Boomi enables its customers to deliver integrated experiences to transform interactions, transform how customers add and connect with suppliers and transform, simplify and improve employee engagement. Thomas Lai, Vice President and General Manager for Asia Pacific and Japan, Boomi, talks about his most memorable achievement and about how he changed his management style.
Describe your current job role.
I am Boomi’s Vice President and General Manager for Asia Pacific and Japan, with responsibility for elevating our customer retention rate and driving revenue through new business while ensuring profitable growth.
What would you describe as your most memorable achievement?
There are three equally memorable achievements:
I had the opportunity to step into a VP role for the first time earlier in my career – about 20 years ago. I worked for a CEO who invested in my professional development, alongside a supportive board. The process taught me a lot about stepping up and running an organisation. It was very stressful, however. I spent a lot of energy working on everything. I learned to pick my battles, and to invest my time on what’s most important. That meant less of ‘doing it myself’ and more of guiding my team to do their jobs well and empowering them to make decisions.
Second was my time at Jetlore, a company acquired by PayPal, where I held the role of Chief Revenue Officer. Following the acquisition, I wasn’t sure how I would fit in as a VP of a US$2 billion B2B company with tens of thousands of employees. It was a drastic shift. However, that experience helped me hone my ability to indirectly make an impact, as opposed to explicitly driving change.
The third is in my current role, where I’m applying what I’ve learned from past roles to a more complex model in APJ, which requires several different levers to be effective amid varying degrees of digital maturity and diverse business and buying cultures. I won’t say I’ve ticked all boxes, but I feel I’ve made strong progress since I stepped into the position in October 2022.
What style of management philosophy do you employ with your current position?
I want people to feel empowered. I see my role as providing clear direction and highlighting what’s really important – that we establish high levels of credibility – so the wider team can take ownership of their roles and thrive.
Additionally, I see collaboration across this diverse region as the cornerstone to impressive outcomes. No one is alone on an island; we do things together. Throughout my career, I have seen how much of an impact a ‘selfless’ team can deliver.
Lastly, I believe we can make tomorrow better than today, and it should be part of a continuous process of improvement. I also like to celebrate successes to ensure everyone gets the recognition they’ve earned.
What do you currently identify as the major areas of investment in your industry?
In software, more organisations are moving to hyperscalers and using best of breed models to drive more use of data. These are the major investment priorities.
I recently travelled across the APJ region and had several interesting meetings with customers and prospects. A common thread is their desire to ensure the data they feed into analytics apps, AI engines and so on, is clean and complete. This paves the way for creating a new level of customer experience (CX) which puts those companies in a leadership position against their competitors.
If you could go back and change one career decision, what would it be?
There was a time when I was known as a fairly difficult manager. This didn’t sit well for me, and it’s one thing I would take back. I spent time reflecting and enjoy analysing various styles of prominent leaders to incorporate them into mine. After several years of consistent improvement, I feel I’ve progressed to a position of driving empowerment within my direct and extended team. My approach now is to offer guidance on how to think about issues, so all they need to do is state what they want to achieve and how.
What advice would you offer somebody aspiring to obtain a C-level position in your industry?
Ensure you’re doing it for the right reasons. You need to love what you’re doing, or you won’t be energised. Many C-level roles require providing energy for the team, rather than consuming it. That means setting the tempo, being positive and offering inspiring goals. Make a plan for yourself on the skills you need and talk with someone on how to progress on those goals.
What behaviour or personality trait do you most attribute your success to and why?
My career has been about lifelong learning. I’m always curious about different things. That’s served me very well over time, whether it’s new tech, understanding people and what they care about or assessing the issues that impact people.
What’s your go-to productivity trick?
Prioritisation. I’ve created a two-by-two rubric to determine what’s urgent, not urgent, important and not important.
What changes to your job role have you seen in the last year and how do you see these developing in the next 12 months?
As Boomi heads into its next maturity curve – underscored by high growth and being profitable along the way – the ‘general manager’ notion will be more pervasive. How I make decisions (versus how decisions were previously made) will change.
From a regional standpoint, APJ is always a work in progress with three major groups – A/NZ, Asia and Japan. I expect to spend significant time figuring out points of synergy and where we need to prioritise market-specific factors to help each team in their local markets.