Maintaining The Belief

In 2004 I presented an opportunity to my executive colleagues within Asia Pacific to establish an Editorial Production centre that would support the 7 publishing companies we have in the region.   This effectively meant transitioning activities that were performed in each of the businesses across the region and moving those core activities to a new centre location yet to be defined.     

Without boring you with the detail I was given the support to move to a model that would result in us establishing an Editorial Production hub that we would base in Cyberjaya, Malaysia.  In January of 2005 we moved into our new facilities.  At that time we had 4 staff and 15 trainees.   It was like a ghost town.  From January 2005 we were enmeshed in hiring and training our new team, converting and moving our content onto a new regional platform and moving processes and responsibilities from various countries in Asia Pacific to Cyberjaya.   

It has almost been 3-years since we embarked on this journey.   Despite the tears (and there have been many) the challenges (at times almost overwhelming) the frustrations and the roadblocks thrown across our path, we have succeeded.   We have established a truly world-class centre.  We have delivered a better than projected result back to the shareholder.  

When we started down this path we always maintained the vision that we could develop and grow our business beyond the scope of Asia Pacific and I am delighted to say we have achieved that.  From 2008 we will be supporting two of our businesses in North America with the very real likelihood that we can expand beyond that.  What a journey this has been and how proud I am of my very young and inexperienced team in Malaysia.   I have been blessed beyond my dreams in working with this team.   The faith they have shown in me and my vision has been beyond question - a very humbling experience for me personally.  The challenges they have taken on and overcome have been enormous.  Words can not describe to be honest.

Throughout it all, we have maintained our vision and belief and we talked about it constantly.  I asked the question of some of my team leaders 3-weeks ago.  Did you believe we could do this, honestly?  Their response was, we always believed in you and your belief in us but it is so exciting that it is now happening...So we are back down the ‘green-fields’ path again, this time for the US with new systems, new processes and a lot more new people in 2008.    

I spent last week in Malaysia working on the plan -  we have a very exciting year ahead of us in 2008...