By the time you read this
Editorial, you should have received a notice for Extraordinary General Meeting
(EGM) of the HKMA. I am not going to
copy and paste the notice here. Basically,
the EGM is supposed to pass a resolution of increasing the number of Council
Members of the HKMA Council by 3. That
would increase the total number of Council Members from 18 to 21. Together with the President, the 2
Vice-presidents, the Hon. Treasurer, the Hon. Secretary, the Immediate Past
President and the invited Legco Member, the total number of members in the
Council will become 28. The 3 new
Council Members will be added altogether this year via election, though their
terms will be for three years, two years and one year respectively according to
the votes they get. That means we have
to elect 9 Council Members this year. Accordingly,
the quorum of Council Meetings will be increased from 6 to 8 members.
From past records, the HKMA
seldom, or if it did happen before, had problem with passing resolutions in
General Meetings. The obvious reason is
that our members are satisfied with the Council and the running of the
Association. Therefore they do not
bother to turn up and raise questions for the Office Bearers. This has usually been the case in Annual
General Meetings (AGMs). For this issue
of increasing the number of Council Members, it was not raised in the AGM last
year, and it is not going to wait for the coming AGM in July this year. An EGM has been considered necessary. For this EGM, it falls on a busy Monday night,
lodged between a Sunday and a Public Holiday. Therefore the only problem foreseen is not on
challenges and questions, but on meeting the quorum of 15 members. Luckily, this EGM also falls nicely on a
Council Meeting; therefore the quorum should not be a problem.
The reason given for increasing
the number of Council Members by 3 is: “The
number of members of the HKMA has increased for more than one-third from around
7300 in 2007 to more than 9900 in 2014. There
is an increased number of activities in the Association so much so that it will
be more beneficial to the Association to increase the number of Council
Members.” The reason is pretty
obvious, though it is up to members’ own imagination on how many activities are
increased, how they are related to the present number of Council members and to
the increased number of Council Members, and how it is going to benefit the
Association.
I remember reading a business
novel which is said to illustrate state-of-the-art economic theories. It was written by Eliyahu M. Goldratt and Jeff
Cox and published in 2004. The name of
the book is: The Goal: A Process of
Ongoing Improvement. The story is
about how a factory manager achieves his goal of improving output of his plants
through the help of piecemeal advices from a college professor who skillfully
puts interesting economic theories into actual practice. Here, the goal of Council is to better handle
the increased activities of the Association. The means chosen is by increasing 3 Council
Members. The logical question to ask is:
Can the means lead to achievement of the goal? We also need to consider whether there would
be any unwanted effects. Are we talking
about manpower alone, or about efficiency? There is a very basic economics theory called
the Law of Diminishing Returns. It states that in all productive processes, adding more of one factor of production, while holding all others constant, will at some point yield lower per-unit returns, or even negative returns. Do not forget that an important, if not the more important, role of the Council is decision making in policies. A council tends to become dysfunction when it grows in size. For a particular matter which is not overtly complicated or important, if each of the 28 members gives his view for 5 minutes, the discussion will end up for more than 2 hours.
It is efficiency that matters. I came across another interesting economics
principle on efficiency in my study days. It is called Pareto Principle. It states that for many events, roughly 80% of
the effects come from 20% of the causes. It is an observation proved by complicated
mathematical calculations. The reasons
behind such natural order are again complicated and multi-factorial. Put it simple, you can say that 80% of your
clinic income comes from 20% of your load of patients. Or, 80% of the complaints you receive come
from another 20% of your patients. The
Italian economist Pareto developed his principle in the 1900s by observing that
20% of the pea pods in his garden contained 80% of the peas. We can safely expect that 80% of the
activities of the HKMA will still be handled by 20% of the Council Members no
matter the total number is 25 or 28. Thus,
adding 3 more members without looking into other aspects of how these
activities are handled (or, more fundamentally, whether such activities are
needed) might not benefit the Association too much.
(Source: HKMA News April 2014)
