Swimming with Asian Sharks - Business Secrets from the Pacific Rim

Discovering the Leaders in a Group

Mr. Princeton did many presentations for us showing us the same thing, and then explained why we were following him, going through his background, the projects he did, and how he grew the company from 400 to 4,000 employees. Then we talked a lot about methodologies and mentalities, and how a lot of companies work like dinosaurs but dinosaurs became extinct when a meteor struck the Earth. What really needs to happen to the company is to reach the mammal stage where units are smaller and people are more agile. He actually made a full presentation about this.

Then Mr. Princeton played a game with us. In Chinese, the game is called $4 and $5. This is actually a great way to identify who the leaders are in the group and works like this: if I borrow $2 from you and earned $3, and then I borrow $4 and earned $5, how many dollars did I earn? The answer is obvious; however, people get tripped up on a lot of things and they usually end up being two teams with two different answers. The goal of the game is to convince the entire room that one solution is correct. It doesn’t matter which solution it is, but the goal is to move into one center.

At this time, you actually can observe and see who the leaders in the company are. The entire staff played this game, and there were about 15 of us. We just took sides; there were just two solutions that appeared and then slowly one team convinced the other. They did this in various ways, using whatever incentives they had and the team that won the others over used a bunch of magazines as currency and proved the solution with that. It's like a unit cohesion kind of thing, so it was actually very interesting to see.

I discovered that there were far more leaders in the group then were apparent at first glance.

By the way, the answer is you have two dollars after you return what you owe.