Business Leadership in China—Frank T. Gallo—BOOK REVIEW

I would recommend Frank Gallo’s book, Business Leadership in China, to any new-to China manger working for an MNC—that’s who it’s written for and that’s who will probably get the most out of it.I liked the fact that there were a lot of personal examples that show that Gallo has indeed lived the advice he’s sharing.  This to me is the most valuable portion of the book.  Frank has been here for 8 years and writes from experience—both good and bad.  That’s important.  He’s not just sharing success stories, but his mistakes and misunderstandings too.  It’s easy to point out everything that was successful.  It’s much more difficult and more valuable to others to identify where mistakes where made and the follow up remedies.I liked the fact that that there was an attempt to compare the two cultures—this, I think is sorely missing in the literature on international business.    There are more than enough books describing Chinese culture to foreigners but very few making side-by-side comparisons.   This should be the highlight of this book—any time you can have someone point out to you  “we do it like this and they do this” and then identify some personally experienced middle ground you know you have some tools you can use.  There is some of this, but it’s limited in it’s application because of how it’s presented and at whom it’s directed.I like that for whom it’s targeted, it’s a quick read.  I understand that this was written to be digested in (very very very) small parts and would therefore be valuable to someone that is (very very very) busy and has absolutely no time whatsoever to commit to learning anything about a new culture that will impact business results.  Making culture accessible in 5-minute chunks was obviously a goal.And kudos too because the book is just what he claims it is: a starting point for further research into constructing a business model that blends both foreign and Chinese leadership techniques.  To this end, the bibliography is a great resource.  When you read this you know there is more to learn and that Gallo would be a great expat to sit down and have a discussion with.  Personally, I love getting into a book and finding new ideas or ideas that I don’t agree with and having a source citation so I can look it up!  So, thanks for the new additions to my factory-travel reading list!Now, for the things I didn’t like as much.  And please understand, the structure of the book is what I have issues with far more than the content.(I guess) It’s a very MBA style look at how culture affects the corporate environment.  Meaning it’s a very very simplified version of Chinese culture that is explained in the context of how it does or does not fit into various foreign business models and theories.  You both had to know the theories and be in a place (large MNC) where you can use them for much of the analysis to be useful.And while it does compare cultures, it’s actually very PC look at only one and a half cultures, not really two.  What I mean is that Gallo is very deferential to China and Chinese culture and not nearly as nice to foreign cultures.  For example, even in the chapter on honesty, he won’t say that any practices in China are dishonest.  Not one, not once.  He’s not alone in this unwillingness to be (ironically) honest.  I’m not sure why people are afraid to call warts warts after they get to China.  In this case I assume that he didn’t want to offend any of the Chinese reviewers/interviewees, which was probably a good idea considering how valuable the interviews are to the book.  But throughout the book he is more than willing to use terms like “rash,” “haphazard,” “over confident,” “cocky,” “aggressive” (as a pejorative term) and “impatient” to describe foreign business leaders.  Maybe self-deprecation is a Chinese virtue he’s trying to indirectly teach foreigners who read the book.What’s surprising is that this book came out of a class that was teaching foreign business practices to Chinese MBA students but the final product is much more about how foreigners need to adapt to Chinese culture than it was about a 50/50 blending of two ideas.  This is a VERY common approach in many books, usually justified by “China has a 5000 year history” or “China is a huge market” and “you’re just not going to change it.”  And with each of these points I agree.  But these answers don’t justify a lack of analysis of Chinese processes or an unwillingness to look at the need for Chinese to adopt international standards in many businesses.  For example, when it comes to accounting, no one says, “Hey!  Let’s do it the Chinese way!”  So why can’t we discuss both sides of the cultural coin on other issues as well?  If we are to honestly blend the two why is there not equal give and take on both cultural sides?  Is it because we’re in China and we’ve been cowed into thinking that we’re privileged just to be here?  Why is it so popular to bash foreign cultures and worship China?   Has social relativism infected MBA schools too?Now I’m all for cultural adaptation—I’ve spent years reading hundreds of books about China and SEA, studying Chinese and Thai—but even though I was educated as an anthropologist I do not believe that just because “it’s how things are done here” that that automatically makes it right and so the outsider must change.  If that’s the case why not just condense the book down to one page of “When in Rome,” sell togas (chopsticks in this case) and save the executives the time they would otherwise take reading the executive summaries?!  I’m just asking for some balance, that’s all.

Side note on comparing two cultures. I hate the term “westerner.”  Who the hell is that?  Can you honestly say that an Italian manager will have the same style as one from California?  A German the same as a Mexican?  A retired Israeli soldier the same as a Canadian trader?  A 50-year-old MBA in a MNC and a 30-year-old small business owner?  Clumping “westerners” all together is just as bad as grouping Asians all together.  How can you compare cultures when one of the two cultures your comparing isn’t even an identifiable culture!?  Just because there was a class in Junior High School called “Western Civilization” doesn’t mean that “Western” is a culture.

Now that I’ve said all that I have to be honest myself.  This book is good—not nearly as bad as the organizational issues I have with it make it sound.  The content is better than the structure.  I just found the structure and vocabulary of the book getting in the way of me appreciating the context.  (Apologies to those who read my blog regularly and know how many typo’s per posting I usually have!  No, a degree in Anthro didn't teach me how to write well.)Actually I found quite a few useful examples and ideas, mostly from Gallo relating his personal experiences.  And I really like the fact that he will get some Chinese culture into the hands of people that he thinks may not have otherwise looked at it at all.  That’s a huge plus for this book regardless of anything else it does or doesn’t do.I also loved that he has Chinese managers with foreign degrees talking about Chinese culture specifically to a foreign audience.  That, I think is more of what is really needed.  I would really like to see an appendix with extended transcripts of the interviews.  Those interviews by themselves would be another book that I’d buy (and read).I would recommend this book to a foreigner that is new to China and will be working in a large multicultural and MBA environment.  I think that for whom it is written and how it is presented it would connect and be a great introduction (hopefully not a conclusion) to a further study of Chinese business culture.

Finally, for me, this book is also a somewhat humorous look at business executives too.  Open Question to those of you with MBA’s: Do MBA’s really need to have a 1-page executive summary after a 1-page introduction and only 3-6 pages of text?  Is this what MBA school is like?  Is everything broken down into bite-sized pieces for quick digestion with little analysis or context?  Are all MBA’s really so much busier than the rest of us that they can’t read a real book?!  In this book, for example, there only 35 pages of full text (out of 225)!  There are huge headers, big quote boxes, bullet point lists and large font on almost every page!  I’m left with the impression that going to business school must give you ADD as well as an MBA.