Welcome to Off the Record, your new pass into the margins of luxury leadership. Each fortnight, Bettina von Schlippe, Co-founder of Beyond the Boardroom and Publisher-at-Large at Vogue Singapore, distills what’s shaping the region’s luxury landscape, from closed-door perspectives, to unfiltered insights, and the quiet shifts that haven’t made the headlines just yet.

Full disclosure: this column exists because of Google.

Well, more specifically because of what my Editorial Director Rahat Kapur diplomatically calls “content volume requirements” and what I less diplomatically call the “terror of the algorithm.” Six months after launching Beyond the Boardroom (a platform built to enrich genuine insight to the C-suite of the luxury industry) we found ourselves in the very startup situation we had theorised about at length: ambition is not the problem. Volume is. So, Rahat made a proposal: “What if you shared a column about your conversations, the people you meet, and the things you observe? It would be inspiring!”

I regularly ask my team to come up with creative solutions for problems I am cornered by, so naturally I had no choice but to say yes.

So, this is that column. It’s not quite research, and it’s definitely not a white paper. It’s closer to what journalists mean when they say something is “off the record”—unguarded, unfiltered, and very occasionally, raw. Here, all our sources will remain anonymous, which should lend to proceedings an air of investigative intrigue, even if my surname is not Woodward. Whether the algorithm rewards my candour is something our weekly digital meeting will in due course, make abundantly clear, but regardless, I am prepared to take the hit for the team.

It’s no secret that my job has a number of perks, the chief of all being the people I meet. CEOs, founders, young designers, actors, marketers, the occasional model, venture capitalists, I meet them all, and there’s no hierarchy implied by that order. Many of these meetings can feel like the professional equivalent of a good espresso: necessary, brisk, and sometimes forgotten by noon. And then, occasionally, one turns into the piece of 92% dark chocolate with the 10 almonds I allow myself each afternoon. Bitter, complex, and most of all, totally worth it.

Last month, amid the daily flood of amazing invitations that constitute my inbox, one from a contact in the Middle East stood out. An exclusive XI:XI dinner hosted by Circolo—a private membership community whose entire philosophy rests on convening one host, 10 strangers, and absolutely no agenda. No itinerary circulated in advance, no guest list visibility, and certainly no LinkedIn previews recommended.

I confirmed (though nearly forgot as I was deep in a Club Vogue conversation about whether romance is back for Valentine’s Day, and good news, it is apparently) and arrived last. The table was full. Nine men and one other woman looked up with a combination of curiosity and mild reproach. The first course had been held. As soon as I sat down, I begun reaching mentally for my business pitch (a reflex so ingrained in me that it almost operates independently of conscious thought now) when our host rose and delivered a small speech that changed the temperature of the room. “This is not a business meeting, and it’s not a transaction. Tonight is about you. Who you are as a person and what you care about right now.”

The shoulders in the room dropped by several centimetres in unison; the relief was almost audible. We were not here as vice presidents and CEOs. We were here as mothers, fathers, dancers, chess players, and mountain climbers. Before you knew it, something the business books call “psychological safety” and the rest of us deem great conversation, simply happened.

For 90 minutes, the table turned into an exchange of candour that professional life rarely sanctions. Unpacking mistakes made, things learnt, where ambition had carried us and where it had also quietly fallen short. There is something remarkable about sitting beside someone who built a billion-dollar technology platform, sold it for considerably less, and is willing to unpack how they arrived at a place of complete equanimity about that. This kind of acceptance does not come from a coaching programme, and certainly cannot be performed.

What struck me most though was this: the loneliness of the C-suite is not a cliché, but very much a structural condition. You cannot confide in your team. You can, of course, consult Claude, Perplexity or ChatGPT—and many of us do—more than we readily admit. But for all its extraordinary capability, AI is limited in the human perspective it can offer. It has no scars, no lived experience, no painful recollections, no joys of achievement, and no tales of endurance to regale. Which is perhaps, why an evening with 10 strangers and no agenda felt paradoxically like the most nourishing professional conversation I have had in months, and the one that lingered longest.

This is the insight worth sitting with this fortnight: we’ve become master architects of curated connection, yet the structures we build are increasingly hollow. The XI:XI format—one host, 10 guests, and a blank slate—isn’t a new invention. It’s a direct evolution of the ‘Experience Economy’ framework introduced by B. Joseph Pine II and James Gilmore in 1998, a concept that has since become the ubiquitous gospel of every luxury conference keynote. But here’s the thing about frameworks. They describe the outline of a feeling without quite capturing it. The living version is still startling. An evening that cost nothing beyond intention and a genuine willingness to be present generated more trust, more goodwill, and more potential than most of the structured networking I attend across an entire year. No production budget. No brand activation. Just people, actually present.

For all its extraordinary capability, AI is limited in the human perspective it can offer. It has no scars, no lived experience, no painful recollections, no joys of achievement, and no tales of endurance to regale.

The data also bears this out, and it’s worth pausing on. According to the 2024 Edelman Trust Barometer, personal relationships remain the single most trusted source of information for senior decision-makers — above institutions, above media, above AI. And yet the average executive spends less than 5% of working hours in unstructured conversation. We have engineered spontaneity out of professional life and then commissioned think-pieces lamenting its absence. The irony of my writing one now is not entirely lost on me.

For brands, the implication is as straightforward as the execution is elusive. Emotional resonance is not a feature you layer onto an experience, it is the very architecture. What people carry with them is never the production value, it’s whether something genuine passed between them, and whether it was real enough to remember. And for leadership teams, and I mean this with some conviction, the most quietly radical thing you could do this quarter may simply be to take the agenda off the table for 90 minutes and discover who is actually in the room. Not their titles. Not their positioning. Them.

There is a larger conversation waiting here about the economic models that hold profit and purpose in tension without one gradually eroding the other. We will get there. For now, the theme of this particular evening stays with me: presence, not performance, is what people remember. In luxury. In leadership. In life.

The algorithm (I am told) has been fed, and your coffee cup (I suspect) is by now, empty.

Until next time, remember the best conversations are always off the record.