Excellence at the top

MALAYSIA CEO OF THE YEAR

THE Malaysia's CEO of the Year award was launched in 1994 as a result of the collaboration between Business Times and American Express.

The idea was mooted by Hardev Kaur (then Business Times editor) and the late L.S. Chew from American Express to introduce an annual prestigious award to recognise top CEOs in Malaysian corporations.

They approached Bernard Thamboo (then general manager of Business Times) to design the criteria and mechanics of the judging process.

As the judging had to be credible and beyond reproach, the process needed to be quantifiable and measurable, and based critical success factors on the expertise of the CEOs and the performance of their organisation functional activities. This would facilitate a holistic evaluation for effective comparison.

A panel of independent judges is appointed every year from "captains" of key government agencies and the corporate sector to ensure professional and unbiased judging. For consistency and accuracy of the judging, a moderator intimate with the judging mechanism will guide the judges.

The judging is based on six critical areas:

* About the CEO - for outstanding display of visionary leadership qualities; outstanding ability in leading the company.

* Financial Management - for outstanding management of the company's assets, liabilities and equities.

* Marketing Management - for outstanding and successful marketing and positioning the company into an outstanding company at home and abroad.

* Operations Management - for promoting awareness of quality and excellence in productivity.

* Development Management - for promoting staff excellence through training programmes; creative use of technology to give the competitive edge.

* Corporate Social Responsibility - for community/environmental projects and activities that contribute towards nation-building.

The judging criteria was further fine-tuned in 1997, 1998, 2000, 2001, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2008 to reflect the economic changes and give more focus on relevancy and currency.

The number of critical success factors has grown from 29 in 1994 to 54 this year (22 qualitative and 32 quantitative).

The judging process starts by inviting the public to nominate eligible individuals. The nominee should be the one who has the ultimate management responsibility for an organisation, be it a public-listed, private-listed or partnership company.

The CEO reports directly to a board of directors, accountable to the company's owner(s). Some CEOs are known to have other designations such as managing director, executive chairman, president, managing partner, etc.

The next stage is sending a detailed questionnaire to the nominees. Once all the completed questionnaires are received, a shortlisting process based on relevance and completeness in addressing the critical success factors will be carried out.

Finally, the panel of appointed independent judges will evaluate the shortlisted nominees individually.

The judges will award points to each answer in accordance with the established judging criteria and scoring guide. Using the scoring mechanism software designed for this award, the weightage and ratings from all the judges will be computed, summarised and ranked for the said judges to verify, review and decide on the winner.

The recognition of the most outstanding CEO would be an endorsement in the business community on the excellent quality, leadership and management skills. From past observation and feedback, new opportunities would ensue for the winners in one way or another.




Bernard Thamboo
November 2008