CEO Forum 2014
A doctor’s training is useful
for crisis management:
Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad
When Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad
talks about crisis management, it pays
to listen. As Prime Minister of Malaysia
for twenty two years, and a politician for
almost as many years before that, Tun
Mahathir encountered problems that
ranged from individual concerns to national and international issues. Given
his background as a medical doctor, it
may not come as a surprise that his approach to problem-solving is that of a
physician’s: Diagnose and Remedy. In his
closing keynote speech at the Perdana
Leadership Foundation’s CEO Forum
2014, he explained his approach to the
1997/98 currency crisis:
“A doctor has an advantage in crisis
management. Our medical course consists of instructions which we should apply to handle a medical crisis that comes
before us. We have been told that the
way to manage a crisis is to be systematic. In handling a crisis, you must face
the facts and get the correct data. Once
you have all the data, you are well on
the way to diagnosing what is ailing the
Tan Sri Nik Mohamed, Tan Sri Vincent Tan and Dato’ Abdul Rauf with Tun Dr. Mahathir.
patient, the economy or the country.
When I became a Prime Minister,
I found this systematic procedure of
gathering information very useful in
order to deal with a crisis which is not
tangible. Of course, a classic one is the
1997/98 Asian Financial Crisis…I am
neither a finance man nor a banker, so I
needed to read a lot in order to understand the briefings given by the officers
concerned. You can be briefed on a lot of
things but if you do not understand the
subject, it is not going to be very useful.
So, how did we manage the crisis?
The traders were selling and buying the
Ringgit. Obviously if they could not sell
or buy our Ringgit, they could not play
around with it. How did we stop them?
Fortunately our Central Bank is very
powerful. It could direct the banks operating in Malaysia that no transaction
in our currency would be approved if the
money deposited or withdrawn was not
for a legal purpose. If the transaction
was to suppress the value of the Ringgit,
the transfer between the buyer and the
seller would not be allowed. Once we
stopped that, we could stop them from
playing around with our currency.
You have to know what is ailing the
economy. By understanding this, you
could prescribe the medicine to reverse
the situation. In our case, if the traders
were selling, we stopped them from
selling. If they were buying, we stopped
them from bu Z[