From the Anchor Desk to the Boardroom: How I Redefined My Own Expertise
My career, to many people, looks like a series of jumps.
I began in media as a reporter and anchor at TVBS, then went back to the U.S. to earn a second master's degree at the Harvard Kennedy School. After graduating I moved to Hong Kong as deputy general manager of ETTV Asia's operations; returning to Taiwan in 2004, I went into Eastern Television's overseas business and founded ETTV Asia, serving as station chief; in 2008 I founded CTi Asia and ran it as station chief, and in 2010 became an executive director at ETtoday. In 2020 I founded my own media and international public-policy firm, working in policy communications and international affairs; in 2025 I earned a doctorate in business from National Taiwan University's College of Management. Today I serve as a director and independent director at several listed companies, including CTS, Vigor Kobo, Lucax, Rechi Precision, and Tatung.
From a news anchor reading a script to someone sitting in a boardroom reading financials and making decisions — it looks like several different industries. People often ask me: how did you "switch"?
But my honest answer is: I never really switched careers at all.
Because I understood one thing early on — your real expertise is never your job title; it's your ability. And ability is portable. And I mean something very specific: the ability to make something complex understandable, to keep asking until you reach the heart of a matter, and to make someone more powerful than you willing to listen. These three, in every position I've held, are the same set of tools.
Take the first: making the complex understandable. The most important thing I learned at the anchor desk wasn't how to read a script — it was how to digest something complicated and deliver it accurately, so that an ordinary person gets it in thirty seconds. An international news story has history, interests, competing forces behind it, but you have very little time to make the audience grasp the real point — and you cannot get it wrong. It looks simple; it's extremely hard. You have to understand it thoroughly yourself before you can say it fast and right. I later found this is just as valuable in the boardroom. When I explain to a room of executives how a geopolitical shift will hit their supply chain or overseas footprint, I'm using the same craft: translating something intimidatingly complex into words they understand and can act on right there. What the anchor desk trained in me wasn't polish — it was the discipline of "simplify, and be correct." From the television screen to the boardroom table, that has never gone out of date.
The second: asking until you reach the essence. A reporter's job is to refuse to be brushed off by the official line, and to keep asking until you hit the real core. Years of that habit went into my bones. Later, in policy communications, it became another ability: reading the gap between what a decision-maker says and what he actually cares about. In my line of work, the most valuable skill isn't being articulate — it's hearing the part that wasn't said. An official's public position and his private worry are often not the same thing. That reporter's instinct to never stop at the surface lets me see, faster than others, where the other side is really stuck. The seat changed, the title changed, but the core ability is the same.
The third: making someone more powerful than you willing to listen. I've interviewed, face to face, more than twelve world-class heads of state. What those interviews taught me wasn't just an international outlook — it was how, in a very short time, to make someone far more senior and far busier than you willing to drop their guard and truly talk. That's not technique; it's how much homework you did beforehand, and whether you made them feel you were worth a serious answer. This works at any negotiating table, in any boardroom — because whether you face a president or a chairman, human nature is the same: whether they'll listen depends on whether you've made them feel you understand what they care about.
So you see, anchor, reporter, station chief, executive director, policy consultant, independent director — the titles keep changing. But those three core abilities underneath have never changed. I didn't "switch industries several times." I carried the same set of abilities onto one battlefield after another, and each time gave them a new name.
Redefining your expertise isn't tearing everything down and starting from zero — that's a waste. It's recognizing what your real weapon is, and then working out what that weapon is called on the next battlefield.
My business doctorate was the same logic. Not because I wanted to become an academic, but because I realized the instincts I'd built over decades in the field needed a more rigorous framework to test them and articulate them. That degree wasn't a change of track — it was sharpening what I already had. And further back, going to Harvard for a second master's while still an anchor was already the same thing: I wasn't abandoning journalism, I was giving my weapon — reading the international situation — a firmer foundation.
If you're standing at a crossroads right now, asking "should I give up my current expertise and start over" — don't rush to negate your past self. Ask yourself one question first: over these years, what have I actually trained myself to do? Once you're clear on that, you may find that the next place you're going doesn't need a brand-new you. It needs the you that you thought you had to leave behind, but have in fact been carrying, and accumulating, all along.