FORWARD THINKERS
As i pen this month’s note, news of German fashion meister Karl Lagerfeld’s passing started appearing on my social media feed. Then came an avalanche of tribute on mainstream media. Chanel’s extremely low-profile CEO Alain Wertheimer probably put it best: “Thanks to his creative genius, generosity and exceptional intuition, Karl Lagerfeld was ahead of his time, which widely contributed to the House of Chanel’s success throughout the world. Today, not only have I lost a friend, but we have all lost an extraordinary creative mind to whom I gave carte blanche in the early 1980s to reinvent the brand.” For three decades, Lagerfeld thought out of the box, rejected the status quo and tore down the walls—all in pursuit of creativity and to present fashion in unprecedented ways. Like the style doyen, our cover feature personalities have succeeded in giving traditional businesses a modern and innovative spin to stay ahead of the competition. Aurum director and fourth-generation scion of construction conglomerate Woh Hup, Michelle Yong is on the cover. She reveals why she ventured into the world of start-ups and co-working spaces, which were uncharted territories for her family business. Also featured in the story are two other business minds, Foreign Policy Design Group’s co-founder and creative director Yu Yah-leng and Bynd Artisan co-founder and CEO Winnie Chan. Yah-leng aims to use design to remind younger generations of their roots and to cultivate the idea of design thinking among Singaporeans, while Winnie is breathing new life into the good old notebook at a time when digitalisation is rife. Read about the innovative ways of these three enterprising women on p.118 Another radical corporate leader in this issue is watch industry veteran Jean-claude Biver, with whom I had snagged a rare interview on p. 104. Having recently stepped down from his operational duties at the LVMH group watch division, he is widely respected for his achievements in the industry, bringing numerous brands from the bottom of the pile to the highest echelons of horology. In the nineties, he pushed for and brokered the deal for Omega to be the official timepiece of the James Bond franchise, a partnership that still exists till today. Also, this month, as we celebrate International Women’s Day (IWD), it is heartening to see that according to the Bloomberg 2019 Gender-equality Index, companies worldwide have significantly closed the gender gap with a 40 per cent jump in women in executive positions from 2014 to 2017. Like what this year’s IWD theme #Balanceforbetter suggests, recalibrating society’s gender ratio will only result in economies and communities to thrive.