When I spoke with James Low, he was general manager of COMO Uma Paro and COMO Uma Punakha in Bhutan. The book’s roll call records that he retired in December 2024 after a decade leading the COMO properties there.
What Low speaks to in the book is how a calling can arrive before the work begins. He was a schoolboy on a field trip to a premier hotel in Kuala Lumpur. He walked into the lobby, took in the decor and the restaurants, and decided on the spot that this was where he wanted to spend his career, setting aside an earlier plan to work in a bank. He had not served a breakfast or waited a table. The calling, in his case, arrived in the shape of an atmosphere. Behind that moment stood his father, a senior officer in the Malaysian Police Force who would step out of his car in a traffic jam and direct the cars himself, and who counseled young offenders instead of fining them. The lobby was where the character his father had built in him found its industry.
“I quietly told myself that this is the environment I want to be in” James Low, then general manager, COMO Uma Paro and COMO Uma Punakha
He also gave me one of the book’s clearest examples of a mentor’s gift arriving in a single sentence. As a young Hyatt employee in Asia, he found himself seated at a hosted dinner next to Bern Chorengel, then president of Hyatt International, who had chosen that seat over one beside the area vice president and the general manager. Chorengel called him by name and asked what Hyatt meant to him and how he could add value to the hotel. The story is forty years old. Low tells it as if it happened last week.
In the book, James Low appears in Chapter 1, The Calling, where his lobby moment and his father’s example show a calling recognized at the threshold of the work, and in Chapter 2, The Apprenticeship, where the dinner with Chorengel shows how a senior leader can shape a career by choosing to listen.
“In the world of five-star chain hotels, an employee hardly ever gets to meet a regional vice president, let alone the president” James Low, then general manager, COMO Uma Paro and COMO Uma Punakha