Leadership Quote by Tharman Shanmugaratnam

Tharman’s line lands because it refuses the comfort of “steady as she goes”. “Treading water” is an image of effort without movement: you’re busy, you’re tired, you look alive, but you’re not getting anywhere. It’s a quiet indictment of a politics and policy culture that confuses activity with progress, especially in eras when headlines, quarterly numbers, and election cycles punish anything that doesn’t pay off immediately.

The twist is the second sentence, where the metaphor turns predatory. In the ocean, survival behavior can kill you. “Drinking seawater” is what happens when the body’s emergency response becomes self-harm: the thirst is real, the action is understandable, the outcome is worse. That’s the subtext Tharman is signaling about short-term fixes - subsidies that paper over structural problems, populist spending with no fiscal base, growth strategies that ignore inequality, climate, and productivity. You can keep people afloat for a while, but if the only tool is keeping afloat, you normalize crisis management as governance.

Context matters: Tharman has spent decades as a technocratic political leader in Singapore, a system built on long-range planning, institutional credibility, and an almost allergic reaction to improvisation. As President - a role tied to safeguarding reserves and social cohesion - he’s not just critiquing impatience; he’s warning about the slow corrosion of state capacity when every decision is optimized for the next news cycle.

The genius of the line is its moral psychology: it admits why short-termism is tempting, then shows how it quietly changes what “survival” even means.