Swimming with Asian Sharks - Business Secrets from the Pacific Rim

Always Provide Options

Mr. Princeton taught me throughout the trip that I must remember to provide options.  Whenever you have a proposal, have multiple options available. If you only have one particular option, then people are very restricted. They believe they don't want to make a decision because if you only give them one option, it feels as if you're forcing their hand to do something. And people don't like being forced. To provide options allows the party making the decision to believe they are part of the process.  It also makes it easier for them to accept the outcome, even if all the options are not in their favour.

Many times throughout the trips, I found that by providing options, I was able to maintain cooperation with even the most difficult people.

Part of the reason providing options works is that the party you are providing the options to can see that you have given the topic some thought.  This is great for those people who are doing the managing.  A person who comes to me with options after I have assigned them a task, shows me they have done the necessary work.  If a person you are managing shows up and says they are stuck on a problem without providing some options to solve the issue, this shows me they are not using their brain, and makes me wonder what I am paying them to do.  Often, it would only take a few moments to come up with some options, but the result of the interaction is that they don't value my time.

Having options not only shows that you are prepared, it also shows that you care.  Have you ever had someone try to tell you exactly what to do?  They come up to you and say you must do something.  The person instantly gives off an air of "I don't care about what you think, just do it the way I tell you."  Unfortunately, I have been guilty of this a few times with my employees.  What ends up happening is the task is done with either resentment or pauses whenever there are challenges. The resentment comes from the lack of getting their approval for the action because no one likes to be forced into doing something. The pauses come from not knowing how you, the person who requested the task, exactly want it done.

For example, when on the Korean skincare website, I asked the employee to pick some themes before I ran off to a meeting.  When I returned from the meeting, it was no surprise—the employee spent much of the time trying to figure out where to look for the themes, let alone picking them, and the original task was abandoned.  If I had given an option of either working on what he was already working on or picking the themes, he would have been able to move on his original task once he got stuck.

When dealing with my partnership for big data, I keep this option mentality in mind.  I offered three options to the partners.  Each option was geared toward testing the waters in terms of their appetite.  Option 1, I would be an advisor, with 5-15% of the shares, helping the main driver of the project push the project along.  Option 2, I would have 51%, drive the company, and the rest would give me support at a cofounder level.  Option 3, I would own 80-90%, drive the company completely, and they would get shares as advisors.

I made it clear that if they took option 1, someone would need to have the 51% because I have learnt from many start-ups that leadership is the key.  They ended up picking option 2, which upon reflection, I should have made much more difficult because effort is difficult to measure.  The proper approach would have been to tag a monetary value to each of the options to enforce commitment.

For example, option 2, if I had stated that the 51% driver must be full time, and dedicate 10 thousand dollars, the other partners make up the rest of the 90 thousand needed to run the company.  We arrived at the 100-thousand-dollar mark based on a three-year burn rate in Hong Kong, supporting about five staff.

Another mistake of mine was not to have the money in the bank before starting.

Don't make that mistake.  The fear of poverty is a key factor in why the project failed because I spent much of my time working on side projects to make ends meet.  More on this in a later chapter.