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Branson flashed his trademark grin, flicked his shaggy, maverick hair.

‘Business is like the best game you could ever imagine.'

We talked about his multi-billion dollar investments in financial services, media and telecoms, airlines and space travel. He described his responsibility to hundreds of thousands of staff, and millions of customers.

And he was calling it a game.

He was having fun now, challenging the notions of conventional strategies and structures, especially in the biggest companies. The essence of Virgin, he said, is to do things significantly different and better.

He talked about his admiration for kids and for the next generation of entrepreneurs – especially those in fast-growing markets who have hunger and passion, and how he was inspired by iconic revolutionaries, Nelson Mandela and Steve Jobs.

‘You've got to think different, uninhibited like a child, never give up, have an ambition that you really care about, take more risks, be ingenious, make a bigger difference to people's lives, have incredible fun, but also play to win.'

I asked him what keeps him going. ‘Doing things different, unexpected and a bit crazy,' he said. ‘It's about playing the game. But the best way to win is to change the game.'

Whilst he says he's not too old for an all-night party, Branson loves a game of tennis, and that's after he's swum for an hour each morning along the coast of his own Necker Island.

From his earliest venture, launching a student magazine, he would always do things differently. He launched his first airline with no knowledge of the travel industry, but he had a big idea, to provide low-cost travel that was modern and fun. And he had a brand that at least some people loved. He could see an opportunity to disrupt the market, to be on the customer's side. When he launched mobile phones, he piggy backed on somebody else's network to grow further and faster, and targeted a new generation of consumers.

Even Virgin Galactic, his latest and craziest business, is not all it might seem. He had no experience of space travel. But he got together with glider designer Burt Rutan to do things differently, launching his spacecraft from the back of a mother ship, eventually to be fuelled by his algae farms on the Carribean, hugely reducing costs and carbon emissions and enabling daily departures and landings.

Perhaps the most surprising revelation is that space is not really the frontier. Branson's real ambition for Virgin Galactic is inter-continental travel. Imagine a one-hour flight from Rio to Jakarta, or Cape Town to Beijing. It could get a little weightless on the way, but could transform the way we think about the world.

Whilst Branson was still playing, it was already evening in Beijing.

Li Ka-Shing was sitting down to a dinner of his favourite snake soup. The Chaozhou-born, Hong Kong-based chairman of Hutchison Whampoa is the richest man in Asia, worth around $30 billion according to Bloomberg.

Yet he lives a relatively frugal existence, wearing simple clothes and a $50 Seiko watch on his wrist, and has donated much of his fortune to education and medical research.

This is a man who sees business as an ancient game, rooted in Chinese culture's ‘Wu Xing' where the five elements – wood, fire, earth, metal and water – come together in a mutually generative sequence.

You can see these phases in Li's business investments which include construction and energy, mining and technology, shipping and banking. Together they account for over 15 % of the market cap of Hong Kong's Stock Exchange.

Li loves a game before work too. In fact you'll find him at 6 every morning teeing off at the Hong Kong Golf Club with his playing partner, movie mogul Raymond Chow.

Whilst Asia rises, the old is still important. And that great old ‘Sage of Omaha', investor Warren Buffett, still knows how to play too.

Twice as wealthy as his Asian peer, Buffett loves to surprise his shareholders when they gather at ‘the Woodstock of business', Berkshire Hathaway's annual meeting. Forget slick graphics explaining the complexities of financial markets, this is different.

As the lights dim, there's a roar off stage, and 80 year-old Buffett rides on, dressed in a leather jacket, on the back of a shining Harley Davidson. He grabs a guitar and starts playing a song. His review of the year. His shareholders love it.

In fact it's interesting how playful the world's most famous entrepreneurs are.

Mark Zuckerberg began writing software at the age of about 10. As his father once said ‘Other kids played computer games, Mark created them'. Whenever he came across somebody else's game, he would hack into the code, and change it to make it better.

Facebook itself started out as a game. Enrolled at Harvard to study psychology and computer science he was quickly distracted, famously creating a game called FaceMash which invited fellow students to vote for the hottest girls (and guys) on campus.

Soon he changed the game, under pressure from some of his peers and University administrators. Facebook was born. And a billion people followed.

The Guiyang Circle