The World Capital of Business

What a week this has been? I have never had one like it, that is for sure!

It started with the networking meeting Monday and Tuesday on the Kowloon side of the city. Lots and lots of information and input from the more than 50 people (and potential customers) from all over the world. Tuesday evening I moved to a cheaper hotel on Hong Kong Island. A 4-star hotel in central Hong Kong for what equals USD 40 per night. Sometimes you are just lucky!

Since then I have basically just been doing one thing. Meeting people! One after the other, non-stop. Meetings that have been set up through IMD classmates, old colleagues, friends, connections on www.linkedin.com or through people from the network meeting. A good share of the people I have met have been Danes. I guess like most other nationalities we stick together and help each other whenever we can.


When I first got to Hong Kong I felt that everything was so rushed, too much efficiency to really be enjoyable. Somehow this efficiency absorbs you and you become part of it. You are grabbed by the flow and fall into the rhythm of the city. I have never done so many meetings in such a short period of time as here. Everything is so close, you never spend more than 15 minutes going anywhere, very often it is just around the corner. At the same time everything is so focused on business that you can set up a meeting in a matter of hours. I have met people here who makes their living out of ‘just’ knowing and connecting people. Like Nokia! One meeting constantly leads to the next, “I have this guy you need to meet” people say all the time. It is like you find a little piece of rope in the sand, but as you start pulling it becomes longer and longer and eventually turns into a net. As you try to reel it in it just gets bigger and bigger. I have discovered an amazing amount of things the last week – a whole new world, actually - and still I suspect that I have only seen a fraction.

Today I took the one-hour train ride to the Chinese border, got a visa and then ventured into Shenzhen, a city that in 20 years has transformed itself from a sleepy fishing village to a fifteen million people production facility! I had set up two meetings in Shenzhen, one with a local company and one with an multinational company with an office there. Of course I wanted to get the information from the people that I met, but most of all I wanted to get a feel for China. I have heard so much about this place the past ten years, but I had never been there. There is only one way of experiencing these things and that is by going to see for yourself. As a foreigner in China you are a completely blind and deaf. You cannot understanding anything people say and you cannot read the sings. Neither can they understand you. You just hand over a note or a business card to the taxi driver with the address written in Chinese and then hope that he takes you to the right place. Today he did.

Tonight we went for a few drinks with an amazing 25th floor view of the Hong Kong skyline. It beats Manhattan by miles. It is just such much wider, bigger, more colourful and spectacular.

The hotel is fully booked tomorrow, so in a few hours I need to pack my things again and go to my friend Morten’s place, where I will spend the last night. We are heading out on an all-day boat trip tomorrow arranged by the Swedish community here. The smart thing would be to stay back, sleep and get some work done, but I don’t want to miss this chance. Tomorrow night there are new parties waiting and Sunday morning I head off to Singapore. I might actually have another very early morning meeting on the way to the airport, so is the Hong Kong way! And in Singapore there is another 5 meetings lined up so far with more on the way.

I guess I have said before. The second half of the year is no less intense than the first, it is just much more fun because you are doing it to yourself. It is still only a few hours of sleep per night, but it is OK because you are in charge yourself. It is happening because you cannot stop chasing opportunities. It is driven by excitement, not by force or fear! I love it!


LIVING IN LAYERS

You are not in doubt that Hong Kong always has been in lack of space. Everything is in layers. The places where people live...

… and where they work.

Even the trams….

the busses….


and the boats are in layers!

Business, business, business!!



Sunset over Hong Kong Island seen from the Kowloon side…


and a part of the Hong Kong skyline just as the lights start to come on.

At the Bruce Lee platter on the ‘Walks of fame’.

In Shenzhen. Five years ago this area was a swamp!

From Cool Kenya to Hot Hong Kong

Wow, what a change of scenery it has been.

- From dry and cool (22C) Kenya to hot and very humid Hong Kong.
- From the dusty roads of the Nairobi to the busy waters between Kowloon and Hong Kong Island.
- From the bunk beds on Ngong road to the 8th floor on Harbour Plaza hotel.
- From the desperate poverty of the Kibera slum to the Ferraris and high rise office buildings.
- From the wide and bright laughs of the Kenyan’s to the complete absence of even just a little smile from the people of Hong Kong.

It is amazing that you can travel between two such extreme contrasts in less than a day. Kenya was a first for me and so is Hong Kong, so I have the privilege of exploring them both with eyes that have not yet been coloured by experience and opinion. The only things I can see that they have in common are that they were British colonies and that they therefore drive in the wrong (left) side of the road and use the same electrical plugs.

In Friday’s diary entry I asked why Kenya is so underdeveloped, when there are so many smart and hard working people in the country. A number of different Kenyan’s (from old colleagues to the taxi driver that took me to the airport) have replied to that questions and they all say the same:

What Kenya is lacking is leadership!

What they mean by that is that the Kenyan government is too busy lining their own pockets to help their country develop. There is no doubt in my mind that if Kenya had a Nelson Mandela they would leap out of poverty as quickly as South Africa is doing it. They already have everything else that it takes.

The next two weeks there are no classes and no project. The time is reserved for job hunt and on-campus-recruiting (known as OCR) where a large number of companies will come on campus to conduct interviews. I will be spending those days in a somewhat different way, though.

I have chosen to start my own company upon graduation and am therefore working on a business plan that I aim to have ready in November. I have conducted most of the operational analysis, but now I need to know whether the customers will want to buy such a product at all. That is why I am in Hong Kong!

An old friend of mine (a Belgian that I met in Indonesia, who now lives in Hong Kong. Long story, I know) is hosting a networking meeting for 50 people from 28 countries that all are potential future customers of mine. They are here to get to know each other and I am here to get to know them. The networking meeting will run over the next two days. Tomorrow they will do a lot of short 5-10 minutes presentations and Tuesday morning I have been given a 15-minute slot to present my idea. It is obviously a truly unique opportunity to be able to pitch your idea for fifty customer representing most of the world. I am not doing a sales pitch, though, but am purely here to get an idea of what it is I need to deliver for them to buy my product. To truly understand your customer, as they say.

Wednesday, Thursday and Friday I have set up a number of other meetings with potential customers and a supplier in Hong Kong and Shenzen. Over the weekend I will move to Singapore, where I have set up a number of similar meetings. Sounds expensive, but with the exception of these first three days (where I need to stay at the hotel for the networking meeting) I will be staying with old friends, so it is actually not that bad.

All day today I have been working on my presentation for Tuesday and the questionnaire for the subsequent interviews, so I have not seen anything of Hong Kong yet. I hope I can find some time on Saturday to do that.

Now I better call my girlfriend and go to bed. The jetlag has hit me harder this time than it usually does.

Thorsten

Welcome to the worlds second largest container port!

This is the view from my hotel. Notice the constant fog. It is very, very humid here.

Exactly the same skyline, just taken at night. Hong Kong is one big island of colourful light!