As China loses the labor advantage that has propelled its economy for the past three decades, will the country's entrepreneurs be able to compete in world markets?
I wonder. With wage inflation already eroding China's ability to compete on labor costs, I don't see much evidence that Chinese entrepreneurs are capable of generating profits through core competencies, as companies in mature economies do.
Chinese entrepreneurs tend to hold the view that they shouldn't follow in the footsteps of foreign multinationals, that they should pursue a "Chinese" way of doing business. That mindset is due partly to the obvious advantages of China's huge labor force and partly to Chinese businesspeople's sense of their country's unique history.
Exactly what defines the Chinese way is a matter of debate, but it's based on the idea of a collective, as opposed to an individual, culture. To oversimplify, people from individualistic cultures tend to think of themselves primarily as individuals and as distinct from others. People from collective cultures consider it a primary obligation to look out for those who are connected to them by family, home town, or employer. In most Chinese companies, employees from the CEO down to the lowest-paid factory worker believe that harmony and loyalty should be maintained and confrontation avoided. Disagreeing with a colleague's or boss's opinion in a meeting or in public is out of the question.
A collective culture is great for rapidly building an organization from scratch. But too often, companies with collective approaches continue to disempower individual employees and devalue their intellectual contributions.
Ren Zhengfei, the hard-driving founder and president of Huawei, is one of China's best known and most influential entrepreneurs. He's also the man primarily responsible for the telecom maker's "wolf culture," in which individual aspirations are explicitly subverted to the needs of the corporation as it relentlessly pursues the Western corporate lions. In the company's early days, R&D workers often kept rolled-up mattresses under their desks because of their notoriously long hours. Ren seems intent on maintaining this corporate culture indefinitely: In their race against other multinationals, he said, "Huawei people, especially the leaders, are destined to work hard for a lifetime and to devote more and suffer more than others."
Thanks to Ruxiang Jiang / Blogs HBR / Harvard Business School Publishing
------------------------
http://ziaullahkhan.blogspot.com/2011/12/chinas-hard-work-culture-today.html
visit us at www.shabbarsuterwala.com
Belum ada komentar untuk "[LeadersWorkshop] Article:- China's Hard-Work Culture: Today An Advantage, Tomorrow A Weakness"
Post a Comment