The Man Who's Seen It All

This post was originally published on my ex-company Synovate's website in September 2009. 

Written by renowned foreign correspondent, writer and editor Anthony Spaeth, it was a tribute to visionary CEO and my boss for 12 years Adrian Chedore, who retired after 30 years in market research.

I'm republishing this piece as it was not only beautifully written, but because it carries so many lessons they don't teach you in business school. More than anyone, Adrian taught me what it meant to be a leader. 

Adrian Chedore, newly arrived in Hong Kong in 1979

Adrian Chedore, a 27-year old slave in the London advertising biz, was downing some beer in a pub when his flat-mate mentioned that his employer, AGB McNair, had a short-term job available in Hong Kong.

“I said, `Sure. How long is it for?’” Chedore recalls. “And he said, `Six months.’

“I think we were on our sixth pint.

         

“Now I happen to have thought that Hong Kong was in the Caribbean – I really did – and six months in the Caribbean sounded like a pretty good idea.

        

“And there were only two applicants for the job anyway.”

         

So on July 11, 1979, with preparation that can only be called minimal – “Actually, I didn’t realise that everyone didn’t speak English in Hong Kong” – Chedore touched down at Kai Tak airport. Three days later, he met a bloke working for one of AGB McNair’s competitors at the Press Club in Wanchai.

“He said, `Adrian, you have no chance of succeeding here. We’re too big. Why don’t you join us?’

         

Chedore chuckles: “If ever there was a better motivator. To be fair, the guy paid for the beers.”

         

A little more than 30 years later, Chedore is retiring as one of the true giants in the market research industry. He and six colleagues created Asia Market Intelligence in 1991, riding the rise of Asia and coming through the Asian financial crisis in glory. After AMI was acquired by Aegis in 2000, Chedore became the global CEO of the company’s research business and insisted the company could be led from Asia rather than Europe or North America. He rebranded the company in 2003 and Synovate was born.

Synovate had US$968 million in revenues in 2008, up from $231 million in 2000. It has offices in 61 countries and over 6,000 employees, but Chedore says the key to its strength is that it’s grown big without growing staid or stuffy.

“When we started AMI we said we’d never employ more than 25 people,” he recalls. “When we sold, it was something like 600 employees. We wanted to keep the feeling of a team. It’s quite soft, this idea, and it’s hard work. But if you can keep that feeling, you can do anything. If you have people who buy it, who don’t have an in-built cynicism. And that kind of cynicism is much less in Asia, particularly Hong Kong, which is such a positive place.”

Chedore, 57, has not only lived through the amazing rise of China and the rest of Asia. As one of its pioneer market researchers, he was the man with his finger on Asia’s pulse. This is the story of the man who saw, and measured, it all.

Chedore likes to tell stories, loves to tell stories – it must be the Welsh blood – and none so fondly as those about his leaving Britain for Asia and his arrival in Hong Kong. “That date is the date my life changed,” he says.

Here are his stories, in his own boisterous, self-deprecating and compelling voice.

“In London, life was so regulated,” he recalls. “You had to get the train to work at a certain time. You had to leave the pub at a certain time because it was going to close. You had to get to the fish and chips shop because it was going to close.

“I get to Hong Kong and there was all this freedom. You ate whenever you wanted, you drank whenever you wanted. It never stopped!

“After six months, I said there were two things I’d never do again. I will never commute to work and I’ll never iron a shirt. (I had discovered Chinese laundries.) And I haven’t ironed a shirt since.”

But Asia in 1979 was far different from the continent we know today. Japan was the only democracy; all the rest of the countries were dictatorships, authoritarian states or, in the case of Hong Kong, a colony. The electronic media was rigidly controlled and the only regional print publications were the Far Eastern Economic Review and the three-year old Asian Wall Street Journal (with a measly circulation of 20,000). China had yet to recover from the Cultural Revolution and the Gang of Four, and was almost as weird as North Korea is now. Chedore recalls his first trip to Sham Chun (which we now call Shenzhen) in Feb. 1980.

“I went with a good friend who came out to visit. It was classic, wasn’t it? I’d been to Manila and Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur and Singapore. They all had these fascinations: you had your camera out every few seconds. But in Sham Chun, you barely took your camera out. There wasn’t anything.

“It was certainly a very foreign land, really quite alien: basic, backward. It was the strangeness – having everyone look at you like you landed from another planet – and yet it was boring.

“I came back to the reality of Hong Kong and thought, `I don’t have to go back there again.’”

Three months later, Deng Xiaoping declared Shenzhen a special economic zone, changing China, Asia’s and Chedore’s destinies.

“The lack of information in Asia back then was so great we were collecting relatively basic information that other countries would take for granted,” he says. “How many people smoke cigarettes, how many people drink beer? Is this brand considered old or young? It made research easy: it was all new information. Now, if you find something really interesting, it’s probably wrong!

“I was interested in the simple things. In 1979 it was relatively rare to see a boy and girl walking down the street holding hands, let alone kissing. Or a girl not wearing a bra. The emphasis that housewives put in cleanliness in the home. Or family feelings being so intense in Asia. As a marketer, you couldn’t think of a family of 2.3 kids and a dog. Everything was spread over several generations, and that’s how purchasing decisions were made in Asia.”

After a few years getting acquainted with Hong Kong, China and Southeast Asia, Chedore discovered Japan – and an entirely different Asian universe.

“I didn’t start doing research in Japan until the late ‘80s,” he says. “That was when I realized I knew nothing yet about Asia. My confidence zone with Asia was blown apart there.

“I was overwhelmed by how different it was. I was doing work for IBM. IBM would give a guarantee on their products, and that was a negative for the Japanese. For them, you selling me your product is the guarantee. That’s just one example of the Western approach going right up against a brick wall. I seriously considered moving to Japan. ”

But China’s rise kept him in Hong Kong.

“Our first job in China was for Heinz baby food,” he recalls. “The question was: Would government crèches or ordinary mothers pay for a very cheap baby cereal instead of feeding babies congee, or whatever they fed them. We did the research with governments and mothers, and the amazing thing was the answer was predominantly no. Because they couldn’t afford it. That tiny difference in price was too much for the consumer.

“But there was a second amazing result. The tiny percentage of consumers who could afford the difference in price was so large. It was a market. In most places, you say there is a good market if 20% of the people can be reached. In China, a niche market is actually a huge market.

“The rise in prosperity in China is simply mind-boggling,” he says. “When you see people buying a microwave or a washing machine or a car, or even a motorbike – those were elite products in the 1980s. Think of the number of families that are crossing that threshold each year: you’re creating a new country. In fact, the number of consumers crossing that threshold every year is the size of many countries. It’s been an explosion of buying power!”

The threshold for Chedore’s career came with the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, which humbled competitors and made his company only stronger.

“We started AMI in 1991 and by 1996 we probably had six offices, opening around one a year,” he says. “And then this crisis hit, and we were in the middle of the storm. I decided all our competitors were cutting costs, laying off expats – expats were flooding out of Asia – and I decided we’d do the opposite. We would not only carry on as usual but we’d expand, open new offices, maintain all our employees. You see, we had never borrowed any money, never acquired anything, and we did everything out of cash flow.

“And to make a really big statement, we held our yearly conference at the Oriental in Bangkok, which, by the way, we got very cheaply.

“It was a defining moment for AMI. We were lucky, of course: we could make it through. But we came through as the leading agency in Asia. We had loyalty from our staff and customers, and it was an interesting case study in how to weather adversity.

“And I think you can only do that kind of thing in Asia. We need the passion, courage, the fact that people are less cynical or skeptical. We had a team that had worked together a long time, were friends together, and we were determined to get through this thing. It allowed us to leapfrog. To me it was a wonderful moment, the one my coming to Hong Kong was leading to. I came for only six months and now I was staying and committed to Asia.”

Chedore’s next commitment was to Aegis when it purchased AMI in 2001. Under the terms of that deal, Chedore agreed to stay on for three years.

“The CEO of Aegis at the time was Doug Flynn,” he recalls, “and soon after we were acquired, we were sitting by a pool at a conference in Miami. Doug asked me what I was going to do after my three-year contract with the company expired. I said, `I’ll either sit on the beach or run the whole company.’

“He called me a few days later and said, `I can’t wait three years.’”

Chedore was made CEO.

“Then Doug said to me, `When are you going to move to London?’ I said, `I’m not going to.’ He said, `You have to,’ and I said, `No I don’t. Believe me, companies don’t have to be run in that way.’

“I’m very strange in what I believe in management. There’s no headquarters for Synovate. I’m here, the head of human resources is in New York, the CFO is in London, the COO is in Chicago. I believe quite passionately in this. We’re international. We don’t have a nationality. The problem with the hub-and-spoke management system is when Brazil wants to deal with Malaysia, they have to go through London. It’s crazy. Why not let people connect directly without going through the hub?

“Synovate is one brand, one vision, but not a vision dominated by one centre. It all came from my learning in Asia. If you ask a person if he wants to work for a small company or a big one, they usually say they’d prefer a small company. But they also want the benefits of a large company: the resources, the economies of scale. Everybody wants a small company’s culture with the infrastructure of a large company – without the bad bureaucracy, and you have to guard against that.

“That’s what we have at Synovate: We’re the biggest small company in the world. We’ve been by far the fastest growing research company in the world both organically and by acquisition. Which to me means the slightly zany style of management works.”

Chedore will continue to work out of Synovate’s Causeway Bay office through the end of 2009, taking a ten-day break in October for a honeymoon with Bonnie Kwok. (They’ve chosen Tahiti, Chedore says, because it was one of the most difficult destinations to get to.) Then he’s going to enjoy not working for a while, at home in Stanley and at the diving resort he owns in Puerto Galera, the Philippines.

“I’ve been working 36 years,” he says, “and as everyone knows, in Asia you pack in two years of work for every calendar year. With 30 of those 36 years in Asia, I reckon I’ve been working 66 years!

“I came to Hong Kong for six months in 1979 and stayed for 30 years. I’m still waiting for my ticket back. I said I’d run Synovate for three years, just to get it started. That was eight years ago.

“I’m not very good at keeping to my timetables.”