This building brings back a lot of memories for me. Some really good ones, and some I’d rather forget.
For months now I’ve driven past it nearly every day, on my way to and from Print Plus, watching the refurbishment come along quietly in the background of my daily routine. Scaffolding going up, then coming down. New paint. New signage. And this week, the announcement that the Jabatan Alam Sekitar, Taman dan Rekreasi is officially moving in.
I knew this building back when it was TelBru’s headquarters, but even that chapter was really just one layer of a longer story. The organisation itself started life as Jabatan Telekom Brunei, JTB, a government department before it was corporatized. That corporatization ran from 2002, when TelBru was incorporated as a public limited company, through to 2006, when it became fully operational as the entity that most of the younger generation would recognise today. Years later, in 2018, the government took things a step further and established Unified National Networks, UNN, to consolidate the physical network infrastructure of all of Brunei’s telcos, TelBru, DST, Progresif and BIG, under one roof. By September 2019 that handover was complete, and TelBru itself rebranded that December, becoming imagine. The company I once worked for, in the building I once worked in, effectively doesn’t exist anymore, at least not under that name or in that form.
There’s something quietly fitting about that. Institutions get restructured, renamed, refurbished. Walls get repainted and new tenants move in. But the people who passed through those walls carry something forward that no restructuring can touch.
I met some genuinely wonderful Bruneians here who inspired me and wanted nothing more than to make a difference. People with integrity, who worked hard not for recognition but because they believed in what the organisation could be. Many of them remain friends to this day, and that’s a legacy this building gave me that no corporate restructuring will ever erase.
But this was also where I learnt, the hard way, about office politics and the laws of power. I was on the receiving end of it. It knocked my confidence and took a real toll on me, in ways that took time to work through.
Looking back, though, I wouldn’t change it. It shaped who I am as a leader today and reminded me never to treat people the way I was treated. If anything, it gave me a clearer sense of the kind of workplace I want to build wherever I have the chance to lead, one where merit and integrity carry more weight than politics and proximity to power.
Funny how the places that hurt us the most often teach us the biggest lessons. Funnier still that I’ve had a front row seat to this particular building’s own reinvention, watching it get refurbished on my daily commute, right as a new institution moves in to write its next chapter.
No bitterness. Just gratitude for the people, the lessons, and the journey this building was one small part of.
