On shelf after shelf, I could see copies of Jim Collins’s “Good to Great,” Jack Welch’s “Straight From the Gut,” Tom Peters’s “Re-Imagine!” and just about everything the late Peter Drucker ever wrote. There was no management topic, no matter how arcane — the science of H.R. anyone? — that didn’t have its own section.
There’s a good reason for this. In the West — not to mention Japan and South Korea — management skills are a given. Graduate schools of management churn out M.B.A.’s, while instilling the basic processes and systems that virtually all multinational companies rely on. People who rise to the top of companies are the ones who have mastered the art of management. But there are also many first-rate managers who populate the middle ranks of companies. They are the lifeblood of most big companies.
Not so in China. “The shortage of managerial talent is huge,” said Zheng Yu-sheng, the associate dean at the Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business. In the course of my two weeks in China, I heard this refrain constantly — and not just from business school professors. “We are constantly looking for chief financial officers who can speak Mandarin,” said Thomas Tsao of Gobi Partners, a Shanghai-based venture capitalist. “There just aren’t very many people here who have the range of skills you need in that position.”
Besides noting the huge appetite for management learning, he goes on to point out some of the hurdles facing business development in China: corruption, personal interests, relationship issues, and need for accountability.
There must be some applications here for people that want to help Chinese society develop and have management or literary skills that could use them to develop relationships with Chinese people.
