Pia Alisjahbana: The Other Hugely Famous Female Indonesian Mogul

This was a huge treat. Yesterday, I did a keynote at a place called @America-- a first-of-its-kind American culture and event center in Jakarta in -- where else?-- a mall. All of South East Asia loves its malls-- the more ridiculously grand the better. But Jakarta is the only place where I've attended business and startup events in malls.

@America is sponsored by some of our biggest tech companies like Cisco and Google, and as such it's a pretty slick facility. In nearly 15 keynotes I've given in the last week, it was the first time the slide clicker actually worked. 

I was thrilled to see an audience full of teenaged girls-- all wearing different colored blazers denoting what school they were from. That's a normal sight here, but to my American eye they looked like an audience of little Indonesian realtors.

But the real honor was that Pia Alisjahbana attended. Quite rightly, she was mobbed by the girls when we walked in, everyone snapping a photo of her with their Blackberries. Alisjahbana, a professor and owner of a magazine publishing empire, is one of the most famous female moguls in Indonesia. The other is Martha Tilaar-- who I write about in the Indonesia section of Brilliant, Crazy, Cocky and with whom I'm doing an event tomorrow.

Alisjahbana was gracious when I called her out during my keynote. I was talking about the importace of finding mentors, and arguing that would-be entrepreneurs need to be aggressive about finding them. I asked Alisjahbana if she would take time to sit down with one of these kids if they called her and asked her for an hour of her time and free advice. She stood up, warmly smiled and looked around telling everyone yes to great applause, and I can only hope she gets flooded with requests from the ambitious young girls I met seeking to build their own fortunes. 

Alisjahbana also graciously shared a bit of her story with us. It started with her parents who were publishers until Indonesia's former president, Sukarno, took away their printing press and told them to go to hell. They fled to Kuala Lumpur with the family. But they missed Indonesia and came back once Alisjahbana was grown and gave birth to her first child. The family was hoping the famously mercurial Sukarno might give the printing press back, but they needed a way to get an audience with him. They fought through a crowd at one of his appearances, and Alisjahbana's mother shoved her daughter in front of Sukarno telling him the family had recieved a new baby and wanted him to honor them by naming her. He told them to come by the palace the next day. It took a few tries but they finally got an audience with him, and he bestowed a name on the child. He then asked what the parents did for a living and the mother said, "Nothing! You took our printing press away from us years ago!" As expected he had no memory of it or why he did it, laughed and gave it back. The family was back in business. 

Years later, at her husband's suggestion, Alisjahbana started the first "non-trashy" women's magazine called Femina, and the girls at the event had grown up reading it. The octogenarian recently passed the empire on to her daughter and retired, but I have no doubt she fills her free time with plenty of projects. 

Like a lot of Indonesian women, when I asked how she juggled family and work she said she just brought her kids with her everywhere. They fit into her life, rather than her shaping her identity around them. I'm starting to warm to that philosophy. Don't be surprised if the next time I write to you from Indonesia, I've got the baby in a sling with me.