Leading in the ASEAN Region

What’s the most important factor to monitor - people, strategy or culture? While you’ll need to prioritise each of these factors differently, you must be addressing all three factors well to lead your department or company. These factors are closely interlinked so ignoring one factor would naturally have a negative impact on the others. You've got to work very hard to build the right culture, values and direction.

Letting everyone set their own priorities is a prescription for disaster. Business is a team game. An excellent recent example is AirAsia, which I’m on the board for, which became rather siloed over time. This in turn made the company bureaucratic and factionalised. After the leadership realised and recognised this, it enabled us to become more efficient as a company. We changed the culture to be more integrated and we called it One Air Asia. An organisation needs to reach consensus on priorities and try new things to grow but there should also be processes to follow such initiatives. The company needs to be willing to pull the plug if initiatives are not working. Generally speaking, most companies have too many initiatives going on at once. It is better to have fewer initiatives with greater emphasis.

Given the multiple initiatives in an organisation, as a leader, you need to make difficult decisions on where to focus. Prioritisation is crucial at this point. It's always more important to focus only on the relatively important big issues rather than a whole raft of problems that will burn people's time without making much of a difference to the organisation. One of the biggest lessons that I learned in GE was to give priority to the big “why” so that resource allocation could go to significant opportunities moving forward.

I don’t subscribe to the analogy of keeping fires burning. If the issue is critical and strategic, then the teams should be working on it. If not, then kill it and don’t let the fire continue to burn. Don’t let non-strategic projects frustrate teams and reduce their energy, causing good people to leave the organisation.

Decision Making Frameworks

Always prioritise customers. The voice of the customer should always be the loudest and be given the most weight. With the many digital initiatives today, we can now leverage on data-driven decision making. For example, we can get much better data on our markets and customers to better understand their decision making processes. Further, the data we get from our equipment like aircraft engines and gas turbines help both GE and our customers to improve their performance and safety. The goal is to create a win-win for our customers.

It’s also critical to understand what the real business question is. Ask stakeholders about what they really want to know - Why is this person asking this question? What's the context? What are the impacted segments? Based on the answers to these questions, you can then create an analysis plan with hypotheses that guide you. Next, you decide on the methodology you’re going to use whether it’s correlation analysis, predictive analysis or any relevant methodology. Based on the methodology, you collect the data that you need. After collecting your data, you need to validate, order, triangulate your data and get into the analysis to answer your guiding questions. You then end off by making recommendations.

In addition to data driven decision making, I find the Disney brainstorming framework to be very useful. The Disney brainstorming framework is about getting all of the brains in the company to work on big issues together. No matter where you are in the company, you can take part in this brainstorming framework, including entry-level employees who are usually not heard. This type of brainstorming offers them an opportunity to be heard, and it gets employees energised and excited about the role they can play in some of these transitions.

In the Disney framework, you can have 25 or more people in a room. You start by posing the various strategic questions that you want answered. Everyone then writes their answers on post-it notes and sticks them on the wall. The first stage is known as the Dreamer stage, and you don’t want to get in the way of creative solutions during this stage. Create a space where all ideas are welcome, and focus on the process of creativity. In the next stage, known as the Realist stage, you want to get into the practicality of the idea. It’s not about what’s wrong with this idea but about what can be done about the idea. At this stage, the focus is on the “how”. Finally, you go into the Spoiler stage where you shoot holes at the ideas suggested. During this final stage, you want to be critical and talk about why an idea can’t work. This whole process gets employees engaged in the process of decision making which is vital.