The power of ‘stratecution’

James Yap Ming Hsiang

James Yap Ming Hsiang is a certified trainer who looks after training and development, quality assurance, customer experience and process improvement at Elken Sdn Bhd.

As someone who thrives on challenges, James has always enjoyed a good strategy game, and is constantly looking at doing things differently. Anything unique piques his interest because to James, the concept of individuality stands out the best in a competitive world.

The Infinity Cohort champion of the 2019 Elken Leadapreneur Accelerator Series (Cycle 3), James’ win was something unexpected as he found it difficult to adjust to the 16-week programme at the beginning. In fact, he jokingly claimed that he ‘regretted’ his decision to join Leadapreneur in his first few weeks of training.  

James’ involvement in Leadapreneur did not happen by chance. He was eyeing the programme since last year as he watched his colleague go through it and requested to join the next accelerator series.  

He initially found it tough to juggle between his daily routine and the targets he needed to achieve on this programme, especially since participants had to innovate a project, product or process valued at a minimum of RM45,000.

But after the first month, James found himself adapting to the challenges quite easily and rising to the occasion as he began discovering useful tips on leadership and strategic thinking – the leadapreneur style.

Ideation became a breeze thereafter with him coming up with several creative business solutions. The only link he needed was proper execution strategies. That was when James first came across the concept of ‘stratecution’ as shared by Leadapreneur’s CEO Jan Bartscht.

It was the thread that sew his ideas together and as James put on his strategic thinking cap, he decided to enhance Elken’s current live chat system by introducing some user-friendly widgets to improve the system’s functionality. The process improvement would expectedly save the company almost half a million Ringgit per year!

The idea materialised smoothly when he realised that he need not invent something extraordinary as innovation was also about improving current process and procedures to churn out exceptional results.

With the chat system in place, Elken is expected to see tremendous improvement in terms of customer engagement and satisfaction by 25% within the first quarter. James has even taken it upon himself to keep track of the system’s progress and continuously improve them from time to time.

It was just a simple perception change that led James on to start seeing things from the right angle. His 16-week journey with Leadapreneur had helped polish his leadership and critical thinking skills, taught him how to find strategic solutions, and brought out the best of his negotiation and persuasion skills, among other things.

Despite possible challenges stemming from organisational culture and behaviour, James is optimistic of making a big difference in Elken and creating an identity for himself as an inspiring learning and development practitioner and author someday.

Congratulations James Yap for becoming a Champion of the Accelerator!