SCG creates 'leadership profile' for steering its |new business direction

The leadership profile, which addresses the new internal and external business landscape, comprises three pillars: engagement, imagination and excellence.
The engagement pillar involves diversity, meeting stakeholders’ demands, making emotions matter, and ensuring the value of people.
The imagination pillar concerns the ability to deal with leverage opportunities, differentiation, delivering values and making the organisation crisis-proof, while excellence involves qualities such as being change-ready, showing increased dynamism, having the ability to deal with business complexity, providing a home for talent, and being Asean-wide.
SCG’s leadership development framework follows a new corporate vision announced by the group’s chief executive, Kan Trakulhoon, in 2007 to “go regional” and increase the portion of high-value-added (HVA) products.
Since then, the conglomerate has increased its non-Thai staff by more than 300 per cent and currently employs more than 10,000 people outside Thailand, out of a total of 38,000 employees. The building-materials-chemicals-paper group has focused on the Asean region, where it has operations in nine of the 10 member countries.

PURSUING TRANSFORMATION
Speaking at the “ASTD-STADA Asia Pacific Conference” held in Singapore recently by the American Society for Training and Development and the Singapore Training and Development Association, Pimjai said that despite its leading role in its home country, the conglomerate was little known outside Thailand. Another challenge in pursuing the corporate transformation is the lack of a “burning platform”.
“People did not see the urgency because business was good. We have been conducting the corporate transformation without people feeling the burning platform,” she said.
SCG now earns 74.3 per cent of its revenue from Thai operations, 14.6 per cent from Indonesia, 5.9 per cent from Vietnam, and 2.9 per cent from the Philippines.
The group has increased the contribution of HVA products from only 4 per cent in 2007 to 34 per cent at present, and targets 50 per cent by 2015.
James Engel, senior executive director of APM Group, which advised SCG on the leadership programme, told the conference that another key challenge for the group was its attempt to change the mindset of its staff from “silo” to collaboration. It has been encouraging the “open and challenge” corporate culture, though it may go against Thai culture in which people usually do not speak up at meetings.
Pimjai said the new leadership profile had been created to meet the challenges of businesses. Among the organisational issues and business opportunities that the new approach has been applied to are its development of so-called “mobile managers”, the launching of new HVA products, delivery of client-focus solutions, development of “matrix structure” managers, installing sourcing management, and the building of value-chain managers.
Panittha Buri, director of marketing and sales at the Bangkok International Trade and Exhibition Centre (Bitec), commended SCG for the ability to maintain some of its good old values while introducing new ones, as well as its management’s vision, which she said was one step ahead of other companies in the region.