I’ve seen that fail before, how quality and order erodes etc… China-Fade!

You need to be here together with your local team, watch, learn and doing plenty of micromanagement. You’ll need one of your top people living here.

So why do so many US technology companies continue to try to second-guess and micromanage their China local management?

Try: pure condescension. I hope my company is an exception, but somehow I doubt it, so please bear with the elaboration…

Under “management by condescension,” the benighted Chinese employees, in management’s eyes, are hard workers and good people with a hopeless lack of understanding of modern business practices. Therefore, we bring in the enlightened management team from the home country (read: whoever we could coerce or cajole into a move to Beijing) to impart to them a small fraction of our vast business knowledge. Then every time our gross ignorance of the market, the local business practices, and the management of personnel leads to a conflagration, we smile kindly and say, “ah, they just don’t get it yet.”

How did this condescension start?

That’s a more interesting question. I don’t think it’s racism, in most cases, but just a complete lack of comprehension. It begins, of course, with a language barrier that prevents the foreign managers from communicating with most of the workforce. If you can’t communicate with your people, you can hardly know what their capabilities are and aren’t.

Then when every bit of news comes filtered through one of the few English speakers on staff, it leads to a distorted view of reality at best. In the worst case, if one of them also happens to be the danwei idiot, then the communication disturbances become all-out anarchy. Not pretty.

But I surely agree that when all is powerpointed and presented to the governing committee back at home, it can all be attributed to

“poor performance by local management”