IN this week’s Success: The Insight Story column, Glocomp Systems (M) Sdn Bhd executive director Alex Liew (pic) answers SunBiz’s questions.
How has your life experience made you the leader you are today?
My entrepreneurship journey started 25 years ago and it was not all smooth sailing. As the saying goes, “When the going gets tough, the tough get going”.
In the beginning as a startup, we needed to handle many departments ourselves, from sales to order processing, delivery of project, finance, credit, collection, cash flow and we gained a lot of experience along the way.
As the business started to grow, we realised that we needed to hire people with the necessary expertise, those who were smarter than us, to focus on different departments to make the company more efficient.
Working with more experienced team members is an example of leadership. Empowering team members to excel to greater heights is key. When there are roadblocks, I always work together to solve problems as I believe that more minds are always better than one.
What traits do you look for in your talent? How do you decide who is right for a job?
For talent, there are three important areas that I look at – qualification, attitude and ambition. We need to be clear that qualification is not certification. For those who are certified, it does not mean that they have the qualifications to do the job. A qualified person is someone who can do the right job with the right experience.
Attitude is important to achieve greater heights; individuals with a good attitude are deep thinkers, hardworking and driven. Ambitious people have the desire to learn, excel and be successful. They too have a strong desire to achieve goals. With ambitious team members, we can steer the team in the right direction and ensure they deliver their objectives.
How do you think the industry you are in will evolve?
A few keywords, namely digital transformation, hybrid multi-cloud, robotic process automation (RPA). Digital transformation is key to helping organisations to step up and be more competitive and efficient. The Covid-19 pandemic has driven a lot of digital transformation among organisations, be it the government, corporations, government-linked companies or small and medium-sized enterprises.
Take e-wallet as an example; the adoption rate is high. However, there are many areas in digital transformation that every organisation needs to embrace. Digital transformation and technology is an investment to grow the business to be more competitive; it is not an expense.
Cloud adoption is increasing as it gets business applications and workloads running in a short time. Upgrades and lead time for equipment are no longer a concern. However, there are still some workloads that are crucial that need to be done on the premises. And some workloads require different cloud service providers. For example, primary workloads will be with the main cloud service provider, but your disaster recovery workloads would be with your secondary cloud provider. This makes a hybrid multi-cloud environment. We see that hybrid multi-cloud is the future.
Embarking on digital transformation, there is a lot of automation with RPA that can be done to improve efficiency to automate repetitive workflows. RPA cuts human capital as organisations scale while also minimising human errors. The key benefits of RPA include a productivity boost, creating a better customer experience and producing data for analytics. Some successful examples of automation are in finance, accounting, healthcare, insurance, manufacturing and pharmaceuticals. In all these industries, one common use case is to automate accounting and back-end processes.
What advice can you offer those looking to start their career/own business?
Focus on what you do best – that is crucial. Not everyone succeeds in entrepreneurship. Some will be successful at building their career as an employee and some excel at entrepreneurship. It is extremely important to focus on your strengths to excel.
However, in building a pathway to success, one key is leadership. In any area that you pursue, leadership is important to set direction and help the team to achieve success. A good leader always has a successful team.
Resilience and determination are also important. In every journey, there are always going to be a lot of challenges. You need to be persistent to go through the journey. The important thing is to learn from mistakes and improve. This is part of the ingredient for success.
How has mentorship made a difference in your professional life?
Mentorship has been a key factor that has made me what I am today. It has given me a lot of insights into building strong fundamentals. Experiences shared by mentors helped forge a much shorter path to making improvements. Even when we are making the same mistakes, we know where the path is heading to.
I am blessed to have many mentors who assisted me in different stages of my career. I learnt so much from these experiences.
What do you want to accomplish in the next five years?
Here at Glocomp, we see that digital transformation is key. Besides striving to greater heights in our core business, we are committed to building international-level skillsets with local talents. We will be investing heavily in improving human capital and increasing talent skillsets to enable Malaysia to be a talent hub for the region. Areas of automation, analytics, artificial intelligence and hybrid multi-cloud will be the focus of key growth for us. We look forward to working closely with the public and private sectors for key digital initiatives.
What’s the best piece of advice you have received in your career?
Never blame others for our failures. When we fail in anything that we do, we should never blame anyone else but instead, look at ourselves to find what are the factors that need improvement. How do we do better the next time? It is also important that as a team, together do a post-mortem to find weaknesses collectively to improve.
Move away from our comfort zone to keep enriching anything that we do. When we feel comfortable and stay in our comfort zone, that is the start of trouble. When we think that we have no reason to improve, this is when we fail. We need to keep improving, and learning new trades that we are not comfortable with. No pain, no gain!
Who is your most-admired business leader? And why?
Steve Jobs. He never gave up despite the huge challenges that he faced. Every time he failed, he came back stronger. He also brought a lot of new ideas to the team, and most importantly, he was able to lead the team to revolutionise innovation.
What has been the biggest challenge you have faced? What did you learn from it?
Human relations are the biggest challenge I’ve faced. Working with different individuals is challenging, everyone has different characters and personalities. Patience, better communication skills, trust and relationship building are some keys that can help make better connections. Sincerity, which I feel gives comfort and commitment, is also key to building good human relations.
What are the top three factors you would attribute success to?
1, Hard work – Am a strong believer in that the harder you work, the luckier you will be.
2. Empower team leaders – Team leaders are often smart and capable people. Believe strongly in empowering team leaders for them to excel and bring teammates and company to greater heights.
3. Keep striving for improvements – Never be comfortable, never think that we are at the top but always strive to improvise and make changes for the better.
