At this blog, we have always tried to moderate and conservative in our claims. We have never stated that TBI will go bust on such and such a date; we do not want to indulge in speculation, and there’s no way that anyone outside Head Office can know exactly how bad the finances are. However,…
TBI (The British Insitute), an ailing language chain in Indonesia, has been reeling from the news that its former Head Office at TBI Sudirman (The Sequis Centre) has been closed due to “cash flow” problems. While they will publicly deny they are have serious financial difficulties, no intelligent person will doubt that a company which…
Today we would like to report the solemn news that TBI Sudirman has bitten the dust. Kicked the bucket. Passed away. In short, TBI Sudirman is ‘mampus’: dead. In the most disastrous turn of events in the history of TBI, they have been caught so chronically short of money that they are now unable to…
In this final part of this four part series of posts on TBI’s organizational structure- one which we have shown has been plagued by rent-seeking practices which have sapped the energy and competitiveness of the company from the start- we look at the real reasons for Mariam’s ouster in late 2015. Why was the TBI…
TBI is a company which has now had a lost half-decade or more. Between 2006 and 2010 a large number of new franchise schools opened under the guidance of Retty Setiawan, but in 2010 she was forced out of the company by Luke Preece, an Australian con-man who claims to have a degree in Geology…
“In a dysfunctional society or organization, people acquire wealth via corruption, rent-seeking, and theft. Perhaps they steal it at the point of a sword. Perhaps they acquire wealth through outright corruption. Perhaps they acquire wealth through holding a position in a completely dysfunctional management structure that requires internal politicking rather than actual performance.” That last…
In our last post about Preece, TBI’s bogan Machiavelli, we showed a photo of him handing out certificates at TBI Bali. Let’s use that as the starting point for the second part of this update. Specifically, let’s start with this question: How did we know that he was now at TBI Bali in the first…
“Belajar bahasa bisa sangat menyenangkan asal kita memiliki pengajar, tempat dan lingkungan yang mengasyikkan. Salah satu tempat belajar bahasa yang seru adalah ILC.” Bo’ong deh! Translated into English, the misleading sentence above reads: “Studying languages can be fun so long as we have a teacher and environment which is exciting. One such language school is…
During the sorry years of 2010-2011 when Luke Preece ran amok at TBI and ensured that all the other ex-pat managers at TBI were fired (dooming the company to its present funk of stagnation and rapidly shrunken market share), he was helped by Lilies Augustin, a self-confessed former bankrupt, who he installed as Marketing Manager…
In the past few days, a teacher who TBI Malang tried to recruit has come on Dave’s ESL Cafe and alleged that Scott Martin has told him that Indonesian law is ”a grey area” with regards to employing teachers on business consultant visas. In other words, Martin has been caught red-handed lying to potential teachers…
tbilanguageschool 