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LIFE on the 11th floor in Wisma Sime Darby was pleasant for me, though I did not know that it was not going to last.
I had a small team and we earned our fees from clients mainly from Indonesia. I could muster a team for any assignment, including feasibility studies to plant oil palm. Our results exceeded expectations. The return on capital was high since we had few assets, apart from a few computers.

Every Monday morning, I would attend the meeting on the sixth floor with the other
heads of departments at Sime Darby Plantations.

I could sense that the culture was different from that in my previous employment. This was a routine of highly structured presentations; each head of department not raising any serious questions, knowing his turn will come next. The small talk before the meeting was idle chat, not revealing anything.

At exactly 10am, head of the Plantations Division Ken Eales would appear from a side door, leaving his corner office to sit at the head of the table, with Caroline Lee from finance sitting next to him. She would have briefed him with the numbers a half-hour earlier.

Eales was the one who agreed to get me into the company, and he had been to my house in Surrey as a dinner guest before he reported back to Tunku Tan Sri Ahmad Tunku Yahya, head of Sime Darby, on his return to Kuala Lumpur.

At dinner, I reminded him that we had met back in 1964, more than 23 years ago, at another big plantation management agency.

In those days, the British agencies were run by British managers, and with the changes in ownership, they had left. However, he was one of the last to stay. He had done it by being diligent, knew his facts and held himself well on the 21st floor, where the main board of directors met. He had an impersonal approach.

On the day I joined, he told me: “I follow an old saying. Believe in none of what you hear and half of what you see.”

If a misconduct occurred, he would take action. After a domestic inquiry, he would study the report and would back it even if the culprit had to be sacked.

“I am not worried if he takes us to court. We cannot allow a drop in standards.”

When we lost a planter to a heart attack, he instructed everyone over forty to undergo annual health checks.

“We have spent years to train each one of them. We are only protecting our investment.”

He may say more on a topic for that week before allowing the meeting to start. The head of the estates would report first, as they generated the most revenue. If the crop was low, we would listen to the oft-heard words like drought, water stress, seasonal floods and the palms entering a resting phase. If the crop had exceeded estimates, then the reasons would change. Management and teamwork had a lot to do with it.

Eales would listen without comment, for he would have heard them before. The head of engineering would be next. His team ran the mills. He would have good reasons to offer low oil and kernel extraction rates but would stop short of blaming the plantations for sending unripe bunches. A long war could start if he said that. Instead, he would show the results of other mills in the country, many of which also did not do well.

There was a downstream department, and the person would fly in from Johor, where he was in charge of the refineries of cooking oil and specialty fats in Pasir Gudang and Singapore. His problems were too complex for me to follow. His losses could happen with a drop in oil prices in Chicago. The dollar could move against him.

I heard the phrase “negative margins” for the first time. On some rare months, the factors worked the other way, giving him huge profits, and his face would light up when he gave his report.

When it was my turn, I spoke about my clients who were mainly from Indonesia. The group had no plantations there. I could see that Eales and Lee were the only two listening carefully while the rest flipped through their papers or relaxed after their turns.

Soon, I too could sit back to listen to the rest. The last presentation was from the head of trading. He and his team sold crude palm oil
and palm kernel. In some months, the prices achieved may be lower than the average that was reported by the industry. He had a list of reasons for that, including timing.

Equally, in other months, he did better than the market average. He would then do his presentation with panache, and go on with giving his view on prices for the following weeks, supported with figures from the trade newsletter Oil World.

World supply may go down if the rains in Brazil and Argentina arrive at the wrong time during the soybean season. Frost may hit growing areas in the United States. Then he would return to the home picture, giving our national production and remaining stocks. He would conclude with his forecast, phrased with a few preconditions. It would be a masterly performance to end the meeting.

I missed some of those meetings as I was travelling with members of my team, working on assignments. My absence was noticed but I did not get any comments from Eales.

It was after I came back one day that I heard a rumour he was going to retire. I took it seriously as I knew by then that often rumours were true.

I was curious to know who would take his place, and one name came up most often – a person who was heading another part of the group.

He was stout, restless and active. I did not know him well apart from greeting him as we rushed at airports to catch our flights. Later, I learned a little more about him. He was reputed to be close to Tunku Ahmad, and over the years, he had been allowed to do his job his way, making big changes as he saw fit.

This made me realise that my position may not be secure.

Mahbob Abdullah has extensive experience in the management of oil palm plantations. Comments: letters@thesundaily.com