Playing ker-ching, or Where's Wally?

THE ALCHEMIST

The delegate was as close to horizontal as it is possible to get on a plush but undersized Louis XIV-style conference chair.

Arms folded across his chest, his eyes all but closed, he remained unmoving for the best part of two hours. In the coffee queue I asked, as one does, if he had found the morning’s proceedings absorbing. “Not very,” he replied candidly. “No ker-ching.” A major fund buyer, he spends a lot of his expensive time looking and listening, albeit in repose, for “stuff”. What kind of stuff? The stuff that makes the light go on, the eyes flicker, the tired brain engage with a spirit thought to be lost in a morass of dreary RFPs. He does not know precisely what he is looking for, but he will recogni...