With a stellar career that includes over 30 years of international C-suite experience, Jenifer Thien’s journey shows the power of leveraging work experience
Jenifer Thien had a successful career at Mars Incorporated, a company famous for its confectionery products like M&Ms and Snickers, but also a big player in the pet food industry with brands like Pedigree, Whiskers and Royal Canin. During her 25-year journey with Mars, Thien took on diverse leadership roles and drove significant business transformations in supply chain, procurement and risk management. She also spearheaded sustainability initiatives long before they became mainstream.
“I had a really fantastic career,” says Thien, whose last role with Mars was as global chief procurement officer based in Chicago—the first woman and first Asian to be appointed to this vital leadership position. “I was quite fortunate to have been able to do a lot of things with them, but I’ve always wanted to have a second chapter where the theme is more about giving back or paying it forward. It’s about leveraging my experience to help others and helping companies create value.”
It’s okay that you have this diversity, but if your organisation isn’t open, transparent, respectful, or humble enough to be curious and listen to other opinions or accept another style, then it’s moot, right?
In 2019, she retired from Mars and returned to Malaysia, just before the Covid-19 pandemic. She set up Grit and Pace, a consultancy focused on advisory work. Along the way, she met mentors and sponsors who encouraged her to get involved in board work, seeing it as the perfect avenue to add value. “I have experienced situations where, if the executive team has a very strong partnership with the board, you’ll know the business will do very well. Conversely, I’ve also seen situations where very good executive teams, very good talent, can’t reach the peak of their performance because they don’t have that kind of rapport with the board. So for me, it makes sense that I feel like I can play a part and add value in that whole equation. That was why I chose to get myself involved with board work.”
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Thien now serves as a non-executive independent director on the boards of several public-listed companies in Malaysia, the UK and Singapore, where she emphasises the importance of representing all shareholders without any conflicts of interest. She highlights the critical nature of quarterly meetings, which are the main touchpoints with the company. “This is the part where board directors have to be quite deliberate, because you have a very small window of interaction every quarter. So you’ve got to be deliberate about the impact you want to drive in the organisation. There’s also [the challenge of understanding what’s going on] if you’re not in the business [daily]. That’s where you need to be perceptive and ask the right questions. And listen really well to what is being said and told to you. What I’m trying to say is that this is where experience comes in. Observe things you can pick up from a conversation. ‘I heard that...’ ‘I think something is not right.’ ‘Maybe I’ve seen this before.’ Whatever it is, I think experience is very important—asking good questions and listening intently.”
