If Only...

By September this year, I would have spent 20 years of my life working for the present company. When I first started in the Brunei branch office, I was practically a nobody. Over the years I've gradually—and very painfully—climbed the ladder to reach where I am today. I hope I can keep it going, and with any luck, I may be able to reach the very top some day.

It's quite some experience having been from the very bottom to somewhere at the top. But because I've been at the bottom, I feel I'm better able to appreciate the problems experienced by the junior staff. Whenever I have to decide on anything concerning my staff, I can always think of how I myself would view the situation years ago. It's a little easier to put myself in their shoes, because I have been there before.

Having been through what they're going through now, I would like, if I can help it, to listen to whatever problems they may have, and then try my best to solve them. It all sounds very easy when viewed as an outsider from a distance, but when you're actually there and your decisions may have a big impact on others, sometimes it's not so easy and straightforward as you may think. And because I'm dealing with so many people, there will be times when some of them won't be happy with my decisions. After all, it's almost impossible to please everybody all the time.

One of these days, I will become too old and perhaps no longer effective to manage the office, and have to make way for the next generation. When that time comes, I hope I'm able to fade gracefully into the background. For whatever it's worth, I will try to share any useful experience with my successors.

But I have no doubt that there will be problems which I may fail to solve during my tenure. After all, I am not a perfect man. I can't solve every single problem. I can just hope to solve many of them. But the one thing I won't do is to start building up a pile of "ifs" to cover up my failures when I was the captain. For the more I try to justify my failures, the likelier will I look like an idiot!

Take this line as an example:

"There was not much pressure to abolish the system at that time but if I had continued my term up to the next general election, I would have eventually reviewed it (ISA) myself."

—Former Prime Minister Tun Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, referring to the Internal Security Act (ISA). [NST]

A very idiotic thing to say when it's obvious that practically everyone in the street's been against the Internal Security Act even long before he became the Prime Minister. So it's not exactly true that there "was not much pressure to abolish the system". In fact, in my opinion, the ISA was one of the main reasons for the results of the last general election in Malaysia.

Decidedly, Abdullah has done some good during his tenure as the Prime Minister of Malaysia, but he couldn't do much about the ISA. It is too late now to say "if I had continued...", because if he had done something about the ISA back then, he might have continued up to now as the Prime Minister. Throughout his tenure, he has been saying he needed more time to make changes. Till the end, he kept saying there's not enough time to perform. He did not realise that the rakyat eventually ran out of patience with his promises. But he dreams on—if I had continued my term... if only...