CDE Reflective Journal Entry 2

Management Consultant Situation Presentation.

Hello. For the last two weeks we are doing our Management consultant situation on Chinese technology companies. The situation that a company is having good sales in China, but they would want to advance to the US market, what should we, as a consultation team, to come up with ideas to help them land themselves into the US.

If you want to achieve good sales, there's one undeniable fact about it- we must appeal to the US customers so that we can do well in the US.

However, how can our products appeal to the US customers? There comes the relation with the US cultures. How can we make changes to our company management to suit the US market? That is one good question. Well, we cannot deny that fact that in the US, there is some sort of inherent stereotypes against Chinese products or services. On the streets of America, Chinese products are not as common as the local brands like the US. So what should we do to revert the situation? 

I find the experience of being in a management consultant situation a very enriching one. Maybe I'm inexperienced in this field. But I think that in order to achieve good sales in the United States, we must get rid of the cultural implications of the products that we want to sell in the US.

Let us take an example of Lenovo, which is a pretty successful computer technology brand around the world. When Lenovo was making its way into the overseas market, the management board was changed, with the introduction of foreign personnel to manage the company, also the official language of Lenovo was changed into English instead of Chinese.  For one simple reason, people from other countries are not that willing to accept  Chinese culture into a piece of technology that they will use everyday.

So that the management consultant situation that Mingchuan(23), Sherwin(21), Yikun(24) and I are doing is Meizu. Why do we choose Meizu? Well, it is a hardware company. Like Lenovo, in order to success in the United States, we must eradicate the cultural implications, to make it acceptable into the United States market. As a hardware company, it will be most easy to remove the cultural implications. We can just delete the preinstalled apps in Meizu like Sina Weibo( China's Tweeter) and Wechat(China's whatsapp) and problem solved. With the addition of apps like Facebook and instagram installed, Meizu phones can make its way into the US market.

However, we want to make the products successful. To achieve good sales in the US, we must work with local telcos such as Verizon and AT&T. Because Meizu has a weak support base outside Mainland China, it is necessary to work with these telcos so that we can better integrate into the United States Market.Also, changes to the management board of the company need to be made. Americans must be employed, as to create new ideas for Meizu, the ideas that suits the needs or popular among the US people. American values is also required to be introduced into Meizu's US base. One example is to introduce the 20% rule to the Meizu work space in order to spark creativity. Also, Meizu also needs to update their devices frequently in order to keep up with the pace of evolution of technology in the US.

Also, we agree that Meizu should target a wide range of people, not just by the low price of its gadgets, but rather how can we re imagine the mobile operating system. I believe that phone makers like Samsung will not achieve long term success, simply because its phone run the Android operating system. I can't be sure of it, but I think that, in order to make way into the US market, we must have something special to impress them. Chinese software makers are very keen onto designs nowadays,
for example, the Xiaomi brand has launched its "moving desktop" which allowed anyone to create a theme for their phones to be customized, in any design, any types of animations they want. Also, I hope that Meizu can announce a tablet that emphasizes on drawings, for professional artists to use. Currently what we have is normal tablets with a beginner's application to drawing. But I hope to change that by introducing a tablet with multiple gestures and powerful applications installed, like the Adobe Illustrator. But the impression that illustrator gives us is that, it is too complicated and hard to use. Meizu can cooperate with Adobe to introduce a tablet-friendly version of Illustrator, which can help the artists to practice their art with ease.  I hope something like that will attract the attention of general American consumers.


OTHER GROUPS
When talking about other groups, they like to mention that they would want to retain the Chinese culture present in their technology companies when they go overseas. For example, the group doing Youku and Toudou(China's YouTube) stated that when Youku starts its business in the US, they must let the users in the US to upload their videos to Youku. So I want to ask them this question, what makes Youku different from Youtube? And why will the Americans favour Youku over youtube? Youtube has been a major part of their culture and always will be, but for youku, I'm pretty sure that many Internet users in the US didn't know about Youku at all? Right now, Youku has all the shows, TV dramas related to China, and those movies, including those Americans movies, can be streamed for free on Youku. In America, this is a complete infringement to copyright. It is due to the difference in culture, that I think Youku will not be widely accepted in United States, same for the Baidu search engine(China's Google).

Also, the group working on Lining(A sportswear brand) mentioned that they should follow the success story of the US brand Nike, to achieve its success in the US. I would like to ask them what can they do when Nike has dominated the world with its sportswear. Times have changed, Li Ning should not follow the success story of Nike, instead Li Ning should start its own path in the US market. Because Nike is a US brand itself, it is not applicable to the Li Ning context where Li Ning is actually based in China. While Li Ning is selling great in China, Li Ning should expand its market to nearby countries first, to achieve its globalized structure, maybe Lining can start a production line in Vietnam, assemble in China, then sale them in the US. It is a great way to reduce cost prices so that Lining can make its sportsware at low prices, which then can be more popular in the US.

In a nutshell, in order to achieve fast success in a foreign and (generally)high-class market like the United States, A China-based company must reduce of it's Chinese cultural implications, as it is not widely accepted in the US. But we must keep the products the same.In the beginning of the reflection, I have mentioned the Chinese culture must be eradicated. However, my friend convinced me that Not all Chinese values or ideas are 'bad' or not appealing to US people. For example XiaoMi (A Chinese Tech Company) has many different themes that the users can into. Many people actually like this idea. We should adapt their ideas and values and get rid of only some Chinese values. We should take in both the good things from China and US and combine them into a better vision. I am convinced by his point of view, and therefore I believed that   The company must localize in the US, and "convert" some traditions to the culture of the US. But we should not be just a replica of a US brand, we must start from zero, and develop an innovative and creative brand that is different from the rest, that is what stands our company out from the others.

I find this management consultant situation a very enriching one, I hope that we can learn CDE in a more enriching manner just like the management consultant situation. I know that we are not delivering a  professional piece of work, but at least we get to learn about the political situation which barred the Companies from reaching the US. Americans will also find it hard to buy devices from China technological companies.  I think personally, I have learnt a lot of the differences from different cultures. And with this Management consultant situation, I believe that we are really learning on Cultural differentiation Elective from the management situation as it involves two cultural changes, as the company leaves China, and enters the US.

Reflective Journal Entry 1

You have attended the first 2 lessons of of CDE. Reflect on the elective and your expectations.

From the First two lessons, I have learnt about basic American culture, and a simple differentiation between East Asian and US cultures. But firstly, Mr Karplus gave us an introduction on cultural differentiation by showing us a set of HSBC adverstisments, the one that's most hilarious is that a Caucasian man went to Hong Kong for some sort of business with Chinese. The Chinese invited him for a dinner. He was not used to the food that the Chinese has offered, and therefore he doesn't like it. But he quickly gulped the food down because it is a sign of politeness in Western culture. The Chinese, on the other hand, thinks that he needs more, so he called for more food for the men. This short clip of advertisement depicts the exact same problems that we are facing as a globalizing society. People has been making mistakes such as disrespecting other's culture or making a joke out of themselves, all due to their ignorance of other people's culture. Therefore, CDE is a great course we should take for us to understand more about Western culture, especially the USA.

 CDE has been a course that I have interest in, and I'm eager to find out about the differences in culture. The first lesson we were given an introduction about the differences between Asian and American cultures. In the second lessons, we were taught about something that we are very unfamiliar-American culture, what is it like? Well about American culture, what comes to my mind first, is the fast food, which turns out to be a quality of Americans, to be efficient people. We are also taught that Americans love Science and Technology, loves to work and loves to progress.  Americans, in my mind, always represent freedom and equality, while the East Asians are conservative. For me, it is actually not the case, America may represent freedom and equal. But the truth is that racism and prejudice, and white superiority still occurs in the US, therefore, the US isn't a country of Equality. In fact, many countries around the Earth are still having issues with racism and group superiority. Those are the content that I have learnt over the past two lessons. For me, although I feel that there are some differences between the East Asians and the Western culture, I feel that there are a lot of similarities between the different cultures. For example, Americans emphasizes on progress, and Asians also yearns for progression. Also, the ideals of collectivism of the Asian cultures are disappearing and got taken over by the US individualism.  On the other hand, there are a lot of differences between the two cultures though, for example marriage, the Chinese hopes a marriage to be life long, and the relationship between the male and the female must be firm before marriage. In US, a marriage is more sort of about loving, and there is no responsibility to carry and a marriage can take place if they love each other. Also, the Chinese are much more relationship-oriented as compared to Americans, the Chinese believes that by maintaining a good relationship with work partners is more important than completion of the work itself, while the Americans will take completion of their tasks as priority. Surely there are lots of differences between American culture and Asian culture (that's why we take the elective), but at the same time, the cultural differences don't seem great in some aspect. Maybe that's due to the product of globalization, or maybe the culture may be just the same from the start. Who knows?

Mr Kaplus also talked about Google company, a company representing the American society. Deep in the silicon valley, we can see alot of things different about different companies. For example Google comparing to Apple, as we all know, google is exceptionally generous at providing it's employees with lots of great facilities, like free food, gym etc. But may I ask what's the point that Google is doing all this. The company could have just save up the money and invest it in its services, or marketing, etc. This actually brings back us to one of the core American values: Work hard, play hard. google believed that by allowing it's employees to enjoy themselves with the facilities provided to them,they will do better in their work when they are back to work. Also, Google allows for their employees to think up of something else other than their normal project. This allowed for innovation to happen, and alot of google services actually happened from that little thoughts of the employees.

I think the elective has been a really fun and enriching one, usually for IHE lessons like history, we only focus on the past, but CDE enables us to focus on current issues, and to face the future. Culture is the main part of CDE, and culture is what we are learning. Many people thinks that Culture belongs to history, but culture is actually present tense. As we looked into the culture, we can see many issues, or problems related to culture. I expect to learn about cultural differences between the Chinese multi-ethnic society and the US society. Also, I want to learn about the differences between Chinese socialism and the US political system. I am looking forward to learn alot of new information and differences. between the cultures, in many different ways, whether political,economical and historical.