Finance is not for the faint of heart. It is an addiction fuelled by top-notch rewards and the fear of uncertainty. And, like any other addiction, it ends up consuming the lives of those it lures.
Thanks in part to the unsavoury set of characters finance often nurtures, every world problem ends up at the doorstep of a bank at one point or another, a fact that has made bankers some of the most feared characters in the public eye.
Machiavelli once said that it is better to be feared than to be loved, if one cannot have both.
Mr Thana and his daughters attend an SCB marketing event.
SCB's Thana Thienachariya, however, says the best lesson he has learned since his 22nd birthday is unconditional love. "I am a sentimental person, and something that my employees don't know is that I sneak out early to play board games with my daughters," says the chief marketing officer, 48.
According to his profile, Mr Thana has taken top spots in a handful of fat-valuation companies, most recently at SCB. What few people know, however, is that his main job for the last 14 years has been chief executive dad.
One of Mr Thana’s first marketing campaigns, for the SCB Easy app, began in August. Photo: WEERA WONG WONGPREDE
Today, Mr Thana doesn't take the hardest decisions in the boardroom, but in video arcades and chain restaurants. The only things he thinks about right now, he says, are his daughters, who are entering their teens and "thinking about boyfriends and studying abroad".
"What will I do when my daughter tells me she has a crush on a boy?" That's the important question.
Mr Thana and his family.
"My daughter is 12, and before I thought I would be against it for sure, but when it happened I felt like I needed to help her. We went to a restaurant and the boy she liked coincidentally was there. I knew his mother, so I wanted to take my daughter to talk with him. She refused, but when we got back in the car I saw her texting to her friend about it."
The friend replied: "Cool dad."
Mr Thana joins a mini marathon event. Photo: SCB
It's not that Mr Thana has avoided tough choices in his career. A cursory look at his CV reveals top positions in some of the most troubled industries. "I saw an executive summary that said the first three industries that would be disrupted would be media, telecom and consumer finance," he says. "I was in all three. Every time I joined a company, it was always during the peace before the storm."
Mr Thana started his career as a flight attendant in the US after failing to make it into a top-20 school for his MBA programme. "All of my siblings went to the University of Washington," he says. "I was the only one that had to take a seven-hour drive to Washington State."
Mr Thana got his degree in economics from Chulalongkorn University, and afterwards he joined his parents in Seattle, to which they had emigrated so that their daughters could have a better education. At the time, his mother worked at Baskin-Robbins and his dad worked at Nordstrom.
"My parents are very special people," he says. "My mom just completed her undergrad degree at 65 and is now working as a judge's assistant. She is busier than me these days."
After a couple of years making the seven-hour drive from Seattle, Mr Thana came back to Thailand and started working at a securities firm, but he quickly moved to Total Access Communication (DTAC), where he started in a finance role but quickly rotated through "eight or so departments".
Then he stumbled into marketing. Mr Thana says he got hooked on marketing because it's about common sense and empathy, rather than logic.
Mr Thana and his daughters in Halloween costumes.
"I failed in my first marketing project because I tried to do it by the book," he says. "When you don't know marketing and people ask you to do marketing, you do what [marketing guru Philip] Kotler suggests you do -- and then you fail."
That was Mr Thana's first big professional failure. Through the years, he has learned to cherish rather than endure failures: "To keep failing is the path to success, because that's the only way to learn new things. I enjoy something new because it gives me the opportunity to fail."
Mr Thana took his last position at DTAC as government relations leader, then became CEO of a jeans company. "I failed terribly and only stayed in the job for about six months," he confesses.
After trying his hand at consumer goods, Mr Thana was called to the top spot of GMM Grammy, the country's largest entertainment company. As CEO, he was asked to improve the company's satellite TV business at a time when the web was eating into its market share. "I was not a success, I was not a failure, but the timing was not really right," he says.
A lack of time has been a constant theme in Mr Thana's later career and has dictated many of his most important choices. "I can be picky where I decide to work," he says -- after all, there can always be more money but never more time.
The most important thing was his daughters, he says, so he took a two-year sabbatical, during which he advised close to 10 companies, including Telenor, the parent company of DTAC. At Telenor, Mr Thana was key in the Norwegian company's entry strategy in Myanmar.
"Then they asked me to join in Myanmar, and again I refused because of my daughters," he says. "After a while I decided I don't like to be the top guy. It's too much responsibility, and I don't like being in the newspaper, seriously."
Eventually, the part-time life took its toll on Mr Thana. "I felt like something was missing, like I needed to be useful to something or someone," he says, so he found his way to SCB by chance.
Unlike many in the financial industry, Mr Thana has never fallen victim to the delusion that he can control destiny, whether in the stock market or in his personal life. "It was a coincidence that I was there at the right moment," he says. "I don't see myself as a career type of guy, I never really had a goal in my life. I go with the flow, I am a very artistic-emotional type."
Despite his professed relaxed demeanour, Mr Thana, whether by choice or otherwise, carries himself with a serious drive -- from gig to gig and crisis to crisis. It was this drive that brought him to SCB, where he achieved enough financial stability to work as much or as little as he pleased. It also got him into a normal weight range.
"This is a picture of when I used to be over 100kg. One day, I felt something weird in my heart," he says, squeezing the left side of his chest to re-enact the scene. "After I stepped into Bumrungrad hospital that day, I was not able to get out of my head that I could suffer a heart attack at any moment."
Mr Thana could only work one or two days in the office since the heart incident, assailed by sudden panic episodes. "One day I started jogging, and I found that it somehow assuaged my fears, so I haven't stopped since. I worry that the day I stop, the fear will set back in." He now sports a more or less athletic body in a tight black polo and is preparing for half-marathons and eventually a full marathon.
Through his career, Mr Thana learned that the way to work is to see oneself in a one- or two-year project. True to his philosophy, his office is unusually sparse: a couple of books (one of which he is the author), a stash of papers, a whiteboard and two Diet Cokes. "Next year, I will re-evaluate if I'm having fun or being useful. If you see my room, I can pack within 10 minutes and leave."
Mr Thana suggests he will stay put at SCB for the time being: "I am very selective in picking my job, because I don't want to work in hostile environments any more. I can't stand office politics, and people here see me as an adviser, not as someone that has authority because of his position."
He may have learned to enjoy failure, but the thought of what could have been never crossed his mind. "It seems impressive that a boy from Korat like me could have made it to this position, so I must have done something right," he says. "I'm afraid that if I had changed something I would not be here."
Off the top of his head, the only regret is an instance when he scolded one of his daughters. "I felt so bad, I had to write a Facebook post about it," he says. "Thankfully, she liked it."
Thinking about retirement, Mr Tanah says he might follow his daughters if they decide to study abroad.
Would anyone's daughters like that?
He stares at the ceiling for a while. "They are almost perfect daughters, almost."
