1) Are You a Town Major or Businessman?

Many business books ask the question, “Are you a manager or a leader?” But they miss the point about the need to first be a businessman. Do you understand the details of your business? Are you deeply aware of the financials and the risks? How close are you to the money? That is a potential pitfall when you work at some of the larger MNCs – you could end up like a town mayor. You manage the infrastructure, ensure the lights and plumbing works, but you lose touch with the core of your business.

2) Sepak Takraw Leadership

In today's volatile world, it is difficult to predict the future. Leadership styles have to evolve with the changing situation. Agility is therefore a key leadership attribute. We must be like a sepak takraw (a kickvolleyball game popular in Southeast Asia) player: however the ball comes to us, we have to adapt and respond. We cannot complain that our teammate did not set up the ball well – we just have to make adjustments and strike the ball as well as we can.

3) The Gift of Customer Feedback

I spend many Saturday mornings responding to customer feedback. We have a lot of well-meaning customers with interesting ideas. Sometimes I receive feedback from friends of friends – people I don’t know, but who are keen to share their ideas with Tigerair. Even if their views are not fully feasible, they help trigger other ideas that we can implement.

For example, feedback from a regular customer about simplifying the booking process led us to enhance our mobile app. Our app now allows our customers to store their personal information, which can be recalled when they rebook on Tigerair. It is thanks to customer feedback such as this that ours is now one of the most userfriendly travel-related smartphone applications in the market.

4) Confront Complexity, Communicate Simplicity

We must not shy away from confronting the most complex of issues. But when we are done with the analysis, we need to communicate our findings in the simplest form. The objective is to ensure that our employees and customers understand the issue and the solution. Let me give an example. Tigerair used to provide only Point A to Point B flights – because we didn’t like the complexity of connecting flights. If our customers wanted to book a connecting flight on Tigerair, they had to settle one flight segment first, and then hope that the second flight segment would still be available. And there were times when they were disappointed.

We tackled the complexity of managing the booking of multiple flights. We introduced what we call “combo-flights”. The idea is to facilitate the simultaneous reservation of two separate flights. While the back-end process of getting this done is complex, we were able to ensure the service makes for a seamless customer experience.

5) Stupid Questions are Interesting

Being new to the aviation industry has its benefits. It allows me to ask “stupid” questions. Sometimes, these questions challenge old assumptions and stimulate interesting thoughts that we can develop further. For example, the aviation industry is in the habit of measuring “Route Operating Profit” or “ROP”. However, this is a measure of gross profit, and not returns. A high ROP doesn’t really say much, unless you also know what resources have been put in to generate that ROP.

At Tigerair today, we prefer to measure returns on each of our routes, rather than just their profitability. That changes the conclusions we make on the attractiveness of our routes, allowing us to make the right investments.

6) The Value of a Brand

We made a subtle but important change from “Tiger Airways” to “Tigerair” in July 2013. Our previous brand name of “Tiger Airways.com” was quite a mouthful, and somewhat dated. We have been working at transforming our organisation in the past year, and having chalked up some initial progress, it is now a good time to inject a new personality into the company and set a new direction.

We want a strong value system to support our strategic direction. The new brand personality symbolises this change. To bring the Tigerair brand to life, we are making fundamental changes to our internal mindset and core processes. Our goal is to make travel as stress-free and easy as possible for our passengers.

7) Operational Service

We have to overcome dogmatic thinking. Just because we are a nofrills airline does not mean we do not care about the experience of our customers. Think about your favorite hawker stall. You know it is not a five-star restaurant, but you still expect basic attributes, like cleanliness and timely service. And you would still visit it regularly. Likewise for Tigerair, we want to provide our customers a smooth and safe experience at an exceptional value.

We felt that “customer service” is a label that is burdened with a specific connotation that is unsuitable for us. So we coined a new term: “operational service”, which to us means delivering operational excellence to provide a seamless customer experience.

8) Primacy of Reason

No single person can hope to monopolise all ideas – I certainly don’t have all the ideas. My job is to enable the entire organisation, not just senior management, to generate and evaluate ideas. Titles and ranks should not come into play. It is important to depersonalise ideas so that only the best prevail. It doesn’t matter where the ideas come from, as long as they work. It is better therefore to start a discussion with no predetermined outcome. And let reason – not rules or rank – dictate where it ends.

9) The Universe of Possible Events

I would be worried if my team came to me with just one idea, and said, “We should do this one thing.” In these unpredictable times, we need to dream up different scenarios. What are our options? What assumptions are these options based on? What should we do if these assumptions don’t pan out? It is better to have several scenarios planned, so that we can adjust our trajectory accordingly as different internal or external forces shape up.

10) Stars or Constellations?

When you look up at the night sky, do you see stars or constellations? This ability to connect seemingly unrelated and obtuse items into a bigger whole is important for leaders. How do we organise data such that it flies in formation, but also synthesise seemingly disconnected information into a big coherent picture? I believe that we should read as widely as possible – not just articles on business, but on philosophy, politics, science and history – to gain perspective. This is the best way to learn from the best minds, not just of those living today, but across the span of human history.