When I first came to the U.S. in 2000, with much surprise I found out that not everybody's nose is that big. People are nice, just like what we are in China.
The lesson is we are all biased by what we were exposed to. Americans could be even more as people are more self centric than the rest of world. As the biggest economic body and most influential democracy, Americans have great reasons to be self centric. The issue is people didn't realize they know less and less about the rest of world. Then they have a higher risk of being occupied by the "big nose" stereotypes. I can safely say people outside the U.S. know much more about Americans, not the vice versa. Example? Whenever I called my mom who still lives in a little village where she was born, she always had more global news than I did although the only communication channel for her is a TV. Why? Close to being a typical American, I seldom watch global news anymore, and even when I wanted to watch, there is simply not much to watch on TV anyway.
Now my client has won a significant contract in China, and needs to send a great team there for a few months. They have a lot of good reasons to be nervous - they don't know much about the country, it is their first customer in China, and they don't feel comfortable with certain ways their customer does business. Most team members are very experienced professionals and in their 50's or 60's. They have a lot of experience, they also have a lot of things embedded in their mind about China - its companies, people and the ways people do things over there.
My advice was simple: Leave everything you know behind and just go there figure out on your own. China has developed so much in the past 10 to 20 years, and a lot has changed since then. However, media's opinions in the U.S. haven't changed that much or that fast. So what we learned from the media could be 5 or even 10 years old. This means a generation behind given China's economic development clockspeed. Rather than being occupied with old and biased mindset, why not just go there with a fresh mind and find out on our own? Most likely things are neither as good nor as bad as we imagined. And indeed that's what they found out and now the project is well under way.
This applies to whatever we do with a different country, culture or people. We are all biased with all kinds of stereotypes, big or small. We rely much on other people or media's input which is mostly biased as well. Leaving our mind open and trying to test out on our own could be the best solution. That's why it is so important to just go there and meet with the people face to face. This doesn't mean we don't trust anything from any third party. It is just to remind us the risk that we could be importing other people's "big nose".
About the Author
Bob Liu, C.P.M., CPIM, is Managing Director of CSCS International. He is stationed in Silicon Valley and travels frequently to Greater China to help clients build their local supply chain organizations. Bob got his MBA in supply chain management, and has been managing global supply chains for over 10 years in the U.S. and China. He can be reached at bob.liu#ChinaSCservices.com (substitute # with @).
