Saigon’s Pudong
Everyone knows what happened next!
I was standing on a rooftop in Ho Chi Minh City last month with a local fund manager who has run a Vietnam-only strategy for fourteen years. He pointed across the river. “You know the Bund in Shanghai? That’s our Bund. You see the flat vacant land on the other side? That’s our Pudong.” I […]
The Book I wrote in a Hotel Room.
The Lesson that changed how I work.
It was a rainy weekend. I was alone in my hotel room in Guangzhou, looking down on the sodden streets below. Nowhere to be and a lot on my mind. I’d been thinking about the concept for years. Every meeting that went nowhere, every western executive frustrated that no one wanted to talk business. It […]
You Can’t Fake It
The Forgotten Weapon. Nobody leads with passion any more. They should.
The meeting had been going for hours. We were pitching two brothers. They run one of the Philippines’ major universities and were considering expanding into our region. They’d toured the site, heard the numbers, sat through our case for why this matters: world-class training, global shipping partners, young Filipinos from poor families building careers at […]
Hold the Line
The Tourists and the Ones Who Stay
A colleague told me last week he was pulling out of a Manila deal. Too slow. Too complicated. Too many moving parts with no clear timeline. He’d been in market four months. Araw ng Kagitingan – Day of Valor – was the same week. The irony wasn’t lost on me. The Philippines marked Bataan last week – […]
Time-Wasters
No Agenda. No Decisions. The Perfect Meeting.
Before writing a single page of proposal on our local PPP project, we’ve had four meetings. The Mayor. The Vice Mayor. The Mayor’s son. Plus a young attorney of generous proportions who says very little, spends most of the time on his phone, yet appears to miss nothing. Every meeting involved plenty of food, small […]
Asia Wasn’t Built by Committees
Start a Revolution…today!
History proves you don’t need an army to change the market – you just need a spark! I was in a meeting in Manila the other day when a senior business leader said, “It doesn’t take a lot of people to start a revolution.” This got me thinking about revolutions, disruption and global upheavals. We’re […]
Me versus We
Why the Squeaky Door gets Replaced….
From an early age, I was taught that the squeaky door is the one that gets the oil. This is typical western thinking. We’re raised to be soloists – standing out, grabbing the spotlight, speaking with confidence and getting the deal done in record time (preferably before lunchtime!) But as soon as you step into […]
The New North-South Corridor
A Fresh Approach for Entrepreneurs and Investors….
For as long as I can remember, we’ve referred to the relationship between ‘East and West’ as the answer to everything, including new food recipes, innovative fashion designs and even maintaining world peace. When I was a young boy growing up in suburban London, my Father travelled to what was then referred to as the […]
Turning Left
Leave the old rule book at home….
One of the first of many mysteries you encounter when moving to SE Asia (especially here in the Philippines) is the traffic. For a westerner used to driving in places like Sydney, London and even Hong Kong, it seems like total chaos. You wonder how on earth anyone gets anywhere! Before long, the traffic becomes […]
Strategy v Execution in SE Asia
Execution is harder than it looks….
It’s wonderful to see all of the recent attention and interest in South East Asia and ASEAN. When I moved to the Philippines last year, I didn’t expect to find myself in the centre of the region which has become the subject of so much attention (events, conferences, missions, podcasts and Government reports – see Invested: […]