Orchan Consulting | Asia Sdn Bhd

How Ready Is Your Team? How ready is your organisation for a crisis? Can you communicate to your stakeholders within an hour? Or will it take your team several hours to respond? Recently, a major Malaysian Telco faced a technical outage. These things happen, but the fallout from it went deeper – it turns out that they took ten (10) hours to acknowledge the issue to their customers. Not a good look for the brand! Netizens did not let them off lightly either, and were super unimpressed at the response from the company. Basically, they failed their customers, and from an issues / crisis perspective, they weren’t ready or communicative. Customers were left stranded without a clue. This looked clumsy, and suggested to their stakeholders that the customer-orientation was not well aligned. Ideally, a first response should be within fifteen (15) minutes of an incident – but this, fairly, can be stretched to an hour. But certainly not ten (10...

Is the Fate of the Tulip Sealed? It’s not all that often an entire country gets rebranded. Recent examples would be Sudan – now North Sudan and South Sudan, based on the effects of civil war. A few years early was Burma, rebranded as Myanmar. And there have been others too. Just this week, another country, oddly, opted to rebrand. Holland. Or, The Netherlands. But I’m confused, as I remember this very rebranding from my younger years? At Primary School I had a proud Dutch teacher, Mrs van der Maar. She was proudly Dutch, from Holland. A few years later, she was proudly Dutch, from The Netherlands. But finally, The Netherlands have finally opted to be called just that, The Netherlands, with Holland being officially dropped from all official sites, communications, and campaigns. Perhaps they just wanted a long lead-in time to make it happen? Ramblings and reflections aside, it’s certainly complex to rebrand an entire...

The Hallmark of Internal Stakeholder Relations Done Well? A Birthday Card, from Your CEO It’s refreshing to see the CEO of a large corporation have that personal connection to all their team members. It often goes without question that the larger the organisation, the less in touch people are, especially through the hierarchy, but this does not need to be the case. You don’t need daily communication from the CEO, but you do need some element of personal communication to humanise the position, and to ensure that lines of communication are in fact established, and somewhat functional, even if not regularly utilised. As an entrepreneur, I am always in touch with my team. Be it for work activities, or celebrating important moments. It is a given. But, what if I had 1000 employees? Or more? One CEO (and I’m sure that there will be more) has found a great method. It might keep him busy, but the end result has got to be positive. Improved internal stakeho...

Baby Steps Simon Also Says | "The best thing about little changes is that they add up to one big one". Exploring change within your organisation? Experiencing roadblocks? Would you like a fresh perspective on implementing the required changes?  Drop us a line (changenow@orchan.asia) or give us a call (03-2110-9407) for an obligation free chat about your needs.

Resistance of Change As a leader in your organisation, you are going to face instances where others resist your efforts to make change. You should expect it to occur. It’s one of the many organisational realities that come with your position. As you encounter resistance, it’s important to understand the complexity of change. First, it’s inaccurate to say that it is human nature to resist change. This is a common misunderstanding about change. We don’t naturally resist change. The truth is that we accept change all of the time. We easily make changes that we believe are in our best interests. Instead, what we do resist is change that we believe is not in our best interests. This is an important change distinction that’s critical for any leader to understand. When people resist you, it’s because they see some aspect of what you want to do as not being in their best interests. They could be mistaken in this belief or they could be correct. Either way, however, ...

Recovering From A Crisis How many of us think that recovering from a crisis is a near-impossible task? You’d be wrong though; but in all honesty, it is also not an easy task to achieve. Having watched many crises evolve over the past few years, and observing how the business responded and bounced back, for some, it can and will be an uphill battle. For others, a simple storm in a teacup.  Regardless, organisations should not become complacent; planning for times of crisis is extremely important, and often the difference between riding out a crisis and being swallowed up in the tidal wave of public opinion, simply boils down to effective planning. Generally, it all depends how bad the crisis is. Samsung hit a major roadblock – first with its exploding mobile phones, and then with its washing machine issues. But, the crisis here played out differently than many expected. It hit hard financially. Recalling an entire product line, to the point of cancellatio...