A Tennis Court In Quezon City.
A Training Floor In Cebu.
Alex Eala learned tennis on a makeshift court in Quezon City. Two weeks ago she brought Centre Court to its feet, beating the defending Wimbledon champion – the first Filipino to reach the second week of a Grand Slam. The world called it a breakthrough. Filipinos recognised something familiar. “I want to make my own […]
The Demand Story In SE Asia everyone is missing
Southeast Asia property investment
I was at a children’s birthday party in Liloan, near Cebu City, in an area of low cost housing. The whole street came out to celebrate. Doctors, nurses, lawyers, teachers. An old fashioned community gathering. The kind I remember from growing up in Kew. This is the Philippines nobody talks about in an investment deck. […]
Singapore is not a map of Southeast Asia.
It’s a Command Post
Singapore is not a map of Southeast Asia. It’s a Command Post. Western companies and entrepreneurs keep making the same bet: land in Singapore, apply the China playbook, expect the region to follow. It doesn’t. I’ve spent over twenty years trying to understand China. Scale. Speed. One Government, one five year plan, one language, one […]
Most People Go To Asia And Come Back The Same.
The Rare Ones Don’t
Most People Go To Asia And Come Back The Same. The Rare Ones Don’t I reached out to an investment adviser in Australia last week. He mentioned, almost in passing, that he was travelling to Ho Chi Minh City with his family. We invited him to meet us while he was there. A briefing on […]
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 […]