Meritocracy as a Double Edged Sword to Entrepreneurship

Contributed by BL

It is often said by many in Singapore that we works on a meritocratic system.Meritocracy is often interpreted as a type of society where wealth, income and social status are decided by fair competition. This rests on the basis that the winners deserve their resulting advantage. If you want to be philosophical about this point, the system advocates the connotation of social darwinism, i.e. it is the survival of the fittest. Meritocracy cannot be the sole driver for any society, because it would lead to an aggressively competive societies with large inequality of income and wealth, as contrasted with societies which promote equality. Oftentimes, most governments, like Singapore balances egalitarianism with meritocracy to ensure that the gap between the rich and poor.

The insight I want to draw is not on the political implications of such a system. That aspect has been discussed in depth not only by journalists, political scientists and even politicians. The differentiation lies in how it impacts entrepreneurship and influences the view of the majority on the views on enterprise. Let me draw a link on how the entrepreneurial culture can be skewed away from a meritocratic system.

By inference, meritocracy advocates competition because each individual will strive towards acquiring more wealth, income and social status. All it takes for the individual is to adapt to the rules of the game and exploit the loopholes that will grant him or her maximum advantage of the system. To some, that can be considered entrepreneurial, but I termed that opportunistic. That’s where the real difference lies. Entrepreneurship also supports competition except that it requires a few key ingredients: (i) a risk taking mentality, (ii) passion and hard work, (iii) credibility and (iv) adaptability . In order to maximize the returns from a gamer’s point of view, there are times where an individual will exploit the meritocratic system that will contradict credibility and hard work.

Let’s use the example of graduates and I often hear that Singaporean students are “muggers” only and they are just studying for the sake of examinations. I granted that fact, but from what I saw in the world class universities, it is not very different. The difference is that I can see a higher percentage of students in the top universities are studying for their passion (and that percentage is about 30-40%). That’s why we get a lot of students joining clubs and societies for the sake of CCA points, but not putting their heart and soul to pursue their passions. It is precisely the double edged sword that the system allows a “by hook or by crook” mentality that is interpreted by perception as entrepreneurship.

We are having a shortage of entrepreneurs because most people have sacrificed both risk taking and passion to trade for the social contract. Here is a hypothesis which I have that may explain the shortage of entrepreneurs. We often look to US as both a meritocratic and entrepreneurial system that has a high rate of venture creation and destruction. The appetite for risk taking equals the meritocratic attitude, but if you look closely, these systems are highly unstable, because you can get a higher chance to get situations like the Enron and Worldcom scandal and the famous Schon scandal (a science sham) blowing right to your face. In those cases, people traded credibility in exchange for more benefits because they exploited the meritocratic system. Perhaps, the Silicon Valley is the anomaly and it propagated entrepreneurship to take precedence. If you trace the historical roots of entrepreneurs, they are always few and far between. Here is where my hypothesis comes in. My conjecture is that entrepreneurship and innovation will always be in the lower half of the mark and it is actually normal to find a shortage of entrepreneurs because they incorporate a set of attributes which may be counter intuitive to the system itself. As a matter of fact, does that mean that only a selected few will become entrepreneurs because of their attitude? I don’t have an answer to that question.

It is in our nature to take the path of the shortest resistance. Being an entrepreneur requires the individual to take the path that is not shortest. I will use an analogy in physics which best illustrates this idea. The principle of least resistance in physics suggests that all particles take the shortest route in the classical world, i.e. the physical world which we see day to day. Most people in society will naturally do that so that they will acquire the status and wealth without too much effort. However, if you go to the quantum world, according to Feynman, he showed that the particle at a certain scale (in the nano scale) can take paths which do not adhere to the classical one. In that world, the particle can take the “quantum leap” and performs all kinds of phenomena which are counter intuitive, like quantum teleportation and tunnelling. Take that analogy to the entrepreneurs, it means that you would not take the same path as most people and that’s why there are so few and far-between entrepreneurs with passion.

Of course, we should continue to advocate entrepreneurship with common sense in a meritocratic system and that’s how we improve our society economically and socially.

Acknowledgement: The thoughts in this article is inspired by a comment with Mervin Chai, Chairman of NUS Entrepreneurship Society during a discussion together with Leong Hanyang.

Technorati Tags: Meritocracy, Entrepreneurship, Singapore

Updates: The article has been featured in the blog e pur si muove which means “And yet it does move” in Latin, muttered by Galileo Galilei when he left the session of the Inquisition that had found him guilty after a trial for “grave suspicion of heresy”. Well, as he pointed out about the use of analogies of physics, and I am apologetic to say, “Well, this is what I tend to do due to my past life as a qualified theoretical physicist.” and tomorrow.sg.

No related posts.