Strategic Lessons from Thailand: Legacy Bundle
Expanded Edition Including All Original Field Notes

This Legacy Bundle brings together a complete set of strategic insights and memoir-based lessons drawn from over a decade of real experience in Thailand's tourism sector, infrastructure challenges, and informal economies. Built on the original release, this expanded edition includes the full collection of field notes. Honest, practical, and focused on relevance.

Through vivid storytelling and clear analysis, the book examines cultural tension, operational risk, misaligned interests, and the underlying patterns within unpredictable environments. From monsoon floods and power outages to failed hotel ventures and abrupt pivots, each chapter offers a look into the decisions, constraints, and adaptations that shaped one entrepreneur's journey.

Whether you're leading a business in uncertain conditions or simply curious about how strategy plays out in the real world, Strategic Lessons from Thailand provides insight you can use.

Included in this edition:

Inside the book

This nonfiction collection documents a real business journey through post-tsunami Thailand, based on the original journals of a Finnish entrepreneur who built and rebuilt in unfamiliar territory. From hotel failures to infrastructure gaps, and from local workarounds to moments of insight, each story is paired with reflections from his son. These added notes connect past events to modern themes like risk management, adaptation, and resilience in uncertain systems.

Why it matters

If you're considering life or work in Thailand, this offers a look at the parts guidebooks leave out: the hard realities that surface after arrival.

It's also written for those who have had to operate without safety nets, whether in startups, freelance life, or unstable systems. These stories don't just reflect on challenges; they offer structure for thinking through them. The result is not a memoir for its own sake, but a resource for those who need to move fast, stay sharp, and make sense of chaos.

About the author

Jonny Ekholm is a Finnish MBA, strategist, and service design expert with a background in leadership and organizational change. As a teenager, he witnessed his father build a life and business from scratch in Thailand, shaping his own approach to systems, risk, and resilience. This book distills the lessons he observed, later studied, and reframed through lenses such as systems thinking, behavioral economics, and practical experience. It is part legacy, part field manual, and entirely grounded in reality. He writes about class divide, unpolished resilience, and how setbacks can become long-term advantages.