The moment of revelation for Vivian Lau, chief executive of two very successful organisations, came as she stood at her mother's funeral. 'I had spent my entire career for profit. I lived and worked for the P&L [profit and loss] of a company. I had lost sight of the P&L of life,' she said.
Looking around her at the funeral, this youngest of a family of 10 brothers and sisters rested her focus on her siblings and came to the conclusion that her mother, still by far the single greatest influence in her life, had achieved something far greater than anything she had done in 10 years of a full-on, head-down career.
'I thought: 'Mum, you did a great job. You raised 10 successful companies' It was the turning point for me and it helped me redefine the meaning of success and the purpose of life.'
Faced with the revelation that she had become so consumed with her career as a Shanghai-based information technology consultant in the then dazzling new world of digital media that she had lost perspective on the core of human existence, she resigned, returned to Hong Kong and then went to Inner Mongolia to work on community projects raising funds for small children.
'I started working with the women there. In Inner Mongolia it's the women who look after education because almost all of the men will have gone to work in the mines. The only time the father returns is either when he retires or because he has died.'
What these women faced was something outside Lau's experience or imagination. Members of a culture under profound threat from both the increasing influence of the Han Chinese and the desertification of the traditional Great Plains, they nonetheless seemed to embrace each day with new energy as though everything was possible again. To Lau, this was inconceivable.
