Anas Zubedy - The Edge

The Edge Interview Last week (From FB)
Sunday, 06 December 2009 at 13:23

1. What does your job entail and what do you like most about it?

Basically I will clarify goals, set directions, the pace of the organization and make sure that everybody runs at the same speed but faster than the competition. I also teach and write the (training) programmes. I like my job because I’ve managed to create a profitable business that allows me to promote my social cause at the same time.


2. What are the main programmes conducted by the company?

Our main programme is called MAD – Making a Difference. It is a change programme that companies can use to help their people move from where they are right now to where the corporate objectives are. Let’s say a company had just gone through a merger of two different cultures and they want to build a new culture; we help them build the culture. The MAD programme is a very good tools to help companies achieve their soft goals.

3. Who are your main clients?

Our clients are multinational companies and local companies, big and small. We also deal with small boutique companies. My partner and I decided years ago to have a diverse list of clients. You see, before 1998, I decided to focus on one or two big clients. But when the (1998 Asian financial) crisis came, it hit me because when I lose one client, I lose everything. In 1999, when I relooked at my business, I decided to have as many clients, in that way our business is more stable.

4. What is your management style?

We are very casual and relaxed in the way we run things but we’ve serious in the business. In other words, the substance is very serious; the form is a lot of fun. The way I manage is I like to see my people happy and performing. So if they’re happy but not performing, I won’t accept it. if there’re performing but not happy, then I’m not happy. I want to make sure they’re both happy and performing. I create an environment whereby people will be having a little bit of fun but are also doing their job.

5. How do you achieve the balance between employee who are happy and
performing at the same time?

Get people to learn to be happy when they perform. Here we are very laissez faire, we call each other by name, they can laugh at the bosses, and they can poke fun at us, it’s no problem. Work is work, fun is fun.


6. How do you handle conflicts that arise in the workplace?

We deal with it quite directly. With key people in my company, I always have one-on-one sessions with them. In other words, I like to engage my people and I also ask them to do SWOT (Strength-Weakness-Opportunity-Threat) analysis on themselves, the company and myself. In other words, everybody is given a chance to say what is good and bad for the company. Normally this is the time of the year that I will ask everybody to send me a SWOT analysis of the company. After I listen to everyone, I will go back and think about it and form next year’s goal and direction.

7. What has been your worst management decision and in hindsight, how
would you have done it differently?

I find it hard to pinpoint because I’m a very slow and steady person. I don’t take high risk, I don’t take low risk; I’m a very medium-risk taker. Because of that, no really bad thing has happened. Anything that happened in the past that’s not good may turn our for the better. Because of that you learn, you make things even better.

8. What’s the best management advice you’ve ever received and from
whom?

They are a few, but the best advice I have, whether in running a business or life, is the Quranic statement that says, ‘Don’t hold everything until you choke, don’t let it go until you lose everything.’ There’s always a balance you have to find.

9. You have taking out unity-themed advertisements in newspapers since
2000. What sparked the idea for the ads?

Well, I’ve wanted to do it since I was young. I was just waiting to have money! When I have really a lot of money, I’ll go on TV, billboards. Now we have Facebook. We’ve going to find as many avenues as possible to spread the message of unity.

10. How much have you spent in placing the ads so far?

Around RM 1.5 million.

11. How has the ad spend affected your bottom line?

Well, the company has survived since 1994, and it has grown since 2001. Since I advertised, the company grew about 10 times. But the advertisements are a small part. You see, a lot of people don’t understand that advertising only works when your product is good. In fact, the best way to kill a lousy product is to advertise it.

12. How has unity added value to your company?

Well, bcause out approach is ‘many colours, one race’, we have clients who represent the whole of Malaysia. That’s the reason out client are so varied. We do not confine ourselves to one particular race or to one particular group of people. Our business also reflect that. We add value to the company because unity at the end of the day is the goal of humanity and obviously, my company is moving towards it and people will follow.

13. What do you think of the 1Malaysia concept?

I think it’s a very nice relaunch of the Rukun Negara. The brand ‘1Malaysia’ is so easy to remember and very well done so that it become a catchphrase. What we need to do it to take away 1Malaysia from the perception that it belongs to (Prime Minister Datuk Seri) Najib or Barisan Nasional. 1Malaysia has to become a hak rakyat. I support 1Malaysia and I think we need to take it away from the politicians, bring it down to the people and make it Malaysian-owned.

Link to follow...

1. http://www.great-inspirational-quotes.com/inspirational-poems.html 9/12/09

http://www.poemsource.com/mother-poems.html

http://moneytree.my/2008/03/12/the-moneytree-road-map/

Energize Your Customers Online

NOVEMBER 13, 2009

Energize Your Customers Online

Competing for your customers' attention online can be tough, especially when you're up against dancing banner ads and all of the daily emails customers get. Here are three tips to cut through the clutter and capture your customers' attention in this crowded space:

1. Create a sense of urgency. Send out a coupon that needs to be used by midnight or offer a free product to the first 50 respondents.

2. Energize your customers to tell their friends. Word of mouth is incredibly powerful and valuable, especially on the internet. Give your customers something exciting that they'll want to share with their friends.

3. Make it fun. Whatever the interaction is, keep it simple, fresh, and engaging.

3 Tips for Demonstrating Humility

3 Tips for Demonstrating Humility

Effective leaders need to be mindful not only of their accomplishments, but of their character as well. Humility is a key aspect of character. Here are three ways to step out of the limelight and let others shine:

1. Temper authority. Don't use authority just because you have it. Encourage your people to make decisions, set their own goals, and take responsibility as often as possible.
2. Promote others often. Grooming talent is good for your organization and for you as a leader. Promote people around you, giving them opportunities to match or even surpass your success.
3. Acknowledge the accomplishments of others. If things go well, give away the credit. If things go poorly, take the fall. This humble approach will ensure your team rallies behind you.

3 Steps to Managing Your Day

DECEMBER 3, 2009

3 Steps to Managing Your Day

The best laid plans for your day are easily thwarted by simply opening email or walking past a colleague's desk. Before you know it, you've lost countless hours to putting out fires. Here are three steps for keeping control over your day and your time:

1. Set a plan for the day. Spend five minutes before turning on your computer in the morning to write down what you want to accomplish that day. Be realistic. Schedule time in your calendar to get each thing done, putting the harder tasks at the beginning of the day.
2. Refocus. Every hour take a minute to stop what you're doing, look at your list, and reflect on your last hour. Was it productive? What can you do to make the next hour productive?
3. Review. At the end of the day after you shut off your computer, review your day and ask yourself what you were able to accomplish. What will you do differently tomorrow?

The Ultimate Dye Job

by A.G. Lafley, as told to Cait Murphy

My note: Great write up highlighting boardroom working on big deals - getting board approval by understanding internal strength and opportunity in hand. 4 days for $4.95 billlion deal.

A.G. Lafley prefers khakis over Armani and systems over charisma. But despite his soft-spoken style, Lafley’s transformation of Procter & Gamble made him a star in business circles, as he earned a reputation as one of the country’s most effective CEOs. Chief Executive magazine named him CEO of the Year in 2006, and during his tenure P&G made enormous strides in innovation and financial performance.

That is somewhat ironic because business was not Lafley’s first love. A graduate of Hamilton College, he was studying for a doctorate in European medieval and renaissance history at the University of Virginia when he joined the Navy. He spent much of his five-year military career running retail operations at a large military base in Japan. The experience intrigued him enough that he forsook renaissance history for Harvard Business School.

Joining P&G in 1977, Lafley started as a brand manager for Joy dishwashing liquid; he went on to posts in the laundry, cleaning products and advertising divisions. A stint in Asia proved particularly influential, instilling a love for design that he brought back to Cincinnati in 1998, when he became president of the North American business unit. In 1999, Lafley added global beauty care to his portfolio; and in 2000, he became president and CEO. Though he stepped down as CEO in June 2009, he is still chairman of the board.

In this interview with BNET, Lafley describes the decisions that went into buying Clairol, the first major acquisition of his tenure.

To dye or not to dye?

We spent a long time in purgatory on this. Beginning in the 1990s, we started working on hair colorants, looking at everything from the chemistry to the product formulation to understanding the consumer experience. We saw this as a sleepy category; there hadn’t been much product change for decades. Also, we did a lot of in-home, one-on-one research. What we found, by spending entire days with women, was that hair coloring was inconvenient, messy and, frankly, a little bit scary. You were dealing with things that bleached your hair, and then things that dyed it. P&G already had superior conditioning and safer bleach; if we could just nail the dye part of the coloring, we would be in.

When I came back from Asia in 1998, we were still working on this and brought what we had into consumer testing. It didn’t deliver — the brand, the concepts, none of it was very exciting. It became quite clear we were not creating anything new that was as strong as what L’Oreal and Clairol already had. That was a real blow.

The stark reality is that you learn more from failure than you ever do from success. The key is to learn from that failure and to fail early and cheaply. And we did learn from that exercise, and everyone understood why we had not succeeded. It laid the path to our success in this category later on.

In 1999, I picked up the global beauty business unit as part of my portfolio. The question I faced was whether to bury the whole [hair color] thing. I knew we had learned a lot, and I thought we had a good lead on the product and technology side. But I also realized that a new brand had a low probability of success. The category was a walled city, with L’Oreal the biggest wall.

It came down to two things. First, we knew that there were unmet consumer needs in terms of performance, convenience and the overall experience; and second, we had a coloring technology that looked promising. With that in mind, I made the first major decision — not to give up on the category. The question was how to enter it.

Making the case for Clairol

Then in early 2001 Bristol-Myers Squibb put Clairol on the block. Should we buy it?

At the time, our technology was not ready to go, but we couldn’t affect the timing of the auction; the business was for sale when it was for sale. I thought we should go for it. The board, though, was a little skittish and plenty skeptical. I had to sell them.

We met in the boardroom at P&G’s headquarters in Cincinnati. I went in with one or two overheads. I wanted to have a discussion, not a slideshow, and we did. The members of the board challenged me on my market assumptions, the investment situation, and our assessment of consumer opportunity. I was also probed on the technology and product and pushed real hard on what we had that was proprietary. Could we do what we said we could do?

I made the case that hair care was a core business. P&G was then the leader in shampoo and on the verge of becoming the leader in conditioning and treatment. The next two big segments, as I saw it, were styling and colorants.

I told them we had been working on colorants for years and that we were close to a superior, proprietary product. Then I laid out the consumer behavior. There were more women coloring, and they were starting to color younger. And because women were living longer, they were going to color longer — once you start to color, you color to the end. The market was growing faster than other hair markets. All the trends looked good. We also knew a lot about the consumer — things the competitors were not acting on.

Then I had to deal with the brand issue. Clairol was a good No. 2 — behind L’Oreal —that we could build on. Nice n’ Easy [Clairol’s major coloring brand] still had a lot of brand equity, but it had been neglected. It sort of had become your grandmother’s brand. I thought that with our marketing expertise, we could do something with it.

At the end of about three hours, a majority of the board agreed with me that there was enough equity in the Clairol brand, and that we had enough equity on the consumer side, to make it worth bidding for. They bought the argument and we agreed on a price to offer. It was an incredible vote of confidence in the small team working on this — and in me.

Convincing the board, round II

On Friday around 6 pm, I got a phone call: We had lost. I asked Peter Dolan, who was running Bristol-Myers Squibb at the time, “Will you give us 48 hours for a best and final offer?” He said, no, he had a good offer. I argued that he had nothing to lose; if our bid comes in lower, you have the other offer in hand. If it’s higher, you’re going to get more money, and look like a hero. He said, OK, you have until 8 on Monday morning.

We worked all day Saturday; on Sunday, we had a board meeting. This one was by phone, and no, people were not happy to have to give up a Sunday afternoon. For another three hours, we debated and discussed how high we could go. The questions were even tougher this time, about the competitive situation and the market. Those who were skeptical were even more skeptical. Finally, we agreed to increase the offer.

We got the revised offer to Peter Dolan the next morning; he called me back in an hour or two to accept; we ended up paying $4.95 billion. Then we had to do the contract in something like 24 hours.

On Tuesday morning, when we signed the contract in New York, one of our best attorneys was asleep in her chair in a corner, and one of the finance guys was asleep on the floor. And of course, that was just the beginning. Then we had to deal with the regulatory agencies, and integration, and making it work.

http://www.bnet.com/2403-13056_23-368086.html?tag=content;col1

Judgement

"What we’ve learned after spending all this time with CEOs is that judgment is a process."

Noel Tichy and Warren Bennis
http://www.bnet.com/2403-13056_23-368088.html?tag=content;col2

P&G's Cultural Revolution

by Noel Tichy, as told to Cait Murphy

Tags: Team, Procter & Gamble Co., Leader, AG Lafley, Team Management..., Leadership, Management, Tichy, Warren Bennis, University of Michigan, L?Oreal, mass channel, consumer products, Ed Artzt, Noel Tichy, as told to Cait Murphy, Noel Tichy, as told to Cait Murphy

Procter & Gamble makes stuff, most famously Tide laundry detergent, Crest toothpaste and Pampers diapers. Lafley has devoted enormous attention to keeping these iconic brands fresh. But his larger achievement, argues Noel Tichy, director of the Global Leadership Program at the University of Michigan business school, is a subtler one. Lafley, he says, dragged P&G out of its insular mindset. Tichy is the author, with Warren Bennis, of Judgment: How Winning Leaders Make Great Calls (2007), in which the authors discuss AG Lafley’s leadership and tenure at P&G.

On judgment

I’ve written 12 books on leadership and my co-author, Warren Bennis, has written 37. What we’ve learned after spending all this time with CEOs is that judgment is a process. Business leaders don’t make decisions in a blink; that’s for firefighters and ER nurses.

There are only three really important buckets for decision-making: (1) who is on (and off) your team, (2) what mountain to climb, and (3) how you act when a storm hits. The most important is the first — God help you if you try to set a strategy with untrustworthy, stupid people.

Once you identify a need, you have to name and frame the decision that is required. Then you need to align key stakeholders, and finally, you must execute. To make a good decision, all three elements must work. In business, there is none of this “the operation was successful but the patient died” thing.

In the case of Clairol, A.G. Lafley identified the need: to fill out the portfolio. Then he made the case to stakeholders, in this case the board and senior leadership, to make the acquisition, rather than try to do it organically. And then the team executed, integrating the brand and creating new value. Clairol was clearly a significant strategic play. Anything you do early on, especially when a company is struggling, is both symbolically and substantively important to the company.

In another case, though, Lafley stumbled in one area — aligning stakeholders — and nearly jeopardized the decision. In 2001, he identified problems in the baby division. So one morning he named Deb Henretta, a marketing person, to take charge of it. By that afternoon, the revolution was on. “How could you turn over our sacred business to this outsider?” asked the veterans, many of who had engineering backgrounds. “What does she know about manufacturing diapers?” In fact, Lafley wanted Henretta there because she was not an engineer; he thought the division needed to think harder about the consumer. But by not aligning with the leadership team, he threatened to undermine the whole decision. After all, Henretta was going to need their help.

So Lafley did what we call a “re-do loop,” inviting senior members of the diaper team to a several-hour meeting to discuss the appointment and make the case for their own candidates. In the end, Lafley stuck with Henretta, but by listening and explaining his thinking, he was able to stop the rebellion from becoming destructive. And then they — Lafley, Henretta, and the team — executed, rejuvenating the division, in large part because it got a lot better at listening to consumers and delivering products they wanted.

On Lafley’s record as a leader

It is not too much to say that he literally saved the company; there was a lot of discussion back in 2000 about breaking it up. Since Lafley took over, P&G has gone from crisis-driven to consumer driven.

I remember reading studies in the 1970s and ’80s about P&G’s world-class manufacturing, how it got every penny out of manufacturing, and every penny out of every product. Inward looking and engineering dominated, the company was basically a manufacturing company producing consumer products. From Day 1, Lafley’s goal was to make P&G into a consumer-driven organization, and he has done that.

His most important legacy, though, is not how he strategically repositioned the company. That may be irrelevant two, three or five years from now. What is more important is how he has strengthened succession planning and the leadership pipeline; there are leaders in place at all levels. The worst indictment of any company or CEO is that there is no internal successor ready to step up. Lafley has put tremendous rigor, discipline and time into developing leaders. And when he stepped down in 2009, there was a homegrown successor, Robert McDonald, ready to step in to lead a very good company.

On the P&G’s culture

In the old days, honest to God, there were these big oak doors and dark halls. You would go in through one oak door, and then there would be a secretary guarding the next oak door. Now it is a really open environment, more campus-like, with the CEO sitting out there and available. Ripping out the oak and opening up the headquarters space really reflects the way Lafley thinks. In the last decade, P&G has become much more outward looking. It is more nimble and responsive to consumers; before, it was more a matter of, “We’ll tell you want you want.”

I remember being invited to help on leadership development when Ed Artzt was CEO [1990-95]. I was brought in to talk about GE’s work at its Crotonville leadership center with the head of human resources and some other leadership development people. Artzt started railing about, “Who’s bringing this Steven Covey junk here? What is all this about teamwork? What teams need are leaders!” And so on. That was my introduction to P&G

By contrast, I was recently involved with a project with P&G in which teams from six business schools (Texas, USC, Harvard, Michigan, Duke and Northwestern) were tasked with a real problem. Lafley told them the company would have about $50 billion in sustainable products by 2010. How, he asked, could he get the company’s employees engaged in sustainability wherever they are? Then he invited the winning team from each campus to Cincinnati, where they spent half a day with 20 P&G executives. At the end of the session, Lafley summed up and listed what ideas he was taking from each team. And it really happened. I mention this to show how he has a great commitment to getting ideas from anywhere. That is now a big part of the company culture, and it has not always been that way at P&G.