What was your first job and what did you learn from it?
My first job was in the Budget Division of Singapore's Ministry of Finance. This was a good place to start, as it gave me an excellent bird's eye view of the entire government. It also emphasised that government operations have to be cost-effective - as it is tax-payers' money that we are utilising, and the onus is on all of us in the civil service to spend it well.

Who is your hero, mentor or person you most admire? Why?
I have had a large number of mentors in my career in the Singapore civil service. In each job, I have had one, or in many cases, more than one mentor. I try to keep in touch with all of them. I think that having many mentors was immensely valuable to me and a key factor in the progress I have made in my career. It is partly recognition of this fact that has guided my own work as a leader - and I try to help others as I have been helped.

What is your favorite book?
The most thought-provoking book that I read recently was "The Innovator's Dilemma" by Clayton Christensen. It's easy to understand why the topic is interesting - the Internet space is moving so fast and we are all struggling to understand it fully. Also, in the economy of the future, the challenge is innovation.

What advances in your field do you envision over the next 10 years?
It has been an exciting learning experience for me to participate in developing the infocomm sector at this time. Despite the turbulence the global IT and communications industries have gone through in the last one year, the Internet is here to stay and the industry will recover. There will be new issues created by convergence of technologies, and these may be increasingly complex as traditional industry boundaries become less distinct. And it becomes a challenge to deal with these issues, as we don't have answers from the rest of the world - we're inventing from the edge. Yet technology will become integral to each individual's daily lives, and issues relating to consumer protection, privacy and so on, will need to be resolved.

What do you see as the single most interesting element of your work?
There are many interesting elements, but one key aspect, as a leader, is ensuring the professional and leadership development of my team. The challenge is to build a strong organization that survives when the leader moves on. I therefore believe in building leaders at all levels and in encouraging ideas from everywhere. I believe that this helps build sustainability. I also do not see myself as having to be the professional expert in each and every area - I suppose this is particularly obvious to me in leading IDA, which has a team with a wide-ranging area of expertise! I believe that strong teams have members with different skills and perspectives, and my key role as a leader is to be able to gel these people into a high-performance team.

What was your greatest challenge and what did you learn from it?
I have tried to leave each workplace that I have been in, better than when I found it. As a civil servant, I feel that the concept of stewardship is important; I don't see my current assignment as my "empire," but as a position that I have been entrusted with to do something responsible with. I am not sure that I managed to achieve this objective in very my first assignment, but I can safely say that I have done so for the other jobs that I have taken on.

What was your greatest challenge and what did you learn from it?
I think that the greatest challenge has been to build a new team in a new organization, like the IDA, at a time when the business environment is changing so rapidly. Any merger is destabilizing, and knowing that the work you do is also evolving at the same time makes the change more daunting for most people. But I think that the business challenge - of making Singapore competitive as an infocomm hub and moving forward as an e-economy, e-government and info society - was so exciting and so important that it gave the IDA team something beyond the merger to focus on. This paradoxically helped to pull people together as a team very quickly. I think IDA has introduced many initiatives in the last year which have made a difference to Singapore's competitiveness as an infocomm hub and info-society. The credit really goes to the excellent team of officers at IDA who have collectively made this happen.

What strategies do you use to maintain balance in your life?
Balance is important. There must be time for family, friends, and other things in life. Frankly, maintaining balance is tough in this fast-paced environment - it requires a lot of determination, and discipline to not try to do everything!

What advice would you give to young women who want to enter your field?
My advice to women starting out would be not to expect that people will discriminate against you because you are a woman. If you start with that, it could become a crutch or an excuse. Having said that, I believe management skills in the information age will be increasingly about nurturing both intellectual capital and people. These skills are different from those needed in traditional hierarchical management structures. I know many people, both men and women, who have a lot of such skills in these new ways of working. It may increasingly be more of an individual quality rather than a gender issue.