Walk into ten luxury boutiques in Dubai on the same afternoon and you’ll have pretty much the same conversation ten times. After twenty years on that floor, I don’t think the sameness is a lack of effort. It’s that the advisor is selling, when the job is to translate.

I ran a session for a group of boutique managers last year, eight of them around a table, all wearing the particular expression of people who have not slept properly since the second their job title changed. I asked them a fairly simple question. How much time do you...