Working with SRI

A Plot Twist Worthy of a Hollywood Film

I was honored to host the awards ceremony for an international American-film festival held in China in 2016. About one year later, a Chinese acquaintance and southern China cultural celebrity directed a feature film and needed our services to help him enter the film festival for 2018. As Chinese directors are constantly seeking opportunities to validate their work on the international stage, he expected that working with us would be a push in the right direction..

We painstakingly worked together with the Chinese director and his team, and successfully submitted the film entry before the entry deadline. Several months passed. The film festival was only weeks away and both myself and the director repeatedly communicated with each other and the film festival organizing committee. As part of the mundane process that leads up to spectacular events such as international film festivals, we had asked the organizers for a final written document confirming our entry’s acceptance into the festival. But so far there was only silence in response.

  • It was at this point that we had the first clue that something was amiss. I phoned the committee and politely asked for confirmation. Our submission was not listed, neither was there any record of it. And the deadline for film submissions was long past. I was shocked and horrified and livid all at once. Nevertheless, I calmly explained that we had been working with one of the committee’s head members for months on this submission, and there must have been some mistake. As soon as I mentioned the name of the committee member, there was a long sigh on the other end of the line.

    I realized that we had been taken for a ride. Unbeknownst to us, the “committee member" that we had been in contact with for months had in the interim been fired for fraud and other devious business practices. I explained our predicament to the organizer, and was transferred to the director of the film festival, who decided to make a huge exception on account of my timely request, and agreed to expedite our submission, as long as we turned it in on the next business day. I hung up the call with the director in the States and proceeded immediately to explain the situation to the film's director and coordinate efforts on the China side to turn in the film within the next day. The race against the clock paid off, and the submission arrived in time for screening by the organizing committee.

    At this point, I was already thanking my lucky stars, but I knew we weren't out of the woods yet. After all, the film had not been officially accepted into the festival. A day after our submission was delivered to the film festival committee, the film's director called me requesting that I communicate with the festival director and use my “close relationship” with him to put in a good word for the film, in hopes of getting an award of some sort. For Americans who don't understand Chinese culture, this request would almost certainly sound absurd and even offensive. The selection process for awards at well-known international film festivals is (supposed to be) fair and unaffected by personal relationships. Any attempt to circumvent that fair process would be frowned upon at best, and at worst, could jeopardize the submission of the film all together. And we were already treading on thin ice with our late submission.

    I did not promise the director anything over the phone. Rather, I waited until the next day when I had a chance to speak with him in person. I explained that we were very lucky that our submission had made it in time, and at this point the final result was out of the control of even the director of the film festival himself, as the decisions regarding awards were made by a panel of judges, and not one person. The director understood my point: Things are done differently in the United States, and we had already done as much as we possibly could on his behalf in pushing the film through to the panel. We would have to leave the rest up to the panel’s decision-making process.

    There are two points worthy of note here: (1) To begin with, I had no "close relationship" with the director of the film festival. In fact, I had not communicated with him about the film previous to my call reporting foul play. The reason the director decided to help was purely out of respect for the rule of law and the firm conviction that the "right and fair thing" should be done in giving our film a chance. Furthermore, the director of the festival knew that I possibly had evidence against the former member of his team who he was preparing to sue for international fraud. Therefore he agreed to make an exception to the rules and allow our submission.

    But when I explained this situation to the film’s director, he interpreted it to mean that I had a special relationship with the film festival director. I did not attempt to deny that, as that would automatically create a lack of trust in my ability to "work things out" for my client, the film director. Therefore, while candor is important, it is also important to choose the right time for candor.

    (2) When it came to explaining why I could not influence the outcome of the awards process, it was important to disconnect my assumed "close relationship" with the film festival director from the specific issues at hand. If I were to follow the Chinese logic of the film’s director and agree to use my personal "connection" to effect a positive award outcome, eventually it would become evident that I had indeed not done so, and in the end my reputation with both sides would have been seriously damaged. Therefore I took the direct route of explaining the American way of choosing awards. Thus, I neither offended my Chinese client, the director, nor risked jeopardizing his submission with the film festival committee by "doing the Chinese thing" and asking for special treatment from the festival director.

    To this day, the film director believes that I effectively used my "good connections" to affect a good result for his film, which, in the end did win a notable award. In fact it was playing by the rules and fighting for the "right", all in the context of cultural expertise and sensitivity, that won the day.

    The Chinese director later jokingly told me, “Getting this film to the festival had more harrowing twists and turns than the movie plot itself. Thank you for making it work in the end!”

    If only he knew the whole story.

Focusing on the Who vs the What

I was involved with a multi-million dollar company that was going to be bringing in some investors from China to both invest capital and support the management team as they discussed opening a new office in Mainland China. The Chinese side currently headed three international franchises with stores across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia and they were tasked with setting up the next month’s meeting of investors. They spent the first ten minutes outlining a business trip to the US that included meeting with their counterparts, the families of their counterparts, some professors at the local university that had done research in the particular area of investment, touring the university, and generally prioritizing people and relationships over the discussion of exact investment numbers and details. The American side, listening to this, became increasingly (and to me noticeably) agitated with an obvious lack of details, meeting times, the specifics of any business plan for the trip to the US.

  • As soon as the Chinese were finished talking, the American CEO jumped in and reworked the proposed schedule to include significantly fewer family and cultural events and more time to talk numbers. The Chinese politely responded with a request to include the events they’d outlined. But despite their requests, the American’s just didn’t see how “business was going to get done” without “more time at the table.” After about 25 minutes, as the American CEO was wondering if anything “substantial” would ever actually be accomplished and the Chinese were second-guessing their choice of people to work with, I asked if I could make a comment or two.

    I wasn’t supposed to be in this meeting, but had arrived early for another meeting and was invited to attend and listen in. As an invited observer, I was aware of my position and simply tried to be helpful by cautiously but directly pointing out that neither side was really hearing what the other was prioritizing. The American CEO quickly retorted that the investor meeting was turning into a family vacation. So I started with her first.

    I pointed out that that the Chinese were already committed to investing money—likely as much as was expected (turns out, more even), but that they needed security in the form of personal relationships in addition to contracts to move forward. To accomplish this they wanted the time with employees, families, professors, and they wanted to know more about the university where things were located. They wanted to spend time and build relationships with their new American counterparts. The content of “at the table” meetings, while important, was deemed to be secondary by the Chinese side—not because it wasn’t the most important but because they already believed that their American counterparts were competent and that the business plan was sound. The point of the trip for them was to confirm that they could trust them and give the Chinese partners the prestige (photo ops) to continue to sell/support the deal back home. The Chinese nodded vigorously as I explained to the Americans what they were missing.

    The second part of my comments then focused on what the Chinese missed. The American’s didn’t need to have any personal relationship or specific trust in the Chinese investors; the US legal system gave them ample coverage if something went wrong. And the US business environment, with significantly more social trust than in China, meant that a level of honesty was already assumed. That the Chinese had money was nice, but their business competence was not known—no one on the US side had ever heard of any of the Chinese companies that they owned. Doubt increased as the Chinese seemed to be actively avoiding the technical discussions about the business plan that the Americans were convinced were the most important of the trip.

    To be honest, this was a little harsh for the Chinese, but the American’s were anxious and I bet that the Chinese trusted me because of how I had explained their position minutes before. Eventually, the two sides agreed to extend the trip an extra day and include most of the family events and also schedule additional hours for discussions of numbers.

    Take away: These two groups were literally the proverbial two ships passing in the night. There were two different conversations happening at the same time—Dueling Monologues. Both thought they were helping the other move in the direction that they themselves deemed best. Neither was understanding the other, even though they were speaking the same language and thought they were listening well. And to their credit, they were both honestly trying to understand—but they were trying to understand their own priorities, not their partners’.

    The people involved in this venture are professionals with decades of global experience and who work for companies with scores of global offices and thousands of employees. They are all highly successful professionals who are well-educated multi-millionaires who head tech, investment, legal, education, and other service-sector corporations. But they didn’t realize that they were having the same meetings for different reasons. Neither realized that the other side in the negotiations didn’t understand what was thought to be “fundamental” and “basic” about “doing business” to them.

    Even when both sides agree to a meeting’s format and content and actively discuss the same things, both initial expectations and final understandings can be very different. This meeting, called by the Chinese side, was supposed to be a personal sit-down with the US CEO. The Chinese expected it to be a chance to get to know each other, talk strategy, discuss goals, ideas and build trust. The American CEO brought all the data that she expected a first meeting would require—quite literally a stack of documents to make sure that they were both on the same page in terms of numbers and schedules. The Chinese were looking for trust and assumed competence while the Americans assumed trust but were concerned about details and business acumen.