IIUM Premier Ibadah Camp

Bismillahirrahmanirrahim

Assalamualaikum wa Rahmatullahi wa Barakatuh

Salam Sejahtera

dan Salam 1Malaysia

YBhg Dato’ Sri Dr Zaleha Kamaruddin, Rector of IIUM,

Deputy Rectors, Executive Directors, Directors, Deans and members of IIUM community.

It gives me great pleasure to be with you this morning, to speak in this very first Premier Ibadah Camp for IIUM Leaders. I am a staunch believer in engagement. In fact, we must all believe in engagement. Both speaking and listening. And this Ibadah Camp is a very good form of engagement. Engagement between the Senior Leadership of our University and the Generals on the ground; that is each and every one of us. We all determine how much and well our University’s aspirations and strategies are realised. So today I wish to speak about our aspirations for our beloved University and the challenges therein, and would like more to listen to your views.

2.      But first, let’s ponder a little on what we aspire for. There is a very well-known global company that has seen spectacular growth year-after-year. The revenue grew 359% between Quarter 1 of 2009 and Quarter 1 of 2013. For the same period, profit grew by an astounding 479% and the share price went up by 471%. This company has been beating analyst estimates quarter-after-quarter, that the market expected the company to beat, rather than meet the expectation. In the most recent quarter announced last week, the company’s revenue grew by 17% with a very healthy gross profit margin of 38%. That is an amazing performance given the current global economic climate. But what happened after the results announcement is even more interesting, to say the least. Its market share fell by 12% in one day! So, let’s look at this. Here we have a company, Quarter-on-Quarter, grew its revenue by 17%, maintained a healthy gross margin of 38% and yet fell in market value. The angle I want to emphasise is the expectation on the company. It has been outdoing itself so much, that the market wasn’t expecting it to beat others and stay number one. It’s beyond that. The expectation was for Apple to set its own benchmark and beat it. Now, that is a class act to follow! So with our own aspiration, that’s what we ought to do. Go beyond others’ expectation. More than that, go beyond our own wildest imagination.

3.      Our stated aspiration in the IIUM 2013-2020 Strategic Direction Document is to be a ‘Premier Global Islamic University’. And this aspiration is supported by six pillars standing on the foundation of Islamisation. The six pillars of:

• Quality teaching & learning
• Research & Innovation
• Internationalisation
• Holistic student development
• Talent management
• Financial Sustainability

4.      These are highly ambitious targets, seemingly daunting at first sight. Our aspiration is nowhere moderate, as far as typical definition of moderation is concerned. I know Tan Sri Prof Kamal Hassan will disagree with that ‘normal’ definition. The message is, this aspiration is not for the faint-hearted. We need to internalise this aspiration as our own personal goal. It will be a challenging journey.

5.      But then again, we are used to this. After just 30 years, we are among the 450 top universities of the world, among the 160 top universities in Asia and top 6 in Malaysia. Surely, we have done many things right to deserve our current place in the rankings. But 450th place in the world doesn’t maketh a ‘Premier Global Islamic University.” In his book titled “What Got You Here Won’t Get You There”, Marshall Goldsmith argues that many successful people, and organisations, falsely believe that doing more of the same will propel them further forward. But this belief system has a grave flaw built-in. We are not perfect. We all have some flaws, some shortcomings. Yet we succeed. So our success is in spite of some of our behaviours, not because of it.  But it is not easy for successful people to change. It is very hard. We have a positive reinforcement that plays in our mind all the time. It says, “We have been successful, so we must have done it right. There is no need to change.” If we are not careful, if we repeat our negative behaviours, that will only expedite our failure. Positive reinforcement is good as it give us confidence to tackle new challenges. But we must couple this with active feedback. Or even better, feedforward. We’ll come back to this feedforward in a short while.

6.      So the message is, we become successful in spite of certain negative behaviours and habits. To be even more successful, we need to know what these are. Our challenge is to identify the factors, behaviours and habits that needs to get into the ‘not to-do list’. For us as Leaders, for the Department, for the Kuliyyah, for the University. When we have success and failure, we need reward and punishment. Heaven and hell. And so, when we have an aspiration, a vision, we need a ‘to-do list’ as well as a ‘not to-do list’. We need to be aware of it, acknowledge it, look at the list every day and make a conscious effort to avoid the ‘not to-do’ and to do the ‘to-do’.

7.      Going back to feedforward, this is a term coined by Marshall Goldsmith. With feedback, we are told by others about our past. What we did well, and what we didn’t. A positive feedback tells us how well we managed a past event. An event that may not be repeated in the future, in which case, the feedback is academic. Similarly, a negative feedback tells us what we did wrong. Again, this could be academic if it was a one-off event. Add to that, as humans, we are averse to negative views of ourselves. Denial and rejection gets in the way of useful learning from a feedback. So on one-end, feedback could give us false confidence in our ability to tackle infinite variation of future events. At the other end, it could create ill-feeling between colleagues. Feedforward is an idea meant to overcome the problems with the feedback. With feedforward, we choose an area that we want to change, and seek ideas from others on how we could achieve the change. This allows us to learn positive habits of others. What worked for them in managing their own challenges. As the process becomes embedded in our university, there will be collective learning and collective reinforcement of positive behaviours. At the heart of it, feedforward is about helping each other, in a positive environment, to tackle future challenges.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

8.      Let’s talk a little more about the behaviours, about the success factors. What needs to get into our ‘to-do list’. There are many ingredients needed to achieve success. And they vary at each level of the organisation and by Kuliyyah. They also vary by the timeline given to achieve it. In my view, there are a number Key Success Factors, -KSF- that are universal and timeless. They are Integrity, Responsiveness and Creativity.

9.      Integrity is not just about avoiding corruption. That is but a small aspect. It’s beyond that. It is about honesty and trust. The position we hold in the University is an amanah entrusted upon us. As leaders in IIUM, we need to stress the two I’s; International and Islamic. Our positions are an immense responsibility. To the Global Ummah. To Islam. These positions also give us power to act. To quote Voltaire, the 19th Century French revolutionary, “With great power, comes great responsibility”. To fulfil our duties and amanah responsibly, integrity must be the core of our being. It must be the foundational value of our personality, from where our thoughts, words and actions originate.  And it is absolute, there are no degrees of integrity. A CBT is a CBT.  Be it five Ringgit or five million Ringgit. A CBT is a CBT.

10.   Second is responsiveness. And here I mean it as a process, not only an action. We must welcome views, comments, feedbacks, complaints. Give it due consideration. And respond, fast. If it can be done today, let’s do it today. For us at IIUM, at the most basic level, this is about listening and responding to our immediate stakeholders, the students. As much as possible, involve them in our decision making. Sometimes, they could give us a fresh perspective on old issues. They could also give us a new direction. If it makes sense, let’s do it. If it doesn’t, discuss it with them. Our students are rationale people. After all, we pride ourselves in producing high quality, highly employable graduates. And, when they are a party to a decision, they will support the implementation. Therefore, as ironic as it may sound, we should involve the students in areas which are more likely to be controversial or opposed. That’s where we really need their support.

11.   Similarly, we should be able to act on intra-University issues faster because it’s within our control. I know there are some inter Kuliyyah issues that take a long time to resolve. We must move beyond our self-imposed fencing. I look forward to a more collaborative work approach, where we can become more responsive to the requests and queries from our colleagues, regardless of their Kuliyyah. When we respond fast, it will mean giving the recipient more time to act on our decision. And if our stakeholders get their answers fast, and have more time to act on it, that could result in better quality output. This is a virtuous cycle. It is a virtue. If everyone of us become more responsive, it will virtually fast forward our University in reaching our aspiration.

12.   Third is creativity. We need to be creative in how we see our surroundings, our problems. In essence, this is what Blue Ocean thinking is. I was involved in the National Blue Ocean Strategy as the then Chief Secretary to the Government. One of its biggest achievement is in bringing together two agencies to collaborate more closely. I am talking about the Police and the Military. They now train at each others’ facilities, march together at the Merdeka Parade, do joint patrols at KLIA and elsewhere and host join Open Houses, among others. The change came when they started seeing themselves as part of the bigger picture. That of the Malaysian Public Service. Not Police. Not Military. The key stumbling block was the mindset. We need to be creative in where we draw the lines. In IIUM, we should see ourselves as leaders of IIUM. Full stop. Not Kuliyyahs or Institutes. Kuliyyah, Institute and Department are just administrative necessities to facilitate our operations. Not debilitate it. The academics, classrooms, the vans and the computers all belong to the University, not the Kuliyyah. We should see them for what they are, the University’s assets entrusted to the Kuliyyah. A Premier Global Islamic University must be able to optimise its resources to achieve its goals. The more optimal our resource allocation, the better we will be, the faster we achieve our aspiration. This is a creative mindset.

13.   On creativity, I would like to share a quote from Einstein. “The formulation of a problem is often more essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skill. To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle requires creative imagination and marks real advances in science.” More often than not, too much time is spent in brainstorming, analysing and finding solutions to a given question. But how often do we question the validity of the question itself? For example, we can look high and low for the best supplier and negotiate a contract; OR, internally look for another department in the University that may already have a similar facility but underutilising it.  OR, even better, find a corporate organisation operating in that space that may have a much more sophisticated equipment than what we need, and could benefit from the internship of our students and research expertise of our academics. So in this case, we don’t need to have the equipment. What we need is access to the equipment. A creative question could yield surprising results.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

14.   We have talked about our aspirations, what can stop us from getting there, the ‘not to-do list’. What will help us get there, the ‘to-do list’. And we have discussed some of the items for the list; Integrity, Responsiveness and Creativity. Now, when we get there, what will it look like? How would we know we have arrived?

15.   For this part, we must summon the power of visualisation. Visualisation is a very powerful tool. An American author, Napoleon Hill once said, and I quote, “What the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve”. So we must be able to visualise what a “Premier Global Islamic University” will look like. As leaders, we must be able to paint it to our colleagues. What they don’t see, they can’t aspire.

16.   A “Premier Global Islamic University”. That by definition means we cannot be comparing ourselves to just other universities in Malaysia. We are established under the Companies Act. We teach in English and Arabic. We enrol overseas students. So our competition is not Malaysian universities. We should benchmark, and be benchmarked by a much larger global peer group. This should be our visualisation. In areas where we choose to specialise, we must be the first choice for students. And for academics.  A Global University must be global in its outlook, in its student and academic population and its research focus. We should aspire to have presence globally. This need not be through branch campuses, but through franchised curriculum and academic and student exchanges with other Premier Universities. Our alumni are well positioned globally. We should make the most of our alumni network in building our global presence.

17.   But this is not about increasing the quantity of students, this should be about increasing the quality. Quality attracts quality. Prestige attracts prestige. Premier universities work with other Premier universities. We cannot, and should not, be everything to everyone. We choose where we want to play, and we do it exceedingly well. Here, we need to ask questions. Creative questions. Why would the best professors in a given field want to come to IIUM? What will we offer that other universities can’t? Why would the best students come to us? Why would the choice employers choose our graduates over others? Why would the government and other bodies want to fund our research? What is the value we bring to the table that others can’t?

18.   Creativity is essential in visualisation. In making our plans a reality. We need to take a leap from a thinking mindset that creates plans to a doing mindset that translates them into reality. Plans alone do not attract students and Professors. Reality on the ground does. Our plans to produce holistic students will look good on paper, but how does it look in reality? Maybe 100% employment before graduation! Now, that will attract high quality students to IIUM. Plans are well and good, but we need to nail it down to every last action needed to get there. Immediate, medium and long term actions. To get from the aspiration to the outcome, there will be a million inputs, processes and outputs. What we need is the shortest, most efficient route from the aspiration to the outcome. A healthy dose of creativity will keep us stay focused and get there fast, without being distracted by processes and outputs.

19.   So our next challenge is for each Kuliyyah to be able to paint their picture of a Premier Global Islamic University. Don’t let Good get in the way of Great! Make it compelling. A picture one can smell, and touch. Craft it, and hang it for all to see. Most importantly, for our own view so that it becomes a constant reminder and motivator for our role in this University.

20.   A word of caution here. At the expense of sounding contrarian, I must say we will never fully ‘arrive’ at our aspiration, ever. If we think we have, then our aspirations were not ambitious enough to begin with. Our picture of the aspirations today, will be different from the picture we may have in 5 years, 10 years. The aspiration is a journey. The horizon will keep moving. There will always be better things to aspire for. More responsibilities to take on. But along the way, we would have built much, achieved much, helped others achieve their own aspirations. And that’s the beauty of this amanah. The journey is the satisfaction. The journey is the reward. We want the future generation of leaders to say, “That is a great track they have built, let’s do them justice. Keep it going, just better.” The best legacy we can leave behind is an achievement so great that will drive our future leaders into action, not one that will lull them into mediocrity.

21.   To conclude, let me summarise the tasks I have outlined earlier:

• Develop a ‘not to-do list’
• Develop a ‘to-do list’
• Paint your picture of what the ‘Premier Global Islamic University’ will look like
• Answer the question why we would be the University of choice to academics, students, employers and funding agencies.

22.   On that note, I wish you all the best with the rest of program for today and tomorrow. And for the years ahead.

Wabillahitaufiq wal hidayah, wassalamu’alaikum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh.