When I was in my early 20s, I spent a summer living and working in Taipei and Hong Kong. It was a wonderful experience. I'll never forget my apartment in Hong Kong's Causeway Bay. It was a small single room with a small bed and an even smaller bathroom. The bed didn't fit me -- at all -- and my legs would hang over the bottom of it. I couldn't stop hitting my shins on the bottom of the frame at night. The bathroom didn't have a dedicated shower, just a hose coming out of the wall. So everything would get wet. It also took me 15 minutes the first morning I showered to figure out how to make the water hot. Eventually I got it.
Despite all this, I remember being enchanted with Hong Kong. Here was this tiny little place with very little developable land that had managed to become, through trade, finance, real estate and other things, one of the wealthiest places in the world. Capitalism! I could also feel the connection to Toronto. Hong Kong has one of the largest Canadian expat communities in the world. In fact, I ran into one of my high school math teachers in a bar in LKF. That was wild. He had moved there with his wife to teach. I suppose because of all of this, I have tended to follow the region a bit more closely.
Last July, the British government promised a path to citizenship for the 3 million or so Hong Kong residents who hold or are eligible for a British National Overseas passport. This passport, as I understand it, was given to citizens at the time of the 1997 handover. Though I don't know how utility was actually derived from it over the years. Before last year's announcement, this document didn't include the right to stay in the UK. However, now it does. And the UK government expects that some 300,000 Hong Kong residents are going to take advantage of this in the first five years of the program. And indeed, according to the Financial Times, 2020 was the first year since SARS back in 2003 that the region lost people -- it had a net outflow of about 39,800 people.
What will this mean for Hong Kong? Well, Bank of America estimated earlier this year that capital outflows from Hong Kong could reach £25 billion in the first year of the program. But maybe this is being too conservative. Here in Canada, capital outflows from Hong Kong hit a record last year at C$43.6 billion. But this too could be an underestimation, as it doesn't include transfers below C$10,000 and probably a bunch of other transfer methods. How much money is actually flowing outward?
This weekend the Financial Times published the above survey results showing sentiment around leaving Hong Kong. Surveys are, of course, a funny thing. Saying you might probably potentially do something is a lot different than actually doing something. But for what it's worth, about a quarter of pro-democracy supporters (which is maybe half of the population?) responded by saying that, yes, they would be prepared to leave. If you include those who responded no, but that they would reconsider and leave if things got worse, the number increases to about 70%.
I don't know how meaningful all of this becomes for Hong Kong. Time will tell. But it has me thinking about my tiny bed and tiny shower in Causeway Bay.
Image: Financial Times
"Very little remarkable comes out of bureaucracies for a simple reason. The members of the bureaucracy seek to be beyond reproach. Reproach is their nightmare, their enemy, the thing to avoid at all costs. And the remarkable feels like a risk." --Seth Godin
I went into the office yesterday to sign some documents (they had to be originals) that I have been working on finalizing for the last 6-7 months. I'm not going to share what the documents were or who was involved, but I will say that it took the entire 6-7 months to get two lines added to the agreement. No other changes. Just the addition of two lines -- okay, it was more like a line and a half. On the one hand, I am horrified that such simple things can take so long in the hands of bureaucracy. On the other hand, this is not an outlying situation.
I say this not to bitch, but to instead make a case for the remarkable. As I was signing the documents yesterday, I couldn't help but think of the writing of Seth Godin and quotes like the one at the top of this post (which is from a post called "Bureaucracy = death"). Because one of the professional goals that I have set for myself is to always strive to create things that are remarkable. I want people to look at whatever the thing might be and think to themselves, "yeah, this is extraordinary."
But here's the thing about remarkability. It lives on the edges. It's by definition not ordinary. It is extra-ordinary. And so there's risk. Maybe it won't work. But you know, that's okay. It also thrives on novelty. You have to be the first and you have to be the best. Because when it does work, it'll very quickly become the ordinary. But this too is okay because it's how the world moves forward. Remarkability is not a one time event, it is something that is continuous.
That we have organizations with cultures and processes that systematically eschew the remarkable makes me sad.
Fred Wilson wrote a great post last month about leadership. In it, he compares what he calls visionary leadership to operational leadership. Here's a snippet:
I like to keep things simple and in my simple mind, leadership comes in two flavors, visionary leadership and operational leadership. Founders are almost always visionaries (if they aren’t, run in the opposite direction) and hired CEOs are almost always operators.
The post goes on to explain the dynamics between these two types of leadership. Vision, he argues, needs to come from the top. You need someone setting direction at a high level. Operational leadership doesn't have to be this way, and often isn't. You can hire for it.
In some special cases, you have leaders who are both. Another snippet:
Leaders who can provide both operational and visionary leadership are a rare but special breed. When you find one, get on their bus and stay on it for as long as you can. It will be an incredible trip.
I have seen all of this play out in the real estate development space.
There are people who are great at identifying new sites (land) and coming up with fresh and innovative ideas, but it is clear that they need an operator or two around them. There's nothing wrong with this pairing.
Development is also a very long and slow game and you need people who can operate -- deeply in the weeds -- over extended periods of time. Persistence and tenacity are crucial. Patience I guess, too.
If this topic is of interest to you, I recommend you check out the rest of Fred's post.
When I was in my early 20s, I spent a summer living and working in Taipei and Hong Kong. It was a wonderful experience. I'll never forget my apartment in Hong Kong's Causeway Bay. It was a small single room with a small bed and an even smaller bathroom. The bed didn't fit me -- at all -- and my legs would hang over the bottom of it. I couldn't stop hitting my shins on the bottom of the frame at night. The bathroom didn't have a dedicated shower, just a hose coming out of the wall. So everything would get wet. It also took me 15 minutes the first morning I showered to figure out how to make the water hot. Eventually I got it.
Despite all this, I remember being enchanted with Hong Kong. Here was this tiny little place with very little developable land that had managed to become, through trade, finance, real estate and other things, one of the wealthiest places in the world. Capitalism! I could also feel the connection to Toronto. Hong Kong has one of the largest Canadian expat communities in the world. In fact, I ran into one of my high school math teachers in a bar in LKF. That was wild. He had moved there with his wife to teach. I suppose because of all of this, I have tended to follow the region a bit more closely.
Last July, the British government promised a path to citizenship for the 3 million or so Hong Kong residents who hold or are eligible for a British National Overseas passport. This passport, as I understand it, was given to citizens at the time of the 1997 handover. Though I don't know how utility was actually derived from it over the years. Before last year's announcement, this document didn't include the right to stay in the UK. However, now it does. And the UK government expects that some 300,000 Hong Kong residents are going to take advantage of this in the first five years of the program. And indeed, according to the Financial Times, 2020 was the first year since SARS back in 2003 that the region lost people -- it had a net outflow of about 39,800 people.
What will this mean for Hong Kong? Well, Bank of America estimated earlier this year that capital outflows from Hong Kong could reach £25 billion in the first year of the program. But maybe this is being too conservative. Here in Canada, capital outflows from Hong Kong hit a record last year at C$43.6 billion. But this too could be an underestimation, as it doesn't include transfers below C$10,000 and probably a bunch of other transfer methods. How much money is actually flowing outward?
This weekend the Financial Times published the above survey results showing sentiment around leaving Hong Kong. Surveys are, of course, a funny thing. Saying you might probably potentially do something is a lot different than actually doing something. But for what it's worth, about a quarter of pro-democracy supporters (which is maybe half of the population?) responded by saying that, yes, they would be prepared to leave. If you include those who responded no, but that they would reconsider and leave if things got worse, the number increases to about 70%.
I don't know how meaningful all of this becomes for Hong Kong. Time will tell. But it has me thinking about my tiny bed and tiny shower in Causeway Bay.
Image: Financial Times
"Very little remarkable comes out of bureaucracies for a simple reason. The members of the bureaucracy seek to be beyond reproach. Reproach is their nightmare, their enemy, the thing to avoid at all costs. And the remarkable feels like a risk." --Seth Godin
I went into the office yesterday to sign some documents (they had to be originals) that I have been working on finalizing for the last 6-7 months. I'm not going to share what the documents were or who was involved, but I will say that it took the entire 6-7 months to get two lines added to the agreement. No other changes. Just the addition of two lines -- okay, it was more like a line and a half. On the one hand, I am horrified that such simple things can take so long in the hands of bureaucracy. On the other hand, this is not an outlying situation.
I say this not to bitch, but to instead make a case for the remarkable. As I was signing the documents yesterday, I couldn't help but think of the writing of Seth Godin and quotes like the one at the top of this post (which is from a post called "Bureaucracy = death"). Because one of the professional goals that I have set for myself is to always strive to create things that are remarkable. I want people to look at whatever the thing might be and think to themselves, "yeah, this is extraordinary."
But here's the thing about remarkability. It lives on the edges. It's by definition not ordinary. It is extra-ordinary. And so there's risk. Maybe it won't work. But you know, that's okay. It also thrives on novelty. You have to be the first and you have to be the best. Because when it does work, it'll very quickly become the ordinary. But this too is okay because it's how the world moves forward. Remarkability is not a one time event, it is something that is continuous.
That we have organizations with cultures and processes that systematically eschew the remarkable makes me sad.
Fred Wilson wrote a great post last month about leadership. In it, he compares what he calls visionary leadership to operational leadership. Here's a snippet:
I like to keep things simple and in my simple mind, leadership comes in two flavors, visionary leadership and operational leadership. Founders are almost always visionaries (if they aren’t, run in the opposite direction) and hired CEOs are almost always operators.
The post goes on to explain the dynamics between these two types of leadership. Vision, he argues, needs to come from the top. You need someone setting direction at a high level. Operational leadership doesn't have to be this way, and often isn't. You can hire for it.
In some special cases, you have leaders who are both. Another snippet:
Leaders who can provide both operational and visionary leadership are a rare but special breed. When you find one, get on their bus and stay on it for as long as you can. It will be an incredible trip.
I have seen all of this play out in the real estate development space.
There are people who are great at identifying new sites (land) and coming up with fresh and innovative ideas, but it is clear that they need an operator or two around them. There's nothing wrong with this pairing.
Development is also a very long and slow game and you need people who can operate -- deeply in the weeds -- over extended periods of time. Persistence and tenacity are crucial. Patience I guess, too.
If this topic is of interest to you, I recommend you check out the rest of Fred's post.
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