Write an article about Pos Malaysia’s dire need to put its stamp on the future .Organize the content with appropriate headings and subheadings (h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6), Retain any existing tags from
Pos Malaysia, the venerable Malaysian institution, was in the news recently, though not in a very flattering way.
The more interesting story is that Pos Malaysia has been underperforming for years, in its financial aspects, and as a brand. In business, a strong brand is a critical driver of a healthy financial picture.
Given that we are all stakeholders of Pos Malaysia, it’s appropriate to ask if the company can ever improve, or will the poor performance of its brand, and hence the poor financial returns, be a permanent feature?
The company certainly faces major existential challenges. The biggest is that while online commerce has created infinitely more stuff to deliver, there are also many younger, nimbler and more aggressive competitors around eating its lunch.
Legacy issues
Pos Malaysia is saddled by many legacy issues that hinder it from competing effectively. Its traditional mail business has collapsed. It lacks technology and innovation, has high fixed costs and a large workforce that’s difficult to adapt and transform.
There is also its rather opaque ownership structure, a legacy from its days as a government department turned into a government-owned company.
A company’s branding is a great asset; in its broadest sense, a brand is a sum of everything the company does – its products, pricing, sales and distribution, service, communications, promotion etc.
To build a strong brand, the company also needs to have a similarly strong culture to deliver it.
Pos Malaysia, and many other companies in similar situations, is certainly trying hard to change its culture, or “our way of doing things”; its culture forms the operating system, if you will, that drives the actions of any human organisation, whether a business or a bureaucracy or even a country.
Culture revolution
Many present-day challenges aren’t solvable using yesterday’s culture. Leaders, political and especially business ones, have tried to change – or at least have talked a lot about changing – their organisation’s culture. Most have failed.
The successes of new tech companies, where the founders tout their culture (often stuff like open and colourful offices, wellness initiatives and free coffee), have made culture a cool business topic. It’s even taught in business schools nowadays, perhaps a validation of its importance to organizational success.
But such successes don’t last. Take the iconic “HP Way”, the culture that propelled Hewlett-Packard to success as a tech company that literally started in a garage in what is now Silicon Valley.
That many of you would be asking “Hewlett who?” is proof that even a company as successful as Hewlett-Packard doesn’t stay successful for long.
Rising to the challenge
Another example: the old culture at Boeing where engineers cared about building safe and innovative aircraft that dominated the civilian aviation market. That culture didn’t survive either, killed by the more recent culture where bean counters call the shots and “shareholder value” trumps everything else.
When your culture isn’t refreshed, disrupted or otherwise transformed to face new challenges, or when you discard your old, successful culture for the latest fad, companies – and their products – can crash, sometimes literally.
Older companies such as Pos Malaysia find a desperate need for its employees – from those in the corner offices down to the humble postmen and counter clerks – to change their ways to address the new challenges facing their existence.
A huge obstacle is that, in reality, the survival of organisations like Pos Malaysia is basically – for political reasons – guaranteed. There isn’t much urgency to change among its staff, especially the senior ones. They’d rather just wait things out and soon enough a new leader will appear, and the game begins again.
Falling back on ritual
But if the culture doesn’t change, it won’t deliver the big business goals promised by its leaders. Remember the earlier analogy of culture being the organisations’ operating system – none of your “programmes” will work if the computer’s operating system is outdated or broken.
Herein lies the rub: most leaders aren’t good at changing the culture of their organisation. It’s often because they themselves are products of that same culture, and also because their past successes required different skills – business or operational or even political ones – rather than leadership and transformational ones.
So, when it comes to culture, many leaders just focus on ritual – town halls, slogans, a checklist of vision and mission and values etc. When they fail, as they often do, many revert to the default of being ruthless people who see humans as just disposable means of production.
Then the doom cycle continues, with the leaders discarding any cultural transformation initiatives and instead focusing on strategy or financial engineering or – as it often happens – expensive consultants, while employees in turn lose trust in those who lead them.
Reward system
Pos Malaysia isn’t making much ground – assuming they know what’s needed to be done – to forcefully change their culture. This is partly because of the political nature of their existence, which sees preserving jobs as part of their social responsibility, and partly out of ineffective execution of what needs to be done.
Often the single most powerful lever of change, the rewards systems, aren’t thoroughly overhauled, or even touched. The rewards – positive and negative, tangible and intangible – therefore aren’t aligned to the goals demanded by the new strategies.
Admittedly, managing carrots and sticks is hard and risky, as it may entail upsetting entrenched perks and entitlements. It may also involve painful chopping and changing of the organisational structure to turn it into an enabler, and not an obstacle, of future success. That’s hard, painful and often risky.
Cultural transformations then often become mere tinkering around the edges, cosmetic and performative rather than substantial. The carrots and sticks on the leaders themselves are often geared to incentivise quick successes. The easiest results are often achieved by going on full ugly-capitalist mode and slashing and burning things.
Obstacles to change
Even without knowing the numbers, I can easily assume Pos Malaysia has too many employees, and often more of the wrong kind, those who were right when the world was different a few decades ago, as opposed to those who are right for the world of tomorrow.
And while it’s easy to point the fingers at the rank and file, in my experience it’s often those at the top, those who fiercely guard the status quo, that are the ones most likely to derail any such transformation.
There’s a saying in business lore about being on a burning platform, where your survival as a business is at risk. This is supposed to be a powerful driver to change.
But it’s not easy convincing many organisational members that the platform is really burning, especially those who are in denial about the precariousness of their situation.
More to come
While logically you’d agree a sunset industry geared for last century’s business realities such as Pos Malaysia would indeed be a burning platform in this day and age, I somehow doubt that many in Pos Malaysia, from the rank and file to the leadership to the shareholders, see things that way.
So, the current stories about Pos Malaysia, unflattering as they are, will soon pass. The news cycle and social media will fixate on the next bad news or outrage. There’s plenty of both in the world today lining up to explode in our faces.
But the travails of Pos Malaysia look set to continue. We’ll be hearing more from them for quite a while yet I think.
The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of FMT.
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