Taxi Mafia in Xian

Taxi Mafia in Xian 

After spending 2 days in Xian, on my way back to the airport, I had figured out that I could take the airport shuttle bus which stopped outside the Melody Hotel downtown, opposite the stunning Drum Tower for 27 Yuan. With a flight at 11:30 AM, I had allowed myself plenty of time to get to the airport, only an hour’s ride from town centre. So arriving at the bus stand at 07:30 that morning, I was about to get in line in the queue of passengers waiting to board the next bus leaving for the airport.
 
I was stopped by a woman and a man who asked me what time my plane was. I told them and the woman wrung her hands in desperation as she informed me that the shuttle bus would never get me there on time, that it took the better of 2 hours at the very least to arrive at the airport and that traffic was very bad THAT morning. I was stunned as I was sure I had allowed plenty of time, from having talked to the staff at my hotel earlier.
 
The woman then signaled to a plain vehicle standing nearby, suggesting that I HAD better take a cab instead for 50 Yuan, sharing with 3 others. Thoroughly confused and bewildered at this turn of events, I didn’t think to walk back up to the people handling the shuttlebus passengers to get their version of things. I just stood by the roadside, forlorn and dismayed, at the thought of having to take a cab which was not only more expensive but less interesting for me than to be with a bunch of passengers in a big bus.
 
After much hesitation and reflection, I decided it was best to take the woman’s advice and headed over to the unlicensed cab which was waiting with 2 other Chinese passengers who had also been fed the same story as me, that they wouldn’t arrive at the airport in time for their flights. I found it quite difficult to believe that the 2 chinese locals were not more discriminating or skeptical about the story we had been fed. We were being scammed, I was sure of it but what could I reasonably do about it?

As it finally turned out, we got to the airport in just under an hour, which meant I had a 2-hour wait before my domestic flight back to Shanghai. I have posted my experience on the internet to warn unsuspecting travellers for the future. 

Visit my website: http://www.cross-culturalsynergies.com/

Chinese New Year 2013

The Chinese Lunar New Year of the Snake went off with a bang around the world on Sunday February 10 as fireworks erupted with furious intensity and filled the sky. This occasion is notably celebrated not only in China but by millions of  overseas Chinese residents from North America to South America, and from Australia to Asia.

But in Beijing the celebrations were notably muted, following government appeals to reduce air pollution which had risen to near catastrophic levels in recent weeks in the run-up to the annual Lunar New Year fireworks.

Setting off fireworks to celebrate renewal and ward off evil spirits is a traditional part of the celebration that marks China's most important family holiday.

Also known as the Spring Festival, which is based on the Lunisolar Chinese calendar, the Chinese Lunar New Year of  the Snake is celebrated from the first day of the first month of the lunar year and ends with Lantern Festival on the 15th day. In countries like Malaysia, Indonesia or Vietnam where Chinese count as ethnic minorities, the celebrations are officially recognized with one or two public holidays although Chinese-owned businesses will normally shut down for a week to ten days, this being the most significant festival of the year.

What will the New Year bring for Chinese?

In China, snakes tend to end up in medicine cabinets or on the dinner table. If you are interested in knowing what the year brings for you, you can consult an astrologer who referring to the Five Elements (Metal, Water, Wood, Fire and Earth) theory, will predict your fortune and fortell what will happen in your life in the Water Snake year.

According to various fortune tellers, 2013 is a year of yin Water over Fire, and Fire is the element of happiness so that will bring confidence to people and facilitate an economic recovery. It’s also said to be a good year for starting families as snake babies will find it easier to make friends or work for a good boss.

How to greet Chinese friends and visitors 

The traditional greeting is: Xing Nian Kuai Le (Mandarin) or Gung Hei Fatt Choi (Cantonese) to kick off the Year of the Snake. It means: May the New Year bring you joy, happiness and  prosperity.

• Avoid saying “Happy New Year” in Cantonese which comes out as Sen Nin Fai Lok. This last character, Lok, unfortunately sounds the same as the character meaning “decrease” or “drop” so it’s taboo to a lot of Chinese minds. A Malaysian or Hong Kong Chinese will not be happy when you wish him/her a quick descent in the coming year.

Demonstrating sensitivity
These days, managing successful partnerships with Chinese companies requires continued engagement, pragmatism and focus. Differences in culture, experience, and man­agement practices mean that each side needs to pay systematic and explicit attention to clarity of commu­nication and trust-building between the partners. Many partnerships have foundered and others will certainly do so in the future—be it from conflicting objectives, lack of mutual understanding, sheer cultural distance, or lack of effective follow-through on change management.

If you are a global team leader, show sensitivity towards your Chinese colleagues when organizing phone conferences or international meetings at Headquarters and make efforts not to schedule them during important holidays like Chinese New Year.

A case in point: a well-established global company with significant presence in the Chinese market, decided to hold one of their global meetings at a time coinciding with the Chinese New Year celebrations. Apparently they had checked with their Chinese colleagues who numbered about 10 in all whilst the rest of the global managers numbered about 30. The Chinese had not raised any public objections about the date to HQ but it was learned in private that not all participants were happy about having to travel to New York, spending the most important holiday of the year away from their families.

There are numerous incidents where team members located in Asian countries routinely attend phone conferences late into their evenings.  Why?  Because their colleagues in headquarters are located more than 10 hours behind.  Wanting to maintain politeness and harmony means that they will almost always acquiese to the inconvenient scheduling. At the same time, they are most likely to accompany that willingness with an exasperated shake of the head and ‘but-I-can’t-really-believe-they’re-actually-asking-me-to-do-this’ type of disbelief.

What to do different
If China is indeed one of the critical parts of your organization, isn’t it about time you do something about Chinese New Year as the Chinese have done for you on Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving or  Halloween?  Extrapolate the same spirit to your day-to-day interaction with your Chinese counterparts.

Respect differences and cultivate knowledge of your teammates’ cultures
Whilst different cultures vary in how they show respect, following some general rules for leading and managing cross-cultural teams should help you to score points and lead to positive results:

Þ    Learn at least one fact about every team member’s culture

Þ    Acknowledge cultural differences and remind teammates to respect them

Þ    Do not overgeneralize or attribute characteristics of a given culture to individuals

Þ    Demonstrate flexibility and try to find middle ground and compromise when potential points of conflict surface

Þ    Watch or read the news from your team members’ countries of origin. Discuss cultural topics with your teammates to better understand different viewpoints

Þ    Become aware of the traditional festivals of your virtual teammates. Send an e-card or e-greeting to convey your well wishes. Send virtual gifts.

Þ    Respect different time zones when scheduling virtual meetings. Honor as much as possible everyone’s availability and time preferences.

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Plane crashes linked to a cultural dimension?

Can cultural issues cause planes to crash? Malcolm Gladwell — the wild-haired pop intellectual of “Tipping Point” fame — says yes, and dedicates a whole chapter to the subject in “Outliers: The Story of Success,” the book he  published in 2008.

In an interview with Fortune Magazine , Gladwell, a British-Canadian journalist, bestselling author and speaker, said:

‘Korean Air had more plane crashes than almost any other airline in the world for a period at the end of the 1990s. When we think of airline crashes, we think, Oh, they must have had old planes. They must have had badly trained pilots. No. What they were struggling with was a cultural legacy, that Korean culture is hierarchical. You are obliged to be deferential toward your elders and superiors in a way that would be unimaginable in the US’

‘But Boeing and Airbus design modern, complex airplanes to be flown by two equals. That works beautifully in low-power-distance cultures [like the U.S., where hierarchies aren't as relevant]. But in cultures that have high power distance, it's very difficult.'

Gladwell explores two plane crashes—one Colombian (Avianca Flight 52) and another, South Korean (Korean Air Flight 801)—and how the culture of the pilots perhaps contributed to each disaster. He focuses on how well the pilots communicated with each other and with air traffic control. Poor communication in these examples, he argues, has to do with something called a culture’s Power Distance Index (P.D.I.)—the term and concept come from psychologist Geert Hofstede—which is a measurement of “how much a particular culture values and respects authority,” as Gladwell defines it. Countries with a high P.D.I. generally value being more deferential towards authority, and thus not contradicting a superior (the U.S. has a low P.D.I. of 40). Gladwell argues that since both Colombia (67) and South Korea (61) rank towards the top of the P.D.I. list, the subordinate members of their cockpit crews were unable or unwilling to speak up as assertively as they should have about safety concerns.

What’s your take on this? The next time you take a flight, are you going to check on the nationality of the pilots before flying? Is the airline owned and managed by a hierarchical culture such as Thai, Chinese or Mexican?

Visit my website: http://www.cross-culturalsynergies.com/

 

Going for gold in emerging markets

Winning the $30 trillion decathlon: Going for gold in emerging markets

McKinsey Quarterly, August 2012

By 2025, annual consumption in emerging economies will rise to $30 trillion, nearly half the global total. Yet today, the developed world’s largest companies get only 17 percent of their revenues from these new markets. Despite advantages in scale, technology, and access to capital, multinationals risk missing out on the century’s defining growth opportunity. McKinsey has identified 10 key capabilities that companies must develop to seize this opportunity.

Amongst them, ……………….. the urgent need to develop, recruit and retain local talent by portraying themselves as the ‘employer of choice’. Firms like L’Oreal, Motorola and Nestle have been successful at branding themselves as desirable employers.

They must also learn to build and manage effective relationships with key local stakeholders in government, civil society, and the local media to harness their support for market access, merger and acquisition activity and reputation enhancement.  

Not to mention the fact that understanding the cultural characteristics of the emerging market consumer will have significant implications for brand and marketing strategies.
Read the whole article

Watch this video:

McKinsey experts highlight a number of business disciplines where global companies need to raise their game in order to compete effectively, ranging from brand building, innovation, sales and distribution to the development of local leadership.

Visit my website: http://www.cross-culturalsynergies.com/

Britain’s Tiger Mums or tough love, chinese style

A few weeks back, I watched a programme on BBC Channel 4 titled, Britain’s tiger mums, which revealed that immigrant Chinese mothers in Britain were practicing draconian and grueling child-rearing measures to ensure their children’s place under the sun, similar to that practiced by American-Chinese immigrant, Amy Chua, controversial author of The Battle hymn of the tiger mother.

Tough discipline and extreme child-rearing practices have often been used to explain the reason why American kids are falling behind in school whilst Asian immigrant kids excel scholastically and are widening the gap in America’s ability to compete globally. Amy Chua's book unleashed an uproar around the world amongst Western mothers, who called her such names as nuts, Hannibel Lecter, erudite serial killer, accused her of abusive perfectionism and overpressuring her children.

My own take on this: the answer probably lies somewhere in the middle of this great big controversial divide. Perhaps Western-style parents should toughen up and worry less about hurting their children’s self-esteem and Asian-style parents should soften up and show more care about how they treat their children who come home from school with unsatisfactory report cards.

My own parents (2nd generation immigrants from Guangdong) understood the importance of hard work and discipline but they were not sufficiently educated themselves to enforce academic discipline upon me and my 7 other siblings. They left the task of monitoring our school work and exam studying to the older siblings, and I haven't turned out too badly, if I do say so myself. On the other hand, various of my classmates from more privileged backgrounds did receive ample doses of training and monitoring in their academic life from their parents as well as disciplined musical instruction and practice from professional teachers. One of these classmates is today a well-adjusted wife/mother and head of dentistry at an Ivy League school so yes, the results of tiger parenting are there to behold. 

Amy Chua on her day off

http://www.npr.org/2011/01/11/132833376/tiger-mothers-raising-children-the-chinese-way - audio critique by Maureen Corrigan

http://blogs.wsj.com/ideas-market/2011/01/18/the-tiger-cub-roars/- daughter of Amy Chua responds to readers’ questions about life in the tiger’s den.

Video: comments made by The Colbert Report, an American satirical television programme.

Battle hymn of the tiger mum:

Article in Wall Street Journal
A lot of people wonder how Chinese parents raise such stereotypically successful kids. They wonder what these parents do to produce so many math whizzes and music prodigies, what it's like inside the family, and whether they could do it too. Well, I can tell them, because I've done it. Here are some things my daughters, Sophia and Louisa, were never allowed to do:
• attend a sleepover
• have a playdate
• be in a school play
• complain about not being in a school play
• watch TV or play computer games
• choose their own extracurricular activities

Of all the responses to Amy Chua’s essay on Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior, perhaps first and foremost you’d like to hear from one of her daughters. Well, Sophia, the older daughter, wrote a letter to her mom in the New York Post:

Tiger Mom,
You’ve been criticized a lot since you published your memoir, “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.” One problem is that some people don’t get your humor. They think you’re serious about all this, and they assume Lulu and I are oppressed by our evil mother. That is so not true. Every other Thursday, you take off our chains and let us play math games in the basement.

But for real, it’s not their fault. No outsider can know what our family is really like. They don’t hear us cracking up over each other’s jokes. They don’t see us eating our hamburgers with fried rice. They don’t know how much fun we have when the six of us — dogs included — squeeze into one bed and argue about what movies to download from Netflix.

I admit it: Having you as a mother was no tea party. There were some play dates I wish I’d gone to and some piano camps I wish I’d skipped. But now that I’m 18 and about to leave the tiger den, I’m glad you and Daddy raised me the way you did. Here’s why.

A lot of people have accused you of producing robot kids who can’t think for themselves. Well, that’s funny, because I think those people are . . . oh well, it doesn’t matter. At any rate, I was thinking about this, and I came to the opposite conclusion: I think your strict parenting forced me to be more independent. Early on, I decided to be an easy child to raise. Maybe I got it from Daddy — he taught me not to care what people think and to make my own choices — but I also decided to be who I want to be. I didn’t rebel, but I didn’t suffer all the slings and arrows of a Tiger Mom, either. I pretty much do my own thing these days — like building greenhouses downtown, blasting Daft Punk in the car with Lulu and forcing my boyfriend to watch “Lord of the Rings” with me over and over — as long as I get my piano done first.

Visit my website: http://www.cross-culturalsynergies.com/

Are you a universalist or a particularist?

Radio broadcast by Fons Trompenaars and Charles Hampden Turner

Are you a universalist or a particularist? 

Consider for a moment this dilemma: You are a passenger in a car driven by a close friend, and your friend's car hits a pedestrian. You know that your friend was going at least thirty-five

miles an hour in an area where the maximum speed was twenty miles an hour. There are no witnesses.

Your friend's lawyer says that if you testify under oath that the speed was only twenty miles an hour, then you would save your friend from any serious consequences. What would you do? Would you lie to

protect your friend? What right does your friend have to expect

your help? On the other hand what are your obligations to

society to uphold the law?

This is the sort of question that Fons Trompenaars and Charles

Hampden Turner asked 15,000 managers in 28 countries around

the world. They were interested in exploring the cultural

difference between what they called universalist societies and

particularist societies. Universalist societies follow the rules and

assume that the standards they hold dear are the correct ones.

They try to get everyone to conform to them. That way, they

believe, society works better. Particularist societies, on the other

hand, believe that particular circumstances are more important

than general rules and that your response depends on the

circumstances and on the particular people involved.

Going back to the car and the pedestrian, Trompenaars and

Hampden Turner discovered that North Americans and North

Europeans were almost totally universalist in their responses.

They would put the law first. Only 70 per cent of the French and

the Japanese would do so, however, while, in Venezuela, two

thirds would lie to save their friend.

Does this matter for managers? Listen on  to find out more.
Episode 13: Fons Trompenaars and Charles Hampden Turner

Or read the transcript here:
http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/handy/trompenaarsturner.pdf

Visit my website: http://www.cross-culturalsynergies.com/

Ushering in the Year of the Dragon 2010

Chinese New Year is the longest and most important celebration in the Chinese calendar, and falls this year on January 23, 2012.

New Year festivities traditionally start on the first day of the month and continue until the fifteenth, when the moon is brightest. In China, people may take weeks of holiday from work to prepare for and celebrate the New Year.

Immigrant Chinese communities throughout Asia (Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos) also take part in this celebration. Being 30% Chinese in population, Malaysia is no exception and Malaysian Chinese also embrace this as the most important festival in the whole year. Many throw an 'open house' on the 3rd or 4th day to receive friends and colleagues from the other 2 races, Malays and Indians.

Legend has it that in ancient times, Buddha asked all the animals to meet him on Chinese New Year. Twelve came, and Buddha named a year after each one. Actually one of these creatures is mythical, the dragon. He announced that the people born in each animal's year would have some of that animal's personality. Those born in dragon years are innovative, brave, and passionate. Examples include Salvador Dali and John Lennon.

Fireworks and Family Feasts

Chinese New Year celebrations are a time of family reunion and  people wear red clothes, decorate with poems on red paper, and give children "lucky money" in red envelopes. Red symbolizes fire, which according to legend can drive away bad luck. The fireworks that shower the festivities are rooted in a similar ancient custom. Long ago, people in China lit bamboo stalks, believing that the crackling flames would frighten evil spirits.

The Lantern Festival

The lantern festival is held on the fifteenth day of the first lunar month. Some of the lanterns may be works of art, painted with birds, animals, flowers, zodiac signs, and scenes from legend and history. People hang glowing lanterns in temples, and carry lanterns to an evening parade under the light of the full moon. As a child, I remember trotting around the neighbourhood with other children, eating New Year candy and carrying a lantern to light up the streets as dusk fell.

Another important custom is the performance of the dragon dance. The dragon—which might stretch a hundred feet long—is typically made of silk, paper, and bamboo. Traditionally the dragon is held aloft by young men who dance as they guide the colorful beast through the streets. Many Chinese families hire these dance companies who are traditional martial arts or kung fu experts to come dance in front of their homes, believing that it chases away evil spirits and paves the way for good luck and prosperity for the New Year.

http://www.cross-culturalsynergies.com/