And so the next day, Dr. Kwa writes to me and he says, “So has Gany signed the letter?” I said, “No, he took it home and he’s going to come back to me today.” He said, “No, then fire him. So terminate his services.” So I said, “Why?” He… Read More
I refused to do this.” And so he said, “Well, you should do the right thing.” I said, “I did the right thing.” And so we left it. I mean, I slammed down the phone and left it like that. But I mean, that was the end of the… You… Read More
Yeah, so it was accumulation of various policies that I didn’t subscribe to. And this kind of slow pressure of getting me to conform to Dr. Kwa’s sort of management style, which I was resisting. And there were a number series of incidents and one was actually he got my… Read More
It when they have a function by a corporate function. So they leave excess bottles of wine. They give them to the food and beverage staff. Food and beverage staff keep them. And then when they have a vacation, they open them and they drink wine. And this is a… Read More
I don’t think we need to bond them. And they said, “No, we’ll follow this.” So we are bonding people. So this is like one of these small aspects of discontent, which one sort of builds up. And as in the difference between the cavalier Dr. Ong and the very… Read More
What circumstances led you to make the decision of leaving the zoo, zoo you built into a world-class facility, were you under impression?… Read More
And so it became Wildlife Reserves. So that was the holding company for the three parks, the Night Safari Zoo and the Bird Park. And then slowly, my demise came in because whereas before that, we were running as two separate companies, the Zoo Night Safari and the Bird Park. Read More
I was president of SEAZA, the Southeast Asian Zoo Association. If I go on to go to a council meeting or to go to a conference in the zoo, it’s just written off. But in the bird parks style, you have to quantify it in terms of dollars and cents. Read More
I mean, and I would tell the chairman, I said, “We don’t do that.” And he said, “Why not?” He said, “That’s what government does.” He said, “Yeah, but we’re not government. We don’t have to follow government procedure.” If I send somebody on a trip. I pretty well trust… Read More
So he was chairman of Bird Park, chairman of the zoo. And so about three years later, and we got all fine, there was no problem. He kind of said, in fact, the first thing he said to me is like, “Bern, just do what you’ve done. You’re doing a… Read More
It’s just stupid. Two small companies in the same business. I mean, come, let’s just get on with it.” So we merged. Dr. Kwa obviously was the chairman of Wildlife Reserve Singapore, I became the CEO. And so we went on for a couple of years. We actually struggled with… Read More
They’re totally different.” The corporate culture in the zoo is one of Dr. Ong’s personality, is a very open non-civil service, almost cavalier sort of a management style with very few concerns about the rules and regulations of government and with the Jurong Bird Park, because it’s been run by… Read More
And there will definitely be a clash, but the worst thing is to be a clash between the two chairman ’cause one’s gotta go, right?… Read More
If you merge the two companies, one’s gotta go. You can’t have two chairman. So the chairman, Dhanabalan, had a… Chairman of Temasek Dhanabalan who had asked for the merger, said, “Okay, I understand. I mean, let’s not rock the boat. It’s not a big issue.” So everything went well. Read More
How does that come to place?… Read More
Why?… Read More
So what happened was we had a new chairman of Temasek Holdings, a gentleman called Mr. Dhanabalan, who formerly was the Deputy Prime Minister. So quite a hot shot. And when he came into Temasek, quite some time before the merger, I mean many, many years before that, he looked… Read More
Was your creativity and fame an issue with others, top civil servant?… Read More
People within the city government, were they jealous of the fame?… Read More
I’m not sure, actually. I don’t think so, It’s difficult to say, but I didn’t encounter any jealousy. I think the zoo is always sort of out on a limb anyway, so that it’s never really mainstream anything. And I think even within zoos, within a zoo, you have so… Read More