Bangkok, for a Meeting
Bangkok this week, for the APJ management meeting — two days of regional reviews in a hotel ballroom that could have been in any city on earth, followed by evenings that could only have been here.
The meeting itself: numbers, pipelines, the standing argument about headcount across three time zones. I am still the Bermuda guy in a room full of Asia hands, taking notes on the business and the geography at the same time. First note, underlined: this region is not one market. It is twenty markets wearing a trench coat.
Nobody in that ballroom will remember the quarterly forecast. What we will remember is the food street outside it — wok stalls with their tower of flame, boat noodles in broth dark as tea, mango sticky rice at midnight, a whole city eating outdoors at plastic tables at an hour when my other home is asleep. The ballroom catering was French and forgettable. The street food cost less than the coffee upstairs, and I would fly back for it alone.
Management lesson, if I am forced to extract one: the formal program is never the whole meeting. The region got explained to me over noodles, by the people who actually run it, in the order they actually care about. Every organization chart should come with a list of where its people eat.