‘Without the passion in you, nothing is likely to get going’

Raised in an average Singaporean family with nine brothers, Lawrence Chia Song Huat, executive chairman of Pico Far East Holdings, realized the importance of pulling together as a family to make ends meet.

After his elder brother Chia Siong Lim founded Pico in 1969, the young Song Huat started helping out in the business during the school holidays.

When he grew up, he served in the Singaporean army for two years before his brother sent him to the United States to further his studies in 1981. After graduating from the University of Tennessee, he headed straight back to the family business in 1984, starting from scratch.

“Although I studied finance at university, I worked in the sales department, project management department and the warehouse department in Pico. But I had never worked in the finance department because I was eager to learn everything that’s new to me,” says Chia.

Before assuming the chairmanship of Pico Far East Holdings in 1994, Chia was managing director of the Pico Group of Companies in Europe and North America, based in London from 1989 to 1994. Again, he started from zero to turn the business around.

“It was tough there in the beginning but, later on, I found it was all about attitude, learning to adapt, understanding the culture, and seeing what it takes to make the company profitable.”

Chia sees the most important thing as building up the passion in one’s job despite difficulties or obstacles, no matter what that job is — a driver, a cook, a leader or a chairman, everyone should learn to cultivate passion in the job.

“If you don’t have passion, life will be very miserable. It’ll be stressful getting up each morning to go to work, but if you have passion for it, like me, I wake up at 6:30 am every day to go to work. That’s the difference.”

He notes that the most difficult part of being a leader is the ability to propagate continuous self-improvement and self-education. As the emergence of new technologies is affecting the way every business operates, a leader has the obligation to keep up the trend and direct his employees on the way they do things.

“A leader needs to make sure that he stays in front at all times so that he can develop the right strategy and a right vision for the rest to follow. A leader cannot afford to relax because new challenges keep coming. He or she can’t stop learning, thinking, can’t stop making changes. The trend is always on the move, he or she must be there all the time.”

But how can one keep up with the trend all the time? Chia suggests that leaders stay with young people to learn about the latest technology, and feel not ashamed to learn from one’s subordinates. In addition, a leader can also join organizations to communicate with other chief executives to make sure he’s informed of everything that’s going on in the industry.

“You must be out there with the staff and customers, understand what they want, and keep an eye on what’s going on in the world. For example, when the iPhone X comes onto the market, you don’t necessarily have to buy it, but you need to learn how to use it.”

And, instead of recruiting an employee to train him, Chia adds, he’d rather hire smart people to learn from him. “If I don’t know how to use the social media, I’ll hire people to teach me about the social media, so a leader is also a follower. Your job is to empower the employees and follow them.”

And, an advice from his first customer Motorola, he recalls, has propelled him forward all these years. “The job you do today is as good as your last job. Your success today is as good as your last success.”

“That means, we must do our job as if it is our last one, so that we’ll try our best to do it. If we fail today, we don’t have a job tomorrow. Thus, we need to make sure that we don’t make mistakes, we must deliver a perfect project each time, so that we’ll have other projects.”

Chia is also a member of the global network of young chief executives, Young Presidents’ Organization (YPO) — a platform for executives to connect, share their experiences and challenges.

“I knew nothing about Hong Kong when I first came here to take up the chairmanship, but YPO helped me link up with Hong Kong society, and I built up friendship with many peers in Hong Kong. I’ve learned a lot from them. YPO is also an educational institution that allows me to have a close bond with peers. I can’t imagine my life here without YPO,” he says.

Chia urges young people to develop their passion, try to discover what they want to do. He believes that passion can be developed because if anyone has the passion, he or she can do a fantastic job. The deeper the passion, the greater the performance.