Leadership

Dahmakan’s beginnings were tumultuous at best. Yet, the shaky initial stages of offering a one-dish menu soon gave way to a rapidly-expanding healthy food delivery service that now uses an AI-controlled logistics system. dahmakan co-founder and CEO Jonathan Weins revisits dahmakan’s evolution from an idea to a reality - and the sheer tenacity that connected the two.

Li Ka-shing’s son Victor has a lot to live up to. Here’s how he, and any successor to a family business, can make a success of keeping it in the family

Striking the work-life balance has never looked so easy. Michelle Ongpin Callaghan shows us how it’s done

HKTDC’s Start-up Express is designed to give local small businesses a boost

John Wood is the founder of Room to Read, a global non-profit focused on child literacy and girls’ education. The Hong Kong-based organisation boasts the kind of superlative-smashing figures every entrepreneur dreams of. Room to Read’s programmes have benefited over 11.6 million children around the world since it was founded in 2000, distributing 20.6 million children’s books—including 1,300 original Room to Read titles—and training more than 10,000 teachers in the process. It’s perhaps no surprise that Wood remains driven to hit ever more impressive targets. In his former life as an executive at Microsoft, achieving impossible-sounding metrics was part of the job description, as Wood candidly outlines in his first book, Leaving Microsoft to Change the World. The title of the book is something of a spoiler for what came next. A 1998 vacation in Nepal changed everything for Wood. The number of children he encountered without access to books in school left a lasting impact, and eventually led him to leave Microsoft to do something about it. This year, Wood released his third book, Purpose, Incorporated, which uses his business acumen and experience in the charitable sector to recommend how modern companies can do more good in the world. His message is clear: entrepreneurs shouldn’t try to change the world once they’re successful; trying to change the world can be a key factor in why they become successful. “My goal when writing the book was to show that purpose is not antithetical to profitability, which I think has been a view in the business world for way too long,” says Wood. “Too many people think that purpose means giving away the store, or that purpose is something you silo off into an underfunded and understaffed CSR department—a cynical box-ticking exercise” “This book is saying let’s take a radically different approach. Let’s find a way to bake purpose into the very DNA of the company—to actually build purpose into the business model and use it as a competitive advantage.” Below, Wood outlines five reasons why building social impact into a startup from day one can reap dividends for the entrepreneur as well, of course, as doing a lot of good in the world.