Author

Samson Lai

Browsing
Key Associations

Awards Presentation Ceremony: The 12th Customer Caring Scheme 2022

By

Caring our customers is the key for success for small to large companies from the old days to even now digital era. Jeff Bezos, Founder of Amazon, said repeatedly, ‘The Most Important Single Thing Is to Focus Obsessively on the Customer’. To encourage customer centricity, GS1 HK has been organizing the Customer Caring Scheme #貼心企業 for years.

The Awards Presentation Ceremony of the 12th Customer Caring Scheme 2022 was held successfully yesterday. It was our honour to have Lilian Cheong JP, Under Secretary for #ITIB as our Guest of Honour today. Appreciate it.
https://lnkd.in/gNu-hXM4

In the capacity of the President of GS1 HK’s IoT Industry Advisory Council, I was grateful to present trophies to the awardees together with a few other VIPs including Bernard Chan, Under Secretary for Commerce & Econ Dev of CEB, Duncan Chiu of LegCo (IT), Roy Ng #GS1HK Board and certainly Anna Lin #GS1HK. Congratulations to all of the awardees for their amazing work on customer care.

In parallel with this Awards Presentation, it was also a solution day. Elite partners of GS1 showcased their solutions empowered by GS1’s technologies, data and innovation there. Great to see many new and old friends in the ecosystem again there.

Our Data Literacy Association #DaLa DaLa – Data Literacy Association was one of the supporting organizations to fully support the Customer Caring Scheme. In fact, the best use of data is to delight our customers and create the best customer experience. There were 2 keynote speeches in the event. Both were focusing on making use of data and had great examples of AI and data applications on operation excellence, trading inprovement, safety, and more.

Thank you so much to Anna’s leadership and great effort from our GS1 HK colleagues including Corinna Fung, Dr. Stephen Lam, Mignone Cheng and many behind the scene for organizing such a meaningful award and a fruitful solution day.

#CustomerCare #CustomerCentricity
#DataLiteracy #Data #AI

Keep Reading
By
Activities

CUHK EMBA Class: “Crafting and Executing Winning Strategies”

By

From group photo with masks to f2f live class without masks. Mission in action now! Our CUHK EMBA CLASS of 2024 has just started 9 months ago. I met our new students first time (with masks on) in our program called Residence Week back then. It was a fruitful orientation week for all of us. Last weekend, I was very pleased to meet them (without masks and with smiles) again.

Our students are taking our course called “Crafting and Executing Winning Strategies” jointly developed and taught by Dr. Gilbert Cheung, Professor Pong Yuen, Howard Lam and myself. Our objective is to empower our EMBA students to become strategic leaders. It is easier said then done to be a strategic leader. Are you a strategic leader? Does your company have a strategy? Why bother? Why Strategy failed? Or Do you really know what is Strategy? More to be explored in our learning journey.

Apart from our experience, we also leverage on our networks to invite the best strategic leaders in Hong Kong and the region to share their practical experience on strategic management.

My first guest speaker was Susanna Wong, CEO of YATA. We are so grateful to have Susanna to share her experience in #YATA, #SHK and #Mckinsey with us. Her sharing was really insightful, inspiring, impactful and practical as well. She discussed the challenging dilemmas that we always faced in practicing strategies like Stubborn vs Persistence, Change vs Plan, Financial Pressure vs Long-term Goal, Top Down or Bottom up, Communication vs Interpretation, Good Strategy vs Bad Strategy, and more.

We did have a good start of our “Crafting and Executing Winning Strategies” course in the last weekend. Our students started with some doubts on why we need to take Strategy seriously and now they are keen on digging wider and deeper on Strategy to master it. More to come in the next 3 months as the course continues. Stay tuned.

#Strategy #StrategicThinking #StrategicManagement
#Change #ChangeManagement
#CUHKEMBA CUHK EMBA CUHK Business School

Keep Reading
By
Talks / Seminars

Sharing with MTR Executives: Digital Strategy – Lead and Execute Your Digital Vision

By

Grateful to have a fruitful discussion with 3 elite digital leaders in Hong Kong and share our experience with a group of senior executives of MTR. Thank you to my panel guests:
Wai-yin Wan #MTR
Matthew Chan #JardineRestaurantGroup
Michael Yung #Google #GoogleCloud

Our main theme was Digital Strategy: Lead and Execute Your Digital Vision. It was really inspiring to many participants including myself indeed.

My 3 key takeaways are:

1. Digital Strategy should be seen as Strategy in Digital Era; Digital Transformation should be thought as Transformation in Digital Era; and certainly Digital Leader should transform themselves into Leaders in Digital Era. If we have no Strategy and cannot get transformation working, there is no place for Digital and certainly no place for Digital Leaders.

2. Cascading Strategy down is one of the major challenges for any companies. Just townhall communication is far from enough. Treat every employee differently just like how we are doing for customers. What does our Strategy mean to every single one of employees? Rather than just “Segment of One” for customer (customer centric or customer obsessed), can we do “Workforce of One” (employee centric or employee obsessed)?

3. Innovation will just become a threatre and showroom if we don’t understand the first 2 points. Even you got a fancy innovation head title, it doesn’t mean you can overcome all challenges in Transformation including Digital Transformation. Eventually you lose your passion and leave your company voluntarily or involuntarily.

more…

Thank you to MTR Learning and Development team and my CUHK teammates to make this meaningful panel discussion happen. Appreciate it.

#CUHK CUHK Business School
#DigitalTransformation
#DigitalStrategy #DigitalLeader
#Change #Transformation
#CustomerCentric #CustomerObsessed
#EmployeeCentric #EmployeeObsessed

Keep Reading
By
Training

CUHK EMBA Course: Strategic Management of Innovation

By

Just delivered a challenging but rewarding 4-day intensive CUHK Chinese EMBA course on Strategic Management of Innovation. Really felt tired and exhausted but all my effort was paid off with the deep participation and engagement with my excellent executive students from the mainland.

My dear students presented beautiful flowers to me to show their appreciation. Wow! It was the first time in my teaching journey to receive flowers. What a surprise and touching indeed. Thank you so much my dear students.

We couldn’t have acheived that much without the great sharing from my guest speakers Miles Wen (温豪夫) #FanoLabs, Nixon Chau #SenseTime, Christina Ong #HSBC, Adonis Ya #NewRetail, and Thomson Lai #AECOM. They are all elite leaders from different industries. They openly shared their valuable experience on innovation from their perspectives. Our students including myself learned a lot from them. Thank you.

Felt particularly grateful to have Adonis as my guest speaker as he was my CUHK EMBA student who have taken this course (English version) before. He applied what I taught him so well and has created new breakthrough in his career. Really happy for him. He sincerely shared his experience with my students.

I would like to thank my senior executive students from different cities in mainland China for their effort to spend 4 consecutive days here and did a fantastic job in their group projects as well. I hope my experience in innovation has inspired them to lead their companies and teams to seek breakthrough and achieve their H3.

Recap, remember and redo… “What should we do differently from yesterday so we can survive today?”

CUHK Business School CUHK EMBA #CUHK #CUHKEMBA
#CorporateInnovation #Innovation #Technology #Entrepreneurship #Intrapreneurship

Keep Reading
By
Activities

Congratulations to Dr Tenny Lam Receving the Excellence in Research Application Award

By

Congratulations to my mentee, ex-colleague and good friend, Dr. Tenny Lam, CEO and Co-founder of Grand Rise Technology Limited, on receiving the Excellence in Research Application Award of the 1st ever Hong Kong Innopreneur Awards organised by #FHKI and sponsored by #HSBC.

Really proud of Dr. Lam not just receiving the award but also demonstrating how a corporate leader was successfully transformed to an elite entrepreneur. When Tenny and I worked in the corporate world, he had already demonstrated his #intrapreneurship and #innovativeness. He often brought in new business and ideas to solve tough problems. Well done, Tenny as I always believe your #enterpreneurship. You now found the right path to excel. Add oil.

Dr. Lam received the award from Professor Sun Dong, the Secretary of the Innovation, Technology and Industry Bureau #ITIB of HKSAR Government today in front of almost all key stakeholders of Hong Kong #Innovation and #Technology #Ecosystem.

For more about the Awards and other award winners, please visit here https://innoawards.org.hk/

Keep Reading
By
Activities

Welcome CUHK Chinese EMBA Students Back to CUHK Campus in HK

By

Back to school finally! Welcome our CUHK Chinese EMBA students back to our main CUHK campus in Hong Kong. Yes, it was all physical presence with no zoom and no MetaVerse. Today, we had a welcome dinner with our professors, students and colleagues .

If there was no pandemic, our EMBA students in mainland China were supposed to take most of the classes in our Hong Kong campus. Unfortunately, they haven’t been able to do so in the last 3 years and had to go online for most of their classes.

Apart from our core CUHK EMBA programme in Hong Kong, which is conducted in English, I also taught a few corporate innovation and entrepreneurship classes in Putonghua on Zoom together with a few guest speakers to our Chinese EMBA students. It was a valuable journey to share my experience with senior executives in mainland China and I learned a lot from them as well. It went well but it was still not as engaging and impactful as f2f classes where I can play “Ping Pong” (interactive chats) with my students on classes as I used to do.

It was a good start today to see our students in person. Good news is that my next class for CUHK Chinese EMBA will be f2f in our HK main campus. The students will come to Hong Kong for 4 consecutive days for every course. Will get it ready to have an impactful learning journey with my fellow executive students from the mainland. See you all soon.

Appreciate the great effort and support from our Chinese EMBA programme team. Let’s have many many great cohorts ahead without masks and Zoom any more. Cheers.

CUHK Business School
CUHK EMBA #CUHKEMBA
#CUHK #EMBA #ChineseEMBA
#CorporateInnovation #Entrepreneurship

Keep Reading
By
Activities

The 2nd Cohort of DLEP Programme in CEBHK

By

Once again, users at all levels across departments demonstrated that they can make good use of data to create real impact to their customers and companies. We witnessed it once more in the China Everbright Bank Hong Kong Branch #CEBHK today.

Colleagues from different front, middle and back offices at CEBHK have gone through our Data Literacy Empowerment Programme #DLEP organized by Hong Kong Institute of Bankers #HKIB and OpenCertHub Academy #OCHA in the last few months. This was the 2nd cohort already at CEBHK. They were required to do a team project to pick a pain point in the company and use data to tackle the problem.

Today, they presented their projects to the CEBHK’s senior management Nancy Wu, Stephen Chang, Fanny Chan, Carrie Leung #HKIB, Dr. Victor Ng and myself from #OCHA. It was really impressive on not just the business impact created from their data initiatives but also the cross-team collaboration. Thank you so much for the team’s effort and the support from all senior management of CEBHK and Carrie.

In the last few months, Victor, Patrick Tsoi and I have provided a series of data literacy training, shared industry best practices, conducted hands-on workshops and provided mentorship for their team projects to the participants. We are so grateful to see that teams today can apply them so well in solving their real problems. From mindset, skillset to everyday use of data is our goal and we have seen this happening in CEBHK.

Special thanks to Fanny, Elaine and their teammates for their effort and trust to my team from the day 1 of our collaboration. Look forward to co-creating even more impact and values to CEBHK throughout our data literacy empowerment journey at CEBHK.

#DataLiteracy #DataCulture #DataMindset
OpenCertHub Academy
#BigData #AI
#CitizenDataScientist #DataCitizen

Keep Reading
By
Activities

D2Place – How Traditional Manufacturing Leader Transformed Itself

By

Appreciate Rico Lau from LAWSGROUP to introduce and show me and my teammates Andy Kwok, Victor Ng and Derek Leung from OpenCertHub Academy about the Group’s creativity in various areas. It has really opened our eyes on how a traditional apparel manufacturing leader has successfully transformed themselves and been making a huge impact to the community. Impressive.

LAWSGROUP has turned the traditional buildings in old district Lai Chi Kok into vibrant and popular shopping, dining and entertainment co-creation spaces called “D2 Place” https://lnkd.in/g3MUvnpi with young #enterpreneurs. It empowers many young innovators to test out their products, pivot and scale up to real shops. I can feel the passion from not only the enterpreneurs but also the young customers there. Thank you Rico to have shown us around. I am sure there are a lot more to explore in these spaces and it is still evolving. Really appreciate the team effort from Rico, Leslie Fok, Miko Cheung and many others from LAWSGROUP to revitalize these spaces, empower #entrepreneurship and made many impossible to possible.

Rico also brought us to the Laws Knitters Studio 羅氏針織工作室 which not only shows the history of knitting but also provides a co-creation space for designers and manufacturers.
Riding on their ecosystem creativity, knitting products now have many varieties as shown on the photos. It can be personalized as well.

When I saw the traditional “#Singer #勝家” sewing home machine, it triggered a lot of memories on how my mom made clothes for me by her own hands from scratch when I was young while the economy has not taken off. Thank you mom and thank you Laws Group to build this studio for our collective memory.

Rico and I exchanged many good ideas on #Innovation, #DataLiteracy, #MetaVerse, #ESG, #SocialImpact, #Community #Cocreation, and more. Look forward to having even more collaboration with him and his teammates at LAWSGROUP in different areas in the Year of the Rabbit and beyond.

#Knitter #Creativity #D2Place
#LAWSGROUP #LawsKnitters
LAWSGROUP 羅氏集團
OpenCertHub Academy #OCHA

Keep Reading
By
Activities

HKDAS Hackathon 2023

By

Grateful to have had chances to provide mentorship to so many #blockchain, #web3, #metaverse and #ESG innovators in today’s Hong Kong Digital Asset Society #HKDAS #Hackathon 2023 in Cyberport. I particularly appreciate these innovators’ heart and innovative minds to make use the emerging technologies to find new ways to solve tough problems and create deep social impact.

In the capacity of Industry Advisor of HKDAS together with Edmund Lee and Vincent So, and the Founding Chairman of Data Literacy Association #DALA, we act as mentors together with many experts for today’s hackathon. Thanks Fonia Wong 黃仰芳, Alex Au, Celia Lok and their teammates from HKDAS to have created such a great platform for us to co-create values in the web3 era. Glad to see Mrs Fanny Law, the former Chairman of HKSTP, there as well. Thanks to her continuous support and interest in our innovation and technology ecosystem.

Look forward to collaborating more with HKDAS to shape the future of the Digital Asset in Hong Kong.

#DigitalAsset #FinTech

Keep Reading
By
Activities

Lunch Gathering with CUHK EMBA Team

By

Our CUHK EMBA team had a joyful lunch gathering today to kickoff the Year of the Rabbit. Really thankful and grateful to have the great support from our EMBA teammates behind the scene so that we can focus on teaching and sharing with our students, and our students can focus on learning.

In 2023, our CUHK EMBA programme marches forth into its 30th year. So many CUHK EMBA graduates have gone through the journey and become elite leaders in Hong Kong and the rest of the world. Really appreciate all our teammates behind the scene in the last 30 years to make this happen. Our current and past teammates all contributed a lot to the growth of not just CUHK but also Hong Kong. Let’s give them a big 👍. Thank you.

More about CUHK EMBA:
https://lnkd.in/fWQzDKq

#CUHKEMBA #EMBA
CUHK EMBA
CUHK Business School

Keep Reading
By