Oh man, they’re all getting younger

I was having lunch with a 40-something hotelier Thursday at Prego, The Fairmont Hotel, when I bumped into Ian Wilson, the hotel’s general manager, sitting at another table.

I said hello across the room as one does on such chance encounters.

My lunch “date” asked me, “Who is he?” I told him. He said, “He looks far too young to be a general manager.”

“He’s more than a GM; he’s also the regional boss for the group,”I boasted.

“Gee, they are getting younger,” my “date” said. Because he was paying for lunch, I didn’t want to say that was because he and I were getting older.

That same evening, I ran into Peter Gowers, the new Asia Pacific boss for InterContinental Hotels. Gowers looks 16 but is really 35.

He’s got these big round eyes that at a glance you’d think he was David Archuleta, that sweet, dewy-eyed, round-cheeked American Idol contestant that everyone thought would win America’s biggest karaoke singing competition but thank goodness, for once, Americans got it right and voted the better man, David Cook. Yea!

Gowers’ ascension to the IHG throne in Asia Pacific was through the Bass channel. He was with Bass when that company bought Holiday Inn which then bought InterContinental and when the company decided to split hospitality from its other businesses, Gowers moved over to hospitality where he became chief marketing officer.

I didn’t have much of a chance to spend time with Gowers at the Jones Lang LaSalle cocktails held at the Hotel InterContinental prior to its annual hotel investment conference in Singapore on May 23. Being the new boy on the block, everyone wanted to meet him and I wasn’t about to barge in and rain on his parade.

Everybody too wanted to say hello to Richard Hartman, the new CEO of Millennium & Copthorne PLC. It felt a bit weird seeing Hartman in his new role at his old stomping ground – he used to be what Gowers is today – but Hartman was, as ever, at ease, mingling with old friends and colleagues.

In his interview with The Transit Café, Hartman had said that the reason he took on the new job was because he couldn’t see himself retiring. “I retire, I die,” he said.

I then ran into Jeffrey Flowers, who I thought had retired from Marco Polo Hotels, but no, he’s now an advisor with the Dusit Thani group in Thailand.

“My retirement lasted two minutes,” he told me.

I then had a strange conversation with two hoteliers about “dates” and what men looked for in a “date” – don’t ask me how it got started but I do find conversations can get really interesting with hoteliers if you can steer them away from talking about crystal chandeliers or the thread count of bedsheets.

“Intellect, conversation, personality,” they told me. These two hoteliers were, I’d say, in their 50s. Wisdom comes with age, as you will soon find out at the end of this column.

Then as I was waiting for a taxi outside the hotel, who should I run into but Gowers. He too needed a taxi. So while we both waited for our taxis, we chatted.

I asked him, as one does in casual conversation at taxi ranks, if he had problems in Asia looking as young as he did. (It wasn’t so long ago when people asked the same question of me and I felt it only fair to subject someone else to this stupid line of questioning.)

“Not at all,” he said. “It is true in Asia, age is revered but I think in business, it’s whether you can do the job that counts.”

Funny, that was exactly my answer – hmm, let me remember – heck, I can’t remember how many years ago when I was asked that same question.

I like the fact that Gowers took a taxi like us common folks. The new Chief Minister of Penang, for instance, rides the bus to work and flies AirAsia. There’s something to be said about these next generation leaders.

Then just as I was starting to wonder if it was time for me to retire and how long I’d last, I saw a headline in a newspaper that read, “Getting older may bring wisdom”.

The article was about the fact that while brains do deteriorate with age, older brains are better at transferring “the information they’ve soaked up from one situation to another”.

“A broad attention span may enable older adults to ultimately know more about a situation and the indirect message of what’s going on than their younger peers. We believe that this characteristic may play a significant role in why we think of older people as wiser,” said one expert.

I went to bed, the wiser that night.

Catch more of Yeoh Siew Hoon at the Transit Cafe – www.thetransitcafe.com

by Yeoh Siew Hoon