At 79, Liew Mun Leong has no time to be sentimental

His self-avowed 'pragmatic' operating style, he says, was deeply influenced by pioneering leaders.

- Ravi Velloor

Looking out from his memorabilia-filled high-floor office in Centrium Square in Serangoon Road, Mr Liew Mun Leong is fully aware of the distance he has travelled in life. Nearby Jalan Besar — once an area where gangsters roamed — is where he spent his early childhood. Home then was a one-room tenement occupied by seven people, including his parents and grandmother. He himself slept on a foldable cot in the corridor, pouring hot water over the canvas on Sundays to rid it of bed bugs.

I asked Mr Liew – the government civil engineer who was chief project manager for Changi Airport's Terminal 2 and, later, the entrepreneurial business leader who shaped CapitaLand into South-east Asia's most valuable property player — why this anecdote was not in Barracks To Boardroom, his autobiography being launched on Aug 8.

“There are enough sob stories in Singapore,” he countered. For instance, Mr Lee Yock Suan, his friend and classmate from Queenstown Secondary School who went on to become a long-serving Cabinet minister, also endured hardship in childhood.

“Yock Suan would need to stop studying at 7pm because his home had no electricity.”

Nevertheless, says Mr Liew, Mr Lee was a brilliant student who went on to Raffles Institution and won a President’s Scholarship.

“Instead (of sob stories), I thought I would relate some of what my mother — a real tiger woman — would say. One of her pet sayings was ‘Even if the sky falls down, treat it as a bed.’ It means, to take every crisis in your stride.”

The unwillingness to allow himself self-pity is typical of the 79-year-old Mr Liew, whose self-avowed “pragmatic” operating style, he says, was deeply influenced by pioneering leaders such as Dr Goh Keng Swee and Mr Lee Kuan Yew.