I can imagine the controversy is no fun at all for Mr Tan's successor and other senior executives at Income's headquarters.
Mr Tan himself could be imagined gleefully piling on the pressure to get the 38-year-old insurance cooperative to revert to an established bonus structure for a certain group of life policies. He has even started a 'collective protest' action on his blog to push Income into a rethink.
Knowing Mr Tan (I have known him for many years and used to serve on Income's board of trustees), I doubt he is gleeful over the controversy.
He is passionate about his convictions and can get highly intense when engaged in an important issue.
The issue is important. The change in bonus structure, announced by Income last month, affects regular payouts from a reported 310,000 policies.
It's a bad deal for policyholders, Mr Tan says. It's not, Income says.
It is one of those situations in which both sides can muster arguments and analyse numbers according to their points of view. Those directly affected and those who are not but who are interested in the merits of the case are often left puzzled.
Could not a reputable institution such as Income get to a meeting of minds with its ex-chief and jointly explain plainly to policy-holders, stating also the points on which they have agreed to disagree? That would be helpful.
Instead we have what the headline on 11 May's Dr Money column called a Battle of the Titans.
Such titanic battles - if you will bear with the overstatement - inevitably raise disturbing, intriguing questions in people's minds.
Questions such as these: Why is Mr Tan Kin Lian attacking his former employer, an organisation that he ran for 30 years? Does he have a real point, or is he venting some unhappiness?
Why is Income holding on to so different a viewpoint instead of taking advice from its former chief?
After all, Mr Tan's years of service were described by Income as illustrious after he was succeeded by Mr Tan Suee Chieh in February 2007.
Are there parallels between Mr Tan's collective protest action and former Malaysian premier Mahathir Mohamad's sustained criticism of his successor and his demand for Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi's resignation?
No and yes.
No, because the nature and scale of the two situations are different. One concerns a company and a few hundred thousand customers. The other embraces a nation of nearly 30million people.
Yes, because charitable as well as uncharitable thoughts come to mind when former chiefs take aim - some would say take potshots - at the places or the people they used to lead.
Some former leaders feel a compulsion to do that, whether they have stepped down voluntarily or otherwise, because they just cannot let go. They are like stalkers. This kind of compulsion is a psychological, maybe even psychiatric, problem.
Then there are the savants, real or self-proclaimed. The word savant has its roots in 18th-century French and refers to a 'knowing' person.
Some 21st-century ex-chiefs genuinely believe that they have so much knowledge about their former domain that their institutional wisdom is still current. So they know better than their successors, or so they think.
Some organisations are smart enough to tap the expertise and experience of their alumni, especially the truly valued senior people who have left.
Those organisations that do not place such value on former employees run the risk of well-meaning or disenchanted people setting out to save past employers from themselves.
Sometimes the ex-insiders are right, and they could prove to be an organisation's saviour. Sometimes they are wrong. And there are times when the current bosses should get together with the now-outsiders to pool collective wisdom and set things right.
I suspect that is where Income and its ex-chief are at.
Income says that for life policies bought after 1993, annual bonus will be cut from 2.3per cent to 1.3per cent of the sum assured and special bonus increased from 25per cent to 30-120per cent (for policies ranging from 20years to two years).
'The policyholder benefits are not impacted by the restructure,' Income adds.
1,000 SIGNATURES
Mr Tan disagrees. His point is that Income is unilaterally changing terms to the detriment of policyholders when they should be given the option of accepting or rejecting the revised terms.
In his blog last Thursday, he said he had obtained 210 signatures for the collective protest but needed help to achieve the target of 1,000 signatures by 25 May.
I would not call Mr Tan a stalker. But is he a savant in this controversy and a saviour to those policyholders who do not want the new bonus terms?
The more pertinent question is whether Mr Tan and Income can get together, with or without 1,000 online signatures, and give policyholders a solution that is in their best interests.
This article was first published in The New Paper on May 22, 2008
