The IEL Distinguished Speakers Series is a platform at the intersection of leadership and engineering. The materialization of Engineering Leadership.
… to challenge prevailing thinking
… to challenge the status quo.
Past Speakers Over the Years
Mr. Tang Kin Fei
Group President & CEO, Sembcorp Industries
Being Future Ready: A corporate perspective. An engineer’s perspective.
16th April 2015
Sembcorp Industries is a leading energy, water and marine group with operations across 15 countries. The group’s vision and next phase of growth: being a truly global company. What capabilities and talent are required of a global company? And how is Sembcorp preparing itself for this future? Mr Tang Kin Fei shares the group’s strategy and tactics for growth and long-term sustainability, and how a foundation in engineering helps one to be future ready.
View webcast of the event.
This event was supported by Engineering Alumni Singapore (EAS).
Mr. J Y Pillay
Rector of the Residential College of Alice & Peter Tan, UTown, NUS
What It Takes to Nurture Engineer Leaders
13 November 2014
IEL has as its mission the nurturing of engineer-leaders. To this end, we provide programmes in the Faculty of Engineering for engineers and engineering students to apply their technical skills, develop their soft skills and hone their value-creation skills through innovation & entrepreneurship activities. These are skills needed for engineers to step up as leaders. Value can only be created by those who can spot opportunities and have the right skills to pull together people and resources to make things happen.
What else can and should be done to develop leaders in engineering? How can Singapore continue to draw in and cultivate talent able to create value for Singapore?
Come join us and share in this opportunity for a frank chat with Mr. Pillay, an Engineer-Leader!
Professor Sir Mike Gregory
Head, Institute for Manufacturing (IfM) & Manufacturing and Management Division, Engineering Department, University of Cambridge
Manufacturing in a High-cost Country
9 January 2014
The last 5 years have seen a dramatic renewal of interest in manufacturing in high cost countries particularly the USA and the UK. In part this is due to the perceived instabilities in the financial and service industries but also because countries with a strong science base again see manufacturing as an important way of capturing value. Continuing changes in the scale and capabilities of developing countries have also contributed to a rapidly changing global industrial landscape.
Professor Gregory will describe some of the measures which are being put in place to enhance manufacturing capability in high cost countries and review emerging patterns of industrial and manufacturing policy.
Professor Liew Mun Leong
Provost Chair Professor (Practice), NUS Business School and Faculty of Engineering
Founding President & CEO, CapitaLand Group
Pragmatic Leadership – Key to Leadership Success in Corporations
3 September 2013
Professor Liew Mun Leong is first and foremost an engineer. “I was trained as an engineer and wanted to be a good professional engineer. I spent many years doing that. I had never thought of becoming a CEO.” So how did this engineer become recognised by Fortune magazine (2008) as one of the top 25 most powerful businesspeople in Asia?
Come hear from one of NUS Faculty of Engineering’s own distinguished alumni as he shares his thoughts on leadership.
View webcast of the event.
Mr Tan Gee Paw
Chairman, Public Utilities Board
The Little Blue Dot
3 April 2013
In the two preceding lectures, Mr Ngiam Tong Dow had discussed the need to have wealth creators rather than wealth managers, and Mr Choo Chiau Beng had followed up with his lecture on wealth creation from an organisational perspective. In this lecture, I will discuss the role of engineering systems for wealth creation, in particular with respect to a basic infrastructure, water.
In many countries, water technologies span the entire water spectrum from water supply to used water treatment technologies to flood alleviation schemes. Often these technologies exist in separate and unrelated silos, residing in different and often competing agencies of the government. Singapore recognised the need to view the entire water spectrum of technologies as a total engineering system a few decades ago and took the bold step of putting the disparate pieces together into a integrated engineering system, injecting a strong dose of innovative R&D into the missing links. The result has been most rewarding. What was formerly a limiting factor to wealth creation in a water scarce country has now become a thriving new industry for Singapore with global impact.
What did it take to achieve this and can this same model be applied across a large company?
Mr Choo Chiau Beng
Chief Executive Officer, Keppel Corporation Ltd,
Chairman of Keppel Land Limited, Keppel Offshore & Marine Ltd and Keppel Energy Pte Ltd
How do we “create” wealth?
19 November 2012
In the preceding lecture, Mr Ngiam Tong Dow, Pro-Chancellor, NUS, spoke on what characterizes a “tycoon” – a wealth creator.
Keppel has been credited with spearheading the revival of an entire industry and generating further wealth creation opportunities in Singapore and abroad. It persevered and seized the opportunities to consolidate, innovate and expand the offshore and marine business, translating and spinning the opportunities beyond its original core business.
What did it take to make that leap forward, and continue to drive developments?
What investments in innovation, technology and people did Keppel make to become what it is today?
How can other local companies follow the example in pushing the boundaries, to stretch beyond their comfort zone, with an eye not on short-term gains but on long term, sustainable impact?
Mr Ngiam Tong Dow
Leaders in Wealth Creation: Jurong Island versus Shenton Way?
16 May 2012
Though our education system has produced an abundance of wealth managers, we have precious few wealth creators. Graduates in accounting, law, economics, engineering and even medicine, rush headlong for managerial jobs in banks, industry, and yes government. Only a tiny few take the plunge to start their own enterprises. Why so? In my contact with successful entrepreneurs, the singular characteristic that differentiates the wealth creator from the wealth manager is the tycoon thinks out of the box. The CEO thinks within the box.
When the best and brightest of Oxbridge and the Ivy League head straight for the City of London and Wall Street on graduation, their countries will inevitably go into relative economic decline. While wealth management may reward the talented individual banker handsomely, it does nothing to increase the wealth of the country. Henry Ford contributed more wealth to America, than dare I say, Warren Buffet, the fund manager extraordinaire. Similarly courtiers like Sir Francis Drake and Sir Walter Raleigh, the original venture capitalists at the court of Elizabeth I, plundered more gold from Spanish galleons for the realm than the wealth management coups of the famed Rothschild family.
Is there a cautionary tale in all this for Singapore when we value Shenton Way more than Jurong Island?