Strategies - SIM Teow Hong

The first challenge is ourselves. How do we convince our own stakeholders, the schools and all that, to first embrace a common strategy and for them to articulate their own respective plans that is in line with their strategy. So thats the first challenge. Each school has to articulate what they want to do and we have to make sure that these are all in line with the total university strategy. That's one. Next thing, of course, is to convince the board that this strategy that we are embarking on would achieve the kind of goal and vision that they want for SMU. So that's the other part of the engagement that is very active. And we are very fortunate to have a very active board that really help us shape all these things and they truly are actively gave their advice and their input in terms of where we should be going. So that's the other one. In terms of MOE, they decided to come up with a different funding model for the university which actually resulted in just them coming up with a total, what they call a block budget to give to each university without having to go into all the details of why are you spending so much on this, why are you spending so much on that, they don't have to do that anymore.