Plenary session 

Plenary session October 5, 2016, Wednesday at 9:30-10:30
Topic: Wangdao Accounting

      Mr. Shih serves on the boards of the ABW family (Acer, BenQ, and Wistron) and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. He is the former Chairman of the Asia Business Council, a former member of the International Advisory Panel for Malaysia’s Multimedia Super Corridor, a Governor of the Asian Institute of Management, and Honorary Chairman of the Taiwan Excellent Brand Association.

      BusinessWeek named Mr. Shih one of the 25 Top Managers of the Year. Time featured him in its article “60 years of Asian Heroes” for turning Taiwan into a PC-manufacturing powerhouse. In September of 2007, Mr. Shih, as Taiwan’s Special Envoy, attended the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Summit in Sydney, Australia.

      After almost 45 years’ experience in business practices, Mr. Shih found that the key factor of a sustainable business does not lie in its fancy products, or competitive business models, but lies in the business leaders’ styles and business cultures. And Mr. Shih calls these “Wangdao”.

      "Wangdao" is a way of organizational leadership, which is the necessary world view for a new era leader. Pursuing mutual success, Wangdao businesses are ambitious but do not seek to control everything. They avoid confrontation, and though they avoid confrontation and are not domineering, they are able to hold on to their advantage and achieve great success. In contrast, “the overbearing way” businesses consider only their own interests. They stick to the zero-sum and winner-take-all competition model and the law of the jungle (“eat or be eaten”). They might be big, but they are not sustainable. Wangdao is the specific manifestation of "cultural" spirit, "policy" thinking and "implementation" ability, to achieve three core beliefs - "Sustainability, Value Creation and Interest Balance". Wangdao Business Leaders are committed to balancing career achievements and humanistic care, pursue all-round excellence of individuals and society in General. Following this ideal, individuals, companies, and organizations of Wangdao will have a better chance of sustainable development and long-lasting prosperity.

      Traditionally, the ultimate goal of an enterprise is to maximize shareholders’ welfares. Only if enterprises fulfill the goal, then they start to think about the stakeholders’ welfares, and last the issues of corporate governance, corporate social responsibility (CSR) or environmental sustainability. However, Wangdao puts emphasis on sustainability first, and then the stakeholders’ welfares, and last the shareholders’ welfares maximization.

      With the implementation of IFRS, Mr. Shih attempts to incorporate Wangdao, IFRS implementation, and six-dimension values together, in order to develop a systematic and competitive tool for enterprises with international uses. This is a three-year project, and the proposed outputs include guidelines for the enterprises, academic research papers and books.

      We all know that an enterprise’s competitive power equals its value over cost. However, enterprises usually focus on direct values, tangible values, and the values of those we can immediately observe. These three explicit perspectives are over-emphasized nowadays. Mr. Shih urged that we should turn our attention to the implicit perspectives, including indirect values, intangible values, and the values of those we may observe in the future.

      The most durable, or we say competitive, implicit value lies in the core value of an enterprise. Core value may be expressed in an enterprises’ brand value, corporate culture, corporate mission, or the mechanisms to balance the interests. This soft concept should be started form the organizational culture, and should be implemented from top managers to every employee in the company.

      All these issues can actually be related to the contents of managerial accounting. If you want to know more about the combination of Wangdao and accounting, come to Taipei next year, and Mr. Shih will give you a more impressive speech.

Reference: http://www.wangdaomp.org/about.php