Ocean of Change

WHEN Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak met his Facebook friends in Kuching recently, he told them that one of the books that have influenced him is the international bestseller, Blue Ocean Strategy. In this book on business strategy, the image of the blue ocean is used to describe the "uncontested market space" where the opportunities for profitable growth are unlimited, in contrast to the red ocean where "bloody competition" severely limits commercial success. Like many other business books, the illustrative list of case studies that illuminates the success of the strategy comes from the business world. But this has not limited attempts to apply its principles in repositioning non-commercial institutions such as museums and public libraries. In fact, for the prime minister, it is a management strategy that can be adopted and applied in transforming government as it is about thinking out of the box. Indeed, as applying the blue ocean strategy does not always require something new but simply a new way of doing things, this has rightly been a focus of many of the initiatives under the actionable framework of the Government Transformation Programme. In the case of the National Key Results Area on crime, for example, where the target is to reduce street crime by 20 per cent and the overall crime index by five per cent, the strategy since last year has been to boost police presence, not by increasing recruits, but by reassigning administrative tasks to civilian staff and, thereby, releasing those who had hitherto been desk-bound for beat patrols.

As in this case of curbing crime, all the initiatives under the Blue Ocean Strategy announced by the prime minister on Saturday have leveraged on untapped resources and potential, such as mobilising soldiers to replace the police in patrolling the borders, training policemen in underused army training centres, rehabilitating petty criminals in military camps, or growing crops on idle army land. An additional advantage of making use of the existing human and physical resources in such a manner is that it cuts across government agencies and avoids the sometimes wasteful division of labour and duplication of resources. Moreover, when it is cheaper by RM281 million to build five rehab centres in army camps instead of five new prisons and the bill for training 10,000 constables in military facilities is RM600 million less, this is clearly an added incentive for using the strategy. Considering the heavy fiscal weight of public expenditure and the need to narrow the budget deficit, any strategy that maximises output and minimises cost is a good strategy.