Time dotcom: Declared Dysfunctional

Time Dotcom Bhd (TdC) CEO Afzal Abdul Rahim's Official Declaration:

TdC is DYSFUNCTIONAL; TdC is disconnected from the market.

TdC needs: a Total Overhaul, a Paradigm Shift, a new Business Plan, a set of Turnaround Initiatives and Divisional Initiative,s and some Quick Wins!

Afzal admitted that these are vital because TdC has too many leakages in operating expenses. Its spending for network is high, it is too dependent on vendors’ solution, it lacks direction, has no clarity and, most importantly, its product offerings are too complex.

“This company has structural issues and people work in silos. We have to be conscious that we are dysfunctional as an organisation and we have to do basic cleaning up as we can get simple things wrong.

“If we do not change everything in the peripheral, we cannot achieve the target and that is why a complete overhaul is needed,’’ chief executive officer Afzal Abdul Rahim told StarBiz in an interview.

He said the structural problems came about because “people were too busy organising functions around personalities and this resulted in them building silos and empires which led to no synchronisation.”

“There is clearly a lack of direction and clarity and everyone only thought of his own work. (TdC has been looking inwards) and that is why TdC is disconnected from the market. We did not know what the market wanted,’’ Afzal said.

Afzal came on board in October last year and that is what he discovered after more than three months at the helm.

He has a three-year mandate from Khazanah Nasional Bhd to turn TdC around.

TdC has been suffering from internal hemorrhage; it has been losing money for more than a decade.

Turnaround? How are they doing it?

From observations, they are:

(1) Removing existing executives using VSS and parking new executives into the old job role (85% of the executives were replaced - 23 out of 27);

(2) Cost Reduction Initiatives: (i)Cutting operating expenditures from RM100 mil to RM40 mil. & moving office from it's Jalan Tun Razak leased-premises to its own premise at Glenmarie in Shah Alam.;

(3) Flattening the organizational hierarchy to enhance visibility;

(4) De-coupling from the United Engineers (M) Bhd (UEM) group and Time Engineering Bhd.

Will it work? Theoretically yes; empirically ... behemoth task and onerous. Turnaround is not just simply: putting on the right man on the bus and taking out the wrong people off; it is not just about having a good business plan and flattening the steep hierarchy. It is about a strong leadership, a strategic business action plan which are goal-centric with fixed time frame, a high performance team supporting and driving change, and a dynamic cashflow system which are driving the revenue growth & collections with a team of researchers empowered to innovatively drive cost-reduction without sacrificing or trade-off with elements that are contributing positively to the organizational processes. Most of all, the change and impact which provides positive contributions towards organizational goals and objectives are sustainable and becomes the new culture within the organizational system.

What about Rewards? But you can't have or sustain a high performance team without a strategic reward system: the rewards must be result-based, rewarding the "Lembu"and not just the "Sapi", and it motivates - the people on the job and continually drives their performances from good to great.

Strong leadership is not just about a good-talking leader or a friendly person; he leads by example and he has the vision and foresight of the businesses and he has the ability to identify good performers; most of all, he and his executives have the right attitude and are of strong character. However, he can do no better if his team are incompetent or inexperience : qualifications aren't just enough; these executives must possess on-the-job experiences, experiences in complexity and chaos management, experiences of similar failures from without and within, and excellent skills in Project Management, Financial Management, strategic Business Management and Risk Managemen; and most of all, they have the "Right Attitude" and with business-centric mentality.

Critical Failure Factors: mediocrity and ketuanan mentality, class & color differentiations, lack of focus or unsustainable focus, a new crony system replacing the old, talks well and talks often about performance instead of driving & ensuring performance are acted upon and measured on, good at meetings as well as spending too much time in meetings talking about performance and not spending time with the people on the job to manage the products and services to the customers/clients on time, with the right quality and at a competitive price, as well as managing the effective cost of the products and services.

I can only wish Afzal: "Best of Luck" and "May God Bless You and Your Team".