Battling Shyness

I’m invariably surprised when, at employee training sessions or staff meetings, none of my Chinese employees ask questions.

Part of the reason, they tell me, is that schools don’t encourage students to ask questions – and certainly discourage them from interrupting teachers and professors.

This is very bad training for journalists, who have to ask questions and interrupt as part of their job descriptions.

There’s nothing worse than a journalist at a press conference who fades into the background. They should be out there, collecting business cards, introducing themselves to everyone, asking questions, arranging follow-up interviews and otherwise working on developing their sources.

But if shyness is bad for journalists, it’s murder on sales people.

Recently, a friend of mine needed to hire a business development person to find leads and schedule interviews with prospects, and he specifically wanted a young college student for the job.

To test for shyness, he had the candidates come all at the same time, to a group interview, to see how they acted when they needed to compete for attention.

In addition, he asked me to come in to serve as a potential customer. I was, in fact, a potential customer for his services – Carlo Wolff is a partner at Wolff & Tan, a consulting company that helps small businesses become more organized and profitable.

We conducted mock telephone calls in which I played the part of myself, and one job applicant after another pretended to call me and attempt to get through my sales resistance.

The experience was educational for the job applicants – they watched what the others were doing and saw what worked on me and what didn’t work.

It was also educational for me. I learned a lot about cold calling from watching Carlo run the job applicants through their paces.

Most of the applicants were local students, but one was from Singapore.

The difference between the Singaporean applicant and the others was dramatic. He was more outgoing, had a stronger presence, and also had some experience as well.

I talked to Wolff later about what he thought of the experience.

“Especially in this context, which is strongly culturally-directed, it was interesting to get people out of their comfort zone,” he said. “In a Western setting, this would have been easy. But here, it was a challenge for them.”

Next time, he said, he plans to push the applicants even further in the interview setting, and increase the stress level even more.

After all, sales is a high-stress field – candidates who cannot handle the pressure should be screened out as early as possible.

Next time I have a number of job applicants to interview I may well do the same thing. Call them all together into one room, and run a mock press conference. See who asks the most questions, who introduces himself and comes up to shake my hand, and looks me in the eyes, and gets my business card.

And the one who calls me up afterwards, and asks follow-up questions – that’s who will get the job.

The Holiday Spirit

Christmas is my all-time favorite holiday. I’m not alone, it’s popular with many people, whether or not they actually adhere to the Christian faith. In my family, with its blended background of faiths, we see Christmas as a symbol of what is holy in every child.

But, putting aside, the religious significance, the Christmas season has more stuff associated with it than any other holiday I know of.

Sure, the Fourth of July has fireworks, flags and picnics, and Thanksgiving has a big meal and a football game. New Year has the ball on Times Square and a big party at midnight and one song that most people only know a couple of lines of, anyway.

Chinese New Year is a pretty good holiday, too, with fireworks, red envelopes full of cash, gifts, and bright red decorations.

But Christmas is a whole industry. There’s the tree and the presents. The decorations. The proximity to New Year. Plus a million Christmas songs and carols, movies, cartoons, books and poems. You’ve got the Santa Claus legend with the sleigh and the reindeer and the elves and the costumes. The North Pole village, Rudolph and Frosty, the Grinch. There’s a Santa in every major mall and shopping center in the US and many countries around the globe – and now, in China as well.

It can be overwhelming for some, sure. People who are living alone, without friends or families, can feel even more isolated during the holidays.

And then there’s the spectre of consumerism and commercialism that haunts the holiday – almost as bad, in my opinion, as the spectre of self-righteous religiosity that can make those of other faiths feel uncomfortable and unwelcome.

But, on the whole, the Christmas season brings people together. I’m glad to see that the holiday is becoming more and more secular. The gifts, Santa Claus, many of the songs and movies, are not specifically religious. But even the secular aspects of this holiday are about family, about giving and sharing, about shared traditions.

Those of us who celebrate this season in all its trappings, whether as Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwaanza, or even simply as a secular New Year, are participating in a shared international event. Even more than the Olympics, Christmas reaches directly into homes and public gathering places.

Many countries have contributed to Christmas traditions, and there are regional variations on this holiday. The best holiday practices spread quickly, by word of mouth, from family to family, by businesses, and by the media.

As countries like China embrace globalization, they adapt this holiday and make it their own – and add their own touches.

You can track the pace of globalization through China by tracking the Santa Clauses and the decorations in public squares and the carols playing in the shopping centers.

Foreign firms are in the vanguard, with chain restaurants like KFC putting up holiday banners and playing holiday music.

But even Chinese stores, like the national supermarket chains, are playing Christmas music in a variety of languages. Most of the popular Christmas carols now have Chinese versions, and they sound as pretty as they do in the original.

Others may bemoan the secularization of Christmas. But, to me, a secular Christmas is an inclusive holiday that brings people together into one global family.

Given the choice between bonding over competitive, national-pride events like the Olympics, and shopping and eating centered holidays like Christmas, I’ll take the food and presents anytime.

All Roads Lead to China Blogs

As a journalist, I routinely hear complaints that the news industry is dominated by a few giant multinationals that determine the boundaries of public discourse. I also hear that the news industry is dying, as bloggers now do for free what the media used to do for money.

My personal position is that we’ve always had consolidation in the industry – as long as publishers existed, they’ve been growing bigger and merging with other publishers.

But we’ve always had competition. First the tabloids and the “yellow press,” mimeographed newsletters, radio and television, alternative newsweeklies, and now the Internet.

New companies will always spring up. Some will fail or be swallowed up. Others will remain small, serving a particular niche audience. Some will rise above their humble beginnings and join the ranks of media conglomerates.

I am enjoying watching the rise of the online news alternatives – the bulletin boards and forums that aggregate user-generated materials, the blogs and personal newsletters, the podcasts and videocasts.

One of my favorites is Fons Tuinstra’s China Herald. Disclosure: Fons is an old friend, and a member of my board of directors.

I subscribe to his blog on RSS (using Bloglines). One of the great things about reading his blog, and blogs like his, is that I don’t just find out what he’s thinking about on a particular day, but also what he’s reading.

Bloggers like to read other bloggers, and they link to them on their sites.

This week, for example, Fons linked to China Rises, a blog by Tim Johnson, the Beijing bureau chief for McClatchy Newspapers.

Tim has been collecting photos of overburdened trucks and bicycles. It’s a lovely introduction to the perils of transportation and logistics management in China.

In a recent blog post, Tim talks about having some furniture reupholstered – and seeing a sofa, several chests of drawers and two huge bookcases loaded on the back of a tricycle.

My other favorite blogs include All Roads Lead to China and the China Law Blog.

At the beginning, one of the main topics of conversation of bloggers was blogging. They wrote about their software problems, about how they agonized over which font to choose, and other administrative and technical details.

Interesting comments often got lost among the minutia.

Today, however, blogging software has become reasonably easy to use and standardized, and bloggers turn more of their attention to their topics of interest – rather than to their blogging process.

Sure, some blogs never catch on. Their writers either give up or keep the blog as a hobby, with a small group of diehard readers.

Other blogs catch on, get organized, get professional, get discliplined, and get focused. With readers come advertising dollars, and the bloggers can even hire staff and turn into what is starting to look like real news operations.

This has happened at Gawker Media in the U.S., for example.

English-language blogs don’t do as well in China simply because the audience is smaller – there are fewer Americans in China than, say, Americans in America. But blogs like The Shanghaiist, with its stable of regular contributors, looks like it might be getting there.

Do you have a blog about business in China? Email me, and I’ll add it to my personal blog list – and we might review it here on this site as well.