A Hong Kong habit of mind
I was born in Hong Kong on 16 March 1983. I went to St. Paul’s Co-educational College, then to The University of Hong Kong for a BBA and an MBA. When people ask what that city has to do with a parcel leaving Shenzhen, I answer with a habit.
Hong Kong treats a border as an ordinary working condition. Goods, documents, languages, and clocks sit next to each other, and nobody finds that dramatic. That is useful training for this industry. A shipment is already in more than one jurisdiction while it is still in the warehouse, because the promise includes someone else’s customs rule and someone else’s last mile.
St. Paul’s, from 1998 to 2001, was where I learned to be precise in public. You say what you mean. You leave a fact as a fact. I still hear that standard when a service description grows an adjective. “Fast” is a mood. “Handed to the linehaul the same working day, if the parcel is in the warehouse before the cutoff” is a description. The second sentence can be kept. The first can only be marketed.
The university years added the commercial layer. An offer arrived in the spring of 2001. I started the BBA that September, finished in June 2005, and read for the MBA through June 2007. International business and global operations were courses. They were also a description of the city I was already in: a place that makes a living by being intelligible to more than one system at once.
I carry three rules from that formation into the vice-president work at Sunyou.
Date the promise. A range without a cutoff is a wish.
Write the seam down. If two parties both think the other is holding the parcel, the parcel is already late.
Keep the language plain enough that a seller can repeat it. If our sentence cannot survive being forwarded, it was a mood. A service can be forwarded.
Hong Kong is my origin. The habit is the point: clarity at a border, and a plain name for a delay.