HE grasped the chopsticks with all the daintiness of the oriental princesses he once tutored. Except this time, Richard D. Lewis’ students were several hundred Western and American executives in various shades of blue, gray and pinstripes. Guests at the Beijing meal were as attentive to manners coach Lewis as they were to the enticing mix of sushi and succulent chicken breast eaten with chopsticks by Westerners and silver cutlery by Asians at the September event.
Lewis, president of the Global Cross Cultural Institute and an author of books on cross-cultural management, spent five years in Japan as a private tutor, instructing Empress Michiko and other royals on foreign etiquette. Today he picks up fees as a consultant and speaker at events like September’s Cross-culture Management Guru Asia Forum.
Host of the forum Donny Huang has made a good living in the distance between chopsticks and silverware. From an office in Zhongguancun, a forest of blue plate glass in Beijing’s Haidian designated as Beijing’s Silicon Valley, Huang’s company 4Stones Cross-cultural Consulting Group has advised multinationals like Motorola and Philips on the niceties of Chinese etiquette and corporate culture. He’s also been coaching the staff of ambitious domestic firms like Lenovo and telecommunications technology makers Huawei and ZTE on how to act like locals when abroad. “Chinese corporations are getting more global and there was no one doing this kind of work in China, so I saw there was a market for this.”
Cross-cultural competence is the buzzword behind 4 Stones’ business and Huang, a kind of svelte Asian version of Bill Gates, complete with gold-rimmed spectacles, is fond of terminology. “How the cultural foundation is to be managed,” is 4Stones terminology for how a Western boss and Chinese staff, and increasingly vice versa, can get along well enough to build a successful business.
Yet Huang’s “Cross-culture Management” isn’t a new concept, only the term is. Western corporations did it a long time ago. Now, as Chinese businesses seek not just markets but mortar-and-bricks acquisitions abroad, they’re learning that there’s more at stake than sending containers of goods, like learning how to be liked by foreign shareholders. 4Stones business splits half and half between foreign multinationals and domestic Chinese firms. But, interestingly, 60 percent of the turnout at September’s conference was local Asian.
For those Chinese executives headed to foreign shores good manners it’s not all about when and where you should clear your throat or clean your ears. “Businesses must be able to predict precisely and understand the behaviors acted and reacted by counterparts in a foreign environment. Good cross-cultural models can help to improve the efficiency of teamwork.”
Not doing your homework on a foreign culture can mean losing money as well as face, says Huang. “It’s a competence you need to learn. You must have the right cross-cultural knowledge and culturally be able to adapt to behaviors. If you go to the USA you should know you shouldn’t smoke in company. And if you go to China and you’re invited to dinner the seating arrangement is important.” That extends to behavior in the boardroom too. “In Western meetings you have to be direct. Not so in a Chinese meeting.”
Huang reckons he’s well qualified from a two-year MBA program at the US-based Thunderbird International Business School. “It was the first school to focus on teaching global business and the first business school to teach cross-cultural education. I really liked that component.” By the time he graduated in 1995 he had a vocation -- for that he credits Professor George Renwick. “He had a lot of case studies of companies going global where international managers didn’t recognize differences in mindsets and thus caused a lot of troubles.”
After seven years in well-paying corporate roles at US firms like Baskin & Robbins (“The first couple of years you think you have hit the jackpot!”) and several intermittent stints in China, the last to build an e-learning business, in 2002, Huang got pointed forward by his old mentor, Renwick. “He came to China and said there’s a need for cross-cultural training services here and said ‘why not you?’”
So Huang crossed the Pacific one more time. Settling in Beijing in 2003, he started writing articles and giving speeches, mostly in Chinese, to educate locals and create a market for cross-cultural training. “I wanted to position myself as a leader in the area. I spoke at conferences. I wrote 30 articles for business journals. Go to Google and loads will come up!”
But it was a difficult transition from executive to specialist. “It took time for me to change. I had to be an expert in one trade and not a jack of many.” Still, the feedback was good. “Magazines were asking me to write and I was invited to conferences. It opened a lot of doors. Professors were asking me to give guest lectures. People know we do something.”
Soon it was time to pitch for business. Some of Huang’s earliest customers were the Chinese companies he’d been lecturing about. “They were now becoming international, and there were major barriers to overcome. There were cultural issues to mergers and acquisitions which they hadn’t anticipated.”
A lot of those issues related to different managerial styles. “In the West you achieve results through systems and structures you can quantify. In China it’s more trust- and people-related. In the West the people issue is dictated by law and is contractually fixed. But in China relations are important.” Too many big-company executives sent from the West try to enforce Western systems in Chinese operations. “What you think may be right, but people resist. The solution is to understand why people resist. Chinese staffs are not comfortable in a direct situation, so in China you go talk to them indirectly.”
Beyond management, local Chinese staff often lack the worldliness to settle into multinational corporations. “Chinese middle managers have great potential but managers might want them to do business in multicultural settings.” That’s where 4Stones makes its money. Aside from cross-cultural training to help Western managers settle into China, the company’s four Beijing-based consultants spend half their time coaching Chinese and expatriates at the China offices of multinational firms.
Charged with the company tools, Michael Jiang, a Beijing local with a Japanese business degree, has devised and patented a software program called Worldpass, which tests and categorizes individuals and nations according to their cultural traits and needs. “In the UK there is a major tendency to equality,” he explains. “But in China there is a major tendency to status.”
Clients, assessed individually, can check and compare scores on the Internet. “We have explanations for each score and they can compare to scores in our US offices.” Training is assessed and applied according to scores, says Jiang, 31. “In the future we’ll have more staff and systems,” says Jiang. Getting staff isn’t easy. “We need bi-cultural people.”
But cross-cultural consultancy is catching on in China. “We got 1,000 applications for one job,” says Jiang. The company recently hired a Chinese native who returned from France to fill an opening for a consultant, one of four now servicing clients in Beijing.
Competitors in China are mostly in-house. Several corporations have added an intercultural department. US financial services operator Prudential has a Prudential Intercultural. But there are no Chinese companies offering solely cross-cultural training.
The business of cultural (mis)understanding is good. 4Stones is planning an office in Shanghai to add to its Beijing headquarters. Two consultants staff the company’s office in Honolulu. Why Honolulu? “Because Hawaii is the best place for east and west to meet. They research the USA and we China.”
The company name was chosen as a statement of intent. “It’s 4Stones because Chinese people believe that if you want to start something you need very rigid foundations,” says Huang. “A chair has four feet. Stone represents a very rigid foundation and something strong. There are four corner stones in a house.
By LANCE MAUGHAN
