Le Temps Friday 30 November 2007 Careers

IATA’s innovative solution to preparing its executives for working in China Management: The association representing the air industry is training its Western and Eastern executives in pairs. Fabienne Bogadi

Western businesses dream about China. It is a vast market. Once there, however, the dream can turn into a nightmare. The misadventures of Tim Clissold, a young Briton in love with China, are famous. He invested half a billion dollars of American funds there and lost everything, despite the energy spent restructuring around twenty businesses bought as a joint venture. In his biography published in France a year ago*, he explains his failure was due to the weight of Chinese history, the different perception of time, the ambiguity of the language and the multitude of different rules and regulations which seem to have been invented to be ignored. It’s a representative experience of the cultural gap that exists between the East and the West.

How can the setbacks experienced by Tim Clissold be avoided when starting up a business there? In the context of the gap of mentalities, the training and preparation of executives seem to be key factors to success. The International Air Transport Association (IATA), whose activities in China have quadrupled in 4 years, is well aware of this. It has just launched, in partnership with the management and consultancy company Brimstone Consulting Group, an original intercultural training program for executives, entitled I-Lead. “There are several solutions for managing our placements in China”, explains

Guido Gianasso, vice president of the IATA Human Capital sector, who will present his model next week at the University of Geneva**. “But none of them seemed satisfactory to us. That’s why we chose a company solution”. You have to show respect and look for a common language and acceptable compromises for everyone concerned.

In brief, there are three options. The first possibility is to send an expatriate executive with the increased likelihood that, through ignorance, he will fail; the second is to employ a boss of Chinese origin on site but in this case, the risk may be a total loss of control of the situation; the third option, preferred by Western companies, is to employ a multicultural executive, a Chinese person from Taiwan or Hong Kong, or a Chinese person trained in the West, or even a Western person raised in the East and steeped in both cultures -- but these strong prospects are in great demand, and as a result are rare and not particularly loyal to their employer.

“We explored a fourth option. It consists of eliminating any intermediary, teaching our young Chinese as well as Western talents, to work together”, explains Gianasso. “It is a partnership

solution where we count on our own troops”.

The program head chooses around twenty strong prospects from different branches worldwide. They come from Geneva, Singapore, Montreal and Hong Kong. These “change agents” work in pairs, with a Western person and a Chinese person in each pair. There are four women among them this year. “We hope to encourage a common culture overtaking the divergences of each to form a multicultural philosophy belonging to our group”, expands Guido Gianasso. In the first step, these twenty people met in Beijing in October to attend a launch seminar there, organized by Giovanni Bisignani, the Director General and CEO of IATA, and with executive committee members present. The seminar concerns the company strategy and also includes training on the two cultures.

Next, each couple chose ten local talented personnel, who for their part attended a “cultural awareness” seminar. Currently, all of these young people work together on specific projects based on a theme -- for example, the environment. “But the aim is not so much the success of the projects as the intercultural sharing, the identification of future strong prospects, the development of leadership and especially the training of a culturally educated replacement on site, capable of working across the two cultures”, emphasizes Gianasso.

The experience seems all

the more interesting given that the lack of talented personnel constitutes an endemic problem in China. Its staggering growth since the start of the 1990s has as a result that the demand for a qualified workforce is much greater than the supply. This is at least the analysis of Winter Nie, professor of Operations and Service Management at IMD and a Chinese-American. “In China, young people are often very well trained. The country has no less than 500 million engineers”, she explains. “But those who have international experience or education are rare”. What is her advice in this context? To invest in young prospects, offer them career and development plans. And planning programs of succession.

However, the majority of observers agree that the success, in China, is possible for everyone. “There are some Westerners who manage very well without training. They have developed abilities enabling them to react positively whatever the context. It’s a combination of know-how and interpersonal skills, a mixture of sensitivity to the other person, flexibility and perseverance”, observes Gérald Béroud, founder and director of SinOptic, a company offering all sorts of services related to China, which includes courses and specialized seminars, specialized in accompaniment of delegations.

Winter Nie tells the same story. According to her, training or not, career plan or not, an open mind is a tool for success that is in

everybody’s reach. “When Westerners come to China, they tend to be arrogant, to use their own cultural framework to judge who will succeed. Personally, I would advise them to show respect and to look for a common language enabling to find an acceptable compromise for each person”. This is a simple matter of good sense. * Mr. China: A Memoir. Tim Clissold, HarperCollins, 2005, 272 pages ** Tuesday 4 December at 18:30h: “What’s new in leadership development”, Unimail, Geneva, info: karen.longden@hec.unige.ch