Thought Leadership – Page 4 – Asia School of Business

“I wanted to help other people find meaning, and this inspired me to go into coaching.”

Mental and emotional health are some of the least discussed topics in our society today, yet they impact a wide range of people. People who struggle with it are often stigmatized and are left without a supportive environment. At Asia School of Business (ASB), a pioneering and innovative business school, we strive to challenge the norms and spark new dialogue. This extends beyond just the business sphere, to our personal lives and mental wellbeing as well.

With the establishment of the Coaching and Counseling Center at ASB, we strive to create a supportive environment for people to thrive. Being able to support individuals at work and in the campus environment is critical to ASB’s core value of nurturing people’s physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual well-being. During the recent Mental Health Awareness Month in May, we had the privilege of speaking to Michele Sagan, Head of the Coaching and Counseling Center at ASB.

She is a psychotherapist as well as a certified executive and life coach, and completed her postgraduate studies in psychotherapy. Prior to diving into the coaching and counseling world, she spent twenty years in finance, management, human capital, and leadership roles, both in Malaysia and the UK, at global organizations including HSBC, Iclif, and CIMB.

Michele is passionate about channeling her decades of experience working with people into helping them increase their wellbeing as well as dealing with a wide range of personal, mental, and emotional concerns such as anxiety, PTSD, relationship problems, and team conflict.

In a candid conversation, Michele shared her journey of how she discovered her passion for coaching and counseling that led to her heading the Coaching and Counseling Center at ASB. As awareness of mental health continues to grow in the wake of Covid-19, Michele discusses how mental well-being impacts both our personal and professional lives and the need for balance.

Crystal: Hi Michele! You’ve been in the coaching and counseling space for 8 years. But before that, you were in the corporate world. What inspired this big change?

Michele: I always tell people that they need to be their most authentic selves and do the things that add meaning to their lives. For me, it was just about putting this advice into action. After decades of working in finance, I realized that what mattered to me was not crunching numbers but empowering the people behind the numbers. I started at Iclif in the area of leadership development and when I moved to ASB, I set up ASB’s Coaching and Counseling Center. 

Right now, I’m doing what matters most to me: empowering people to become their best selves. Becoming certified as a coach and psychotherapist has further equipped me with the tools I need to help people with greater nuance and a greater depth of understanding.

Why does ASB’s Coaching and Counseling Center exist?

Today, it has become increasingly important to support students and staff in terms of their mental and emotional well-being. There are so many stressors out there for students to navigate – from their workload to relationships to family issues.

Counseling centers offer a safe space where mental and emotional health discussions can be normalized and tackled head-on. At ASB, we are pleased to be able to offer a wide range of coaching and counseling services to support our students, staff, faculty, and community.

How is the coaching and counseling center at ASB structured?

In line with ASB’s commitment to wellbeing and excellence, ASB Coaching and Counseling Center provides a comprehensive service not just focused on mental health management but also on the wellbeing and personal development of each and every one of ASB’s community members. ASB’s Coaching and Counseling Center provides a variety of coaching and counseling approaches, including:

Executive coaching

To support professional growth, we provide executive coaching focused on developing competencies so our staff and students can excel at work. We provide both individual and group coaching that cover a variety of topics such as leadership development, working in teams, stakeholder management, managing change, and more.

Counseling 

You can never tell when a student or staff member will need mental and emotional support. This is why we offer ad-hoc, walk-in counseling. This provides a safe and confidential environment for staff and students to address their psychological, emotional, and developmental needs. Staff and students benefit from individualized treatment plans and one-to-one counseling sessions.

Advisory

When issues arise between different parties such as between students and ASB as a school, or between bosses and team members, we feel it’s important to have a trusted intermediary. As such, we provisory advisory in grievance cases and help people work toward positive resolutions.

Apart from these tailored services, we also have regular fireside chats throughout the organization to create a space to discuss topics related to mental and emotional health and work hand in hand with the HR department to continuously engage ASB staff and faculty through various wellbeing initiatives.

Michele Sagan is the Head of the Coaching and Counseling Center at ASB.

Why do we need to have more conversations around mental health?

Mental health is not only about managing mental health issues, it’s about wellbeing as a whole. It is about finding a balance and managing all aspects of your life from your mental, emotional and spiritual states to your physical wellness. It’s also about cultivating a sense of purpose and meaning in life while accepting who you are even as you strive to become your best self.

In many ways, mental health can be more important than our physical health because our physical health is often impacted by our mental and emotional states. It’s physiological at the end of the day. From an organizational perspective, it is also important to support staff wellbeing as we need to bring compassion and empathy to the workplace. We don’t want a workplace with no soul, no heart, and no spirit.

“We need to bring compassion and empathy to the workplace because we don’t want a workplace with no soul, no heart, and no spirit.”

How has Covid-19 impacted our mental health?

For one, everyone is afraid for their own health and that of their families. This put significant stress on all of us. On top of that, we are all suffering from anticipatory grief where we grieve the future we had planned for ourselves and our loved ones – a future that is no longer certain because of this pandemic. When there is no clear end in sight, our stress is compounded further as we try to adjust to the new normal.

Covid-19 has also seen a shift to working from home, and many respond to rising demands in the workplace by putting in longer hours, which takes a toll on us physically, mentally, and emotionally. Covid-19 fatigue does not help either, as we try to adapt to the new normal with increased Zoom and screen times. Technology also means it has become increasingly difficult for us to separate work from personal lives.

It is common to check emails at all hours, take business calls at meals, and work on weekends. As such, the number of cases of people suffering from stress, anxiety and depression has increased significantly during the pandemic. And because employees are working remotely, and micromanagement is no longer possible, it is more critical than ever that organizations focus on keeping their people motivated.

Trust is now the most crucial commodity in any organization – trust between employers and employees. Employees will only give their best to organizations they trust and as such organizations have to put compassion and empathy at the forefront and center of any employee engagement initiative, bringing the ‘human element’ back into the workplace.

Has the dialogue around mental health improved since you started out in this space?

I think there is still stigma everywhere. But today, we see more people are opening up and saying, “I’m stressed; I’m not handling things well.” In the past, people didn’t share these things. Attitudes like, “If I’m a high performer, I can’t have mental stress and can’t bring it to the professional table” were more prevalent. But now, people are more open about their need for support, realizing that it is valid.

They have come to realize that their mental health concerns are the same as any physical health impairment. If you’re not well, whether physically or mentally, then there is nothing wrong with seeking help and treatment. If we can get sick physically, why can’t we get mentally or emotionally ill? There are many viruses for mental health, such as toxic relationships, unhealthy habits, or the pressure put on you by society. 

So do bear in mind that seeking help for mental health is just like seeing a doctor for a physical ailment like the flu – you learn about your symptoms and then receive treatment for them.

“…today, we see more people are opening up and saying, “I’m stressed; I’m not handling things well.”

What’s your advice for the way forward?

Mental well-being must be given priority. Yet it’s hard for people to find trusted, safe spaces where they can address issues, or just vent. This is a key part of what we’re trying to do at the Coaching and Counseling Center.  We know how personal these issues are: that makes privacy critical to everything we do. Every single conversation with our coaches and counselors is kept highly confidential. Neither the colleagues nor the managers of people who use our services will know that our services are being used.

If we can get sick physically, why can’t we get mentally or emotionally ill? There are many viruses for mental health, such as toxic relationships, unhealthy habits, or the pressure put on you by society.

More people than you think are reaching out for help. As a professional in this space, it’s clear to me that it is more important now than ever that we are there to provide them the support they need.

Do remember though that at the end of the day, that the only person responsible for your own wellbeing and happiness is you. You have the power to change your situation and the first step to changing your life is to help yourself. So reach out and so speak to someone to get the support you need so you can live a fulfilled and meaningful life.

As someone who is creating Asia Pacific’s business leaders of the future, what do you believe are the essential skills leaders require?

In many ways, we need leaders who are Renaissance women/men or polymaths, as opposed to specialists of an industry or a field. A polymath is a person with profound knowledge, proficiency and expertise in multiple fields and today’s leaders have to be able to combine various ideas, look at problems in novel and useful ways, and develop a broad and yet still deep set of skills, talents, and knowledge.

You’ve coined ‘smart’ and ‘sharp’ as skills of the future. What are these?

They are replacements for ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ skills, a concept coined by a US Army doctor in 1972 who observed that his pupils had different skills: dealing with machinery required ‘hard’ skills, while dealing with people and paper were ‘soft’ skills. This concept has served us well since, but I find it too binary, not to mention the semantic implications of the words themselves.

Soft implies gentle, delicate, mild, quiet, tender, weak. However, there is nothing soft in navigating competing perspectives and cultures, handling and delivering critical feedback or dealing with office politics. Instead, I prefer to call these skills ‘smart’.

Hard implies rigid, difficult, heavy, static. But how can we think of engineering or software development as static or rigid? I believe ‘sharp’ is more apt as such skills need constant updating or sharpening. I think it’s time to reflect on these classifications, because we can drastically change someone’s perspective by how we choose to talk about and frame something.

How important are smart skills in leadership today?

Smart skills are more important than ever because we live in a world of extreme diversity: generational, ethical, value-based, gender, etc. Gone are the days when giving an order was an effective act of leadership. I personally work with people from five different continents and across five different generations, therefore as leaders, we need to know how to adapt, motivate, inspire and connect.

We need to increase our investment in learning about them in action, especially as smart skills are more difficult to develop. I believe that a successful leader today has to be both smart and sharp. Take cognitive readiness, one of my top 10 smart skills. In order to be cognitive ready, one has to master system dynamics, one of my top 10 sharp skills.

Also, did you know that one of the primary reasons why digital transformation fails is not the absence of digital literacy, a sharp skill, but the need for more validation and adaptability, both smart skills. So, instead of thinking of these skills as binary, I prefer to think of them as the yin and yang; co-existing and complementing each other.

So, you can teach leaders smart skills then?

Yes, you can, via a combination of the classroom experience, plus an action component supported by deeply embedded reflection. At ASB we call this Action Learning, and we teach it both in the MBA and in the executive programs.

For example, in teaching a leader emotional maturity as a smart skill, first they need to learn what it is, and then act on it, before reflecting on what we did and how we did it. And then to repeat it, but this time with more expertise and awareness. It’s not easy, but that’s why my favourite mantra is ‘the job is easy, the people are not’.

Discover Professor Padurean’s successful skills for a digital transformation here.

Read the full article HERE.
Originally published by Business Chief APAC, a ‘Digital Community’ that connects the world’s largest brands and their most senior executives with the latest trends pivoting towards technology and digital transformation.

Filipino-born Ponce Samaniego isn’t your traditional MBA. After working in social development at the Asian Development Bank, he had more than impressive accolades and salaries on his mind when joining the Asia School of Business (ASB) MBA. “ASB attracts academics, corporate partners, and MBA students from around the world who are motivated by the opportunity to build something unique,” he asserts.

Through his MBA, Ponce was able to secure a fellowship at ASB’s partner school, MIT Sloan, studying for a Master of Science (MSc) in Management Studies. With this global experience and depth of knowledge under his belt, he landed a role working as a senior program manager at Amazon in the US. Here’s how he made it happen.

Experiencing new business industries on the MBA

With the experience of leading social impact projects across 15 countries, Ponce admits that finding an MBA program that would excite and challenge him wasn’t easy. ASB’s location in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, at the heart of the fast-moving Southeast Asia region, was one determining factor for Ponce.

Wanting to tap into the Malaysian business school’s “vibrant and entrepreneurial energy”, Ponce embarked on the MBA, determined to use his time there to quench his thirst for adventure and immerse himself in the business world.

ASB’s Action Learning (AL) projects—immersive consulting projects at real companies—exposed him to different career industries and routes he hadn’t thought of before the MBA, tackling business problems in the banking, food and beverage, and agricultural industries across areas like corporate social responsibility, human resources, and data analytics.

He was also able to directly apply the management framework learnings from the MBA, taught by a mix of ASB and visiting MIT Sloan professors, into these practical projects, experiencing first-hand how to lead across various sectors effectively. “The MBA made me a globally competitive professional, making me even hungrier for new experiences to learn and opportunities to create something special,” he notes.

Building tech skills in the US

With a fresh set of skills and new-found confidence after his MBA, Ponce set his sights on MIT Sloan’s MSc in Management Studies (MSMS). This 9-month program allows MBA students from select partner schools, such as ASB, to gain a Master of Science degree and specialize in a field of their choosing.

“After the ASB MBA, I became hooked on learning more about innovation. That was when I decided I wanted to transition to a role in tech,” he reflects. The MSMS offered the perfect route to expand his business and managerial skills he’d developed through the MBA and build more tech-focused skills in an entrepreneurial environment, opening new and exciting career avenues for him across the US.

His ASB experience was a strong asset to his application. “The ASB alumni and faculty played a critical role in my MSMS admissions process as I believe that their view on my academic and professional abilities, as well as long term career aspirations, carried significant weight on the MIT admissions’ decision,” he notes.

As a reflection of his academic achievements, he also received the ASEAN Fellowship, funded by Bank Negara Malaysia, the founders of ASB. Honing his tech skills was a priority for Ponce on the MIT Master’s, taking courses in data analytics and innovation, while also gaining hands-on experience on a project at a startup in Israel.

Landing a role as an Amazon program manager

Ponce has used the combination of his MBA and MIT Master’s to land a career as a senior program manager at Amazon in Seattle, having completed the fabled MBA “triple jump” (switching locations, industries, and job function).

Working at Amazon, one of the largest tech firms globally, Ponce wants to learn everything there is to know about the disruptive influence of technology. “After my ASB and MIT experience, I became interested in learning more about how we can use technology and innovation to achieve systemic change,” he reports.

He works for Amazon Flex, an app that allows independent contractors to make deliveries to Amazon customers, managing a team that supports and drives operational improvements for delivery partners and customers.

On a daily basis, he deploys skills from his MBA to propel his career forwards. During ASB’s AL projects, he’s developed ‘sharp’ technical skills like systematic problem-solving and ‘smart’ skills like resilience and teamwork, which he’s applying into his role as an Amazon program manager.

What’s more, these intensive projects have prepared Ponce for transitioning to a new job, industry, and country amidst COVID-19. “Through AL projects, we’ve built relationships across borders in a short amount of time, working remotely with our hosts in between trips.

As a result, we’ve learned to trust in our ability to learn quickly, adapt, and face unknown challenges,” he notes. Ponce’s MBA helped him build a global network, gain broad leadership skills, and gain access to a world-renowned master’s program: the perfect launchpad for his career as a senior program manager at Amazon.

Read the full article here.
This article was originally published on BusinessBecause, a network helping MBA students make connections before, during and after their MBA.

For future business leaders, the COVID-19 pandemic has been a lesson in preparing for uncontrollable situations. Recovery is likely to see many workplaces experiencing change, as well as rapid digitalization. Preparing for this future of work will demand leaders to embrace several important skills and competencies, as well as a renewed emphasis on resilience leadership.

We spoke with Loredana Padurean, associate dean and faculty director for Action Learning at Asia School of Business, to identify the various skills that you can gain from an MBA that will help you build resilience as a business leader, and prepare for a new way of working.

You’ll master ‘smart’ and ‘sharp’ skills

Skills are often separated into ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ categories. These definitions gained traction within a manufacturing-based economy, where ‘hard’ skills related to working with machinery, and ‘soft’ skills detailed those needed for working with people. Many believe this terminology is no longer useful in today’s business world, where humans and machinery work hand in hand.

Industry 4.0 requires business leaders who can use their sharp intellect to organize a team, while also having the technological know-how to design ways of accelerating business processes. For ASB, the future of work demands the interconnectedness of these ‘sharp’ and ‘smart’ skills for truly resilient leadership.

Asia School of Business (ASB) has reframed the terminology of these skills: technical skills are defined as ‘sharp’ since, in today’s environment, digital and tech skills need to be continually updated and sharpened, while calling the skills which demand intelligence and diplomacy as ‘smart’ skills as these help employees navigate the workplace environment.

You’ll learn to embrace adaptability and flexibility

After a year characterized by uncertainty, the ‘smart’ skill of adaptability will be crucial for managing a team in a post COVID-19 world. “You constantly have to adapt to new environments in business, particularly at times of crisis,” reflects Loredana. Being able to navigate uncertainty and adapt to ambiguous situations will provide you with a competitive edge in an ever-changing business landscape.

During COVID-19, ASB MBA students had to quickly adapt to working alongside other MBAs in various time zones during immersive group projects, learning the value of adaptability and problem-solving in novel situations.

With 54% of employees wanting to continue to work from home after the pandemic, understanding how to navigate the challenges of a digitalized world has become ever more crucial for the future of work. ASB helps MBAs become business leaders well versed in meeting the demands of a digitally connected world.

You’ll learn that entrepreneurial thinking isn’t just for startups

When the going gets tough, it’s important to bring new ideas to the table, especially when you’ve exhausted previous ideas. Creativity ranks among the most desired attributes in the job market, according to a LinkedIn study. Loredana believes intrapreneurship and entrepreneurship are at the heart of leadership, particularly throughout COVID-19.

“These skills teach you how to problem-solve, how to react to an environment of constant change, and how to rely on limited resources,” she notes. Cognitive readiness—featured amongst ASB’s top ‘smart’ skills—is an essential component of intrapreneurial and entrepreneurial thinking.

This skill relates to being mentally prepared for issues you encounter in complex situations, as well as an ability to predict how future issues might impact your business. You can put your cognitive readiness to the ultimate test in real-world business situations during entrepreneurial Action Learning (AL) projects on the ASB MBA.

This is where you’ll try your hand at creating a new product, developing the prototypes, and then formulating a strategy for your product. Through these hands-on projects, you’ll gain experience of what it’s like to continually adapt your business idea to consumer needs since you’ll receive feedback from potential buyers.

You’ll be prepared for the technological revolution

As businesses become more digitalized, future business leaders require the confidence, knowledge, and aptitude to apply technology to business processes. This requires more than just swotting up on ‘sharp’ technical skills across topics like AI, blockchain, and big data. Without intelligent insight from humans, digital transformation cannot go far, explains Loredana.

Therefore, in addition to learning technical skills, you’ll need ‘smart’ skills like adaptability and cognitive readiness to meet the changing demands of the digital shift. Future MBAs who want to be part of the digital transition should look to regions like Asia, where the technology sector has fueled a quick economic recovery across Asia.

The ASB MBA offers opportunities to explore the intersection between technology and business. ASB MBA grad Saloni Saraogi experienced the growing influence of fintech on modern financial institutions during her AL project at Bangkok Bank. This drove her to explore how technology can be a tool for financial inclusion—the theme of her research with the United Nations Capital Development Fund.

Throughout the ASB MBA, you’ll spend almost a third of your time involved in integrated action learning projects with companies, providing plenty of chances to practice ‘smart’ and ‘sharp’ skills in a real-world environment. No one can predict the future impact of the pandemic on business industries. An MBA, however, can help prepare you for inevitable uncertainty, while arming you with the competencies to bring fresh, innovative ideas. This is what true resilience looks like.

Read the full article here.
This article was originally published on BusinessBecause, a network helping MBA students make connections before, during and after their MBA.

Image courtesy of BusinessBecause

The growing mandate of central banks

The complexity of the world has changed the role of central banks. In many countries, central bank mandates have evolved from simply keeping prices stable and limiting inflation – to far-reaching dictates, such as economic growth, job creation, and even influencing climate change.

“As the role of the central bank has grown in importance, central banking practitioners need to quickly and effectively assimilate best practices and current thinking to deliver the best possible policies and outcomes,” said Dr. Zeti Akhtar Aziz, former governor for Bank Negara Malaysia (BNM) and current Group Chairman of Permodalan Nasional Berhad.

Transforming central banking education

Historically, central banking education combined on-the-job training and short courses with a solid university (and possibly post-graduate) education. For employees, courses were delivered internally by central banks or through partnerships with academic institutions on central banking-related topics. Learning on the job and through disparate modules meant it took years to accumulate the requisite knowledge to develop a command of the issues facing central banks.

Furthermore, the needed knowledge has been constantly evolving, seemingly at an increasing rate. To provide an accelerated option to bring central bankers to the frontier, Asia School of Business (ASB), in collaboration with MIT Sloan School of Management, is launching in June 2021, a one-year, intensive Master of Central Banking program.

“The design of our curriculum is integrative,” said Prof Eli Remolona, Director of Central Banking at ASB. Subjects are woven together to give a holistic view, from the latest techniques in data analysis to emerging issues, such as digital currencies.” “This program will equip leaders to create impact, faster,” added Prof Remolona, who spent over three decades in central banking including at the Fed and the BIS, after completing his PhD at Stanford.

A dedicated knowledge hub for central banking

ASB has also established the Central Banking Research Center to serve as a research and knowledge hub for central banks globally. “Because ASB is located strategically in Malaysia, with proximity to some of the world’s fastest-growing economies, we have ready access to research opportunities and case studies relevant to Asia and the emerging economies,” said Prof Charles Fine, CEO, President, and Dean of ASB.

Underscoring the relevance of Asia to the world, Prof Hans Genberg, Senior Director of Central Banking and Finance Programs at ASB, who has been a university professor as well as having served in leadership roles at the IMF, SEACEN, and the HKMA, said: “It’s crucial for the world to understand Asia, its nuances, and challenges. In my 30 years as an academic in central banking and economics, these topics were always focused on advanced countries.

During my time in Hong Kong, I became convinced that we need to teach the developed and developing world how to consider the needs of emerging markets when formulating policies.” ASB’s Prof. Anella Munro, an MIT graduate who spent nearly two decades at the Reserve Bank of New Zealand after completing her PhD at Oxford, asserted, “The curriculum we’ve designed really addresses the training needs of central banks, a lot of which is not covered in mainstream economics and finance programs.”

Prof. Triwit Ariyathugun, added, “After finishing my PhD at Chicago, I thought I would have to pick between academia and policy. The opportunity to join ASB, with its MIT affiliation, gave me the best of both worlds.”

Building a global network of central bankers

The immersive 12-month master’s program includes six weeks of courses at MIT, and is designed as a residential program so students can build a strong international network with junior. and senior central bankers lasting beyond the program.

In addition, each MCB participant will be part of a team that makes an extended visit to one of several participating APAC-region central banks, working on an “action learning” project to deepen the immersive exposure to policy issues and policy makers in the region.

“It’s essential that central banks not only understand and communicate within the borders but coordinate and work with central banks elsewhere,” emphasized Robert C. Merton, Professor of Finance at MIT, Nobel Prize Winner in Economics, and co-chair of the Advisory Council for the Master of Central Banking. The Council includes nine former governors from across four continents

For the founding class comprised of students from over a dozen countries, the network they are about to build in this first-of-its-kind program might define not only their individual trajectories, but the future of central banking in the region and beyond.

Read the full article here.
This article was originally published on South China Morning Post.

In the last of three articles, Professor Loredana Padurean, Asia School of Business, lists the smart and sharp skills for successful digital transformation.

Smart skills are the skills required to work with people, sharp skills are required to work with machines. And one might ask, don’t we already call these skills ‘soft’ and ‘hard’? Yes, we do. But do you know why? The soft and hard skill terminology was coined in 1972 by a research team in the U.S. Army to differentiate people who were good at machine operations, coining these skills ‘hard’, from those who did well in people-related, supervision roles, coining them as ‘soft’ skills.

And since 1972, this ubiquitous terminology has served us well. But just like all other fields of study which get to constantly revise critical concepts, we believe that this terminology needs a fresh, new approach to reflect the current environment and in light of the roles that each play in our day-to-day lives. But you ask, is this just semantics? I know what you mean. Does it matter how we name the skills, as long as we have them?

But let’s think about this. Narratives are created over time; a few years back, ‘catfish’ was only a fish but in today’s vocabulary, it has a whole new meaning. I love this quote from UC San Diego Professor Lera Boroditsky, a leading cognitive scientist in the fields of language and cognition and former faculty at MIT: “By choosing how you frame and talk about something, you are causing others to think about it in a specific way.

We can drastically change someone’s perspective by how we choose to talk about and frame something.” For example, speaking of the word ‘soft’. Dictionaries define it as mild, gentle, and weak. But what’s soft about navigating competing perspectives and cultures, pitching high-stakes projects, and dealing with office politics?

How do smart and sharp skills link to digital transformation?

I believe that digital transformation is built on three pillars: strategic, operational and cultural and part of the cultural pillar which I address more extensively in this article is also bringing a new approach to training and upskilling. Many of the companies I work with ask: What skills do we need to develop in our organizations? And while the answer is a lot more complex than this interview allows, here are the top 10 smart and sharp skills I think are essential for starting the digital transformation journey.

Read the full article here.
This article was originally published on Business Chief APAC, a ‘Digital Community’ that connects the world’s largest brands and their most senior executives with the latest trends pivoting towards technology and digital transformation.

In the second of three articles, Professor Padurean at Asia School of Business explains why digital transformation is easy, people transformation is not

Simply put, much about digital transformation is primarily about people. Unfortunately, more than 70% of enterprises fail to create any value from their digital transformation efforts, but what is interesting is that 62% of organisations cite culture as the number one hurdle to digital transformation.

And while this may come as a surprise, the reality is that at its heart, digital transformation is a people transformation. Many companies tend to focus on selecting and implementing the right digital technologies, however this strategy is not likely to lead to success.

In my first feature for Business Chief, I talk about the three pillars of digital transformation: strategic, cultural and operational, however today I want to shine a spotlight on the cultural pillar and the importance of cultural transformation. When I work with companies embarking on a digital transformation journey, I always ask them to consider if they have the right culture to adopt change?

So, what is the right culture for transformation?

Successful digital transformation requires a culture that accepts risk and tolerates failure, that supports new ways of doing things, the encouragement of innovation, and very importantly, a reverence for failing forward. The digital culture is one that is aware that digital transformation requires different thinking, it’s a culture where employees are empowered to take on new challenges, they are compensated for learning new expertise and they are incentivised to break new ground and build new models.

I think by now we all know that the best way to respond to digital disruption is by changing or adjusting the company culture to be more agile, risk-tolerant, and experimental but more than anything, it demands that we realise that digital transformation will require a change in the leadership approach and changes to organisational dynamics, which is in many ways a more complex task than technology deployment.

In today’s world, every business has the potential to be a global business. But do leaders know enough about the legal and regulatory complexities of operating in the global marketplace? How can they guard against international legal risk? And how can they unlock untapped international potential?

We speak with Kevin Crow, Assistant Professor of International Law and Ethics at Asia School of Business, about these topics and more, which he teaches about in the International Law & Global Business Strategy course offered by the Iclif Executive Education Center at ASB.

What led you to become interested in International Law?

I was interested in ethical questions long before I developed an interest in law. There’s one particular event that triggered it – an incident with an American in Singapore, Michael Fay, who had been caught vandalizing Mercedes Benz automobiles along with a friend who came from China. There were both given the same sentence; a certain amount of money they had to pay and, as is the Singaporean criminal custom, six strokes of the cane, a sort of corporal punishment for crime.

Now, because an American was involved, it came to the attention of then-president Clinton, who intervened and got Fay’s sentence reduced to 4 strokes of the cane. So now, two people guilty of almost the same crime were to receive two different punishments. This set off a debate on different approaches to punishment, the state’s role in enforcing law, what the purpose for the punishment was.

And this was where I began to be interested in the ethical aspects of those questions. There wasn’t actually a right answer. It wasn’t a question of truth, it was a question of values and what one cares about, whether as individuals or as societies.

Later, I became interested in law because, at least in theory, law is society’s expression of what its ethics are. Later this expanded into Public International Law because that deals with the biggest questions, with incommensurable values, and like in the Michael Fay example, with clashes of ethical norms, like those in Singapore and the United States.

You have practiced both International Criminal Law AND International Economic Law. What motivated you to pursue both?

I started out studying law to become a criminal defense lawyer – my initial goal was to become a public defender in the United States. During my third semester I took a course in international criminal law, and I thought “Whoa, this is so much more, this is the biggest fish I can go for in this criminal law game.” In international criminal law, as you can imagine, the defendants are political or rebel organizations, usually with charismatic leaders.

There is a theory of liability called joint criminal enterprise, driven by the notion of command responsibility. The idea is that it’s not necessarily the people committing crimes on the ground – we’re talking massive genocide-level crimes – that hold the legal and moral responsibility for a crime when it occurs. Instead, the responsibility lies with the people who organize the enterprise and command mass crimes through the enterprise.

So, you go after the heads of such organizations. The joint criminal enterprise in international criminal law bears a striking resemblance to the multinational enterprise in international economic law. They’re zygotic twins. But there is a strong disconnect between liability for “joint criminal enterprises” and the liability that can attach to corporations given legal definitions of corporate purpose.

The thing that kept bugging me was that the legal purpose of an organization is quite often profit; meanwhile, criminal law doctrines for enterprise liability require criminal purpose, which means that a corporation’s role in an international crime almost always escapes liability within those doctrines.

This means that in international criminal law, even though you could have an enterprise intimately intertwined with broad international crimes, because the organization’s purpose is to pursue economic gain rather than to commit a crime, they incur no liability whatsoever! That’s why I got interested in connecting my criminal law work to international economic law, to the business world, and linking it all together, by pursuing an intellectual marriage of these fields.

What are some big challenges that business leaders face when it comes to International Law?

The answer to that depends on what perspective you’re taking. They are generally three buckets of challenges.

One challenge is the liability challenges that corporations are subjected to. This is from the perspective of a person that runs a business and wants to expand internationally. They might want to expand their contract network, for instance; this is a common scenario because something like 80% of goods produced around the world are non-primary goods. They don’t come out of the factory fully made functional things – instead, there are little parts produced everywhere and they get assembled somewhere else.

So if you’re doing this, you may be asking questions like what are you liable for across these different jurisdictions? What is the international law governing the agreements across these different states you’re operating in? How do you protect an investment in a foreign state if, for instance, the government suddenly goes rogue and decides to nationalize all factories? These are pertinent questions that have become even more relevant in these COVID times.

Secondly, there’s the internal perspective. There’s a growing area in research focusing on how large multinationals are creating “normative internal legal orders” that, while not real, hard laws, set rules that have effects in the multitude of jurisdictions in which they operate. A good example of this is the freedom of speech principles that many big social media companies are applying. T

hey set up an internal board of freedom of speech experts who are purportedly responsible for determining the standard of speech, and while those who sit on the board are known, the actual decision-making process may not be known or publicly knowable, yet the results are internationally applied.

This is quite a fascinating subject, and so for businesses, one of the things to consider is what are the best practices for setting up their own internal normative orders, or law-like orders if you will, and this is another bucket of challenges.

The third bucket is the instruments that should be considered should a business wish to expand strategically, whether into another market or region, or another category. Many of these may be soft law instruments, like the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, but to what degree should a business owner be considering them? Just because it’s a non-binding law, do you throw it out the window?

Strategically, adherence to soft laws such as these are used for signaling – for instance, if your organization wants to stand for diversity and equality, then it makes sense to adopt law instruments that pertain to such. This is an area relevant for those interested in strategic CSR; most of the world’s largest companies reference some international legal text, whether binding or not, in their CSR or ESG strategies.

What can participants expect to learn from your course to help them overcome these challenges?

I think one of the things my course brings to the table is that we look at trends and from there, we can better anticipate what’s going to happen, legally speaking. So for instance, I keep up to date on international investment law, I read every arbitral award, so I can give a heads up on where things are going, what new liabilities might be emerging – and that’s an advantage that business leaders can gain from my course.

Ethically, there’s a lot of attention that’s being paid, especially with the onset of the pandemic, to whether businesses are really serious about corporate social responsibility or ESG initiatives and that’s another area where I can provide insight. I can help identify what the biggest challenges are for a given company, what other companies are doing, how they are dealing with similar challenges, and then participants can decide for themselves whether those solutions work within their own context.

Additionally, I also incorporate a few strategic frameworks depending on what participants are aiming for. For instance, if they are looking to enter a new market or country, the Triple A Framework (Adaptation, Aggregation and Arbitrage) can help determine which strategy is best for them to adopt, based on their own organizational make-up.

Another framework I use is the CAGE framework, a way to determine what the challenges will be no matter what the strategy you adopt, just by looking at different types of distance – Cultural, Administrative, Geographic and Economic.

Turn International Law into a Powerful Tool for Your Business

Gain more insight into the intricacies – and opportunities – of international law, along with valuable tools and frameworks, at the International Law & Global Business Strategy program that Kevin will be running over four days (24th, 25th, 31st May and 1st June 2021).

Vasavah founder and CEO Matthew Roman, from the Class of 2022 for Working Professionals (MBA-WP), speaks to us about his journey of becoming an entrepreneur, the challenges he’s faced along the way, and advice he would give to people with a similar entrepreneurial path.

Scaling A Global Startup with an MBA

“At the end of the day, what force of good are you creating? What impact are you delivering to your community?” says Vasavah founder and CEO Matthew Roman during his Interview with Asia School of Business. Originally from the urban district of Pasig, Philippines, Matthew is part of the Class of 2022 currently pursuing the brand-new MBA for Working Professionals (MBA-WP) program at Asia School of Business (ASB).

With passion and determination, Matthew founded Vasavah, his second startup, in the Philippines back in 2017. Vasavah is a data sciences company that integrates, automates, and analyzes data in a way that makes the most sense to your company. Be it to address efficiencies in managing customers in all stages of the sales cycle, simplify operation processes, or promote efficiencies to lower costs, Vasavah designs the best solutions that addresses your most pressing business goals.

In a conversation with ASB MBA 18’ alumna, Crystal Cha, Matthew talks about his journey of becoming an entrepreneur, the challenges he’s faced along the way, and advice he would give to people with a similar entrepreneurial path.

Crystal: How did you first hear about ASB and why choose ASB?

Matthew: I actually ran into ASB a few years ago when I was working with my first startup. I realized that in business, there are many different perspectives involved. I really wanted to understand the different lenses to apply when I look at business. I ended up going to an MBA tour and quite interestingly, nothing really sparked much interest in me.

Then, Gulnura from the ASB Admissions Team walks in and she came across as so unconventional and different from the other people I was meeting at business schools. The way she was talking to everyone and presenting the school was completely different, and that resonated with me. And here’s ASB saying if the MBA was going to be redesigned from scratch today, what would it look like? They re-thought the MBA but used MIT’s best practices as the foundation.

When Covid-19 happened, I saw that as an opportunity to actually pursue an MBA. When it came down to it, it was John Sterman’s lectures that really nailed it for me, and I got led to John Sterman because of your article on System Dynamics at MIT Crystal. That sealed the deal for me!

Tell us more about your startup, Vasavah, and who is the audience you serve?

Vasavah in a nutshell is a data sciences company. We’re not just a team of data scientists, we’re also software developers that develop software that’s data science-aligned. We empower companies not just with automation, but with measurement control and the ability to comprehend all the information that their systems gather. We deliver that digital transformation not to the point of automation, but further with built-in real-time business intelligence and data analysis.

Who are some of the typical clients that you work with?

Our biggest clients right now are actually in the power industry. Ayala Energy is one of our biggest clients today. We also have a lot of clients in retail because we’re the official IT consultant for the Philippine Retailers Association.

How long have you been running this company?

Vasavah is the second startup I founded. When I saw that the service industry might not be the future of IT, I exited my first startup and I started Vasavah. I put this up in 2017, so we’re running into our fourth year now.

What were some of the biggest challenges keeping you up at night – that you hoped this MBA could address?

Well, the scariest parts are also the most exciting things. I could see that our products and what we’re doing is something that would be a very high scale, high growth thing. It would be a global thing and not specific to our own country. With Vasavah, we might have a few thousand customers today then tomorrow we have ten thousand and then we have a hundred thousand.

There is no reason for us to be constrained within the Philippines, our products would function just as well in Malaysia or Thailand. How do you design it so that you don’t become the very problem that you’re trying to fix? We don’t want to create variances within our organization that drowns us in complexity.

That was the biggest fear for me, because we fix these kinds of problems for other people and we know how bad they can get. The biggest things that keep me up at night were – What are we not thinking about? What are we not anticipating? That’s actually why system dynamics resonated with me because system dynamics is the study of the complexity as a whole.

You’ve completed several semesters at ASB now. Has ASB delivered?

What you should understand about ASB is that there are a lot of tools you can use, but these are just a handful of the cherry-picked tools that the professors had the time to discuss with you. These tools are not all you can learn. What is critical is the perspective these tools give you, the lenses that they teach you to have, like how do you approach or look at this and what are the questions you’re supposed to ask.

How have you changed as a person by being part of this program?

If you think about it – the entire world is a business transaction, even if you’re buying groceries or even the economics of choosing whether to buy a big box of detergent or the small one. At the end of the day, the way I’ve learned how to look at things really has an impact. I think the biggest impact that ASB can give to an MBA graduate is not really just about business skills, it is actually about gaining principled leadership.

It’s easy to just focus on maximizing profits or marginalize your staff or have a good financial statement at the end of the year, but at the end of the day, what force of good are you creating? What impact are you delivering to your community? I think that is one of the bigger responsibilities a business school should have that often gets forgotten.

I really love that about ASB – they instill the mentality that you’re not just here to be good businesspeople, you’re here to be principled businesspeople. When I look at things now, such as the vendors that I use or the products that I use, I think to myself, is this the right product to buy? It’s the cheapest – but at what cost? So, it does impact everything that you do and I think that it’s an important perspective that ASB has given me.

What advice would you give to fellow entrepreneurs who might be considering an MBA, and are unsure whether it is the right move?

I think every entrepreneurial journey is different. It really is a journey and there isn’t a set destination that you should be targeting. You should really be considering what kind of journey you want to have. At the end of the day, entrepreneurship is one of the hardest things you’ll have to do in your life, so you better pick the journey you really want and have a clear understanding of what it is you want to create.

Always listen to good advice, and at the same time, listen to good critiques – but you have to make your own decisions. I wouldn’t tell anybody that ASB is the best school because you have to figure out what the best school is for you based on who you are. For me, ASB is the best school because I think that it is the best fit for me.

It’s no small feat for any woman to hold a position in a competitive, corporate environment. Even as workplaces continue to incorporate more gender diversity in their hiring – women still face down glaring odds when it comes to securing leadership or management roles. The Fortune 500 list of companies see only 8% of women as CEOs.

But with the help of a heightened emotional capacity and perceptiveness – Gillian Ng, Senior Director of Corporate Governance at the ASB Iclif Executive Education Center (Iclif) believes that any woman can rise to top positions. Gillian sat down with South China Morning Post (SCMP) for the Women of Our Time conference to discuss how women can continue to leverage their existing skill sets in order to be more recognized in the workplace.

Leading with preparation and emotional intelligence

“I was once invited to sit on an international panel once in Bangladesh, and I did all my research,” Gillian starts. “I was sitting on a panel with 4 other men. And when I was asked questions, I would provide a lot of supporting facts and figures. At the end of the panel, the chairman, who was a man, made a remark – he said, ‘You can trust a woman to come prepared with all this information.’”

This illustrates just one of the many situations where she had an upper hand because of her willingness to come prepared with hard statistics and proper reasoning before a meeting. In her experience, Gillian understands that women are wired very differently than men. This doesn’t put them at a disadvantage – rather, it provides a unique opportunity to provide a fresh perspective to challenges.

In a very different way, women can make their mark. As an example, Gillian shares a story from firsthand experience of a construction company facing a recurring challenge for many years. “They had senior project managers leaving every two years, and changing project managers so often is actually quite detrimental to the projects.” “When they had only men on the board, they could not find out what the key issue was with the project managers.

This changed when a woman joined the board.” According to Gillian, it was this woman who had the idea of taking a different perspective. She explains: “She started to probe into the ‘softer’ issues,” or what at Asia School of Business is called SMART skills.

Learn about the Smart and Sharp skills of the future

“Why was it that these project managers want to leave? Were they spending enough time at home? Did they have enough time with their children?” It was through this woman’s fresh outlook on things that she realized these project managers were giving up their jobs as they felt they lacked time with their family. Through working directly with the project managers on addressing these issues, the firm was able to improve retention rates, which had repercussions throughout the business.

Stories like these aren’t isolated incidents. Research by Korn Ferry – a leading human resources and organizational advisory firm – shows that women score higher compared to men on nearly all emotional intelligence competencies. These social competencies are directly correlated with leadership skills; paving the way for women to be leaders in their own right.

Women’s strengths in corporate governance

As the Senior Director of Corporate Governance at Iclif Executive Education Center, Gillian is no stranger to the intense demands of the business world. Underpinning the successful management of companies is good governance. It sets the guideline for how businesses, boards, and their respective chairpersons should be managed – according to moral values and principles of the company and its stakeholders.

In the midst of a turbulent economy, good governance also helps with mitigating new risks and obstacles. “We’ve had climate change, racial tensions, sustainability issues, issues with welfare standards for foreign workers and more,” explains Gillian. “At Iclif, we go back to the basics to build and inculcate ethical standards, which include good moral standards and integrity.”

Learn more about Iclif’s Corporate Governance programs: Discover courses tailored specifically for directors or individuals looking to effectively fulfil their fiduciary roles in a company. Find out about Iclif’s programs for equipping your top leaders today. Gillian explains that women, specifically, can play to their strengths in a Corporate Governance role.

“Women are very meticulous,” she says, drawing from her personal experience. According to Gillian, women have a tendency to go above and beyond reports and numbers – curious to know the real reason behind why certain things happen and why obstacles arise. Never taking anything at face value and asking the right questions to get to the bottom of issues are why women prosper in roles that rely on curiosity and emotional depth.

To normalize more women spearheading more projects or taking stronger stances in the boardroom, Gillian emphasizes the support needed by other women too. These include pushing other women to greatness albeit their insecurities, or even speaking up on behalf of a woman when she’s belittled or discriminated against.

“I’ve had deputy governors, assistant governors who were women. All of them were really good role models who told us that we’re not just filling up a ‘quota’ but because we can do the job well,” Gillian says, drawing from her own experiences.

Building a better future for all

At its very core, Gillian says that Corporate Governance is really about empowering the next generation of forward-thinking leaders; be those men or women. I tell my children: It’s hard to say what’s going to be important in the future. What we can do, however, is to inculcate good values in them so that they can navigate it,” Gillian says. “In that same way, our programs are focused on helping companies cultivate good ethical cultures and moral standards – which is the essence of good governance.”