Within China there are different business cultures. Leadership styles and employee expectations for behavior and workflow vary between multinational companies, local private companies, and government owned organizations. State  Owned Enterprise(SOE) organizations are the most traditional .Local Chinese companies still follow traditional customs, but may also incorporate Western concepts into their business systems. This is especially true if they are led by the emerging breed of young Chinese entrepreneurs. Multinational companies operating in China bring their Western cultures, and Chinese employees working within the multinational company learn how to operate within this sub-culture. Leaders in a multinational company may come from several base cultures. They learn to work in ways that show both understanding of and respect for local Chinese employees.

Consider Huawei, the privately held major telecom equipment manufacturer, Huawei is one of the most global companies in China today. The founder is said to combine both Chinese and Western wisdom. The top leaders work like a Chinese family-all of them are very close, and they trust each other. To incorporate Western wisdom, a Western multinational company helped streamline their product development and management systems and to organize the company to work more like a Western company. Since top management is like a hierarchical Chinese family , the decision-making process is very nimble and not transparent to those outside the management team. When a decision is made, execution happens very systematically as employees are trained to respect authority and follow directives from their superiors . A combination of East and West business practices has enabled Huawei to grow into a large global company ,acting in many ways as a bridge for the connectedness between Eastern and Western business practices.

The capacity for a global mindset is particularly important when two very different cultures need to coordinate. A specific Chinese example from this experience is a joint venture(JV)between a Chinese SOE and a U.S. multinational company. The SOE is run very differently from the multinational organization .Think of this from the JV CEO’s perspective. Although the CEO might have come originally from the U.S. company ,or from the Chinese side, as CEO they are CEO oversees a JV which has a 50/50 percent split where neither organization is dominant. The U.S. company is a very successful iconic company .The Chinese SOE has almost two million employees, and is very tied in with the government in China . Both companies are very proud of their success. And the two companies are almost diametrically opposed to one another in terms of management systems, values ,process and decision-making-in almost every way.

In this example the CEO has worked diligently to weave a careful path between these two enterprises. The CEO spends each day focused on expertly balancing all the facets of a new venture. The CEO must express sensitivity to both cultures, while moving things forward .Both companies have a different decision making process, and each is learning how to work with the other. The CEO must have an ability to maintain sensitivity and neutrality as a leader . The CEO is required to look with value at each side of the JV while working outside of their own base culture as an individual . The valuable experience that the CEO has gained inside of their base nationality, and their base corporate culture, must be retained ,taught and blended with skill. All of this is done while absorbing, respecting and adapting to the new corporate and national culture.