Money Machine

Chapter 21Financial Tsunami

On September 7, 2008, Peter Ma invited me to visit him at PAIG headquarters in the district of Zhangjiang, near Shanghai's Pudong International Airport. Liew Shan‐Hock took me there by car, about an hour's drive from the city center. Past the gated entrance, the driveway led through a large and beautiful garden, with lush lawns, tall trees, colorful flowers, and other types of vegetation. There were flowing streams crossed by small bridges, a large Dutch‐style watermill, a classical Greek or Roman style pavilion by a pond, and, most improbably, a Gothic‐style clock tower some 300 feet high. In the middle of this most un‐Chinese scenery stood a sprawling building of seven or eight stories whose ground floor was surrounded by a walkway with arched openings, similar in style to the courtyards of Spanish monasteries.

This palatial setting was home, at least during working hours, to some 6,000 PAIG employees. It had only opened the year before. Ma later told me that he had personally designed the entire layout. He had impressed me as a man of vision and action in terms of his business acumen. In a different way, this place furthered that impression.

Ma gave me a personal tour of the main building. On one floor, there were thousands of workers busy at their computers. Their job was to input data provided by customers. Ma told me that the work process was designed to break up a complicated task into small pieces so that a worker could specialize in one ...