Singapore Management University (SMU) welcomed Dr Fernando Flores to its Presidential Distinguished Lecturer Series on 22 November 2013.  Dr Flores, who was the former Finance Minister of Chile, is also an author, educator and entrepreneur.  He has devoted more than 40 years to studying how people work together.  Taking a cross-disciplinary approach, he successfully synthesised his insights on technology, language and management into a new theory of work that has had many practical applications in education and in the corporate world.

Dr Flores, who ventured into the field of research because he wanted to ‘make a difference’, commented that language is something that we take for granted to be just sounds and symbols.  Communication is not just the passing of information from one point to another; it involves the moods of the people on the giving and receiving ends of the information, and encompasses a feeling and an emotion, he explained.

He opened the session when he spoke about ‘Speech Acts’, which are what he described as the five primary moves human beings make in language every day – Declarations, Assumptions, Assertions, Promises and Requests.  Dr Flores is one of the thought leaders who distinguished language as not simply a tool we use to describe a world that already exists, but rather an action that produces a world and a future that would otherwise not have existed.

[Photo: SMU President Professor Arnoud De Meyer presenting a token to Dr Fernando Flores.]

In the one-and-a-half-hour engagement with SMU faculty, staff, students and members of the business community and public, which included a Question & Answer session moderated by SMU President Professor Arnoud De Meyer, he shared insights on various aspects of language, including the complexity of language in the education, business and political contexts.

Responding to a question from the floor about his rich life experiences, he said, “I never lived thinking who I was… you have to pursue an intuition.”  Perhaps it is this philosophy towards life that drives Dr Flores, who is also President of Chile's National Innovation Council for Competitiveness, to be in the forefront of innovation.

About the SMU Presidential Distinguished Lecturer Series (PDLS)

The SMU PDLS is a platform which has been graced by numerous luminaries over the years.  Since its inception in 2005, the Lecture has featured internationally-eminent academics and scholars, as well as outstanding business or leading statesmen who have achieved distinction in their respective fields.  It is organised with an objective to stimulate intellectual discourse among the SMU community comprising students, alumni, faculty and staff, about issues of significance and interest.