Haier, taking the middle management out - Bill Fischer

Bill Fischer

Home appliances manufacturer Haier has become of of the leading forces in China's drive for innovation, says IMD-professor Bill Fischer in the People's Daily. "Reinventing Giants" is a recent book he co-authored focuses on Haier's transformation process: the middle management is taken out.

The People's Daily:

In the new structure, the customers' needs are learnt by the sales team and fed back to Haier's top managers, who make decisions about the company's strategies based on this information. The role of middle management is taken out of the model.

"Once customers are at the top, why do you need middle management? Is it to manage the top managers?" Fischer asks. "No. Many companies in the world say that they put customers first without knowing what it means. But Haier has executed it well." 

At Haier, the company's management structure pivots around ZZJYTs (zi zhu jing ying ti,which in English means independent operation units). 

Each new project or market opportunity leads to the formation of a ZZJYT, a dedicated small team of workers with a separate budget, functioning almost like an independent company. Fischer and his co-authors studied Haier's three-door- refrigerator ZZJYT in detail. First a leader is selected who is then responsible for recruiting the team. The ZZJYT model inspires entrepreneurial spirit in workers, Fischer says. It gives them decision-making power and motivation to work hard because their salary is directly related to the performance of the unit. The key benefit of the ZZJYT arrangement is fast response to customer needs, he says,but such a structure requires courage by a company's top management to implement it.

More in the People's Daily. Bill Fischer is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

China Weekly Hangout
Shadow banking is on the agenda of the +China Weekly Hangout for Friday 30 August, featuring shadow-banking expert assistant professor Sara Hsu . You can read or announcement here, ask questions, or register for live participation at our event page.

Discussion on the ability of China to innovate, by the +China Weekly Hangout  on October 11, 2012, with political scientist +G. E. Anderson and China consultant at-large Janet Carmosky. Moderation by +Fons Tuinstra of the China Speakers Bureau.

Related articles

• Haier "insanely curious" - Bill Fischer
• Changing China trends on innovation - Bill Fischer
• The corporate reinvention - Bill Fischer
• Can China become a leading global innovator? - Bill Fischer
• Chinese firms listen better than its competitors - Bill Fischer
• Idea hunters go to Beijing - Bill Fischer

Haier is “insanely curious” - Bill Fischer

Haier, China's famous electronics firm who started already to go global in the 1990s, is “insanely curious”, tells IMD professor Bill Fischer in the Business Spectator. Fischer is the co-author of a new book on innovative strategies Reinventing Giants: How Chinese Global Competitor Haier Has Changed the Way Big Companies Transform.

The Business Spectator:

As for Haier, its founder Zhang Ruimin is an avid reader of business literature and a Drucker-quoting member of a management mutual appreciation society that includes Michael Porter and Gary Hamel. IMD professor Bill Fischer, co-author of Reinventing Giants, a new book about Haier, says the company is “insanely curious”. But it is pursuing “revolution by accretion”, with each new development built on the last. Even Haier’s autonomous business units trace their roots back to Japanese quality improvement programs that the Chinese company adopted in the 1980s.

More in the Business Spectator.

Bill Fischer is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

China Weekly Hangout

Can China innovate, was the question the +China Weekly Hangout addressed in October 2012 with political scientist +G. E. Anderson and China consultant at-large +Janet Carmosky. Moderation by +Fons Tuinstra of the China Speakers Bureau.

On July 1 Hong Kong we saw the annual march against Beijing rule. The +China Weekly Hangout will examine on Thursday July 11 (delayed hangout from July 4) the turnout, and how the relationship between Hong Kong and Beijing has developed, since China took over the former British enclave. You can read our announcement here, or join the debate at our event page here.

Related articles

• Integrity counts for Chinese firms - Janet Carmosky
• The corporate reinvention - Bill Fischer
• The Hong Kong/Beijing relationship - China Weekly Hangout
• China not facing a Lehman moment now - Shaun Rein
• How to pitch your China book to a publisher - Paul French
• Comparing two big elections - Janet Carmosky

The corporate reinvention - Bill Fischer

Bill Fischer

Most companies in trouble restructure, scale down, very few are able to reinvent themselves. But it can be done, writes IMD-professor Bill Fischer in Forbes. Soon a book on the Chinese company Haier, one of the companies who reinvented itself, co-authored by Bill Fischer, will appear.

Bill Fischer:

When done right – here, I’m thinking IBM, Haier, Telekom Malaysia – the results can be impressive. The organization is given an entirely new start, and rather than being a confused incumbent under attack, they can be granted additional life as a result of taking bold and daring choices.  But, if you are Kodak, RIM or Nokia, for example, you find yourself a victim of major disruption from outside,  as your key products and services are being preempted by unexpected, and imaginative market entrants [namely, Apple, Samsung and Google] who have completely changed the products and business models that you had built your long-term success on, and the industry and value-chains that you were a part of, removing the very bedrocks of your past success upon which you had most likely planned your future. If you are SONY, Dell, or Yahoo, on the other hand, your problems are more likely internal: your own organization, or the constraints you have placed on it, have let you down and you lack the visionary leadership that brought you success not so long ago. With either success or failure, however, the outcome is more the result of leadership than anything else.

More in Forbes. 

Bill Fischer is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form. Telecom giant Huawei is still one of the Chinese companies that has to reinvent itself, concluded the China Weekly Hangout on October 18, 2012. Present are +David Wolf, who wrote a book on Huawei and China veteran +Andrew Hupert. Moderation by +Fons Tuinstra of the +China Speakers Bureau.

Related articles

• Apple still popular, despite government action - Ben Cavender (chinaspeakersbureau.info)
• China internet hacks no surprise - Wendell Minnick (chinaspeakersbureau.info)
• Why I left China - Marc van der Chijs (chinaspeakersbureau.info)
• Moutai under austerity fire - Shaun Rein (chinaherald.net)

China Weekly Hangout: the innovation debate

CEIBS China Europe International Business School (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Is China a copy-and-paste culture, stealing innovation from others, or the upcoming paradise for global innovation, replacing Silicon Valley? Two schools of thought are heavily divided on the innovation issue and the China Weekly Hangout on Thursday 11 October is going to try to drill a bit deeper than the daily one-liners about this subject. You can register here on our dedicated event page.

For this hangout we have invited eminent experts on innovation on China:

• Bill Fischer, professor of innovation at IMD and former CEIBS dean. He recently co-published The Idea Hunter: How to Find the Best Ideas and Make them Happen
• Greg Anderson, consultant and author of Designated Drivers: How China Plans to Dominate the Global Auto Industry (confirmed)
• China-guru at-large Janet Carmosky, Ceo of the China Business Network (confirmed). 
• Richard Brubaker of CEIBS is currently traveling, but will join if possible.

Fons Tuinstra of the China Speakers Bureau will moderate. 

Together with a few other subjects like sustainability, international relations and political and economic developments, innovation is likely an issue that will make regular appearances in our China Weekly Hangout. In this first innovation hangout we will draw some first sketches and dive into China's possibilities in the auto market. In the official hangout only a few additional seats are available, do drop us a line if you want to join.
Others can follow the event on YouTube and give comments or ask questions a our dedicated event page.

Every two, three months we will address additional issues regarding innovation like: education, intellectual property, creativity, government policies, Confucianism and other elements of the innovation debate. If you want to get regular updates, do register at our China Weekly Hangout page or you can register for this event only at our event page. Changes will be announced here, and at our event page.

The China Week is in principle held every Thursday from 10pm Beijing Time, 4pm CEST (Europe) and 10am EST (US). During and after the hangout a YouTube screen and link will be available on this page.

Related articles

• Why are the Chinese leaving China - China Weekly Hangout (chinaherald.net)
• Why are foreigners leaving China? - China Weekly Hangout (chinaherald.net)

Top-5 most-read stories for August 2012

Europe is preparing for the hottest day since 1944, so what better to do than retreat in my cool study and look back. Today we resume our top-5 of most-read stories and some of our top-speakers feature here: Shaun Rein and his book "The End of Cheap China", and the "healthy" image of McDonald's in China, Tom Doctoroff and his grim outlook on China's innovative capacities, Zhang Lijia and the conspiracy theories on the London Olympic Games, and of course Jeremy Goldkorn on Weibo. 

This is also a good spot to announce our China Weekly Hangout. On this website we mostly focus on stories from our speakers, picked up by mainstream media, or published on their weblogs. You can follow our announcements on this dedicated webpage, or on my personal Google+ account. We will use our YouTube account for broadcasting, and you can sign up here too. 

Calling our China Weekly Hangout a TV-show is probably a bit over the hill, but technology offers the opportunity to bring together people from different continents for an exchange of thoughts, an opportunity we cannot let go. We have been setting op a small China Weekly Hangout team, and will use Google+ for future exchanges. 

What we want to do is taking the daily news a step further. We will bring China experts - sometimes or speakers, but not only them - in debates that add a bit more value to those daily messages. Take for example the debate on China's innovative capacities. Some of our speakers, like Bill Dodson and Tom Doctoroff have a pretty grim outlook on the copy-and-paste talents in China. 

And while IMD professor Bill Fischer is not really optimistic about China's recent developments on innovation, but he has a very different way of defining innovation, for example in his book  The Idea Hunter. Bringing together some of these conflicting ideas seems a useful plan, and it allows it to do a little bit more than just follow the daily publications in other media. 

In August we will do a few more tests, as the new applications and other features on the Google+ hangouts are coming in on a weekly basis, and make the usage of this new broadcast technology pretty exiting. Please let me know, if you are interested in joining in any capacity, as audience, expert, panelist or otherwise. 

Now back to our top-5 stories for August:

1. Shaun Rein, Why China is not cheap anymore
2. Tom Doctoroff, On innovation Chinese won't deliver
3. Shaun Rein, McDonald's healthy image in China
4. Zhang Lijia, The conspiracy against China at the London Olympics
5. Jeremy Goldkorn, The genuine debate on Weibo

Related articles

• My meeting with Chen Guangcheng in NY - Zhang Lijia (chinaspeakersbureau.info)
• Consumers are willing to pay a premium - Tom Doctoroff (chinaspeakersbureau.info)
• In China, dark is ugly - Zhang Lijia (chinaspeakersbureau.info)
• The high ambitions of China's consumers - Tom Doctoroff (chinaspeakersbureau.info)
• The insult of shengnu, leftover women - Zhang Lijia (chinaspeakersbureau.info)

China's innovation is lagging - Bill Fischer

Bill Fischer

China's innovating power is not really moving forward, tells IMD-professor and author Bill Fischer in the Shanghai Daily. "You need also the ability to commercialize ideas as well."

Bill Fischer:

 My sense is that, if I was to do the ranking myself, what I would say is that China's ranking in innovation has pretty much remained unchanged over the past few years. 

What that means is that China certainly has the inventive capacity to be one of the frontrunners and leaders in innovation. But more inventive capacity isn't really enough. You need not only the ability to create new ideas, but the ability to commercialize those ideas as well. 

And the reason I think China remains steady in terms of its innovative performance is that we have yet to see a real breakout in terms of large global organizations which have brands and channels of distribution to be able to really commercialize the inventions that can be made here... 

And if you look at the science and PhD students, a lot of research in the West relies on these Chinese graduate students. They are doing it in the United States and Europe. 

So by every indication, we know there's incredibly creative talent in this country. There always has been. China's history as an inventor is legendary. And you just don't lose that. It doesn't go away. That's one thing. 

But the reform has been going on for 33 years. When we look at who are the big global players, we see Haier, Huawei, Lenovo, maybe two or three others you could speculate about, depending on what your perspective is.

More in the Shanghai Daily.

Bill Fischer is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting of conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

Bill Fischer is the author of a recent book on innnovation,The Idea Hunter: How to Find the Best Ideas and Make them Happen.

How to become successful in executive education - Bill Fischer

Bill Fischer

IMD-professor (and formet CEIBS dean) Bill Fischer wrote up on his weblogwhat makes him successful in executive education, answers on questions from CEIBS professor Ellie Weldon. "One of the few advantages that I have found to be associated with aging,  however,  is that sometimes people ask for your opinions, and then actually listen."

Bill Fischer, on one of the key factors that made him succeed:

A belief that my role is no longer to be the “purveyor of truth” but rather, instead, to serve as a “smart person facilitating smarter people.” This is not easy. It defies decades of professorial prerogatives and requires a willingness to cede control over the classroom experience to the participants, but it is a sober and realistic admission that the people in our executive education classrooms know a lot, are smart people, and should own the experience. My role, then, is to put them into a position where it is their program and not my own.That is not to say that I abdicate my responsibilities as an "instructor" or as someone whose job it is to observe many different managers and businesses, and to draw opinions from these experiences, but the emphasis should be on applying this knowledge to move the participants' conversations forward, rather than "dazzling" them with what I think that I know.

Much more on Bill Fischer's weblog.

Bill Fischer is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch, or fill in our speakers' request form.

Related articles

• Can China become a leading global innovator? - Bill Fischer (chinaspeakersbureau.info)
• Working with the digital cowboys - Bill Fischer (chinaspeakersbureau.info)
• Changing China trends on innovation - Bill Fischer (chinaherald.net)
• The debate: The End of Cheap China - Shaun Rein (chinaspeakersbureau.info)

Changing China trends on innovation - Bill Fischer

Bill Fischer

China has a poor record on value-creation and capturing value of innovation outside the country itself. But times are changing, very fast, suggest IMD-professor Bill Fischer on the website Management-Issues. China might surprise the world again.

Bill Fischer:

Interestingly, there was no disputing the role of appropriating the ideas of others to build China's innovative capital, as evidenced by the clustering of many of China's new economy champions in the lower left-hand quarter. Bu this is not so surprising: many Western firms also owe their historical origins to the ideas of others. Google, for example, was judged by my Chinese observers to have originated by building upon the prior search-engine innovations of others, but then, as the arrow indicates, has subsequently grown through mastering the ability to both create and capture its own value - something that few of the Chinese firms have apparently achieved. 

But what is more notable about these impressions is that all but a handful of the Chinese firms are essentially only capturing value in the Chinese domestic market. They have, to date, been unable to launch strategies to create value and they have not been very successful in capturing value outside of the Chinese domestic market. 

This could start to change, however. Baidu announced earlier this year a new "box computing" strategy aimed to differentiate it from Google, and Sina Weibo has recently entered the Japanese market and is rumored to be launching an English language rival to Twitter. If these are, in fact, realized then perhaps we'll see more value-creation in the growth trajectories of Chinese firms?. 

Also interesting is that Lenovo and Huawei, two of the Chinese three firms most "northeast" in their location on the chart (both creating & capturing value — presumably where we would find the most sustainably successful innovators), would probably regarded by outside observers as being the least "entrepreneurial", the least "new economy", and the least "independent" of all of the firms represented. If we had added Haier to this set, the results would have been similar. So much for the innovation stereotypes so cherished in the West!

More on Management-Issues.

Bill Fischer is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch.

Related articles

• Can China become a leading global innovator? - Bill Fischer (chinaspeakersbureau.info)
• The debate: The End of Cheap China - Shaun Rein (chinaspeakersbureau.info)
• Working with the digital cowboys - Bill Fischer (chinaspeakersbureau.info)
• China innovation fueled by US education - Shaun Rein (chinaspeakersbureau.info)

The debate: The End of Cheap China - Shaun Rein

Shaun Reiin

The End of Cheap China: Economic and Cultural Trends that will Disrupt the World is the title of Shaun Rein's book, expected in March 2012. But the debate on the book has already started, at his linkedIn Group, The End of Cheap China.

Wages in China are going up, and China's government is trying to offset a plummeting export with increased domestic consumption. Is is working?
At the LinkedIn group  The End of Cheap China, IMD professor Bill Fischer kicks off the discussion:

 Last week, I heard the CEO of a very large European company claim that "a new Iberia" of consumers joins the Chinese market every year.....but, consumption's role in GDP continues to be an disappointing basis for hoping for decoupling. Is it that the overall economy continues to grow so fast that the increase in consumption doesn't show up?

 Both Shaun Rein and Bill Fischer a speakers at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need them at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch.

Related articles

• Apple is lagging behind Google's android - Shaun Rein (chinaherald.net)
• Jobs in China? Not that easy - Shaun Rein (chinaspeakersbureau.info)
• Inflation undermines consumer confidence - Shaun Rein (chinaherald.net)
• China tied by debt and inflation - Shaun Rein (chinaherald.net)
• Why China should not bail out Europe - Shaun Rein (chinaherald.net)

Can China become a leading global innovator? - Bill Fischer

Bill Fischer

After becoming the shop floor of the world, China is now focusing on its position as global innovator. IMD-professor Bill Fischer examines in Forbes whether those ambitions can become true. Counting patents is certainly not the way.

There is a big difference between creating new ideas [creating value] and capturing the value associated with these new ideas.FT.com/alphaville reports that many of the Chinese patents counted are utility patents, and do not represent significant new contributions to knowledge [in other words, not value creation]. Furthermore, at least one observer on the scene has reported that Chinese government authorities are encouraging the disaggregation of patent applications in order to boost the numbers of patents being produced. This month, INSEAD’s Global Innovation Index for 2011 ranked China just 29th overall in innovation [Switzerland #1, U.S.A. # 7]. According to this analysis, although China’s innovation benefits from growing market and business sophistication (for a middle-income economy) and a lively financial sector, there are disadvantages associated with social infrastructure deficiencies relating to innovation-related institutions and human-capital development. It would appear that while China might be becoming more productive in generating patents, these may not necessarily translate into economic impact. On the other hand, China ranks #1 as the world’s top “importer of R&D,” which would be appropriate for innovation strategies based on value-capture...

Increasing the “rate” of inventive activity will only get you so far. In order to make it big on the global stage, a nation’s firms need to be able to capture the economic value associated with that activity. This means investment into organizational design on a global scale, establishing brand visibility, building worldwide supply chains and channels of distribution, and all of the rest of the complex set of activities that go into making a successful multinational corporation. Two years ago, Rebecca Chung and I reported that experienced Chinese managers participating in CEIBS’s [the China Europe International Business School] EMBA program appeared considerably less optimistic about China’s prospects as a global innovative leader than did a similar set of their peers in IMD’s EMBA program [66% of the 53 CEIBS' EMBAs saw China's near-term future as "staus-quo", while only 18% of their IMD peers agreed with this assessment]. Perhaps what the Chinese managers saw, that outsiders in their enthusiasm missed, was that increasing inventive activity might well be the easiest part of successful innovation, and that it is indeed a less glamorous and more managerial long march to becoming able to realize the value associated with that increased inventive activity.

More in Forbes.

Bill Fischer is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch.

Related articles

• China relaxes procurement rules on innovation - Shaun Rein (chinaherald.net)
• Chinese firms listen better than its competitors - Bill Fischer (chinaspeakersbureau.info)
• The Idea Hunt - China vs Europe (fonstuinstra.net)
• No room for high-risk innovation - Arthur Kroeber (chinaherald.net)

Chinese firms listen better than its competitors - Bill Fischer

Bill Fischer

Competitors from China are becoming better, IMD-professor Bill Fischer concludes in Forbes. Cheap labor and competitive pricing are replaced by a far greater asset: listening better to their clients. Fischer zooms in on UnionPay, China's only electronic retail network.

Huawei, Lenovo and Haier are some of the familiar Chinese names in global competition, but more are getting ready, Bill Fischer discovered at the UnionPay headquarters, talking to Mr. Chai Hongfeng, Director and Executive Vice President.

He is an urbane, sophisticated, cosmopolitan executive, who could have stepped off of the cover of Forbes, and he summarized the company’s managerial needs with four words...:

“Study, Standards, Cooperation, and Innovation”: this is not about price. Nor is this the image of the traditional State-Owned Enterprise dinosaur.What this is, instead, is a recipe for learning more and faster than their competitors. This is all about building a smarter organization.

Some 16 years ago, Peter F. Drucker, the management gurus’ guru, predicted that the next big managerial innovation would come out of China, and we’re still waiting. Perhaps, somewhat unexpectedly, it might just be the ability to listen better in an effort to construct faster-learning organizations? In the spirit of that sentiment, my good friend William Keller, the former CEO of Roche China, and a long-time Shanghai resident, has observed that in the competition for learning about how to do business in this brave new world of globalization, Western firms travel the world telling others “how to do it”, while Chinese firms travel the world “listening to the lessons of others.” Keller asks: “Who do you think will learn faster”? Granted “listening” is not necessarily the same as “learning”, nor is either a guarantee for building an effectively “smarter” competitor. But, listening and learning do strike me as excellent starting points for competing in the ideas business.

More about his findings in Forbes.

Bill Fischer is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. When you need him at your meeting or conference, do get in touch.

Related articles

• Idea hunters go to Beijing - Bill Fischer (chinaherald.net)
• The Idea Hunt - China vs Europe (chinaherald.net)
• The story after GFW-professor Fang got hit by a shoe (chinaherald.net)

The Idea Hunt - China vs Europe

Image via Wikipedia

Innovation tops many agenda's, from individuals, organizations and countries. But what innovation actually is and how to deal with it, outside high-brow and often mythical debates, remains illusive.

Bill Fischer and Andy Boyton have in their recently released "The Idea Hunter: How to Find the Best Ideas and Make them Happen" produced an excellent guide on how to hunt for ideas and get them in place. They describe the core of innovation and - apart from giving very down-to-earth advice - they turn around arguments I have witnessed in many of the innovation debates.

My apologies when I focus on the China angle here, it is my angle and not of the book, but I learned a few important lessons from the book that should reflect on the debate on how innovative China actually is.

Is China not the 'cut-and-paste' country where few original ideas are the basis of its innovation? Is China able to be innovative, because of its cultural inhibitions? Is its neglect for intellectual property not actually stealing from others? Fischer and Boyton turn around that concept and argue that innovation is mostly a cut-and-past process, and mostly not producing new and original ideas. The better strategy is try existing ideas are use them in a different setting, they argue.

This is an extremely important attitude for an Idea Hunter. Trying to come up with thoroughly original ideas all the time ... is a losing game. The better plan is to identify potentially valuable ideas that either are already being used or have been used in the past. The task then is to slip those ideas into your setting or circumstances.

They use a wide range of examples to illustrate their point. Take for example Sam Walton, the founder of Wal-Mart:

Walton made a habit of prowling for ideas in other people's stores... It was "just part of the educational process," part of his regular exercise. ... Walton had the right attitude as an Idea Hunter. "You can learn from everybody," he taught. "I probably learned the most by studying what my competitor was doing across the street." He gladly conceded that all the ideas tried at Wal-Mart, such as how and where to display items, were copied from stores. His wife, Helen, says he seemed to spend almost as much time in other people's stores as he did in his own.

Let's put this in black and white. In Europe, for example in my native country The Netherlands, basic research seems to be the holy grail of innovation. Original ideas are presented in TV-shows and are funded by the government. We look in admiration at a company like Philips whose research department has been famous for groundbreaking basic research. And, yes, we know all that basic research seldom left the corporate labs, because there was a huge disconnect with their marketing and what consumers really wanted.

Is from that perspective China not much more innovative? And should the innovation debate not be focused more on what we actually get from it, in stead of conducting intellectual debates on concepts and principles that add little value?

Bill Fischer is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch.

Image by Fantake via Flickr

Related articles

• Idea hunters go to Beijing - Bill Fischer (chinaherald.net)
• No room for high-risk innovation - Arthur Kroeber (chinaherald.net)
• Kissinger fails to answer key question - Jasper Becker (chinaherald.net)
• The Challenging Chinese Consumer Market (ilookchina.net)
• Humor as a tool against the authorities - Jeremy Goldkorn (chinaherald.net)
• The story after GFW-professor Fang got hit by a shoe (fonstuinstra.net)

Idea hunters go to Beijing - Bill Fischer

Bill Fischer

When you are looking for smart ideas in China, go to Beijing, rather than Shanghai or Guangzhou, writes IMD business professor Bill Fischer of technology management in the Business Times, exploring the strategy for idea hunting.

Interested in Web 2.0? Go to Silicon Valley. If you go anywhere else, you are reducing the likelihood of finding a good new idea. Why? Because people with Web 2.0 ideas congregate around Silicon Valley; so, there is a higher probability that you will discover a good new idea there, than, for example, Paris, or Milan, or even Shanghai.
Can't leave China, and still interested in Web 2.0? My suggestion is to go to Beijing's Zhongguancun district. There, you will be more likely to 'bump into' someone from Beida, Tsinghua, or the Chinese Academy of Sciences, or even alumni of Founder, Stone or Lenovo who will be interested in your ideas and might have ideas of their own, or know somebody who does.
You are less likely to find that sort of information in Shanghai or Guangzhou, and certainly not in smaller cities. Good idea hunters know this and they, like any 'big-game' hunter, go where the action is in order to enjoy the best chance of 'hitting their targets'.

Read here his full article.

Bill Fischer is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. When you need him at your meeting or conference, do get in touch.

Related articles

• Why China does not need Home Depot - Paul French (chinaherald.net)
• Online background checks - a strategy (fonstuinstra.net)
• China correspondents covering Japan (fonstuinstra.net)
• Property remains a major wealth creator - Rupert Hoogewerf (chinaherald.net)

More education not always better - Bill Fischer

Bill Fischer by Fantake via Flickr

Getting more patents and PhD's are not the ways to improve education, writes IMD professor Bill Fischer in Business Week. Getting faculty in with business experience is more important to improve the now lagging education in China.

IMD's 2010 World Competitiveness Yearbook reports that China's education system has been in decline since 2007 in terms of how well it meets the needs of a competitive economy, presently ranking 44th out of 58 countries—below countries such as Greece (43), Kazakhstan (35), and Qatar (14). Finland, on the other hand, which ranks 1st in this category, is a notable reference point that people speak about with respect to how its educational offerings in engineering, technology, and innovation are having a direct impact on the economic vitality of the country. Do you ever hear the same about China?

If pushing out more graduates, patents and PhD's does not help, what is the problem, according to Bill Fischer?

During my sojourn in China as an academic and as president and dean of the China Europe International Business School, I was frequently struck by the thought that China's scarcest resource might just be "practically experienced" university faculty. Far too many of the Chinese professors I observed in other schools (CEIBS insisted that any faculty had the ability to interact competently with executives) had never actually worked for a living; they were lifelong academics, and everything was "theoretical" for them. This simply does not work if the goal is to transform new ideas into practical solutions. And it is particularly devastating if we are speaking about business schools and their role in preparing a "managerial class" for competing on the world stage.

More in Business Week, where Bill Fischer explains this is not only a problem in China.

Related articles

• Foreign managers increasingly hired in China - Bill Fischer (chinaherald.net)
• First Steps: On-Campus Environmentalism in China (sierraclub.typepad.com)
• Job hunting? Better learn Mandarin (cnn.com)

Foreign managers increasingly hired in China - Bill Fischer

Bill Fischer by  Fantake via Flickr

The chances of foreign managers to get hired in China, even for Chinese firms, increases, but on the condition they speak Chinese, says IMD-professor Bill Fischer in an interview with CNN.

Bill Fischer, a professor at Switzerland's IMD Business School who has studied China's changing business climate, said that Chinese firms are increasingly interested in hiring foreigners with experience in international financial markets and building global brands.

"The skills that go along with managing on a broad platform -- those are skills that they haven't had to develop in the past. But as they want to build their own brands, they want to do that as well," he told CNN.

"The jobs are there, but they're there for people who not only are experienced, but have some language skills, particularly if you're working for a Chinese corporation," he added.

More on hiring trends in China in CNN.

Commercial
Bill Fischer is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. When you need him at your meeting or conference, do get in touch.

Related articles

• Companies better in targeting Chinese consumers - Shaun Rein (chinaherald.net)
• Foreign brands struggle as Chinese retailers rise - Paul French (chinaherald.net)
• NBA puts soccer to shame - Rowan Simons (chinaherald.net)
• Taiwan's military intelligence thorough infiltrated - Wendell Minnick (chinaherald.net)

2010: the year of shifting gears - Bill Fischer

Bill Fischer by Fantake via Flickr

IMD-professor, and former CEIBS dean, Bill Fischer, describes on his weblog the fast changing speed in China's development. While China has made huge steps forward, at the end Fischer still sees huge barriers to real change in China:

The conundrum underlying all of this is that there is lots of creativity in China today. The art scene; fashion; sculpture; music; cinema. China is awash with creativity. But, if you look closely, what you see is that this innovation is individual innovation, not organizational innovation. What sets the eBays and Amazons and Apples apart is that they are all “organizational” innovation. The iPod experience could not have been designed by one person; it needed a team, and a diverse team at that. Same is true behind most of the big innovations of recent times. Yet, what is it about Chinese organizations that they turn out to be so much less innovative than the sum of the people who are brought together under that organizational structure? Is it that the command & control approach to management which has characterized thousands of years of Chinese history is still hard to break? Or, is it Confucian respect for hierarchy and relational prerogatives? Is it not enough trust; or too much trust? Is it not enough diversity? Or, is it something else?

More at this weblog with a too long name.

Commercial
Bill Fischer is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. When you need him at your meeting or conference, do get in touch. 

Related articles by Zemanta

• Expo 2010 about more than making money - Wang Jianmao (chinaherald.net)
• The Party sets the digital agenda - Paul Denlinger (chinaherald.net)
• China's consumers keep on spending - Shaun Rein (chinaherald.net)
• Income gap widening - Zhang Juwei (chinaherald.net)