Asia’s most driven professionals share a specific quality with each other that their counterparts in Europe and North America also share and that the Naora voyage is built around: the quality of someone who has taken the ambition that their culture made available and applied it with the specific consistency and the specific intelligence that the results they have achieved required, and who has arrived at a point where the results are visible and confirmed and the ambition that produced them is looking for its next expression.
In Hong Kong, this person has built the financial career that the world’s most concentrated banking and finance hub produces in the people who commit to it completely. In Shanghai, they have been part of the specific economic expansion that has produced more wealth in a shorter time than any economy in human history.
In Seoul, they have been inside the specific combination of technological innovation and design culture that the Korean economy has developed and that the global market has been discovering for a decade. In Tokyo, they have been the carrier of the specific quality of excellence and attention to detail that the Japanese professional culture produces and that the global economy has come to depend on in ways it does not always acknowledge.
What They Are Looking For
What the most driven professionals in Asia’s most dynamic economies are looking for, at the specific point in their careers and their lives where the Naora conversation tends to find them, is not more of what produced the results.
The results have been produced. What they are looking for is the context that the production of results did not produce alongside them: the genuine community of people who are not professionally relevant to them but who are genuinely interesting in the way that the professional network is interesting for different reasons. The conversation that is honest because the people in it have chosen honesty rather than because the professional context requires a specific version of it.
The time that belongs to them rather than to the output it is supposed to produce. The offshore sailing life provides all three in the specific form that the high-performance professional culture consistently prevents.
The Asian Route to the Naora Circle
The Naora route’s Indo-Pacific chapter covers the Indonesian archipelago, the approaches to the Indian Ocean, and the Pacific passages that connect them: the region that is geographically closest to the major Asian professional hubs and that the Naora voyage spends the majority of its five years in.
The Hong Kong professional who joins a Banda Sea leg is joining the voyage in waters that are culturally and geographically adjacent to the world they built their career in, in an environment that is as different from that world as any environment on the planet, accessible by a flight time that the Bangkok holiday requires and at a remove from the professional context that makes the Mumbai or Tokyo boardroom approximately as relevant as the planet’s circumference can make anything.
The invitation-only selection applies to the Asian professional with the same rigour and the same openness that it applies to every other applicant. The quality we are selecting for exists in Asia in the same concentration it exists everywhere else where the specific combination of ambition and achievement and honest self-awareness produces the person who has arrived at the question the Naora voyage is built to help answer. The conversation is thirty minutes with Antony or Sven.
It happens in English, which is the language of the Naora Circle regardless of what languages its members speak at home, and it happens at whatever time the Hong Kong or Seoul or Tokyo or Singapore calendar permits.
