What it takes to succeed globally

Hsieh Tsun-Yan knows all about entrepreneurship. The President's Scholar bade goodbye to a gilded career here and worked his way up the ranks of renowned consulting firm McKinsey. He returned 20 years later to help Singapore firms succeed globally. He tells Susan Long his plans to shake up the leadership landscape here.
By Susan Long, The Straits Times, 1 Feb 2013

HE IS officially retired. But Mr Hsieh Tsun-Yan, 60, feels that life has just begun. After years of restructuring the world's most profitable companies, the former chairman of consulting giant McKinsey & Company's Asia operations has restructured his own life.

He is more energised than ever. Next month, he is launching a book on entrepreneurship he co-wrote, called Heart, Smarts, Guts And Luck, which recently made the New York Times bestseller list.

He sits on the boards of global companies like Japan's Sony Corporation, India's Bharti Airtel and Canada's Manulife Financial, and holds directorships at the Singapore International Foundation and Institute of Policy Studies.

In the last five years, he's styled himself as a chief executive counsellor, helping chief executives, boards and business owners tackle change and succession issues.

His start-up, LinHart Group, has a hush-hush client list of the top blue-chip companies here and elsewhere. He estimates that he has coached some 50 chief executives so far, a fifth of them Singaporeans.

And he's set himself a new goal - to transform the leadership landscape here, one chief executive at a time. His dream: to see a Singaporean chief executive at the helm of a Fortune 500 company one day.

Meanwhile, he's moved upstream, starting with getting MBA students here out of the door on the right foot. The National University of Singapore (NUS) Business School Management Advisory Board member since 2009, who was recently appointed its Provist's Chair professor, has designed from scratch a course that teaches what he believes is the nub of leadership - influence.

"In Singapore, there's too much thinking and not enough doing. The system rewards people for coming up with ideas, as opposed to being effective in influencing people, communicating clearly, selling an idea and so on.

"Business is all about doing. You get no marks for thinking up a good idea until you do something to make it real."

Rather than criticise, he did something about it. He spent half a year putting together his managerial communications module, which he now teaches to first-year NUS MBA students, to address misperceptions of what it takes to succeed in business. He says it is the most concrete way he knows to raise NUS' MBA rankings, currently No. 23 worldwide, according to the Financial Times.

All his case studies are taken from real life, including text message exchanges with chief executives and chairmen. He is planning a mock cocktail party, attended by corporate bigwigs, where students are graded on their ability to socialise, ferret out information and make an impression.

He notes that most business schools focus on cramming in knowledge and techniques, such as how to calculate assets and liabilities. "But the day you walk out of here, the first thing that's going to stop you dead in the water is not that you don't know how to calculate. It's that you cannot communicate well," he says.

In his 30 years of consulting with over 30 industries worldwide, he notes that influence - which he defines as building the right networks with the right stakeholders - is the core skill that makes or breaks careers.

"People try to get away with technical excellence and expect if they give a correct technical answer, they deserve a promotion. But you've been paid already, salary plus bonus, for good performance. You're promoted because you're influential or you're a good leader. This concept is very alien to Singaporean managers."

His module, which is currently oversubscribed, will be compulsory for all incoming NUS MBA students this year.

Different calculus

MR HSIEH is a first-generation Singaporean, the third son born to a civil engineer and housewife. His grandfather was famous modern Chinese painter Xie Gongzhan. His childhood was spent wandering around his Braddell Heights bungalow home, stealing papayas from neighbours' trees, cycling, fishing, and pursuing everything that piqued his curiosity, except studying.

He entered Primary 1 a year early at Catholic High School, was whacked by a teacher for his inability to read or write, and took home report cards awash with red ink. He scored the full spectrum of grades from D7 to A1 for his O levels, until he came into his own during his A levels at Raffles Institution and won the President's Scholarship and Colombo Plan scholarship. "All these made me refuse to be limited by test results or what others say about me, and to believe I can effect change."

He went to the University of Alberta in Canada, where he topped his mechanical engineering cohort and met his wife Siau Yih, a teacher-turned-housewife from Malaysia. In 1974, he returned to serve his national service at the Officer Cadet School, which piqued his interest in leadership.

Invited to join the elite Administrative Service, he replied: "No, thank you, I'd like to be an engineer for a while," which he adds, "didn't please them very much".

He was sent to the Public Works Department, overseeing the purchase and maintenance of tractors and bulldozers amid the building frenzy, which saw the world's heavy equipment giants knocking on his door.

He found himself "teaching them how to sell to me". After five years, he decided he would "do a better job on the other side of the fence" and applied to Harvard Business School. After he repeatedly asked the Public Service Commission for deferment to do his master's, but was refused, he paid back his bond of $27,000 with his father's help, and set off.

He remains an advocate for "more flexibility" in the handling of public officers who studied on government scholarships. "If you bring them up properly, they will be back. Let them make their own life choices and serve in whatever capacity they want. If the Government creams them all, how can Singapore be competitive?"

In 1980, the newly minted Harvard MBA holder made the bold move of applying for McKinsey, which then "didn't know where Singapore was on the map".

He was the first ethnic Chinese and Singaporean to be admitted. Instead of its established New York City office, he chose to join its fledgling Toronto office, where he could learn "at the bottom of the totem pole how to get business and clients". His calculus was: "Where can I be put at most risk and learn the most?"

He worked 12 hours six days a week, chasing after good partners to learn from. From "not knowing a single soul", he became "the biggest rainmaker" in Toronto and was known as the "fastest gun in the East", thanks to the charity boards he joined, from the Toronto Symphony to Christian homeless youth organisations.

Chief executives on those boards noted the intrepid way he went about the charities' business, and hired him to do likewise for their own businesses. Within a breakneck five years, he made partner, then senior partner five years later at McKinsey - one of the fastest ascents ever.

By 1995, he was chairman of its worldwide Professional Development Committee, and by 1997, managing director of its Canadian practice. Midway, he took up Canadian citizenship after it became too onerous to renew his exit permit yearly.

He is known in the industry for being intimidatingly clever, occasionally coming across as brash. Mr Dominic Barton, 50, global managing director of McKinsey, whom Mr Hsieh mentored, says his value-addedness lies in posing tough questions others are troubled by but dare not give voice to. "He's bold; he believes life's too short to do incremental things. He's tough, demands a lot and challenges you, for your benefit."

Coming home

IN 2000, he returned to Singapore as McKinsey's managing director for South-east Asia, motivated by a "sense of duty to give back" to the country that shaped him and help grow regional businesses into world leaders.

He started by helping to give feedback and shape policies here, sitting on the Workforce Development Agency's board when it was set up in 2003, and the Economic Review Committee.

He then worked at burnishing six Singapore companies for the next eight years - McKinsey never reveals who its clients are - with two becoming specialised global leaders thus far. Out of another six he worked on regionally, a company in India and another in Malaysia also hit the big time.

What made all the difference in these cases? Courageous and decisive leadership that could marshal the troops, says McKinsey's first chairman for Asia.

He retired in 2008 to coach business leaders full-time, teach and write. He now spends about seven months out of a year here, and the rest at homes in Europe and the United States, where his daughter, 32, works as a marketing manager. His son, 26, is an advertising executive here.

He continues his quest, working on "strengthening the leadership quotient" here and raising the traditionally low-risk appetite of Asian companies, inching them away from the shoreline to discover new oceans.

Many of the blue-chip companies he works on are successful in their own right, having inherited a good business model, but one nearing its expiry date and yielding less profitability.

Beyond looking into their financials and helping to devise a radically new business model, he works with the management team one by one - the chief executive, board chairman, down to key middle managers. "Asking them to roll the dice on their career requires emboldening."

Wearing his chief executive counsellor hat, he asks them searching questions on what their ultimate purpose in business is. He leads them to the conclusion that "it's not about managing risks, but what kind of risk you consciously go out to take to explore new frontiers".

"This is the leadership moment, where someone has to take the vanguard to breach the beach. Some will say there are too many unknowns, this is not proven, the business is still growing at 1 to 2 per cent, I'm still making a few million, I can do this till I retire, so it's too much risk."

But others will step up. For example, he asked one company to adopt a then unpopular asset-light balance sheet strategy, which no one else in the industry in Asia had done up till then. There was "enormous criticism", but the chief executive and his team pushed it through to spectacular success. "Not everyone is uniformly gung-ho. You just need the alignment of enough people who are. And I am there to help firm up their resolve," he says unflinchingly.

Hsieh Tsun-Yan on...

New leadership demands

"Being right is no longer good enough. New leadership demands that one has to be ambidextrous and able to manage the dialectics of hard and soft, rational and emotional, short- and long-term, being in control and being able to follow. Another attribute: Daring to do unpopular things. Look at the corporate world: no CEO who could withstand crisis in a challenging market was ever a popular CEO. There is no such thing."

His worries post-2011 GE

"We used to worry about our competitiveness. Now, do we worry about it as much? The pendulum may have swung too much from being externally focused to being internally focused. Singapore is a place with zero natural resources. We don't have the flywheel of oil and gas, gold and silver and rare earths to buffer us when we stop pedalling. If you don't pedal, you start to slide backwards. People tend to forget that goods and services, people, ideas and money, need to flow through here like a river. If you plug it up, the river stops flowing and soon you will need a big clean-up when it starts to smell."

Asking the right questions

"If Singapore were a company with citizens as shareholders, these are the questions to ask: Do we have the right leaders and the right leadership pipeline? Do we know the DNA of leaders we need in 20 years' time? What will be the new social compact? That will determine how we select, prepare, challenge and advance leaders."






Professor Hsieh Tsun-Yan : Do we know who we are and what we stand for? If we don’t, how can we expect real breakthroughs?