The Future of UMNO-2

By Sakmongkol

There's an interesting management book written by two authors which must be taken up as reading material in addition to the current UMNO vogue of mentioning Blue Ocean Strategy. Yes, we know lah, the PM reads BOS- but we get turn off when others trip over each other trying to see who mention the title more in the hope the PM notices them.

There are many people around who make it a habit of quoting management books which are the rage of the times treating as though they contained some formula of biblical significance. Itulah- the last time your mothers told you to take up the harder subjects, you chose to membaca hikayat and all those books with fairy tales. Now as you grow into adults, you suddenly come across some literature totally alien to you and therefore you quickly adopt them as breakthroughs. To you that is.

Barry J. Nalebuff and Adam M. Brandenburger used the term co opetition as the title of a book on game theory. ( Co-opetition) The term implies that while you compete you must also cooperate. Two seemingly contradicting postulates but which are in reality two sides of a coin. For example, UMNO needs to cooperate with its competitors on common grounds- such as the war against corruption, advocacy of the rule of law, establishing the rules of the game to compete. We are all for those things. But UMNO people must have an open mind- UMNO's willingness to co-opetitate must not be seen as a weakened position. Remember our long term interest is to secure market leadership. Our competitors too need to embrace this new way of competing and cooperation at the same time. We can agree on certain principles and universal values. Otherwise, we ALL shall be seen as digging in our partisan foxholes. But never mind if they don't. We do well for ourselves.

This new paradigm is worth looking into. In the business game we can have several winners: 'The goal is to do well for yourself.' In the game of politics, the same idea should be adopted. We all can do well for ourselves. Very often politicians from both divides have the human tendency to try to 'blow them out of the water' when challenging other competitors. Sadly this tendency is present in the 2 biggest Malay parties- UMNO and PAS. When challenged in turn, the tendency is to denigrate the opposition and to engage in wishful thinking about its certain total failure: when that fails to materialise, the next step is to go to extremes in the attempt to assert the threatened superiority. PAS has been quick to label UMNO people as infidels( when its 'superiority as spokesman of Islam is threatened) while UMNO has been calling PAS as empty vessels making a lot of noises about Islam but hasn't implemented anything to that effect.

Think of wastage. Nobody has calculated the total cost UMNO lost in the effort to drive PAS from its position in Kelantan. Or the costs involved when trying to blow PAS out of the water and the cost to PAS as it attempts to inflict the same on UMNO. UMNO itself handed Kelantan into PAS's lap in the 70's when it decided to include PAS into the BN. UMNO became host to the political germ in the form of PAS. Both are offering similar products complementing each other.

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