Lee Kuan Yew turned Singapore from a struggling nation into a financial hub by thinking like a CEO. He obsessed over first impressions, from airport cleanliness to layout, to attract talent. With no natural resources, he made skilled immigrants the foundation of everything.
Lee Kuan Yew was the leader of Singapore. During his reign, he took Singapore from essentially being a third world country with a lot of problems to one of the best financial hubs in the world. He ran the country like a CEO. And one of my favorite anecdotes about Lee Kuan Yew is how he used to obsess about the airport onboarding experience. What are the bathrooms like? How clean are things? What's the first few miles from the airport to the city? Lee Kuan Yew used to obsess over everything because he knew that is talented people coming for the first time. And If you look at it, Singapore has essentially no natural resources, so it's not blessed with Saudi Arabia's oil or LA's beauty necessarily, but just attracting as many talented immigrants, the single biggest thing from my understanding of Singapore's story that they did.
