Here is a short interview with David Arkless a government and regulatory executive from Manpower. He is discussing Manpower's joint venture with the Chinese government.

The Q&A that particularly intrigues me is as follows:

"WM: What’s the most surprising thing about modern Chinese capitalism?

Arkless: They’re embracing it, and it’s changing quickly. There are still some old characteristics. They wonder why we work on such short horizons when their economy has been running for 5,000 years. The cities have become dynamic and fast-moving. They’ve got the long-term view and the desire to get things running in the short term very quickly. They still call it a socialist economy, but it’s behaving like an open one."

This is precisely the issue that Manpower and others in this position need to be careful about when entering significantly different marketplaces based on different economic models and mindsets.

Having lived and worked (as the head of HR) in a post-communist country (Czech Republic) the average age of our workforce was approximately 26. That meant the workforce had lived half of their lives under communism. (They were in their early teens during the Velvet Revolution.) Their parents lived their lives under communism and the significant clamp down by the Soviets after 1968.)

All I can say is that an executive team who has only lived under freedom and democracy their whole lives will see the world and what's possible very differently. It was difficult to have empathy for a workforce whose DNA consisted of living (even half their lives under communism.) As execs coming from North American we lived a different life and would never be able to understand what that was like to live in a country where freedom was not an option.

One thing I wish we had done as an executive team is actually experienced a simulation of life under communism. We also should have been required to collectively study the history of the country we were living in. The debrief of all of that could have helped us understand the implications of the national culture as we created our corporate culture. Knowing the background of the nation and history of leadership in the country would have given us insight as to why there was no official word for "leadership" and the closest word loosely translated meant "supervision." It would have given insight to the behavior of a nation based on their mindsets not ours ala empathy.

Doing things like this could have helped us be better executives and helped us understand our workforce as we were asking them to change their thinking, their understanding of the world, the world in which they operated and worked. I am not sure what "cultural training" is like these days but hope that it includes more rigorous content than eye contact, body language and asking how to pass the salt without insulting the host. (It also should be more experientially based, occur on-sight and happen about 3-4 months into the assignment. In this way there is already some sense of the biases and issues and makes the "training" more relevant.")

As Mr. Arkless reminds us..."They are embracing it and it's changing quickly." It's important to honor and respect elements of the past so that moving into the future "quickly" is part of the natural progression.