STIMY Ep 148 Part 1: The Graveyard is full of Indispensable People - Dato' Sri Idris Jala (Chairman, PEMANDU)
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Idris Jala: If you want something desperately, just like, you know, Paolo Coelho once said, the whole universe will conspire to make it happen, but you must take that first step of action. You ask the question, how do I write this letter that somebody who reads it, he said, wow, I haven't seen any letter quite like that.

So you must write the letter that really strike the heart of the reader, right from the moment they read it. So the letter I wrote to Shell was, "Dear sir, I am the man you're looking for." That was a starting line.

You know that if you put that there, I know the guys got, I've never seen a letter quite like that.

Ling Yah: Hey STIMIES!

Welcome to episode 148 part one of the So This Is My Why podcast.

I'm your host and producer Ling Yah, and today I'm very excited to introduce you to a fellow Sarawakian, Datuk Sri Idris Jal a.

He's known as the turnaround guy. He comes into a company that isn't doing well and completely turns its fortunes around. And did you know that he's actually Kelabit? Kelabit is a tribe in Borneo and there's only 5, 000 of them.

And we go into depth in his journey in basically living in the highlands. What it was like, what his father was like and how that influenced him in terms of how he sees leadership and how he ended up working at Shell just because he wanted a free plane ticket to go back home.

He ended up spending 23 years at Shell and did a lot of different things, including being posted to Sri Lanka as the managing director where he faced strikes, one of his employees was kidnapped, there were bombs placed at the depot, and he also received death threats.

Another thing we cover is also his faith. Dato' Sri Idri Jala is part of the Bario Revival, which was a tremendous period for the community up in the Highlands.

Dato' Sri Idris Jala has so much to share that I've actually split his interview into two parts and part two comes out next Sunday.

Now, if you want to hear more about what he's doing, he has actually started a podcast with his son Leon Jala called Game of Impossible, which is a father and son podcast where they talk about all things transformation through the lens of business, leadership, sport, and faith.

New episodes drop every Friday at 6 a. m. They can be found on YouTube and Spotify. Just look for The Game of Impossible. But in the meanwhile, if you want to learn how Dato' Sri Idris Jala came to be who he is today, stick around. You're gonna enjoy this.

Are you ready?

Let's go.

Hi Idris, me personally, I first heard about and of you in 2017, the Global Transformation forum

Okay.

Idris Jala: Yeah. Yeah.

Ling Yah: Usain Bolt was there and Richard Branson was there. And then you came on and for 40 minutes you gripped me and I thought, who's this person that can keep my attention, 40 whole minutes, with the craziest stories, and he's from Sarawak.

Wow, he's incredible, so your story has always stayed in my mind, and later on, when I speak to people in preparation for your interview, the first thing people always say is, oh, he's a great storyteller, you will never be bored, and English isn't even your first language.

So I wonder where this storytelling element in your life came from.

Idris Jala: My, my dad is a very big storyteller.

My dad was a teacher, and he used to tell us stories. Every night he would tell stories.

The Kelabit have an oral tradition of telling stories. They're almost like epic poetry, like Shakespeare.

The language is rather archaic. The modern day Kelabits will really struggle to understand all of it. The story is told in, in rhyme. And so not many people can do it. It's not written.

It's really gradual, epic. Epic stories. It's incredible. That's where, the source was my dad.

Ling Yah: Any particular story that comes up to your mind?

Idris Jala: Wow, lots of stories. The Chinese movies, you'll find people, all sorts of fighting, people jump from heaven to heaven, that kind of story.

If you think about Lord of the Rings, the stories that my dad told us, they was very similar.

There's a movie called Apocalypto. You know, that story grips me a lot because it really depicts what my dad used to tell me about stories of the jungle, the warfare, how people fought each other.

And the three layers of heaven that people jump into and all sorts of things like that.

Ling Yah: Yeah. Wow. And your dad definitely came out a lot in my research. He sounds like a force.

Yeah. to be reckoned with.

Idris Jala: Yeah. Incredible man.

Ling Yah: Yeah. He threw you once into a pigsty?

Idris Jala: Yes, indeed. Yeah. I remember when I was a kid, I was naughty.

I think his method of making me learn was he threw me in the pigsty. I cried until I was blue in the face and I was frightened by the pigs and it was dirty as well.

And I think I remember he did the same thing with my brother. My brother, I think he was already old enough to walk, but he still refused to walk and he was crawling.

All his other friends who were the same age as him, they were already walking. So my dad early one morning took him and threw him in the middle of all the tall grass, with the dew and it was wet.

He stood up straight away. Wow. So my dad has a method and his method is he throw you to the deep end.

Either you sink or swim.

Ling Yah: And you spoke about dirty. There was once you were traveling with Penan people from the neighboring tribe and he made you sleep on the floor.

Idris Jala: Yeah, we were in Long Alang. That time along Long Seridan, it's a small place there. Yeah. He was a school teacher. From Long Seridan we went by boat, I think it was two days by boat to Limbang.

And he had money to pay for him and me to stay in the hotel. But he said, you know, son, it's not nice. We don't have money to pay for all the other village folks to stay in the hotel. They are sleeping at the fish market. That's what they normally do when they come here. So we're going to sleep with them.

I can tell you, Ling Yah, it was so smelly because of the rotten fish in the fish market. So the guys early morning, they come with their fishes. Around five in the morning, we had to get off our mat, roll it up. But the whole night was very smelly. Stink of rotten fish.

My dad put his blanket over my nose. He said, that would put you to sleep. But it was very, very smelly. But my dad has this idea of, you know, you should not use your money and be different from everybody else. You just have to be just like everybody else. That was all the time his approach to it.

If he and I were to stay in the hotel, he would have to make sure that everybody else stayed in the hotel.

He didn't have money to do that for all of them. It's almost a whole tribe, you know, many boats that were coming out there. So we all slept at the fish market.

Ling Yah: Sounds like he was the first example of what a leader looked like for you.

Idris Jala: Yeah. He's a leader and follower at the same time.

Ling Yah: Yeah. And he told you this thing called ketuit.

Idris Jala: Ah, yeah, that's right. That's a kelabit word. Ketuit, it's very similar to hokkien for 'kiasu'. Yeah. 'Kiasu's hate to lose. Ketuit, my dad said it's a burning desire to win. Doesn't matter which side of the fence you are, which side of the coin you are.

If you are Ketuit or Kiasu, the consequence of that is you take extreme measures. You don't take normal measures to do it. You take very extreme measures. And that's the core to winning.

Ling Yah: And what did he think winning was for you?

Idris Jala: He always tell me, son, winning is defined by an individual.

And so nobody should tell you what winning is, but you define for yourself what winning is. So if you're in school, if winning is to be number one in the class, that's winning. But if winning to you is defined as having many friends, that's winning too. So he always tell me, what I now call True North.

True North is a measure of success that you define for yourself. Nobody else define it. You define that is your true north and therefore you then pursue it because you believe that is your true north and that you could call it winning. Very similar idea.

Ling Yah: What do you think your true north was back then?

Idris Jala: My true north then was I wanted to be top of the class.

Ling Yah: Yeah.

Idris Jala: So I asked my dad, Dad, you are a teacher, how do you become top of the class? He said, very simple son, find out who's currently number one, be his or her best friend. And do exactly what he and she does, but put it to the power of 10. 10 times.

That mean extreme measures. And what's the progress? First term, second term, and third term. You see what happened.

Ling Yah: And that's Uncle Medan.

Idris Jala: Yeah, Medan. Medan is a very good friend. He and I were friends since primary one, actually.

Ling Yah: Wow.

Idris Jala: And we were very good friends. I recall when I was a kid, he had a pair of Bata shoes. White color.

My father had a little bit more money. So he begged me a tricycle. I was bored with my tricycle, but I like his shoes. So I told him, why don't we batter trade it? I mean, I didn't have any value for money. I didn't know what was the cost, the price of the shoes relative to the tricycle.

Well, I swapped it. Of course, I didn't get a good thing from my dad. Medan and I were friends. And there were times I went to his house and we stayed in his house.

I didn't tell my dad and my mom I was staying there, and I decided to spend the night at their house. They did a whole search party looking for me, village to village.

They thought I had lost in the jungle. They almost went into the jungle to look for me, and then eventually they found me there. My mom was so cross with me, but she was happy to have found me. But the, admonition was not then, it was the following day.

Ling Yah: Wow. Studying so hard being number one, did you have a vision of what that would lead to?

Idris Jala: I wanted to be a lawyer. When I was in Form 1, we had a principal, his name is Alexander Lian. Lian Ngorong. He had a very simple idea and he told all of us kids, cut out a small placard, this size, and he gave us a measurement.

Mm hmm. Write down on that placard, your ambition. What do you want to become? He called it pinpoint your primary goal, PPPG.

So we all put it down and he said, pin it on you. We were in boarding school and I stuck it on my bed. So every night before you go to sleep, you look at that and every morning when they wake up, look at that.

He wanted us to pinpoint your primary goal, and that was my goal. I wanted to be a lawyer, but, you know, as it turned out, I never become one.

Ling Yah: And weren't there soldiers as far there that really influenced the way?

Idris Jala: Yeah, the soldiers, the soldiers came to Bario. You may recall if you look at the history. Yeah.

We had the Indonesian confrontation because Malaysia and Indonesia, they had a confrontation. They kind of wanted to claim Sarawak to be part of them. Kalimantan and Kalimantan and Sarawak, they said, It all belongs to Indonesia.

Our village was right at the border, Kalimantan border. So the soldiers were there to protect us against the Indonesians.

The British soldiers were there and they call themselves the SAS. I think they were there for more than a year and a half. I can't remember exactly, but I remember very well as a kid that my first real exposure to people in town among the soldiers. And so when they left, The Gurkhas came .

The Gurkhas also camped there for quite some time. And when the Gurkhas left, then the Malay Regiment came. Perhaps maybe about six to seven years, the soldiers were there in the village. And my first exposure to the world outside was really then.

Ling Yah: And there was that sense of curiosity.

Idris Jala: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, they smoked and they ate different food and I mean, they were doing things that we didn't do. They watched movies and , everything they had. They have nice clothes, they had guns, you know. They had so many things that we didn't have. We had blowpipes where they had guns.

Yeah. And so, they were very different sets of people. The British, when they were there, of course, their hair was different from our hair. There was a lot more different, some blue eyes, you know, etc. It was very interesting.

And my brother and I, we inherited a bed from a British soldier and his name was I think written on the bed when they left.

His name is James Tal or something like that. When I went back to Warwick, I studied to do my master's in Warwick, I was curious and I tried to find out whether this guy is still alive and I was never able to trace him. I wanted to tell him I inherited your bed. Yeah. I slept on your bed.

I grew up in your bed. you know. But I think he might have died by that time.

Ling Yah: That's a shame. We spoke about Uncle Medan and then another important person in your life is Uncle Osad.

Idris Jala: Ah, yeah, Osad is, soulmate. Really soulmate. So Medan was from primary one to primary six. I was so close to Medan.

Then I went to Long Seridan, I came back there. So by the time I came back from Long Seridan, I was in form one. I was a little bit of a stranger in Bario because I'd been away for two years. To a very different village. So Medan was always there and he had made friends with other guys in the two year period.

So when I left and came back, I was a bit of a stranger and Osad was a stranger. I remember turning up in the school on first day. I saw Osad walking around really lost because he was not from Bario and I was lost. I'm from Bario, but I went away for two years. That's how he and I became friends.

To this day, he kept reminding me. I was wearing a pinkish red sweater. But it was cold, by the way. And that was why I had that. We had been soulmates, in many ways.

Ling Yah: I have seen friends from Ba'kelalan. And they will have fireplaces, they'll be wearing sweaters.

Yeah. It's very different.

Idris Jala: Very different. We grew up in that environment. Nighttime is cold. Very, very cold.

That's why storytelling is a very normal thing by the fireside. Someone would sit by the fireside, they put the logs, and then someone maybe putting some chicken and some wild boar meat while they were doing that, and the story start flowing.

And the story start flowing. Really very interesting. When I grew up, before kindergarten equivalent, we were in Long Lellang because my father was teaching there. He opened the school there. They had this thing that they did at night when it was cold. They started telling stories of ghosts.

Really frightening stories about ghosts. When the stories are finished and told, then we, the young kids, they had this thing about who is brave enough now to go and walk all the way without torchlight. From the longhouse to the river, get to the river, prove that you've been to the river, get a stone from there, put your feet in the river till it's wet, and come back with the stone.

Now the whole story about ghosts is in your head. That's the thing that they do. We were so frightened to do it. I mean, we had pigs down there, we had buffalo, and we had cows, and you don't have torchlight, and you had to walk all the way into pitch dark to go and get that stone. I did it before too.

It was very, very frightening. They did all that, you know, all part of growing up in the village.

Ling Yah: But that wasn't the most scary part, right? The scariest moment was when you watched a movie. And you had to walk through the cemetery.

Idris Jala: Oh, yeah, yeah. There's many, many things like that, you know, to walk through the cemetery, there's many, many things.

There was a story about a guy. He went out hunting, and he had to pass by a cemetery to go hunting. When he was hunting, he ran out of battery, and so there was no light. The only way he would return, he knew he would have to return through the cemetery, by touching the logs and touching the trees. Then as he was approaching the cemetery, he did this, then he knew it was a cross.

You know, we believe in the jungle that the, the ghosts are all in the cemetery. It was wailing loud hallelujah in the cemetery.

So the cemetery is some place you don't want to go to. Yeah. Nobody want to go to the cemetery. Cemetery is only meant when you bury someone. The tradition never has been.

Nobody go to the cemetery like the way they do in town, to pay respect, no. When you bury somebody, that's the last time you go there. The next time when you go to the cemetery, is when you're burying somebody else. That place is not a place to go to. Not to put flowers, nothing like that. So, the feeling is always that the ghosts are there.

Ling Yah: Yeah, I imagine, especially when you don't go there.

Idris Jala: Yeah, yeah, don't go there.

Ling Yah: Speaking of stories, one story that I personally grew up listening, because I grew up in a Christian family from Sarawak. I was always told that there's this thing called the Bario Revival, which was huge, which really transformed the community.

And it's one thing for me to hear the story. You lived it.

Idris Jala: Yeah, yeah, we lived it. I would say that all my life, if people ask me about this, we never prayed for the revival. In my personal situation , we were preparing for our Form 3 exams.

Osad, my friend, I invited him to the house and said, Osad, why don't you come and spend the weekend at my place. And maybe the whole week we study. So he and I then devised a program.

So to make sure that we don't get so bored studying, we put in the program some breaks in between for us to read the Bible and then perhaps pray. So that's in between, you know, English and also geography or history.

So we did that. Then as the days went by, the amount of time that we're spending reading the Bible and praying was getting more and more than the actual study.

Maybe day three It was occupying practically almost everything. We were really reading the word We were praying then suddenly we had the encounter. Personal encounter.

We both had the sense of repentance We were on the floor crying to God, you know asking God to forgive us for our sins and all our unrighteousness. It was a wail and cry from the depth of our hearts. And, I think when we finished doing that, I have never experienced happiness as I then did.

There was a peace and it was a joy inside me that I could not contain. And my mom was listening to this from the kitchen. My mom had big accounts of what, what had happened. So we then told ourselves, let's not tell anybody about this, because this is very unusual.

How do you suddenly sit down there and cry for hours, you know, and then start laughing and so happy and we were reading the word and we kept on praying. The next day was just 100 percent prayer.

On that weekend, we then went to the school inter christian fellowship in the afternoon. Our teacher then was a teacher by name, Solomon Bulan, who is now Reverend in the SIB church. He was leading the worship and the prayer meeting.

What we didn't realize was what Osad and I had experienced independently in our room was kind of the same experience of the other students, without us knowing. Because we told ourselves never to tell anybody about our experience, we just came into the classroom, sat behind, and kept quiet. And normally we were very timid kids, and we don't come out and stand particularly in church.

And one of the boys, his name is Samuel, stood up. And he said, I have something to share and I want to ask for forgiveness. The way he spoke and the emotion coming out from the words was same as we had and before we knew we were all standing up. I remember Osad and myself and everybody all standing, we all erupted.

It was like each of us had little fires that were independent of one another. We put the fires together and then they connected and it became a conflagration to consume the whole school. You can imagine. The episode was really something that we couldn't contain. And that was three o'clock in the afternoon.

It went on until 9 p. m. And we were praying and everybody was worshiping. It was incredible. Everybody was down on their knees crying and repenting and accepting Christ. What an experience. And that went on for many days.

And we then decided to go out preaching. So I went with Osad. We spent four days walking in the jungle to his village, to preach to his people.

My sister then spent five days with the other kids. They walked from Long Lellang. Everybody went out preaching. It was incredible. Can you imagine kids at that age? We went out preaching to village.

We didn't study for our exam. Nobody studied because we were preaching and praying and doing all that. Yeah. And walking in the jungle, and I kind of think that if there was an experience that was close to what the disciples did during Jesus time, it was then. That was how we felt.

Ling Yah: There must have been people who thought, maybe this isn't quite from God.

Idris Jala: Yeah, the elders did. So they weren't sure that this was from God, and so they came and wanted to do a gestapo, an inquiry. Whether this really is from God. But when they came there, we just prayed for them.

The kids, the school, we just prayed for them. There was no more questioning. They were on their knees as well. They were accepting Christ, and that was it. And it was exactly that. And I remember then, preaching the Word of God was not a difficult thing to get people to come to accept Christ because it wasn't what we said.

It was the work of the Holy Spirit because I remember it was just one verse that we would read from the Bible and then pray for them. People accepted Christ, and they were on their knees repenting.

For I recall now, in that year, 1973 and 1974, this is probably the one time in that village that there was real peace that happened there.

People who were divorced, they reconciled. People had land disputes, they returned the land to one another. People had brothers and sisters who didn't talk to one another, they reconciled, and so many things. It was a real period. So if you ask me, when did I, in my village, ever experience a peace of heaven. That was 1973.

Through the ages of my, I have my own views about revival. If you look through the ages, revival is not something that happened every day, every year through the history of Christianity. It didn't happen.

Even in the olden days, the Acts of the apostle, there was one episode that happened. Over the years that didn't happen.

Then the question that you ask today is that, Does that mean that God had abandoned the church? The answer is unequivocally no, because God speaks to people not only through revival. So I would say there are two types of revival. One is the revival as in the Acts revival. The other one is the love revival.

So the love revival, it does not come with all the emotions associated with it. But the love revival, how do you then get drawn to Christ in a way that you love Christ? It's the same effect as you had in the revival.

So I think God wants it like that too. That's why he does not give revival as people pray for it. Many churches today pray for revival.

God does not give it not because He doesn't want to give it. It's just that the time and the moment He feels that's not the best for the church But I look at myself. I call my son, son on the revival.

My son Leon, He has an encounter with God, but not through a revival sense. But doesn't mean that my encounter with God is more spiritual than Leon, the answer is no.

Leon encounters Christ in his own way and his experience no less than mine.

And so the question is whether what happens inside you, did you get transformed as a result of your new relationship that you have with Jesus? That's what matters and counts.

Ling Yah: So after that revival, did something shift in you in terms of how you saw what would you do with your life?

Idris Jala: Well, I had a hard time, you know, when I went to Form 4, I was a Marudi, Form 5. Form 6, I began to ask a lot of questions about Christianity. I really had some difficulties with what I saw. And what I couldn't reconcile was, how is it that God is a God of love?

If God is a God of power, how is it that God allows so much suffering in the world? And I begin to ask those very fundamental questions, and I questioned my own faith as well, at that time, because I was exposed to many things.

I saw so much suffering in the world, you know, through the news, et cetera, and I really had difficulty with that.

Only much later, when I went to Varsity, I then came across a very vibrant speaker, that theologically very steep, his name is R. B. Thiem, from Baraka Church. He is a real doctrinal man. And so, when I begin to study, my brother brought volumes of tapes from Baraka Church and I, I would listen to them night after night and day after day, wrote numerous accounts of what I was listening inside there.

I read all the books, you know, inside there. It was then I realized the answer to the question. For me, that was good enough.

The reason why God did not use His power, nor His love to get rid of suffering in the world was because of the character of God. God is not just all powerful, not just all love, but He is God of justice.

And He does all this meaning to say that He gives us volition to choose. But the question I had then was, how come God doesn't remove sin? If He's holy, if He's a God of love, He's all power, why doesn't He use His power to remove sin? How come he doesn't do it? So the answer is the character of God.

The character of God is that God is multidimensional. Does not force you. Give you choice. The volition to choose to sin or not to sin. That's why, you know, Adam and Eve were given the choice to sin or not to sin. He told them the consequences of, of sinning. Because the character of God is justice. He does not force people. He allows you to make the choices.

And so, I wouldn't say that it's sufficient to explain all the problems associated with our observations of the world. It was enough for me. Enough for me to reconcile.

It took me a long time, I would say, to accept and reconcile many of the questions that were deep inside my own thought. And they were the ones that challenged me about Christianity.

I must say there was a period, I went through. I would say, very nervous period in Form 6. I really didn't like life in my upper six then, and I had many things I didn't like, and there was a time that I had difficulty thinking where space would end.

I would lie in my bed, my mind would race through space, and wondering where it's gonna end. And it just run and run and I thought I was going to lose my mind. It was a very nervous experience because when you can't control your mind and my mind was running like it's an aeroplane and running through space and I could not stop.

And maybe I was awake until three o'clock, four o'clock in the morning and I thought I was going to lose my mind and this one went on for a year in my Form 6 and my deliverance was when I went to USM.

It was at that time I began to get reconciled with all these notions about the character of God. You could call that spiritual attack. And that was a very bad period of my life, actually. It was very tough, very, very tough. I had a lot of questions about church, about God and the fundamentals of it, but I reconciled because I went back to the doctrine.

I studied it through and R. B. Thiem was singularly the pastor, the reverend that brought sense to me in the post revival period.

Ling Yah: You say it was a difficult period. This is also when you applied to go to New Zealand.

Idris Jala: Yeah, yeah, that's also

Ling Yah: You didn't even get that. So you must have thought, that's unfair.

Idris Jala: That was, that was the period. That was the period. And I went through the very difficult period, because I wanted to do law, and I studied hard, and I applied to do law, and to New Zealand. I got a scholarship, but I didn't get there. Because I was late by one day.

I was late by one day, and I was really distraught.

Completely distraught.

My whole life, the thing I wanted to do was not there for me. And I had been struggling with my own interpretation of Christianity. My own stand was challenged as well. And I found myself in Penang. We didn't have money because my sister was studying in MU. My father had retired.

And so I was in USM. I didn't have scholarship because I was supposed to go to New Zealand.

And I ended up in USM. They said my scholarship couldn't be changed to go there. My dad didn't have money. And so he went and spoke to our MP, Joseph Balanceling, he passed on now. He told him we have some buffalos in the jungle. If he sold the buffalos to him, would he give some money?

The guy didn't even check the buffalos, whether they existed or not. He bought the buffalos and gave us the money. The money was enough to cover us for one term. So my sister, whose name is Garnette, she did English Literature in MU. She said, you know Idris, I've looked at our exam results.

You're the brighter of both of us. Why don't I quit? I go to school, I go to work. And then there's enough money to cover for a term. If I quit, then there's money to pay your fees for two terms.

I quit and then I go to work. And then maybe I can pay for your fees. I said, no, Garnett, you don't do that. I will never accept that.

So I wrote the most cocky letter I've ever written up to that time. I wrote to the state secretary of Sarawak, telling them that I had this offer of the scholarship to go and do law in New Zealand. I was late by one day.

It was a very lengthy letter, five pages letter. I really told them why they have to convert, make a special case to convert my scholarship in New Zealand and make it applicable to Penang.

And so when it came, it was really, really fantastic. And so they accepted it. So Garnette was then able to continue. My brother came back from Australia. He started to work. And so he then was able to sponsor my sister. And I had my scholarship. The one that was supposed to go to New Zealand. It was made applicable.

So we both did that. It was fantastic. And the best thing about Penang was I found my wife there.

Ling Yah: Yes. Without which you will have no kids.

Idris Jala: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It was really good.

Ling Yah: There must be some magic in your cocky letters, because he also wrote one to get your first job.

Idris Jala: Yeah, yeah, that's a thing too.

Ling Yah: What is the magic? What did you write?

Idris Jala: If you want something desperately, just like, you know, Paolo Coelho once said, the whole universe will conspire to make it happen, but you must take that first step of action. You ask the question, how do I write this letter that somebody who reads it, he said, wow, I haven't seen any letter quite like that.

So you must write the letter that really strike the heart of the reader, right from the moment they read it. So the letter I wrote to Shell was, "Dear sir, I am the man you're looking for." That was a starting line.

You know that if you put that there, I know the guys got, I've never seen a letter quite like that.

Ling Yah: Do you remember the other things that you wrote in that letter?

Idris Jala: I wrote many things in the letter. I was a top student. I wrote this and that, you know, and I wrote in the letter, we had a competition. The best essay ever written in USM. And it was to, to win a prize to go and spend three months studying in Sofia University in Tokyo.

I wrote in the letter. So I really wanted to win that because there were six students from Malaysia, six from Philippines, six from Guam, Brazil, Indonesia, Thailand, Singapore. And one student from one university, one from USM, one from MU. I said, I will be the one. I want to be the one that represent USM. So I wrote really fantastic essay.

And I said, I was the one who won this. I told them the stories about Japan. It was in my letter too. And all of that, very confident.

Ling Yah: Must be the storytelling.

Idris Jala: Yeah. You know, you, you put certain things on the pedestal that you regard will be of interest that will raise the curiosity of the reader. And that will make it very different from any other letters that they've ever received.

Ling Yah: So more of the story, I'm the person you're looking for.

Idris Jala: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Ling Yah: And people remember you.

Idris Jala: Yeah, and so when I wanted to win it, I won it. You know, that's the thing.

Ling Yah: Yeah. And it's so funny because you got that job, not because you wanted the job, but because you just wanted a free flight home.

Idris Jala: That's right. That's right. You've done your homework.

Yeah, at that time, I wanted to be a professor. Yeah. Yeah. I really liked academia. I kind of thought, if I'm not going to be a lawyer and this is my second lap, this is the one.

So I left my books in Penang. And because I had the scholarship from them, they wanted to send me. USM had hired me under the academic staff training scheme. I was going to Pennsylvania to Wharton.

So they said, we'll pay you to do your masters and you'll come back and become a lecturer for 10 years.

But at that time, as it turned out, it was my end of my final year and I had to get back to Miri my hometown. And then I saw this advertisement from Shell.

They said, if you are invited for the interview, we'll pay for your ticket. All I wanted was the ticket. I didn't want the job because I already knew what I wanted to do.

I left my books in Penang, so that's why I wrote this. I wanted the ticket, so I got the ticket, but because they gave me the job, I might as well do the job. So I worked for Shell in June, in 1982. Well, in June, 1982.

By September, I resigned. I told them I was quitting. They said, why are you quitting? I said, I'm going to do my master's, my PhD.

They counter offered. They said, look, look, we want you here. You know, we want to pay for you. You go and do your master's, but no PhD on our Shell scholarship.

So they sent me to Warwick. So I Dutchman. Yeah. Yeah. It was a Dutchman. He brought me to the club, Club Shell Lutong. He said, we like you, Idris. We've seen you since June. Very good. But we don't like your hair.

And I'm like, I think I have long hair. Cause I, I didn't conform because I knew I was not going to stay there for long, you know?

So he said, I'm going to see the managing director. We've never done it before. If I can convince the managing director, we will send you a letter to confirm that we will sponsor you to do your masters, and this is the first time we're doing it in Sarawak Shell Lutong.

And so he did it. So I really am indebted to him for that.

Ling Yah: But Warwick and Wharton, surely there's no comparison.

Idris Jala: I don't know. But because at that time my first job, I was doing industrial relations. So the masters in Warwick was the best institution in the English speaking world for industrial relations.

So I went there because it was the, at that time they said, why don't you go to Cambridge? But Shell said, go to Cambridge, go to Oxford.

No, no, no, I want to go there. Cause I studied about what they were doing here. All the main changes in the legislation, industrial laws that were done during the Margaret Thatcher era, when done by Hugh Clegg, they were the founders of the school in Warwick.

The Richard Hyman and all these big guys who changes industrial labor laws. They were the guys who started that school. I really wanted to be part of that revolution, if you like. And so when I went there. I was so shocked and surprised to see that the way they approach industrial relations was, it was simply seen as the relationship in labor and capital.

When you define industrial relations as the relationship in labor and capital, you already know, using those words, it meant that it was the very left. So I spent a lot of time studying Karl Marx, Das Kapital, and, why ownership of, Capital was the, the core to the socialist and the communist system that he was talking about.

And so in that sense, he was saying collective bargaining is not the thing that should be done. There are two ways to do it. The representative of capital with the management, representative of labor with the union.

The two ways in which they can come to an agreement was collective bargaining. To then conclude their collective agreement that will govern the three year tenure of how the relationship will, will ensue.

But then Marx says, no, no, no, if you do that, you succumb because the, there's an unequal relationship. The power lies with, with management, which is capital and therefore, the moment you agree to negotiate, you're already conceding. That is why they're saying no collective bargaining revolution.

So that's why Marx said the core to the conflict that exists in the capitalist world was The power rests entirely with who owns the capital. And so, therefore, labor, which is proletariat, they're working in that context. When you negotiate, you negotiate with an unequal exchange. And that is why revolution was necessary, to take capital and distribute it.

And that's why state capitalism actually came in as a more moderate form of Marxism. So, in many sense, when I was studying industrial relation, It really went back to the core part of how you define industrial relations, because when you define in those terms, you really get back to the roots of. Marxism.

Because I was exposed to many different ways of how that was seen. And the very interesting thing was, we were really looking at the relationship, the dialectics between labor and capital. And when you do that, you enter into government, statism. Very interesting. So it brought me to see much broader perspective.

And we had very interesting lecturers.

We had a guy called Johann Galtung. He was a visiting fellow, from United Nations Peace and Conflict Research. He was a German.

He came and became a lecturer, and he taught us a very interesting idea called the theory of social cosmology. The rise and fall of empires, he said, it begins in a few relationships.

If you take a broad sweep of history, from the early ages, into the Roman Empire, into Egyptian, into even the Chinese civilization, et cetera. The rise and fall of empires when, when the few key relationships break down: man and God, man and man, man and space, man and time. And so, when those relationships break, that's how that empire collapse.

When the relationship tick, That's the rise of that empire. So it gave all sorts of reasons. For example, the Roman Empires. How do you see the decline of Roman Empires? Is that when they started killing one another in the circus. Men and men, they even put games to kill one another. So that was the extent.

And they had huge parties. The Romans, they were glutton., they ate like, there's no tomorrow. And so men and the planet, they're plundering the world. And so when you add all this together, and they will define God as well. And so at that time, you already know, based on the parameters that Johan GTO referred to, you knew that the human empire was going through a state of decay..

It was just a matter of time before he went down. Very interesting notion. It's the same thing with the Egyptian empire. He gave all those parameters and points to how empires rise and fall. It was very, very, very interesting. So I learned a lot as a result of many of those exposures.

Ling Yah: But you weren't in charge of an empire when you were back then.

Idris Jala: The most interesting thing, Ling Yah, is this. I always find the most important part of education is to open your mind. If your mind is open through many different thoughts, and it becomes fertile.

When it becomes fertile, whatever seed you put inside it will grow. Education is about, making sure to open the mind.

And so I always tell people, go and take a course that will open your mind. Because if it opens your mind, it becomes fertile. And half the battle is won, because in work, we are all continuously learning. Every single day, you learn because you absorb many different things. It comes into your mind, but if your mind is fertile, you will create something out from it.

So it will not just be knowledge, the knowledge is applied knowledge to create something out, out of it.

Ling Yah: That perspective of opening your mind, that's not really common in Malaysia, because most of us would say, Oh, we just study for exams.

Where did that come from for you?

Idris Jala: I suppose it was a sense of curiosity you know. I mean, I was fortunate that I was brought up in a family that had a lineage of people that really wanted, to broaden my father aside. My grandfather was a chief in that village, and it was natural for him to have asked my dad to become the successor, to be the chief. But they said, no, go and study.

So my dad became one of the pioneer teachers. It was an unknown. Why would my grandfather, tell his son, go and study, be a teacher. Don't be a chief. My great grandfather on my mom's side was all chief.

And he then got this guy, my great grandfather, was the first guy that walked all the way to Belawit to find out about Christianity.

And he was just curious. Yeah. Very curious. So I came out with a tradition where people were curious about something else that was not the current state of affairs. From my dad's side, it was education.

From my mother's side, it was, it was Christianity faith. So that was very different from the normal. So I was brought up with that family that the search for the world out and beyond.

And they also told me that life is one big adventure,

And I remember very well, my sister and I, we were coming from the village and we came down on, I think there were 10 boats to the nearest town called Marudi. And there was lots of discussion how they would navigate every rapid along the way.

And there was one day, one night it rained and rained and rained, the whole river swell and the river was almost unnavigable. And when we were reaching a particular rapid and everybody was scared on the rapid because treacherous.

Idris Jala: They had long discussion how to navigate. It's a huge boulder in the middle of that.

That time I was kindergarten school age. Our boat came down and, we hit the boulder in the middle of the rapid. And a little boy that was next to me, my same age, his name is Michael. The grandpa just grabbed him and put him on the boulder. I remember it distinctly. And our boat came down.

We successfully navigated and there was a sandbank on the side of the river, and a huge torrent of current flowing down. It was really treacherous. And Michael was screaming. He was sitting on the boulder there, in the middle of the rapid. I mean, that boy, little boy sitting out there, and the people were screaming and shouting, Stay there, Michael! Stay there, Michael! And I remember it well.

The next boat came, and they hit the boulder. My cousin, she jumped out from the boat, into the water. Jumped out into the water. And, the father knew that if he jumped and followed her into the water, he would also die. There's no way he would survive in that rapid.

It's so treacherous because he saw the daughter going into the rapid. He also jumped and held the daughter and lifted up. I remember clearly that time.

As I said, life is one big adventure. And that was it.

I remember distinctly him holding the daughter, lifting her up as they were going down the rapid and they, of course, drowned and died.

And so, My life was full of that stuff.

Going out to town was a huge adventure in itself. You may wonder whether you come back alive or not, but people put themselves through this. And all we did was remember, come down to town, you get matches. We redistribute them.

Matches was a very important commodity to light a fire in the jungle. So if you ever go to town, you have to make sure you buy as much matches as possible to distribute to all the other folks. And sugar is a very important commodity too and clothes because we're very poor. But life was an adventure.

Everything was about an adventure. Even going to the jungle to hunt was an adventure. Going to town was an adventure. And sometime they are life and death. So I grew up in that environment where I didn't fear those kinds of difficulties. So wanting to go through the unknown, taking plans to study and find out, open your eyes into it.

It's like an adventure, huge adventure.

Ling Yah: Starting your career at Shell probably was an adventure. You always talk about those leadership days, but I wonder before you were a leader, those early days, were there any bright spots that basically molded you into who you are today.

Idris Jala: I don't think there was one bright spot, but there were many. But I would say if you ask me one moment that really made a huge difference, it was Sri Lanka.

It was Sri Lanka simply because when I went to Sri Lanka, I was appointed as the managing director for Sri Lanka. And that company was run by the government for a very long time and lost money for 22 years.

Shell bought the company, then Shell owned 51 percent equity. And Shell lost money running its joint venture for five years. So altogether, that's 27 years of continuous losses. Then I was appointed as the Managing Director.

I was a relatively young man, and my eyes was lit up looking at the possibilities of making a change there.

But when I went into the job, I realized that everything that I had learned in Shell, not applicable. The kind of challenges we had there was not in the manual of Shell.

I had people that planted bomb at our depot, took my transport manager hostage. We had strikes, and our selling price for LPG was lower than product cost. So that mean everything that we sold, the more we sold, the more we lost.

And I could not control price because price controlled by government. So, it was so difficult. At that time, I realized this is the moment I'm going to fail. It was really the moment I was going to fail because there was nothing in the Shell manual that equipped me how to tackle this.

Ling Yah: Was that the first time you felt, I will fail?

Idris Jala: Really, really helpless. It was truly a game of the impossible. To be clear, I never chose that game. It was entrusted on me. I didn't know. If I knew how hard it was, I definitely wouldn't have said yes .

Ling Yah: Couldn't you have also gone to Peru as well?

Idris Jala: Yes, yes.

I had, I had three job offers at the same time.

Ling Yah: Yeah.

Idris Jala: One was an offer to become double promotion to go to Nigeria. Yeah. And become the managing director of Shell in Peru.

My wife said, you're going to Nigeria. I'm not joining you. You're going alone. She said said because she was at that time working as a manager in the corporate comms division.

And she had done a lot of work on crisis management and Shell had lots of global problem with Nigeria. And she said, I don't want to go there. So that was out.

Peru, I didn't want because I don't speak Spanish. So the requirement was, if I did that, I really have to learn a new language. I think it would not fair for me to go out there while I'm doing the job and learning Spanish at the same time. And I think it is just not fair, both for the organization and me.

So the only choice was just one, Sri Lanka. That was it. And I couldn't possibly tell people I don't want all three.

I mean, how can you ? Shell gave you three jobs and you reject all three. What kind of employee are you? And so I couldn't possibly do that. So I said, yes, this is the one.

And so I went there, but it was difficult, and I do believe that it made a huge difference because it, it fundamentally transformed the way I viewed the approach to how to tackle it.

It was not the old way of doing it. I knew the old way of doing it is not going to work. The current way of doing it is not going to work. Everything that was done, I had to put them aside and start new. And that was a huge starting point.

Ling Yah: That's one of the stories that stuck with me the most. It was just one big event.

30 percent of the workforce slashed and the strike and the bomb. Everything was fine.

Idris Jala: And my wife, people don't know that she had lots of difficulties when she had panic attack. And she had difficulty breathing. It was very difficult. It was very, very difficult. She had that as well. At home, we had the challenge, you know, really massive challenge.

Ling Yah: How do you decide as a family as well to do this? Because surely you must have some concept. This is not going to be easy.

And this is not a decision you make for yourself. It's for your family.

Idris Jala: Yeah. Normally, I mean, Ngan and I, any big decisions, we both did this together to go out and do it.

In fact, to be clear, when we went to Sri Lanka for the first time, she flew with me to put me there and that she left me. I was a bit distraught. I said, my God, I turn up in this environment. It wasn't quite the way, the romantic way I thought about it. And then there we were staying in the hotel. And then two days later, she was going back to KL.

And then I said, wow, my God, I'm stuck here on my own for three months. Staying in the hotel all by myself starting this. But the whole notion is every big decisions, I make it together with my wife.

Ling Yah: And you also always pray first.

Idris Jala: We always try to pray. When we were in Malaysia Airlines, we did the same thing as well.

Decisions of going to Malaysia Airlines, we prayed. Government also, we prayed. And,

Ling Yah: What does that prayer look like?

Idris Jala: The prayer, the way in which we do it, like the government, for example, we went through a period of maybe a couple of days just reading the Word. We started with Genesis and then we started reading all that.

So chapter after chapter, book after book, and then, we were praying, you know, we just read the Bible. And the beauty is that we all, as Christians, we, all say that God speak to us through the Word.

So if we don't listen, then we don't. So if you want to get divine guidance, the best thing to do is to read the book, the Word. Just read it.

And so we read it and then we then concluded. We went to see the pastor. We spoke to pastor Choo and Nichu and then we prayed and then we decided to do it.

But when we did it, there were some clear things that we say we will do and not do. And that was part of the negotiations I had with the prime minister.

If I do that, I don't want to do three things. One is I don't want to be a member of your political party. So I will remain totally independent.

Two, I don't want any involvement in any rally, political rally. So if you guys do any rally, nothing to do with me. I, I'm not involved.

Third, I don't want to answer questions in Parliament.

That he had difficulty with. He said, why? Cause you're a parliamentarian, you're a minister, you should. I said, the problem is this, I don't think anybody in Parliament, they're genuinely asking answers to questions they raise because they are only doing it to play to the gallery. I said, if I want to engage them, we will take them outside Parliament, there's no immunity.

We will have briefing with them, explain all the facts, no problem. But because I also want to do my job, if I had to attend Parliamentary, when am I going to do my job? I did a lot of work that needs to be done. So he agreed. So we then devised the work so that Koh Soo Koon answered all the questions in Parliament.

Tan Sri Koh Soo Koon answered all the questions that pertain to the transformation work so that I then focus on the work.

Ling Yah: But isn't it easy once you enter and have this role to just stay forever?

Idris Jala: But no, I've always felt that, you know, there's always time and season for everything. You believe that if you go there during your period, you must be clear about your turn off, the things you plan to do.

And you go out and do it. Never make the position becomes you. Because the position itself, It's independent of you, and that must never be part of you, because if you make a position, you think you now have power. But you have power only because a position has power. When you lose it, you're back to your old self.

So, you must remain grounded, within your own skin and it shouldn't disturb your psyche. You should live life very normally and do the best you can. My old boss himself, Shell, once said, the graveyard is full of indispensable people.

When they die, they thought that the whole world is going to collapse. They die. They get buried. The whole world continues to live very normally. And that's what my attitude is.

You go out there. You get involved in what you do. You make a difference. You put the things that you said you were going to put there. And hopefully it will leave a legacy there.

You leave, someone else come and do it. You know, they probably do a better job than you. That's how life is.

Ling Yah: You've mentioned True North twice. I want to go back to Sri Lanka again, that True North. I dug a little bit deeper into the whole negotiation part and I learned that later you agreed you would do an independent tribunal and then you found guilty.

The president of Sri Lanka called and said, no, let them go. And you stood your ground. You must have felt fear at this time.

Idris Jala: Yeah. Yeah. You are lawyer. You understand that. You know, We had a very big discussion and I said, look, I made sure that we agreed with the union that we do not hold a domestic inquiry because the union said if we hold a domestic inquiry, it was the Shell people who are conducting the inquiry and they said it was unfair.

So I then told them the deal is why don't we take an independent retired judge from the industrial court, let him or her conduct the inquiry. So that we will then conclude, guilty or not guilty, nothing to do with us, totally independent. And so we all abide by it. So, then, he found the guys guilty.

That's how we sacked them.

When the pressure was mounting from the presidential office, that I had to take all these guys back, I said, look, I didn't find them guilty. We've agreed the rules of the games were very simple, that the law of the land must be applied. And this was done independent of Shell. Therefore, I stood my ground. I said, no deal.

The problem with that is this. This is when I turn into this life is made up of black, white, and gray zone. Unfortunately, life is a lot of gray stuff. If you live your life thinking it's all black and white, you end up being miserable. Because in this gray stuff, there's a lot of negotiations that need to give and take.

So as we went through the negotiation, it was a heavy duty negotiation. Involved the minister of labor. And the Minister of Labour was negotiating. They got the union on the one side and me and my management team on the other side. We were negotiating how to deal with this. And the deal that was struck by the Minister of Labour was something in the beginning I rejected.

That was this. The guys that were sacked, about ten of them, who led the massive strike and taking our transport manager hostage, that deal was signed resignation letter, 14 days later.

That means I have to now accept the fact I've lost to the union pressure. I take them back into the office, reinstate them in their jobs. And then 14 days later, the letters that were already pre signed by them, they all resigned.

That was the deal that the Minister of Labour put forward, and I said there's no deal. I refuse to accept it. And in the meantime, the strike was ongoing because no workers could do any work in our depot, in our plant, because they were listening to the union.

So if it persists for another day, the whole country couldn't cook. It was a real problem. We were the only supplier of cooking gas in the whole country. By the third day, if it went, the hotels cannot cook, the homes cannot cook. The pressure was on me. So If I stood my ground, then I was putting the whole country on ransom.

So if you look at life, purely white and black, it was absolutely wrong for them to force me to accept these guys, because they were guilty. Not guilty by me, by the law of the land, by the independent inquiry. And so if I follow the rules, I should stick in there and say no deal. But life isn't like that.

So I then said, okay, negotiate. The negotiation ended up like this. One day they come in. I said, they come in, I will succumb to the pressure. You can write anything. I will take them back. But one day later they resigned. So that was it. So the front page newspaper says the CEO of Shell Sri Lanka succumbed to union pressure.

He was wrong. So I was crucified and in a public domain, meaning to say that I misjudged the union pressure and lost the union pressure and therefore it was a huge victory.

And to make matters worse, the management team who was on my side, they were with me the whole time around, felt betrayed.

They felt that they came and gave all their support to put me there and I became a coward. Then I was a coward and they betrayed their faith in me and I simply gave it up like that. They were the guys who believed we must stand in the white. This is not black, we must stand in the white, we must reject this.

What is righteous and what is right, we must stand in there. But life, you have to live with compromises. And compromises like that, that it will be face saving for them. At the same time, we'll get, at the end of the day, they're no longer in my, my employ.

That was it, so, I just explained to the guys, we will have the last laugh.

They didn't know what I was talking, I was talking in rhythm. So, and then everybody, they all resigned. So for a very long time, this story was embargoed. I never talk about this openly when I was working there because it was something that couldn't be reconciled in a public domain. Now that I've left, that many years have passed, and I feel that the story that can be told.

Ling Yah: And that was the end of episode 148 part one with Dato' Sri Idris Jala.

The transcript and share notes can be found at www.sothisismywhy.com/148

And make sure you stick around for next Sunday because we'll be releasing part two where we go deep into what happened after Shell in Sri Lanka, how he's built his career since, including becoming the current chairman of Pumandu, how do you set impossible goals and all things to do with leadership and career development.

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