pls dont look down on him,he like most of you just want to be an employee all his life and is unwilling to venture forth and start his own company and bear all the risk of worrying whether his company will be solvent the next day and has to worry about every faucet of the company from manufacturing to logistics to distribution to marketing to hr to the balance sheet and worrying about 200 other people's jobs and whether he has to fire them next week to pay the bills.all he has to do is sit in his air con office and do his job as an employee and collect his 15k paycheck at the end of the month.at least he is not some low class peasant employee like most of you making ur 3k or 4k paystub every month.and considering he is a very highly trained employee 15k executive with over 20 years experience running other people's companies for them,he is more likely able to know to start his own business.the question is taking the first step forward.
If you worked long enough you will find many people are just operational, nothing strategic about them. They happen to be "lucky" to get the job due to their "qualifications", ethnicity (angmo hired by angmo, ah neh hired by ah neh, chink hired by chink, list goes on), at right time right place.
Very few will change the status quo (even if very obvious changes seen in the market). That is why many established companies sinked once their iron rice bowl business model is drastically affected by macro-economic-social-political changes.
To narrow things down, the macro-changes in the world (digitisation, open door economy, information available everywhere) meant that the Singapore (who ride with the post-WW2 and cold-war western economic boom) advantage has ended. That is nothing unique or special about Singapore or its work-force which can be readily replaced by anyone anywhere.
It is quite obvious that PAP government has zero leverage about the MNCs here (shown by the non-local job hirings and support for Pink-Dot) as they can easily move to KL or BKK as regional hubs. In fact these days with superior IT reporting technologies, the need to regional jobs or offices are making less sense as many local-country sales office can directly report to HQ (and even conduct meeting online).
Just think carefully, how many unique and powerful Singapore brands are there? I can't think of much. Or really successful investment houses or funds in Singapore? Also none.
If one compared to HK, they have a lot more locally owned companies which have global footprints (for example Lee Kum Kee). Lee Kah Shing's Hutchinson investment group has way way more success than GIC or Temasek. Even the HK based Malaysian owned Kerry Group which is based in HK very well oiled machine in the agriculture commodity business. Just compared the value of the listings on HKEX versus SGX. That is the most obvious report card.