In Overlanding Through the Boardroom, Johan de Villiers turns bush lessons into business ones. In this edited excerpt from the book’s 11th chapter, he pays a stranger in full for a round trip to the Cambodian coast, misses the only ferry off an island hours before a non-refundable flight home, and learns that the first rule in the Stoic handbook has less to do with staying calm than with sorting.
Mr Moon
Mr Moon was leaning against a pristine white Toyota Camry, deep in conversation with our taxi driver, when Kim and I got back to our hotel in Phnom Penh after breakfast. It was 2014. We had just come out of two weeks in the Laos-Cambodian rainforest and were due to fly home to South Africa.
The day before, the same driver had told us about an island off the south coast, an unspoilt paradise like the one in the film The Beach. I had left that film certain no such place could exist. He assured us it did. Koh Rong Sanloem lay in the Gulf of Thailand, just off Sihanoukville, a five- or six-hour drive away. We had three days before we were due home.
“He will take you to Koh Rong Sanloem,” the driver announced.
Mr Moon’s English was limited, so I wrote the island’s name on a scrap of paper and did the rest with my hands: take us there, come back for us in three days. He signalled back that it was very far. “But yes, I take you,” he said. The price was $50. I asked whether that was each. He shook his head. For both. I asked whether that was one way. “No, no, no. Two-way.”
“JD,” said Kim.
When Kim calls me JD, I pay attention, the way you did when a parent used your full name, middle one included. Our tickets were nonrefundable, she reminded me. Miss the flight and we would be paying thousands of dollars for new ones.
“But I trust this guy,” I whispered. I had known him for as long as it takes to agree a price. I paid him the full $50 before we had packed a bag.
“We go now,” he said.
A bungalow called Rumi
We left the heavy luggage and the survival kit at the hotel. Almost six hours later Mr Moon delivered us to a jetty on the coast and pointed out a little shack whose sign showed a ferry, a map and a timetable. The woman inside said the ferry was due within the hour, only ran every few days, and would come back for us three days later. Perfect timing, I thought.
“JD,” said Kim.
The woman asked whether we had booked anywhere to stay. We had not. It was peak season, she warned, and we would struggle to find a bed. After a fortnight in the jungle I was quite prepared to sleep on a dune. “JD,” said Kim again, eyes narrowing.
While we waited we found a local vendor selling a rather potent vodka, the kind you could have run the ferry on. By the time the ferry came in, Kim had stopped calling me JD.
Forty-five minutes later we were on a picture-postcard island. A Frenchman who seemed to be in charge of six chalets on the beach, some of them vacant, waved us off. “Sorry, all booked.” We strolled on, buoyed by the vodka, until a sign on a pole said Rumi and a second one, further up the path, offered the word we wanted: bungalows.
The owner was a Ukrainian woman in her late twenties. Her father, she told us, was an oil billionaire. She had fallen in love with the island, bought the lodge on a whim and renamed it after the Persian poet. “I wanted this, not a life in Monaco with a Lamborghini or a chalet in Europe,” she said. She also had a bungalow open.
It cost $25 a night, breakfast and dinner included, and there was no menu. In the morning you told the staff what you wanted and they dived for it on the reef. I ordered an enormous crab in pepper sauce. For two days we paddled and snorkelled.
The ferry keeps her own hours
On the morning we were due to leave, we headed for the jetty to catch the 10am ferry. She was not in yet, so we went for coffee at the beach bar. The Frenchman from the chalets strolled over, puffing on a pungent Gauloises.
“The ferry,” he said, “it’s already left.”
It was 9.30am.
“Zings aren’t so precise ’ere on the island,” he said. Nine o’clock or 10, it was all the same. She had come early, gone back to the mainland and would return in three days. Had she been able to talk, she would not have seen the problem. “The timetable is an opinion,” she would have said. “I am the ferry.”
Kim gave me a look I knew well. “JD.”
Panic was not an option. There were no other passenger boats, but most of the Frenchman’s staff lived in a fishing village on the far side of the island, and they crossed the bay somehow. In little fishing boats, he admitted, with a look that said we would not want to stake our lives on one. He went off to ask anyway and came back with good news. A diesel fishing boat would take us to the mainland for $100.
The boat arrived 40 minutes later, a weathered vessel very like a snoekskuit back home, with a long propeller shaft at the back, a skipper who spoke no English and a co-pilot of unknown competence.
About an hour out, at the mercy of two fishermen in the middle of the Gulf of Thailand, Kim said it again. “JD.” She wanted to know whether I thought Mr Moon would still be waiting for us on the mainland. We had, she pointed out, paid him in full already. And we were probably going to miss our flight.
Then she spotted some fishing gear, borrowed it with a gesture to the skipper, baited a hook and, to everyone’s surprise, reeled in a king mackerel. She gave it to the fishermen. They now had our $100 and a sizeable fish for dinner.
Two piles
Leave that boat where it is for a moment, a couple of hours short of a jetty that might or might not have a white Camry on it.
The Stoics had a rule for exactly that stretch of water. The cleanest version belongs to Epictetus, a Greek who spent part of his life as the slave of one of Nero’s officials and later ran a school of his own. The handbook of his teaching opens with it: “Some things are in our control and others not.”
Then he sorts. In our control he puts our opinions, what we pursue, what we want and what we avoid: in a word, our own actions. The owner of Rumi had worked that list out for herself: with Monaco and a Lamborghini to choose from, she chose a reef. Outside our control he puts the body, property, reputation and office. Read that second list again as someone who runs a business. Property, reputation and office are what most of us spend a career trying to command, and a former slave filed all three under not yours.
Stoicism is famous for calm, the stiff upper lip in a toga. Calm is only what is left over. The work is the sort that comes first, because nobody stays calm about a problem they are still trying to push uphill by hand.
Overlanding teaches the same sort for free. The weather is not yours. The recovery kit is. Nobody has ever winched a rain cloud.
On that boat the two piles were easy to tell apart. The ferry had gone, and no amount of feeling strongly about her would bring her back. Mr Moon would be on the jetty or he would not. Getting off the island had been ours, and it was done.
Call it the fishing boat rule. When the ferry has gone, stop staring at the horizon and go and find out who owns a boat. It will be slower and smellier and it will cost you $100, and it is the only part of the morning that is yours.
Every business has a ferry
Every business has a ferry. If you export fruit from Ceres it is the rand. If you sell to corporates it is somebody else’s budget cycle. None of it is yours, and a remarkable amount of management time is spent standing on the jetty being furious with it.
My own ferry was the golf course. Many a business deal would never have been done without one, and the only difficulty is that you have to be able to play. I cannot. That ferry was never going to be mine, so I found a boat. In 2018 I raced the Tankwa Rally, three days and 1,000km of desert, and afterwards First Technology became a sponsor. The man behind the rally introduced me to the Western Cape’s fruit export market, where most of the farmers were no strangers to a rally themselves. Until then our clients were mostly in fintech. By the time I wrote the book, the fruit exporters rivalled them for profitability.
The sort is harder than it sounds, because the piles do not come labelled, and the commonest mistake is to file something under not mine because it is uncomfortable. Take a company that chased a significant contract for months and lost it. The team was strong, the pricing competitive, the design excellent and the materials good. What they had neglected was their relationship with the people making the decision, while their competitors took the time to get to know them. The client wanted a business partner and was offered a vendor. They had treated the relationship as weather. It was recovery kit, and they had left it at home.
People belong in the sort as well. You cannot control whether somebody keeps their word. You can control who you hand your $50 to, and I do not recommend my method. There is a better test. Picture an overturned car, one wheel slowly turning, steam billowing from the wreck, and a phone with enough battery for one call. Decide who you would ring, whether they would answer, whether they would come and whether they would be any use when they got there.
Run that test on your suppliers. Then, if you are feeling brave, turn it round and count the clients who would ring you.
The part where Kim was right
Now for the part of this story I have been steering around. Kim was right three times in one day.
She said the tickets were nonrefundable. She said “JD” at the ferry schedule, and “JD” again at the idea of landing in peak season with nowhere to sleep. I could see all three risks, and I filed every one of them under it will work out. Two of them went wrong. The first lodge turned us away, and the ferry left without us.
That is the hole in my Stoic story. The sort only works if you do it honestly, and the easiest way to cheat is to drop your own homework into the pile marked beyond my control. I had two days on that island and a Frenchman who plainly knew how the ferry behaved, and I never asked him. A few pages later in the same chapter I tell the reader that my preparedness is way better than the next guy’s. The next guy would have booked a room.
The second concession is about price. It is easy to be philosophical about a missed ferry when the worst case is a credit card. Ours was thousands of dollars in new tickets. Epictetus had been another man’s property. I was applying his rule between a reef dinner and a flight home, and those are not the same exam.
The third is about Mr Moon, and it costs me the most. In the book I say our decisions on that trip were made on calculated trust. I stand by the trust. The calculation is harder to defend. I paid a stranger in full, in advance, for a service three days away, which as procurement is indefensible.
Then I sat on a boat with nothing to offer but hope. Kim caught dinner.
Who should sort, and who shouldn’t bother
Do the sort if your Monday meeting spends longer on the rand than on your clients. Do it if the same complaints open that meeting every week and nobody in the room owns any of them. The pile you cannot touch deserves a minute. The boats deserve the rest of the hour. And do it before you lose your temper, because the ferry cannot hear you.
Do not bother if what you want from the Stoics is permission. “It was out of my control” is the most abused sentence in management, and it is usually spoken by whoever never asked about the ferry. On that jetty it was me.
And do not bother if you want it as decoration. Stoicism on a coffee mug is a mood. The working version is a list with two columns, and the hard items mostly belong in the column you were hoping to avoid.
The snoekskuit took three hours to reach the mainland. And there, true to his word, was Mr Moon. He had driven six hours to meet two strangers who had paid him in full three days earlier. He drove us six hours back to Phnom Penh, where we arrived at sunset with just enough time to grab our luggage and get to the airport. Nothing I did put him on that jetty. The best thing on that whole coast was in the pile I could not touch, waiting in a white Toyota Camry.
Johan de Villiers is the leader of First Technology Western Cape, an award-winning IT provider in South Africa. His book, ‘Overlanding Through the Boardroom: Using Adventure Principles for Success in Business’, is published by Rockhopper Books.
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