OPO Global

Managing The New Workforce In China

Sun, 23 Oct 2016 21:11:17 -0700

When I came to China 9 years ago to build an IT organization for a multinational company, the job was to take a bunch of raw talents who were smart, technical, culturally reserved but yet curious and turn them into employees that can engage, and excel in, delivering service with business sense and a globally recognized aptitude. The success formula was straight forward: install a clear structure, set stretch goals and keep honing their soft skill s and gave them proper exposure. Viola, a great team took shape.

Ten 10 years on, things are much different. Today, the global exposure, social and communications skills of the 22 – 32 generation are much refined coming out of the gate. The timid and shy nature has been replaced by confidence and eagerness to express themselves. With China fast becoming the largest single market for many industries and products, a new work culture is forming that caters to the unique East-meets-West era of China. The standard Western organization structure and management value no longer represent the most effective way of organizing work and people in China. In addition to the functional or technical job skills, valuable employees of today also need to possess the ability to crisscross across Chinese and outside culture, innovate new ideas and to connect to different parts of the society.

In China the MNC workforce are typically much younger then their Western counterpart. The stereotypical workforce demography in China resembles the following:

Do not have significant financial burden
No longer motivated by the promise of long-term employment or ‘have new things to learn,’ but by having a chance to prove themselves or work in-line with what they like.
Most of them enjoy the cocoon feel of the university environment.
No longer see expressing their life value through work alone.
Middle managers in their mid-30’s, heavy-lifting work force under 33.

In other words, the...Read More

Getting Business Results for MNCs in China

Sun, 18 Sep 2016 06:56:43 -0700

Even since the Industrial Revolution, Western companies hold absolute advantages over local competitors from the perspectives of ideas, technology, process, quality and scale. Base on them for decades Western business enjoy the leading position to dictate what products to produce and distributed, and how consumer will buy and pay for them. The consumers need them.

Today, It is not a dispute anymore that China is the largest singular economic entity on this planet. The effects of Western advantages are quickly diminishing for those who want a piece of action there. Over the past 3 decades companies from all over the world have come to China to explore business opportunities. Some are highly successful, most are doing okay but not as explosive as they had hoped, and a lot of them failed and left.

Large companies that already have brand recognition, competitive products and services as well as substantial investments can afford to carry on with their global strategy and products, at least for some time. So it is no surprise that the likes of Dow Chemicals, Apple, Ford, BMW came to China and made lots of money: but what if you are one of the middle-of-the-road brands that enjoy a good reputation in the Western world but can’t quite crack the China nut quite open? Over the years I have dealt with a lot of such companies and have observed the following common mistakes.

The top dog of the organisation that runs the China business is NOT local. The word ‘local’ refers to mentality, not skin colour or race. Executives with deep company background may know the products and company culture well, but what’s important for competing in a local market are knowing the law of the jungle and attracting and keeping people who are right for the China market. Unfortunately, the tendency of many MNCs executives is to use people who are more like themselves than those with what the company need. Another common issue is estimating the...Read More

Chinarize Your Global Strategy For Success

Thu, 05 May 2016 08:38:53 -0700

One of the themes we hear in the China expat circle often these days is that people are getting sent home from their expat assignments and there will be no replacement. Business in China is not up to MNC top management’s expectations and they have decided to cut costs.

It is true that many multinational companies are not getting the results reflective of the market potential when they set sail to China. To explain why this is the case many blame the one-party political system, unfair government policies, rogue local competitors, high labor costs, but seldom because of strategy, planning and execution. However, at the same time many companies did very well in China amid operating under the same environment, how did they manage to do that?

Having lived in China for 9 years and have dealt with many businesses in various industries, here’s my observation on how MNCs can be successful in China.

Don’t believe the Western media

Before and shortly after I moved to China, I relied on the information and opinion of books, magazines to help me understand the Chinese society, culture and day-to-day protocol. After 9 years of deliberately lived outside of the expat cocoon, I have developed a realistic understanding of the Chinese society, culture and geo-economic structure and why things are the way they are. These days, when I picked up books or articles about China, 9 times out of 10 I’d cringe and sometimes even shocked. A lot of articles or books about China are filled with generalization based on sliver of events, misrepresenting government intentions, and mixing biased opinions with facts. China is too enormous and complex to be stereotyped and generalized, which is what many of these articles tried to do. As in the United States is complicated and diverse, China is 4 times more populated and hence its society is exponentially more complicated. I am amazed how anyone can make sensible...Read More

From Server Room To Board Room

Mon, 14 Mar 2016 07:09:49 -0700

In the old days, and I am not talking about that long ago, if you were a CIO chances are you will retire as a CIO. You took care of the company’s electronic plumbing so that your users can do their work. Well done, thank you. Enjoy your gold watch.

However, today’s business is driven by digital thinking: how to push products in front of people’s electronic devices, how to transact over handheld tools and channels and how to enable devices to interface with each other to make life simpler for everyone. All these are enabled by IT technologies; so what IT knows is beyond plumbing and could make significant differences in a company’s future prospect.

In the mean time, your counterparts on the business side are trying to make sense out of the digital world, and they are creating ways of using technology. Shouldn’t that be your job? If someone else is doing your job, what value are you demonstrating? A lot of companies still confine their IT in a back-office role: keeping the infrastructure cost low, making sure the applications and their support centralized and cheap, keep the data safe and flexible. Atta boy.

You understand technology, you know how things are put together, and you are experienced in building business framework inexpensively in the digital world: you should be telling business what they should do instead of waiting for them to hand you projects.

Today’s digital world is a levelled playing field: it allows people who don’t have your background to create value out of IT; but at the same time it allows technically-minded people to create things of commercial value.

If you are a CIO chances are you are working in a big and complex organization. One challenge of a large organization is that its agility, which is vital to survival in today’s business climate, gets constricted by business processes designed based on historical reasons. Chances are, old rules that escorted the money making process was made is likely have been...Read More

HR 3.0 – Building a True Strategic HR

Wed, 17 Feb 2016 07:33:07 -0800

As business executive for years, HR organizations I have come to know have mostly been a support organization, or being treated as such. Traditionally, the HR department is responsible for government labor regulations compliance, company policy enforcement, recruiting, on-boarding, and off-boarding, performance management, employee satisfaction survey, compensation and benefits management, succession management, and perhaps projects that satisfy occasional strategic and tactical needs such as lay-off preparation and execution.

Today’s business war is actually talent war. In today’s post-industrial world where strategic asset to a company means creativity, agility, reputation, and value in the ecosystem in which the company operates. In today’s world, business needs the following to survive and thrive:

A positive brand in the talent market to attract good people.
Strategic leadership development program.
Tactical, easy to access information on staff performance trends and raise awareness and possible remedy of talent mismatch or talent exodus situation.
A creative labor model that allows maximum creativity and agility in all areas.
Have a good grasp on employee state of mind to anticipate unnecessary and unwanted turnovers.
Intelligence on other companies or competitors’ talent situation.

At last, the opportunity for HR departments to shine has arrived; HR is the logical place to lead and guide the organization into fighting shape. But before HR can transform the business, it first needs to transform itself. Be the example for the business. Specifically they should:

Develop a true customer-centric service mentality. Today too many HR professional are task-oriented. They need to develop themselves into business consultants.
Morph themselves into an agile HR organization; relegate routine process work to Cloud vendors and outsource partners.
Recruit people with real...Read More

Personal Trainer for Your Organization

Tue, 22 Dec 2015 07:43:02 -0800

During the past 10 years, with the general adoption of the Internet, people are connected in a way like never before in human history. Individual voices can now be heard farther, wider and deeper, and making perceptible impact in business, politics and social norms. As a result prevailing order are being disrupted.

In this new order, small companies with interesting ideas, services or business models can get easy and inexpensive global market reach. With consumer desire now readily harvestable from the sea of public data, opportunities arise for those who have the smarts to listen and the capability to act quickly. The competitive landscape for business is no longer price, geography and brand; for businesses that touch consumers they now compete on value, service, business model, and consumer alignment.

The assets that once allowed a business to win in the old world: manufacturing facilities, raw materials, land and a hierarchical management structure are now dead weights that prevent companies from moving forward. The new asset is people; smart people with ideas, passion and leadership skills.

If companies were analogous to people, then agile and fit ones would definitely be more apt to survive in a chaotic environment than those that are obese and slow.

A lot of HR consultants touch on the subject by talking about how to use human capital to your strategic advantage. They mostly tell you to treat your employees well and in return employees will give you the best. But these ideas missed the fact that organizations are constantly evolving and need for hard and soft skills change. When competing in the new order, retaining too many people with mismatched hard and soft skills dampens a business’ responsiveness and agility. Many companies tend to let such deterioration drag on until one day it overwhelms the entire organisation.

Just like a person, when the person’s job involves a lot of repetitive heavy lifting， then his size,...Read More

Disruption Proof Your IT

Sun, 15 Nov 2015 06:16:34 -0800

It is no news that large established organizations are being threatened by small start-ups in today’s frequently disrupted business world. Small businesses with good ideas can now create viable products or services by using public IT infrastructure; from network to hardware, to enterprise applications, to personal productivity tools, to B2B platforms; anything can be rented and easily plugged in together. Disruption is cheap these days.

If getting the traditional IT stuff done is easy, then what value does enterprise IT serve anymore? Not that many years ago, data were mostly stored in enterprise applications, off-line storage and self-contained function specific hardware, etc. The CIO role was important because they can extract information out of data for the business to make good decisions.

Now that useful business information are available from the Internet, what enterprise business users want now is to have the same access and agility that their young small competitors have but combined with data only found in your legacy environment.

If one can take a peek into the future, it is not hard to imagine that in 10 years a typical IT organization (those with less than 25,000 users) would be much different than today’s from a structural and functional perspective. The job of today’s CIO should be to bring today’s legacy environment into the future environment; and before you can do that you need to bring your team into the future first.

Recently I heard a story about a business unit in a large multi-national chemical company requested a straight forward change on their ERP system. When IT replied that it would take 9 months, the business went around IT and asked a system integrator to build them a work-around on the mobile platform. The solution went live in less than 2 months. I would hate to be in the shoes of that company’s CIO when the CEO find out about this.

In a large organization as a CIO you may not have total control over...Read More

Meet Your New Strategic Weapon – HR

Wed, 07 Oct 2015 09:00:00 -0700

With the advance in technology, transformation in lifestyle and demographics, and seemingly limitless VC money for start-up companies, competition in all businesses has turned up a notch or two. The traditional battlegrounds of brand, product, geographic presence, have to be augmented by battles of business model, value identification, creative value marketing, alliance channels, and other factors that have yet emerged but is being worked on by well-funded start-ups. This is no longer a theoretical postulation but a real threat to real companies, large and small. Just ask at IBM, HP, Nokia, Blockbuster and Best Buy.

For the most part large global companies have the resources to bide time and hopefully reset their footing. In this new flux-oriented, fast-paced, digital world, the obvious solutions to survival are already expressed in buzzwords such as innovation, change, and reinvent, etc. But in reality how many companies can really transform itself into a really agile, innovative and future-oriented organization?

In order for a large organization to transform into a fit-state that can survive this era of the “Great Disruption,” it needs to proliferate the entire organization with people that are agile, innovative and motivated. They need to have a strategic partner within their organization, whose goal is to know all there is to know about how to maximize and optimize the people power inside the organization. People, after all, are the source of agility, innovation and forward momentum.

We have all experienced it: sometimes in life, you get game changing opportunities from places you least expect. For example, the job you loved might have came from an unexpected area; your soul mate may not be your teenage crush but someone you realize been there all along; the boss who didn’t seem to fond of you turned out to be your biggest supporter...Read More

The Strategic Leadership Commission – Managing Your Talent Asset

Mon, 14 Sep 2015 09:00:00 -0700

The accelerating rate of change on this planet is killing a lot of companies.

It wasn’t that long ago that if you had a good idea or a good product, work out a good process to produce, market and deliver the product, tinkle with your strategy according to the megatrends once in a while, you company can last for decades. However in today’s world new technologies come out too fast, competitors get their funding too quickly and easily, and setting up a business is just a few clicks on the computer. Disruption comes too easily. During the 12-month period ending 6/30 in 2014 about 1 million companies filed for bankruptcy in the US and during the next 12 months another 900 thousand piled on top. So how can anyone stay alive and even thrive in this hostile environment?

The answer lies in the “About Us” section of almost everyone’s website: “We are agile, innovative and adaptive.” But regardless of how much companies boast or claim they are or want to be agile, innovative and adaptive, in most cases the reality is a different story.

Human nature is intrinsically selfish, insecure and a bit lazy; they tend to keep things unchanged and predictable until the last possible second. Because of this, in large organizations managers typically get to where they are by playing safe within the prevailing rules and boundaries; and they tend to hire new employees that demonstrate willingness to align with such modus operandi, further reinforcing the resistance to change inside the organization. To compound the problem, most people tend to lack introspection skills and over estimate their own ability to control their environment or their place in the big picture. Rarely do you see true leader with an open-heart that put the company's interest first.

Unfortunately In today's ultra-fast changing business world, there is no room for complacency. In order to survive and thrive we need selfless leaders with true leadership beliefs and courage to break the mode,...Read More