Days of getting inspired
It is often said that any successful endeavour is the result of x% inspiration + y% perspiration. Today let’s look at the first leg of the equation…
This summer at Marou Chocolate, we found the time amidst a pretty busy schedule and without leaving Ho Chi Minh City to get some renewed inspiration from silicon valley insider Guy Kawasaki and from Vietnamese über mathematician Dr Ngo Bao Chau.
Guy Kawasaki is primarily known as the marketing guy behind the early heyday of Apple computers in the 1980s. Hawaiian born Kawasaki is a charming guy who has made a career of making things clear to his audience. In the very early days of Marou Chocolate, we’re talking so early that it wasn’t called Marou yet, reading Guy Kawasaki’s Reality Check, a book aimed primarily at would-be Silicon valley entrepreneurs, really helped us focus on important aspects of starting up a business, such as selecting our partners, knowing what to expect when we were pitching our project; even if we weren’t courting Venture Capitalists or Angel Investors in Palo Alto, the book was a real eye-opener. Learning that Guy Kawasaki was coming to Saigon at the behest of the Viet Youth Entrepreneurs we took the opportunity to meet him (and give him a few bars of chocolate…) and listen to his too brief intervention on ‘Enchantment’ in business. Obviously Guy is the enchanting type, and his self-deprecating humour (his story about turning down the opportunity to become Yahoo’s first CEO _and a billionaire, but he couldn’t have possibly known it at the time_ was pretty hilarious) worked wonders. The master class took place in the relaxed environment of Cargo, a converted warehouse in the formerly rough dock area in district 4. The free flow of wine really helped the message too…
A few weeks later we turned up at the main lecture hall of the Ho Chi Minh City University of Social Sciences to listen to Dr Ngo Bao Chau, Vietnam’s only recipient of the Fields medal, the highest award for mathematicians. Mathematicians of Dr Chau’s caliber evolve in an intellectual stratosphere where common brain cells die for lack of oxygen, so it can be hard to understand their brilliance if they fly too high to be seen from the ground where we tread. In an hour or so of discussing the links between beauty and symmetry and the parallels he sees between the work of scientists and artist, Dr Chau managed to take us on a roller coster ride from Platonic solid polyhedra
to the not so eye-pleasing symmetries of some contemporary Vietnamese architecture and to the latent symmetry that makes the works of Sol LeWitt so fascinating to the mathematician and to me (I could stay in front of Drawing #260 for hours at MoMA said Dr Chau, I remember being similarly engrossed when I first saw Sol LeWitt drawings at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts when I was a student).
“The inspiration for my research is beauty” concluded Dr Chau.
Finally we had the pleasure to collaborate with a marketing class at RMIT, the Ho Chi Minh City campus of the Australian university. Led by Caroline Nguyen, six groups of students had to research and present on the subject of taking Marou to the following Asian markets: South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, Hong Kong and Malaysia. The students who were mostly Vietnamese had to present us with their findings, their recommendations… It was somehow weird to find ourselves on that side of the fence and at the same time a great breath of fresh air to be reminded of what we do and why we do it and how we could improve it by seeing these young women and men going through this 'let’s pretend we’re Marou’ exercise.
What next, the Marou Apprentice TV reality series? Maybe not…
