His family-owned telecom, Sapura, was installing software-management systems at Kuala Lumpur airport, introducing pre-paid phone cards and rolling out a mobile-phone network. He thought he had it made, but that didn’t last long.
Soon a deluge of foreign invaders, fast-changing market conditions and red ink hit Sapura hard. He was now 35 and realized he had to bail out. “I knew it was no point chasing the herd,” he says. “It was time to stop, look and change direction.”
Shamsuddin left for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to work on a master’s in technology management.
“The classroom would be packed with the sharpest minds aged 22 to 40,” he remembers. “It was a hotbed of new ideas.
You were constantly challenged to think in new ways. It taught me to look at the big picture.” He met professors who trained him in systems thinking and corporate strategy.
He learned about the dynamics of a changing organization.
By the time he returned to Malaysia in 1997 he was ready to jump into an entirely different industry, oil and gas. “It struck me as strange that Malaysia was an oil-producing country and yet nobody had put together an integrated oil-and-gas services business,” he says. “I knew we had to plug the gap.”
