performance and fair assessment

MAS sounds like a good place to be ... Should have worked harder at economics and joined them!

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March 29, 2007 (Straits Times)
Rejected for PSC scholarship but he's now MTI perm sec
Ravi Menon didn't do well in A levels but later won a scholarship to Harvard

By Assistant Money Editor, Audrey Tan

MINISTRY of Finance deputy secretary Ravi Menon is a high-flier by any standards. But as a young man, he was rejected by the Public Service Commission (PSC) when he applied for a scholarship.
He did not do well in his A levels at Raffles Institution and did not qualify for PSC or many of the other scholarships he tried for, he recalled yesterday.
'In the end, I managed to get a scholarship from the National University of Singapore but only $3,000 for one year,' said Mr Menon, 43, who is married with three children aged five to nine.
A civil servant for the past 20 years, he will be appointed Second Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Trade and Industry (MTI) from July1. He will join Permanent Secretary Peter Ong to help oversee MTI's expanding scope, the Prime Minister's Office (PMO) said yesterday.
Mr Menon will be one of just three permanent secretaries who did not join the civil service as a PSC undergraduate scholar (the PMO did not say who the other two are).

Instead, he went to the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) after graduating from NUS in 1987. Six years later, he received an MAS scholarship to study public administration at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government.
He became assistant managing director of MAS in 2002, before being seconded to the Ministry of Finance in 2003. He joined the Administrative Service in 2005.

'The great thing about MAS was it took everyone on the same scheme, people who had been MAS undergraduate scholars and people who were not. We were assessed and developed on the basis of our performance. That was good for me,' Mr Menon said.

He joined public service because he wanted to make economics his career but on a broader canvas than the private sector could offer.
'I wanted to do something that didn't relate to the bottom line of one company, but in a sense the bottom line of all Singaporeans.'
One of his main priorities in his new MTI post will be looking at how economic growth can filter down to benefit all segments of society. 'It's the same imperative as 30 years ago. But 30 years ago, when you had growth, distribution took care of itself. Today, we can't take that for granted.'
Singapore's biggest long-term vulnerability is complacency, he said. 'You will find increasing calls for slowing our pace, pressure to redistribute, be insular and so on.'
But, prospects for Singapore have improved with increasing globalisation. 'I'm very optimistic...If we make the right moves, we are better placed than most. Because we are small and nimble, we are better placed to seize opportunities,' he said.
audrey@sph.com.sg