International Business
What did I learn while travelling in China and India? Business opportunities are everywhere and it takes ingenuity and perseverance to recognize and capitalize on them. Each country has its quirks or idiosyncrasies, weaknesses, strengths, and lessons to be learned — especially in business. Knowing which to capitalize on and when is what will proverbially bring home the bacon.
China
China is an infrastructure powerhouse. They build what they need and in record time without any red tape. The bridge to the Yangshan deep sea port is a prime example of China’s speed and efficiency when they need something. They built a 20 mile bridge in just one year. The design and sheer size of the project left me awestruck. And the bridge is just one example. Everywhere you look in China there are projects like the Yangshan deep sea port and none more so than the preparations for the Olympics.
China’s leveraging their infrastructure engine to build up Beijing for the 2008 Olympics. I still have doubts about whether the air quality will be improved, but none about China’s ability to build and prepare their infrastructure for the Olympics and the crowds of people it will bring. If you doubt my assertions, they’ve instituted a driving reduction by only allowing cars that have license plates that end in even numbers to come into Beijing on every other day and plates that end in odd numbers on the alternate days. This effectively halved their traffic, pollution and all without any red tape or time involved in a bureaucratic process. Ingenious.
The Chinese handle most of their business like they handle life: with an importance relationships or more complexly: guanxi. What is guanxi? In the simplest form: a gift. Someone gives you a simple gift and then in time you’re required to give a gift in return when needed or most appropriate (but not right away). This builds relationships and favors between people who can then leverage these relationships and favors to move ahead. In our trip, a few of the companies we visited were able to give us visits with more companies just by calling in a little guanxi. By receiving these visits, I now have some guanxi to give back to the companies who helped me. Make sense? If not, don’t worry, it is a bit confusing until you experience it firsthand.
If you are going to do business in China, be prepared to do favors and bring gifts to everyone you do business with. You don’t need expensive gifts, just thoughtful ones. I believe this practice comes about from the sheer amount of people in China. In order to get anything done, to move up the corporate ladder, or just to do general business you need people and you need to make yourself unique from everyone else. Guanxi is the Chinese answer.
India
India was a different beast entirely. The media refers to India as a tiger straining against a leash and the leash is India itself. The tiger is represented by the young Indians and their desire to succeed and show the world how powerful and driven they are. The leash represents the Indians who are clinging to tradition and don’t want to grow or move forward. India is divided and united at the same time. Confused? It is difficult to grasp and can be compared to the traffic in India. Do a search on youtube.com for Indian traffic and you’ll see the kind of controlled chaos that I’m referring too.
At first glance the traffic looks daunting and it should be, as it’s also very dangerous to drive in India. But the danger is not what we are concentrating on. Rather we are looking at the simple fact that Indian’s are moving three times the amount of cars as Los Angeles on very old infrastructure with half the traffic. I am more than likely making a few generalizations but my point is that the will and determination of the Indian people is what is the most impressive. The government is extremely democratic and as such as placed an extremely high value on education. Even in the most rural of cities there were signs advertising engineering, commerce, business, and hotel management schools. All the signs promised good scores and high paying jobs. Can you imagine that in the United States?
Best Practices
Service, service, service. Both India and China had many successful businesses all making a lot of money. What did they all have in common? Quality service. Each business treated their customers with respect and concentrated on the service aspect of the business. If westerners could learn anything from the Chinese and the Indians it would be that while anyone can copy a product quite easily (especially the Chinese) it is much more difficult to copy quality service. I was able to glean a lot of useful knowledge on the jewelry business from Adora Jewelers. Their views on the market may have differed greatly from my own but on one thing we can agree: service to the customer. They treat the customer to champagne and delicious food and pamper them in any way possible. This kind of treatment entices customer to come back and buy jewelry again rather than from their competitors. Of course this could be applied to any business but it was easy for me to understand as my father owns a few jewelry shops in San Luis Obispo.
Comfort Zone
I had been to China before in 2000 for a government sanctioned cultural exchange and the culture shock hit me very hard then. This year I was prepared and accepted the travelling like a breath of fresh air. Maybe not fresh air as this year it was exceptionally smoggy in China but the euphemism still holds true. My comfort zone was definitely tested in India. Personal space is attacked regularly and lines and courtesy seemed to be at the bottom of everyone’s list of priorities. At McDonalds, four men cut in line before me by physically pushing me away and out into the mob of people in “line”. While this was extraordinarily rude, it was the status quo in India. Maybe it is not rude to cut in front of people in India. Either way, I didn’t let it get to me. I’ve come to realize that when travelling to another country it is best to try and be as polite as possible and if they are rude to you, accept it until you can respond appropriately for the culture. I’d rather have a bruised ego than leave a bad impression as a “stupid American”.
Conclusion
If I could sum up the trips experiences into one statement that represented everything I learned I’d have to say: Business is all about relationships. Everyone has heard it before, but it becomes very real the more you experience it, and especially in China and India.