Episode Transcript
[00:00:10] Speaker A: Hello and welcome to Hacking Kaizen. I'm Graeme Newman. Today we have the privilege of speaking with Ekapon Pongsutropon, the former chairman and CEO of several listed and family owned companies and a board member of the Thai Institute of Directors. Well delve into Kun EHS personal journey, his leadership philosophy and how he navigates business challenges when things don't go to plan.
At the core of our discussion is critical thinking in business management and leadership. It's a vital tool for navigating complex challenges and making informed decisions. By analyzing data, evaluating alternatives and synthesising information from various sources, leaders who practice critical thinking are better positioned to foresee potential problems, devise strategic solutions and drive innovation. Moreover, nurturing a culture of critical thinking within an organisation encourages thoughtful discourse among team members, leading to a more robust and sustainable business outcomes. We'll also explore the purpose of the Thai Institute of Directors and their directors certification programme, which is accredited by the Stock Exchange of Thailand and the securities and Exchange Commission. All this and more coming up. Stay tuned.
[00:01:36] Speaker B: I think I should say that I'm quite lucky in the sense that I started young and became a general manager at the age of 29 and started being CEO at the age of 41 and, and became a chairman of one of the listed companies at the age of 49, something like that. So I got a good sense of being department managers, general managers, directors and eventually as a chairman of the board.
To me, I don't think we can talk about leadership alone without being a good manager as well. I think leadership and management have to go together. You cannot be a good leader and be a bad manager and make it successful.
To me, when it comes to leadership, it has to do with at least four things. One, of course, as everyone knows, it's a vision. So basically you have to provide or gather your stakeholders to share the same direction of the business. So the vision has to be clear. And having said that, you need to have good communication skill. So vision comes first and then you have to be able to communicate it articulately and very well. And then you have to motivate people. As you know, leadership is about people. Not very much on the process, but, you know, people have to be involved and, you know, they have to buy in whatever you like them to do. And last but not least, is about priority, or I should say time management.
This is where people always say that you have to do important things as opposed to urgent things.
I think we did talk about it before that we always doing firefighting on a daily basis, but that's not what leadership should do, leadership should focus on the most important things, even if it's not urgent. So again, when it comes to leadership, to me it's about vision, communication, motivation and time management. And as I mentioned before, that leadership alone is not good enough. So it has to come with management as well. And I think everyone would learn at the beginning. When it comes to management class, we did talk about planning, organizing, staffing, directing, controlling, that kind of thing. If you compare the four pillars of leadership that I just mentioned and sort of four pillars of management, it comes hand in hand. To have a good planning, you need to have vision, but vision alone cannot come true. So you need to have good planning to make your dream come true, to make your vision come true, and then to execute it, you need organizing, you need staffing, those things.
[00:04:41] Speaker C: That's quite a rapid ascension up the corporate ladder. And aside from the extrinsic things, the remuneration and salaries, there must have been some intrinsic motivation to want you to.
[00:04:53] Speaker B: Get to the top when it comes to motivation, right? Money is just the so called hygiene factors. I believe you know about Mars law kind of thing. Actually, I didn't understand that when I studied in the college or university. But after practicing this for quite some time, then this thing come back to me. When we say hygiene factor, you never have enough of it. The more sorry you have. You may feel a good motivation at the beginning, but then after that it comes back to normal. You get used to it. So money, salary, even bonus or anything else, extrinsic motivation is not good enough, actually, just very short time kind of motivation, particularly for me. Right. I would be looking for a work or jobs that could enhance my potential, could educate me to move forward in the future. As you probably can say that I'm quite interested in sort of leadership and management because I have to handle too many jobs at the same time, many people at the same time. So I would love to learn more. And having a good coach, good mentor is very important. And I found a lot when I was working at the CM, Siemens, with a good mentor and with something that I can enhance my potentials, that's my real motivation.
[00:06:33] Speaker C: Let's unpack that a little bit more. Which leadership experiences had the most profound impact on your career?
[00:06:41] Speaker B: I think when I was the CEO of one of the listed companies, actually that was the first time I worked with a listed company. And you have the pressure from shareholders to deliver the results and at the same time being able to communicate what they think and what the shareholders think to all the employees at that time I was with the sort of agro industry business and it's quite tough because agriculture in Thailand is up and down, pricing is up and down.
The price of the commodity, you know, could be like not double, but you mean like quadruples or five times this year than last year, things like that. So you have to handle fluctuations. And at the same time, during that time it was a big rest in the minimum wage.
You probably know that Thailand minimum wage has been increased significantly from like a little more than 100 bar to today is like, you know, almost 400 bars. And you have to deal with the currency fluctuation because this is the export business. So that time it was tough.
Cannot control raw materials and all the negative factors impacting us. So I have to think hard on what's the way to handle it. And eventually, long story short, actually, I went back to the background of the company where it started. And the philosophy of the founder was that the business that we started was to help or to support the farmers, which is quite, to me is quite significant and quite interesting.
And it is the purpose of the company. It's the purpose of the business. Understanding the purpose of business gives me, you know, the sort of decision making rules.
What are we going to do? What are we not going to do? You know, things like that. So at that time it was like, you know, we have to fight with the farmers all the time because we want to buy at a low price and, you know, and the farmers like to sell at high price. So it's always a conflict. So we have to think hard how to help them without, you know, hurting our p and ls, hurting our cost. So the only way to do it is to have a win win solution, saying we need to drive productivity of the farming itself as opposed to fighting on the pricing. So we help them improving productivity per acres, tons per acres, that kind of thing. So with a higher productivity, then they have lower pressure on pricing with us. So we help them with the productivity and at the same time we guarantee to them that they're going to have this kind of income per acre as opposed to baht per kilogram, things like that. So that's sort of my major achievement, if I could say, in terms of changing the whole business concept, the business models and also the direction of the company. So we manage it quite well, getting ourselves out of the, you know, the sort of business fluctuation, uncertainties and those things. So we managed to control the business much better and leading the way in terms of the new business model.
[00:10:20] Speaker C: Well, I think that's certainly something to be extremely proud of to build a sustainable, closed circuit ecosystem with suppliers and make sure that the top line is also coming in. And it resonates with perhaps something we don't see enough of in Southeast Asia. Enterprise level is starting with the why, not the how, start with the why.
[00:10:45] Speaker B: Yeah, that's exactly. Probably the most important thing. Normally people would think about, you know, what to do and how to do it, which is the sort of difference, a major difference between the so called efficiency and effectiveness. Right. It's easy to focus on efficiency, meaning, you know, cutting costs, cutting expense, or even improve productions, you know, that kind of thing. But that's probably not effective. Effective thing is, you know, what's the right thing to do and why we doing it right? What's the direction of the company? What are we gonna do? What are we not gonna do? When it comes to strategy, the way I look at it, whether it's a good strategy or probably it's not a strategy or bad strategy, I would look at it four things. One is that strategy come up with new things to do. What the new things we gonna start doing? What are the things we gonna stop doing? So, you know, to start stop. Right. Normally when we see strategy, many times we say, okay, we're going to do this better, we're going to do this more, we're going to do that. But many times we don't see that we're not going to do this, we're going to stop doing this, things like that. So I will look at start, stop, do more, do less.
If you come up with a strategy and you have these four categories clear, then I believe you get the strategy. But whether the strategy is right or not, that's another story. But whether it's a strategy or not, to me you have to be clear what to do, what not to do, what to do more, what to do less, that kind of thing. So business direction and right strategy is very important.
[00:12:31] Speaker C: I'm going to be provocative and say, some people are natural leaders. They come up with the vision. These are the why people. I'm not that. I'm more of a how person. I would prefer to work behind the sharp arrowheads. But these competencies that you've talked about, are they inherent? Does this come down to natural talent or can it be nurtured and trained?
[00:12:53] Speaker B: I think everything can be learned right. But whether you learn it in a hard lesson or in a good time, normally we learn it at a bad time and you have to be a struggle, struggling a little bit before coming up with a new idea, you know, tough times, you know, having to accommodate many different stakeholders, you know, give me something that they need to think hard and how to do it. I think, I think one of the skills I learned most from handling many stakeholders is how to maximize the mutual benefits for each stakeholders. I'm not saying I'm compromising. Compromise is not a good word because compromise could give you half ways of everything. But you need to understand priorities of each stakeholders and then, you know, come up with, you know, you cannot give everyone everything, that's for sure. But what are the most important things? Sometimes people don't ask these kind of questions. You know, if they give you, you know, three things they want to get, you need to ask immediately, you know, why they want those three things and what are the most important in those three things that they asking for. Otherwise, you cannot give them all. So, yeah, I learned it from, you know, during difficult time.
[00:14:14] Speaker C: So developing that more. How do you adapt your leadership approach when transitioning between different industries?
[00:14:23] Speaker B: Okay.
Right. That's probably the beauty and the luck that I have done many kinds of business, but it has always come down to, again, as I mentioned at the beginning, the leadership and the management, you don't have to come together. Originally it was probably key net management because that's the sort of one, two, three is more of a science side of running the business.
All the job to be done or the industry that I have worked for. You know, you have to start with the good planning, organizing, staffing, directing, controlling, that kind of thing. But eventually it's going to come down to people. So again, you need the leadership. So to answer your question, although different businesses have different sort of opportunities and threats, but, you know, eventually it comes down to those principle of leadership, leadership and management as well. Not to mention about, you know, technologies and those things which you have to learn as time goes by.
[00:15:32] Speaker C: And just to get into your mindset, I'm curious, what do you do in the morning? Do you put your trainers on, go out for a run? Are you reading the FT when you hit the office? What are you looking at? Are you looking at financial straight away? Are you looking at issues, risk? What's that kind of initial?
[00:15:50] Speaker B: When I was as a CEO, yeah. All right. Wow. I think at the beginning I was like anybody else? Starting with email, looking into what people emails to me, what do they want?
What are the issues today? Things like that. But after a while I got to know that that's not the right way to start a day. You know, it consumes perhaps the whole day just to respond to other people or the issues that other people create. And you have to answer if you look at the emails. So I changed, actually, but that's after a while that I listened to some of the gurus and particularly those time management people, which I believe that we should start the day with.
Looking at your mission statement again, if I take it a little bit further, I used to say this when I talk about the mission statement, there are only two days, two most important days in your life.
One is, of course, your birthday is for fun, but what's the most important second day in your life? People say the day you die, which is no different, right?
The most second day.
Somebody told me, I can't remember who, the second most important day is the day, you know, why you were born, which is, wow, somebody may have not figured it out.
[00:17:29] Speaker C: That's a very wonderfully endearing thai buddhist approach to leadership.
[00:17:35] Speaker B: Is it? I don't know if it's buddhist or, you know, whatever religion, but I think that really strike me. And, yeah, have I figured it out?
I'm not going to tell you my personal life. Just kidding. But I'll tell you. But that's important for the business. It's a mission statement of the business. When it comes to mission statement of the business, normally people will say, okay, we will be great at this, at that.
We be very efficient, that kind of thing. The mission, the mission statement is, you know, again, what are we born for? And when it comes to business again, it's about the purpose of the business. Right back to how we should start a day. You better go back and read again before you start reading the email. You know, what's the purpose of the business or what's the purpose of life for you? And then starting that, what's the most important thing we should do? And some of the things that we probably omit is, of course, the exercise, you know, good health, good nutrition, that kind of thing. Good sleep. But you already slept last night. But anyway, to start a day today, actually, I'll focus on exercise first because I have to take good care of myself because I already very fast, right. And then instead of looking at the emails, I start thinking about, you know, what are the most important projects I like to do today? Where are we now? Where is it now? How do I move further and then start writing what I plan to do today? And then about maybe 10:00, 11:00 I will start looking at the emails. But I like to start with what I like to do first.
[00:19:25] Speaker C: Wow.
And in terms of your management style, some executives prefer the upstream and the downstream to go through an EA. There's a firewall and the executive assistant looks after that traffic and that communication. I suspect you're more of a people person. You're more independent.
[00:19:43] Speaker B: I believe so. I think eventually it has to come down to people. And I read the book name good to great. That's Jim's calling, if I'm not mistaken. I think that's the thing. I mean, some, you know, even though you have the good strategy, can you remember whose quote is this? Maybe you can help me that they say, you know, culture, eat strategy for breakfast. Have you heard of it?
[00:20:12] Speaker C: Yes. I'm gonna have to ask Arjan GPT for that one.
[00:20:16] Speaker B: You can do it now.
Yeah, but that's, that's really true. I mean, you know, you come up with a strategy, but how good it is, you know, it's not important as whether people buy it and, you know, go for it. Without the right culture, you can do, you can execute even how good the strategy is.
[00:20:41] Speaker C: That reminds me of an interview I listened to with Sir Jim Ratcliffe, who's the founder of Ineos, now the world's biggest petrochemical company. He talks about the three values of rigor, grit and a sense of humour. And I think the blending of those three is a wonderfully simple, yet incredibly visceral message. And that leads me on to when you're up against it, things inevitably go wrong. Things are out of your control. You have to dig deep, you have to be professional and you have to lead. How do you do it?
[00:21:17] Speaker B: First of all, I will say it's my fault, which is, I think one of the hardest thing to do. I mean, some, but I learned that again during the difficult time with one of the international companies, logistic company, actually. And, you know, when I work with the thai companies, it's sort of different culture, but when it comes to international, basically it's a european company facing. The fact is the most important. And what I learned was that, you know, in Thai, normally we come with the good news first, right. And then try to hide, if possible, the bad news. You know, even if we can skip, we skip it, right. But when it comes to, I'm not gonna say european or western, but when it comes to how to say this direct kind of communication, I think it's good. And I learned this from my boss, that bad news happen.
Bad things happen. Tell it first, tell it upfront, and then after that you get relief.
I've already said it so I should not say always, but most of the time I feel I would love to say that, hey, it's my fault, and here it is and this is the lesson learned. And then next time, you know, we try to avoid it. How? And, you know, things like that. And that's, I think that's a good relief for, you know, because, you know, if you don't try anything, you're not gonna, you know, do any wrongdoings. But, you know, if you try always, sometimes you go wrong.
[00:22:56] Speaker C: At the start of the interview, you said you were incredibly fortunate. You had mentorship and you had coaching. Looking back on your career now, I would hope you also convey that to the younger generation coming through in terms of succession planning and nurturing the future leaders of the country economically.
[00:23:16] Speaker B: I always say to my old people that when you get to the new job, the first thing you need to do is to look for successors, which is normally not in a job description.
Normally job description would say that you have to do this, do that, but identifying successors and be able to help them. Actually, to me is the purpose of life.
Why are we human? Human is doing what basically human is to create another human and make it better for the future. Like we said, we need to make a better world for our next generations.
But, okay, better world. We have to do it. But for the next generation to survive, they have to be much better than us because, you know, in the future there's a lot of uncertainties, let alone the planet we live to them. But, you know, the economics, the technologies, the culture, you know, all the difficulties that they're going to face, you know, cyber security, those things. Right. We need to groom them to be much, much better than us. So I think that's one of the purpose of life that particularly to me is to help our children, to help our successors, to help the younger generation at least, to know what to be prepared for. They don't have to listen everything to us, but, you know, here, this is what you're gonna see. This is what you're gonna face. What do you think about it? Let them think and we can support them.
[00:24:58] Speaker C: On that note, what advice, therefore, would you give aspiring leaders looking to make a significant impact on their industries?
[00:25:09] Speaker B: The things that when you talk about inspiration or sort of motivation, I still believe in the coaching philosophy, which is, you know, try not to tell everyone to do what you think is the right thing, but try to ask good questions and let them think first and think as hard as possible and then you can support them. It's like you know, you cannot force anyone to do what you like them to do, but what you can do is to get them to understand and get them to think by themselves that this is the right way to do. That way they give you more commitment and more motivated to do things. So you probably tell me that I'm a people oriented, and that is true in a sense that I'm more of coaching as opposed to telling people to do or not to do.
[00:26:09] Speaker C: My advice as a kind of outlier to enterprise. Well, I think it's a lot to do with active listening. I would imagine at CEO one perceives that you spend most of your time talking, but I suspect you spend an equal amount of time listening.
[00:26:25] Speaker B: Right.
[00:26:26] Speaker C: And that's a very important aspect of senior management, to be able to listen actively.
[00:26:32] Speaker B: Right.
[00:26:33] Speaker C: And not make immediate judgments.
[00:26:36] Speaker B: That's very hard. Actually, two things I like to talk about this, right? To be able to do active listening, you have to do good questioning first to listen to people. It's not like, you know you want to listen everything you know they want to say. Of course there will be a lot of things they like to say, but asking the right question is probably more important than getting the right answer. You've probably heard about the story of elevator in the building.
You know, somebody says that this elevator is too slow and, you know, people are bored or with waiting for the elevator. So how do we solve the problem? Right? It depends on the question again, whether the question is the elevator is too slow or is too boring just waiting for the elevator. If you think it's too slow, then technically you can have more elevators or make it faster or whatever. But if you think the problem, or the question is how do we, how do we solve the boring issue? That's another story. You can have mirror, you can have television and that kind of thing. Same thing if you want to solve traffic situation, say, in Bangkok, right? What's the problem? If the problem is that it takes long time from here to there, that's one problem. But if the problem is you don't know how much time you need going from a to b, that's another story, which may be the second problem you can answer or you can get solution easier. Same thing to do, active listening, you need to have the right questions. And that's probably the most important skill, if I may say, for the board members, for the top executive, for the CEO's and those things. If you want to get your people to start thinking deep, you need to get the right questions.
[00:28:34] Speaker C: You were talking about the board and my recent experience of going through the director's certification program at the Institute of Directors, I did.
[00:28:44] Speaker B: Tell me about it.
[00:28:45] Speaker C: Well, it was absolutely life affirming. I was extremely fortunate to be amongst a group of extraordinary, extraordinary people, the leading and sharpest minds in the country.
Plus an innovation design guy. So.
But as a director, Kenne of IoD, can you explain to our listeners what's the purpose?
[00:29:08] Speaker B: I believe it started off with the corporate governance.
You know that a lot of listed companies in Thailand, in Thailand stock Exchange are family business. Doesn't mean that family is not good, right? Family business is a good thing, but with the good corporate governance, it will be the best. Right.
So what does it mean by good corporate governance? And you need to have the good cooperation between the shareholders, the board, which is supposed to be representative of shareholders and the management and of course the staff and everyone in the company. Right. So to be a good board member that can, you know, enhance the shareholders value and at the same time you help CEO's and the management team to run the business in a good direction, in a good way. I think that's where the corporate governance comes in.
And at the same time you cannot look at the major shareholders only because when it comes to listed company, you're talking about public company. So there are a lot of people, small and large shareholders as well. So you have to make it equitable, you know, make it how to say that fair for everyone. So you need a good corporate governance to be a good board member. So we'll be talking about the duty of care, duty of loyalty. You learned it right? From the DCP. You have to tell me two more then.
[00:30:38] Speaker C: Duty of care, duty of obedience, duty of loyalty and duty of disclosure.
[00:30:42] Speaker B: Yeah, that's right. Okay. You passed, right. And of course it's. And there's a lot of details behind it. But today is even more than that because you heard about the story, you know, the negative stories of some of the companies, which to me I think we still fail to educate board members and also all the stakeholders about what to be a good board to be able to avoid those unfortunate stories that we are hearing in the stock exchange.
[00:31:13] Speaker C: My last segment, Kine, which I tend to put at the front of the podcast, and it's an obvious one, is there anything that we've missed or is there anything you would like to add in terms of learning from your incredible journey?
[00:31:27] Speaker B: Okay. I think the, probably the thing said to be it's not only about listening to people, right. I think you mentioned about active listening.
I was gonna say that normally when we hear people talking their own story, we just take it for granted without further questioning. I think to me that we have to dig down. The Japanese would say to the root cause, or many people would say to the sort of root cause analysis. And I think that's one of the most important that maybe many people lack of. Right. Let's say, for example, when we say our customers say our product price is too high, then what does that mean?
I heard a lot of salespeople would come to me and say that, hey, our price is way too high than other competitors, things like that. So what are we going to do? We just simply cut price? That's probably not the way to do. We have to dig deeper. Let's say why? How do they compare our price with other competitors? What's the real motive of having lower price? Well, basically they want to cut expense, right? Or if it's a b, two b kind of business. So basically they want to improve profit. So instead of thinking about cutting price, then we have to think about how do we help them reduce their expenses? Or how do we help them improve their profitability.
What if we sell our products to them at a higher price, but they can make even more profitable than they used to buy from other competitors? Would they love it? Of course.
I think one of the basic skills that people need to have more is critical thinking, understanding deeply. And that's probably even more important today when it comes to AI or the new technology we having, because all the knowledge in the world is already in AI arena. So, you know, you don't need to, you know, asking experts or, you know, that kind of thing. You can look at the chat, GPT or Gemini or whatever. That's knowledge. But deep thinking, critical thinking, understand root cause. I think that what human can do maybe better today than AI, but I'm not so sure about the future. But I think that's the basic skills that people need to have. So again, when it comes to solving business issues, personal issues, or negotiation among different stakeholders, understand deeply what people think, understand deeply of what are the issues, and ask why? Why? Why relentlessly get to the root cause, be able to solve the real issues in the future.
[00:34:34] Speaker A: My thanks to our guest, Ekapon pong Sutrapon. There on our website you can find the program notes and a reading list for this episode. Hakink Kaizen is produced by DSA. We'll be back at the same time next week, but until then, from me, Graham Nieman. Many thanks for listening.
