Randy McGraw

I grew up like Charlie in Willy Wonka’s town — a mill town, a row house, the whistle at 7:15, 3:15 and 11:15 — in Wilmerding, Pennsylvania, George Westinghouse’s town, looking across the valley at more row houses stacked on the hillside like rice paddies, except the green was concrete grey. It was natural to imagine how things must be elsewhere.

Elsewhere began by accident: a knock on my parents’ door in 1993, a salesman with a pitchbook for satellite television, and within two months a company van through the rural South — Pell City, Talladega, Jackson, Mississippi — my first “international” experience, inside my own country. Then Los Angeles and DIRECTV, when the badge numbers were still in the low hundreds.

I arrived in Tokyo in the late nineties with Hughes and DIRECTV, into a satellite payTV market that had already consolidated to one platform before we launched. Ours was the one that left — and having helped steer that exit, three months and ninety million dollars ahead of plan, with the partnerships that made it orderly, was the first lesson in a career that would be spent, more often than not, at the edges where one technology meets another.

Sixteen years in Japan, then Singapore, then Bangkok. Three decades, two billion dollars in partnerships, almost none of it done alone. I came for the work and stayed for the education — the different ways people live, think and solve problems, an education you only get by leaving home, staying gone, and living deeply — professionally and socially.

No one arrives at their true north by the straight road. You get there by taking the detour on purpose — the town nobody’s heard of, the job no one recommended, the place where you lose home-field advantage — learning and living it deliberately. And so it was for me, as with you, as with the rest of us: the road to Singapore leads thru Mississippi.