On the 5th November 2019, AIA
Toastmasters Club held a dinner to bid farewell to our club patron, Tang Pei
Shih, who was leaving AIA to pursue further career opportunities. The dinner was held at Crystal Jade
Restaurant at VivoCity. Present at the
dinner were current President Jack Sia; Immediate Past President Eric Tan, DTM;
former presidents Linda Lee, Liang Ye, and Zhuo Shu Zhen, DTM; and past
Executive Committee members and agency force stalwarts June Lee, Heny Chen, and
April.
In addition to being our club patron, Tang
Pei Shih was Head, Agency Training & Development. She has served in AIA for 22 years, and in
that time was instrumental in building up the agency training programme to be
the best in the industry. AIA Group held
the number one Million Dollar Round Table company status for nine consecutive
years running as of 2023, with one in four AIA consultants qualifying as MDRT
members, representing the top 5% of financial services practitioners worldwide. AIA Singapore separately maintains the
largest agency force in the country, over 6,000 professional financial services
consultants, trained through an Institute of Banking and Finance-accredited
curriculum. Building an agency training
system that produces that concentration of top-tier practitioners, in an
industry where most training programmes produce mediocrity at scale, is not a
modest professional achievement. It is
the kind of institutional infrastructure companies spend decades failing to
replicate.
Why the Club Owes Her
As our patron and a member of the club,
she was pivotal in securing funding and management support, and is part of the
foundation of our success. A
Toastmasters club inside a corporation survives or dies on exactly this kind of
institutional backing, not on enthusiasm alone.
Plenty of genuinely excellent corporate clubs have collapsed the moment
leadership stopped seeing the value in funding them. AIA Toastmasters Club did not become the club
it is by accident, and Tang Pei Shih’s fingerprints sit on that outcome as
directly as anyone’s.
She is well loved, highly respected, and
she will be missed. Twenty-two years is
a long tenure to build something, and considerably harder to hand over
gracefully than it is to build in the first place. The room that gathered to send her off,
filled with the very people whose own presidencies she helped make possible, is
the clearest evidence available that the send-off was earned rather than merely
owed.
Terence Nunis, DTM
| Division Advisor, District 80 Division M | Club Advisor, AIA Toastmasters |
Past President & Founder, Awesome Toastmasters
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