Business ecology report
About Sewing Machines and Computers
In this report I want to focus on my last trip to China and my developing relationship with the Zhejiang University in Hangzhou.
My sponsor, colleague, and friend is Professor Dr. Wang, Zhong Ming and we are step-by-step working towards a better understanding of how business ecology can be applied and how we can work together.
We both feel that team leadership is one of the key levers in influencing complex systems like organisations and as part of the School of Management and part of the Global Entrepreneurship Research Centre at the University, we are focussing on starting a Team Competence Center for this research.
The University is in the process of hiring a manager for this TCC and we are in the process of defining and building my role as visiting professor.
The first visible contribution will be a team leadership development program based fully upon business ecological principles. Our focus is on entrepreneurs and leaders with their management teams in the Zhejiang Province and Shanghai. We also include teams from multi-nationals where there is more often than not a high cultural diversity.
What is very important to me is that we are not trying to export western ideas to China. Business Ecology is not related to any culture. Rather on the contrary. Business Ecology is looking at western implicit cause-effect management thinking and eastern implicit emergent management thinking and giving both equal importance. The first half of the S-curve is often more emergent, the second half of the S-curve is often more cause-effect and so both cultures shake hands in one organic growth process. We like to blend all this into something new, instead of pretending to know the full truth. I believe this programme will be as new and relevant when we bring it back to Europe as we hope it will be in China.
During my trip we met Xia Baichao, Board Chairman and President of Hemboug, a high quality producer of fantastic clothing. During dinner we had in depth discussions about the family structure of his company and the role his children could play there. For children in the second generation the strategy is one of tough love, no spoiling at all, a careful education. The values can only be transferred if the children have to fight their way up in the system and gain the respect of all workers and managers: that is Xia’s opinion.
I discussed with him what I know about the patterns of families which prove that this is possible during many, many generations and many S-curves, using the Dutch Brenninkmeijer and van de Valk families with their value driven and entrepreneurial approaches as examples. Like those families, Xia showed an almost instinctive drive to manage S-curves and to escape the mental prison success can create.
His son showed us the factory and I must say I was amazed. It was fascinating to see how in Shaoxing, south-east of Shanghai the factory was a complete eco-system of a well designed, maintained organisation and sustainable working conditions for the employees. It was a very high impact moment walking through the factory. The view was familiar: many employees behind their sewing machines working in a frenzy to produce top quality material. My emotion was less familiar: I never realised how much energy and dedication I could feel by simply being there.
A fact, related to the development in China, was that the trend was exporting less (now below 30%) and producing more and more for the local market.
When we drove back via Hangzhou to Shanghai, Professor Wang sat next to me on the backseat, with Xu Ben, a colleague, in the front seat next to the driver. All three of us were working as hell on our computers, our fingers were rattling on the keyboards, the light of the screens illuminating our faces in the early evening and suddenly I realised we were in the way we were seated and behaving, sure not different to all those workers in the factory, but instead of sewing machines we were lined up with computers instead.
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