Thursday, November 29, 2007

China Makes, The World Takes

Interesting magazine article by James Fallow about manufacturing in China!

Highlights...

“Happy with crappy...”

The Chinese factories can respond more quickly, and not simply because of 12-hour workdays. “Anyplace else, you’d have to import different raw materials and components,” Casey told me. “Here, you’ve got nine different suppliers within a mile, and they can bring a sample over that afternoon. People think China is cheap, but really, it’s fast.” Moreover, the Chinese factories use more human labor, and fewer expensive robots or assembly machines, than their counterparts in rich countries. “People are the most adaptable machines,” an American industrial designer who works in China told me. “Machines need to be reprogrammed. You can have people doing something entirely different next week.”

At the moment, most jobs I’ve seen the young women in the factories perform have not been “taken” from America, because in America these assembly-type tasks would be done by machines.

But the Chinese goal is, of course, to build toward something more lucrative. Many people I have spoken with say that the climb will be slow for Chinese industries, because they have so far to go in bringing their design, management, and branding efforts up to world standards. “Think about it—global companies are full of CEOs and executives from India, but very few Chinese,” Dominic Barton, the chairman of Mc­Kinsey’s Asia Pacific practice, told me. The main reason, he said, is China’s limited pool of executives with adequate foreign-language skills and experience working abroad. Andy Switky, the managing director–Asia Pacific for the famed California design firm IDEO, described a frequent Chinese outlook toward quality control as “happy with crappy.” This makes it hard for them to move beyond the local, low-value market. “Even now in China, most people don’t have an iPod or a notebook computer,” the manager of a Taiwanese-owned audio-device factory told me. “So it’s harder for them to think up improvements, or even tell a good one from a bad one.” These and other factors may slow China’s progress. But that’s a feeble basis for American hopes.



Monday, November 26, 2007

Want A Prestigious Job?

The 2007 "Most Prestigious Occupations" poll measured the public perceptions of 23 professions.

Participants were asked to rank these professions as having "very great prestige," "considerable prestige," "some prestige," or "hardly any prestige at all." They could also opt not to rank them or say they weren't sure.

Sixty-one percent of adults consider firefighters to have "very great prestige," making this occupation the most prestigious on the list.

Five other occupations were ranked as having "very great prestige" by over 50 percent of the adults surveyed: Scientists and teachers are considered very prestigious by 54 percent of adults, followed by doctors and military officers, who earn the prestige of 52 percent of Americans, and nurses, whom half of all adults consider very prestigious.

Among the least prestigious occupations are real estate brokers, actors and bankers. Only 5 percent of survey participants ranked real estate brokers as very prestigious; 9 percent gave actors this label, followed by 10 percent for bankers.

Accountants, entertainers, stockbrokers, union leaders, journalists, business executives and athletes all also ranked low on the list: Less than 20 percent of adults consider any of the aforementioned occupations to have "very great prestige."

Consequently, five occupations are perceived to have "hardly any prestige at all" by at least a quarter of adults: stockbrokers (25 percent), union leaders (30 percent), entertainers (31 percent), real estate brokers (34 percent) and actors (38 percent).


Saturday, November 24, 2007

Chinese Graduates Look for Jobs...

This is a photo from a recent job fair for college graduates in China...
China has been under great pressure as the number of college graduates keeps surging. According to statistics, 5.59 million students will graduate from higher education institutions in 2008,an increase of 640,000 over this year. About 30 percent or 1.4 million college graduates failed to find a job on graduation in 2007.


Tuesday, November 20, 2007

FREE Knowledge Management Tools

A great new 94 page FREE guide is available online which offers an exciting array of knowledge management tools.
You just CAN'T pass this up!

Highly recommended!!!!!

Monday, November 5, 2007

Teambuilding

A great article from Yahoo News about team building!

Some key ideas...

If you have a bunch of jerks, your brand is going to be a jerk," said Tim Sanders, former leadership coach at Yahoo Inc. and author of "The Likeability Factor."

Kris Thompson, vice president of human resources at Lindblad, said, "You can teach people any technical skill, but you can't teach them how to be a kindhearted, generous-minded person with an open spirit."

At KaBoom, a nonprofit that builds playgrounds, CEO Darell Hammond started thinking about who left and why, then focused on the characteristics of workers who stayed. The list of traits: Can do, will do, team fit, damn quick and damn smart.


Hammond said he isn't afraid of scaring people off, since the best candidates "are constantly looking at themselves to excel, not just cross the finish line, but blow through the finish line."


When all 90 of the people on his staff meet that criteria, he said, "It's incredible. If you have 89 who do and one who doesn't — it's painful."




Saturday, November 3, 2007

China is Reducing Costs Too!

You may think that China is mainly a source of cheap labor. While it is true that China DOES have cheap labor, it is also true that China is changing the way business is done... particularly with respect to introducing cost innovations that extend far beyond cheap labor, driving down costs for the mass market together with excellent execution with the "three faces" of cost innovation (offering high technology at low cost, a near-impossible range of choice, and "speciality products" at volume prices).

A new book, Dragons at Your Door: How Chinese Cost Innovation Is Disrupting Global Competition, by Ming Zeng and Peter Williamson, makes the case that perhaps the largest 200 Chinese corporations are doing something far more important than merely offering cheap labor. They are introducing cost innovations that could truly change the way business is done everywhere!

You might want to have a look... to fully understand global competitive forces in the 21st Century.