Those of you who have been following MTD over these past several months have probably noticed the cover for my book, Managing the Dragon, which appears in the middle column of our site every day. The book is being published by Crown Publishing, a part of the Random House organization, and will be available on March 18. It will also be published in China and translated into Chinese by China Youth Press, publishers of the Chinese editions of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and First, Break All the Rules, among other titles. In addition to being available on amazon.com, Managing the Dragon may be pre-ordered on barnesandnoble.com, and borders.com

Although a number of people have suggested over the years that I write a book, I never took their suggestions seriously. Writing a book is a daunting task, particularly when it has to take second place to a full-time job, and done on weekends and plane trips. I finally changed my mind and decided to take the plunge, however, because I believe that now, more than ever, every company in the world has to engage China. The country is becoming such an important part of the global economy that any company that does not faces a very uncertain future. If I could in some way make China just a little more understandable to others by sharing my own experiences, I reasoned, writing a book would be a worthwhile effort.

Tom Friedman gave me the final push. I got to know Tom when he was writing The World is Flat. He was very interested in learning how China fit into the flat world he had discovered in India. After we finished reviewing what he planned to include in his book about me and ASIMCO at one of our meetings, Tom unexpectedly turned to me and said, “You know, Jack, there is a book in you.” That was all of the encouragement I needed.

What is Managing the Dragon all about? The book essentially is designed to answer the three categories of questions that I inevitably get from audiences when I speak about China. First, everyone is curious how to draw the line from my Pittsburgh upbringing, through my education at Yale and Harvard and my experience on Wall Street, to Asia and China. The line follows a fairly logical pattern until I moved to Hong Kong in December, 1991.

Secondly, audiences want me to distill over a dozen years of experience into a couple of sentences of wisdom. They want me to tell them the single most important thing that I have learned. There is only one answer to this question, and my answer is the same in each case. It is absolutely imperative to build and empower a strong local management team in China if a company wants to have any hope of long-term success in the country. While this is easy to say, it is very difficult to actually do because China does not have the same legacy of management as a country like the United States.

And finally, once the basics are covered, there is a veritable litany of questions which deal with how China works on a daily basis. How can the Chinese make things so cheaply? Why does China create overcapacity? Is China’s growth sustainable? How does one deal with the legal system and protecting intellectual property? What’s it like dealing with the government? What do the Chinese think of Westerners? How has the country changed since I’ve been in China? What’s it like to live there?

In order to address each of these questions, the 18 chapters of Managing The Dragon fall into three parts. The first traces my progression from Pittsburgh to Yale, Harvard, Wall Street, and then the big leap east to Hong Kong and China.

The second part of the book discusses the management issue. In these chapters, I explain how I had literally hit the wall in running our business in China by 1997, and had to come up with a different way of closing China’s management gap. In this section, I explain how we finally were able to develop strong, local management in the country by focusing on China’s new generation of managers, and I provide three case studies that describe how we implemented our New China strategy for management.

Finally, the chapters in the third part of the book address the key themes that I see in China, which taken together, can provide answers to many of the questions about how the country works. While different themes are discussed in each of the chapters, a common thread runs through all of them, and I show how they are connected.

Every company, every individual needs to develop their own strategy for China. Other books on China have been written, but this is the first that attempts to put in one place all of the lessons learned by someone who has experienced it first hand. If it helps the reader in some small way to develop his or her strategy, then I will consider the book to have been a great success.