Chinese Version

Tuesday, April 11, 2006 SCMP Business Post
Part six of eight

Wearing Many Hats

Bernard Chan President, Asia Financial Group Member, Executive and Legislative Councils, Hong Kong SAR

Wearing many hats, Bernard Chan is president of the Asia Financial Group and Asia Insurance Co. Ltd, director of Asia Commercial Bank Ltd, and advisor to Bangkok Bank Public Co., Ltd. He has been a member of both the Executive and Legislative Councils as well as several other public and private bodies. He spoke to the Richard Ivey School of Business on leadership, community service and balancing conflicting obligations.

On leadership

“As a leader, you need to command and at the same time be respected, both by your peers and by those that you are leading. In my case, respect doesn’t come naturally because I am relatively young compared to many of the people I work with. Both in business and in politics, I need to convince others that although I don’t have the seniority, I do have the ability to make things happen. At work, I am the youngest person in management. Some people might think that I am where I am because I am the son of the company’s chairman. For this reason, I need to work extra hard to demonstrate that I can truly be their leader.”

On pitfalls that leaders often fall into

“Being too sentimental can be harmful. In business you need to be decisive in making tough decisions. We sometimes know what we have to do, but forcing ourselves to make the right decisions decisively can be difficult. It can be a drawback to invest too much emotion into your work as you might become too attached to it. I recently sold a business that should have been sold a long time ago. The decision itself was a nobrainer, but letting go of a tie that had been built up over 50 years was hard.”

On community service

“Hong Kong’s traditional business environment encouraged you to stay focused on one thing only: business. But this is no longer applicable. Businesses now need to think about the community and the effects their actions may have on the community at large. My involvement in community activities has an added benefit: it allows me to gain a much wider perspective for my own business activities. Wearing more than one hat, I am not only responsible to my shareholders, but also to the communities that I live and work in – and the people around me. Companies nowadays need to be much more well-rounded in order to become good corporate citizens.”

On balancing conflicting obligations

“I need to balance my business, public, and private lives – and I believe that I am doing a reasonably good job of it. I delegate as much as I can to my assistants. After delegating, I still need to assess the situation and make sure that the right decisions are made. My biggest challenge is dealing with my private life. I have two sons, aged three and six, and being the kind of father that I want to be is not something that I can delegate to someone else. It can be very challenging finding time to spend with my family. I am consciously working on this because in a few years’ time my two boys will have lives of their own and might not have too much time for me anymore. This is one of the reasons why I’ve already declared that I will not be running for Legco in the next election. I want to have more time to spend with my wife and children.”

On public and private sector leadership

“Leaders of public and private bodies are accountable for different things, but I don’t think the credentials needed are very different. In thepublic sector you need to be accountable even when you are not using taxpayers’ money. You need to be seen as willing to face the public, and many leaders in the public sector lack experience in dealing with this kind of situation. Pressure from the media and from the community is driving expectations higher and higher, and you have to be very sensitive to the expectations of various stakeholders. You can be more candid when you are among your corporate peers, but as community leaders, the comments you make can have impact on the entire community, and the community is not as homogenous as it once was. You need to be sensitive and have a higher moral standard in order to survive.”

Best Practices in Corporate Social Responsibility

Incorporating corporate social responsibility into strategic decisionmaking is one of the most difficult challenges facing today’s business leaders. A research project in Canada investigated what companies in that country were doing to manage the challenge.

Click on www.ivey.com.hk/iveybusinessjournal.html to learn what Tima Bansal, professor of strategy at Richard Ivey School of Business, discovered in her study on best practices in corporate social responsibility.

<< Read about the other leaders >>