The millennials’ Champ
Dusit Thani scion Siradej Donavanik is thinking big thoughts and underscoring ‘ experiences’ as he helms the group’s Asai hotel offshoot.
If the millennial generation ever proclaimed a poster child, he or she would not be far from Dusit Thani heir Siradej Donavanik.
Mr Siradej is entering a business world completely different to that faced by his grandmother when she founded the group 70 years ago. Now more than ever, rising business leaders are called upon to grapple with the consequences of progress: inequality, the destruction of the environment, and the disappearance of uniqueness in a world engulfed by globalisation. In this atmosphere, the 32- year-old, dressed in a spraystarched white shirt and a wide- lapel grey suit, casts a reassuring figure.
Champ, as he is also known, looks unusually young, partly because of his buzz haircut — the only one he ever gets — and partly because of his still- slim figure, built on organic products and yet to be married to a steady diet of business lunches and breakfasts.
Mr Siradej, who recently wed childhood friend and architect Natapa Sriyuksiri, is playfully brazen. Like a young kid who smiles after willingly disobeying his elders, he seems to take pleasure in challenging old wisdom. “I don’t know how much I can talk about this,” he says as he furtively glances at his public relations manager, several decades his senior.
“They won’t like what I am about to say, but I will say it anyway.” Mr Siradej then launches into a story of how he and a couple of work colleagues started drinking in the conference room before taking the party to a wine bar. “That’s it,” he says. “These days wine bars is the most I do.”
His public relations manager, now visibly sweaty, heaves a sigh of relief. “I am open, perhaps too open,” Mr Siradej says. “Like my father.” She seems to approve.
Unlike old- guard businessman elders, Champ makes a show of candidness, straying from previously agreed- upon scripts. Starting with a canned answer, he looks up and asks if everyone is satisfied yet. “More to the point of your question … ,” he’ll begin as he invariably proceeds to peel through an answer like layers of an onion until his retinue finally declares he has gone deep enough.
For the last nine years, Mr Siradej has been in charge of expanding Dusit Thani, traditionally focused on full-service hotels, into new revenue streams. During his time, for example, the company created Dusit Foods Co and invested in NR Instant Produce Co (NRIP), a maker of ready-to-cook/ready-to-eat meals, seasoning powders, dipping sauces and juices.
After finishing his Bachelor of Arts in economic and political development at Exeter University in Britain, Mr Siradej went to work at a securities firm and later at HSBC Thailand. He asked his dad about joining the family business “because I thought real estate would be an outlet for my creativity”.
Mr Siradej has been managing director of the company’s Asai brand for five months now. “It is a separate corporate entity,” he says. “People at Dusit don’t know much about what is going on with this brand, and that is the way I like it.”
These days wine bars is the most I do. SIRADEJ DONAVANIK DUSIT THANI HEIR
He is also in charge of running a restaurant business, a passion he traces to his first job “flipping burgers” at McDonald’s. “It was a school requirement, and it was more of a factory than a kitchen,” he clarifies. He later went on to wash ingredients at French and Italian restaurants.
Now he’s one of the partners behind the Bangkok iteration of Ginza Sushi Ichi, affiliated with the Michelin-starred Tokyo restaurant of the same name. “We only use fish straight from Tokyo’s Tsukiji Market,” he says.
At Dusit Thani, Mr Siradej has confronted an “old guard” bent on doing things the way they were done in the past. Many of them, he says, have been employed at the company for more than 20 years, which contrasts strongly with his Asai team, most of whom are in their middle 20s.
“I did a lot of surfing and not so much studying at Exeter,” he says. “I don’t hire based on grades or universities, I hire based on creativity, which is a better judgement of acumen than anything else. All decisions are taken democratically, including the design of the toothbrushes and whether we should have them in the room or not.”
Mr Siradej’s approach and emphasis may clash with that of Dusit, which has been shaken up by the appointment of its first non-family chief executive, Suphajee Suthumpun. Despite differences, the board was ultimately accepting of Asai’s concept, he says, once the economic benefits of the model were laid on the table.
While Champ speaks confidently about profit margins, he seems most at ease when discussing big ideas. He preaches the gospel of “experiences”, a doctrine fuelled by Instagram, local coffee shops, Gucci tigers and an almost pathological obsession with the “exotic”.
Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari’s recent New York Times best-seller, changed his life, he says: “This is such a humbling read that has made me think about everything in my life and my place in it. I can’t wait until it comes out in Thai to distribute it to everyone I know.”
In a sense, Mr Siradej and the generation of up-and-coming business owners that he emblematises are the embodiment of the central tension between progress and well-being that frames Mr Harari’s book.
According to Mr Harari, human history developed in leaps and bounds, marked by three central revolutions: cognitive, agricultural and scientific.
The cognitive revolution allowed humans to organise in larger groups by creating fantasies like money, social class and states. The agricultural revolution allowed men to leave their nomadic lifestyles and enabled some groups in society to accumulate wealth. The scientific revolution is now giving man unprecedented control over his environment and his genetic make-up.
These three revolutions have left, and are leaving, some people better off and others worse off. If you ask the Bangladeshi woman working in a factory 12 hours a day, she will say she is better off as a hunter-gatherer, Mr Harari says. A New York stockbroker, or Champ, whose family has been accumulating wealth for generations, would not.
In fact, the glorification of experience on which Asai relies is itself a product of the cognitive revolution, Mr Harari would argue. The preoccupation with collecting as many and unique experiences as possible was born out of romanticism, an 18th-century European movement. “Even what people take to be their most personal desires are usually programmed by the imagined order,” writes Mr Harari. A chieftain would never have thought of travelling to a rival territory as a pleasant way to spend a break.
Asai is precisely designed to allow guests to imbibe as many local experiences as they can fit into their travel itinerary. “The new luxury is not about surroundings, but about experiences,” Mr Siradej says.
Asai’s restaurants are meant to give guests a taste of the national cuisine, and hosts are trained to suggest local restaurants. “I never cook for foreigners,” Mr Siradej says. “And there is nothing I dislike more, when I go to a foreign city, than being recommended the hotel’s restaurant.”
He says he would probably be a farmer if he weren’t in the hospitality industry: “I am fascinated by farming and how it impacts us as a species.”
For better or for worse, writes Mr Harari, history cannot be stopped — the complicated web of winners and losers, and the constant competition between companies and individuals, makes it impossible to return to a hunter-gatherer society, or for that matter to return to how the world was organised yesterday.
Now, in perhaps cynically fatalistic fashion, Champ has been tasked with advancing the interests of a major conglomerate, globalisation, modernity. But he is proceeding cautiously.
The responsibilities on the shoulders of young entrepreneurs like Mr Siradej are larger than those of their parents, and they are taking the cue. Customers now demand that companies take definite stances on hot-button issues like race, gender and religion, and they are prepared to boycott companies that take positions different from their own.
“In business, I am not obsessed or passionate about building the biggest and the best of something,” Mr Siradej says. “I simply want to help promote people and benefit the environment by building something unique. I genuinely want to have a positive impact.”
His corporate responsibility initiatives run the gamut from conservation to employment schemes. “I always tell the Asai team that If we can’t promote staff after three years, we are not doing our jobs properly.”
The world has started to philosophise about the consequences of human inventiveness. More than the ancestors who founded the companies they now lead, Mr Siradej and his generation are being called upon to handle the tensions that strain modernity.
Mr Harari worries that the future is now in the hands of a very small number of entrepreneurs, that morality will be more important as humans gain more power to create and to destruct, and that corporate decisions which in the past affected thousands now reach hundreds of millions.
The responsibilities of tomorrow’s business world are enormous, but Mr Siradej’s thoughtfulness inspires hope.