In August, I had the opportunity to interview Tien-Ti Mak. Tien-Ti is ex-Australia Post where he was Innovation Partner and Chief Technology Officer.
At Australia Post, he helped to drive customer led innovation through corporate venturing, new business incubation, and the exploration of disruptive technologies. He also Technology and Digital strategy and architecture across the enterprise. Tien-Ti was a key agent of culture change within the enterprise, championing new ways of working and a customer focused, lean start-up mindset.
Prior to that, Tien-Ti had a successful career in consulting with Accenture and The Customer Experience Company. He has played pivotal roles in major transformation programs for a number of large organisations. He constantly challenges the status quo, and is a highly creative problem solver.
Tien-Ti's career has spanned over two decades across a variety of industries including telecommunications, insurance, superannuation, banking, government and logistics.
Matthew Cossens (MC) – Tell us about yourself, who is Tien-Ti?
Tien-Ti Mak (TM) – First of all, I am an Australian, Malaysian, American born Chinese. I was born in the United States, I grew up in Malaysia and work and live in Australia. I am happily married with 2 children who I love spending time with.
Apart from that I like to cook, I like to run and do lots of fun things, such as I learnt how to make balloon animals from a YouTube video one day!
MC – Wow, I wouldn’t have picked that!
TM – Yes, Exactly! Something different.
MC – Are you good at it?
TM – I have been surrounded by small, kindergarten aged children at birthday parties all demanding balloon animals before and I survived 😊. So I’m good enough to get through that.
MC – Beautiful, well done. Talk us through what you are working on at the moment? Or what you have been doing as I understand you are in a period of transition.
TM – What really interests me from a work perspective is corporate innovation. I’m a corporate innovator with an absolute love of start-ups, technology and finding new ways of solving customer problems.
I’ve been lucky enough over the last several years to spend my time at Australia Post to see and explore different ways of connecting the start-up world with the corporate world. What I have seen is when you get it right, when you get to connect the amazing creativity and innovative new ideas from the start-up world, with the scale and distribution ability of the corporate, and then put those two worlds together just right… the result is absolutely fantastic.
I have spent the last several years working on corporate innovation. How do you think about incubation of new businesses? How do you encourage intraprenuership (or an entrepreneurial mindset inside a corporate)? How do you change the culture to enable that? How do you partner with the external ecosystem? And what I am really keen on doing right now is taking some of those lessons learned over the past several years and looking for ways to apply it more broadly in other corporates.
MC – Great, I look forward to talking to you more about that in more depth later on. Looking at your success thus far, what habits/rituals do you think have been a driver of your success?
TM – The key one is that I like to ask ‘Why’ a lot! I’m a very curious person and I have a desperate need to understand how things work. My observation is that people often ask ‘why’ with a mindset of wanting to change it. Because they think they should change it, or they feel they need to change it.
I’m a believer that more often than not, you ask why not because you should change it, but because you need to understand. You need to figure out what is the best way to help and that may or may not involve changing something. The old way might work incredibly well and asking why helps to figure that out.
MC – What would you consider your most significant accomplishment to date?
TM – The one that stands out in the last few years was being able to figure out how to connect the start-up world with the corporate world. One of these examples is the work I did at Australia Post with a start-up called Fulfilio (www.fulfilio.com.au). Fulfilio was a start-up created internally, operating entirely as a start-up would, but with the special ability to very rapidly scale and create success by being able to leverage the assets of the broader corporation which was Australia Post.
Just like unicorns, such successful partnerships are rare, and for me to be part of it was incredibly exciting.
MC – Certainly! Can you talk more about the journey of Fulfilo and some of the challenges? Australia Post, in my opinion is a business that has ticked along for a long time in a very linear fashion. Can you talk through some of the challenges of incubating the start-up piece? How the more traditional people in Australia Post dealt with that shift? And how you lead through that change?
TM – I think I would characterize Australia Post and most of the other corporates in Australia right now as understanding that there is a need to innovate. There is a need to change, and I think there are very few people out there now that would object to that particular statement.
The trick is how do you do it. Everyone agrees that we need to be able to innovate but how? Right now there is so much noise, uncertainty and different ways of tackling this particular problem. It’s almost stifling and confusing as you start on this journey as a corporate innovator. Where do you start? Do you start on the culture side? Or the venturing side? Or on the start-up side? Or just run a hack day? There are so many different options for you. I’d say one of the biggest challenges for people starting off on this journey is how do you cut through that noise and figure out what your strategy is and how you are going to approach this and chart a course through.
There are some very tricky and murky waters.
MC – That’s great, Thanks Tien-Ti. Looking at sacrifices then, what sacrifices do you think you have had to make to be a successful leader?
TM – I don’t know if I would call it sacrifices as such, but one of the things that is always challenging in this modern age is the line between work life and personal life. It gets blurred very easily, especially if you are really passionate about what you do. It all merges into one. I often wonder and worry as to whether or not I am able to create the right balance between the two and to be truly present for my family for example.
How do you ensure that you are always truly present for them, and not be distracted by other things that might be happening at work or that has urgency.
MC – Is there any tips or tricks that you could share around being present? Or that you utilize to ensure that you are giving them your undivided attention?
TM – I wish there was a magic pill that one could take, I don’t think there is unfortunately. It requires a lot of discipline. I need to be able to say that I’m coming home now and make a deliberate choice and conscious effort to walk through the door and put on a different hat and different mindset. And go and think about balloon animals instead of corporate innovation as the case may be! 😊
MC – That’s really good. What do you attribute your success to?
TM – Without a doubt the people I have worked with. What I have seen from having led and being a part of many, many teams is what you can achieve with a diverse group of people, with different skill sets all working together, is so much more than what could be done individually. That has been the most exciting and successful thing I have seen in my career.
MC – When you are building a team what qualities or attributes do you look for in the right people?
TM – One of the things I have learnt over time is that teams work incredibly well when you have diversity in thought, and diversity in skills and ability. A good example I often talk about is the idea of having a team that has a Hipster, a Hustler and a Hacker.
MC – I like that!
TM – you can look it up on google. It’s a very simple model - the Hipster, Hustler, Hacker. The Hipster is someone who worries about the experience, the human side of things. The Hustler is someone with the commercial mindset, who knows how to sell something. The Hacker is someone with the technology nous to put it all together.
If you think about Hipster, Hustler, Hacker they are very different archetypes, they are very different personas. You would not typically put them together in a single team but when you have them together in one team what you can achieve is just phenomenal. You can build brand new businesses from scratch!
MC – How do you manage the balance between those three personas? How do you make that work for the benefit of the company of you are creating?
TM – With great difficulty, I can tell you that. It is very easy for those personalities to clash. They are coming at problems in different ways. One of the biggest challenges and tasks of leadership is how do you create an environment that helps guide the team to work together and see each other’s viewpoints. How do you build off each others ideas to make it stronger and better.
That’s a topic for a big, long thesis! 😊
MC – Certainly a longer discussion than we have time for today! What’s the biggest lesson you have learnt in either your professional or personal life?
TM – The biggest lessons comes back to people again. I’ve learnt that the job of a leader is to enable and empower people. Last century’s definition of good leadership or good management was all around directing and creating a factory like condition with high levels of predictability. In this century we are in a very different age and leadership is all about enabling and empowering people. I’m a big believer in giving people more information, more accountability, more skills and help them to grow beyond where they otherwise would be.
MC – Who’s been your greatest inspiration?
TM – There are way too many people to list! The general type of person that sticks out in my mind though is the person who wakes up one morning and realizes there is something that they haven’t done yet. There is something that they need to grow in. There is some skill they need to develop as an example. They then consciously and deliberately go out of their way to pull themselves out of their comfort zone and immerse themselves in a different way of working in order to pick up that skill and understand that ‘new thing’ whatever it happens to be.
I am always inspired by stories of people who have done that. People who have deliberately got out of their comfort zone and done something different. It takes great bravery and it takes great courage to go and do that and for me that is very inspiring!
MC – Looking at books, what’s either your favourite business related book or just favourite book of all time?
TM – One of the books I often find myself recommending to people is a book called Made To Stick by Chip and Dan Heath. (https://heathbrothers.com/books/made-to-stick/) It’s a book about different ways of communicating and the power of storytelling. There are some great techniques in that book which I love.
MC – I will have to check it out. If you had a chance to start your career over again what would you do differently?
TM - Absolutely spend more time working in different countries.
MC – Why?
TM – I’ve had a couple of opportunities to do that. For example - I worked in Argentina for almost 1 year. What I found is that being immersed in a different culture, in a different language, in a different working environment, just opens your mind to a whole new way of thinking that you wouldn’t normally get if you are in one place. I think that is an enormous learning opportunity, it helps you understand the world we live in. That world is getting smaller everyday and I think it is incredibly useful to have diversity of experience.
MC – I agree, that’s fantastic. If you were conducting this interview what question would you ask yourself? Can you answer that for me. It’s my favorite question to ask!
TM – Of course . For me the question would come back to where my passion area lies. The question is how do you apply some of the lessons learned in corporate innovation and how do you start to solve the challenge that is involved in putting together the best of the corporate world and the startup community.
There is a whole bunch of different things that I think we can talk about. One of the early lessons that I realized in this space is that there is often a misnomer that innovation is the outcome of creative people, who live in the realm of wild cowboys in the west that are going to run off with crazy ideas and do ‘stuff!’ If you think that way, then people often make the incorrect assumption that therefore it doesn’t belong in the boardroom or in a proper setting with the right governance and compliance etc because its wild west style innovation. But what I have learned is that innovation is definitely not that!
It’s actually an extremely disciplined exercise that requires very strong and rigorous management processes that need to be brought to bear. The lean mindset that comes along with the lean startup world is all about how you stop waste from happening. When you are rigorous about that and apply it correctly you’ll find that it takes incredible amounts of discipline and hard work to do that. Much more in fact than a standard, business-as-usual operation.
MC – Yes. I’ll ask two questions. How do you setup innovation in a corporate environment for success? And secondly how do you take innovation, transformation, disruption from being a ‘buzzword’ to actual reality?
TM – The first thing to think about in terms of setting up a corporate innovation function is to realise that innovation is different to regular corporate BAU. For example there are a lot of people who talk about corporates needs to innovate like a start-up or to run fast or be agile, deliver quicker etc. I don’t really believe in that.
I think that a corporate (to use a metaphor) is like a big giant oil tanker, it’s really, really good at taking billions of barrels of oil from point a to point b. It is not a speed boat as an example. And asking an oil tanker to manoeuvre and drive like a speed boat is a sure fire way of inviting disaster to occur. I like to think about it more like a fleet of boats – you still have your big oil tankers but you should also have a bunch of speed boats running around that are not very good at transporting oil at scale but are very good at searching for the next interesting opportunity that might be out there. Treat them like a ‘fleet’ and connect it all together. That is the most important principle or mindset.
MC – I love that analogy, it’s really powerful. So how do you move from buzzword to reality? Everyone talks about disruption, innovation or are discussing the journey they are going on in that space. But how do you cut through that noise and make it real? What needs to happen for that to occur?
TM – It’s a great question. There’s another word being thrown around at the moment which is ‘innovation theatre’. A lot of people are recognizing that the activities that are happening right now are a theatrical production to make an organisation look really innovative. I think that is a real shame.
My personal belief on that is that there is a journey that everyone has to go through. More often than not, one of the early steps in the journey is one of innovation theatre. You almost need to start by dipping the toe in the water, figure out what it all means and learn from it. But what is really important to be able to get past that initial first step is to deliberately create a long term mindset that says we need to invest. You need to be driven from the top down, with the view that we need to invest in our future and company and adopt a long term mentality. You need to think about the ‘fleet’ and invest not just in oil tankers, but also in speedboats.
MC – So looking at that analogy then. How do you sell a board or a company on that mindset if one of those speed boats gets sunk, or attacked by pirates? The question I’m looking to ask is how do you sell the proposition of failure, or the risk associated with innovation or the perceived risk?
TM – Without doubt, innovation must fail. If you are not failing then you are not doing innovation right, to be blunt! Innovation is about searching - you need to go down many different paths and realise there may be nothing there and come back again. So failure needs to be embedded into that different way of thinking, the different way of operating. When you are running a fleet of speed boats, it’s ok to send the speed boat east and discover there is nothing heading east and it needs to turn around rapidly and head west instead. That’s fine and should be part of the plan, it should be part of the mindset. That is good and correct. The problem is that if you were to do that with the oil tanker, you send the oil tanker east, then that has caused an enormous delay to the shipment of oil that it is trying to deliver and usually that means enormous amounts of cost.
I think the mistake that many corporates have made in the past is that they only know how to think about things as an oil tanker. So, if someone decides there is an opportunity on the east side they go and build themselves another oil tanker and then send the oil tanker down that path. That is an enormous waste of money, time, and resources when all you need to do is send a speed boat down, check it out, come back and report before you build another oil tanker.
The real message to a board is to think about how much you are wasting in terms of resources, time, effort and money in investing in something when you don’t know what is over the horizon. What is the leanest, cheapest, quickest, easiest way to go and figure out what is over there without necessarily betting the farm on it.
MC – That’s really good. Looking at innovative companies (you’ve been with Australia Post and Fulfilio is a great success story) are there other corporates you look to and say they’re doing it right or they are doing something interesting in innovation? Are there others you can highlight?
TM – There are many. One that I found interesting was Salesforce (in the US). It’s amazing to watch their journey. They are such a large behemoth of an organization, global, but still so incredibly innovative. One of the models that they explained to me back then was the idea of Salesforce Ventures and how they look for opportunities to partner with, or invest/acquire startups that are sitting on the Salesforce platform. When I reflected on that, it is an incredibly clever ecosystem that has been created by them. You have Salesforce and the platform that enables lots of players to come and create apps and build add-ons to the core platform. Then you have ‘Ventures’ that sits on top of this looking at which of these players are successful, which ones are working. Think of that as the fleet of speed boats. They can look and say look at those 6 speed boats, they are running really fast, they are doing really well, maybe we should invest in them. I think that is a really clever way of looking at how to approach that problem.
MC – Looking at the future of work then – what excites you about the next 5 years, 10 years in either technology or corporates in general?
TM – What I find really exciting is that the nature of both work and corporates is changing. It’s no longer one of giant organisations that do everything themselves, with all the functions, IT, Legal, Accounting etc all imbedded in their organization. Instead we are moving more towards a network style organization where an organization can tap into what others do. I think the very nature of organisations and therefore work starts to change and we then move ourselves into more of a service based model where different people and organisations are providing services to others.
MC – Thank you very much for your time Tien-Ti.
TM – Likewise, thank you.
#leadershipseries #leadership #innovation #corporateinnovation #disruption #motivation #success #informationtechnology #IT
This article is originally published at www.matthewcossens.com/blog/
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