I'll say American, or Western business culture has a lot of "non-problems." To even imagine what makes a "problem" to a rich Western multinational, one has to put up some effort.
I'm not a fan of S. Jobs, but generally approve of ways how he reanimated Apple Computers. A lot of commons sense based decision making in corporate structure, and HR policy. For one, he fired a lot of business degree holders from running actual engineering units — an issue of "inversion," I think is what the prime majority of big tech companies suffer from, and can't do a thing about.
Remembering that, I can only continue to laud and appraise what it is the mainstream Chinese way of running a tech company. I was dealing with Chinese electronics since my first job in a trade company in Singapore 12 years ago. Just how freaking efficient they are. This baffled me 12 years ago, and it still does today.
Nowhere but in China, you can have "signed contract in the morning, widgets in the evening." Rather sizeable collectives of up to 100 men are running here without a single "business" degree holder except of a single accountant/tax filler. Such companies run almost like as if they were a computer program, except they exist in real world.
If I am asked to summarise what that malaise is that ails Western business in a single sentence it is "Western business culture is not about doing business."
Too artsy, too talkshopy, too much "empty thinking," some people don't even know what they are supposed to do — if I take upon Jiang Zemin's style of a maxim statement.
Having grown up and worked in the US and lived in China for the past 10 years, I think you're overreaching with your characterization of corporate culture.
China, like the USA, has a wide range of companies that span the spectrum of efficiency. Try to get some customer service at China Telecom and you'll see the bottom-tier of efficiency that resembles, or is even worse, than trying to get your cable fixed with Comcast.
> China, like the USA, has a wide range of companies that span the spectrum of efficiency. Try to get some customer service at China Telecom and you'll see the bottom-tier of efficiency that resembles, or is even worse, than trying to get your cable fixed with Comcast.
True. There are horrifically bureaucratised private companies with SOE roots, or ones ran by the "old boss" class. But in China, nobody will place them as an example to emulate, but in America, the amount of people hellbent on "running the company like a F500 multinational" is just scary, and these people _don't even realise_ that they are doing, and wanting something that is wrong.
Are you telling me there are startups that want to run like F500 multinationals?
No company has SOX compliance departments, mandatory HR trainings or audited travel expense policies because they want to, they're just there because beyond a certain point you'll find out the hard way that they're there for a reason.
> Are you telling me there are startups that want to run like F500 multinationals?
Yes.
And their polar opposites are not better either.
Many of those guys are claiming that they know a thing about tech industry. Some have actual tech education, maybe some low effort projects, but I meet a lot cadres that put forward statements like "Our CTO has 20 years engineering experience, we have zero reservations about our execution ability," but then it finds out that the guy ran RnD offices for 20 years, but every time he actually had to make anything he ran from one agent to another "to deal with those Chinese factories." In other words, a dude on a CTO job with zero actual manufacturing experience. In such cases I almost feel obliged to whisper to the CEO or the founder "if he can't make you anything, why do you even hire him?"
I'm not speaking about our clients, but, say, "the feel of industry in general" :)
When I see people coming to SZ with an aspiration of making the next Ihpone, some of them come with a crew the size of our our entire engineering consulting company (around 50 people,) but they already have a baggage of "product managers," "corporate strategist," "experience managers," and some 10 other managers with titles I never ever heard of.
That way you can have startups with 10th of megabucks in funding, huge teams, and no products to sell...
A recent HN story that impressed me was about Chinese manufacturers making inexpensive airplane engine parts that turned out to be defective with cheap casting and shoddy repairs, pretending they used proper tools and materials instead. Maybe they were working "like a computer program", but they were criminals.
Can concur. Most people have no idea how ineffective we can be until they see something else. I love how fast Chinese companies move. You should write an article about your experiences.
Having worked in Chinese tech companies, they are both more and less efficient (fast to execute really).
They're fast because there's no planning being done. Because there's no plan being followed, people can jump on a new project. They're not held up with long term projects and goals.
On the other hand, some large projects are half assed and started fresh over and over because they keep failing due to lack of planning and proper organization infrastructure for execution (processes).
I'm not a fan of S. Jobs, but generally approve of ways how he reanimated Apple Computers. A lot of commons sense based decision making in corporate structure, and HR policy. For one, he fired a lot of business degree holders from running actual engineering units — an issue of "inversion," I think is what the prime majority of big tech companies suffer from, and can't do a thing about.
Remembering that, I can only continue to laud and appraise what it is the mainstream Chinese way of running a tech company. I was dealing with Chinese electronics since my first job in a trade company in Singapore 12 years ago. Just how freaking efficient they are. This baffled me 12 years ago, and it still does today.
Nowhere but in China, you can have "signed contract in the morning, widgets in the evening." Rather sizeable collectives of up to 100 men are running here without a single "business" degree holder except of a single accountant/tax filler. Such companies run almost like as if they were a computer program, except they exist in real world.
If I am asked to summarise what that malaise is that ails Western business in a single sentence it is "Western business culture is not about doing business."
Too artsy, too talkshopy, too much "empty thinking," some people don't even know what they are supposed to do — if I take upon Jiang Zemin's style of a maxim statement.