The Frederick Chavalit Tsao Story
We are proud to present an excerpt from Quantum Leadership: New Consciousness in Business by Frederick Chavalit Tsao and Chris Laszlo.
IMC’s Origins
To fully understand my ideas of business sustainability and its stewardship of society, you have to look at the legacy I inherited. Each generation of my family evolved the business and shaped it to thrive in the particular era in which it found itself. But consistently applied across every era have been the three values of our founder, my great-grandfather: integrity, hard work, and prudence.
My great-grandfather Tsao Wa Chang was a sampan boatman in Shanghai at the turn of the twentieth century. One day, a drunken captain left a bag full of cash and documents in his boat. My great-grandfather could have kept it; it would have represented a fortune for such a poor boatman. Instead, he chose to seek out the captain, but his ship had already sailed. Months later, when the ship returned, my great-grandfather was waiting for the captain with the bag and its contents intact. It turned out that many of the documents were bills of lading and titles for cargo in a warehouse. The captain, a Westerner, was impressed with my great-grandfather’s integrity and gave him a large reward—a sum of money that would allow him to establish his own waterfront transport business. And so our family business was born.
With each succeeding generation, the business grew exponentially and often against all odds. Under my grandfather, Tsao Ying Yung, and my father, Frank W. K. Tsao, it expanded in shipping and real estate, through two world wars, and against the backdrop of China’s transition from empire to republic and thence to today’s more market-based socialist regime. As the Tsao family grew, members migrated from China across the globe—my grandfather died as a citizen of Brazil. By the time I was born, our business headquarters had moved from Shanghai to Hong Kong.