An Expatriate's Diary A monthly column from a Malaysian expatriate in San Francisco

Five minutes to midnight.....the air is still hot and thick.....summer is finally here and the heat wave is driving everybody crazy................

Dear Diary:

July has been an extremely hectic month for this expatriate, and yet exciting. First of all, I received a promotion (a well deserved one if I might say so myself) and I have been given the opportunity to learn about the financial structure of the organization. Certainly an area of intrigue to me, not to mention the opportunity to pick up new and important skills. The training has been challenging and to some extent, stressful. However, I am convinced that in the end it is well worth it.

Mentoring and career development are important management issues in today’s corporate America. Senior management here has been and still is very selective and slow to “take in” new managers ( the so-called rookies) under their wings. Those lucky few are put on the fast track and usually rotate through all functional areas within the organization in order to familiarize themselves with the core business of the company. I was wondering if Asian organizations do the same? As far as I can remember, working in an Asian organization means putting in your eight hours worth of work and then you go home and have a separate life on the side. There weren’t any corporate ladders to climb so to speak but I could be very wrong. After all, it has been a decade since I left the Asian business scene.

Communication and people skills are among the top priorities considered in selecting “the rising stars” nowadays. It used to be if you are not an engineer, chances are you will never see the peacock throne of organizations such as Boeing, Hewlett-Packard, General Motors, etc. And similar situation applies to the other industries. Recently we are seeing a new trend in the process of selection of executive officers by the American corporations. Emphasis are placed on the candidate’s “soft” qualities (people skills, leadership, communication, presentation styles, etc.) rather than the hard-core background and training. All these make good sense because leadership does not come automatically with academic training. Rather, leadership is like a bottle of fine wine - with years of hard work and careful selection of the best lineage of grapes, nurtured, aged and seal with a little faith and good luck ( in the case of leadership it meant one is either born with or without IT).

Another area which I believe is critical for the making of a great leader of an organization is one’s value system, and how that value system flows with the culture of the company. We are generally aware of the existence of culture and subcultures within an organization. Sometimes there is even a real need to have these “micro-cultures” around because teams or functional groups live by and work under specific norms and are often being identified as such. However, we have to be careful not to let these norms interfere with the overall culture of the organization and/or impact the bottom line of the organization. More importantly, senior management (especially those from outside and did not have the opportunity to rise through the rank so to speak) need to know, understand and embrace these subcultures. Believe it or not, being consider as “one of the team” can be a very powerful motivational factor other then financial awards. Understanding the culture and knowing the business of the company to it’s core are two powerful ingredients in the making of a successful leader and executive.

Management style is another crucial factor in the selection of a good manager. There are many success stories out there each associated with a unique managerial style but the most prominent are the care-taker and jungle-fighter managerial scenarios. The care-taker cares about his fellow workers. He/she makes intuitive decision and constantly instills the culture of “work being part of your life”. They are not hung up on hierarchy and focus on getting consensus from the entire group. On the other hand, the jungle-fighter emphasizes the “winners destroy the losers” and “be ready to eat or be eaten” mentalities. Both are extreme and yield impressive results and in today’s super competitive global market place, one may need to master both sets of skills in order to be successful. I do not see a bias of either one when it comes to comparing Eastern versus Western management style. American corporations, however, seem to emphasize more on the team building care-taker management style lately.

One striking difference between the East and the West when it comes to the role of management is the fact that most Asian conglomerates are family businesses. In this sense, the principle of insider versus outsider still holds true except the insiders are family members. That usually is where conflict of interest arise especially if the organization is a publicly traded company. One of the most common agency cost, then, is between the management executives (fill with family members) and the shareholders (the public) of the company. This is not to say that family member does not make good executive, rather, it makes the task of being a leader of the organization that much more challenging. The family-controlled company usually is not as open to new ideas and challenges post by talented outsider and thus easily forego growth opportunity for the sake of keeping everything within the family. There are obviously family-owned corporations in the West but majority of those that are publicly traded have outsiders as chief executives and senior officers so as to avoid agency conflict. The United States is one of the few nations that govern it’s business world with strict policies and regulations and conflict such as insider versus outsider receives extensive scrutiny. Whether we realize it or not, this more often than not becomes a major roadblock in business negotiation between the two halves of the globe. The West sees the Asian market as fortress that is impossible to penetrate and even when they are in the “game”, they find it extremely difficult to play the game with the policies and rules they are so familiar with back home. Asians see Westerners as calculative, manipulative, aggressive and unyielding. Most Western businessmen will put all of their cards on the table the first day of the meeting and want to make a deal. However, their Eastern counterparts just stares at the cards and try to decide what sort of game their Western guests are trying to play. I have always advised my fellow American business associates not to bring their lawyers to business meeting with the Asians because that is almost a guarantee to kill the deal. But that is a whole different can of worms.

Gheez....my apology for rambling on and on. Sometimes you just have to go with the flow even though the “flow” may not make any sense. It is more important for me to be able to capture my train of thoughts at the exact moment, after all, this is my diary. Come to think of it, I believe I shall treat myself to a big midnight desert.....banana with three scoops of ice cream....assorted nuts....whip cream....non-fat, of course....and tons of chocolate syrup.......better hide the weighing scale in the bathroom for now......SWEET dreams my dear diary.........

August………..in San Francisco

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