This is China! BLOG

Univeristy of Chicago MBA Students Consider Asia Business

It was my genuine pleasure a couple weekends ago (21 October) to participate as a panelist at the 6th Annual Chicago Asia-Pacific Business Conference, sponsored by the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. I’d judge about 150 MBA students from the University of Chicago and other B-schools from Illionois, Missouri, Pennsylvania and New York (Columbia Graduate School of Business in New York City). It was a young, well-dressed crowd, that was attentive if not a bit shy in asking questions of speakers and panelists. It’s not that they didn’t ask any questions – for they did – there just wasn’t much in the way of controversy or heretical issues posed.

I do have to say one of the more impressive aspects of the Conference was having Richard Li speak. Mr. Li is the chairman of PCCW Ltd, the Hong Kong telecommunications company that went through a highly-publicized leveraged buyout bankrolled ultimately by his father, Li Ka Shing, the richest man in Hong Kong. Though the younger Li was not able to attend in person, he was good enough at 10pm Shanghai time on a Saturday night to spend an hour on a satellite link with the audience (I guess he didn’t have any high-society suarees scheduled that night). Satellite technology has come a long way: it ONLY failed once during the talk, in the first five minutes. After technicians mended the glitch in communications, the link held up and Mr. Li gave a high-level assessment of how the Chinese economy is developing.

A couple points that seeped through the speech and then subsequent Q&A was that government transparency (or the lack thereof) of the Chinese government system would be a deterent to the credibility of the country’s financial system as long as officials worked behind an obscurist veil. The other point that boiled to the top of the discussion was that the number one issue vexing the development of foreign and domestic companies in China was the lack of middle management with experience managing enterprises; the dearth of skilled Chinese managers was also the number one barrier to Chinese companies developing global brands and international markets.

The panel on US, China Trade and Investment in Asia supported representatives from Japan, South Korea and America. The Asian representatives were kind and soft-spoken in their presentations; the American – Sean King, a Vice President at a strategic advisory firm in New York – was a bare-knuckle brawler who spared no feelings. Mr. King projected North Korea would nuke Japan before it would nuke South Korea; and South Korea did not have a prayer of becoming the financial capitol it aspires to in the face of competition from Hong Kong and Taipei. He was to his credit sensitive enough to apologize to the two Asian speakers at the end of each pronouncement, each of whom went white and then pink with embarrassment at the projections.

My panel was the best-dressed. The moderator for the panel was the very charming Professor Tanya Menon of the University of Chicago B-school, whose speciality was power in the cross-cultural business environment. She wore a smashing black dress with black heels. And then there was equally charming Ms. Kyung H. Yoon, University of Chicago graduate (’78), dressed in a brown pants suit with a pink and white silk scarf and brown suede pumps. She is Vice Chairman of the largest executive search firm in the world. I wore my pin-striped Zhong Shan suit with a white, high-button shirt, because I just could not bring myself to wear a tie that day. The final panelist was Yuyoshi Koie, a sixty year-old Fujitsu Vice President who was credited for launching and commercializing the first color plasma display monitor in the world market. He was not as well-dressed as the rest of us, but he was certainly a lot smarter than all of us put together. He had just flown in from Japan to race in the Chicago marathon and – lucky for all of us – to speak on the panel. I had just flown into Chicago from Shanghai, so ours was the most international of panels, as well.

Our panel was on Managing and Leading Organizations [in Asia]. I shared stories about managing in China I’ve published on this blog in the past; Mr. Yoon discussed the importance of Headquarters being engaged in Asian operations; while Mr. Koie emphasized how important the human touch is in managing people across cultures.

Former Times Magazine correspondent Matthew Forney delivered a keynote speech that contrasted the rarefied heights of Chinese political power with the grassroots revolutions that are happening in the countryside of China. He used two personal case studies that supported his final thesis that he is optimistic China will not implode or explode socially or economically in the forseeable future.

A bit of a religious conversion for a journalist, if you ask me.