In a crisis, don’t bank on groupthink for a way out; Thrice during the Cold War, decisions by a single leader turn out to be the correct ones

June 17, 2014 Leave a comment

PUBLISHED JUNE 12, 2014

In a crisis, don’t bank on groupthink for a way out

Thrice during the Cold War, decisions by a single leader turn out to be the correct ones

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HARISH MEHTA

Playing a key role: Mr Lee (right) with Mr Deng in September 1988. Mr Lee, on a visit to Beijing in November 1980, had told the Chinese leader that in order for Asean diplomacy at the UN to be credible, Asean must not be seen to be restoring Pol Pot to Cambodia. – SPH FILE PHOTO

ARE global diplomatic crises resolved more effectively by interventions of powerful political personalities, or by interventions of bureaucracies? In other words, is presidential or prime ministerial decision-making more influential than bureaucratic groupthink?

Three Cold War crises show both approaches at work: the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, US President Richard Nixon’s Triangular Diplomacy with the Soviet Union and China to initiate nuclear arms control treaties with Moscow and diplomatic normalisation with Beijing in the 1970s, and the role of Singapore in resolving the Cambodian conflict in 1978-1991.

The Cuban Missile Crisis, a 13-day confrontation between the US and the Soviet Union, began when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev secretly placed nuclear missiles in Cuba, which the US quickly detected. US President John F Kennedy employed bureaucratic groupthink in the early stages of the escalating crisis.

The Executive Committee of the National Security Council (Ex Comm, consisting of Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Attorney General and the president’s brother Robert F Kennedy, and others) met regularly to advise the president.

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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