Por Ernie Tadla

Um negócio típico do negócio no oeste envolve uma reunião com os dois partidos e seus advogados e resolver um contrato rapidamente. Você assina-o, e sae-o. Algum problema? Veja-o na corte! Eu tenho um plano a travar. Rapidamente, eficiente, ao ponto, vamos começar sobre com a mostra. Em seguida!

O olhar chinês em um negócio do negócio como ganh-ganha, benefício mútuo, e um relacionamento a longo prazo. Isto é possível somente com confiança, que faz exame do tempo construir e estabelecer. A confiança é um sentimento que você tem sobre alguém. Você não põe uma data do tempo sobre a confiança. “Eu confiarei em você em quatro dias, quatro semanas, quatro meses.”

A confiança é a palavra operativa. Sabem haverá uns problemas, mas se nós nos confiamos que e nós estamos olhando o prazo, nós o trabalharemos para fora. Nenhuma necessidade para advogados. Nenhuma necessidade “vê-o na corte.”

A confiança do edifício lá é a mesma que aqui. Faz exame do tempo e de reuniões repetidas. Daqui, muitas visitas a China, muitas reuniões, muitos banquets. A maioria de povos ocidentais do negócio não estão abertos a tais etapas e infelizmente não gastam e não desperdiçam muito mais a tempo, energia, frustração, dinheiro e as oportunidades perdidas atrasam dentro.
Como mencionado mais cedo, ESTADOS UNIDOS. Treasury Secretary, Henry Paulson visited China over 70 times while chairman of Goldman Sachs. He has excellent guanxi with the current Chinese leadership. An example of no results due to a lack of guanxi from the province of British Columbia. Excerpted from The Daily Courier in Kelowna, B.C.:

“Minister Visiting China to Improve Tourism Status.

(Vancouver CP) — Senior B.C. cabinet minister Colin Hansen says he’ll press Chinese officials to speed up the process to list Canada as an approved tourist destination. Hansen says he doesn’t know why it’s taking so long to gain the coveted designation which many believe will unlock the gates to a tourist gold mine. “I wish we could be making progress faster,” Hansen said.

Canada began approved-destination talks with China in 1999, but the process has dragged on. The EU won approved-destination in 2004, less than a year after its negotiations began.”

Second, you can’t “speed up” guanxi and the building of trust. I would guess this was Hansen’s first visit to China regarding this matter and he was going in typical Western mode to kick some Chinese ass.

Third, Hansen doesn’t “understand why it’s taking so long” because he doesn’t understand guanxi.

Fourth, make progress faster? Hansen, not his assistant, must make four, five or six trips to build trust. The Chinese establish trust with the individual not the organization.

The EU has guanxi. The B.C. government does not. It is as simple as that. The B.C. government did not invest in guanxi for two reasons.

1. It didn’t understand the Chinese business culture.
2. It wasn’t prepared to invest the dollars and time to develop guanxi. Now what money and time did they save? Or look at the millions of lost tourism dollars for B.C. that could have started six years ago, one year after they began negotiating, like the EU did.

One important fact. Any company wanting to do mega, long-term business in China must send its top man over to develop guanxi. This has to occur not only with the top man in the Chinese company, but also with the proper governmental person. This shows face and is an indication of your respect and seriousness and how your company views the China business relationship.

Guanxi is not a stand-alone concept. It is a powerful and effective tactic only with the proper identification of who to begin developing guanxi with. I have witnessed much frustration, wasted time, and delays with financial anguish because the concept was right, but with the wrong person.

For a nation of 1.3 billion people, it is amazing how interwoven and connected everyone is. The Chinese are the originators of business networking, which develops with guanxi.

The key strategy is to find and work with a consultant who has already established guanxi with a broad spectrum of business contacts and networks. He can easily and quickly locate the right Chinese person who knows where to go, who to ask and what to ask. They will more easily accept you if you come highly recommended from one of their own race, which they trust and respect. Initially, they do not trust “foreign devils.”

Remember that the Chinese respect long-term relationships. That is why their school classmate networks are so powerful and pervasive. Friendships and relationships that were formed in school will continue to hold and bind through the years. They all started in the same class and course, but upon graduation, they spread out throughout different industries and areas of government and after years are now at various levels of power and authority. These bonds of respect are still maintained and are indeed very strong.

Here is an example of how guanxi really works:

First, the players.
≺ First Automotive Works (FAW), the largest automotive manufacturer in China, is government owned and based in the city of Changchun in Northeastern China. It has twenty-five wholly owned subsidiaries and controlling interest in twenty partially owned subsidiaries — including with Volkswagen and Toyota — with over 132,400 employees.
≺ Volkswagen AG entered into a joint-venture partnership with FAW in 1991. China is the only place in the globe where VW does not own 100 per cent of its facilities. When I arrived in China in 1999, VW had 52 per cent of the automotive market through its two joint-venture partners. FAW also had a joint venture with GM. You can do that because FAW is government owned.FAW/VW is the joint-venture company with FAW owning 60 per cent, VW owning 30 per cent, and Audi (owned by VW) owning 10 per cent.
≺ Ogilvy & Mather (O & M), Saatchi & Saatchi, and Grey Worldwide are 4A advertising agencies. 4A agencies are global and handle global accounts and are owned by three or four large advertising global giants. Grey was VW’s global agency.
≺ Dynamic Marketing Group (DMG) is an independent American entrepreneur owned agency specializing in the China market.

Peter Xiao, one of the Chinese partners of DMG, was from Changchun. His family was well connected and respected in high places. His father was a high-ranking Army official and some of his school classmates were FAW senior managers.

In the mid-90s, Dan Mintz had started his film production company, Pacesetter Pictures International (PPI) on his living room table in Beijing and was producing TV commercials for 4A advertising agencies. The 4A agency DDB was doing the advertising for FAW/VW and PPI was doing the TV commercials.

The other partner in DMG was Wu Bing, a very efficient Chinese lady who got things done right and had earned the total respect FAW.

There was guanxi with FAW, Peter, Wu Bing, and Dan that went back to 1993.

Now, fast forward to 2000. PPI has morphed into DMG, a full-fledged advertising agency with the same principals, Dan, Wu Bing and Peter.

A solid, trusting relationship had developed over the years stretching back to Peter’s Changchun days, and first-class television commercials that PPI had produced some years earlier. The relationship was maintained by many flights to Changchun, dinners, banquets, meetings, entertaining, favors, and gifts.

The 4A agencies don’t have guanxi with the Chinese clients. Every two years, they import a new foreign general manager. Guanxi takes longer to mature and is done on a personal level, not a corporate level.

FAW/VW, which manufactured the highly successful Jetta, was going to introduce the Bora, its first new model in 10 years and was looking for an advertising agency to do the national launch.

The German side favored Grey Worldwide, because it was their global agency. The Chinese favored DMG because they had previously been burned by a couple of 4A agencies, but had nine years of guanxi with the DMG principals. The other two 4As were cannon fodder.

The night before the pitch, our DMG team flew up to Changchun and had dinner with some FAW people including several that were on the selection committee. After dinner, we returned to our hotel room and made a practice pitch presentation to a member of the FAW selection committee. He told us what to take out and what to put in.

Our staff worked throughout the night putting together the new presentation, complete with charts, data, visuals, etc. Next morning, all four companies presented their pitches.

DMG won the contract.

The concept of guanxi is you want to work with people you know and trust. You want a long-term, win-win relationship with a proven commitment to work together to overcome differences and difficulties.

Since FAW and DMG had a strong, trusting relationship, they wanted to continue working together. So, we showed them what we had and they told us what they wanted. We gave them what they wanted. Western ethics dictates equality to all the suppliers. Chinese ethics are based on the customer. It is the client’s money, their product, and they want what they want.

That’s how guanxi works!

Business meetings fulfill a different function in China than in the left-brain West. The full bore of face and guanxi takes place before the meeting, where the parties, based on trust and respect for each other, decide what is needed to make a win/win situation. No surprises, no losing face. The actual meeting is more for confirmation, for announcement. We never went into a meeting where we didn’t know what the result would be.

Ernie Tadla, www.odysseychina.net

Next week: Lesson Six. It is all about time!