Greater China Business Club

When I did my MBA at the Richard Ivey School of Business from 2002 to 2004, I was eager to prepare for a future career in China. At the time, going to China to work was not at the top of most MBA-holders’  lists for international work experience, but I was fortunate that Ivey still had (and still has) a number of great options for China exposure:

• There is the Ivey China Teaching Project.
• Ivey has a large number of China-based case studies (a specialty of the school’s Asian Management Institute).
• Ivey’s main campus is in London, Ontario, but it has a sister campus in Hong Kong.
• Ivey (both London and HK) also has a large group of Chinese students and alumni.
• And, even back then, it had an exchange programme with the then-virtually-unknown-and-unranked CEIBS.

I highly recommend Ivey to any MBA or EMBA who is looking for a career in China post-graduation. That said, one of the best preparations for my future career in China was joining the Ivey China Club.

Joining the Ivey China Club was something of a controversial choice, truth be told. It was, in reality, mostly a club for the current Chinese students to socialize and connect with each other and with the previous Chinese class for study tips and support. It was not so much for fostering greater China business relationships (since many of the ICC members had made the decision to emigrate to Canada) or for meeting with the non-Chinese students. Nevertheless, the ICC welcomed me and a handful of other non-Chinese students into the club. By my estimation, participation was a most effective activity towards my understanding of China and Chinese people in general, and how to do business in China specifically.

For example, it was from the ICC that I learned how to drink erguotou (slowly) and build up guanxi relationships (even slower). Some of the kinder members even tried to foster my ability to speak Mandarin — in vain, I might add, since I had not yet begun to study the language seriously, but thank you for trying.

I am somewhat saddened to see the Ivey China Club is no longer on the list of social and business clubs at Ivey. This may have been because, after the 2004 graduating class, the number of mainland Chinese students attending Ivey declined (along with attendance in general, I might add, part of the downturn that hit a lot of MBA schools after the wave of people that went to school following 9/11 and the end of the dotcom bubble). It seems to have been at least partially replaced by the “Business in Asia Club.”

One of the questions I get asked frequently at speaking engagements throughout the world is, “How can I develop my career in China?” That is the by-now-self-evident purpose of this post, I hope: Join your local China club! Get involved in the Chinese community at your school or town. By all means do the other stuff, like studying Mandarin, learning more about China through reading books and attending presentations. Also consider coming to China as an exchange student — in undergrad or graduate school it makes no difference, just get here. But, in terms of interacting with Chinese people before you get here, you cannot do better than these kinds of social and business clubs that bring Chinese and local people together.

The GCBC is a student-run organization that supports and promotes greater business connections with China and contact between Rensselaer students and China professionals. There are a lot of other great interviews on their site. Check out the listing at the GCBC’s Stories and Insights.

Like other English newspapers published in China, the Global Times English edition caters to two audiences: Foreign residents in China looking for news in English, and also Chinese who are interested in reading the news in English for language study or personal preference.

You may have heard the statistic that there are more people studying English in China than there are native speakers of English in the entire world. There is a similar statistic — also frequently quoted for its surprise-cognitive-dissonance factor — that China has the largest number of English speakers in a single country, more than America, even! I would have to say that both are pseudo-facts at best, since it depends on how you define  a “native” speaker or, for that matter, what it means to “study” a foreign language.

The population of India — where English is used as a working language — may be significant enough to match China’s own claim to the largest number of English speakers in a single country. And as for “study” of a language, as a speaker of Japanese, Mandarin, and native English, I can attest that real communication ability and the study of a language are usually two different things. I studied French in elementary school; I would hope that my vague recollections of pommes frites and une bibliotheque do not still qualify me as an actual speaker of French, as those above pseudo-facts seem to imply about Chinese students of the English language.

That said, interest in the study of English in China is huge. It is a huge industry. Huge numbers of people do speak at least some of the language, in the hundreds-of-millions HUGE, according to some estimates. So I was delighted that the Global Times re-purposed my interview as a language lesson: It can be used well by Chinese studying English since the context is in the article, but foreigners studying Mandarin can also get some benefit (characters and pin yin are all included). In a future post, I will include some of the words, idioms and proverbs that I used in the book.

In the meantime, here is the list they came up with with a couple of my notes in parentheses:

Chinese you need:

Book：书 (shū)

Upgrade：升级 (shēng jí)

Shape：形成 (xíng chéng)

Opportunity：机遇 (jī yù) (I like to use the word 机会 – jihui)

Strategy：战略 (zhàn lüè)

Challenge：挑战 (tiǎo zhàn)

Transformation：转型 (zhuǎn xíng)

Trend：趋势 (qū shì) (for supertrends I use 大趋势 – daqushi – big trend)

Urbanization：城市化 (chéng shì huà)

Affluence：富裕 (fù yù)

Sinofication：中国化 (zhōng guó huà)

Inception：创始 (chuàng shǐ)

Consumer-oriented：消费者为导向的 (xiāo fèi zhě wéi dǎo xiàng de)

Consultant：顾问 (gù wèn)

Capacity：容纳能力 (róng nà néng lì)

Now if only somebody could come up with a good translation for “Show me the money!”

Thursday May 10th 18:30 – 21:00 @ Green Drinks Shanghai   Full Event Info Here (free to the public)

I am the featured speaker and will be talking about China’s sustainability supertrend and the opportunities companies and individuals can find therein. Other information here and here.

Friday May 11th 09:00 – 18:00 @ Transition China 2012  Full Event Info Here (1950 RMB)

Transition China is an all-day entrepreneurship event with more than a dozen speakers, I will be speaking about the top entrepreneurship opportunities in China’s economy today. Other speakers include top executives from Google China, PayPal China, Hurun Report and venture capital. More information here and here.

Tuesday May 22th 12:15 – 1:30 @ CVRVE (Shanghai Center) for CanCham Full Event Info Here (100 RMB / 150 RMB)

A lunch-hour book talk to learn the key ways to turbocharge your career and business in China using the China Supertrends.

Additional events may also be listed on the events section of the China Supertrends website and the website for my publisher, InChina Publishing.

If you cannot make it to one of those events, stay tuned for further announcements.

I also speak to corporate clients at annual meetings, executive visits to China and overseas speaking engagements. To that end, I will be in Japan in mid-May and in Shanghai for the remainder, but please contact me anytime.

I believe — though I cannot be certain — that this is a reference to one of my all-time favorite movies, 1996’s “Jerry Macguire” starring Tom Cruise.

This is a movie that means many things to many people. To me, “Jerry Macguire” is a story about breaking away from the cynical corporate world, starting a business on your own and balancing life happiness with work. Early on, of course, Jerry has to confront the paradox that leaving behind the corporate world does not mean being able to avoid the competition and pressure to succeed: Even as an entrepreneur you will still be called upon each and every day to show customers, partners and employees that you are willing to fight for their interests and have the passion and commitment to go the distance. Thus, the “Show me the money!” mantra Rod needed Jerry to shout to keep his business.

Buy the book on Kindle via Amazon.com

Now that I have completed the new book, the time has come to promote it. A common misconception among new authors is that their publishers are going to do a lot of marketing for a book. Far from it! Unless you happen to be seen as an up-and-coming Stephen Covey- or Stephen King-caliber best-selling author, publishers do very little marketing beyond sending out your book to reviewers and getting it listed in the right databases.

That is nothing to sneeze at, of course, but it is far from sufficient for a new author (of which I still consider myself even though this is my second book). Authors have to do speaking events, interviews, guest posts on blogs and just all-out hustle for every possible reader impression.

Which reminds me, I have had a couple of speaking events already in Shanghai, at Shanghai University School of Economics and at the Suzhou Indonesian Students Community Talk 2012.  I have many more events coming up in the following weeks and months.

Would you like to attend one of my presentations? Keep an eye out on my China Supertrends blog’s event listing and my publisher’s event listing pages.

Would you like me to speak at your event? Please get in touch.

More information on the presentation can be found here and you can register by going to the CanCham website at this link.

Jason plans to talk about differences in leadership style, decision-making, and power distance, in the context of Chinese employees working at Western multinational companies, and will also discuss some of the Chinese management approaches including Mao-style management.

The article, titled Of MICE and Trends, discusses how China’s MICE industry will develop now that mega-events such as the World Expo 2010 are over. The Chinese government’s recently published macro-economic five-year plan for China is one place that MICE companies can look for new strategic direction:

The 12th Five Year Plan … was officially unveiled in March, and should be required reading for the country’s MICE industry.

[...]

The government is keen to close China’s wealth gap, which goes hand-in-hand with narrowing the east-west development divide. Eastern coastal regions have received far more investment and witnessed more economic development in the past three decades, but as attention shifts to boosting consumption in western regions, brands will follow.

Another growth area to focus on, which this blog has written on before, is the employment fair. Specifically, in 2011 job fairs will be in greater abundance and more widely attended as yet another 6 million graduates hop into a frothy market that has quickly recovered from the effects of the GFC.

MICE Now is a print-only publication but can be ordered by contacting CER, and I also recommend their annual MICE publication for those in the industry, the China MICE Guide 2010-2011.

You can download a copy of the article Of MICE and Trends in PDF format here:

Jason Inch pages from MICENOW-2011

This issue’s theme is the employment situation in China so I decided to write about some of the job trends I find interesting right now (both for local Chinese and expat residents).

The first is shan yun -

Recently a new phrase has popped up in the Chinese lexicon, shan yun, which I’ll liberally translate as “crisis pregnancy,” meaning having a baby during the economic crisis. Why is this significant? Under the new employment law which went into effect January 1 2008, women are granted extended legal protections and may not be terminated during pregnancy or maternity leave, offering a year or more of safe employment. The unforeseen result? Employers already facing difficulty are rife with sudden marriages and pregnancies. No data is available yet but I’ll wager that 2009 will have seen a mini baby boom among urban professionals.

While writing this article I also found myself remembering my time spent in Chicago and Seattle during the dot-com boom. Back then, job-hopping was practically an institution, with lavish signing bonuses. One company even gave you a Porsche if you joined their firm, and good computer programmers were so scarce that massive H1B visa quotas were primarily allocated to Indian software engineers. In China, during the last four years I’ve been here, wages and voluntary turnover were steadily increasing in the major cities, until the global economic crisis hit, anyway:

It wasn’t so long ago that job websites such as 51jobs.com advertised themselves to candidates with a kind of euphoric “Enjoy life, try switching jobs!” tone. It all seemed reminiscent of dot-com boom tales of copy-editors becoming high-tech executives and making paper millions on stock options. But as in the dot-com bust of 2001, in Shanghai today jobs are hard to find, and the people with them are head-down and hard at work in their cubicles, assiduously trying to avoid “prairie dogging” – sticking one’s head up could mean getting it chopped off. One Canadian employer told me that voluntary job turnover has dropped to zero at his firm in the last three months. Some employers are probably enjoying this new era of stable employees who do not leave at the drop of a yuan.

Quite a change in attitude among employees. Search firms are also in a perilous situation, with cutbacks among even senior recruiting professionals. The new tone sometimes manifests itself in amusing ways. One example: At jobs website zhaopin.com, they’ve adjusted their advertising, from the picture on the left, saying “How can you get lucky in your future career? Once you are certain, job-hop again!” to the advertising below, with the tagline reading, “How about letting a good job find you?” And there’s now a cute mascot instead of the over-the-top jumping metaphors of Monopoly or Kung-fu flying. I imagine the mascot is there as if to say, “I’m your guardian angel in this horrible job market!” Reassuring.

For foreigners working in China, myself included, the employment landscape is changing but is by no means dire. I still hear lots of stories of young expats being transferred to China with hefty rent and living allowances, while for those in China already, Chinese companies are actually becoming an attractive option as so many multinational firms have frozen their hiring until the financial crisis ends. Chinese web-portal Alibaba is hiring 5000 new employees this year, I hear. Or you can always try a job fair:

April 23 – CanCham Shanghai, 6:30 PM at the Four Seasons Shanghai

May 7 – Green Product & Business Forum, 10 AM at Shanghai’s Guangdong Hotel Conference Center

(More information on the above two events can be found at this post on Supertrends).

As well, in May I will be talking to some groups privately, including a study tour to China from my alma mater, the Richard Ivey School of Business, and a group of EMBA students from the John Molson School of Business of Concordia University.

I am available to speak about China’s economy and the Supertrends at events inside and outside of China. Please contact me for more detials.

The overall topic of this issue of the newsletter is in fact the upcoming World Expo. I have previously written on this topic in relation to Haibao, the pinipedean Gumby look-a-like Expo mascot, but my new article is less tongue-in-cheek and more about what the real potential for the 2010 Expo really is:

Fast-forwarding to 2010, the Shanghai-hosted World Expo could be a turning point of the economic crisis, or it might be one of the worst-timed major events of the 21st century: When Shanghai opens its doors to the world, China’s economy and that of the world could be on the way to recovery or in the midst of a downturn possibly rivaling the Great Depression.

I go on to compare it with the last major expo, that of 2005 in Aichi, Japan, which I had the chance to attend given that Nagoya was a city I once called home. The theme of the Japanese pavilions and the overall event was the role of technology in our lives, apt in a demographically-challenged yet high-tech Japan. This contrasts with the theme of Shanghai’s, which is to be Better City, Better Life, basically all about urbanization and sustainable development. I must say, I prefer the idea of a cleaner greener future rather than one in which I am served by robotic guides…

I think that in the end, Shanghai’s Expo will be, much like Aichi’s was, a phenomenal success. Sure, there is the possibility it may not be in the booming China that we have grown accustomed to in the last several years, but I believe it will be a source of new optimism for a brighter future.

He gave few specific details, but the following statements stand out, as quoted from his full address:

…each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet.

…We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together.

…We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories.

…All this we can do. All this we will do.

As I have written previously, I see this to be a viable solution to the multifaceted problems facing our world. Quoting Al Gore, whom I believe put it into the best phrasing yet (albeit in reference to the US situation in particular) in his speech last July,

…We’re borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf, to burn it in ways that destroy the planet. Every bit of that has to change.

I hoped that President Obama would be using such a strategy to invigorate the US economy. While his current economic recovery plan of approximately $825 billion, which has just passed the US Congress and is going to debate in the Senate next week, has a fair amount of environmental spending (about $58 billion could be termed energy-generating or -conserving spending) the bulk of the $825 billion is devoted to tax credits, infrastructure spending, aid to the poor, education and so on.

It is disappointing that there was not more, but saving the planet is a hard sell when the overall economy and people’s livelihoods are in trouble. However nearly $60 billion in green stimulus, which includes more than $20 billion in renewable energy tax credits – for things like solar panels installed on rooftops – is a great beginning to what hopefully will become the hallmark of his Presidency: Changing the direction and drive behind the US economy.