Among Chinatrust Financial Holdings chairman Jeffrey Koo’s three sons, Andre Koo is perhaps the most unusual.

"He’s modest, sincere, exceptionally low-key. When he speaks, he puts people at ease," says the chairman of one publicly owned financial institution who is well acquainted with the younger Koo, echoing the impressions of numerous colleagues in financial circles. "If it wasn’t for the striking physical resemblance to his two older brothers, you’d never guess that he’s the number-three son of the Chinatrust Koo family."

Andre Koo, the chairman of Financial One Corp., has a more reserved, restrained temperament than his elder siblings, shying away from the limelight and not going out of his way to cultivate relationships with political bigwigs and other influential figures. Yet he has made waves through his management of Chailease Finance Co., Ltd., a Financial One subsidiary, which now holds a market share of nearly 50 percent.

"The hard-driven life of military school was a major influence on me," says Koo, who, despite graduating from a top U.S. business school like his elder brothers, still considers those difficult days at military school in his youth to have been the pivotal influence on his character and his business management style.

A Bullied Princeling

While attending school in Japan at the age of 15, Andre Koo made his crucial life decision – he would enroll in the Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps program at New York Military Academy near the United States Military Academy at West Point. For the next two and a half years, he forsook the lap of luxury and embarked on an arduous academic journey.

As Koo tells it, he enrolled in the school because he actually yearned for that West Point-type environment, yet he never could have guessed that it would completely change his character and outlook.

At the academy, all the students were treated the same, all subject to the same strict disciplinary and physical training. Not only did the academy offer no special treatment for the scion of an influential family, but due to the relative dearth of Asian faces at the school, he was even subjected to harassment and bullying by upperclassmen. Through it all, however, Koo sucked it up and ended up graduating with honors.

Those two and a half years of "winters so cold your snot would freeze during drills" and "being challenged to fights at midnight," an experience that would be tough for anyone to take, let alone a princeling of an aristocratic family, molded Andre Koo’s resolute character and inspired his outlook on leadership and management.

The military takes physical training seriously and, when embarking on a mission, demands the highest levels of discipline with no room for individualism. After taking the helm of Chailease Finance Group in 2003, he embarked on a program of systemization, remaking the organization to water down the influence of any single individual, clearly demonstrating the vestiges of his military training.

Additionally, despite being the company’s single biggest shareholder, Koo doesn’t self-identify as "the boss." Instead, he has established a "business management committee" rarely seen in the industry to handle corporate policy-making decisions, of which he is chairman, with the rest of the committee almost wholly comprised of senior corporate executives.

"The individual is insignificant, but great power can be brought to bear through group cooperation," Koo constantly reminds committee members during meetings.

Koo believes the management experience he gained through his military training experience has taught him that the most important things are mission (business objective) orientation, as well as the centripetal force and tacit cooperation of the team (employees).

Translated from the Chinese by Brian Kennedy