What business and espionage have in common — from someone who has worked in both

Thank you for joining me today. I want to start by asking you about something that most people in your position rarely get asked — not the professional achievements, but the internal work that made them possible. Can you take me back to the moment when you understood what you were really building here?

Karl Godderis has navigated Southeast Asia's business corridors for three decades and written intelligence thrillers on the side. In this conversation with Dr. Manju, he draws the surprising parallels between trade negotiation and intelligence work — how both require reading intent beneath stated position, managing ambiguity under pressure, and building trust with people whose interests are fundamentally opposed to yours.

On the challenge that defines this work

When you say that, I notice something — there's a particular kind of pressure in what you're describing. Not just operational pressure, but something more existential. The sense that what you're building matters in a way that doesn't allow for half-measures. How do you hold that?

That's exactly it. And I think what most people don't see from the outside is that the pressure doesn't come from external expectations — it comes from your own clarity about what the work is for. Once you understand that, everything else is just problem-solving. The hard part is reaching that clarity in the first place. Most leaders never do.

On what the work demands of the person doing it

I'm interested in the personal cost of what you're describing. Not in a deficit framing — I mean the way this kind of leadership shapes the person who does it. What has this work made you?

It has made me specific. I don't mean narrow — I mean I have a much clearer understanding of what I am and am not built for. That kind of specificity is often mistaken for rigidity from the outside. It's not. It's just the result of years of learning what works and what doesn't — at a level of resolution that most professional development frameworks don't reach.

Full transcript continues on published episode page · EUROCHAM Malaysia CEO Karl Godderis on 30 years in Southeast Asia, writing spy novels, and what trade negotiations and thriller plots have in common.