This chapter storied about the CEO of SKALI, Tengku Farith Rithauddeen. His father, Tengku Ahmad Rithauddeen and his mother, Tengku Nor Aini have always been firm but loving them. He has six siblings that are Tini Supardi, Tengku Farahlucia, Tengku Feizaluddin, Tengku Putri Falida, and Tengku Fadli. They are very pretty closed and at the same time, they lead their own lives like all families.
His father was a government minister and he was always busy. He has many long periods away from home because his duties as high as profile government. So, his mother was care and disciplines him and his siblings. His mother is Kelantanese women, which are entrepreneur in the family. His mother loved a good business deal and she had an eye for properties.
At age 13, he went to high school in Ottawa, Canada. His parents figured that since Ottawa was one of the coldest place on earth, so he had focus on his studies. His parents strategy worked and he got through high school and college quite smoothly, finally graduating from Carleton University with Bachelor’s degree in Economics in 1992.
His grandfather was an entrepreneur and was probably the first large-scale Malay rubber plantation owner. He is a very powerful man, strong, stoutly built and etc. he also always in rubber estates, making sure everything was working in order.
His mother also trained him and his sibling in financial management because many of the rooms would be rented out to other students. So, he would collect the monthly rental from the students and pay the necessary dues like taxes, utilities and so forth. He would also regularly sent financial statements to his mother and she would give him instructions on what kind of things to buy for the house.
When he graduated, he came back to join Commerce International Bankers (CIMB ). He was attached to the privatization unit, which was then headed by Nazir Razak, who is now the Chief Executive Officer. He enjoyed working at the bank as a corporate finance executive. He had to organize all the entertainment functions of the company, which was quite an eye-opening experience for him.
His first experience to IT is using an Apple II to play flight simulator games in the 80s.he also read a lot of books and magazines about computers and learnt how to do some basic programming using the Basic language. In college, he took Management Information System courses but at CIMB, he also fortunate enough to be exposed to IT too. So, he had learn how to use PowerPoint to create presentations because nobody else in his unit knew how to use it.
His CEO Robert Cheim, used to ask him to prepare his PowerPoint slides whenever he had presentation to make because word got around that he was quite good at this and everybody had him doing their PowerPoint presentations. Same like spreadsheet for financial modeling, that he used Lotus123 which was pretty new at time. He was doing everybody’s spreadsheets. He don’t mind because for him, he can found experience interesting and most important, it showed him how much technology could be used to improve productivity.
At CIMB, he meets Azmi Ahmad who would later become his business partner in SKALI. Nazir had been transferred to run CIMB Securities and Azmi stepped in as acting head of the Privatization Unit. One day, there was a lot of restructuring going on in the Commerce Asset Holdings Group and CIMB was being folded into Bank Of Commerce (BOC). The restructuring called for a harmonization of salary payments and announcement of bonuses.
Traditionally, CIMB would announce in early December how much the bonuses would be, and pay them at the end of the month, together with their salaries. But due to the harmonization process, CIMB had to follow BOC’s policy of announcing and paying bonuses sometime in the coming year.
This is made Azmi being Azmi was concerned about the welfare of the staff and he decided to send a letter to the powers-that-be to let them know exactly how they felt about it. So, everyone in the team helped draft the letter and it took many versions before we could agree on something that everyone was happy with and they faxed the letter.
One day, when he came to the office early in the morning, Kak Julia, Robert’s secretary came looking for Azmi. He knew that the bosses had read the letter. So, when he asked him about Azmi and that letter, he said that he didn’t know about that. When Azmi came to the office, he came straight to the office and hi said that the letter was his idea and everyone backed him up. After he meet Md.Nor Yusof, the managing director of BOC, he said that MD had offered him a job in BOC because Md.Nor was very impressed with Azmi writing skills. But Azmi politely declined the offer because corporate finance and privatization was more his licking. Finally, Azmi was a leader and he always stand up for his people.
A few after he joined CIMB, Azmi and Aimi Aizal Nasaruddin, his colleague and he would join forces to form a corporate advisory consultancy called ACIF Resources, which would later become one of the main shareholders of SKALI.
Saturday, March 8, 2008
CHAPTER 2 : MULTIMEDIA CITY
After he worked at CIMB at 1994, he was asked to join at Road Builder, a listed company that his father had just bought into and his father was an executive chairman of the company. So, he didn’t know if he could live up to his expectations and he didn’t want everyone to treat him better then others because he was the chairman’s son. And he wasn’t sure whether leaving CIMB would be the right things to do. He also just got married to his girlfriend.
He was driven by a desire to learn what was happening on the other side of the fence. And he also wanted to know what running a ‘real’ business would be like. So, he asked his brother in law, Shahrir Roose for advice. Then, he said that he should write down his weakness and show to his prospective boss. So, he listed down his biggest weakness that’s:
i- Inexperience and lack of connections ( in the construction industry)
ii- Careless and not meticulous
iii- Lousy handwriting
After that, he showed it to Chua Hock Chin, the executive vice-chairman, and he actually liked his list of weakness and he didn’t his lack of experience. One thing that he learnt from working in the Road Builder is the relationship count a lot. The construction business is an entirely different ball game. He also had to learn to speak different languages with different sets of people.
He was shocked because the working environment at Road Builder was quite a culture. He said that working in a nig company took some time to get used to as well. This is because at the bank, he had 20 colleagues, but in Road Builder, he had 400. When he joined SKALI, they have always emphasized building good relationship with everybody they deal with. The position that he was given at Road Builder was a business development manager.
When 1995, he had a unique opportunity to pitch for a development project at Universiti Pertanian Malaysia (now is Universiti Putra Malaysia). Syed Jalaludin, the university’s Vice Chancellor was looking at ways to enhance his 600-acre campus, so he went to see him and discussed the possibility of Road Builder paying a role in the effort. The vice-chancellor naturally balked at he idea. We had heard about the concept of the Multimedia Super Corridor( MSC) from Tengku Azman Shariffadeen of MIMOS. They figured it’d be a good idea to have a cluster of research centers to complement the MSC project and decided to appoint MIMOS as project advisor for Multimedia City at UPM. His association with MIMOS allowed him to get knows Arif Nunn, who recently stepped down as CEO of Multimedia Development Corporation (MDC).
By 1996, they were all set to go with their Multimedia City concept. They had grand plans and even engaged the renowned architect, Kisho Kurukawa, for the project. Syed Jalaludin likex their idea and threw in his support for the project. However , they still needed to get the EPU’s approval. Because it involved university land, it was considered a sensitive project. They didn’t want a blatantly commercial project and instead that any development there had to be something with national interest in mind.
He decided they had to go all the way to the top and wrote to then –Prime Minister Dr.Mahathir Mohamad. He attached a lot of supporting document to make his case.
Strong objection to Multimedia City came from the unlikeliest source, the late Othman Yeop Abdullah, who was MDC chairman at time.
In 1997, would be the year of the Asian economic crisis, so the notion of starting a big project like Multimedia City would have been out of question anyway. He was a bit dejected.
He was driven by a desire to learn what was happening on the other side of the fence. And he also wanted to know what running a ‘real’ business would be like. So, he asked his brother in law, Shahrir Roose for advice. Then, he said that he should write down his weakness and show to his prospective boss. So, he listed down his biggest weakness that’s:
i- Inexperience and lack of connections ( in the construction industry)
ii- Careless and not meticulous
iii- Lousy handwriting
After that, he showed it to Chua Hock Chin, the executive vice-chairman, and he actually liked his list of weakness and he didn’t his lack of experience. One thing that he learnt from working in the Road Builder is the relationship count a lot. The construction business is an entirely different ball game. He also had to learn to speak different languages with different sets of people.
He was shocked because the working environment at Road Builder was quite a culture. He said that working in a nig company took some time to get used to as well. This is because at the bank, he had 20 colleagues, but in Road Builder, he had 400. When he joined SKALI, they have always emphasized building good relationship with everybody they deal with. The position that he was given at Road Builder was a business development manager.
When 1995, he had a unique opportunity to pitch for a development project at Universiti Pertanian Malaysia (now is Universiti Putra Malaysia). Syed Jalaludin, the university’s Vice Chancellor was looking at ways to enhance his 600-acre campus, so he went to see him and discussed the possibility of Road Builder paying a role in the effort. The vice-chancellor naturally balked at he idea. We had heard about the concept of the Multimedia Super Corridor( MSC) from Tengku Azman Shariffadeen of MIMOS. They figured it’d be a good idea to have a cluster of research centers to complement the MSC project and decided to appoint MIMOS as project advisor for Multimedia City at UPM. His association with MIMOS allowed him to get knows Arif Nunn, who recently stepped down as CEO of Multimedia Development Corporation (MDC).
By 1996, they were all set to go with their Multimedia City concept. They had grand plans and even engaged the renowned architect, Kisho Kurukawa, for the project. Syed Jalaludin likex their idea and threw in his support for the project. However , they still needed to get the EPU’s approval. Because it involved university land, it was considered a sensitive project. They didn’t want a blatantly commercial project and instead that any development there had to be something with national interest in mind.
He decided they had to go all the way to the top and wrote to then –Prime Minister Dr.Mahathir Mohamad. He attached a lot of supporting document to make his case.
Strong objection to Multimedia City came from the unlikeliest source, the late Othman Yeop Abdullah, who was MDC chairman at time.
In 1997, would be the year of the Asian economic crisis, so the notion of starting a big project like Multimedia City would have been out of question anyway. He was a bit dejected.
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