#8 Communication, Culture and Kindness with Aziph Mustapha

Episode 8 is joined by two-time TedxTalk speaker, kindness advocate, and head of Culture Transformation & Employee Engagement at Celcom Axiata, Aziph Mustapha! Much like his vibrant personality, Aziph has a unique mix of corporate, start-up and government leadership experience. He was an entrepreneur for a decade before entering an IT-related governmental agency before being head-hunted for the Malaysian Innovation Foundation which he headed for 6 years. Now, he’s in the corporate world and in between his full-time jobs, he is an international keynote speaker and has spoken overseas in events like the ISPIM Innovation Summit in Australia. He also organizes speaking events like the Perak Festival of Ideas which earned an entry in the Malaysia Book of Records for the most number of events held within a single week. But that’s not all, he also runs a weekly live interview show on LinkedIn with influential people all around the world. Be sure to tune in to our latest episode this Monday to hear Aziph talk all about culture, communication, and kindness!

We also discussed the following data points during the episode:

1) In Malaysia, grassroots innovation is one of a few high impact programs intended to empower the bottom 40 percent of the income pyramid. A recent example of grassroots innovation is when we had a critical shortage of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) during the first lockdown. Many NGOs, individuals (and even kids!) helped our front liners by making creative PPE garb from what they had!

2) According to the Department of Statistics Malaysia, major economic sectors across Malaysia registered a 16% fall in labor productivity in the second quarter of 2020 with total hours worked dropping from an average of 8.5 billion to 6.2 billion hours. The National Health and Morbidity Survey 2019 revealed that close to half a million of Malaysia’s population have had their mental health affected by the Covid-19 pandemic.

3) A 2010 Harvard Business School survey done in 136 countries found that generous people were happiest overall. A 2020 study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that while 68 percent of the people believed selfishness was a common trait among those who made more money, in reality, people with selfless attitudes and behavior had higher incomes and also more children.

Get connected with Aziph here.

Check our his TedxTalk videos here and here.

Read our transcript for this episode here.