Sampoerna Headquarters

I work at Sampoerna University, which is funded by the Sampoerna Foundation, headquartered at Sampoerna Strategic Sqaure, about five kilometers from where I work and live.





.

The Sampoerna Foundation is managed by the Sampoerna family. They made their money as cigarette tycoons.  The company started out as a little cigarette cart in Jakarta, but exploded over the 20th Century into the major cigarette company in SouthEast Asia. The company's major claim to fame was the mass production and sale of clove cigarettes as a significant segment of the tobacco market, at least in this region.  Several years ago the Sampoerna cigarette empire was sold to the Phillip Morris conglomerate for billions and the Sampoerna Family now devotes its energy to expanding their philanthropic efforts, including the creation of the university where I now work.

Today my boss took me to the headquarters and gave me a tour of HQ and all its opulent glory.  There are about 30 castings of Rodin's The Thinker all around the world.  One of them is in the lobby of Sampoerna HQ, but no photos are allowed, so unfortunately you are left to your imagination for that image. But I am able to show you a few pictures of my tour including the entrance to the building and the staff lounge on the 31st Floor, which looks like some place Ernest Hemingway must have hung out at if he ever visited Indonesia.  

If nothing else, I can't ever claim that my work life has been lived for 30ish years in a cubicle in Topeka counting beans or pumping gas at the local Petrol Mart.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Erik's Book Club: November Selections

Image
I experienced another wonderful month of reading, six books in all.  Five of them were quite magnificent. The Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi was probably my favorite.  It's a novel that was a finalist for the 2020 Women's Prize for Fiction. It's a philosophical novel of family, religious faith, identity, and science and one women's struggle to understand them all as they apply to her tragic life. It would take a 1000-word review to do the book justice;  I would simply say that I highly recommend it and it's a book worth seeking out. Very different, but as good as Gyasi's novel is: When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut, a finalist for the 2021 Booker Prize. It sounds peculiar: it's a hybrid history/novel retelling the story of crucial discoveries in quantum physics. It's a book that disorients the reader in that, for the first half, it is extremely difficult to determine where fact ends and fiction begins. Ultimately it is a caution
Read more

Erik's Book Club: September Selections

Image
I was bogged down in August, but I've roared back in September, reading five books during the month.  Even better is the fact that all five books were fantastic and worth reading. First one I read is a book a dear friend recommended quite some time ago and I found an old copy that I brought with me to Indonesia.  Finally, I read it: Blink, by the prolific Malcolm Gladwell. Though it's one of his older works, it still resonates today. In a nutshell, Gladwell utilizes lessons from psychology and neuroscience to teach us how to make better decisions using our ability to focus extremely quickly on a few essential details. Highly recommended, though it was sad to read the chapter on the Amadou Diallo case.  15 years ago Gladwell provided a blueprint on how police could be better trained so they could avoid cases of accidental police killings of minorities, such as in the Diallo case, by training police to recognize bias and modify their policing. Of course, in the thoroughly unprogr
Read more

Erik's Book Club: August Selections

Image
Didn't get much reading accomplished in August. Partly because it was my busy season of New Student Orientation and the start of the academic year, but also because I got bogged down with the main book I read. The book that bogged me down was The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro. Earlier this year, I read his newest work, Klara and the Sun, which I zipped through and enjoyed immensely.  However, The Buried Giant, while it is a well-written and profound work, really was a book that didn't speak to me and I had trouble getting through more than about 15 pages a day.  The novel is a fable telling the tale of an elderly couple trying to find their long-lost son as they hike alone through the stark English landscape.  The story is set in the darkness of Post-Arthurian England and mixes realism with the exploits of dragons and knights. If you like Ishiguro, you might enjoy this book, but I found it tedious and I would strongly recommend reading Klara and the Sun instead. I also read a
Read more