Weed out the problematic, errant, incompetent officers early

Upholding integrity: Ismail (centre) chairing the EAIC coordination meeting with heads of enforcement agencies. — Bernama

Problematic government officers found to be involved in malpractices or wrongdoings must have their services terminated early to put an end to integrity issues involving civil servants and management,  proposed the Enforcement Agency Integrity Commission (EAIC).

Its chairman Tan Sri Ismail Bakar said the Malaysian civil service was once revered among the Commonwealth nations but noted that it is now entangled with integrity issues.

Ismail said giving marching orders to civil servants who are problematic is the way to go to prevent integrity issues from festering at the new department these officers are transferred to.

ALSO READ: Prepare to lose your job if you fail to report graft cases, warns MACC chief“

We are working on eradicating problematic officers in (government) agencies by way of early termination of their service. If the government agrees on this, it will be easier for us to perform our duties,” he said.

Ismail provided examples of court cases involving civil servants who have engaged in malpractice or misconduct.

“But we lost (the case). With the relevant laws, we can see how to terminate their service without having their case concluded in court trials,

Ismail said there has been precedent where problematic officials were terminated, citing existing regulations such as the Public Officers (Conduct and Discipline) 1993 that provide for this.

ALSO READ: ‘Be transparent in sacking corrupt civil servants’

He described the practice of transferring problematic officials to a different department as “a vicious cycle”, which might not be a deterrent.

“What is also worrying is that some civil servants and enforcement officers would get a third party, such as an influential individual or a company, to protect their wrongdoings.

“What is more saddening is that there are higher-ups who are complicit in their subordinates’ wrongdoings.

“In fact, some have even led such activities. Such deeds have tarnished the civil service’s image,” Ismail said.

ALSO READ: ‘Problematic’ civil servants risk early termination, says EAIC chief

He said if enforcement agencies’ disciplinary bodies do not adopt EAIC’s recommendations, it sends a signal that they are not serious about eradicating wrongdoing.

Ismail, who is a former chief secretary to the government, also said that low wages should not be an excuse to be corrupt.

“You already knew your wages (before joining the service), so why did you still take up the job?

“Never use low wages to legitimise corruption,” he said in his opening remarks at the EAIC coordination meeting with enforcement agencies’ department heads yesterday.

“If you love the civil service, carry out the duties you are assigned responsibly,” he said.

Ismail said the EAIC had received 229 reports on integrity cases between June 1, 2023, and May 31, this year, with the highest number of cases related to the Immigration Department.

During this period, the commission initiated 17 investigation papers regarding alleged malpractices by civil servants.

Almost 90% of the probes have been completed and decisions have already been reached regarding two individuals who are being investigated.

The EAIC had, among other things, recommended terminating the public officers’ service, halting their promotion and issuing warnings.

EAIC is a federal statutory body responsible for monitoring and investigating public complaints about the alleged misconduct of enforcement officers or agencies as listed in Act 700.

Currently, it has 21 enforcement agencies under its supervision.

This includes the Immigration Department, Customs Department, Malaysian Maritime Enforcement Agency, National Registration Department and Road Transport Department, among others.Ismail also said that the commission is looking for more agencies to fall under its jurisdiction.

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Goodbye Motorola! How Chicago's greatest tech company fell to earth?

Under the Galvin family, Motorola had soaring achievements. This was the company, remember, that invented the cellphone. Those days are over. What went wrong?  

Click below and Scroll or arrow down to keep reading.

https://shar.es/1RLvt2

http://www.chicagobusiness.com/section/goodbye-moto

Measuring Happiness

BY Bain Insights, Forbes Contributor

Fred Reichheld

Happiness has been a hot topic in business lately and I’ve been delighted to see such a serious subject get the attention it deserves in the corner office. In the Jeffersonian tradition, the “pursuit of happiness” is considered an inalienable right on par with life and liberty. Yet, until recently, managers here and elsewhere in the world made little effort to rigorously measure or manage happiness.

That was part of the reason I created the Net Promoter score (NPS) nine years ago. When I was considering various names for the new metric, I thought seriously about calling it the Net Happiness Score. We describe NPS as a measure of loyalty, but the overarching objective of the framework is to make people happy—so happy that they recommend a product or company to friends and loved ones so they can benefit from a similar experience.

Of course, I ended up calling it NPS. I decided against NHS as a name because I feared it might sound too corny or whimsical to hard-minded business execs, causing them to overlook the very real connection between how customers feel about their experience with a company and that company’s profitable, sustainable growth.

But even today we still maintain a not-so-subtle link between NPS and happiness through the emoticons we use to report the scores.  For example, we communicate a Net Promoter Score of 75 with a wall of faces like this:

It’s pretty hard to miss the link between NPS and the emotional energy of happy or unhappy people when looking at a picture like this. Using emoticons to represent promoters, passives and detractors requires little additional explanation. What’s more, the happy, passive and angry faces illustrate that making people happy and earning their loyalty creates emotional outcomes, not just economic ones.

“If you figure out how to make employees happy and make customers happy, then the business just kind of takes care of itself,” says Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh. “It’s just about delivering happiness.”



Well, it’s not quite that simple since the happiness must deliver profits—but companies already have well-advanced measures to focus efforts on profits. What they have lacked is a rigorous metric for happiness—until the adoption of NPS. Leading practitioners use different language to describe the underlying emotional engine of NPS: Apple talks about enriching lives. Intuit talks about delighting customers. Rackspace talks about “Fanatical Service.”  But they are all talking about the same thing: making customers happier.

As I have noted before, in our work at Bain & Company we find it nearly impossible to separate the notions of employee happiness and customer happiness—they are two sides of the same coin.  There is no way to consistently turn customers into promoters unless they are being served by employees who are equally enthusiastic about their work, and there’s no way employees can be enthusiastic about their work if the customers they deal with all day long are detractors.

Some leaders assume that simply making employees happy will result in happy customers. That is dangerous thinking. When employees come to believe that the job of their leader is to make them happy, the result is almost always entitled but uninspired employees—who help create fewer and fewer happy customers.

Leaders can and should treat their employees well, but they can’t make them happy. True happiness must be earned through meaningful service to others. When a customer scores an employee’s work a 9—or especially a 10—they are giving a standing ovation that provides a real source of sustainable happiness.

What bosses can do is make sure their people are in a position to earn lots of 10s from their customers—by structuring teams correctly, assigning good leaders, providing the right tools and training, supporting them with good policies and putting individuals in roles that play to their strengths. And, as important as any of these, they can install a system that measures the impact employees have on customers and lets employees hear that feedback in a timely manner.

Many loyalty leading companies install employee NPS feedback systems to work in parallel with their customer NPS systems, because they recognize the close and interconnected relationship between customer and employee happiness. Integrating those two systems isn’t always easy—employee feedback has long been the province of the HR department, and employee NPS drifts naturally in that direction.

But loyalty leaders such as Apple Retail and JetBlue work hard to ensure that employee engagement isn’t pursued independently of the goal of delighting customers. Instead, they ensure that they set up a virtuous circle that positions employees to earn “10s” from customers and to hear about it and are rewarded for it. Employee and customer Net Promoter feedback systems remain fully integrated at those companies, because they are part of the same pursuit—the pursuit of happiness.

Fred Reichheld is a fellow at Bain & Company and co-author, with Rob Markey, of The Ultimate Question 2.0: How Net Promoter Companies Thrive in a Customer-Driven World, published in September by HBR Press.

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What Determines a Company's Performance? Shape of the CEO's Face! All a matter of how wide your head is!

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What Determines a Company's Performance? Shape of the CEO's Face!

ScienceDaily (Aug. 25, 2011) — Believe it or not, one thing that predicts how well a CEO's company performs is -- the width of the CEO's face! CEOs with wider faces have better-performing companies than CEOs with long faces. That's the conclusion of a new study which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

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Elaine M. Wong at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and her colleagues study how top management teams work. But they have to do it in indirect ways. "CEOs and top executives don't typically have time to talk with researchers or take batteries of tests," she says. "Our research has primarily been at a distance." They've analyzed the content of letters to shareholders and looked at things like how a CEO's educational or personal background affects how well his or her company does. Wong and her colleagues, Margaret E. Ormiston of London Business School and Michael P. Haselhuhn of UWM, wanted to look at another aspect of CEOs – their faces.



Looking at faces isn't as crazy as it might sound. Several studies have shown that the ratio of face width to face height is correlated with aggression. Hockey players with wider faces spend more time in the penalty box for fighting. Men with higher facial width are seen as less trustworthy and they feel more powerful.

"Most of these are seen as negative things, but power can have some positive effects," Wong says. People who feel powerful tend to look at the big picture rather than focusing on small details and are also better at staying on task. She and her colleagues thought that feeling of power might also be correlated with a company's financial performance.

Wong and her colleagues based their analyses on photos of 55 male CEOs of publicly-traded Fortune 500 organizations. They only used men because this relationship between face shape and behavior has only been found to apply to men; it's thought to have something to do with testosterone levels. They also gathered information on the companies' financial performance and analyzed shareholder letters to get a sense of the kind of thinking that goes on at those companies.

CEOs with a wider face, relative to the face's height, had much better firm financial performance than CEOs who had narrower faces. "In our sample, the CEOs with the higher facial ratios actually achieved significantly greater firm financial performance than CEOs with the lower facial ratios," Wong says.

Don't run out and invest in wide-faced CEOs' companies, though. Wong and her colleagues also found that the way the top management team thinks, as reflected in their writings, can get in the way of this effect. Teams that take a simplistic view of the world, in which everything is black and white, are thought to be more deferential to authority; in these companies, the CEO's face shape is more important. It's less important in companies where the top managers see the world more in shades of gray.

Provided by Association for Psychological Science (news : web)

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Post-Jobs Apple: New research shows Cook will do fine

Performance as CEO all a matter of how wide your head is

By Brid-Aine Parnell •

Forget about your Ivy League/Oxbridge/Harvard business school education, your connections or how many millions in personal funds you can plough into the business: the one thing you really need as a CEO is a big face, at least according to a new study to be published in journal Psychological Science.

Elaine M Wong of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and her colleagues analysed photos of 55 male CEOs of publicly-traded Fortune 500 organisations and found that chiefs with a wider face, relative to face height, had much better firm financial performance that those with narrower faces. (And if you're wondering why this only applies to male CEOs, it is because the whole fat-face thing only works with men – apparently it has something to do with testosterone levels.)

According to Wong and her team, launching this study wasn't completely out of left field, because previous studies had shown big-featured guys were more prone to aggression, seen as less trustworthy and felt more powerful – and they thought these attributes could be a winning combination for CEOs.

Good ratios: Rory Read,
CEO of AMD

"Most of these are seen as negative things, but power can have some positive effects," she said.

Obviously, the Reg couldn't help a little completely unscientific application of these conclusions considering the two new CEOs in the techie stable: Tim Cook at Apple and Rory Read at AMD.

AMD is looking good with Read, since although he's not really got a big face, he hasn't really got a very long face either, so the width-height ratio is probably good.

But Cook is definitely sporting some height there and with those slimly-defined cheekbones, could Apple be in trouble? But no wait, he's practically Jobs' face twin, they're both rocking that lengthy angular look, and Jobs seemed to do OK. Could it be that the concept is not infallible?

Steve jobs (left) and Tim Cook. Separated at birth?

Well, actually, it could. Wong's team found that the way top management felt could interfere with the effect of the head honcho's huge countenance. Teams that took a simplistic view of the world, in which everything is black and white, are thought to be more deferential to authority, so the CEO's face-shape-mojo worked. Big heads are less important in companies where the top managers see the world in shades of grey. ®

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