Step out of the lifts on the 33rd floor of the downtown Hong Kong building where General Electric last year established the headquarters for its businesses outside of the US and it is easy to miss the understated entrance. Walk around the elegant, airy offices and there are noticeably few people. It does not seem fitting for the headquarters of a US conglomerate with $147bn in revenues to be quite so unprepossessing.

John Rice, a vice-chairman of GE, whose appointment created a stir when it was announced that he would head the company’s global operations in Hong Kong, halfway around the world from the corporate headquarters in Fairfield, Connecticut, has a simple explanation for the small, sparse office. “I didn’t want to add another big layer of management,” he says. “What you see on this floor is about as big as it’s going to get.”

What one sees on the floor, in fact, are the offices of only 25 staff – including the chief financial officer of the global business and senior HR and legal managers.