I refer to the letter Ponder the Abdullah years with an open mind.

In my mind - from a leadership and management perspective--Abdullah Ahmad Badawi was probably one of the best things that has happened to Malaysia in a long time.

The dilemma of a leader is this. A leader ideally is one who empowers and gives voice and participation to the people – or so the books tell us – that's the way to go currently anyway. It makes sense on paper.

You want buy-in and motivation and a sense of shared vision, purpose and even methods to achieve that goal for the group. So, of course, you give more freedom to the people to decide.

The challenge is when people say they want freedom, but do not want all the consequences that come with that freedom. ‘With great power comes great responsibility,’ to quote Spidey's Uncle Ben.

People want to control their lives and the freedom to express their opinions and dissatisfaction, but will they then do the hard work of motivating themselves and others, negotiating, putting their efforts and energy to work and improve things?

Will they sacrifice and devote themselves, exercising self-control and self-regulation to stem the greed and corruption in the country – or will they continue to flout laws – because they don't want to be inconvenienced?

Will people understand that the amount of effort, work and team-play contributes significantly to the economic growth of the company and thus the nation?

Will they care enough to maintain the society's infrastructures and systems and get involved in making society a safer place (like getting to know their neighbours and patrolling the streets – rather than pointing their finger at an already weary and corrupt police force?)

No. You see, it is much easier to dissolve oneself of the responsibility of stewardship of our nation, or to put it another way, talk is cheap. So Malaysians sit on the sidelines pointing their fingers at the leadership but fail to connect their everyday thoughts, words, feelings and behavior to the state of the nation.

We want our leaders to make our decisions for us secretly in our hearts - why? So we don't have to bear the responsibility, the tension, the discomfort or the effort, the thinking, self-control, discipline, persistence and self-regulation each Malaysian citizen needs to exercise for us to become a great nation (or even a nation like Singapore for that matter).

We don't have to look deep inside ourselves and change ourselves individually if we are busy epitomising what we actually label our leaders - ‘ineffective, inefficient, corrupt, lazy, all talk and no action’.

We want the Mahathirs to rule Malaysia for it is infinitely easier to blame a leader for the failure of our country because he made all the decisions for us. It is much more difficult to take responsibility to act righteously and wisely in an uncertain and complex world.

It is much more difficult to connect what we do or don't do on a daily basis and believe that it makes a difference to the future of our nation.

So the next time we point our fingers at any one of our leaders, it behooves us to ask ourselves: ‘How are we leading ourselves, our families, our teams, our communities? Will we take the time and effort to make a difference in our families, our communities, or work, etc and remember that ‘With great power comes great responsibility?’ Will we change for the sake of the other?

I hope the answer is ‘yes’ for the sake of our communities, our country and our world.

Abdullah was deemed ‘incompetent’. From an objective view of management, you could conclude that he might be more akin to a 'heretic' rather than an incompetent.

Many leaders were branded 'heretics' when they tried to introduce new ideas and management practices – these people were before their time – and actually produced wonderful results, which senior management proceeded to ignore and started then to shut out the heretics.

Their work was only recognised years later – as being wonderful and adopted because they worked.

Even if Abdullah produced his results – it would probably take us another 30-40 years to get there if he was to be consistent with his management practices. He was not, in my mind, incompetent in his general approach.

What he was doing was not what Malaysians are ready for in general. Malaysians are not ready to think and sacrifice 30 - 40 years in advance. I would rather see Abdullah as a catalyst for change, albeit a shooting star – one that burned brightly for awhile and died quickly as it started.

That says nothing of the value of the star, mind you but just its brevity to light up a darkened sky with it's beauty and life.