Speech by the Guest of Honour
Ambassador George Hara
Group Chairman and CEO, DEFTA Partners and Chairman of Board, Alliance Forum Foundation
Thank you very much for kind introduction for me and thank you for inviting us to this very important ceremony.
Dear Professor Xiang Zhang, the President and Vice-Chancellor of the University, Professor Chak-sing Lau, the Dean of the Medicine, Professor Rosie Young, Former Dean of the Medicine, Dr Libby Lee, President of Hong Kong University Medical Alumni Association and also the Under Secretary for Health HKSAR Government, Dr Theresa Li, Cluster Chief Executive (Hong Kong West) and Hospital Chief Executive of Queen Mary Hospital and Tsan Yuk Hospital, Professor Kenneth Cheung, Hospital Chief Executive of The University of Hong Kong-Shenzhen Hospital, and Dr Kenneth Tsang, CEO of Gleneagles Hong Kong Hospital. And dear professors and dear graduates, the students and their family members.
Today, I am truly honored to celebrate your hard work and achievement at the graduate conferment ceremony of the Faculty of Medicine at The University of Hong Kong. You have chosen the path of the medicine and have overcome many challenges to reach this moment. I sincerely respect your efforts.
As a graduate of the Faculty of Medicine, your mission is to achieve both human health and the society health. A goal should be creating a society where people can live healthy life until the last moment of their lives. To achieve this, we rely on various fields of the study, including medicine, public health, pharmacies, nursing, physiotherapy, biochemistry, and other medical sciences. You are expected to use this knowledge not only to protect each patient's health, but also to promote the health of the entire community and entire society.
Looking at the state of the world, we see division is increasing in both America and Europe and everywhere in the world, the gap between the rich and poor is widening. Economic policies based on theories of the Nobel Prize winning economist have led to a situation where hedge funds and activists are rampant on the Wall Street, further increasing social divisions. In particular, since the business community in the United States declared in 1997 that the company belongs to the shareholders, this Shareholder Primacy idea has spread globally and contribute to the economic imbalances. The shareholder capitalism encourages a focus on the short-term profit, leading companies to prioritise, maximise only the shareholders' values. This is the point I have been trying to change this world to make more middle class around the world.
Therefore, I developed this public interest capitalism theories to serve the divided society that was created by the shareholder capitalism. In the public interest capitalism, companies are not just for shareholders. They are seen as public institutions of public entities that should be contributed to the society through their business activities. The company is composed of employees, communities, planet (since we use air and water), customers (since they buy the product) and suppliers and the long-term shareholders. Therefore, when company makes profit, we should distribute this profit among the members of the company, not just to the shareholders. But in reality, if you look at many companies in the United States, they distribute hundred percent of the after-tax profit just to the shareholders.
This is not right thing to do. So I want to change this corporate governance and corporate law and very active working in the Japanese government in a various title which was introduced by the Master of Ceremony. The success of the business is achieved through the support from employees and those stakeholders. It's very important for you to remember, once you are successful in your career, not only just because of you, but also the support from around you. As a medical doctor, many people are going to become the doctors, we don't just handle the data and numbers. The patients we encounter are not just cases, they are individuals with their own lives. Seeing the human behind the data is a sense of the true medicine, key to building the trust with patience. I expect you to provide compassionate care, paying attention to each patient's background and feeling as you enter the medical field.
Moreover, with advancement in the modern science and technologies, it is said we can create artificial intelligence that surpass human intelligence. I am trying to describe how mysterious human body is. However, this requires about at least 1 million kilowatts, the power of the electricity, which is equal to the one nuclear reactor, considering the human brain function on just about 20 watts. I emphasised at the World Artificial Intelligence Summit that no AI can operate on the same energy levels as human brain. We don't have to eat the electricity. We can just eat the food. So it is quite important to learn about the mystery of the human being, a human body.
This perspective also applies the fields like biochemistry and molecular biology. I encourage you to break free from the conventional thinking and develop a flexible mindset that invites you to view science from a broader perspective and utilise entirely different scientific methodologies. As you move forward in your medical career, I hope you will keep the principal of public interest capitalism in your mind and act to not only protect the health of the individual patients, but also promote the health of the society. I sincerely wish your success as future leaders in medicine. Congratulations on receiving your doctoral, master's and bachelor's degrees. Thank you!
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