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Welcome to the Foresight Newsletter, a free monthly publication of Prevoyance Group Inc. This newsletter shares tips for high performance IT organizations and observations that we hope will prove informative and enjoyable.
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Adaptability
Next to the current state of the economy and the latest corporate scandal, news about China dominates the media. Much of it carries an undertone of fear, detailing a tainted product coming from China, the mounting trade deficit, or implying that China will “take over the world” through cheap products, questionable government oversight and exploited workers.
What is rarely mentioned, and just may be China’s greatest strength, is its adaptability. I spent the past three weeks in Shenzhen, a large industrial city north of Hong Kong, and China’s first “special economic zone.” In the early 1970s, the powers at be in China’s central government decided to dip their toes into free markets. With what was then British-controlled Hong Kong to the south, the sleepy fishing village of Shenzhen became a laboratory and buffer zone, experimenting with a communist political system with a decidedly capitalist economy and preventing any unsavory ideas from Hong Kong from spreading too far into mainland China.
China’s hyperactive version of free markets is not as noteworthy today, the simple fact that a country could abandon a core component of its political and social ideology more or less overnight is amazing when you stop to contemplate the fact. Imagine the US allocating a single state to a grand experiment in a planned economy, or a European nation putting aside decades of tradition, all in the name of experimentation with the hope that the results just might be positive.
While China’s political regime may be less than palatable to many, the ability of the Chinese to adapt is impressive. Whether it is experimenting with an economic system or the less savory Chinese penchant for copying any and every product imaginable, organizations and individuals could all benefit from a lesson in Chinese adaptability. How many times has an unquestioned personal belief held you back from trying something new, or a long held corporate policy or procedure prevented your organization from trying a new process or tactic that later proves immensely beneficial. Many of the people I spoke with in China seemed to regard failure as part of a learning process, the yin to the yang of success and a critical component rather than an unsavory outcome to be avoided at all costs. As the economy and geopolitical order change on a seemingly daily basis, adaptability will be critical to survival, and something we could all use in abundance.
Conceiving versus Making
The Chinese penchant for copying goods certainly raises the eyebrows of the first-time Chinese traveler, and presumably raises the blood pressure of intellectual property lawyers and trademark holders. I visited Lohou Commercial City during my trip, a five story bazaar-type building with literally thousands of small stores, and was shocked by the array of pirated goods. Before you even enter the market, you will likely be solicited for the ubiquitous “copy watch” from a dizzying array of Swiss brands, and once inside the market will be shown high quality printed catalogs full of knockoffs of the latest in designer handbags, clothing and accessories. And this is all after several highly-publicized events to “clean up” the market.
To the western visitor, this appears to border on the nefarious and immoral, with the Chinese ignoring concepts of brand ownership and intellectual property that many of us in the west take as a given. Upon speaking with several Chinese, it seems that rather than attempting to exploit a brand for commercial gain, they hold the making of something in higher esteem than the conceiving. I was told that if someone can offer a product with a similar appearance and quality to one costing ten times more, they are actually performing an economically and morally noble act. The making of a good becomes more important than more cerebral concepts like brand equity, copyright, marketing and R&D. On the other hand, the west has taken the opposite tack during the past several years, looking at manufacturing as a borderline inconvenience (much to the advantage of Chinese contract manufacturers), with countless companies moving production to other entities and choosing to focus on designing, marketing and distributing their wares rather than building them.
Commenting on the moral legitimacy of either side of the agreement is a discussion for another time; however, what is striking is the distance between the two positions, a fact that is instructive from an organizational perspective. Many companies and even divisions within those companies take wide-ranging positions on the question of which is more important: the conceiving or the making. While it is generally unstated, IT or Marketing in one company may be an army of doers, rapidly growing impatient with discussions of the conceptual, while in another organization the doing of a task is far less savory or important than involved and deeply nuanced discussions of the act, its consequences and potential alternatives.
Like most positions, the optimum balance should be somewhere in the middle, with a bias depending on the environment at hand. R&D will always be more focused on the conceptual, while logistics is strongly biased towards making and doing; however, an extreme focus on either side is dangerous. Take a step back from your company, division or team and ponder its focus. Is there action to the point of fault, with groups mindlessly performing tasks and never questioning their efficacy or appropriateness? Are haughty discussions and endless analysis undertaken before the simplest task can be embarked upon? Just as blatant copying of brand-name products will likely be unsustainable in China, an overemphasis on conceiving or making will be dangerous to your organization in the long run.
Travels with Patrick
I stayed in a one bedroom apartment during my visit to Shenzhen, one of the benefits of which was a small clothes washer/dryer in the apartment. As one would expect, all the controls and displays were in Chinese, but after several failed attempts at clean clothes, by about the second week, I was able to push the right combination of buttons and knobs, and end up with clean and dry clothing after a few hours of machinations of the machine.
In an attempt to be a slightly better travelling husband, I had been keeping up with laundry during the trip, and between the washing machine and hotel laundry service, for once I would be bringing home a suitcase full of clean clothes rather than a pile of dirty clothing for the wash. My master plan included washing one final load of clothes the night before my morning flight, so I would have nothing but the clothes on my back for the wash upon arriving home. As usual, the machine left the clothes slightly damp, so I activated another dry cycle then took my shower and did some final packing, assuming I could stop the machine after fifteen minutes or so.
Fully packed and aside from being wrapped in a towel, I confidently hit the “stop” button on the machine, went to open the door of the machine to retrieve my clothes and found it was securely locked. I jiggled the handle, reset the machine, and after several failed attempts resorted to madly pushing buttons on the machine. Based on the poorly-translated Chinese/English operating manual, a blinking red light apparently noted that the door was locked. The manual helpfully noted that a service engineer could unlock the machine, not a particularly helpful option when I was leaving in about 20 minutes. In desperation I activated the 30 minute cycle that the manual described as the “Anti-Viral option” and contemplated a 17 hour flight in my towel. After about ten minutes as panic began to set in, the machine beeped gleefully and I heard the lock mechanism disengage, releasing my presumably virus free (and exceedingly dry) clothing.