Think out of the box, innovate
till later.
My advice to people who are starting off their career is, be generous. If someone asks you to go out there, even though your job title isn’t marketing, go and do it, you will learn something from it. If you do it then you will understand how difficult it is and you will value the whole chain in the business.
This is where we make people understand how businesses are run, I think that is the key.
How has mentorship made a difference in your professional life? In the banking industry, I still recall my first day on the job. I was assigned to the Pacific Bank SS2 branch. On the first day, I met the branch manager. I was just a greenhorn. He called me into the office, spent about 15 minutes with me. That was a real strong 15 minutes.
He said: “Ignatius you are in credit and marketing. You are in a position where you can influence a lot of things. You write a good proposal. The approving authority, whether at branch level or head office, will be looking at it and will say yes or no.
“So, do a good job and do it honestly. There are people who need money from the bank. The person relies on you to write the proposal. People may offer you money, girls, but don’t get involved because once you are tied up, you will never be able to do your job properly from then on.”
Those words stuck to me even until today. Integrity is very important. Attitude is what I look for when hiring people but integrity is the key. Play by the rules but sometimes you have to be smart about it; innovate.
In my four years in consultancy, I’ve seen good superiors, I’ve also seen not so good superiors. I’ve learned to lead people to an answer, don’t keep quiet and let them hit the wall when you can see that they are doing it wrong. The person will lose confidence. Guide him. Don’t give him answers but give him examples so that he can learn from them and at the end of the day he owns the answer, the solution.
What do you want to accomplish in the next five years? We want to be more efficient, we want to do a lot more things differently from MAS (Malaysia Airlines). Nothing wrong with that. I’ve also said this a lot of times to the MAS senior management team: Firefly was set up to do things differently. Essentially we are like a template for the MAS group. For example, we do certain things differently, they can opt to follow. We want to continue to evolve Firefly to be a class-leading airline in terms of innovation. For example, we were the first airline in Malaysia that provided food for passengers despite using aircraft without ovens. We were also the first airline to sell car insurance by partnering AIG. We also sell handphones on our website.
These are things our customers need and are in line with our tagline of “Beyond Convenience”.
Most admired business leader? Why? I don’t really have one. At the end of the day, the best business leader in the 1970s may not be a good leader today and vice versa. It goes with time. It has to be someone who should be able to roll with it. We need to change our mindset.
I always tell the guys in Firefly, you can’t be reading one page the whole time. You should be able to change and look at the market today, there are so many new inventions. We should be able to adapt to changes.
How do you stay abreast of issues affecting your industry? Newspapers, and the news channel is always on. We subscribe to a media scan, we get aviation news globally. We also subscribe to things like weather and environmental issues.
A must-read for every business owner/manager is ... I don’t read books. I read journals and the news because I want to know what’s happening in the world.
Malaysia’s greatest brand. Malaysia itself. Don’t use a corporate name. A crporate can last forever, but it may also go tomorrow. What lasts forever is the Malaysian brand itself. Hence the country, how it is governed, how it is led, is very crucial. It has to be something that people look up to.