Managing The Dragon

As Americans fired up the barbecues all across the United States this past Monday in the country’s 117th celebration of  Labor Day, jobs were on everyone’s minds. On Friday, before workplaces closed for the long holiday weekend, the government announced that unemployment had reached 9.7 percent in August, the highest rate in twenty-six years. Vice [...]

Hannah Seligson’s article about young Americans in China certainly hit a responsive chord. Not only did it top the list as the New York Times most e-mailed article, but it also was the cover story on Yahoo.   At a time when many university and business school graduates are concerned about their careers in the United [...]

China is an opportunity for everyone, I make sure to emphasize to those interested in the country. There is a tendency to think that you have to be Chinese, to know a lot about China, or to speak the language fluently to be able to participate in the growth of the country. While all of [...]

In order to meet the objectives of its various stakeholders–stockholders, employees, creditors, suppliers and anyone else with an interest in the company’s success–a company must run its business and perform according to a variety of metrics. Sometimes, however, circumstances become so critical that it must adopt an overriding, singular focus for the good of all. [...]

Before leaving China for the holidays, I had an opportunity to attend a discussion of China’s economy in 2009, sponsored by the Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business (CKGSB) in Beijing, featuring Jing Ulrich, managing director and chairman of China equities for J.P. Morgan, and Yijiang Wang, professor of economics and human resource management at [...]

The most frequently asked questions I get about doing business in China relate to the human resource issue of how to attract, develop and retain good local managers. A recent article in the August 16th issue of the Economist, Capturing Talent, does an excellent job of showing why this is such a problem today in [...]

Not a month goes by where the email doesn’t come at least once – sometimes from a friend of a friend, sometimes from a friend’s friend’s friend, sometimes from students currently at my alma mater or language program. Regardless, the questions are always the same: What are the internship possibilities in China? How can I [...]

A recent article in The Guardian highlights the growing concern in China over the increasing numbers of Chinese students who are not only going abroad to study, but more significantly, staying overseas after graduation. Living and working in China, one becomes very familiar with the discrepancies in quality between a Chinese education and a Western [...]