Lunch at the Top

This month, dtacblog conducted its “Lunch at the Top” interview with Prathet Tankuranun, the chief technology officer of dtac. His venue of choice sits high on the 26th floor of Chamchuri Square, on the same floor as dtac’s network operations center. There is no fancy executive dining room on that floor. Instead, the venue was dictated by Mr. Prathet’s lunchbreak routine. These days, 15 minutes and a boxed lunch brought to his desk by his assistant is all he gets. Mr. Prathet is a man on a mission, namely dtac’s “One Cell Site One Hour” rollout. His long workday starts at 8.30 am. At 7 pm sharp, while others are heading home, he begins a daily meeting with his network team. He then wraps up a few more loose ends and leaves the office at about 9 pm. Given that Mr. Prathet spends more than 13 hours at his office, he has little patience for “death by PowerPoint.” Instead, he meets with his team in a table-less room where armchairs are arranged in a circle and participants are encouraged to speak frankly—and concisely. The business of network quality is always one of utmost urgency. “Testing the performance of our network around the…

In this month’s Lunch at the Top, dtacblog asks dtac’s Chief People Officer Nardrerdee Arj-harnwongse about work’s next normal COVID-19 accelerated the need for dtac’s transformation due to changing consumer habits dtac is a pioneer in flexible work in Thailand, with thousands of employees working remotely. dtac’s head of human resources says leaders must empower their teams with a strong purpose. dtacblog’s Lunch at the Top series interviews top executives from dtac and Telenor to understand how they view telecommunications’ changing role in Thai society. But due to COVID-19, “lunch” has mostly been transformed into video calls. And no one is closer to such changes than Chief People Officer Nardrerdee Arj-harnwongse. As dtac’s head of human resources, she’s spearheaded the largest flexible work scheme in Thailand, with dtac announcing last year that remote work is here to stay indefinitely for all roles that allow it. We spoke with Ms. Nardrerdee this January, just as Thailand was experiencing a second wave of COVID-19. The company headquarters had been maintaining a 30 percent occupancy level to enforce social distancing throughout the year but had just tightened rules to reduce it further. LEADING IN A CRISIS “The new normal impacts dtac in every…

Update: Dilip Pal was dtac's Chief Financial Officer from 2017 to 2020For this month’s “Lunch at the Top”, dtacblog sat down with Dilip Pal to discuss 12-figure investments over some dosas.dtac Chief Financial Officer Dilip Pal’s choice of an Indian restaurant for his “Lunch at the Top” with dtacblog is a seemingly straightforward pick. But Mr. Pal is quick to point out India is more like a continent than a country, and that the vegetarian delights of Saravanaa Bhavan come from Southern India while he is from Kolkata, to the East. This point of culinary geography reflects Mr. Pal’s own itinerary. Before joining dtac just as the mobile operator’s 30-year concession for its most essential spectrum was ending (more on that later), Mr. Pal’s early career was marked by a willingness to work all over India, which he described as an early exposure to cultural diversity that served him well when working abroad. He joined Telenor as the Chief Financial Officer of Grameenphone, in Bangladesh, before joining dtac three years later, in 2017. As he recently announced that he would leave dtac to pursue other opportunities, we asked him to reflect on his time with the company.“I just completed three years…

We met with Marcus Adaktusson, dtac’s Chief Corporate Affairs Officer, at Muteki by Mugendai. Heading well east of his original Sweden isn’t limited to his culinary choices. Mr. Adaktusson has now lived in Asia for over seven years: Bangladesh, Singapore and, for the last 10 months, Thailand. In less than a year, he has led the key teams behind some of dtac’s most defining moments, from the transition out of its 30-year spectrum concession to the subsequent spectrum auctions, the last of which included Thailand’s first 5G spectrum. We spoke to him just as COVID-19 thrusts mobile operators once again in the spotlight, this time as a service critical to maintaining productivity in the age of social distancing. “I need a purpose to get up and go to work in the morning,” he said. “And right now, dtac’s purpose of empowering society through connectivity has never been more important to our customers and to our other stakeholders.” That point is underscored by the spikes in data usage that followed Thailand’s March-May lockdown. From January to June 2020, traffic increased 44 percent as users flocked to apps like Zoom, Microsoft Office and LINE, quickly adopting digital solutions to remain productive despite…

Sadat Ibne Zaman takes over dtac’s Strategy and Transformation division at a critical time. The COVID-19 epidemic has both upended all economic forecasts and deeply transformed consumer behaviors. Reporting directly to dtac’s CEO, Mr. Zaman must therefore chart a completely new course for the company, a mission he explained to dtac blog over a casual lunch at Somboon Seafood. “The current situation is an opportunity to make a huge shift and digitize all of dtac’s customer touch points and services, automating them as much as possible. We were already in the process of doing this, but the COVID-19 outbreak has greatly increased the urgency,” Mr. ZamanHead of Strategy and Transformation, dtac He notes that dtac is now in a strong position to focus on innovation and transformation. Transitioning out of the company’s original spectrum concessions, which expired in September 2018, was the company’s all-encompassing mission for two years. But dtac finally emerged with its strongest network ever. “dtac has been getting the fastest network speeds in many independent measurement reports for the past few quarters. And we are committed to continue improving our network coverage with the new 700MHz spectrum rollout,” he said. The arrival of Mr. Zaman also marks…