Meet Michal Tkocz from Swire Management Programme

During my first three years, the programme took me through four rotations at Swire Properties and one at Swire Pacific. I had the opportunity to learn business skills ranging from operations, through to investment and marketing, to broad-strokes strategy.

My first two postings within Swire Properties’ retail portfolio in Hong Kong were really a study in customer centricity – probably the most important takeaway anyone can wish for in their first job. Engaging in both portfolio management and customer relationship management allowed me to think of our customers on a daily basis, observe how they interacted with our product, and listen to what preferences and pain points they had.

The next posting was with Swire Properties’ strategic marketing department, which was a chance to switch gears and join the creative process behind our brand DNA. Each day presented a different opportunity, be it working with designers and architects on bringing globally famous museum exhibitions into our shopping malls, helping with the launch of new customer-facing apps, researching world-wide city life hotspots to infuse vibrancy into a newly developed neighbourhood, or drawing up financial projections for new projects.

In my subsequent posting with the Swire Properties’ development and valuations team, I got to use my core real estate investment skillset within a Hong Kong property context, modelling new investments and helping the team at various stages of ongoing developments. It was a chance to get involved with our key strength as a business: placemaking. This is about creating world-class mixed-use places from scratch as a canvas for all aspects of people’s lives – a truly inspiring task.

Most recently, I moved to a group-level role, helping to map out and accelerate digital strategy and execution across companies within Swire Pacific. It’s a really stimulating task with exposure to many business models, since it involves determining how digital strategy can support every operating company’s business strategy. It also touches on core aspects, such as culture, capabilities and capacity for absorbing change. The level of detail in questions we face can vary quite widely – from “How should our Group engage in emerging digital tech?” to “How do we roll out Robotic Process Automation in one of our companies?”

I feel like the great variety of jobs and challenges has set me on the path of developing a truly comprehensive skillset. Most importantly though, it has brought me together with people who I can learn from, who I can achieve things with, and who have become good friends.