Andrew Tani, Founder & CEO of Andrew Tani & Co talks about history of Andrew Tani & Co.

What is AndrewTani & Co. today, not only as a brand, but as a company?

We got our first big break in March of 1988. I was invited to take the place of the Minister of Education as keynote speaker for the annual gathering of the national association of personnel managers. I was sitting in the last row at the back when my name was mentioned as the replacement for the keynote speaker. The man beside me said, "Who is this guy? We don't even know who he is." I walked to the front with my knees shaking. I was 33 years old at that time. I think I did well, because the following day it was in the papers, and I got invited to speak at 20 cities over the coming weeks. My topic was "corporate culture", so they called me, "Mr. Corporate Culture." 

We proceeded to help two of the country’s largest groups of companies the following year, because they were at that corporate culture event. It all started there. We went on to help more Chinese family-owned conglomerates, 17 by last count. In 2001, we got a break to help Bank BNI, a government bank, and also the country’s first central bank in 1946. The CEO engaged us after an interview that was triggered by an ad that extolled, “Teams at work, troops at war,” in a local paper. That was our first state-owned enterprise.

From there, we got an opportunity to go for a beauty contest with Bank Indonesia, the country’s central bank. We were selected, and helped the governor from 2003 to 2008. After that came Pertamina, the national oil company and the country’s biggest business conglomerate.

In the mid-2000s, we served our first government ministry, the Ministry of National Education. In order to get there, we had to prove ourselves by helping the second largest Muslim organization here called Muhammadiya-Aisyiyah. Muslimat Nadhlatul Ulama and other government ministries followed suit.

We are now  busy helping public companies to heighten their organizational effectiveness by improving their quality of management, leadership and process. We are in the process of organizing the People & Organization Development Community, for practitioners of the science and the art. We are also leading a movement to measure the national inertia.

As you can see, the broad spectrum of clients that our company have helped in Indonesia range from private sector conglomerates owned by businessmen who would risk going to hell to make a profit, to state-owned enterprises, to government ministries, and finally faith-based NGO's under the leadership of people who are focused on going to heaven.