Where to focus? Strength or Weakness?

This is a topic raised by one of my readers some time ago, and kindly reminded to me by my mother.  What is my strategy regarding strengths & weaknesses?

 

- Develop my weaknesses?  (e.g. take an assisting, observing role for a chinese SOE client)

- Move to areas where I can play to my strengths?  (e.g. take a leading, coaching role for a multinational client)

 

Looking deeper, there are more choices to be made.  For example, when picking my reading material, do I read Businessweek, Harvard Business Review, and interesting business books or inspirational novels?  Or should I suffer myself through chinese children's books, and slowly reading a single chinese news article a day (or week!) to increase my reading skills?

 

Clearly working for Capgemini I have made part of this choice - to play to some of my strength, thereby finding an employer willing to hire me, which keeps me clothed and fed while I live in this country.  But there still remain many choices to be made with my time and efforts.

 

Staying on the periphery of my comfort zone, I learn the most.  Do I impress the most though?  Or deliver the most value?  Not necessarily so.  Some managers will notice what I am doing, and respect me for growing.  Other managers might see only my unfamiliarity, and perceive me to be an incompetent.

 

I feel that playing to my strengths, I would increase my promotion/salary potential and reputation in the short term.  Long term though, it still has to be better to develop my weaknesses.  I say this because I'm working on the theory that people straddling specialisms are few.  For example, the cusp of business and technology.  Such people who know a fair amount about both are rare.  Add chinese & western culture/business, and chinese & english language, and that's a couple more rare cusps to throw into the mix.  Sitting in the middle of all that - has got to be rare, and thereby valuable.  (a friend told me a chinese phrase to this effect recently.. wu xi xxx gui I believe it was - I have forgotten the third word)

 

That's really what I'm doing here... breeding myself into something quite unique (well, at least rare).  People often ask me what I will do when my 5 year plan is up.  My intention is that having developed my 'cusps', I don't know where the world will take me.  A number of options should open up, either directly related, or seemingly unrelated.

 

Trouble is, any employer will typically prefer the short-term view.  They will want to leverage me for all I'm worth today, and in a sense let me worry about tomorrow.  I'll have to be mindful of what I can influence or control, if I really want to develop more for the long term. 

blu-tack emergency

Ok so I'm looking for a big roll of brown parcel paper (like they use in Ikea or in post offices for wrapping) but I can't find one in our stationery catalogues.  I'm also looking for blu-tack and failing miserably, the best offers I've had so far are children's plasticine, and cooked rice.

 

I want to be able to stick bits of card on the wall (or even better, onto my brown parcel paper), and then move them around.  Flexibility it seems is not something I'm going to easily be able to achieve.

 

Argh.

Websites for restaurants in Shanghai

Sometimes it's hard to find non-western restaurants in Shanghai

 

Here are some restaurant listing websites that popped up when I was doing a search to find 1221, a popular 'shanghainese' restaurant that has been dressed up for foreigners.  We're going there tonight in a large group for French Vivien's leaving party.

 

http://www.thatssh.com/Directory/DirectoryIndex.aspx?TID=20&PID=0

http://www.china.org.cn/english/TR-e/42841.htm

http://www.shanghai-eats.com/portal/common/List.aspx?NeighborhoodSearch=252&ReKind=0

http://www.frommers.com/destinations/shanghai/D42294.html

 

Advanced and Not So Advanced ATMs

I waited with a friend at an ATM last night - a most interesting experience.  She was taking 3000 RMB out of her bank account, interesting because she had to take 1000 out at a time, each time re-inserting her bank card and re-inputting her PIN number.  Usually it seems the transaction withdrawal limit is lower than the daily withdrawal limit.  Maybe some day the bank will realise that this isn't actually very helpful, and causes longer queues.

 

Funnier still, was that having taken the money out, she then put the money back into the ATM!  She had taken the money out of her current account, and was then paying off her credit card bill.  Firstly I was amazed, because I didn't realise you could pay credit card bills at your ATM.  I guess I'd figured it would be like any other utility bill.  This is a good service, because it encourages customers to use their bank's credit card and not a competitor's.  Secondly though it was amusing that my friend had to take the money physically out of the machine (3 times), only to feed it back into the machine (thankfully in one go)!  Why not just have a 'transfer' function!

 

[Actually I guess a reason could be because the machine works off the back of whichever card you have inserted.  My friend will have started with her bank card, and then later inserted her credit card.  In the ATM's 'mind', they're quite separate affairs.  Oooh there's a process reengineering and system integration opportunity....]

 

Anyhow, my friend tells me that she loves that bank - China Merchants Bank, because its ATM system is more advanced than others.  It certainly seems that way, even if the functions haven't quite been 'optimised' yet. 

Mystery on the phones

My, the phones and I are not getting on well.

 

It's a good year now, and I still haven't figured out how to get voicemail on my mobile phone.  I almost had it once, but something went wrong with it, and now I don't.

 

This creates the awkward predicament of needing to answer my phone when it rings.  Sounds normal, but when I'm in an important internal meeting or training, and waiting for a client or sales call, then I do have to answer my phone.  Not having voicemail is very normal here.  It's part of the reason why most people will always answer their phone, no matter what situation they are in.

 

I think it's an evolution - people start of revelling in being in-contact all the time.  But at some point they realise the intrusion, and begin choosing when they want to be available - i.e. when their mobile phone becomes a mobile answering service.

 

I was caught in an awkward foreigner-situation a couple of weeks ago.  I received a call while I was in an informal internal meeting.  The caller introduced themselves in Chinese, and I had no idea who he was.  A classmate of mine apparently, but I had to ask several times who he was and why he was calling, and in the end gave up.  He kept telling me his name, as if I should instantly recognise him.  Sorry pal, but there are just too many classmates in my MBA, and too many chinese names.  It was already inconvenient enough, so I asked him to call back later - which he never did. 

 

I think next time this happens, I'll have to take a number from the mystery caller - poor chap must have been offended as well as confused.  I must try again to get voicemail as well, although it's still proving not easy.  I think I found the right part of the service menu when I called China Mobile or whoever it was, but it wanted me to input my 6 digit password, and I haven't a clue what that might be.  Crap.

Learns - people dynamics

These aren't so much things I've learned how to do, but more things I have learned that I yet have to learn. Ahhh consulting. Is there another career where one gets to know oneself this closely? These all realised in the context of a team sales meeting, which was pretty good, but still a great learning opportunity.

• Foresight - How to better predict in advance, or to identify success criteria in advance. (Sometimes subsidiary obvious goals can be overlooked)
• Oversight - How to see a situation from a birds eye view. Looking at the complete package, not the solution.
• Heightened perception - Looking at a situation real-time via the eyes of others. Reading others' body language and word choices. Noticing changes in others' behaviour and approach. Reacting real-time, and giving recognisable signals to others.
• Sufficiency - How to know when a goal has been sufficiently achieved - and thus move onto demonstrating another.
• Worrying for oneself only - How to know the where one's responsibilty ends and another begins - and let them worry about their part.
• Letting go - How to interject/steer, but without stealing/fighting for control of the wheel.
  
• Knowing when & how to attack - when presented with disagreement/a different view - rather than running straight up and headbutting the wall, take a step back. you've gained awareness that the wall exists. now you can choose when & how you should tackle the wall, if at all. (will the wall get weaker over time, perhaps because it has weak foundations? what is hidden behind the wall propping it up - is it an isolated perspective, or an emotion such as fear perhaps? who built the wall? who likes the wall? if we have scarce resources, should we save our energy and avoid the wall altogether?).
• How to evolve from being a rocket into a heat-seaking missile with speed control. Once inertia is built up (e.g. preparation of a presentation), how perceptive are you that you are getting the feedback you expect? Is it indeed the right discussion topic? Are you so emotionally attached to your mission that you can't see or hear the stimuli suggesting that you are heading in the wrong direction or going too fast? If you do spot the signs, then can you slow down or change direction?
  
  

HK - what a place

For the first time in a long time, I didn't have MBA classes, and took advantage of good timing to visit my mum in HK, who purchance was in HK at the time.

 

It's been at least 6 months since I was last there.  Within perhaps less than an hour of landing, I had travelled by their express train to Central, and walked up to my aunt's office.  In half an hour's walk from there, I bought clothes from a mall, walked through the new four seasons hotel (nowhere near as flashy as shanghai's - quite a different look), and passed a number of interesting bars cafes and restaurants.  Wow, I'd love to work in that area.

 

Hong Kong rocks on the grounds of great architecture, high standard of living, and proximity.  Everything is so close by.  You don't get this with Shanghai - and certainly not in Pudong - you have to cab from place to place.  Maybe I'd feel differently if my office was in plaza 66.

 

This weekend I had a rooftop barbeque overlooking the harbour, had seafood hotpot by the beach in Cheung Chau, buffet at the Jockey Club and walked TST and Soho with my mum.  Staunton street and Elgin street were amazing - tens of tiny international restaurants and bars.  Perfect for a casual date - strolling around and picking a place to eat, or browsing in some of the small shops there.  I met also with Kellog, Janice and Yonnie and some of their friends, at two very nice bars - Isola in the IFC mall, and Finds in upper lan kwai fong (which I'm told is now also known as LKF).

 

HK has shops, restaurants, trees, hills, beaches - all within maybe 20 minutes of the centre.  It's an amazing place to live in.  I'm told Vancouver is similar - I must go check it out.  I'm not convinced by the working lifestyle in HK though - the professional working day does seem to extend across dinner time and weekends as a routine - something that as a European I'm not so ready to accept.  And, there really isn't much of a consulting market there - if I continued as a consultant I'd likely spend most of my time being sent into China for work!

 

So it's back to Shanghai for me :)

Yellow Fever video

http://youtube.com/watch?v=FOyRWuklsiQ&search=Yellow%20Fever%20%28wongfuprodutions.com%29

funny student mini-documentary about how white guys are stealing away all of our chinese girls!

thx sooz!

One Year Anniversary!

Hooray!!!

One year. Well I say. Hahahaha I laugh to remember how my HK relatives were taking bets as to how many months I would last here. Well they didn't know me so well, and they probably weren't so aware of how developed Shanghai is.

I'm glad I stayed in Fudan for the first few months, and that I didn't stay in the dorm but rented ghastly teaching accomodation. That was such a shock - far worse than living in a caravan. The closest I can imagine in the UK is living in a modestly decorated garden shed. Ok, a one bedroom garden shed with a TV and a sofa, but otherwise the comparison holds!

Experiences that are still strong in my mind are the night I got locked out in the rain and the dormitary staff wouldn't let me stay the night in the dorms, despite their having empty rooms or my friends willing to let me in. Also I remember sitting in Professor Tao Zhigang's managerial economics class, taught in mandarin and not being able to understand a single word he was saying. I did my very best to pick out repeated words (shou ru, cheng ben being the notable ones). An exhausting process that went on for months, but at some point ceased to be a problem. I remember cooking by candlelight for about 8 of my mandarin buddies, on a night that we'd bought food but lost electricity. I remember being terrified travelling around Dong Bei (NE China) in unsafe buses, mini buses and taxis at high speeds on terrible roads. I remember my massage shock in Changchun - what I thought was an upmarket and totally respectable massage parlour - wasn't at all! Least to say the girl gave a terrible massage! I remember the warmth that friends Winfun and Matt showed me, and the sense of family in the university. I remember the housewarming party that I held in my new city apartment, where I'd asked friends to bring me MP3s and chinese films, but I didn't expect at all that they would bring me genuine copies! That they did, and especially that colleagues did too, touched me. I remember the ordeal that we went through to choose an apartment - including getting lied to by estate agents, and chatting to Oscar whilst seeing maybe 20 or 30 apartments along the way. I remember having made very good friends with Kim, and loving also my friend Yo. To have gained a close friend of Kim is special, rare, something I am deeply appreciative of. I remember having had a crush on an aussie chinese girl, that was great but sadly not reciprocated, but hey that's life! We've stayed in touch as friends which is superb.

Oh, in my recapping of a year, I've also done 6 months at Capgemini, where I've written a few good sales proposals and helped with a few internal things. The company's been through a lot, and I've recently established a good reputation. Things are looking up. I'll be taking forwards client engagements soon, hopefully in significant roles as well. That'll be the start of a whole new chapter.

Chinese is well behind target if you ask me. I'm in my element when chatting to some close friends, but occasionally relative strangers or friends of friends will laugh at my chinese when I get simple sentences grammatically wrong. Some Chinese people are not afraid to laugh at you, despite your best efforts. I still get riled by this, but just as well I'm not shy like say some Koreans or Japanese. I'll work on my Chinese hard this year, especially now with reduced MBA classes.

I remain close to my mother and sister, although still not so close to my brother. Time will tell on that one I think. It's good to know that being away hasn't too dramatically affected my family. I'm much closer too to Auntie Teresa - I've definitely gained a lot there, that's a blessing. I had some good chats with Yuen, which has brought us closer together - some new closeness after the ebb and flow of some 20 something years of friendship. And whilst staying in phone contact with Vikram has been harder, I'm hopeful that he and Mel will be able to make further good progress in their relationship.

4 more years in my plan, and then who knows after that. The first was always going to be the hardest, although I expect and intend that this second will be just as productive. After that, I hope to reap some rewards and enjoy a little more perhaps, or even take up a new challenge or opportunity in the region. We'll see. Maybe i'll get distracted by some lovely along the way :) Who knows, who can tell.

Sorry for the rambling, as you know, busy life. Up early for a busy day tomorrow - chinese 8.30-10, MBA 12.30 to 6, dinner with some colleagues after that. Got to fit some office work and maybe some lunch into the middle of that somehow. Been taking coffee with a friend lately, not quite sure if it's headed anywhere, but no conclusions yet, will tread carefully and wait and see.

Here's to the next 12 months - Jia you!

How to cross roads in China

This has really confused me. My local friends have scolded me before, really surprised that I cross roads at my own free will, instead of waiting for the green man. Indeed in the UK, we 'wait for the little green man' while we are young, but at some stage of mature adulthood, we cross roads as we please, without causing any problems to police, society, traffic etc. A reasonable balance seems to have been reached.

Hong Kong is the same - crossing the road in the wrong place at the wrong time is jaywalking, a legal offence. But HK has one major difference with Shanghai. When the 'little green man' is on a green, then it is actually safe to cross. Indeed as a child, the motto repeated over and over again on TV was "wait for the little green man". School teachers would cross roads with five or six children all holding hands, all chanting "wait for the little green man".

Ironically here, it seems that at many if not all junctions, the motto is something more akin to "wait for the little green man, and then while you're crossing watch out for moving traffic coming from every direction except one, which we have conveniently stopped for you". Quite literally, whilst the traffic to your left may have stopped, cars can turn right on red, and at many junctions there are left-turn green light filters timed at the same time that pedestrians are supposed to cross.

This really confuses me, and almost got me into real serious trouble once. The less said about that the better I guess. Zebra crossings are the same - for example outside the super brand mall, where there is always foot-traffic on the way to and from lunch. People crossing the road there have to dodge taxis, and buses who really don't have any intention of slowing let alone stopping.

I read in the newspaper of how the majority of pedestrian traffic accidents related to children of migrant workers who were unfamiliar with city traffic systems. I also saw a parent trying to teach their child to wait for the green light. The boy (on his bicycle complete with stablising wheels) saw a gap in the traffic and went for it, leaving his mother behind, agasp.

The boy didn't understand waiting. It makes no sense. The migrant workers' children aren't going to understand. Heck I don't understand. It's so often more safe to cross when the little green man isn't lit. The little green man is a deceitful trickster here, not to be trusted.

It's tricky for me to unlearn decades of trust. Blind trust that I can cross the road and continue thinking about whatever I was thinking about. Daydream, chat on the phone. That's just not safe here, and I'm having to wake up to that.

I like to think that's a good metaphor for one of many things I am waking up to in China. Things are definitely different here. Not always in bad ways, just in different ways. It's an education. Or indeed a re-education.

It's good to challenge the way things 'have always been'. Admittedly it would be nice if I could see some logic in the ways things are here, but I accept that isn't always going to be possible at the moment.

Even today in lectures I looked at a process diagram (cause and effect diagram in fact) that a former senior BCG partner (guest professor) had drawn up. I commented to him that it was peculiar because it flowed from top right to bottom left. The convention is always to have the solution at the bottom right - that is to flow from top left to bottom right. The way books read.

We agreed that it was strange and silly - it doesn't really matter and yet to look at a diagram done the other way, it's uncomfortable. It's nice to experience bits of uncomfortability. I think it's a healthy part of my being out here.

Every day that my health is ok, my family and friend relations are doing ok, and I've learned a little something new, I'm glad to be out here. That's an oversimplification in fact - health isn't easy to maintain or guarantee here, and the learning part consumes time and energy which I often don't have. But anyway, more often than not it's worth it.

Drinking and driving

coming home from dinner tonight in a cab, our cab had stopped at a red light (as they do). A car crashed into us from behind (at low speed). Enough to nudge us, but not enough to through me against the chair in front or risk any whiplash type things. Really low speed.

A reminder that I should sit in the front and wear the seat belt always (which I do 90% of the time). Also a reminder that there are idiots driving cars in Shanghai. How could one possibly crash into stationary traffic at low speed? Drinking is the only possibility. I wonder how long before the government seriously gets its "don't drink and drive" campaign going, or really cracking down. A while yet I say.

After a little quarrelling (the cabbie didn't get too emotional about it because the two men in the car were bigger than him), he took 50 RMB (3 pounds?) from them and left with just a cracked bumper.

if only i was a ...

SAP consultant.  or a Siebel consultant. 

 

SAP consultants have it made right now.  Siebel/CRM is going to get really hot over the next couple of years.  

(Mandarin's pretty essential for the bulk of this of course)

 

Imagine if you were a SAP consultant back in the day 10 years ago.  You'd have made a killing then.  Let's say you're taiwanese, or you happened to be one of those lucky people who chose to study mandarin at Uni... you could make a second killing here in china.

 

Hahaha, if we're on the "if only's" still, then just like "if only I bought a london property between 1996 and 1999", then if only I bought a shanghai property maybe 3 years ago, or even 1 year ago.  Man....  It's tempting to speculate whether the market still has runway.  But I'm generally not a fan of speculation... we'll see.

Only in China...

I worked late one night this week - to 5am in fact, finishing a sales proposal.  I told my company I was going to take the morning off to sleep, but little did I know that at 7am the flat above would start loud drilling.  Oh my.  So back to the office I went.

 

I love our apartment, it is one of the little things about being here that makes life more enjoyable.  But I really miss being able to lie in.  A weekend to Hangzhou in the pipeline I suspect...

UK University league tables

I often get friends asking me to help with university choices.  There are two ways to help here.  One is checking the reputation of the university for the chosen subject.  League tables are usually the way to do this.  There are a number of reputable league tables which list the "top 20 places to study maths" etc.  http://www.planning.ed.ac.uk/Pub/Tables.htm

 

Another way to help is to advise on which city in the UK would most suit a person - personality matching as it were.  But I'm not going to write out a list of UK cities here today.... you'll have to ask me over a beer!

 

 

Learns - sales pitches

Went for a sales pitch yesterday.  Good experience - not something I got involved with in the UK.  Back home I did non-stop delivery.  It seems I'm doing non-stop sales work nowadays...

 

Learns

 

- What stage in the sales process are you?  When will the remaining stages take place?  Is now the time to be engaging and building hypotheses as well as making a presentation?

- what are the interest points?  the influencing factors? (No good talking about methodology if they trust that all big consultancies have good methods.)

- will this client be receptive to BS?  some are impressed.  others fall asleep.  if yours is the fall asleep variety, then rethink your presentation.  (concise, provocative not informative.  debate and discuss, not present.)

- If technology or implementation is involved, then do they want to know how far our scope reaches?  If we are vendor independent?

- Do they expect a local team, or an international team?  (are you presenting local experience or international experience?)

- Goal oriented presentation planning.  What are the key messages you are putting across?  What is the Effect or Impression you want to leave.  What do you want the follow-up action to be?

 

- what are the roles of your team?  who should be looking out for scope?  approach? feasibility?  budget? 

 

- generate problem statements and value propositions at qualification stage, to feed into proposal writing and presentation.

- having consolidated and up to date sales collateral really helps accelerate bid preparation