Southeast Asia

Backward Glances over a Traveled Road

To run a business in Thailand, you need patience and flexibility, advises alumnus Jonathan Hayssen, who opened a high-end crafts boutique in Bangkok 12 years ago.

PHOTOGRAPH BY PETER CHARLESWORTH

HAVING GONE FAR DOWN A PATH LESS traveled, Jonathan Hayssen began to wonder if he hadn’t taken a wrong turn. In the heat and humidity of rural Thailand, he had spent an entire day searching for highly skilled artisans he hoped would supply Rasi Sayam, the high-end crafts boutique he was about to open in Bangkok. One prospective vendor had died. Another no one had ever heard of. A third produced goods Hayssen characterized as “disgusting.” Finally, he found one man who had a single basket that met his standards. “This is ridiculous,” Hayssen, MBA ’81, recalls thinking. “Driving through all these villages to wind up buying one basket for a dollar fifty.”

But in the 12 years since he founded Rasi Sayam, which means “radiant Thailand,” Hayssen’s persistence has paid off in many ways. For every dead end Hayssen came across while scouring countless small villages, he also discovered little-known artists of striking talent. More than 200 now sell their products through Rasi Sayam, supporting themselves and as many as 1,000 family members while sustaining a heritage of artistry that was in danger of extinction.

Rasi Sayam’s influence has extended far beyond the individual livelihoods of its vendors. Located in a beautiful wooden home in the upscale Sukhumvit district of Bangkok, Rasi Sayam has been credited with reinvigorating traditional Thai craftsmanship. The shop’s success has helped transform the way Thais think about interior design and their own culture.

“We had an impact on making Thais appreciate natural things,” says Hayssen, who has been compared to another American, Jim Thompson, who was responsible for the resuscitation of Thailand’s silk industry after World War II. “There was a time when people wanted glitzy stuff—naugahyde, fake leather, and electronics. Thais who were getting wealthy didn’t want things that reminded them of their youth and poverty.” These days the tastes reflected at Rasi Sayam have become “the norms of good taste in Thailand,” Hayssen says.

Establishing a successful and culturally influential business was hardly what Hayssen had in mind when he went to Thailand to work with Mechai Viravaidya in 1981. Better known as “Mr. Condom” in the West, social entrepreneur (and now Senator) Mechai founded the Population and Community Development Association, where he orchestrated revolutionary family planning campaigns that dramatically slowed the country’s rapidly growing population. Hayssen turned down a position with McKinsey to become Mechai’s resident MBA—for $4,000 a year.

Soon afterward, he found himself regularly working at Khao-I-Dang, a refugee camp populated by 150,000 displaced Cambodians, “all with horror stories to tell.” “It’s hard to complain about your $4,000 salary when all these people had their relatives bayoneted in front of them,” Hayssen says.

After working with Mechai for three years, Hayssen established himself as a Bangkok-based management consultant. An assignment with the U.S. Agency for International Development got him acquainted with many of the craftspeople who would later become Rasi Sayam’s vendors.

Twenty years after graduating from the Business School, Hayssen, 47, remembers thinking that if things didn’t work out, he’d simply return to McKinsey, where he had spent the summer while at the GSB. His supervisor there had told him he could “always come back. But if you start working here, two years from now you’ll never take the development job and you’ll always regret it.” Though he deeply enjoyed his summer at McKinsey, Hayssen has no regrets—even though the 1997 collapse of the Thai economy provided plenty of opportunity to rethink taking a path many consider but few actually take.

Thanks to the Thai baht’s devaluation of more than 50 percent, sales and profits at Rasi Sayam skyrocketed—in local currency. Yet, while Hayssen was rewarding his staff with bonuses equal to five months’ pay, he saw his own cautiously feathered nest egg shrink by half in dollar terms. “That was a real big blow,” Hayssen says, from which he has yet to recover. And at the same time, many Thai shops switched their store inventories away from more expensive imported items toward the niche Hayssen had spent eight years developing.

“The competition didn’t hurt us as much as it could have,” Hayssen says. “But it stifled our growth,” he adds, before noting that his competitors’ wares are “still nice, and your cousin in Toledo probably won’t know the difference.”

Having been in Thailand for more than 20 years, Hayssen’s advice for those interested in working or starting a business overseas is simple and straightforward. “Be flexible,” he says. “The corporate culture you want to establish may conflict with local culture.” As an example, he cites his own challenge of getting Thai staff members to think and act on their own after being schooled by rote and taught to do as told by superiors.

“Be patient,” he advises, noting that even in relatively advanced Thailand, “nothing works as quickly or as efficiently as one is used to in the U.S.” Finally, Hayssen says to always delegate paperwork to a “trusted local partner.” Relying on one’s own foreign language skills, no matter how fluent, is an invitation to fall afoul of local bureaucracy.

On a more personal level, Hayssen says that working with everyone from subsistence farmers to cabinet ministers has made him a much broader and more capable individual. But being so far away also has had its costs—what he calls the “ex-pat guilt syndrome.” That’s the account that registers missed weddings and gatherings with friends, and not being there as parents age or siblings take ill.

Returning to his development roots, Hayssen recently coauthored a U.N. publication with Mechai on how nongovernmental organizations can become more self- reliant and entrepreneurial. With Thailand now painfully working its way out of its economic malaise, Hayssen hopes to spend less time at Rasi Sayam and perhaps to begin writing on international development or consulting with “risk-seeking philanthropists.” Or even teaching high school back home in Wisconsin. However, one doubts whether Hayssen—after two decades overseas—will ever leave Thailand, because to see him behind the mahogany counter of Rasi Sayam is to see him at home.

—ROBERT L. STRAUSS, MBA/MA '84

Regina Ip, Sloan '87

On Guard in Hong Kong

WHEN GOVERNOR Chris Patten sailed out of Hong Kong in 1997, ending more than 150 years of British rule, he left behind a smoothly functioning civil service. One of its top career professionals was Regina Ip, Sloan ’87, now secretary for security of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR).

Professionally, Ip has fared well since the transition: In 1998, Beijing appointed the then-immigration director to her current post. The first woman under either government to head the Security Bureau, Ip is responsible for internal security, law and order, drug control, and immigration. Some 63,000 civil servants and more than 10,000 volunteers serve under her.

But personally, the limelight has proved difficult. Ip has been roasted in the press for what opponents see as hard-line stands on Mainlander immigration and on the Falun Gong. Her critics have dubbed her “Red Regina,” and last summer she was cruelly caricatured in a comic book. What was worse, her 12-year-old daughter was included in the parody. Ip fired back in an op-ed piece in the South China Morning Post. She called the criticism sex discrimination posing as political satire; her critics called her oversensitive.

Ip, who was born and raised in Hong Kong, remembers when women there were accustomed to being judged by the fit of their cheongsam. And even though a quarter of the top officials in the new government are women, she says her hometown has not yet outgrown its sexism. Upset by the attacks, she sought the advice of old friends from Stanford.

“Larry Diamond of the Hoover Institution told me if I want to continue with my job, I simply have to develop a thick skin. He is absolutely right. I also need a willingness to accept the increasing loss of privacy and freedom to pursue my private life. It’s a heavy price that any person interested in high public office is well advised to pause and think about.”

Meanwhile, Ip has more pressing concerns. “The events of September 11 are a compelling reminder that danger occurs where it is least expected,” she says. “We cannot take for granted that [terrorist attacks] will never occur here. After all, Hong Kong is an international city with considerable U.S. interests, including a substantial American community of 50,000 people and frequent U.S. warship visits.”

From her headquarters in Hong Kong Island’s Central District—a room so outfitted with security devices she likens it to “a big safe”—Ip has reviewed the SAR’s contingency plans for security and worked on new legislation to combat terrorism.

“The counter-terrorism task is complicated by immense pressures to loosen control of the boundary with Mainland China for tourists and business people,” she says. “Human rights groups are concerned that we might take the opportunity to seek excessive law enforcement powers or roll back rights. We have no hidden agenda.”

Ip graduated from Hong Kong University and then studied Elizabethan poet Sir Philip Sidney at Glasgow University. She set aside her scholarly aspirations and, in 1975, joined the Hong Kong government. A widow, she lives with her daughter in a spacious harbor-view apartment above the bustling Central District. There the security chief reads for relaxation; John LeCarré is a favorite.

Ip sees few differences between the two administrations aside from the fact that the Chinese language has become more widespread in the government. “I think in both languages,” she says. “Sometimes I feel I am moving across different worlds.” The most difficult issue for her since the transition is skepticism about the new government’s commitment to “one country, two systems.”

“It may be that a few people have not yet come to terms with the resumption of Chinese sovereignty over Hong Kong,” Ip says. “But times have changed. China is modernizing rapidly across the board. I believe we have done well maintaining the two systems under Chinese sovereignty. In sum, I have a clear conscience.”

—JANET ZICH