Conversation with a Lily

I met a lily and fell in love with her instantly. She was so beautiful, pure and irresistible that I couldn’t do anything but take her home. I put her into a glass vase with full of water. She felt happy and flourished wonderfully.

Then I started to do my work and paid little attention to watch her. In the coming morning the first thing I did was to see her. But I was surprised to recognize her withering. She dried out, as if she cried the whole night. I felt so sorry, that I poured some water on her, with the full awareness that it wouldn’t help.

One hour later, I watched her again by chance and saw a miracle happening: She flourished again and smiled at me.

Even flowers feel when you love them and when you are lack of attention. What about people?

Strategic Talent Development

Let me start with a conversation between an employee and his boss about strategic talent development.

Employee: “I would like to participate a workshop about strategic talent development on Wednesday at 7:00pm and it costs 250 RMB. Can you approve?”

Boss: “I understand your personal interest in it, but I do not see any relationship with your current assignment.”

Employee: “But it is exactly what strategic talent development all about: preparing for future assignments. And the cost is minimal.”

Boss: “In fairness to all employees I will not approve. It is not a matter of cost, but a matter of principle.”

Employee: “I do not really understand it.” He went there and paid himself…

Sounds familiar?

The workshop did really happen. It was organized by AHK Shanghai for yesterday evening. The Lecturer was Katrin Braun, managing director from Machwürth Team International Asia. (She shares something common with me. We went to the same university RWTH Aachen at almost the same time. The world is small.)

Contact:
katrin.braun@mwteam.com
http://www.mticonsultancy.com/

She addressed the differences between leadership and soft skills training in China and in Europe. The resonance was very positive, proven by a lot of questions and after workshop networking. A great success.

Two Skills Bringing You up to Top 1%

In economic recession, what do you really need to stand out? Two things: Speaking and Writing. Why? Let me give you few examples.

- Suppose you lost your job. What do you do? You prepare a superior resume and cover letter that will always land in the short list. Your interview is so impressive that you become the first choice. (Speaking and Writing).

- When you start a marketing campaign to launch a new product, you have to write clear and focused message to the target customers. Then you have to present it to them to remove all of their doubts, so that they buy your products. (Speaking and Writing)

- You are in the middle to close a deal beating your tough competitors. What is required? Preparing and negotiating the contract so well that will finally create a win-win situation between you and your clients. (Speaking and Writing).

I can go on and on, but let me pause here and ask you a question: have you ever learnt professional speaking and writing? Most likely you got some kind of presentation training. However I bet you have never learnt how to write a professional text.

Let say 10% of the people have natural talent to speak extremely well. Let assume 10% of the people are born writers. If you can do both well, it will literally bring you to top 1%. Call it competitive advantages.

How can you learn writing/speaking? Only by writing/speaking and then getting the feedback from the people who can write/speak well. There is no short cut.

My personal experience: I learnt writing by writing texts every month and sending them to the lecturers of Schule des Schreibens for feedback, three years in a row.

I learnt speaking by creating a seminar myself and producing a DVD: Top Position, getting constant feedback from a professional trainer. I invested a lot weekends for it, 12 months in a row.

It took time and efforts. And it was worth to do, every single minute.

The Italian Way, the German Way and the Chinese Way

Some one knocked at my office door and asked: “Could you please tell me where the conference room C is?” I heard the Italian accent and responded politely: “Are you coming from Italy?” He said: “Yes.” Then I smiled and said: “For Italian I will show you a long way.” He immediately understood my joke and laughed loudly.

Italians have a different work style than German. Sometimes they hold meetings up to three to five hours for an issue where German could conclude within thirty minutes. Why? My observation is that they are passionate about talking, so much that they forget the purpose of the meeting, namely resolving an issue.

Chinese need also more time than German to get things done, but for a completely different reason. Recently, I met a Chinese business woman and she started to talk about the people we know commonly. I started to talk stories over stories about these people and finally we liked each over very much. We spend three hours together and finally I forgot why I was meeting her.

Arrived at home, I called her and said: “Thanks for the meeting, but I forgot to talk my real reason for meeting you. Could you please do me a favor…?” and I told her the reason. She answered without hesitation: “Of cause, I will help you.”

Chinese need more time to talk in order to build relationship, once you establish the relationship you can actually ask everything possible or impossible.

Networking in Internet Age: First Gathering of German Expats in Shanghai

If you are an executive or a business owner, I bet that more than 80% of your success is dependent on your capability of networking. And networking is made extremely easy at the internet age. Here an example.

The group German Expats in Shanghai (/https://www.xing.com/net/shanghai-de/) was created Dec 15, 2008 with the networking tool XING (https://www.xing.com/). Today, three and half months later, there are already 913 registered members. The group had the first gathering March 1, 2009, in Bund Brewery, 11 Hankou Lu 汉口路11号 with around 100 people. All the registration and organization was done online. So everyone could know who else were coming with full details of their profiles, what they offer and what they are looking for.

My personal experience: I spoke with a lot of people there and decided to explore with two people for future business cooperation. I had recommended one person who is looking for a new opportunity to a company which is searching for talents with her profile. This is all because I had some online communications before the dinner. You can call this efficiency.

By the way, the location was very nice and the food was acceptable (except the quantity could be more, probably the restaurant owner was not aware, how much a German can eat, namely always the double size :-). But this was compensated by the free flow of beer, as German people consider beer as food.

Big thanks to the moderator of the group Martin Hackl, Comberry Ltd. and team who organized the wonderful dinner (also for creating the group before - online). Look forward to the next gathering, hopefully very soon.

The Future Value of Time

Every morning I share taxi with two colleagues on the way to the office. And we wait for each other on the taxi rank near the subway station at around 8:20am. When I come earlier, usually between 5 to 10 minutes, I sit down in the subway station and use the time to read business books. You could bridge 5 to 10 minutes easily by doing nothing and just wait. However here is what I have learnt about time.

The first concept about time is the famous “time is money”. Actually, most people, maybe over 90% of working adults get paid by their time. Every one may have a different hourly rate, but principally they sell their time either to their employers or to their clients and customers. People are more generous to waste their time, but they are more careful about money, even small change.

The second concept is that actually you can “invest” your time to generate future value. Learning a skill or building an expertise with your time is a great way to invest your time. By learning smartly you will be able to increase your hourly rate, because you will be capable doing a higher paid job or offer a higher value services. Think about what you could earn with 5 minutes some day and then decide, if you still want to waste it.

The third concept is that time is your life. Suppose you want to live 80 years. That is exactly 42 millions minutes. That's all the time you have and it is very limited and individual, no one can really lend you any more time. So to waste your time is equivalent to waste your life. And maybe this is the most common sin across country and culture boarders in the whole world.

Why Didn’t You Take More Initiatives?

Years ago a friend of mine moved to a new department within his company and got a bad boss. The boss was not really a bad person, but had no clue at all what leadership means.

My friend was very bright and highly motivated to work hard and to change the way how things were done inefficiently in the department. One example: every one kept the information for himself. There is no central data base for things with common interests. And if you need some information, you need to go to certain person to get it, again and again.

But his boss felt threatened by the dynamic guy, and stopped everything the young man initiated. The boss told him that he was not entitled to do such things, because that was the job of the boss.

Slowly the young man realized that he would go no where with his ideas, energy and initiatives and decided to imitate the way how his "good" colleagues were doing, namely just followed the orders of the boss and did exactly what was told. The relationship between him and his bosses had improved. There were no argues any more. The department was doing the same thing with the same inefficiency as before.

In the year end review however, the performance of the department was moderate and the boss got a warning from his boss. He called every one in the department afterwards and tried to motivate them to do more next year. After he called my friend in his office, he told him: “Your performance is moderate. You do everything well what was told ONLY. But you can do much more. Why didn’t you take more initiatives?”