It boils down to whether leadership is toxic or enlightened

A mentor to CEOs and directors

McKinsey director emeritus Hsieh is well suited for role

By ANNA TEO

After more than three decades of business travel as a McKinsey man, Hsieh Tsun-yan found himself in a rather unusual setting for about two weeks in early June - on a coach through Turkey and Syria with his wife and about 20 other couples.

It was a few weeks before his retirement from the consulting firm, and ' 'twas like being back in college', says the 57-year-old of the trip he took with members of Barker Road Methodist Church, a leisurely sojourn through the lands of the Apostle Paul's epistles. Amid the fraternising as they soaked up Biblical history, Mr Hsieh was struck, on a personal note, by how intrigued his trip mates were about his background. He was Singapore's original 'bond-breaker' before the term gained currency and then, at the prime of his McKinsey career, he returned to Singapore 10 years ago after more than two decades abroad.

'They're all professionals themselves, and their children are now studying or working overseas, so it strikes a chord with them,' he says of his trip mates. 'To them, I was a very interesting social example.'

The issue of venturing overseas to acquire skills and pursue opportunities - but eventually returning to serve the motherland - is certainly one that resonates with Mr Hsieh, who is director emeritus at McKinsey. He is also a member of Sony Corporation's board of directors, one of barely a handful of Singapore-born executives with a seat in a global boardroom.

A 1970 President's Scholar who studied mechanical engineering at the University of Alberta in Canada, Mr Hsieh spent five years as an engineer at the then Public Works Department here before he decided to go to Harvard Business School - and later joined McKinsey in Toronto as a newly minted MBA.

After two decades, during which he became managing director of McKinsey Canada - and also gave up his Singapore passport for a Canadian one due to exigencies of the job - he decided to return to his roots, guided by a 'strong inner compass'. It wasn't the call of filial duties, as his parents were no longer around by then, but simply a 'conscious choice' to come back.

He became MD of McKinsey South-east Asia in Singapore in 2000, driven by the goal of grooming homegrown global corporate champions - a task he once described as the core of his existence - and would go on to become chairman of McKinsey Asia as well as founder of its Asia Leadership Institute.

Mr Hsieh may have been considered a renegade in his time for apparently turning his back on a scholar career here and applying for a job 'in an institution that didn't know where Singapore was on the map', as he told the audience at a public talk here years ago. But there wasn't any world-class management consulting firm in Singapore in the 1970s, and Toronto was the place to be in for a young apprentice.

If Singapore wanted to have indigenous world- class CEOs, its best and brightest 'must go work in some global champion or institution', he said at the talk. It's a belief he has espoused over the years as a business consultant, board adviser and CEO mentor, along with other management and leadership concepts such as 'pivotal jobs', 'change readiness' and, yes, 'global champions', or blue-chip MNCs.

In 2007, Mr Hsieh was headhunted for the Sony board. But as he was then still a McKinsey director, he was appointed instead to Sony's global advisory council, joining the board only in 2008 after he relinquished executive roles at McKinsey and became special adviser and director emeritus at the consulting firm. In mid-June this year, he retired from McKinsey. But he continues independently, and zealously, with what has become a passion for him - drawing on his 30 years' McKinsey experience across multiple industries and geographical markets, and his research on CEOs, to advise corporate honchos and aspiring CEOs on the road ahead.

'Sony was looking for someone who has, first of all, broad global experience, who is Asian, with also strong multiple Asian experiences, and who also has something to offer like transformation and leadership experiences,' says Mr Hsieh of what he brings to the company. 'So I flew to New York and met with the chairman and CEO, Sir Howard Stringer, and it was a one-hour meeting that turned out to be four hours. He wanted to continue the effort that he started, to internationalise the board, first of all.

'Secondly, it's to put more impetus on Sony's transformation. And so while they have very outstanding Japanese board members, for example, the chairman of Toyota, the president of Mitsubishi, the idea of internationalising the board is to continue to push for Sony to become more global in not just its scope of business but in terms of its culture.'

Besides Mr Hsieh, the other non-Japanese on the Sony board are Sir Peter Bonfield, who was previously chief executive at ICL and later British Telecommunications, and Roland Hernandez, a director of MGM Mirage Inc.

The Sony appointment sees him flying to Tokyo for meetings almost once a month. The rest of the time, he's meeting and mentoring CEOs and company directors here and in the region - and in some cases, their children as well, the next generation of business leaders.

'If I look back and see the work I've done (at McKinsey), where it had made the most difference was when I was able to, not just come out with the strategic idea, the new organisation design or even help with transformation, but in the end, the make or break was whether we got better leaders out of the exercise. If we didn't get better leaders, that correlates directly with truncated transformation, less than total fulfilment of the upside, unfinished implementation. All of these had to do with perhaps the leadership capacity.

'So I began to emphasise a whole lot more on how I can personally help top executives become better leaders, because if they are better leaders, then they can mobilise the organisation, they can get more of the ideas and the concepts and the strategies done.'

And while business coaches work mainly if not solely with the 'client', he goes beyond to seek out the 'critical stakeholders' as well.

'For example, with succession candidates, we're talking about the chief executive, about board members, lead directors, whose opinions of the candidates are ultra-important. I sometimes need to also go to the critical stakeholders and say, 'If you continue to hold this prejudice and not be ready to suspend or change your judgment, then no matter how hard the person tries, he's not going to be able to do it.' Some of the executives I work with have outstanding business results but have untenable peer situations.'

And apart from guiding the CEO or client to reframe challenges and opportunities, challenging their assumptions and pre-conceived notions, he often digs into how they look at success.

'So if someone tells me, help me become a chief executive in two years. I'd say, 'Well, first, what will becoming a chief executive do for you? Or do for your community, for the country, for the universe; what's that got to do with anything? In other words, I try to probe and encourage them to have a more holistic definition of what success will look like. Why? Because, having spent a career in counselling and studying many CEOs, I've found that not only many successful CEOs do not end their career well, they are not happy while in the job. So I want them to be able to put what they do in the context of a broader purpose, in terms of how does what you do affect the community, the society at large. And that's when you can seek more meaning.

'When people get to that age, 40 and above, they need to have progressed to what psychologists call 'generativity', the desire and commitment in action to leave behind people, places and things that are better than those they found at the beginning of their tenure. That feeling is around, but it needs to be harnessed. And if people can do that more, not only will the peers, the unit, the shareholders and other stakeholders benefit, above all, interestingly, the person himself will also be more fulfilled.'

Mr Hsieh's post-McKinsey advisory role also sees him sharing thoughts and views as a blogger on the Harvard Business Review website. To date, he has posted, as a guest blogger, three well-received articles about being prepared for 'your next defining moment', about 'critical conversations', and about 'learning to inspire yourself'. It's an advisory role on which he is expanding to a full suite of services across multiple platforms under a newly established Linhart Group.

Ultimately, though, Mr Hsieh wants particularly to one day see a Singaporean CEO at the helm of a Fortune 500 company. In his view, there's no reason why a Singaporean can't be running an MNC, right at the top, at the global level.