Most of them are male, married and roughly 45 years old – but they can be as young as 21 years or as old as 80. Almost 25% are female. On average, they have 1.49 children (sometimes as many as seven), whom they rarely see. More than a third is of ethnic Chinese origin with a business based in Singapore, Hong Kong or mainland China, but with employees and customers around the world.

Almost always, they launched a company after trying several different jobs and industries, often in a foreign country. Life has been a mix of fun and sorrow: the challenges of running a company were far greater than they imagined. So were the rewards.

Who are they? They are The Interviewees.

Over the past three years, Weekend Journal has talked to nearly 100 business leaders from 20 countries for “The Interview” – a regular question–and–answer session that explores the personal and work lives of executives - What do you wish you’d known 20 years ago? Who is your mentor? What is your greatest fear? We’ve built up a picture of successful businesspeople – and the lessons they could pass on both at home and in the office.

Some of the men and women featured in “The Interview” were self–made entrepreneurs, while others climbed the corporate ranks. Some were the sole employee of their company, others the leaders of organizations with 20,000–plus employees. We selected people who represented a broad sweep of the business world: advertising, manufacturing, information technology, telecommunications, travel, luxury goods, financial services, retail and shipping – even exploration, professional sports and wine tasting.

Weekend Journal sifted through chats with 96 Interviewees, analyzing their responses and re-interviewing them to learn their collective wisdom: What were the biggest surprises they’ve encountered? What would they have done differently?

Here are the four top lessons from Asia’s business leaders, which can be applied to anyone trying to achieve success, as well as balance, personally and professionally.

LESSON 1 : Learn to love problems

In 1991, Ho Kwon Ping faced a crisis. For years his family’s business, Singapore–based Wah Chang Group, made money “like your average small Asian conglomerate” – with a wide array of property development, trade and third-party manufacturing with low-cost labor in Southeast Asia. But then a factory his family built in Thailand to manufacture shoes closed within a year of opening as clients sought cheaper labor in Indonesia. With the growing manufacturing might of China and India on the horizon, “I knew our business model couldn’t last,” he recalls. “You need proprietary advantage through either technology or a very strong brand. We didn’t have either of those.”

Rather than retreat, Mr. Ho went back to the drawing board and spent several years developing a new business for his family company – a chain of high-end resorts. Launched in 1995, Banyan Tree Hotels & Resorts now has more than 60 hotels and spas around the world. “In those situations, you can either deal with it pessimistically and cling to the past, or you disassemble the problem into finite pieces you can cope with,” he says.

The corporate leaders Weekend Journal has interviewed had no shortage of problems; South Korea entrepreneur Kim Sung Joo was disowned by her family after marrying a foreigner in 1985; they reconciled only after she nearly lost her infant daughter in a home accident shortly after launching her department store chain, Sung Joo Kim International, in 1990; she also lost $30 million overnight during the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis. Fredy Bush was a widow with two children and no college degree when she came to work in Taipei from Utah at age 26 – now she’s one of the most powerful women in Asia as founder and chief executive officer of financial services and media company Xinhua Finance Ltd. Joey Gurango’s first company went bankrupt, but the Manila computer programmer’s second company, Match Data Systems, was a success, and was eventually snatched up by Microsoft Corp., allowing him to retire at age 45.

They all share a common attribute – a thrill in facing challenges. Indeed, successful business people are flexible, happier people, says Warren Bennis, a professor at the Mashall School of Business at the University of Southern California, an author of 27 management books and former adviser to four U.S. presidents. “Their outlook on life is generally an orientation toward optimism,” he says. “It’s what health psychologists call ‘hardiness’.. an expectation of future success. Greater hardiness has a high correlation with longevity and success in the long run.”

This hardiness of business leaders is determined by the “three Cs: commitment, control, and challenge,” says Salvatore R. Maddi, a California psychologist who has studied the resilience of successful people. Specifically, these Cs are a commitment to solving problems, taking control of stressful situations and challenging oneself to learn from problems.

Ricky Wong is a problem junkie. Like nearly everyone featured in “The Interview,” he had an erratic path toward business cussed: In a 10-year period after he graduated from high school in 1981, he founded a children’s summer school, imported college textbooks, and even, while living in Canada, tried his hand at selling ladies’ pajamas. When he returned to his native Hong Kong in 1992, he entered the competitive market for discounted long-distance callback service – a success that he parlayed into City telecom (HK) Ltd., a local phone and internet provider with 4,000 employees.

Although Mr. Wong couldn’t predict where his varied career would eventually take him, the 44 years old says there were two common denominators: hard work and an innate love of problems. “Everything I did before 30 was like the foundation for a tall building – even selling ladies’ pajamas helped me today,” he says. “Without those challenges, I couldn’t have handled the keen competition I face today.”

LESSON 2: Interpersonal skills are the key to success

When Taiwan native Steve Chang – a gifted math student and computer programmer – entered the job market, he thought his technical skills would propel him to the top. He was wrong. “When I was 30, I never knew that business would end up being about people,” he says. “People are everything. I thought business was a bunch of MBA and financial talk, knowing how to sell.” The 51-year-old founder and CEO of Tokyo–based anti-virus software maker Trend Micro Inc. now knows this: “Business is so simple: Continue innovation and learn people’s behavior.”

The keys to the corner offices are your relationships with people. Nearly half of the interviewees said people skills were the hardest lesson they’ve learned: “I wish I was a little bit more astute about people, to know the nuances to understand different needs,” says Gerald Ablaze Jr., president and CEO of Globe Telecom Inc., a Manila–based cellular network provider. “Sometimes you forget about the human relationships, to keep building on them even when challenging them. To remember that aside from the job, I’m dealing with a human being, with their own insecurities.”

The higher up you go in a company, the more important people skills is – listening, seeking opinions, acknowledging the work of others’ become, says Marshall Goldsmith, a top executive coach who has written and edited 18 management books and earns more than $1 million a year counseling CEOs around the world. It is a difficult switch for executives whose hard-charging ways got them up the career ladder: “The most common problem (for CEOs) is winning too much – they built their careers learning how to win, and now they have to learn how to quit winning (by allowing others to have their say). As one of my clients, who is CEO of a huge multinational company, puts it: ‘All my suggestions become orders.’

For Western executives doing business in Asia, cultural differences add a new dimension to these relationships, as has been illustrated in “The Interview.” “I was fascinated by the multiple dinners, and meetings, the seating orders and drinking rituals,” says Herve Xavier, president of Canadian firm Mechtronix Systems Inc., which sells flight simulators. “Patience is important – you don’t step into every meeting expecting immediate results. I remember seeing this guy from the aerospace industry from Germany lose it in a restaurant because he was so frustrated. (Chinese business partners) have to know you’re not just in it for a short time.”

As one of the top recruiters for one of the world’s leading headhunting firms, 40-year-old Kevin Kelly has built his career on people skills – and yet it’s still a constant challenge to improve. “Every year for the past seven years, my New Year’s resolution has been improve my listening skills,” says Mr. Kelly, who six months ago moved from Tokyo to London after he was promoted from Asia-Pacific managing partner for Heidrick & Struggles International Inc. to President of the recruitment firm’s operations outside North America. “Listening instead of trying to interject your opinions, to force yourself to understand what the other person is saying. In Germany and Japan, because the verb is at the end of the sentence, people actually listen and don’t try to finish your sentence.”

LESSON 3: In the battle between work and family, family loses

If Jennie Chua could do it all over again, the 61-year-old Singapore executive would be a housewife. “I got divorced when I was young, and I needed a salary” to support her two sons, she says. Joining Raffles Holding Ltd. in 1988, she rose through the ranks to become president and chief executive of the hotel group, with nearly 10,000 employees at more than 40 hotels and resorts worldwide. Given the chance, however, “I think I would have spent more time with the children, although they seemed to turn out pretty well. But do I remember distinctly when they took their first step? No.”

As business leaders recognize with experience the importance of building personal relationships in business, what suffers are their primary relationships – with their families. More than half the people interviewed bemoaned lack of time with family. “I think you probably can’t really balance the two, but you should always try,” notes Tony Tan Caktiong, a Manila–based CEO of Jollibee Foods Corp. “When my kids were small, I couldn’t spend a lot of time with them.. to play with them, to listen to their stories, just to be with them.”

Experts are dubious whether a balance can really be struck between family and work. “Sometimes I think the whole ‘work life’ thing is a mirage – it’s a fantasy,” says Beth Bader, managing director at the Singapore branch of University of Chicago Graduate School Business. “People feel so insecure in their jobs, so competitive – the people I know who have managed are people who have a lot of self-confidence ... they draw boundaries, and they have the confidence to stick to them.”

Despite the growing number of women in top-level jobs and their changing roles in corporate Asia, balancing career and motherhood is still an agonizing trade-off for the 21 female executives Weekend Journal has interviewed so far. Raffles’ Ms. Chua says one thing that helped her was “outsourcing” her parenting to domestic helpers and her mother while she was in the office. “I felt fortunate to be living in Singapore – which is a small country, so I was always 15 minutes away from home – and to depend on my family for support. In the Asian context, to depend on close relatives is not embarrassing – it’s quite commonly done.” But she adds that the notion of setting aside chunks of quality time is a myth. “A mother needs to be there when the child falls down, or takes her first step.”

Complaints about work-life balance are a measure of regret, says Mr. Goldsmith, the executive coach. “You can work on interpersonal skills, but (family time) you don’t get back – it’s gone. The key is learning how to discipline your time with your family.” In 1990, Mr. Goldsmith started to measure how many days he spent with his two young daughters for at least four hours “without TV, and without movies.” The first year, it was 20 days – by 1994, that had risen to 135 days. “On Jan. 1, 1995, we set our family goals for the year and I asked my daughters ‘how about 150 days?’” His daughters, by the age 13 and 15, declined. “They voted for significant cutback.”

To strike some measure of balance, many Weekend Journal interviewees talked about planning trips around weekends and coming home for dinner on time – Sanjay Mirchandani, former vice president of Microsoft Asia-Pacific and now vice president of Microsoft Enterprise Services Asia, even had his wife and children pick him up from the office everyday to enforce the rule. But as Arun Abey, Sydney-based chairman of financial planning firm Ipac Securities Ltd., says: “If you’re running a business of any size, there’s going to be some sacrifice with family, period. I don’t think there’s any way around it.”

Instead, he spends “high-impact” blocks of time with his sons, aged 8 and 10, the longest being a 10-week vacation. In the past few years, he’s traveled with them to South America, on safari to Africa, and on a trip to Galle, Sri Lanka, to see firsthand the devastation of the December 2004 Asian tsunami. “My philosophy is to spend money and time with them in a wide range of experiences around the world,” he says.

LESSON 4: In Asia, success often means leaving home

Just as many successful executives in Asia change career before finding success, so do many change country. When Hong Kong native John Chen was a young engineer working at a computer company in California, he was passed over for a managerial job. The reason? Poor presentation skills, he was told. Mr. Chen recalls meeting with a fellow Hong Kong native for a drink afterward and they discussed their woes working in a foreign country. “He chose to move back,” he recalls. Mr. Chen chose a different tack: He spent a month’s salary to get training on how to be an effective speaker from anchors at a local television station. “Everyone tended to stereotype (Asians) as only engineers, but I decided to make a run at it – if it didn’t work out, I could always go home.” His strategy worked: Mr. Chen, 50, is now president and CEO of California-based software maker Sybase Inc. – with 4,000 employees worldwide – and sits on the board of directors of several charities and companies, including Walt Disney Co.

For many of the global entrepreneurs and executives featured in “The Interview,” finding success meant expanding their frontiers beyond – almost half the executives spoke about how they found their triumphs abroad. Mr. Tan Caktiong not only staved off the encroachment of U.S. food chains in the Philippines, but also built his Jollibee brands to 20,000 employees across nine countries. Michael Chan, founder of Hong Kong fast-food company Café de Coral Holdings Ltd., found similar success exporting Chinese and other restaurants to China, Indonesia, the Philippines and the U.S.

Living in different societies often pushes executives to try things they wouldn’t have in their own country, and frees them from invisible mental shackles supplied by the comforts of home. For Mr. Chen of Sybase, the decision to work abroad led him “to be more self–aware and self–confident, and (to) prioritize what’s important and what’s not.” At home, he says, “You can be very sheltered, very programmed, and think of things as entitlements. Being alone in a foreign country, you suffer setbacks, but you learn to rely on yourself.”

Jakarta–based entrepreneur Mee Kim considered herself an outgoing young woman growing up in Seoul. But when she left South Korea to attend universities in the U.S. and Australia, that image was shattered. “I realized how shy and introverted I was,” she recalls. “Most Koreans (abroad) tended to keep to themselves, to keep in their comfort zones. It’s very lonely and painful to break through that. I really had to open up and change to connect with people.”

It paid off: After stints of working in Australia and Bangkok, in 1997 Mee Kim opened up her own temporary office company CEO SUITE in Jakarta: it now has 55 employees in Jakarta, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Shanghai and Beijing. The 43 years old says that by leaving home, she found success that, as a woman, she could have never found in her native land Korea, where business is dominated by men. “It allowed me to break rules and social conditions. If I had stayed in Korea, I wouldn’t have achieved half of what I have.”

As globalization pushes business across borders, so it opens up more opportunities for executives and entrepreneurs to have what business school professor Mr. Bennis describes as “crucible experiences.. a test and trial of one’s character. ‘Leaving home’ to me is a metaphor, something all leaders have done one way or another to find themselves.”