MICHAEL ALAN HAMLIN is managing director of TeamAsia, a business consulting group and speaker's bureau, and its Philippine and Singapore affiliate, Hamlin-Iturralde Corporation. Formerly, he served as vice president for external affairs and on the faculty of the Asian Institute of Management. He is a weekly columnist for BusinessWorld, the Philippines' leading business newspaper, and The Manila Bulletin, and is also a regular contributor to the "Rethinking Asia" column in the Far Eastern Economic Review. The author of Asia's Best: The Myth & Reality of Asia's Most Successful Corporations (1998), Hamlin hails from Texas and lives in Manila.