The Hindu Business Line : <I>China wisdom from a score sources </I>

Infosys has acquired 50,000 sq.m of land in Shanghai and 3,00,000 sq.m in Hangzhou, and is building new centres in both cities," informs Bruce Einhorn of BusinessWeek in an article titled, `For Indian IT biggies, China is hot' dated March 24. Einhorn also writes about the deal between Tata Consultancy Services, Microsoft and the Chinese Government for `a new joint venture in Beijing this year'. A press release dated January 29, 2002 on www.satyam.com announces, "Satyam Computer Services Ltd today announced the launch of its operation in China, becoming the first Indian software services company to establish operations on the mainland."

Time, isn't it, that you too took the road to Beijing? To help, here is China CEO, by Juan Antonio Fernandez and Laurie Underwood, from Wiley (www.wiley.com) . The book compiles "voices of experience from 20 international business leaders."

First, select the right `international manager' for China. He or she must have three levels of qualities, viz. professional, personal global, and personal China-specific. Jun Tang, President of Microsoft (China), narrates the case of a Western manager who insisted on leaving the office of his China-based facility nightly at 6 p.m., just as he had in the US. This caused `friction' among the staff who were staying late to finish projects.

"In China, it is important for a leader to show that he or she is part of a team. There is a saying in China: `Together we share happiness, together we bear pain'," notes Tang.

Kenneth C.H. Yu, Managing Director of 3M China, emphasises the importance of understanding Chinese values, which is not the same as knowing "the names of all the different family relationships in Chinese". Two types of commitment that Yu mentions are: `substantial time spent living and working in China', and `a continuous connection with the country'.

The chapter on `managing Chinese employees' begins with a quote of Dr Ernst Behrens, President, Siemens China: "To the Chinese, the company is more like a family. The idea is, `I am giving myself to Siemens. Now you have to take care of me.'"

However, the `bad news' about recruiting is `lack of Chinese middle managers', apart from "high expectations of Chinese employees (leading to frequent job-hopping')."

If you fret about employees leaving, Dominique de Boisseson, Chairman and CEO of Alcatel China, reminds that young Chinese professionals have `unbelievable' ambition. "You cannot keep those people more than a few years, but it is still acceptable as they are strong contributors while they are with us."

Retention is a chronic problem. For example, when writing about how Infosys trains its recruits, Julie Schlosser of Fortune notes that paying for talent could end up being the industry's - and perhaps the company's - Achilles' heel. Her report titled `Harder than Harvard', dated March 17, is available on http://money.cnn.com. Do you know that "the competition for well-trained engineers drove salaries in India up 15 per cent last year"?

Fernandez and Underwood inform that Siemens China receives 4,000 electronic applications each month for various positions. "The China operations of Siemens employ 25,300 people nationwide, 99 per cent of whom are Chinese nationals."

Techniques that work in Japan may not apply to China. For instance, Seiichi Kawasaki, Director and President of Sony China, says, "Japanese people are very vague. We guess each other's meaning. But the Chinese are much more direct and clear... This open communication is much more effective."

An important read is the chapter on `battling intellectual property rights infringers'. Ekkehard Rathgeber, President, Bertelsmann Direct Group Asia, laments about DVDs and VCDs anywhere, everywhere. "You can buy them by the hundreds and thousands." The book informs how the company had relatively little success selling its licensed CDs of US jazz saxophonist Kenny G in China despite the musician's widespread popularity. "While Bertelsmann has sold roughly 50,000 copies of his works, as of 2003 the company believes millions of illegal copies have been sold."

Another alarming statistic cited in the book is about the finding of Business Software Alliance - "that 90 per cent of all software used in China in 2005 was counterfeited." A more serious problem, though, is that of counterfeited pharmaceutical products - accounting for 10 to 15 per cent of all medicines sold in China!

Plenty of takeaway ideas to benefit from.

Is your number up?

"The event became known as The Pulse. The virus was carried by every cellular phone operating in the world." Is your number up?

"The event became known as The Pulse. The virus was carried by every cellular phone operating in the world. Within hours, those receiving calls would become insane - or die." Thus frightens the blurb of Stephen King's Cell, from Hodder & Stoughton (www.madaboutbooks.com) .

Hear Ricardi recount, "I read an article in Inc. only a month or two ago that claimed there're now as many cell-phones in Mainland China as there are people in America." He asks, "Can you imagine?" but Clay doesn't want to imagine. Meanwhile, Tom postulates: "Some terrorist outfit rigs the cell-phone signals somehow. If you make a call or take one, you get some kind of a ... what? ... some kind of a subliminal message."

Elsewhere, stray into Cheatham Lodge, where the afternoon light is dimmer than it should be - `definitely not a good thing'. But why dimmer? "Because there were phone-crazies at every window they could see, crowded up to the glass and peering in at them." How many? "Dozens, may be hundreds of those strange blank faces... " What did Clay see? "Missing eyes and teeth, torn ears, bruises, burns, scorched skin, and hanging wads of blackened flesh."

Take refuge with Jordan, who explains what a computer worm is: "It can burrow in, corrupting your files and your hard drive as it goes. If it gets into shareware and the stuff you send, even e-mail attachments... Sometimes a worm has babies. The worm itself is a mutant and sometimes the babies mutate further." Horrifying!

What about The Pulse? It was a computer program sent out by modem... and "becoming more corrupted every day" Pulse kept on pulsing "because somewhere there's a computer running on battery power". There was hope that eventually "the signal may quit or the program may get so rotten it'll shut down". King writes: "It all depends on whether or not brains do what seriously protected computers do when they're hit with an EMP." Want to phone a friend to know about EMP?

Check, `Is your number up?'

Tailpiece

"You're talking too fast!"

"Because I'm running low on batt... "

"Hello... hello!"

Books2Byte@TheHindu.co.in

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