Swimming with Asian Sharks - Business Secrets from the Pacific Rim

Chapter 4: Northern China Sharks

How to Boast without Bragging

On April 6, Mr. Princeton took me to Nanjing, and so began my exposure to business in China and to the sharks. We started off with a shark in Nanjing.  Nanjing is the ancient capital of China. Previously, in Hong Kong, Rollin's father told me that Nanjing had one of the strongest textile manufacturing industries in all of China, producing the highest quality and almost always guaranteed to deliver.  Rollin's dad was in the garment business for more than 12 years, and as a result, I had a lot of respect for how the city and its people had advanced. The moment I arrived, I found that people seemed pretty well off and the city was a lot slower and more relaxed than Hong Kong.  In Hong Kong, the escalators are twice as fast as those in North America and people are always in a rush.  Hong Kong people move very quickly, talk very quickly, eat very quickly, and in general are very fast paced.  Here in China and Nanjing, the people were far more relaxed, something I had not expected.

It was during the first few minutes of our meeting with the Chinese business owner that Mr. Princeton demonstrated how to position yourself; specifically, how to boast without bragging in a conversation.  The technique is as follow, fit yourself into their world.  Talk about the parts of your past that match up well with their experiences.  Position yourself into their world, in a way that lets you appear to be accessible to the upper echelon of their field of interest.  Show your connections or knowledge in a gentle way.

Some may argue that business has only opened up in China over the last decade, but I believe that business is very advanced in China.  I would argue that it’s more advanced than in any other part of the world.  The reason for this claim is that Chinese people have been doing business for over five thousand years. Borrowing from Malcolm Gladwell's book, Blink, the Asian cultures have had to do the math of business ever since kings taxed based on yield.  It's a mentality that Western cultures, with their landlords and paid salaries, don’t have bred into them. You may have heard that doing business in China is about your "guanxi,” or relationships, and this is true; however, this is also true in the West.  We all want to do business with people with whom we already have relationships.  I argue that it is only human to want to work with people you know.