From Wall St to Bukit Merah

Source : Business Times - 23 Dec 2008

Hsuan Owyang considers his work done in Singapore’s public sector among his greatest achievements, reports UMA SHANKARI

HIS stint of more than four decades in Singapore has bought him a lot of experience. Hsuan Owyang has been chairman of the Housing and Development Board (HDB), sat on the boards of the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) and Temasek Holdings, and also had a role in running some of Singapore’s best-known companies such as Overseas Union Bank (OUB), POSB and Singapore’s largest property company CapitaLand.

But the 80-year-old Mr Owyang, who has retired from the public and private sectors in Singapore and relocated to the US, is just thankful to have been at the right place at the right time.

‘I have been very fortunate to see it (the growth of Singapore) from day one,’ says Mr Owyang, who arrived in Singapore in early 1965 - just months before the nation gained its independence. He is broadly acknowledged for his part in building Singapore Inc.

Born in Guangzhou, China in 1928, Mr Owyang hails from a family that has a record of public service. His father, Chi Owyang, was Singapore’s ambassador to Thailand for 17 years and a co-founder of OUB.

The younger Mr Owyang himself has gained public recognition - and a Meritorious Service Medal - for his work at HDB. He served on the board for 21 years - 15 of them as chairman - until he retired in 1998.

He has also contributed with his his lesser known role in Singapore’s Film Appeal Committee, where he advocated a loosening of censorship rules. While Mr Owyang believes that a censorship policy is necessary to reconcile the more liberal elements in Singapore’s society with the more conservative factions, he was against mindless censorship. Mr Owyang has also chaired two think tanks - the Institute of Policy Studies (IPS) and the East Asian Institute - and served as pro-chancellor of Nanyang Technological University.

Mr Owyang’s first calling, however, was the world of stockbroking and finance. Armed with an MBA from Harvard, Mr Owyang joined Wall Street in 1952 as an investment councillor in the broking firm of Thomson & Mckinnon.

‘When I joined Wall Street in 1952, it was still suffering from the aftermath of the Depression,’ Mr Owyang recalls. ‘Wall Street was neglected at that time.’

Merril Lynch was then the biggest firm on Wall Street. Goldman Sachs had less than 200 employees. Whenever trading volume on the New York Stock Exchange crossed the four million mark, stockbrokers would celebrate by opening a bottle of champagne, Mr Owyang says with a laugh. ‘Now, just one company can easily cross the four million mark!’

His 12 years (1952-1964) on Wall Street coincided with a period of electrifying growth. When Mr Owyang entered the industry, The Dow Jones Industrial Average stood at around 200. By end-1964, it had crossed the 900 mark. It would take another 18 years for the index to cross the 1,000 mark.

‘It was practically the golden age of the US in the 20th century,’ recalls Mr Owyang. ‘It was just after the war (World War II) and America pretty much had the whole field to itself.’

So when OUB asked him to relocate to Singapore to help run the rapidly expanding bank, Mr Owyang was understandably unsure: ‘The future of Singapore was very uncertain . . . I took more than a year to think about whether I should stay or make a move. New York, after all, was the place where everything was happening.’

But he finally decided to come to Singapore to put some of his management training, which was not utilised in Wall Street, into use. He took a big pay cut (making just one-third of his previous salary) and arrived in Singapore - open to change and determined to succeed.

To understand Mr Owyang, one has to look to his childhood. Born in China a few years before the country was plunged into the Sino-Japanese war, Mr Owyang had survived typhoid fever, malaria, hepatitis and several bouts of the flu by the time he was 20. His family was also forced to keep relocating to stay ahead of the Japanese. ‘Because of the war, we had to move around a lot to be one step ahead of the Japanese,’ Mr Owyang says. To complete his six years of high school, he had to go to six different schools in six different cities.

The Sino-Japanese war ended in 1945, but China was in for another challenge - a civil war. ‘The civil war in China had started by 1949. China was in an extremely chaotic situation, and it was practically impossible to finish school,’ says Mr Owyang. In 1949, he left for the US to finish his final year of university.

He enrolled in the University of Dubuque, a small liberal arts college in Iowa. After graduating, he applied to several universities to do his MBA, and received acceptances from most of them, including Harvard and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He chose to go to Harvard.

In his second book published in 1998 (the first was a biography of his father) - From Wall Street to Bukit Merah - Mr Owyang shared lessons learnt in a career which started in Wall Street and culminated in the Bukit Merah head office of the HDB. Along the way, he had spent 18 years at OUB, and also sat on the boards of DBS Land, TLB Land, General Securities Investments and Transpac.

But he considers his work done in Singapore’s public sector among his greatest achievements. Mr Owyang entered the public sector in Singapore in 1977, when he was appointed as a member of HDB’s board.

‘I enjoyed the public sector work,’ he recalls. During his time at HDB, he worked to introduce some private sector concepts into the organisation. ‘I told them, you should not treat the resident as just a resident. The resident is your customer.’ He also streamlined operations and tried to create a culture of getting HDB to better its own record year after year, rather than resorting to complacency in the face of no competition.

But HDB, he concedes, was already a well-run organisation when he took over. ‘Some CEOs want to re-invent the wheel when they come in,’ says Mr Owyang. ‘That might not be a good thing. But you should make a difference between the time you come in and before you leave.’ During the time he was in charge, the number of letters to the press complaining about HDB’s service fell sharply, he says.

For the entire decade of 1988-1998, Mr Owyang was occupied mostly with the public sector. ‘I missed the period where the private sector was booming, but I have no regrets, I would do it all over again,’ he says. ‘I think a person’s life will only be complete when he has contributed to society.’

Throughout the interview, Mr Owyang reiterates that he has been very fortunate in being in two vastly different places but always at a time of great growth - Wall Street in the 1950s and 1960s, and Singapore over the last 40 years. ‘I’ve always considered Singapore a man-made miracle,’ he says. The country’s success, he says, could be attributed to its political leadership. ‘This is the biggest lesson I have learnt from Singapore, that the political leadership leads the way.’

But now, Mr Owyang is retiring to to San Diego, a city which he says has the ‘best climate in the world’. ‘I have done as much as I could for the public and private sectors in Singapore,’ he says. ‘I have to think about the quality of my life in my remaining years.’ Moving to the US will allow him to be closer to his family, Mr Owyang, a US citizen, says.