An Experienced Specialist's Take on Corporate Transformation in the Age of Technology, Culture, and the Road Ahead: Interview with Rhea Ong Yiu

Interviewer:  

Let me start by having you introduce yourself.  

Rhea Ong Yiu:  

I'm an experienced enterprise transformation specialist. I've worked with mostly large pharmaceutical and life sciences companies. I have also spent a good amount of my career consulting for high tech, FMCG, telco, energy, and banking sectors during the heydays of their transformation.  

While my background has been a lot about tech and digital, I found myself in rooms where I have been invited to see the human behind these big transitions, which I would say is the most exciting part of the work.

Part of doing transformation is being able to support the leaders and teams who are in that journey. It’s no small feat to be someone everyone looks up to during high-stakes volatile times, and also having to go through the culture change and transformation yourself. 

Interestingly enough, you will see that I have a very strong track record of having lived through huge transformations myself. The companies I’ve joined have either been acquired, or merged, downsized or roles transitioned to other countries, oftentimes at the very early days of me joining the company or just shortly after I have left. So transformations are no stranger to me.

This led me to hone my executive coaching skills, as I often find myself in situations where I become the listening ear, the empathizer, or a depth provoker and challenger of limiting beliefs in those tough moments.

Fairly recently, I have published the first of a series of books called Adventures with Coco, which is a very personal project, but also a playful way of harnessing the inner work every leader needs to stay grounded in the face of high pressure and changing ecosystems

Interviewer:  

Do you think your experience across pharma, life sciences, and energy has shaped your understanding of the field?  

Rhea Ong Yiu:  

Absolutely. Although they are very different industries, every organizations nowadays could truly benefit from digital (nowadays, AI has taken center stage!), human-centric approaches to operation, which if I’m being honest, transferable across different sectors and markets.

My understanding of the different complexities in varying size of organizations, as well as dynamics and culture has been a great place to learn and understand how humans can play a central role in driving systemic change in the organization.

Of course the products and service offerings are different, with different severity and urgency attached to them, and in the end, you start understanding that some variables work for one industry and not for the other.

I’m grateful that my depth of understanding and experience in the tech integration ecosystem has helped me better recognize the demands of the market and the industry, while working very closely with customers and how to respond to their needs systemically. This is quite significant. 

Interviewer:  

This interaction with the tech sector leads very well into one of my questions. How have current technological developments, especially artificial intelligence, changed the nature of your work?  

Rhea Ong Yiu:  

Absolutely. Maybe if you asked me this question six years ago, we would be talking like, 'Oh,  is AI going to take away my job?' But that's no longer the question;on we are sitting with today. Now we're asking: how do I partner with AI to create faster decisions as a leader, to understand wide-reaching impact of the work we're doing, anchored on transparent data points? And where do I  focus my energy in terms of the work that I actually do versus what can I get AI to do for me? So in terms of the work that I do, it changes the positioning.  

Working with leaders, my goal is to help them partner with AI and be confident as decision makers, more empathic as leaders and make ethical sense of what the data is showing. AI does not secure data by itself, so there is still the need for leaders to orchestrate a layer in their organization where they can capture data points that are compliant, partner with AI to correlate data, but take the lead in making decisions faster with a new level of accuracy.

As a coach, I can also support leaders to enable a more decentralized decision-making model in their organizations, where people with the expertise can share the accountability of taking decisions. In this way, you increase collaboration, shared ownership in risks and outcomes. This helps executives move from being decision bottlenecks, to strategic thinkers creating more competitive advantage and real value for the enterprise, as well as for the workforce.

Interviewer:  

In this discussion about how you help leaders leverage AI and other developing technologies  in their business—whether through data optimizations, collection strategies, strategic approaches,  or doing work faster and better—what do you see? What should companies be prepared for that most are not thinking about yet? What are the rising trends, not even all related to  technology, but in general?  

Rhea Ong Yiu:  

I've seen one pioneering companies take a stab at this. They're in a very competitive market  and they have very little cash flow. So they're in a very difficult position already before even AI is factored in.  

What they have done is redesign the organization so that they become more nimble. They actually follow a red line towards strategic ambitions and are very explicit in terms of how they track value created on a 90-day cycle. So shorter cycles, more decisions taken at the places where the work happens, and so less opportunities to micromanage. 

And because decision-making is shared, leadership teams focus on guiding strategy, while operations teams weigh in on driving operational decisions and owning the outcomes within their domain. Now, supercharge that with AI efficiencies and data transparency, what you’re looking at is a healthy functional organization with high levels of trust and accountability.

It is not utopia, and in real experience, some of the operational initiatives or innovation bets do not really work out to be relevant or successfully contribute to strategic goals. Yet, you cannot kill it without impacting some of your resources. These are real strategic decisions which in the past would take months and even years to pivot. With AI, these insights can come so quickly, therefore a new demand for leaders to create some fluidity of their best talent to move through the organization is going to be a significant lever. This is why I mentioned earlier, looking at how organizations, roles and decision-making is designed within the organization is increasing in important.

Large organizations today still operate on the traditional models of hiring, where people are tied to jobs that require a very specialized set of competencies. The risk of killing initiatives becomes a big risk for talent loss. This is a major implication in the business. It almost fills a deadlock when there is a change. 

In the age of AI where the speed of change is also happens constantly, there is a growing demand for future organizations to have a sense of fluidity, where people can hold multiple roles, develop and grow wider skills and capabilities, and drive change within the organization constantly. Easier said than done. Because a change this requires a new set of leadership behaviours, and as humans, our evolution demands more inner work than we are willing to invest in.  

Interviewer: 

Now that we're talking about stopping initiatives that have lasted for six months and reallocating people, do you see any intersections between traditional M&A work and  corporate transformation?  

Rhea Ong Yiu:  

Absolutely. If you think about M&A work, it's always a long-tail transactional process: the due diligence takes time, the complexity of the old versus the new setup, the size of the company, locations, jurisdictions, systems compatibility, the migration pathway, etc.  We're looking at six months up to 3  years of driving those M&As transaction process.

Now, when we talk about transformation, this happens before the transaction process is even completed. We look at various factors in transformation and for the purpose of this conversation, I’ll categorize it into 3 things: People, Process and Technology. There are a lot more factors that usually hinge on the overarching goal of the transaction, perhaps even considering a new operating model, but let’s stick to these 3 assuming it is a lift and shift:

People: In practical sense, you would look at how the NewCo will look like and which roles will be kept, which roles will be make redundant, which new roles will be needed. However, beyond this, there might also be an opportunity to redesign a new organization. This is such a great opportunity that can happen while a transaction is underway, because you still have access to talent that you might otherwise lose with redundancies if you do this step-wise. Other things that you look at during a transformation include culture, behaviors, etc. This is often a breaking point when it comes to M&A. If the culture is so different between OldCo and NewCo, you’d need to really consider finding a middle ground and make sure you have a clear, inspiring narrative that makes sense, not only to your employees, but also your customers.

Technology: When it comes to technology, the transaction teams often look at comparable processes, what’s there, what’s missing, how it’s done, which systems and tech are being used, etc. Harmonizing OldCo and NewCo technology is in itself a huge effort where transformation truly can play a role. I’ve been in organizations where we ended up having 13 instances of SAP through M&As. In the end, this is not only a huge capex drain for the NewCo, it’s also a resource and operational drain. But migration pathways for these processes are not often done upfront, but postponed for the NewCo to deal with. There is an opportunity for transformation to play a role early in these situations.

Process: When I think about processes, I am referring to for example accounts and receivable, procurement, order-to-cash, employee onboarding, vendor solutions, customer portal solutions etc. Where transformation plays a role here is when you harmonize these processes, or at least design migration pathways so that you leverage high value infrastructure (whether it’s coming from OldCo or NewCo), and make that your new standard of operations. This is why transformation specialists could work hand in hand with M&A in identifying transactional gaps in processes, but also spot opportunities for better integration.

This is where the work that I do, in terms of looking at the organizational structure, looking at the individual behavioral context, the incentive mechanisms, the technology ecosystem could come in. Yes, you buy a company, but if you run the same thing in the same way the old company has done it, what innovation will come out of it? That's also where my work comes in—to reimagine what that could look like and  what's the possibility for innovation. Of course, that requires consent and that requires a buy-in. That also means a narrative and a roadmap should be created to bring people along on that journey..  

Interviewer:  

I think it's very interesting to see this bird's eye view approach with higher equity structures  in terms of employee ownership. That's one of the first things they tell us in economic  literature—that's how you solve the holdup problem, how you solve the incentive issues in  corporate structures. If you incentivize employees to actually work for profit, to actually  want the company to do well on a behavioral level, then it will do better. That leads me to  my last question: What is the one thing that most executives get wrong about leading  transformation processes, and what are the common blind spots?  

Rhea Ong Yiu: 

I think of the power dynamics in organizations today and I think that’s really the best place to start. We see an increasing case of burnout and mental health challenges in both large and small organizations, and studies have pointed to company culture contributing to this. Based on my assessments, this stems from the fact that culture is kind of fluffy and hard to measure, so often its direct consequence to the wellbeing of people is often underestimated. 

The fact that culture often do not have a seat in the executive conversations signals that it is still very much considered an afterthought.  Yes, you have CHROs. Yes, you have people and culture leaders, but when you dig deep into their roles and accountabilities, they often focus on the system and compliance. They’re not strongly  anchored on how culture is affecting the operational success of the business. 

The work that I do has always been anchored on the operating model. How are we engaging people to line up and contribute towards the success of the operating model? What outcomes can they truly be proud of? How can we help them create meaning at work?

I hope that we start to see humans are the real workforce and assets of the company. They are what drives your company to be profitable, to drive innovation, to generate impactful outcomes. All of this needs to go hand-in-hand with how your operating model is  transforming. Does that make sense?  

Interviewer:

Yes, that definitely makes sense. It's the trend now to implement certain  things—HR has more visibility, more focus on company culture, all these buzzwords, especially looking at  the hiring market. But what does that actually mean through your internal processes,  through the way your operations work? How are you incentivizing people? Like we said earlier, how do you incentivize people so you're scratching that itch where they think, 'Hey, I  want my company to be successful, so I can be successful.' What does that look like?  

Now, is there anything you would like to add? Any closing remarks, any words of wisdom?  

Rhea Ong Yiu:  

I would offer an invitation to leaders and also especially in the M & A space, to flex their creativity and explore new avenues of solving new problems, with an openness to learn, and to apply different strategies to tackle new complexities.

To quote Abraham Maslow, "If the only tool you have is a hammer, it is tempting to treat everything as if it were a nail."  

I think we need a departure from applying old processes, old ways of working, old structures to solve the new complexities and demands in the market. This also goes as far as how we organize the work, how we define the roles, and how we treat people differently.

This new generation requires more than the standard off the shelf approaches. We want quick feedback loops, we need iterative ways to get to the end goal, and we want adaptive structures that allow us to sense and respond to emerging market needs.

This is an exciting moment where leaders can truly step up, listen to the needs of the market and the organization, listen to the voice of the employees and customers and explore new possibilities with new solutions and more innovative ways of going around a problem, because we are solving complexity that is different from what it was a few years ago. And if I were to bridge data and AI here, we now have tools that will help us get to information and data sooner than we could ever could have done. 

 Interviewer: 

Thank  you so much for sitting down. This has been very insightful for me, and I know for all our  readers, this will also be really interesting to reflect on. 

 Rhea Ong Yiu: 

Thank you. Thank you so much.

Interview has been edited for length and crarity.