Boo Kok Chuon 巫国俊

Founding Editor, Iconomy Bookcase

For years, I have been searching for a professional identity that fits what I actually practise. Yet after almost two decades, I am still struggling to find a hat that fits perfectly.

I do not really identify myself as an accountant, a financial analyst, a deal maker, an economist, a valuer, or a legal practitioner.

To me, these are less like fixed professions and more like instincts that I deploy when a business problem surfaces.

Sometimes the problem requires me to read the numbers.

Sometimes I have to understand the transaction.

Sometimes I have to work out what the business is worth.

Sometimes I have to trace where the money went.

Sometimes the problem becomes a dispute, and I have to think about rights, remedies and litigation strategy.

And sometimes the best answer is simply to tell the client not to do the deal in the first place.

Recently, I finally came across a description that fits rather better than the others:

Corporate problem solver.

It is not a regulated profession. There is no neat qualification hanging behind it, and I doubt anyone grows up telling their parents that this is what they want to become.

But it describes fairly accurately what I have spent most of my working life doing. A business problem lands on the table, and I try to understand it from whichever angle matters, whether accounting, finance, valuation, transactions, law, governance or simply commercial common sense, before working out what can actually be done about it.

The professional labels came afterwards.

The problems came first.

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Why so many qualifications?

To many people, I probably look like a nerd who has spent years accumulating professional qualifications.

The truth is much less glamorous.

I do not even know where the original certificate for my BSc in Economics and Finance from the University of London has gone. I have never bothered to print out my CVA certificate and hang it proudly on the office wall either.

If you ever visit me at work, you are more likely to find a small, slightly messy room with a few prints of Van Gogh on the wall.

And yes, I know. It is probably time I replace them.

The reason I keep accumulating credentials is not because I enjoy collecting letters after my name. It is because almost every time I perform advisory work, I come away feeling that what I know is still not enough.

A corporate finance problem leads me into accounting.

An investment problem leads me into valuation.

A shareholder dispute leads me into law.

A transaction involving an unfamiliar industry forces me to understand how that industry actually works.

A cross-border deal makes me realise how much I do not understand about another country’s regulatory environment.

Each engagement exposes another blind spot, and once I see the blind spot, I find it very difficult to ignore it.

So I study.

Sometimes that means reading a few cases. Sometimes it means taking a course. Sometimes it means pursuing an entire professional qualification.

And in one particularly severe episode, it resulted in a law degree.

The qualifications are therefore not really the objective. They are evidence of a recurring professional anxiety:

I do not like advising people on things I do not understand well enough.

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A Frankensteinian beginning

I sometimes suspect that I am a deliberately Frankensteinian creation assembled by my parents from a rather young age.

I have told the press before that I closed my first deal when I was nine.

Whether that was precocious entrepreneurship or simply evidence that something had gone terribly wrong with my childhood, I shall leave to the reader.

What I do know is that business and entrepreneurship have been part of my life ever since.

Sometimes I regard that affinity as a gift.

Sometimes, frankly, it feels more like a curse.

One of the thinkers who has influenced the way I look at markets and institutions is George Soros.

Sorry, Dad. I know that, as a victim of the Asian Financial Crisis, you do not like him.

I have always been fascinated by Soros’s theory of reflexivity and, more broadly, by the idea that systems created and operated by human beings are necessarily imperfect because the people participating in them are themselves imperfect observers.

Business is perhaps one of the greatest examples of this.

A company may look neat on an organisation chart. A transaction can be beautifully modelled in Excel. A contract can run to hundreds of pages. A valuation can arrive at a number precise to two decimal places.

And yet, somewhere underneath all of that are human beings making judgments with incomplete information, imperfect incentives, competing interests, fear, greed, ambition, loyalty, ego and occasionally plain stupidity.

That is what makes business endlessly fascinating to me.

It is also what makes it impossible to finish learning.

The longer I have worked with this beast called Business, the more convinced I have become that there is no final level at which one can declare it mastered. Accounting explains one part of it. Finance explains another. Economics gives us models. Law provides structures and boundaries. Valuation forces us to make assumptions about an uncertain future. Psychology explains some of the strange things people do. Politics and institutions influence the environment in which everything operates.

But none of them, on its own, completely explains the beast.

So perhaps I am destined to spend a lifetime trying to understand it.

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Why I write

That is ultimately why Iconomy Bookcase exists.

It is where I put down thoughts that do not fit neatly inside a board paper, financial model, legal submission, valuation report or client memorandum. I write about business, finance, law, investments, corporate governance, due diligence, disputes, public policy and whatever other rabbit hole I happen to have wandered into.

But I also want this to be a place where the personal side of those subjects is not lost.

Why do intelligent people invest in things they do not understand?

Why do shareholders spend more fighting over a company than the company itself may be worth?

Why do entrepreneurs sometimes mistake fundraising for business success?

Why do people continue inventing new ways to lose money?

These are not purely accounting, legal, financial or economic questions.

They are questions about people.

And people are usually the most interesting, irrational and difficult part of any business.

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So, who am I?

I am still not sure that I have a satisfactory answer.

I am someone who became interested in business early and never quite managed to lose interest. Someone who is uncomfortable with easy answers. Someone who enjoys numbers but does not believe numbers tell the whole story. Someone who studies law because business disputes are rarely only about law.

I am also someone who can spend an afternoon thinking about a valuation and an evening listening to piano music.

Someone who was perfectly happy helping his daughter turn a music-education idea inspired by mahjong into a real product, even though doing so created far more work than expected.

Perhaps corporate problem solver remains the closest description I have found.

But I am less interested in the label than in the questions behind it.

How do people build things?

How do they decide what those things are worth?

Why do they trust one another?

Why do they stop trusting one another?

And what can be learnt when the whole arrangement begins to fall apart?

Those are the questions that keep me occupied.

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A notebook from the journey

I should therefore make a confession at the outset.

I have not mastered business.

I doubt I ever will.

And perhaps that is precisely the point.

Iconomy Bookcase is not intended to be a collection of commandments written by somebody claiming to possess all the answers. It is closer to a notebook from the journey.

These are observations, frameworks, lessons, questions, mistakes and ideas I have accumulated while building businesses, advising entrepreneurs, examining transactions, studying companies, dealing with disputes, valuing enterprises, reading the law and occasionally discovering that something I thought I understood was considerably more complicated than I had imagined.

The purpose of this blog is simply to share some of the notes I have taken along the way.

I hope readers will find some of them useful.

And, occasionally, perhaps even insightful.

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A note on intellectual humility

One of my favourite economists, N. Gregory Mankiw, has frequently emphasised the importance of humility in economics.

I find that principle deeply persuasive.

Economics attempts to explain human behaviour, institutions and markets, yet human beings are extraordinarily complicated and the world they create is constantly changing. Compared with many of the natural sciences, economics is still a relatively young science. Our knowledge remains incomplete, our models necessarily simplify reality, and even widely accepted propositions must remain open to challenge when the evidence changes.

I think the same humility should extend beyond economics. It should apply equally to business, finance, law, valuation, investing, public policy and certainly to the things I write here.

I am imperfect, and so are my insights.

They represent what I understand at this particular point in my journey, based on the knowledge, evidence and experiences available to me at the time. That means I may change my mind. In fact, I hope I will.

If tomorrow I encounter better evidence, a stronger argument, a court decision, a new piece of research, a regulatory development or simply somebody who explains something better than I previously understood it, intellectual honesty requires me to update my position.

Where something I have written becomes outdated, incomplete or overtaken by better knowledge, I intend to say so and, where appropriate, revise it responsibly.

I therefore welcome constructive engagement from readers.

Disagreement does not trouble me. A thoughtful challenge may reveal an assumption I overlooked, an experience I have never encountered or a perspective my own professional journey has not exposed me to.

The purpose of Iconomy Bookcase is not to preserve my opinions in amber.

It is to preserve the evolution of understanding.

Over the years, my professional life has given me notebooks full of lessons from entrepreneurship, accounting, corporate finance, investments, transactions, valuation, disputes, law, policy and the occasional spectacular mistake.

Iconomy Bookcase is where I intend to deposit those notes: a library of intellectual insights gathered throughout a professional lifetime.

Some will survive scrutiny.

Some will eventually require revision.

A few may turn out to have been completely wrong.

That is fine.

Because the objective was never to prove that I knew everything.

It was to keep learning, to responsibly record what I learnt, to update those ideas when better knowledge arrives, and to leave behind a useful repository for anyone travelling through some of the same territory.

Welcome to Iconomy Bookcase.

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About the Founding Editor

Boo Kok Chuon (KC) 巫国俊 is a bicultural Singapore-based entrepreneur and corporate problem solver with a BSc (Hons) in Economics and Finance from the University of London. His professional experience spans corporate finance, cross-border mergers and acquisitions, investment due diligence, business valuation, financial analysis, corporate governance and commercial dispute advisory. He previously advised Asian SMEs on access to the United States capital markets, including OTCQB transactions and proposed NASDAQ and NYSE listing pathways, and has since worked on cross-border transactions, restructuring, forensic financial analysis and shareholder disputes where financial and legal issues intersect. KC also served as Chief Operating Officer and Legal Manager at Omnia Law Chambers LLC, working at the intersection of legal operations, business management and legal advisory matters. He has completed the Chartered Valuer and Appraiser (CVA) programme and is currently in the final phase of his Juris Doctor at the Singapore University of Social Sciences. He is Group Chief Executive Officer of the Iconomy Group of Companies and Chairman of Iconomy Foundation Limited, where he supports arts education, local musicians and community initiatives.

Education has always been an important part of KC’s life. He serves on the School Advisory Committee of his alma mater, Woodlands Primary School, and on the Executive Committee of the Alumni Association of his alma mater, Ahmad Ibrahim Secondary School. Through these roles, he remains committed to supporting schools, students, alumni and the wider educational community.

Outside work, KC is a lifelong music lover, a dinosaur fan, an amateur coder and, more recently, an enthusiastic convert to 3D modelling and printing. He is usually happiest when learning how to make something he previously did not know how to make.