Zaman Berubah - Adakah Cara Kita Berubah?

1. Pada zaman pertanian, kebanyakkan orang bekerja sebagai petani. Pada zaman tu kebanyakkan orang bekerja di ladang dan sawah bendang. Mereka menggunakan kekuatan fizikal. Siapa lebih kuat fizikal, mereka lebih berjaya dalam kerjaya. Zaman ini apa yang saya gelar zaman fizikal.

2. Selepas zaman perindustrian, manusia mula untuk berfikir. Banyak perkara dicipta untuk memudahkan pekerjaan. Mereka yang berkemahiran dalam mengendali mesin lebih mudah berjaya. Kekuatan fizikal tidak lagi relevant ketika itu.

3. Bila syarikat menjadi besar, manusia terpaksa berfikir untuk menguruskan organisasi. Pada zaman informasi, kepintaran seseorang akan menjadikan mereka berjaya. Pada zaman informasi, mereka yang mempunyai pendidikan lebih mudah berjaya berbanding yang berkemahiran. Pada zaman tersebut, paper qualification sangat penting kerana ia membezakan siapa yang berilmu. Kemahiran vokasional sudah menjadi kurang penting berbanding mereka yang mendapat pendidikan tinggi di universiti. Zaman ini apa yang saya gelar zaman mental atau kognitif. IQ sangat penting.

4. Sekarang zaman sekali lagi berubah. Zaman sekarang informasi menjadi komoditi. Mesin mula mengambil tugas manusia untuk berfikir secara intelektual. Big data dan analytics menyebabkan kemahiran berfikir boleh diberi kepada teknologi. Apa yang penting adalah kemahiran menjadi manusia. Emotional intelligence. Empathy, perspective taking. Ini merupakan perkara yang teknologi belum lagi boleh buat.

5. Sebab itu zaman sekarang sibuk orang bercakap tentang experience economy. Customer service dan customer experience sangat penting. Hanya dengan memahami emosi manusia kita dapat mencipta perniagaan yang menguntungkan.

The Golden Triangle of Selling

"Everyone in sales now, but sales is not what it used to be!" That is a quote that stick in my mind from Daniel Pink. In his book, To Sell is Human, he explains why the landscape of selling has changed.

THE REALITY IN SALES

1. Today we have more seller than buyer.  - In a recent networking event, I was asking how many of you in this group are selling insurance? Three hands went up. Then I asked, in this group how many of you want to buy insurance? One hand went up. The reality is, today, we have more seller than buyer.

2. Customers are more demanding. - We have choices nowadays. In the past, there is limited products and we have to use whatever available in the market. Let say in the 80s, if I want to have a telephone, the only company that have the solutions is only Telekom Malaysia. Now, we have so many devices, and so many providers. So customers can choose.

3. Closing is harder. - Because customers are more demanding, closing is getting much harder. Hence we need a strategy to get better in sales.

WHAT WE ASSOCIATED SALES WITH?

Pos Malaysia: Leadership Lessons in Crisis Management

Viral post - it can make someone famous instantly and it also can kill a brand instantly.

There has been a viral post recently about some of the Pos Malaysia general worker throwing some Poslaju parcel while shipping it to the consumer. It creates a mixed reaction towards the general public and majority gave some bad comment about it.

Recently, Pos Malaysia created a video to counter the viral post that has shifted the perception towards their brand. However, the way the CEO handles the situation provides us (or at least me) some lessons in leadership.

Here are some of the lessons that come to my mind after viewing the video:

Engagement at Work

Engagement -- is the buzz word that we keep on hearing. According to Gallup study in 2013, only 13% of the workforce are highly engaged. That means most people are not engaged at work and this could lead to performance loss by the organization.

But how do we keep people engaged? 
Most of the time, companies who are looking solely at the bottom line will assume people also looks at bottom-line. They started to pay a higher salary to retain their top talent. However, statistics show higher salary does not contribute to higher engagement. Even though they get a higher pay, they quit the job sometimes for the lower pay but more engaging job. How do we create an engaged workforce so that our people can live up to their potential?

Categories of people in organization

In school, we were trained to get all the knowledge. Exams were designed to test on our competencies in a subject (well, some exams to test our ability to memorize the content). But we were never thought to be engaged in work. 

Wisdoms from the HR Guru - 3 things that I learn from Dave Ulrich

Dave Ulrich is world's no. 1 guru in Human Resource. He always talks about HR Transformation and how HR can play even a more important role in order to help organization to thrive. I have the opportunity to spend a day listening to Dave Ulrich a year ago, but today I want to share some of his wisdom from this short video clip that just been uploaded by The Leaderonomics Show.

1. HR is not about HR. HR is about helping the business win

The problem with most HR is we look at HR as another process in the organization. HR hires candidate, arrange interviews, trains them, pay their salary and take care of their welfare. But HR should play a better role than that. We should look at HR as a major component to help the business succeed. I believe this is a very good mindset, because if we think this way, it will totally change the way we do things. If we hire, we want to hire someone to meet the overall goals of the organization, not just putting another headcount in the department.

In order to do that, HR directors need to involve in the business side of the organization. To really understand where the business is heading and to provide resources to support that bigger purpose of the organization, to provide the right training to increase the competency of the people to achieve the objectives, as well as to put on compensation plans that align with overall organizational direction.

Example given, like in Google, the direction in order for Google to be successful is they have to innovate by creating something new. The HR director, Laszlo Bock tells their people that they are allowed to use 20% of their time to try new creative things, something that they have never done before. This is to create an environment to support the bigger purpose of the organization which is to innovate. On the other hand, Amazon has a different strategy, they want their people to be more discipline.

#SayaPejuang ...adakah anda seorang pejuang???

Sahabat saya Ahyat sedang berkongsi tentang erti pejuang

Satu perkara yang dikongsikan dengan saya pada pagi ini adalah tentang perjuangan. Ramai yang menyebut tentang perjuangan, tetapi adakah mereka sedar apakah itu perjuangan?

Siapa itu pejuang?
Mengapa kita perlu jadi seorang pejuang?

Jawapan ringkas: Seorang pejuang tidak takut akan bahaya.

Seorang pejuang tidak akan menyerah kalah apabila keadaan menjadi sukar.
Bagaimana kita boleh ambil konsep ini dalam perniagaan? Ramai yang berpendapat 2016 adalah tahun yang sukar. Dengan kejatuhan nilai ringgit, kejatuhan harga minyak, peningkatan kos sara hidup, dan pelbagai lagi. Ramai yang tidak jelas akan matlamat sudah tentu akan beralih arah dalam menjalankan apa juga perniagaan.

Tetapi seorang pejuang akan teruskan perjuangan mereka kerana ada sesuatu yang memberikan tenaga umpama dynamo di dalam badan. Mereka tidak akan keluar daripada masalah tersebut untuk mencari peluang yang lain, sebaliknya mereka akan terus memperjuangkan apa yang mereka perjuangkan selama ini, kerana mereka ada tujuan (Purpose). Tujuan inilah yang memberikan satu tenaga dari dalam - The BIG WHY.

Duit sebagai faktor motivasi?
Mungkin ramai menganggap duit adalah satu faktor motivasi. Saya bersetuju, tetapi saya tidak bersetuju sekiranya duit dianggap motivasi paling utama. Ungkapan 'cash is king' hanya benar dalam situasi-situasi tertentu.

Leading Effectively in the 21st Century - What can we learn from Top Companies for Leaders?

Leading in the 21st century could not only rely on 20th century wisdom. The environment is changing. The new reality is that we are living in a VUCA environment - volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity.

AON Hewitt did a study on Top Companies for Leaders® and find out that top companies have certain characteristics:

1. They have self-aware leaders  who understand their personal strength and weaknesses, and use this information to become more effective leaders of others.

2. Build resilience in their leaders through stretch experience, encouragement and support for taking risks.

3. Identify and build engaged leaders who connect strongly with their people, and the team to organization's purpose and mission.

5 Marketing Lessons that I learned from Jay Abraham

"There are only two things in a business that make money - innovation and marketing. 

Everything else is cost."

- Peter Drucker

A photo of me with a replica of Jay Abraham

I attended a session with Jay Abraham, the legendary marketing guru. Some might called him the marketing wizard because of his ability to think of marketing strategies in any kind of business. While I posted some of the photos on the social media, some of my friends were asking me, "what did you learned from Jay Abraham?" 

To answer that questions, I decided to create this post so that it will benefits more people. I list down 5 most important lessons that I learn from that session.

1. Force Multiplier Effect
This is a strategies that Jay mentioned he model it from the military. Imagine you are in military, your enemy will have a certain kind of defence. It is not easy to break through that defence. But if you have a strategy to attack from multiple angle, you might have a better results.

This is what Jay means by Force Multiplier Effect. They attack the enemy from many force.
The goal is for that combined effect destroy the resistance.

3 Lessons in Branding

Branding... It is important in business because branding create perception. Our brain work with association. Whatever our brain associate, it will tend to make generalization.

Branding is important for organization, product and personal as well. But why we need branding?

1. Visibility is more important than ability
Last week I attended an exhibition, MAHA 2014. Large exhibition with international participation. They have this band playing at the food court to entertain those who are enjoying the meal. I was there with my family listening to the band playing with some wrong chords, not so in tune vocalist and drummer who once in a while out of tempo. I was asking myself, I could play better with my ex-band. But I think again, why didn't they called me? Because I was not visible to the organizer.

How many times have you join a seminar and turns out the speaker was not as good as you expect and with information that you think unvaluable to you. At the same time the person sit next to you have the same opinion with you. And you think I could do better than that. But why didn't the organizer invite you instead? Because you are not visible. I have seen the same person from a seminar to a seminar and I think that he is not that competent enough, but still he was everywhere. Because he is more visible than any other options.

The Power of Networking

Tele-copier machine

In 1970’s, salesmen have a problem to sell the new invention for corporate communication devices. They just invented a machine called tele-copier. Tele-copier is a machine that combine two devices into one, which are telephone and a photocopier machine. When salesman approached potential clients, client will ask who else do have this thing? If nobody else are using this, it will be useless.

The machine that known as tele-copier, today is known as facsimile. By 1990’s almost every organization will have their fax machine because it is one of the most useful devices at that time. Can you imagine if you are the only one that using facsimile? That device is pretty much useless. But the more people are using it, it create a different value to the users.

Metcalf’s Law

Robert Metcalf was the founder of ethernet. He define the Metcalf’s Law as:

Economic Value of a Network = (no. of users)²

Illustration of Metcalf's Law

In other words, if you are connected in a network of computer, the economic value is square. In other word, a computer connected into a system relatively have 1 economic value. If you have two computer in a network, the value is 4 and if you have three computers connected in a network the value has increased to 9. If we have more number of users, the economic value will increase exponentially, not arithmetically.

How does this apply in business world?

In business, the impact of the law remains the same. Imagine company like facebook or google, they know the important of Metcalf’s Law. That is why they are giving certain things for free, just to increase the number of users. They would then offer something meaningful later which in turns making them the big bucks. Company who don’t understand this law are focusing on making money everytime they do anything to the customer.

If we think about restaurant that operate franchise, which name that came first to our mind? Of course McDonald’s will come out first. Why? They do have the numbers, or in other words the network of the premise. 

Will People Remember You?

I was fortunate when the founder of Reach Your Goal from UK, Phil Berg shared some of his insight in an event organized by BNI Malaysia. Tonnes of lessons that I learned, and I am going to share with you some part of it.

Phil Berg

Get remembered by each and every person that meets you
If you got a chance to choose between these two things, which one will you choose?
i. To be remembered and be spoken about, or
ii. Become even better at what you do

Which one will you choose?
Well nothing wrong in choosing both, but which one you should put priority at?

Ok, let me ask you a question. Let say I was given an access to watch all the movies in the world and I don't know which one to watch. Can you name me a movie that you would recommend me to watch. Ok, let's think for a second.... [think... think.. don't cheat...]

Once you got that movie, what is the title of the movie?
Let's think for a while, is it the best ever movie that was made that you have ever seen.... or is it something that really stick into your mind because you remembered something about it?

Law of the Lid - Everything Rises and Falls on Leadership

In his book, '21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership,' John C. Maxwell suggested that your leadership is like a lid or a ceiling. It simply means that an organization (or a body even a country) performance will not rise beyond the leader's leadership capability. In other words, the effectiveness is highly dependent on one's leadership ability.

"Everything rises and falls on Leadership" - John C. Maxwell
Not something, not most of the thing... it's everything...

That is why, for most non-performing organization, the only way to increase the performance is only by raising up the leadership capability, or replace the leadership role with more capable leaders. For a performing organization, when we replace the leader with less capable leader, the organization performance will fall to align with the leader's capability.

For example, the McDonald's Fast Food Chain. Everybody knows McDonald's, don't we? Even my kids know it very well. But did you know how it started? It was initially run by McDonald brothers who have a small restaurant selling hamburgers. There is one day, one franchisee wanted to name the restaurant McDonald's, they asked "Why?" They started in the first three years by selling fifteen McDonald's franchise, however, only ten that really operated. Until one guy, name Ray Kroc, who is the owner of a milk-shake machine company, who supplied to McDonald, saw the vision of making McDonald's a successful franchise business. He turn it into an organization, a successful one. In four years, he successfully opened 100 restaurant; the other four years there were 500. Now the organization have 34,000+ restaurant worldwide, and still growing. What Ray Kroc brought into the company was his leadership. He got the vision and he sacrifice a lot (by not withdrawing any money in the first eight years).

Pitching: The Elevator Pitch and 6 Successor for E-Pitch

Elevator Pitch - was originally introduced in this world in 1853 by Elisha Otis. The designed of elevator back then is not much different from the theory of Archimedes which using pulley. The problem with this design is when the rope got cut-off which might cause in fatal or the damage of whatever inside the elevator. Otis invented a patent to safeguard the elevator when the rope fails, a brake activate to prevent it from falling down.

Have you ever seen deals secured
in an elevator these days?

But the problem during that time, people are still skeptical about it. So Otis decided to conduct a demo in one conference. He demonstrated the elevator going down from top. While explaining (or pitching) in the elevator, he cut-down the rope. Everyone is panic - but the magic happened. The elevator did not fall down. There it goes the first elevator pitch in the world.

Elevator Pitch

In many sales courses, the instructor will introduce to you the elevator pitch. The idea of elevator pitch is when you came across someone, how are you going to promote your product and services within a very short period of time. Maybe 1 minute or 2.

In one of the course that I attended, Sales and Leadership Mastery (back in 2010), Blair Singer who is also Kiyosaki's Rich Dad's advisor shared with us the e-pitch technique. What do we need to do in our e-pitch?
We need to establish our credibility.
How?

Tony Fernandes Dreaming Big doing the impossible at Global Malaysia Series

Tan Sri Tony Fernandes is the man who need no introduction. Everyone knows him for the success of the budget airline Airasia. Not just Airasia, he also has so many businesses from telecommunication, insurance, budget hotels, Formula 1, football and recently the reality TV show the Apprentice. Last week I was inspired when I saw him live at Global Malaysia Series (GMS). Being a great entrepreneur, he is the perfect person to talk about how to bring you business to global. He is indeed a Blue Brain that has made it big. His speech is clearly blue and so much people oriented.

Here I would like to share some of the points that I jotted down:

- You must be good at your own country first.
You should be good at your product and business model - at merit. Not because of you know somebody in the government or have cable. Or have sugar daddy to support your business. If you are good at your country, you are good everywhere (with some finetune of course).

- There is no recipe. But if you don't try, you don't know.
Most people have good idea. But most people don't even try their ideas.

- Malaysian parents try to push their kids at one direction.
Tony explains that when he was a baby, his grand parent already set him to be a doctor. It was the culture in Malaysia that parents want their kids to follow the traditional "go to school, get a good grade, get a good job." Become a doctor, engineer, lawyer or accountant.

- Don't listen to people's advice
Previously, Tony was running a music business. Before he started Airasia, people advice him not to jump into this business. Stick to his forte which is music industry. He don't have any experience in aviation industry. But if he listen to people's advice, now he might be in Petaling Street fighting on the piracy issue.

Syed Mokhtar Albukhary

I have a high Growth Emotional Need. It is typical me to buy so many books because I might think that I can benefits from the content. However, I hardly finish reading book because of so many reasons (or excuses). Yesterday, I bought a book - a biography of Malaysian tycoon, the only bumiputera that makes into the list of top 10 riches man in Malaysia (according to Forbes) for more than a decades. He ranked no. 6 in Malaysia and no. 344 of riches man in the world from the latest Forbes list. This book really interest me and for the first time I managed to read the whole book, cover-to-cover in less than 18 hours.

This book really reveal how Tan Sri Syed Mokhtar started the trading business after skipped his SPM examination because the family could not afford to pay for the examination fees. He is really a genius in doing business and there are some strategies that he used which most of people wont. He did not become rich overnight. He really did it step-by-step from a sole-proprietorship. He has his own principle of doing business since the beginning of his venture.

"It was based on the idea that every business needs two key figures who must work together to succeed: one to run the business, another to manage the finances."