[Blasterlord2]

Imagine Singapore as a company A with monopoly over manufacturing of product Z (IT talent).

When company A foresee there is a growth in demand and current production capacity cannot meet demand, it has 2 choices:

1) Add more lines for short term demand (aka increase University intake) or build new plants if new demand will remain or grow (aka new IT focus university)
2) If don't want to add more lines due to whatever reason, another way is to buy from competitor (import talents from other countries) and pass on as your product. Normally this is not recommended since bulk of the money from the new demand is not made by the company A but competitor

Now, if you are the boss of company A, if previously your manager has been using choice 2 for whatever reason, after 1 year, you would probably asked "Why are we still letting our competitor make the earning instead of us earning the money by adding more lines/build new plants"..

Fast track to 1 year later (don't even need 15 years), if your manager still stick with choice 2, then it is time to fire the manager since he/she is not acting of the best interest of the company.

Of course, some might say manager stick to choice 2 because competitor product is better than ours.. If I am the boss, manager lose his/her job immediately because isn't it his/her job to make the best product. If competitor continue to make better product than us, then it is only a matter of time before company A loses it's monopoly to competitor.

The real problem here is that the 'boss' is not really looking to grow the company, but to enrich himself. Just look at Motorola and HP. Their former CEOs made hell lot of mistakes by selling away their most profitable assets just so that in the short-term it looks good to stakeholders. They took the high salary and bonus and moved on while leaving the companies a shadow of their glory past.

This is very different from the founders who took good care to nurture the companies because they saw them as their babies. Very similar to Singapore now.