Daily Inspiration Quote by Lee Kuan Yew

There is a cold-blooded clarity in Lee Kuan Yew's warning: moral hesitation is not a business strategy. The line is built like an ultimatum, not advice. "Deprive yourself" frames outsourcing as a resource you can either permit or deny, and "your competitors do not" turns that private scruple into a public handicap. The punchline, "putting yourself out of business", lands with Lee's trademark governing logic: survival is the first principle, sentiment a luxury you indulge only after you can afford it.

The intent is less to celebrate outsourcing than to discipline the listener into a worldview of relentless competitiveness. Lee led a small, vulnerable city-state that had to manufacture relevance in a global economy it couldn't control. In that context, outsourcing isn't a corporate trick; it's a metaphor for adaptation. Refuse the efficiency gains, the cost arbitrage, the flexible supply chains, and you don't just lose margin, you lose viability.

The subtext carries a sharper edge: if globalization produces harsh incentives, the individual firm doesn't get to renegotiate them. Lee is implicitly shifting the moral argument away from "Is outsourcing good?" to "Who pays when you refuse it?" In his pragmatic lexicon, the answer is workers, shareholders, and ultimately the national economy that depends on competitive firms. It's a realist creed that doubles as political cover: when painful policies are framed as inevitabilities, leaders can present themselves not as choosers, but as custodians of the only route that keeps the lights on.