KUALA LUMPUR: Tan Sri Zamzamzairani Mohd Isa believes in a greater purpose and has a knack for looking at the glass half full when it comes to criticism.
As group chief executive officer of Telekom Malaysia Bhd (TM), the nation’s leading telecommunications company, for more than seven years, he has seen a fair share of criticism and public scrutiny on the company and its services.
“TM is held up to a higher standard. It feels heavy. Everything is under the spotlight. Then, we came to the conclusion that people are critical of us because we affect their lives.
“If we do a good job and come up with something really good, it improves the lives of people directly,” the 54-year-old former satellite engineer said in an interview with the New Straits Times and Berita Harian.
“What keeps me going is looking at how we have developed ourselves from a company that was almost written off by everybody and turning it around.
“And, to see how the people work so hard and get to reap the benefit. If you look back at what we have done, we have changed the lives of Malaysians,” added the Manchester United fan.
His office on the 55th floor of the iconic TM headquarters in Jalan Pantai here features, among others, a photo of him with MU captain Wayne Rooney, Rio Ferdinand’s boots and an Old Trafford home team seat.
Zamzamzairani, or Zam as he is affectionately known, led the 28,000 staff of TM with a legacy dating back to 1946 into the lithe multi-billion-ringgit telco giant that has wholeheartedly embraced the digital world today.
“I am more than happy with what TM has become today. I can’t ask for more. I’ve got the best board and the team is just fantastic,” said the former
Public Service Department (JPA) scholar, who studied communications engineering at
Plymouth Polytechnic in the United Kingdom.
Zam is well placed to see the transformation. As he aptly puts it, he grew up in TM and has seen the changes first hand.
Having started in TM 30 years ago, he briefly left the biggest fixed-line player in 1997 to work in multinationals and in 2005, returned to TM. Three years later, in 2008, he was appointed TM’s CEO.
When asked if he has entertained notions of rightsizing or downsizing the broadband champion, without hesitation he replied: “I am not looking at downsizing or rightsizing. I am looking at increasing productivity. We would prefer that we all increase our productivity.”
For this purpose, TM’s top brass monitors and regulates revenue-per-head-count, cost-per-head-count and even profitability-per-head-count. He admits that monitoring this on a monthly basis makes it easier to drive productivity.
Zam regards his initial years at the helm of TM as the most challenging, having to turn around a business that was facing double-digit decline and being aware that failure would affect the thousands of TM staff nationwide.
“It was lonely at the top, but what I did was create my own Council of Elders, and they didn’t even know that they were in fact part of my Council of Elders. I would have dinner with (them), just to learn from their experience of being successful entrepreneurs.”
These lessons are being passed on to the next generation of leaders in TM through the group’s succession plan initiatives.
“This cannot happen overnight. It happens over the years. If you invest in people, that is the only sure thing. I believe in building leaders and they will know what to do.”