In his 23 years of executive coaching, Ray Williams, president of Ray Williams Associates in Vancouver, B.C., has advised many executives on how to improve the performance of their teams. He took time out recently for an interview over Skype with CKGSB Knowledge to share his insights on how to make your team more productive, whether they work together in one room or are scattered all over the world.
Unplugging America: Is China Ready to Reduce Reliance on Foreign Technology?
October 27 of 2018 was supposed to be a historic day for China’s growing aerospace industry. Landspace, a Beijing-based startup, was set to become the first private Chinese firm to launch a rocket into outer space. Then, at 6:40 pm, a fault occurred. Soon after, Landspace declared the mission a failure. A few weeks later, SpaceX completed its 20th successful launch of 2018. It is unfair to draw sweeping conclusions based on the performance of just two companies, but it does serve as a reminder of how far China has to go before it rivals the US as the world’s leading technological power.
Go Team! Understanding and Correcting Team Dysfunction
Many—maybe even most—business teams are dysfunctional. Whether your teammates are co-founders of a startup or the C-suite of a Fortune 500 company, the evidence suggests you are probably not working together as productively as you might. Outsized egos and mis-sized groups are the most frequently cited cause of team dysfunction, but they aren’t the only problem.
State Advances, Private Retreats
A blog post by a self-styled financial veteran knocked the wind out of the Chinese business community recently. The author, Wu Xiaoping, argued that the country’s private firms should step aside and allow the state to increase its dominance of the economy. The private sector has “fulfilled its task of assisting the state-owned economy in achieving its rapid development,” Wu wrote. The article went viral on social media, sparking criticism from entrepreneurs and support from left-wing commenters. Under normal circumstances, a blog by an obscure middle manager would never garner so much attention. But Wu’s post touched a nerve. These are tough times for private firms.
Retail Revolution: Can Facial Recognition Transform China’s Retail Sector?
You may not recognize the name SenseTime. But if you have spent time in China recently, SenseTime will almost certainly recognize you. Founded just five years ago by a group of data researchers at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the startup has rapidly established itself as China’s leading provider of facial recognition technology. Its face-scanning software is used everywhere from smartphones to office blocks and police stations.
Go Team! Why Teams Fail and How to Set Them Straight
Business has always been a team sport, but over the past two decades, teams have become a much more central concern for managers. Pushed by the automation of repetitive tasks and pulled by the need to innovate, many senior executives now believe that their future depends largely on the performance of their teams. But although technology is advancing, people are not. A recent survey among MBA students and degree holders shows that only 29% said that their teams were organized in a way that gave them a three-quarter shot at success.
Reading the Tea Leaves: Shen Jianguang on the Chinese Economy
A new year is a time for fresh starts and new beginnings. At least, that is what policymakers in Beijing will be hoping. The second half of 2018 produced some negative headlines on the economy as a domestic deleveraging drive and the intensifying trade war with the US slowed growth and undermined confidence. Will these headwinds continue battering the Chinese economy or will Beijing be able to engineer a recovery? There are few people better placed to answer this question than Shen Jianguang, one of China’s most respected economic analysts, whose career has included stints at the European Central Bank, IMF and OECD.
Can Blockchain Technology Fix China’s Food Safety Problem?
On a remote farm nestled deep within the mountainous region of Daozhen, in China’s southwestern Guizhou Province, thousands of chickens are being watched closely. Aided by surveillance cameras and distance-tracking ankle tags, every step, meal and sip that the chickens take inside their paddock is uploaded in real time to an online platform. This farm, along with hundreds like it across China, is part a program that gives consumers a direct data trail from egg to plate. Launched by the technology arm of online insurer ZhongAn in 2017, it aims to boost transparency in China’s food supply chain. The technology behind GoGo Chicken is blockchain.
Codependent Partners: An Interview with Stephen S. Roach
The rapid deterioration in relations between China and the US over the past 12 months has left many scratching their heads and wondering how we got here. Stephen S. Roach is not one of those people. A former Chief Economist of Morgan Stanley and currently Senior Fellow at Yale University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, Roach has been watching the development of Chinese-US relations closely for more than three decades. For him, a tariff war between the world’s two largest economies was as predictable as it is harmful.
Multinational Companies in China: Stuck in the Middle
The Sino-US trade tussle has had the greatest impact on multinational corporations in China—precisely the group that the US started out trying to support. Many have begun considering radical courses of action to stay in business.
Saving is the New Spending: Chinese Consumers are Tightening Their Purse Strings
After years of enjoying the fruits of a booming economy and sharply rising disposable income, life for many of China’s higher earners is getting harder. Amid mounting debt levels and economic headwinds, urban middle-class consumers have responded by scaling back their discretionary spending and reducing luxury purchases—an emerging phenomenon known as the “consumption downgrade.” The newfound frugality of middle-class spenders may be good for their wallets, but it is an unwelcome development for Beijing.
The View from Beijing: Understanding China’s Perspective on the Trade War
For many in Beijing, the trade war confirms long-held suspicions that the United States is determined to thwart China’s rise as the world’s next superpower. As a result, US demands that China abandon Made in China 2025 have also tended to be viewed by Beijing as being motivated not by concerns over fair competition, but by a desire to make sure America keeps its lead in the global innovation race. Public statements from senior figures in the Trump administration have fueled these concerns—the trade war not as an isolated incident, but part of a longer history of US attempts to undermine rival powers.
CKGSB Knowledge Magazine Winter 2018: Decision Time
Beijing faces some big challenges in 2019. Over the past few months, a catchphrase from the hit HBO drama Game of Thrones seems to have been on everyone’s lips in China: “winter is coming” to the Chinese market. The gloomy sentiment has solid reasons. More businesses are struggling to access credit and a sell-off in the stock markets has exacerbated many firms’ difficulties. Meanwhile, the trade war with the US is making life tough for exporters. How worried should we really be? In this issue, we dig deeper into the issues driving recent headlines, and in many cases arrive at some unexpected conclusions.
See in the Darkness: Cai Shiyin Discusses How Dialogue in the Dark Develops in China
“Human beings cannot see with their eyes in absolute darkness, but they can see with their mind,” says Cai Shiyin, an entrepreneur who started the social enterprise Dialogue in the Dark in China.
Unicorn Factory: Interview with GGV Capital’s Hans Tung
Hans Tung knows how to spot a unicorn. During his career, he has invested in 11 startups that have gone on to attain billion-dollar valuations, including Airbnb, Bytedance, Slack, Wish and Xiaomi. Tung is also one of the few venture capitalists that feels equally at home on both sides of the Pacific. A native of Taiwan, he moved to California aged 13 and began his career in Silicon Valley, before becoming one of the first VCs at a US firm to move to China full-time in 2005. Since moving back to the US in 2013, he has continued to invest in both markets.
The Big Cover-up: Tattoo Culture in China
Tattoo culture has exploded in China in the last few years, as the country’s younger generations abandon centuries-old prejudices against the practice and embrace it as an expression of individuality. Chinese millennials are getting tattoos in record numbers, but some are being forced to keep them hidden.
Gavekal Analyst Tom Miller: Premature to Say Belt and Road Initiative is Failing
Pronouncements that the Belt and Road Initiative is failing are premature, argues Tom Miller, author of China’s Asian Dream and Senior Asia Analyst at Gavekal Research. He is well-versed in the problems facing the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and predicted many of them. In his 2017 book China’s Asian Dream, he warned that China’s preference for cultivating close relationships with individual leaders could be a long-term risk for BRI. Eighteen months on, this looks prescient. New governments have won power in Malaysia, Pakistan and the Maldives, and renegotiating deals signed by their predecessors are high on the agendas.
Dancing to a New Beat: BRI is Changing Rapidly As It Matures
What a difference a year makes. Last summer, there was a sense of unstoppable momentum behind the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), China’s trillion-dollar plan to build a network of infrastructure connecting Africa, Asia and Europe. When China hosted its 2017 Belt and Road Forum, 29 heads of state and delegations from another 100 countries traveled to Beijing, hoping to cash in on what President Xi Jinping described as the “project of the century.” This year the landscape, at least from the media’s perspective, looks dramatically different as even China’s closest partners make more cautious noises about the BRI.
How China’s E-commerce Boom Pushes Automation to the Next Level
Compared to other sectors, Chinese e-commerce firms are among the first batches of firms to embrace automation. China accounts for nearly half of global demand for AGVs, enabling one warehouse to process up to 100,000 orders a day with a staff of 20 human workers, work that previously would have required 300-600 people, according to Beijing-based startup Geek+, a leading domestic robot maker in logistics industry. Other tech giants, like Alibaba and JD.com, have also announced plans to invest billions of dollars to roll out next-generation technologies including totally unmanned warehouses and last-mile delivery robots and drones.
Mending China’s Data Fences
Online data theft is rife in China, affecting more than 80% of Internet users, and tech companies often display a cavalier attitude to using people’s personal information. But things may change. In May, the government implemented new data protection rules called the Personal Information Security Specification, which was hailed by some analysts as a watershed for data privacy, with a few even comparing it to the European Union’s game-changing General Data Protection Regulation law. While there are important differences between the two, Beijing’s new rules appear to reflect a wider shift in the way the Chinese government, companies and consumers perceive online privacy.
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