Corporate Shaker

Summary

Mr Chan Chong Beng is a successful and busy businessman. What made him participate in the CEED Programme? “So that I stay successful and busy”, the gregarious businessman answers without batting an eyelid. “If you want to continue to be successful and busy, you cannot take peace for granted. You do not want a situation where you have to worry about your family being attacked.” What the CEED Programme did was to give him good insight into operational realities on the ground that will help keep the peace should anything untoward occur one day in Singapore.

As an employer, he is keenly aware of the need to inject a CEP dimension, including communal harmony, into the workplace. “We do not allow staff to discuss sensitive issues of race and religion at work”, he said, referring to the Goodrich management's policy. Indeed, Mr Chan has gone farther than that prohibition. Although his workforce is largely Chinese, he intervened when a Malay worker felt uncomfortable over a tape of Buddhist chants being played in a company vehicle. He advised the Chinese driver to stop playing it.

His sensitivity to the religious needs of others comes from his experience of living through the 1964 race riots as a ten-year-old boy. The curfew and patrols at night induced in him a sense of extreme anxiety that he has not forgotten to this day. “Young people today do not know all this”, Mr Chan says in a refrain that runs like a common thread through the views of people his age.

Another dramatic incident occurred in 1998 after the race riots in Indonesia following the fall of President Suharto. Mr Chan travelled to Jakarta to check on the welfare of the Goodrich staff there. “I was among only three passengers on the flight from Singapore”, he recalls with disbelief. Mercifully, his staff members were safe and his office was untouched, but he saw the broken glass panels of Chinese-owned businesses and other signs of destruction.