About Siegfried

I first attended The Will to Lead (MBL1) in August 2006, two months after I assumed the head of HR role in Pacific Basin. I knew instantly that this was a leadership program like no other. Siegfried kept it simple, straightforward and backed up all his presentations with numerous real life examples where sound leadership has made the difference between the success and failure of companies. A few of the people I met in the program are still my friends today, and we have taken great pleasure in watching each other grow as professionals and as humans.

Over the last ten years, Pacific Basin has had the privilege of placing over 65 of its staff under Siegfried’s tutelage at various stages of their careers. Each of them have come away with a different view of themselves, PB and the world. 75% of them are still with Pacific Basin and 80% of them are today in higher positions in the company. The very best thing about KFA’s offerings, particularly The Will to Lead and Leadership Communication, is that they do not respect rank or hierarchy, but innovation of any kind including innovating leadership. My junior-most high potential colleagues all the way up to my C-Level colleagues have benefited tremendously from participating in KFA programs.

Pacific Basin’s philosophy on people is simple. If you treat them like assets, they will behave like assets. In the last two years, in what has been the worst recession in the history of the dry bulk shipping industry, Pacific Basin has saved over US$15 million in G&A costs without making any large scale staff redundancies. Our leaders came together and devised innovative ways of saving cost without affecting the lives and careers of our people. We are a truly lean organization where almost everybody has the DNA of our culture running through their blood, and where everyone in the senior management team is always on the same page. This is the key ingredient  of our success. We continue to generate positive EBITDA in a severe loss making environment and our share price remains healthy under the circumstances. Three years ago, we lost two of our senior commercial staff to other companies where they joined as CEOs. This was a fantastic endorsement of Pacific Basin’s leadership development. Even better still was the fact that both of these roles were filled internally, and this allowed us to keep our unique culture intact.

We have not utilized any other leadership program as much as we have used KFA, and this has helped us maintain consistency in thought and action right across the company. I would highly recommend KFA to anyone who wants to show their intent and willingness to develop leaders.

Please feel free to contact me for further information:
psubbiah@pacificbasin.com

KF Andersen’s Lead the Business is a program you must attend. This is 5 days of how to make it happen, get it done and how to transform winning strategies into genuine bottom line results.
It captures Ram Charan’s lifetime learnings working with some of the most successful companies and leaders in history. Through case based learning and discussions, your understanding on how to link together; people, strategy, and operations, the three core processes of any business, together is dramatically enhanced.

KFA makes it a simple, practical and gives you the mental models for how to approach this so you get your own people to work together to create a strategy which is in sync with the realities of the marketplace, economy, and competition. A lot of time is spent discussing how you select and match people to a chosen strategy and with the people in place, how you link them to the day to day operations, which ultimately results in the implementation of programs and actions that delivers bottom-line results.

The 5 days my self and my team spent with KFA changed how I execute my responsibilities as a leader in a very profound way. The task of putting an execution culture in place is hard but very much worth the efforts. The program will accelerate the time it takes by years.

Siegfried is able to give you access to me, if you want to know more.

I met Siegfried Andersen as a 29-year old in the autumn of 1998, and it is no overstatement to say that this first week, as a participant on “The Will to Lead”, changed my life forever.

At the core, engaging with Siegfried has been less about managing people or leading an organization and more about a philosophy of life. I participated in several of Siegfried’s training programs over the next two years and the experience helped me learn about myself, about other people and most importantly, I connected the dots in my life of three decades to come to the realization that almost everything that happens in life is a direct result of what you think, what you say and what you do. And it really is that simple.

Of course, learning to think the right things, say exactly what you think and do exactly what you said you will do is a journey, not a destination. But now, almost 20 years later, the philosophy that is Siegfried’s thinking on leadership has become an indispensable part of my tool box. And in Anglo-Eastern Univan Group, we give our young (and sometimes slightly older) aspiring leaders the chance to themselves connect the dots to realize the limit of their limitations and the power of their potentials, by engaging them with KF Andersen’s Leadership Academy and training. Like all great content, it is not for everyone. Not all that go through KFA’s training will drink the Kool-Aid but those who do will be transformed forever. It provides a deep insight from which high levels of energy, priority, integrity, passion and perseverance can be derived. Qualities that will assist everyone not just in the professional arena but in life as a whole.

I still remember my final goodbye to Siegfried at the end of that first week of “The Will to Lead.” I shook his hand and enthusiastically stated that if what he taught were a religion, I would come to church every Sunday! Today, I still find strength, a sense of renewal, optimism and confidence in what I learned in those two years. I owe a great debt of gratitude to Siegfried and colleagues for the training, discussions and friendships that I have had over the years, and I wholeheartedly and unreservedly recommend KFA for anyone bold enough to take on a journey that may alter your life path forever.

Do you want to know more? Please, feel free email me at: 
hojgaardb@angloeastern.com

My own journey with Siegfried W. Andersen began in the 90’s, when starting out on the corporate ladder.  Since then I’ve had the distinct pleasure to engage KF Andersen in turning around my leadership teams in several different companies in different geographies.  In the last 6 years that has included colleagues in Oman, Singapore, Norway, United States, Italy, Brazil and China, exposing them to several of the MBL modules along the way.

Oman Shipping Company, in 2011-2013, was an eye opener for me, and in part a cultural experiment, to see if the training, which I’d experienced and used in a typically Northern European/Anglo-Saxon context, could have the same affects on my Omani colleagues.  I was not disappointed.  Initial misgivings about European trainers and “other leadership type programmes” gave way to a step change in levels of enthusiasm, change in behaviour and belief in own abilities.  These managers enabled the business to “move mountains” and the individuals themselves all grew above and beyond their previous ambitions, either within the company or onto bigger and better opportunities elsewhere in the middle east, and some have gone on to become successful CEOs or CFOs.  I see that the MBL approach has been the catalyst for that.   

I keep MBL enrolment as “routine” in the training budget for personal and business development.  I cannot turn enough ordinary people into extraordinary performers… “

I am happy to answer any enquiries I receive at:
nff@masterbulk.com.sg