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Peh Shing Huei

He does not sing karaoke, has no interest in mahjong and gets bored by the mere idea of spending hours on a golf course.
Philip Yeo has only one hobby: reading. He reads on the road and he reads at home. One of his favourite childhood memories was renting a boat, sailing off the north-east coast of Singapore and spending an entire day in the sun reading alone.
His dream home is one shaped like a mushroom with the circular perimeter a floor-to-ceiling library so that he can sleep, eat and live completely surrounded by books.
“While people of my age are chasing a little white ball, I read,” he said.

His insatiable appetite for the written word accounts for the success of the former economic tsar of Singapore.
For more than two decades from the mid 1980s, he led the city state’s powerful Economic Development Board, in charge of drawing investors, creating jobs and in that process, largely determining the direction of the country’s economy.
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He drove Singapore’s economy on a relentless upward charge, ensuring it always stayed ahead of competitors by nimbly moving from electronics to wafer fabrication, from chemicals to biomedical.

It was possible because of an incredible network which he forged around the world, being on a first-name basis with most of the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies.
That ability to connect was very often down to his broad knowledge acquired from reading. Colleagues who worked with him for years called him “an oracle”.
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He is able to pick up on any topic and engage in a meaningful discussion. During the interview with This Week in Asia, for instance, he danced effortlessly between the US presidential election and Pokemon, the history of Okinawa and radical Islam.
Before he visited Iran in 2004 for the first time, he loaded up on the history of the country, its civilisation and even myths. That allowed him to connect quickly with his hosts and he succeeded in drawing Iranian scientists to Singapore.

When he was leading Singapore’s biomedical adventure at the turn of the century, he read medical journals, books, magazines and even Genetics for Dummies to improve his knowledge of the subject.
His pace of reading surprised many.
National University of Singapore president Tan Chorh Chuan, who worked with Yeo on the biomedical push, added in a soon-to-be published biography of Yeo: “He’s an avid reader and reads at an incredible speed. He can read a whole book in one or two days.
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“He also has highlighters in his bag, which he uses to highlight portions of the book that are significant to him. It’s not as though he goes through the readings without understanding. He was able to master enough of the domain knowledge [on biomedical matters] very, very quickly. He was very, very impressive.”
Yeo, who now runs his own firm offering economic development services to countries such as Colombia, Kazakhstan and Saudi Arabia, reads across many subjects.
His current picks are the Ottoman empire and drones, so as to better understand the troubles in the Middle East.

“I usually read a few books at the same time,” said Yeo, who turns 70 in October. “When I get bored with one, I move on to the other, searching for a dessert which will excite me. But I will always return to the book and complete it.”
When he is on the road, he relies on his iPad Pro, which he has converted into a phenomenal portable library of books, journals and magazines.
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The tablet houses his favourite Economist, New Yorker, Foreign Affairs and Wired magazines, along with thousands of articles which the former school librarian diligently and systematically filed away.
There is a folder named “Education”, for instance, with some 20 sub folders titled “Graduate Education”, “Gender in Education” and “Computer Education” and so on.
It allows him to easily find and send out articles to friends, to whom he is a one-man wire agency.
“As long as I have wifi, you can leave me anywhere in the world and I will be happy,” said Yeo, who sits on the board of Kerry Logistics and Hitachi, among others. “I’m never short of reading materials.”
Peh Shing Huei is the author of ‘Neither Civil Nor Servant: the Philip Yeo Story’, which will be launched in Singapore next month


What keeps Singapore’s former economic tsar going?

Philip Yeo, Singapore’s former economic tsar, is a former school librarian who has retained his love of books. Photo: Singapore Press Holdings

SIN01-19960509-SINGAPORE: A Mitsubishi Chemical official shows to Singapore Economic Development Board chairman, Philip Yeo (L front) the finishing products of the stack compact discs after attending the blessing of the grounds and groundbreaking ceremony 09 May at the Mitsubishi Chemical Infonics phase II expansion. Mitsubishi Chemical, a world leader in chemical and data storage products, is investing an additional USD 321.4 million dollars to build a new Hard Disk Media manufacturing plant and to increase production of recordable compact disc in Singapore. Roslan RAHMAN AFP PHOTO AFP PHOTO Roslan RAHMAN/rr/mv

Economic Development Board (EDB) chairman, Philip Yeo (L) and Richard Schimbor (R), President of CRI International, Inc. officiate the opening ceremony of new presulfiding plant 02 July in Singapore. CRI/Criterion Manufacturing is the only catalyst manufacturing and regeneration plant in the region with a new extension, an actiCAT catalyst presulfiding plant, to their existing 25 million Singapore dollar (15 million USD) plant, and a research center will be built to bring their total investment in Singapore approximately 50 million Singapore dollars (30 million USD). AFP PHOTO/Roslan RAHMAN / AFP PHOTO / ROSLAN RAHMAN

SIN01-19970624-SINGAPORE, SINGAPORE: Chairman of Economic Development Board, Philip Yeo (l); Chairman of Lonza Singapore Pte Ltd. Andreas de Virgilis (c) and Chairman of Toyo Engineering Corporation, Uzuhiko Uwatoko (r) launched 24 June the ground breaking ceremony of Lonza Singapore's New Purified Isophthalic Plant on the Pulau Sakra Island off Singapore. The US$128.5 million dollars Swiss chemical plant, scheduled for completion by end off 1998, will produce 70,000 tonnes of purified isopthalic acid (PIA) a chemical intermediate used to make polyester resins, coatings and paints, bottles and numerousother products. AFP PHOTO Roslan RAHMAN AFP PHOTO AFP/ROSLAN RAHMAN/rr

SIN01:SINGAPORE,09MAY96 - A Buddhist monk blesses an earth mover before it broke ground for Mitsubishi Chemical Infonics' new manufacturing facility in Singapore May 9. At rear are (L-R) Shinichi Oka (managing dir ector of Mitsubishi Chemical Singapore Pte Ltd), Haruhiko Ikeuchi (managing dire ctor of Mitsubishi Chemical Infonics), Philip Yeo (chairman of Singapore's Econo mic Development Board), and Tetsuo Komuro (board member and general manager of M itsubishi Chemical Corporation's information storage product department). The US$320 million plant will boost output of the company's hard disk and recordable compact discs. jd/Photo by Jonathan Drake REUTERS

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