This is a new column. How long it stays depends on how interested you are in making us competitive again. In making Malaysia, Malaysian companies and Malaysian citizens winners again. Let me begin...

A baby cries. Wearing a party hat, surrounded by presents and balloons, it should have been a happy scene. But no, the baby cries. Trust the Americans to excel in such dramatic irony.  That’s the picture on the cover of December’s Time. The headline reads “The Decade From Hell”. Trust the Americans to also excel in hyperbole. Surely there have been worse.

Surely the 1910s or 1940s —  decades of the two World Wars — were more calamitous. Economically, especially as we emerged from the global downturn, this is nothing like the Depression of the 1930s. Nonetheless, there is more than a germ of truth to the headline, especially for us here in Malaysia.

If one were to be honest, this has been truly an unimpressive decade, probably the worst since we became an independent nation. If not a hellish decade, the first decade in this millennium represented a decade of lost opportunities for Malaysians.

This was supposed to be the Age of Asia. And many Asian countries have done very well. China and India continue to hum through the global economic crisis. The United Arab Emirates clearly put themselves on the world map, as well as put a world map on their shores. Indonesia is now talked about as the next I in BRIC.

In Malaysia, however, we lost out. I applaud Second Finance Minister Datuk Seri Ahmad Husni Hanadzlah for his pronouncement late last year that “our economy has been stagnating in the last decade. We have lost our competitive edge to remain the leader of the pack in many sectors of the economy. Our private investment has been steadily in decline”.

You are thinking: “Fix the country by asking questions?”
Remember the story of a race of hyper-intelligent beings who built a computer named Deep Thought to calculate the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything? When the answer was revealed to be “42”, Philip Dent, the main character in Douglas Adam’s cult science fiction comedy The Hitchikers’ Guide To The Galaxy had to venture to the furthest reaches of the universe to figure out the question to which this number is the answer.

It is meant to be a funny book, but the underlying philosophy is a deeply serious one. Failure to find and ask the right questions can result in horribly tragic consequences.

Last year, Robert S McNamara died. Some of you may recall that he was one of the elite  — “the best of the brightest” — around US Presidents John F Kennedy and Lyndon Bird Johnson. He was also the chief architect of how America conducted the Vietnam War. Mr McNamara once wrote that he and others had not asked the five most basic questions:

•    Was it true that the fall of South Vietnam would trigger the fall of all Southeast Asia?
•    Would that have constituted a grave threat to the West’s security?
•    What kind of war — conventional or guerrilla — might develop?
•    Could we win it with US troops fighting alongside the South Vietnamese?
•    Should we not know the answers to all these questions before deciding whether to commit troops?

In failing to ask these, an estimated 3.5 million people (equivalent to the whole of Singapore today, including their imported foreigners) died. More than 30 years after the Americans fled, Vietnam is only now successfully rejoining the world economy.
(I should add that Vietnam is fast replacing Malaysia as a preferred destination for manufacturing!)

This article marks the start of a series of thought-provoking questions I will pose to get us all stimulated about finding solutions.

Now back to 42. If Arthur Dent were to ask me, my question to the anwer would be: “At what age should one contemplate giving rather than taking as a guiding philosophy in life?” That’s right, 42.

On that note, there are several silver linings in the past decade. There is a stated national aspiration to become a high-income economy and socially, a truly plural 1Malaysia community. Malaysian enterprises are becoming better. YTL became global. Genting ventured abroad. Malaysian banks, from Public Bank to RHB, went regional. Our GLCs transformed, notably CIMB and Malaysia Airlines. Seeing that many of our leaders (in the private and public sectors) are in their 40s, and if indeed 42 is the age at which one learns to care more about giving back, the next decade is looking decidedly better.

With this, Vincent Chin will conclude his 42 column. He will return occasionally next year to comment on the latest developments in management and leadership.His previous columns in Management@Work can be found under the Management section at www.theedgemalaysia.com

This article appeared in Manager@work, the monthly management pullout of The Edge Malaysia, Issue 790, Jan 25-31, 2010