years, the Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology (IMCB) has gathered over 200 scientists, 80% from overseas. They have made the IMCB into a leading intellectual hot-house for the Biomedical Sciences in Asia. We have also started the Genome Institute of Singapore and the Bioinformatics Institute to increase Singapore's capability in research. Several of the world’s top pharmaceutical giants have major manufacturing and research capabilities in Singapore. Eli Lilly has just announced the setting up of a systems biology research centre with some 50 high-level researchers. The Government plans to invest some $2 billion to promote industrial research and new ventures in biomedical sciences. All these will position us well for the era of genetic cures for illnesses.

Critical for the success has been our ability to attract talent. Many are from the developed countries and from China and India. Their diverse backgrounds and cultures help to spark off innovation and enterprise. Ample venture funds also serve to draw in technopreneurs from around the region to use Singapore as a springboard to the world.

Because English is our language of education and work, we have become an educational hub with our universities and tertiary institutes linked to MIT, Johns Hopkins, Wharton School of Business, Georgia Tech and the Technical University of Eindhoven. Insead and the Chicago Graduate School of Business have their Asia campuses in Singapore. Foreign talent was key to our past success, and will be even more so for our future. We have to attract and work with some of the best world players to develop new technology products and go into new ventures which will sell in the region and the whole world. We look for investors with vision to be our partners, to base their high-value activities and headquarters in Singapore and to manage their operations in the region and beyond. We have been the gateway for global companies to the region. Transportation and communication technology can extend our regional reach to a seven-hour flight radius from Singapore embracing a market of 2.8 billion people.

We recognise that we cannot just adopt and adapt technology developed elsewhere. We have to create new technology products and services and be the first to take it to market. We can do some by ourselves, as we did with Creative Technology’s Sound Blaster and the Nomad Jukebox, but we will have more success stories if we have partners to do it with us by using Singapore as a base. For example, HP’s Jornada handheld PC was entirely designed, developed and manufactured in Singapore and marketed worldwide from here. What we offer our partners is an ideal location for fast adaptation of new technology and a platform for innovation, test-bedding and deployment. There is a huge pool of talent in Asia with strong educational foundations in sciences and technology.

Of course, new technology’s greatest challenge is how to identify and develop potential winners. And this is difficult. There will be many failures. There will also be wrong bets, like the frenzied bidding for 3G licences in UK and Germany which went overboard and have saddled BT and Deutsche Telecom with heavy debts. Changing technology makes for a high stakes game which gives high rewards to CEOs who make the right bets, but CEOs cannot make right bets without making wrong ones too. Those who make more correct bets than wrong ones, are the real winners.

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