Knowledge Management: From Brain to Business (PDF 5.5 - Asian ...

people somehow overlook the region. People are focusing more on countries like China,
which obviously has a big market, and India, which is also growing strongly. But we believe
in ASEAN. There is a lot of potential and there are a lot of good people that we can integrate
into the organization to grow together from being a Thai company to becoming an ASEAN
company.
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Figure 1: Four Keys to Successful Innovation
Business direction two: Innovation. The other very strong message is innovation, which I
have talked about. These are the two messages that we send out to our employees and our
management, that these are the things we are focusing on and are doing in the next five
years.
Second Key: Innovative Culture
After the clear and simple business directions we are then targeting the soft side, the culture.
In culture, we have to look into the mirror to see ourselves. We applied various tools, such
as 360-degree feedback, and we found lots of ideas on what we should do to be more
innovative. Very simply, we must look at people and understand their behavior and how they
can improve.
The first people are the unit leaders. What are the qualifications of an innovative leader? We
call them “Inno-Leaders.” From our analysis of ourselves, which came from the feedback
of our organization’s people, we identified that in order to be more innovative we need a
leader to be a change leader. We cannot continue doing what we used to do; we need to
change.
To be a change leader, instead of dragging people along they have to be a change
supporter as well. Lastly, and this is very important, they have to be a role model,
because especially in Thailand, people look up to their elders and see how they behave. If
one keeps on saying that innovation is important, one has to be open and listen to the idea.
If one does not do that, and every time a subordinate suggests something, one says, “Oh,
forget about that. We already did that 10 years ago; it won’t work,” then it destroys
everything.
So these key areas look very simple, but we need to communicate very deeply with the
people. An example shows how serious senior management is. My boss, the CEO of the
group, my colleagues, some senior executives and myself—about 35 people in total—all
attended a course on developing innovative leaders and manager, conducted by an institute
we had hired. The course lasted about three months because it was not every day but on an