ISLAND VOICES
Doing business in Paradise

By John Webster

Understandably, the city is abuzz about the recent Forbes article blasting Honolulu as a place to do business. As others rightly said, the tone of the article was vitriolic, and the picture painted was grossly simplistic.

I am new in Honolulu, and while I too am incensed by the cheap shots, I have spoken to enough business people to know it contains enough valid questions to make even the most ardent supporters take pause.

I am struck by the great potential that exists to channel the aloha spirit and God-given natural advantages of Hawai'i in ways that will make it a very good place to do business while continuing to make it a very good place to live. My views are colored some by my recent period of living and working in Singapore, where I started and ran a government-sponsored MBA program to train Asia's future leaders. The program was a partnership between the Nanyang technological University and MIT.

The Singapore model cannot be transferred wholesale to Hawai'i — there are substantive differences. Singapore is three times larger in population, has a more monolithic culture (largely Oriental), and does not adhere to some of the liberal-democratic values of states like Hawai'i and countries like the United States.

However, like Hawai'i, Singapore is an island, has few natural resources, has a constant influx of highly trained professionals, has a very significant tourism economic base, and has a location that provides unique advantages and unique disadvantages for business. It too is an expensive place to live, is an expensive place to do business, has labor shortages in critical skill areas, and counts on small- and medium-size businesses to employ the majority of its people.

While news of Singapore's success is not new, there is much in its approach to fostering a positive business climate that is worthy of consideration here:

• It has a strong, highly energized and visible leadership that has inspired confidence and has produced very effective spokespeople for the economic agenda.
• It widely communicates its agenda and its plans to help build an understanding and commitment to its objectives.
• It has a reputation for clean and honest government, and through the enforcement of its laws, has a reputation for a clean and honest business environment.
• It has a bureaucracy with a reputation for efficiency.
• It has placed education at the top of its economic plan and has programs designed to build skills that are in tune with its economic objectives and that are designed to add value — while in school and while on the job.
• It has low business taxes and makes extensive use of government awards and incentives to assist the development of small business and of startups.
• It has encouraged the influx of expatriates and has exploited their intellectual assets.
• It courts world opinion and it seeks powerful partnerships.

Unfortunately, an election year may make it difficult to embrace lessons learned from the Singapore experience and to develop the bipartisan programs and agendas needed to build a pro-business yet community-friendly environment.

Hopefully, the election platforms will articulate the generic reforms needed while avoiding the same tones that cause most of us, of whatever political persuasion, to recoil when we encounter exaggerated claims of socialism and comparisons to Castro.

The business community, with its rich intellectual resources, will be well served while serving Hawai'i if it engages wholeheartedly in the generation of ideas and of strategies for telling the world what is right about working and living in Hawai'i.

John Webster is the director of the Hogan Entrepreneurial Program at Chaminade University.