“Insisting you are right is an act of violence to yourself and to others,” my host said.

It was a sunny Saturday. Over lunch, I had been sharing a lesson from my management course: The possibility that two opposing points of view may both be valid.

John’s maxim sounded magnanimous, but I could feel a part of me rejecting it. I asked him to elaborate.

“You force yourself not to listen,” he explained, “and you rob other people of the validity of their points of view.”

This will take a while to digest. The lunch was thoroughly satisfying, and this insight could be the pill I needed to digest a seven-year-long argument. I went out for a walk.

Along the coast, basking in the sun, I explored rocky coves and white-sand beaches interspersed with shrubs and trees.

Can I tell you about this embarrassing argument?

Seven years ago, I took the reins of my grandfather’s business. The business was floundering with profits of only 5 percent. At this point, you either change the business model or go bust.

We had a 20-bedroom hotel with a 400-seat restaurant. The hotel had no competition and was profitable. Despite bringing in over 80 percent of revenue, the restaurant was floundering.

I did a cost analysis. From the restaurant revenue, more than half was spent on guides or drivers. To be exact, we gave over 27 percent of our total revenue to guides in kickbacks, and over 30 percent was spent on serving them a luxurious lunch and giving them gifts to take home.

It was customary in our area for guides and drivers who brought tourists to a restaurant to get a 50 percent commission off the buffet lunch price. Drinks were where the restaurants made money. Guides were also allowed to raise the price to what they thought their guest could afford, pocketing the difference in addition to their commission.

Despite having the best view of Mount Batur in Bali, we were fast becoming one of those tourist-trap restaurants I would avoid on my travels. Adding salt to the wound, word was getting out on TripAdvisor.

The first thing I changed was limiting the markup to 50 percent. A few months later I raised our published price by 50 percent and ended the markup practice.

The guides began to retaliate. A boycott was soon in effect.

The following low season, rumor spread that we had closed. We used Google, TripAdvisor and Facebook to counter those rumors, but the fact that such insinuations were making the rounds was freaking out my family, especially my grandmother.

The matriarch of our family had aged substantially within weeks of the first Bali bombings in 2002. The subsequent bombing in 2005 further robbed her of her confidence.

At the low season of 2012, when the global financial crisis finally began to affect Bali, our numbers dwindled. The effect of the financial crisis was compounded by the fact that the boom years of 2008 to 2011 had encouraged many new businesses to open, unchecked by regulation.

Despite the slump in numbers, our profit margin remained consistent. I became overconfident. We made the a la carte service more available, allowing 20 percent commission from food purchases. This further alienated guides and drivers because guests on a budget now had an option to opt out of the buffet service.

My extended family could not shake their concerns, seeing our car park was no longer overflowing onto the nearby roads at lunch times. They turned a deaf ear to my numbers-driven explanations, and I began to ignore their angry rhetoric.

Bank loans fully repaid by year three, I began to present expansion plans to have more rooms to support our restaurant. I never got the votes necessary to do so. After my third such presentation, I resigned when shareholders declined to vote on the proposed hotel expansion.

Competitors nearby were about to launch new hotels, and I knew that business was stagnating at the current
model.

It didn’t take long to undo the changes I made, and the business is floundering yet again. I was hurt that my efforts seemed to have been in vain and took comfort in the fact that our ancestral land was free from the shackles of guaranteeing a bank loan.

It took distance afforded by studying in New Zealand, over two years to lapse, a university lecture and this lunch discussion for me to realize that in not listening and validating their concerns, I had deeply hurt my grandmother, uncles and aunts who were shareholders.

Having the education to process numbers and see cost-benefit blinded me to the emotional needs and concerns of the prior generation.

I kept insisting that I was right and they were wrong, further alienating them. As the leader of the organization, they gave me free reign to make decisions. Yet I failed to take their concerns on board. Hence, I lost their support.

If I had a time machine, I wouldn’t tell my younger, over-enthusiastic self to make any different business decisions. I certainly would, however, tell him to take more time to listen. Active listening isn’t just therapeutic — it is also energizing, helping the speaker grow from fear into the realm of novel ideas.

I stopped and sat by a picnic table, practicing: Listening to the songs of native birds.

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