Business

Monday June 1, 2009

Rethinking our human resource development

Tableau Economique - A column by Steven C.M. Wong


The term suffers from careless usage and may no longer be a very significant concept

IF I had my way, we would all stop using the term human resource development and start speaking about people potential development instead.

Not only is the term human resource development impersonal and demeaning, a long-time criticism, but it has suffered from such careless usage that it may no longer even be a very significant concept now.

For example, many Malaysians today believe that if only this country had a lot more smart people (however defined), our problems would be solved. To their minds, we would be able to create world-beating products and services out of thin air and become enormously wealthy in the process.

This, however, borders on a virtual tautology: do countries become rich because of more smart people or are there more smart people because countries are rich?

Asked in another way, would the likes of Microsoft’s Bill Gates or Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin have been able to start and build their empires had they been Malaysians?

One cannot prove any counter-factual but it should be clear that to succeed, individual knowledge, skills and abilities alone are not enough. There has to be an enabling environment, one that encourages people to do well, and also one that generates opportunities and rewards good outcomes.

An enabling environment must incentivise people to do well. It cannot penalise them for innovation and hard work. It must equip and empower. Knowledge and abilities are taught as well as caught. It is not just about curriculums and syllabi but personal observations, reflection and debate. It produces opportunities for collaboration and competition.

People are not inanimate objects. They have dignity and desires shaped and driven by complex values, beliefs and attitudes. These are genetically inherited, formed in their homes, which is why families are so important; in schools, a favourite place for indoctrination; and in the workplace; social networks and political space.

A smart person can be driven to acts of great creativity, such as composing a great musical or writing the next great computer application software. That same person can commit devastating acts of destruction. The difference lies in his or her value, belief and attitudinal system; the more closed and dogmatic, the more potentially dangerous and vice versa.

There is nothing wrong with using human resources or human capital as intellectual abstractions. This is done all the time, notably by Nobel Laureate Gary Becker, to further our study and understanding of things. But when we unthinkingly try to reduce development into programmes, we run the risk of turning it into sad and oversimplified parody.

Human resource development today means different things to different people. To governments, it is about providing more schools, colleges, universities and training institutes. Being responsible for the masses, there is perhaps an understandable tendency to take a quantitative and programmatic approach to it.

For private employers, it is about being able to harness the talents of their employees to maximise their companies’ earnings and growth. They can talk all they want about markets, technology, pricing or integrated logistics, but at the end of the day, the ability to earn a buck or raise market share by a point has everything to do with people.

To educational institutes, it is about providing popular and highly profitable diplomas and degree courses. For private institutions, there is an emphasis on offering courses that are in high demand and that command high salaries. For public institutions, it may be more about offering courses that the government deems needful.

All of these are certainly parts of what is needed to develop people potential but taken separately, or even collectively, these approaches are incomplete and constraining. Ultimately, they lead to dissatisfaction with human resource development efforts. More to the point, they do not take into account the lessons of economic history.

In the good old days of central planning, the state wanted to develop people who excelled in what they did but were still subservient to the Soviet. Those who were bright but failed to adopt state-implanted values were consigned to the gulags or prison camps, which is where many artists, writers and scientists eventually ended up.

These states had many excellent people but the economic system was unsustainable and most had to evolve to become mixed market economies. The best and brightest subsequently migrated to the United States, Europe and the Middle East and many have made substantial contributions for themselves and their adopted countries.

The point is that even with the best educational institutions that the state can buy – and one wonders whether we are any where close to this – and even with the most massive state support, countries can and do fail. The idea that human resource development is what we need to reach the heights of economic achievement is woefully inadequate.

It is in our interest to quickly disabuse ourselves of simplistic notions about how one’s populace contributes to economic development. It may be a way-out thought but it could just be that people will be interested in developing themselves and contributing to the nation when strong social cohesion is forged and there is therefore a compelling reason to do so.

● Steven Wong is assistant director-general of the Institute of Strategic and International Studies (ISIS) Malaysia responsible for the bureau of economic policy studies.

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