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Investment News Group working with Condé Nast Portfolio

ING Portfolio, 2008

Question: Tan Sri, the Limkokwing University is one of the only tertiary education institutions in Malaysia that can be considered truly international, with campuses on three different continents around the globe. Can you tell us about the vision behind the establishment of the university?

Answer Tan Sri Dato’ Dr Lim Kok Wing: When I originally started this place 18 years ago, my goal then was to train Malaysians and other people from the Asian region to communicate better, and to encourage and help them get into design, into film and television, and into creative industries in general, which were almost nonexistent at the time. Prior to that I was president of the 4As, (the Association of Advertising Agencies) and it was clear to me then that what we needed was more talent, we needed more writers, more creative people, more film and television people and so on, and what I had to do was convince parents that there was a future in creative industries. Asians generally being very conservative didn’t want their kids to be artists or designers.

So I started this place after I decided to step away from advertising. As you know, I was in advertising for quite a few years in film and television and so on. I began as a reporter, so my work has always been in communications - I was at first reporting, then I became a book designer and then I entered into advertising. When I was a reporter, I was sent to cover crimes and I was always at a court. I would go back and forth between the police station and the courtroom, and I found that terribly dull - and I didn’t like that I was writing stories about bad people doing bad things. I used to try to make the story longer, but the editor would cut it down to a few words and he would tell me ‘No, you cannot describe how he walks, no you cannot describe how he looks, you just describe what you heard and what you saw’. I found that very unimaginative.

So as I said, when I first started this it was only meant for training Malaysian and Southeast Asian people because a lot of them worked here – Indonesians, etc. At that time, there weren’t that many British, Australians, or Americans working here. I didn’t foresee what it has become today, which is why I actually used my name for the university’s name. I had originally thought that it was just going to be a very local thing. I did engage research companies to research a few different names, and they suggested that I put my name on it as I was the one starting it. I said okay, believing that nobody would think my name was suitable to be that of a college - and that was a mistake - the name was recognized and so we got stuck with the name.

Which has turned out to be a good thing.

Do you think it as good thing?

Well yes, because the name illustrates how it is a Malaysian born and bred project.

Yes, that’s true. We started to develop and if you walk around the campus here you will see a lot of industry activities, from branding (gestures outside)… that’s not a Starbucks, that is Willie's Café, and then you have got the fitness business and you have the branding gallery, did you reach the branding gallery - did you walk to it?

Yes, we did.

The Branding Gallery is used to promote rural brands, but we also have the academy for music, we have a studio that is capable of producing albums - I should give you the albums later. What I had really wanted to do was to take the mystery out of business, out of creating a business, and I think after students spend 2-4 years here on this campus, this all will become a part of you. And of course there is the freedom of expression…… when I myself was in school it was very strict: Your shorts must be not more than four inches above your knee, they must not be too short, your tie must be like this and so on and so forth. Traditionally in Asian education one is expected to memorize everything and I felt that I should do away with that completely and allow the student, the person to rediscover himself or herself. So when I talk to the kids I talk about the redesigning of yourself – I tell them ‘design yourself to be the person you want to be, design yourself after the model of the person you most admire, and have all the qualities of people that you really admire’. So what we are talking about is designing oneself.

If you come here when we are in full session, during lunch time there will be people performing on stage, Iraqi students, Iranian students, Pakistani students or African students and so on - it is quite a noisy place, lots of people here, and this place has been built for them to ‘interface’ if you like. You will see during lunch time how they stream out of the teaching block and they all gather here. We have over 130 countries - can you imagine? Very often at one table we got 8 or 10 people, from 10 countries, and as you know - you learn more outside the classroom than inside the classroom, so they learn from each other.

Question: I wanted to ask you to expand upon the global university concept.

Answer Tan Sri Dato’ Dr Lim Kok Wing: I started by looking at how, as Asians we always travel to the West - and each time we go there we would keep our eyes open wide and our ears wide to listen and to learn, and each time we came back we have learned a bit more. However the West has never traveled to the East much, especially when they are young - they don’t come to the East to study. Why? Because the whole world is run on the West’s system, using English, not Chinese, not Tamil…… so people from the West has never felt the need to come here. The older generation, after World War II, when the soldiers returned - they may still know Malaysia, may still remember Asia, but the younger generation does not know much about Malaysia. They wouldn’t be able to even pronounce Kuala Lumpur…which actually sounds crazy – “Kuala Lumpur,” you know.

So I have always felt that just as the coin has two sides, everybody should know both sides. If you stay only in the East and you only look at things from the Eastern perspective, you can see only one side of the coin, you would completely miss the opportunities on the other side. If you are on the West, it’s the same; it would be the reverse, but just the same. When I go to the West and speak to these kids from wealthy countries, they are so ignorant of the East! And of course the media doesn’t help. The media distorts, the media actually thrives on just creating interesting snippets – the uglier, the better, for instance. So I have always felt that in a globalized world where trade goes several ways, unless you know both sides you are unlikely to be able to compete 20 years from now, so I pushed the idea of globalized classroom very actively.

Globalized classroom is one where for example, you could be here for this semester, and then go to Cambodia for the next semester, and you go to London for the next semester without losing time and without losing credits because they are our programs. We can’t do it with American universities obviously because within the Commonwealth system it takes three years to get a degree, but within American system, four years to a degree. With American universities, it’s harder for us to collaborate but we do collaborate with a lot of British, Australian, Canadian, and New Zealand universities.
The globalized concept idea is to allow students to become more competent, and you can see from our tapes and videos, they look very happy, and they are full of energy because for the first time in certain places they have access to the latest in digital technology – the latest Apple, the latest iPods, the latest software, we bring to those places things they never had before. So these kids when they finish, they are way ahead of industry, and as such they are armed to be able to drive industry in those countries forward.

We work using HP, we work using various Silicon Graphics, we work with Acer to bring as much technology as possible to the places where we operate. For instance, in Lesotho where we opened just a month ago, we have now empowered every student who studies with us with a laptop. So there they are, feeling good about themselves because they know that what they are using, is the same as what people use in New York and in Tokyo, and that has given them a terrific lift to know that they are not behind anymore.

We introduced social degree programs in those places so that when they graduate they will be highly skilled and able to make videos, design music, work in advertising - in design and in web designing, etc. Actually that is what they need the most. It is not a matter of having a degree, but instead it is a matter of knowing and having the skills that will build the country. Botswana is not Malaysia, so we designed programs for Botswana, just as we specially designed programs especially for Lesotho. I felt that this globalised thinking is important - you didn’t watch our U.K. video, did you?
Not the U.K., we saw Botswana, Lesotho videos, but we will see it later.

Yes, you should see the British video, because we got Professor Michael Thorne from Anglia Ruskin - which is located in Cambridge - to speak. He talked about the need for change and he talked about the need to know both sides of the world. The British newspapers were pretty good to us. The Times of UK described our arrival in the U.K. as a wake up call to British universities. The Guardian says British universities must reinvent themselves in order to have a more globalised perspective and urged them to employ more lecturers from outside of the U.K. in order to bring the world there, because I said we are bringing Asia to U.K. – not just visiting, but bringing knowledge there. We have about 40 countries represented in the London campus now, it’s not big - about 450 or so students but it serves as a global classroom for our students here.

Question: Tan Sri, earlier you spoke about the difficulty of overcoming the cultural mindset here where people don’t really encourage creativity, how have you gotten around parents’ views and around the cultural barriers?

Answer Tan Sri Dato’ Dr Lim Kok Wing: See my hair has turned grey! I have been pushing for a long time - nobody knew anything about it, nobody wanted to know anything about it, they mostly thought I was insane to promote design, to talk about creativity. People related creativity to singing and dancing and undisciplined people - they did not see it as a discipline that would add value to their business, to their products. And the word “innovation” was not used at all. It was too big a word to use. But the school has now been running for 18 years and in fact tonight they have asked me to go and receive this award from the advertising world.

Anyway nobody knew what it meant, the word “creativity”. A lot of people know my name and if you ask them about me they will say that I am a creative man - very few would describe me a businessman.

The fact is that people did not equate nor relate creativity to business. They think business is serious whilst creativity is frivolous. So I always have to tell them - that chair you are sitting on, that table, the cup that you use, and those nasty instruments you don’t like when you go to your dentist - those are all designed by somebody! But still for a long time nobody looked at it that way and I went around speaking about it, convincing people that Asians were creative people, because a lot of people say Asians cannot think because of the culture of compliance - which I admit we do have. For example, you don’t argue with your dad, you don’t argue with your mom - you may argue inside quietly by yourself but not outwardly! But you know, I have always pointed out that the Chinese invented paper, gun powder, the biggest shipping fleet before anybody else, vehicles using steam and instruments to detect earthquakes long before the existence of the Richter scale, long before Benz invented cars, to convince them that Asians can think. And if you look at the Middle East, they used to have the largest bazaars in the world. And these bazaars actually started modern shopping centers. You know, in Turkey, in Egypt and so on, they started shopping a long time ago, getting together at a bazaar, and the Egyptians invented the wigs for the girls, you know - they like their woman pretty, they invented makeup, and the pyramids which are still mysteries to people, just like the Great Wall of China is still a mystery to people. It took me a long time to convince people that there is a future in being creative in Asia because the idea back then was just to take whatever that comes from the West. So I put up a lot of exhibitions like the one downstairs - the branding exhibition - to convince people, but a lot of people still consider innovation or research as a waste of money, and they don’t see as an investment - even today. They see it as a cost, not a profit motivator. But we have another problem, for instance, in education. Education in Malaysia is highly regulated, and administration is very conservative.

So unless the government machinery becomes innovative and will actually seek innovation, i.e., encourage innovation, progress will be slower than what I think it should be. I think right now, we are slow. We have pretty good infrastructure, but moving forward is not about the infrastructure – it is about the power of the mind which I don’t think is being pushed forward fast enough - I believe we should move faster. I say that because we are aiming to be a fully developed nation by 2020, meaning we must be good enough to compete with Australia and the Western world by then, and that is why I wrote this book about the final stretch and the hardest climb.

Question: I completely recognize what you said about arts being almost dismissed here in Malaysia. I remember when I first came back to Malaysia from the UK - people asked me what I had read at university and when I replied East Asian studies, someone actually asked me what I can do with my life doing such a degree - which I definitely did not expect!! However do you think that this perception is changing generally, and what is the direction and the future of education in Malaysia on the whole?

Answer Tan Sri Dato’ Dr Lim Kok Wing: Things are changing, but we are still the only university with the name “Creative Technology” and we are still the only university that is focused very sharply on creativity. This university was designed to encourage out-of-the-box thinking. People come here and say that this campus doesn’t look like a university; this entire plaza has a business environment.

Question: Do you think that due to the success of the Limkokwing University this trend will spread towards the other universities?
Answer Tan Sri Dato’ Dr Lim Kok Wing: Yes, it has already started and now a lot more colleges are doing design, offering design and if you look at their websites and you look at our website you can find a lot of similarities. So it’s good, people are waking up to the fact that you really need to change and pioneer to stay ahead and not just follow. You could actually innovate, without inventing. For instance, the Japanese did not invent; the Japanese took western models and just made them better.

And now the Chinese are doing things better and faster and cheaper. Thus more and more people in the world will be using Chinese goods. Asia is changing and people are changing - information technology has changed everything. The Internet in particular has changed things because now kids can travel around the world just sitting in front of the computer. In education, we were the first private college to be upgraded to university status and now more will do so because they have seen that we were able to do it, and that will encourage more to go forth, and by going abroad we are also promoting a greater acceptance of the Malaysian brand, Malaysian education. All this I think this will help, this will prompt more change.

Question: The government is pushing forward for Malaysia to become an innovation nation, and of course education is one of the best tools and most important tools for achieving this goal, what else comprises Malaysia’s strategy to achieve this?

Answer Tan Sri Dato’ Dr Lim Kok Wing: I think we need to have a complete ecosystem, you know – innovation must be pervasive, and this is not well understood. There are people who think, you know, that innovation can only happen in the cities, in urban centers, but innovation must be brought also to rural areas. We must innovate rural economy, we must bring innovation to agriculture, to craft, to way of life in rural places, to the fishermen so they could predict better, so they could plan, so they could be safer when they go out sea, so that their boats and the equipment they use are safer and so on,. I believe we have to push hard to innovate the whole country, lift the whole country up.

Question: This may sound like a simple question, but what do you think is the role that fresh design, creative thinking and innovation brings to Malaysia’s business credibility in the region?

Answer Tan Sri Dato’ Dr Lim Kok Wing: I think that when one employs people for specific positions one may look for people above the age 30 or 40 but generally people do not look at age anymore. One instead looks at that person’s capability – whether of not that person is able to do the job, whether he has communications skills, whether he is generally a happy person who will be able to add something to the office… That’s the sort of person you want. So more and more young people will take over jobs throughout Asia, and I think the young people who are being trained now and those who have gone out - and by the way, our graduates are doing extremely well - I think that it will be the young people who will change Asia, whilst the older folks will stick to what they know best. It will be the young people who will be creating and innovating and bringing new ideas to business.

Question: Prior to this interview we were given a tour of the branding exhibition downstairs. How important do you think branding communication is in the world wide market today?

Answer Tan Sri Dato’ Dr Lim Kok Wing: It has always been important - it is just that now the actual word “branding” has become very prominent - but it has always been there, since a long time ago when I was still in advertising. You really have to build a brand that is recognizable, and not only that, recognized as a good, trustworthy brand. But today, due to the proliferation of media, it has become much harder. Now you simply have to work harder to build relationships because the potential customer is no longer just sitting there watching TV anymore – he/she is outside, he/she has a laptop and has a mobile. He/she goes home just to sleep, he/she doesn’t watch TV anymore and doesn’t need to buy newspaper because he/she can read the news online. Also – supermarkets. Now these were very Western originally and there did not use to be many supermarkets even here in Kuala Lumpur. And in these supermarkets everything is available; every brand is there, stacked up against one another in their multitude. So you have to design your packaging better in order to stand out better, you need a name that people can remember. It is not just about what is inside - because they wouldn’t know what’s inside yet - they have to buy the product first. So that is a relationship you have to establish quickly these days because marketing is so intensive and the branding product market is so intense. You have to come forward and get yourself seen and get yourself remembered, and if you are good at that, great, you build a relationship with your customer. But if nobody knows you, that’s almost worse than having a bad reputation. So branding has become important and as we know - whether you like it or not - even people are branded by people. Everybody has an image whether you like it or no. At the mention of someone’s name, people will smile if they like that person. If they don’t like that person there will be probably no expression on their faces. So everybody has a brand image as well.

Question: That actually leads directly to my next question. ‘Limkokwing’ is definitely a brand in Malaysia and a very well respected brand at that - in any article you Google regarding innovation in Malaysia, your name comes out and what I wanted to ask you is what has been your recipe of success in terms of being really able to establish yourself as the foremost thinker in creativity in Malaysia? How have you achieved that?

Answer Tan Sri Dato’ Dr Lim Kok Wing: I don’t know……You see that piece of glass there? (Gestures at an award). That was presented to me by the Deputy Mayor of London of Westminster. I just look at what must be done. Okay, now you have given me a good opportunity to talk about it. A lot of people think creativity is what leads to innovation. And everybody thinks that creativity must come out of chaos of some kind, a chaotic situation - because of the way creative people often like to dress. Creative people dress that way simply because they are nonconformist - nothing more than that. They are not anti-establishment, they are nonconformists, but, of course, they are known to be described as anti-establishment and actually mostly they aren’t! They want to change establishment, they are not anti-establishment. So creative people are associated with wearing crazy clothes and not sleeping at night and so on, but they are very serious people. You give me a problem to solve and I will solve the problem and I have to do a lot of thinking. For instance, that sofa there, if you ask me to sell more of those sofas whilst lowering the cost of production you have given me a problem to solve Now, I have to design something new so that it will cost less to make, but at the same time allow me to sell more than one. That’s what a creative person does, that’s what a designer does. I have always wanted to be ahead of the others – because if you can come up with more options, you are more likely to pick the better option and you keep pushing the boundaries, you keep knocking down barriers. It is doing things that others don’t do, going to places where nobody has been and keeping ahead of the rest.

Question: And do you think that daring per se is important because - like you say Asians generally fear stepping out and daring to be different?
Answer Tan Sri Dato’ Dr Lim Kok Wing: Yeah, Asians are generally very conformists… obedient if you like. Obedient because when you are young you are taught to be obedient, and as you get older this obedience changes into compliance because you simply comply with whatever your bosses say to you. When I work, the word daring doesn’t come to my mind - although others have described me as daring because I went to places where no one else might have gone. Botswana for example - people wonder where is Botswana? Lesotho? People ask…and you know, why Cambodia? With the killing fields, why Cambodia? I went to these places. I first went to Southern Africa to work with Mandela 15 years ago and that was when I realized that a lot of education was needed there. And when I went to Cambodia I found that despite the years of sanction and political problems and underdevelopment, the place was full of happy people. You come out of the airport and you see happy people. You may call them poor by western yardsticks, but they have never had money before so they don’t even know what poverty is…

However, they all want to study. When you go to these places and say that you are from Kuala Lumpur they would ask about the Twin Towers, they would ask about the racing circuit…They want progress! They like hi-technology. And I went to these places because I felt that we could make a meaningful difference, that we could make an impact - and we always have made an impact when we go to these places. We are now preparing to open in Swaziland and we are working hard to prepare for that - we have spoken to the cabinet, spoken to the King…and by the time we have a campus there it will be campus specifically made for Swaziland. It’s not a Malaysia campus; all those campuses across the globe are not Malaysian campuses. Lesotho campus is for Lesotho and Botswana campus is for Botswana. We introduce programs that are suitable for them, for their country. So when I went to Africa - and Africa, if you only consider what you can see on TV then you will be quite afraid to go there, let alone investing a lot of money there. So in that sense yes, being daring, taking risks. And actually Africans are amongst the most creative people in the world: Quincy Jones, Michael Jackson, Denzel Washington, and all the black hip-hop singers - they are of African origin whether they are in UK or in the U.S. On station, on screen, nobody beats them - they are the best. They have inherent talent and in Africa six out of five, six out of ten young people don’t get to go to school and out of those who do go to school more than half will drop out before the end of primary education. So only a very small number go on to secondary and tertiary education. I wanted to help this people to use their talent. Have you heard them sing on our campus opening videos? Amazing. The energy level would put most to people to shame, especially Asians. On stage, on screen they dominate. If you like, they dominate in creative industries, but you cannot force them to become scientists. You know what I mean - they are best in craft, they are best in the arts. The largest creative industry should be found in Africa, why is it not so?

Question: Tan Sri, during you career there have been so many accolades and of course a lot of challenges, can you articulate which has been the achievement you are most proud of in terms of innovation, and what has been your greatest challenge beyond changing the cultural mindset?

Answer Tan Sri Dato’ Dr Lim Kok Wing: Actually nobody has audited the mindset of out students, but I must give you a book that my daughter wrote. She spoke to 200 students from 100 countries. This book is called “Magic” – it is not launched yet, but I will give you a copy, you will have an idea. You read what they say and that is my biggest trophy, what they say.

How this has changed their lives, especially for the African students. I don’t think I have got a trophy for that and you don’t need the trophy for that because there are thousands of them and when I go to Botswana to see them, the students would line up from here to as far as you can see, and it would take me two hours to get from here to there. The trophies of course are nice…….but most of them now are for what I have done in education and the changes I have brought to education. So I think bringing change perhaps is something that I have done reasonably well. Change in this country as well.

With regards to Malaysia specifically, what are your goals for the near future and also for the distant future at this point in time?

It’s a difficult question to answer because I am not a politician, and I cannot impose upon people. I cannot introduce policies. I can only influence people to change policies, and it’s a very, very slow process. But I have written papers about innovation and three years ago the National Innovation Council was formed and at about that time the word innovation was added to the Ministry of Science and Technology. I then wrote again to say that implementation was too slow. So an innovation implementation task force was formed and I sit on all of that and I sit on the MAC board. It is very slow. I don’t think we have the eco-system that encourages creativity. As you know, creativity cannot happen in places where it is not encouraged. It can only happen in a place like this, on this campus - you encourage it and you can see that person blossom. When you see a young lady blossoming, you see it not only in her work but in the way she speaks, you see it in her eyes, you see it in the letters she writes home.

Question: Currently there is a lot happening in the global financial market and this can be considered a great opportunity for Malaysia to really blossom forward. There’s the financial turmoil in the west and, of course, there is political instability in Thailand. What are the key opportunities for Malaysia right now to really step up its game in terms of business and also do you think these outside events are going to drive forward innovation even more within the country?

Answer Tan Sri Dato’ Dr Lim Kok Wing: Yes, Thailand is going through some turmoil, but it will settle down. Thailand has a much larger population than Malaysia, so they have a bigger engine within the country. We are such a small player compared to the manufacturing countries in South East Asia. Indonesia, India, and China, South America - there are huge populations there. We have to innovate, we have to innovate products but we don’t have to invent anything new. We just need to make things better and more relevant. For instance, we should design a ‘world car’ and make it available to everyone. It would be too expensive for the U.S. to do it. We are still able to do it here – we have oil, we have tin, we have metal, we have plastics, we speak English, and we are able to connect with the western world. If we focus on designing a world car or world bicycle - meaning when I say world car I mean one that is affordable to most people, that way we would not compete with companies such as Honda and Toyota who are so established.

So I think if we innovate that way we will be able to move forward. We produce a lot of shoes in this country, but it’s only a fraction of what the Chinese produce and therefore we could lose the business to them easily, but if we are able to produce designs that the world wanted to buy, and then we will keep our business, increase our margin and sell it around the world.

Question: It is interesting that you mentioned shoes because, of course, Jimmy Choo is probably one of the most famous fashion brands in the world – and it is of Malaysian origin. Moving on towards the end of my interview, I wanted to ask you which sectors do you think Malaysia has achieved the largest degree of innovation and what brands in particular?

Answer Tan Sri Dato’ Dr Lim Kok Wing: I cannot say which area has achieved the largest proportion of growth or degree in terms of development, but I think education is one. This never used to be a quality education country, and people often traveled to the UK and elsewhere for higher education, and when universities were finally developed here they did not have enough places for all Malaysians. But the good thing is that the government liberalized education 20 or so years ago. Essentially what the government did was privatize a section of education. Now, roughly half of the students in tertiary education are in private colleges like this one. If you like, you can say that the government has passed the responsibility to the public, to the private sector. In doing so they have created an industry for the private sector – for people like us. We were working closely with the British, the Australian and the American universities when we first started, but over time we started to create our own product, our own courses that are more relevant to developing countries. I think it must be one of the most innovative areas.

Yes, and today Malaysia is an education destination. How else could we have attracted students from 130 countries here? How else would we have four to five billion hits every month on our website? We have Europeans here; we have Americans here - although most of our students are from developing countries. I would think that we have to keep going and keep improving and innovating education, and move it to become more and more relevant to the developing world. If we continue to do that and continue to innovate, in that sense we could become a country that people will admire. As you know, any country that provides quality education is an admired country, is considered a skilled and educated country.

Question: I agree, however which business areas do you think has been successful in terms of innovation? For example, the day before yesterday we were invited to the gala opening of the Malaysian fashion week and it was very interesting to see the amount of support there and we spoke to a lot of people who had being attending this event over the years and they say that every year there have been major improvements. Is Malaysian fashion an area that is really starting to flourish. In what other areas do you do think there has been evidence of progressive thinking?

Answer Tan Sri Dato’ Dr Lim Kok Wing: Now, I have to speak carefully…Where clothes and fashion is concerned there have been some Malaysians who have done fairly well. Jimmy Choo for example…although Jimmy sold his business a very long time ago…but not many. Malaysians have the advantage of being Chinese, Indian and Malay all rolled into one. I can produce Indian music that is also instantly Malay or Chinese or western. I can take all four of them and roll them into one and when you listen to the piece you can hear Chinese instruments, you can hear western instruments and so on and so forth. And this is one of the very few countries capable of doing that. Whilst the U.S. and the U.K are also a melting pots of different ethnicities, the focus there is not the same - they are not brought up the way that we are being brought up here. So we do have advantages that we could explore. However, Malaysia also has a very disciplined society with regards to the way you dress, the way you talk, the way you do whatever. On one hand you have to think globally and appeal to the overseas market, but at the same time you need to be careful at home and take into consideration local sentiments. So I think that whilst we have a very good fashion department, it is unlikely that Malaysia will become a fashion centre. You know what I mean - because to be a centre or hub you need to lead in many ways. So I suppose the best thing for us to do well in is within the area of lifestyle: furniture, interior, architecture, etc, because we do have the skills, the combination of east and west, and cultural diversity. My office here is decorated in a mixture of… I don’t know even how many countries! There is something inherent in us and if you use it well to develop things for lifestyle it is the best way to move a market…However, education starts it all. Education is really the bedrock of innovation. The better you are able to think the better you are able to innovate, the better you able to research, the better you are able to design. I think the future is good - we just have to track on to the right place and take it from there.

Question: What is the message that you would like to send to the readers of Portfolio?

Answer Tan Sri Dato’ Dr Lim Kok Wing: I think that those who are prepared to look at both sides of the coin and can see the best of both east and west, will be the people who do best in the world. I have no doubt about it.