4 rules for motivating your team members

When managing teams in China, it’s easy to think about managing the team as a whole while forgetting that you’re also managing individuals. This is of course true anywhere, but it’s especially easy for foreigner managers working abroad to think they only need to manage the group.

It can be helpful to compare managing teams in your home country to managing a team in China. Understanding the general differences in motivations and expectations help guide how you talk to the group when explaining initiatives, defining expectations, and generally building the team’s culture.

But when I first moved back to China three years ago I fell into the trap of only managing the group, forgetting that I was actually working with individuals, each with unique motivations. I’ve also seen other foreigners managing Chinese teams fall into the trap of thinking only of the group as a whole, rather than also thinking of the group as a collection of individuals.

It’s time to start managing both the group and the individuals.

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Chinese studying abroad — an interview with Danny Wang

This is the third and final post in my series on Chinese studying abroad and the entrepreneurs serving them. I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Danny Wang, co-founder of WeblishPal, a platform that connects Chinese English language learners with native English speakers. WeblishPal focuses on serving Chinese students who are interested in studying abroad in North America.

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Chinese studying abroad — an interview with Greg Nance (part two)

This is the third post in my series on Chinese studying abroad and the entrepreneurs serving them. This is the second and final part of my interview with Greg Nance, serial entrepreneur and CEO of ChaseFuture. As noted in the first part of this interview, ChaseFuture offers services like mentoring and essay proofreading for Chinese students aspiring to attend top schools in the US or UK.

In this part, Greg talks about ChaseFuture’s strategy in China, India, and Russia; co-founders and finding early employees; growing organically and creating a business that can scale; and gathering customer feedback as ChaseFuture considers expanding their services to better serve their customers’ needs.
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Chinese studying abroad — an interview with Greg Nance (part one)

This is the second post in my series on Chinese studying abroad and the entrepreneurs serving them. I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Greg Nance, serial entrepreneur and CEO of ChaseFuture. ChaseFuture offers services like mentoring and essay proofreading for Chinese students aspiring to attend top schools in the US or UK.

This is the first of two parts of my interview with Greg, where he talks about how he ended up in China, his first startup Moneythink, and the lessons he learned from Moneythink that are helping him with ChaseFuture.
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Competing in China’s e-commerce market requires a startup mentality

Xin Wang of Brandeis University International Business School and Z. Justin Ren of Boston University School of Management wrote an interesting article about How to Compete in China’s E-Commerce Market for MIT Sloan Management Review. They analyze why companies like eBay, Groupon, and Google have struggled in China.

They offer advice relevant to both entrepreneurs and large companies: understand your customers, make decisions quickly, and pay attention to your competition. As The Startup Owner’s Manual and The Lean Startup point out, the entrepreneur’s mission is to understand their customers’ needs, test hypotheses by gathering customer feedback, and iterate quickly based on their findings. When doing this, you’ll have to discover how to solve your customers’ problems better than your competitors do. And since you are testing and iterating, you’ll have no choice but to create a culture of quick decision making.

As Blank and Dorf point out, “a startup is a faith-based initiative”. It’s important for large companies entering China, or other new markets, to remember they are also “faith-based initiatives” — even though they are market leaders at home, their approach is unproven in the new market. They need to think like a startup.

When entering a new market, make sure you understand the competitive climate and your target customers’ needs. Then, alter your offering to carve out your own piece of the market. Otherwise you may end up another example of large company hubris leading to failure in a new market.

Using extraordinary service as a competitive advantage at Hai Di Lao

Creating a sustainable advantage in any industry in China is difficult, especially when competitors promptly copy anything that works. Hai Di Lao, a hot pot chain, uses extraordinary service to draw large crowds to its many locations and offers lessons for entrepreneurs in China on how to create a sustainable competitive advantage.

Hai Di Lao was founded in 1994 and now has over 50 locations throughout China.[1] Due to their success in China, they are planning to expand into the US and Singapore.[1] They are renowned for their high levels of service and high-quality food, and for customers waiting hours for a table on most nights.

Hot pot around every corner

Hot pot restaurants are as abundant in China as Starbucks are in the US — or as Starbucks are in most other countries for that matter. If you’ve never eaten hot pot (you may know the Japanese version: Shabu Shabu), I can offer a simple explanation: they bring a pot to your table, put it on a burner, and then you order vegetables, thinly-sliced meats, fish, or anything else to cook in the boiling broth. The most common style includes a pot with chicken broth on one side, and chili oil on the other. It’s delicious simplicity, and comes in many forms throughout China.
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Amazon in China — an example of localization


Amazon’s entry into China is a lesson in understanding the local market and catering to its needs. The most obvious difference is Amazon delivering goods themselves, or at least making it seem like they are. Not only do they understand the local market, but they may even be using a lean approach.

I suddenly started seeing z.cn (Amazon’s URL in China) everywhere I looked. At the time, we were still living in Hangzhou — a second-tier city about 100 miles from Shanghai — so the ads on busses throughout the city donning Amazon’s smile stood out. Advertising is pervasive in China and I wouldn’t be surprised if I found babies with logos on their foreheads; but the sheer volume of ads with z.cn and the Amazon smile surprised me.

Amazon seemed to focus on books and a few other key categories when I first noticed them making their z.cn push, though the range seems to have expanded since then. The similarity between their approach in China and the US isn’t what I find instructive, rather it’s the changes they are making for the local market that should interest entrepreneurs and foreign companies.

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Innovation, and imitation, in China

Whenever I am talking with anyone about entrepreneurship in China, we end up discussing innovation. And I am nearly always asked whether I see real innovation in China, or if the “innovation” is really just imitation. While this a very nuanced topic I plan to explore in many posts, in this post I wanted to discuss just one example of innovation flowing from imitation in China. This example blurs the lines between innovation and imitation for me, and reminds me that innovation is often just taking someone’s idea and tweaking it a bit. So while when I picture innovation I often imagine a creative genius with an epiphany, innovation is more frequently found when one idea is tweaked, or when multiple ideas are put together in novel ways. In business, this generally stems from solving problems faced by your customers in novel ways.
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