Need to change constantly

According to Thana Thiena-chariya, chief executive of PK Garment (Import-Export), continuous improvement – known as “Kaizen” in the Japanese language – would continue to be a key factor in the success of companies. 

“As Jack Welch [a former chief executive of General Electric) once said, if the pace of internal change is slower than the external change, we will lose. On the other hand, if internal change is faster than external change, we will win.

“The top organisations are constantly changing and keep doing things better today than yesterday, gradually but continuously,” he said.

Nevertheless, Orchid Slingshot executive partner Apiwut Pimolsaengsuriya pointed out that failure of some organisations to change was not because they were not aware of the importance of change.

“Like doing exercise [for health], Thais have no problem about the ‘sense of necessity’. The key is how to create a ‘burning platform’ for the organisation that everyone has a feeling that they would die if they do not change....not just changing for the better,” he said.

PK Garment’s Thana said “a sense of urgency” was a “prerequisite” for implementing any change. But to effectively instigate a strong desire for change among staff, managers should not only be preaching but also showing their staff the real things and the real figures.

Thana said he often showed his staff the sales figures of PK Garment’s competitors as well as took them on visits to outlets that were not selling well. 

Thana also shared some change techniques used at his previous company, Total Access Communication (DTAC), where he used to work as the chief commercial officer and the chief of corporate affairs and strategy officer.

“When DTAC wanted its call centre to employ fewer staff and make the rest of them work more efficiently, we took them to a call centre of a pizza firm. Witnessing the much tougher work conditions, our staff felt their office was like a heaven,” he said. 

The same method was used with staff at other divisions, including accountants and cell-site engineers who were brought to hear customers swearing, rather than merely reading written reports at their desks.

“Seeing is believing,” said Thana.

Nonetheless, any improvement or change initiative would fail if an organisation does not have the right people for the jobs. Thana said that four years ago DTAC was not able to solve a high turnover problem at its call centre, despite attempting to improve and implement several measures, until it started to conduct a behavioural personality profiling for the call centre to use in its recruitment. 

The head of the Human Resources Management programme at Sasin Graduate Institute of Business Administration, Assoc Prof Siriyupa Roongrerngsuke, urged firms to prepare for the Asean Economic Community that would become effective in 2015 and would allow skilled workforce to move more freely within the region.

“Business owners will definitely have a headache with the remuneration mechanism that will follow the global and regional markets, not just the Thai market,” she said.

Thanks to the more liberalised regional labour markets, talented staff will find greater opportunities while the future might become uncertain for “grade B” employees. With an ageing workforce, Singapore, for instance, will have a shortage of accountants and financial professionals in the next five years, said Siriyupa.

Somchai Chansawang , deputy CEO of Samitivej and BNH Hospital, said that as the world-famous naturalist Charles Darwin expressed in his “the survival of the fittest” theory, the surviving “species” would not be the brightest, the strongest or the fastest, but the one that was most adaptive to the changing environment.

The conference was entitled “Leading Beyond Borders-Expanding Your Horizons”.

 

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