Did I get my boss fired?
Inside the chaos and ethical quagmire of working in Beijing but reporting to a boss overseas
I was recently asked how I ‘survived’ as the only foreigner in management in China. I chuckled a bit. The intimation was that Chinese companies are known as grueling places, and as a non-native speaker of Chinese of course I would have struggles. Adapting to and excelling at life in the Chinese office was relatively easy once I learned how companies were structured, how decisions were made, and how to make enough friends that I had all the information I needed to be effective.
No, this was nowhere near the greatest challenge I faced.
On two occasions, I worked for Chinese firms in the China HQ but I reported up to a foreigner hired outside of China. I worked on what we called the ‘local’ team, but I was the team’s representative to HQ. In both situations, I developed a more advanced understanding of the business approach and company culture. I was able to cultivate stronger relationships with critical partners, access more relevant and timely information, and become deeply ingrained in the decision-making apparatus. I acted as the de facto leader of the business unit, while needing to balance the wishes of my boss against what was in the best interest of the team.
How did I get into such a quagmire? How did I avoid land mines? How did I survive the impossible task of knowing more than my boss while still progressing in the organization?1
Last Minute Surprise
It was never supposed to be like this. I am not that much of a masochist.
In one case, two days before I was supposed to start a new job, I got a call from the COO. She hired me to be her Chief of Staff, but she had news. One of the managers on the team—someone who had been with the company from when they were a young hatchling—was leaving. I would take over her position as head of the China-branch of a team that was led by someone based in the US. She congratulated me that this would be a great role. It didn’t feel like good news. This was not the position I signed up for.
I kind of had a choice. I could choose not to accept the job and go back to living on a tourist visa making visa runs every few months. I had invested over four months on the job, from the interviews, to flying to the US to get a criminal background check, to the visa paperwork. How bad could it be?
My new boss in the US had never met me, was never part of my interview process, and for all we know she might have thought I was an idiot. On our first zoom call, we laughed about the situation. It was as awkward for her as it would be for me, but we hoped we could build up enough trust that it would make sense. There was also, she said, one last complication. The company didn’t plan to tell the manager’s team that I would take over until a few days before her last day. I would have to learn her job, build relationships with the team and other stakeholders, while not having any formal responsibility.
Last minute surprises no longer phase me in my experience working in China. If something is presented as something, I know it will somehow change.
At another firm, I was the first person hired for a regional team. To prepare for our fast advance into the region, the company recruited more talent hoping we would meld seamlessly. One hire had worked at another Chinese company in the region. She joined under the impression she would have a large charge and her own team. When she found out she was reporting to me, she was flustered. I felt her pain. I tried my best to give her comfort, but she left within a month.
Eventually, they hired the head of the region from one of our competitors. I was told that I would report to him. When we first spoke, he told me his values and goals, but he suggested that I could manage most of the day-to-day responsibilities. This felt like a bad harbinger.
Talent Problem
Before I get too far, I want to make a special comment on hiring in China that I think both is at the root of some of the troubles and the one thing I would fix, if I was allowed to have a say.
Talent Acquisition is not an advanced craft in China, especially at consumer tech firms. Companies hire either through campus or social recruitment. Campus hires are fresh grads that become the workhorses of an organization. It is here that they learn that job titles and what you do are never the same thing. Employees are expected to be generalists, capable of learning a broad array of skills that might be useful to the company.
Social hires typically are looking for some kind of upward mobility, often coming from peer companies but less important positions or lower rung companies looking to make it to the majors.
On occasion, a company will aggressively hunt people with specific experience at certain firms, believing that they could bring over relationships or resources that their firm is sorely missing. Though when contracted, the expectation for headhunted candidates is implicit but widely understood: you need to bring resources to the new company or find yourself managed out.
The employee factory is lubricated by clear employee level systems that set transparent compensation structures with regular performance review. Even though employees jump around teams and units with relative ease, the only thing defining them would be their employee grade. External titles might exaggerate one’s position, but it would never lead to a change in compensation. (There is some equivalence to Western Big Tech, but I reckon the Chinese system is more severe.)
In going overseas, Chinese firms adapt this logic and understanding of talent to new markets. This, of course, leads to various problems.
It is common for Chinese firms to put out vague job descriptions, confusing potential applicants and leading to few high-quality candidates. The goal is to hire generalists capable of adapting to the company with the same flexibility as new graduates in China. Overseas employees demand greater structure and a clear career progression in joining a new firm, something not easily found in the job description or the early interviews.
On the other hand, Chinese firms might aggressively recruit candidates directly or through headhunters, focusing on individuals from fancy peer institutions with perceived ‘resources’ that they can bring to the new company. If someone can help them jump start their business in the market or improve their credibility, it is quite enticing to a company trying to go 0 to 100 in only a few months. Indeed, this is often why most Chinese Big Tech care so much about people with pedigree, but like with social hires in China, tech firms quickly sour on individuals that don’t perform.
To lure in either generalists or targeted hires, Chinese firms have difficulty putting together appropriate compensation packages that would make sense in the local market. It is typical for compensation levels to be standardized against Chinese pay levels, which usually are uncompetitive in certain markets. (The company worries about upsetting its domestic staff.) This tends to bring in less capable talent and lead to poorer results.
In other situations, pay is unstandardized, based purely on the previous salary of the individual with something like a 10-20% raise. This leads to different individuals in the same employee level receiving vastly different salaries. This second way is great for hiring, it leads to huge problems as far as retention leveling.
This haphazard approach to hiring—while possible in a market like China where everyone knows companies by name and are willing to deal with inconveniences—is problematic in overseas markets. It created situations like mine, where I was hired with one idea in mind, but then given to a different boss as situations changed. The inefficiency in China would be smoothed over in short order. If I couldn’t hack it, I would be gone.
But this was far more troublesome in overseas markets, especially possibly soiling the pot for future employees, forcing firms to increase salaries even more to lure talent. Poor decisions by one firm would create problems for other competitors. The talent problem was, in my view, the source of all calamities.
Wolves & Sheep
In an early piece, I made a reference to wolves in the office. This derives from the idea of wolf warriors, the vision of bold and effective Chinese experts demonstrating tough resolve. It was most famously used to describe diplomats and spokespeople. It also came to describe the attitude of aggressive consumer tech managers looking to make a name for themselves.
If there is one thing that the US and China are most alike, it is a pugnacious patriotism that has led to an abundance of militaristic metaphors that consume daily life. In the US, jingoism cross-pollinates with sports to produce a macho vocabulary filled with bravado, reinforced by nearly thirty years of constant conflict on the news. It defines our sense of strength.
China’s language is more a projection of a future as memories of its last conflict have begun to fade away. War metaphors have crossed with video game speak and achieved their most noteworthy expression in the tech companies that for a time were the heart of China’s economic life.
As we prepared to fight off the evil ByteDance, our company set up a war room with screens projecting the daily performance and the goal we had set for the quarter that we felt would vanquish our opponent. Our mascot, an animated dinosaur, was dressed in fatigues carrying ammunition for the battle. The American team—when they saw pictures of how a children’s peaceful guide to learning English was transfixed into a belligerent aggressor—yelped in shock.
The pent-up energy, the pent-up desire to win is focused on the battlefield of internet companies. China’s most cunning and creative talent—short or scrawny, fat or bespectacled—would never be the ones to lead armies into faraway lands. No, no. They would instead lead engineers and finance professionals, marketers and operations experts in an attempt to win over consumers and achieve wealth. To win, the employees must give total and unrelenting commitment to the firm. They needed to work 996.
This culture of intense competitiveness began to shift as industries stopped growing at breakneck speed. Attention turned inward. It was a battle for authority, a battle of fiefdoms. It was an attempt to demonstrate that only your team was capable to solve the company’s biggest challenges. It created a nasty competitive world in which those that succeeded did so by promising the firm that they would do more with less—less money, less resources, less support. It became what we know now as 内卷 neijuan, involution.
They became wolves. They were renegades, like Wu Jing, willing to do what it takes to win, especially if it meant displacing someone else.
One of the first projects I worked on in tech was the integration of a third-party CRM system. It had been a coup for my boss. She had argued that out of the box solutions would provide our company with an immediate ability to improve communication. The leadership greenlit the project, but where the real work would be implemented, at the middle level, there was far from alignment.
The project was in stasis because the third party didn’t have an integration engineer that spoke Chinese. Even so, the engineering team was suspect, feeling jilted that the company didn’t trust them to build an in-house tool. Other teams wanted full control of the project to assure that they could achieve their own goals, fairness and policy be damned.
It took a massive amount of will and charm just to get the integration set up. Then, the product team pulled back, not providing access to the kind of bespoke data that would allow personalized messages. We needed to manually add data fields, painstakingly uploading information and triple checking. The result was very positive, demonstrating the ability to create targeted performance incentives.
Other teams began to drool with envy, but they became upset by the sheer legal restrictions of the software. One team demanded that we prevent recipients from unsubscribing, as they felt it would help them achieve their goals, ignoring legal’s demand. When they didn’t get their way, they worked with the engineering team to build a parallel system to replace the one we had bought at great expense.
We were constantly challenged on all directions. It was a question about power and control and not what was in the best interest of the company. (The best interest was probably to reduce supply significantly because most of our problems related to oversupply that led to low optimization, but I digress.)
Then they came in for the kill. They called an emergency meeting with the COO during the middle of the day while my boss was asleep. She ruled in their favor, saying that they had a compelling reason to take over the use of the CRM system while having our team work, essentially, as their assistants.
The next day, I woke up to a message from my boss in shock. “How could this happen?” she asked. My boss said that we are the same team, don’t they see that?
If you aren’t in the room, if you aren’t in Beijing, if you don’t have the relationships and the chits necessary, you are going to lose. It is a zero-sum world. Either they win or we do, and they won’t allow us to win.
Culture Clash
Typically, the largest cleavage became what I call the Know the Market v. Know the Business dilemma. The overseas teams will claim that their superior understanding of the market meant that they should take a lead on initiatives. The China team felt that it was their product, and they understand the nuances of the business. Thus, only China could lead.
To respond, the local teams would beg to be taught the logic of the product, but this is where there was a massive cultural chasm that was hard to fill. I have previously brought up Erin Meyer’s work on the Culture Map, but it is important to note how the two sides often talked past each other. Each side had a different understanding of how to train and teach. Their expectations were perpetually misaligned.
Take the word: consumer insights. If you ask a Chinese leader, their ‘bare minimum’ expectation of the local team would be that they provide consumer insights. The other day I was on a call where someone specifically asked this. Couldn’t the local team provide consumer insights?
I explained the loaded nature of that term. It means many things to many people. The first instinct of a Westerner is that they need to reach out to a user research agency to perform a Popperian scientific study that could be falsifiable. No, that is not what we meant, the Chinese team would say.
Can you do it without spending money? The local team would carefully think through a google form that would have all the right questions, and perhaps they would appeal for a small prize for people who participate in the survey as they know it would increase respondents. It would take two or three weeks to put it all together and produce a report. They would offer caveats upon caveats that it wasn’t scientific. This is too slow, the Chinese team would say.
Why don’t you tell me exactly how you want something, and I can give it to you, the local team would retort. That is why I hired you, would be the response.
Imagine the incredible amount of frustration that builds up on both sides because of miscommunication. Trust evaporates over a single project. Execution slows down. Each side becomes resentful until they begin to no longer take the other side into consideration when working on a project.
In every organization I worked at, Chinese teams resent for overseas staff increased over time until they became the target of all the problems. Rumors would spread about how much they earned, or how much better their benefits were. They don’t work our hours. They don’t know our product. They are not like us. Or worse, we need to get rid of them.
The only solution I found was to force each side to concede that miscommunication would happen and therefore to implore people to over-communicate. This was made worse when we spoke in English, at times the second language for everyone except for me. I recommended that in speaking with colleagues they shouldn’t only say what they wanted but how they wanted it and examples of what it should look like.
The Chinese side usually buckled first, finding such level of detail too inefficient to provide. But the overseas teams also found it intrusive. No one wanted to put in the extra work.
Two Jobs
As the two sides began to pull further apart, I realized that only through sheer will would I be able to keep the two units in the same universe. Each day I came into the office, I felt that I had two jobs. The first was to charm the Chinese team into supporting the overseas team’s initiatives. The second was to train the local team into becoming self-sufficient.
My ‘day job’ followed the typical hours of a Chinese tech company that ran from 10:00 to 19:00. These nine hours were dedicated to building relationships in China and figuring out ways to leverage these connections for our team’s benefit.
Surrounding these hours on either side would be my night job, where I would take calls with the teams overseas, write detailed memos about what had happened during the day, or try and put out fires that happened half a world away. These jobs were all consuming by themselves, extending my workday to as much as 17 hours from the moment I got into my taxi in the morning until the moment I put my phone down at night.
I mastered my day job with greater results than I could my night job. Not only was it easier because I was in person, HQ was where things happened, allowing you to move quicker and take greater responsibility.
In one situation, I felt that the data analysis team was providing bad target recommendations. These were experienced data scientists that came from peer companies, but the targets didn’t pass the smell test. I was lucky that I inherited a small data team of three based in China, including a journeyman former finance professional who to date has some of the best instincts around data I have met. We agreed there was something problematic here, and so we went hunting to figure out how we could prove it to the company.
We plugged into the main databases and built out our own data visualization tools. We modeled out all the channels that we used for lead acquisition. We looked at things like time to close, time to return on investment. In every situation, we came to the same conclusion. All the leads were shit except one channel, referral. The culprit was obvious. Too many leads were impossible to clear, leading to longer periods for completing and high churn. Referral performed the best because we essentially outsourced the problem of keeping the leads warm to interested third parties.
But I couldn’t blame the sales team and their powerful leader. She was too insulated. I began a quiet project that gained the cooperation of product and engineering teams to boost referral and turn off other channels without anyone noticing. When we improved our sales rate 200% with a 60% decrease in leads, we had proven the data analysis team wrong.
I kept my boss up to date as much as I could, but it was rather complicated for me to explain why we couldn’t attack the sales team leader. There was a level of politics and tact that was too hard to explain. I found myself pocketing information more and more, believing that I was doing something for the best interest of the team.
My night job was always more challenging. Any real impact local team wanted to make required someone in China to help flip a switch. This was rather inefficient and often demoralizing for the local team. I needed to do something drastic and a little crazy. I needed to train the local team to the extent that they could make independent decisions and make an impact with few to no resources from China. To get there, I needed to not just give them information but the tactics, the logic, the comprehension of how to achieve the task at hand, often pushing the team to completely rethink what they thought about the job and the industry.
I had been at the company for only a few months. I was just figuring things out myself. I went into overdrive, trying to reverse-engineer as much as I could about why we did things and how it worked. I spent hours with various teams, especially old hands that had been at the company over four years. I sifted through the data dump and then edited down what to share. I broke up the training process into phases—my years in education served a purpose— and wrote out presentations to share concepts.
Each night, I held class from 11pm to midnight. I spoke with certainty and answered questions exhaustively. I shared how Chinese firms thought about success. I gave precise advice about how to test things in a cheap and efficient manner, to learn from the test, and then to expand our actions to cover the whole territory. I gave preview of what would come if we did things in this way. I explained what we were doing had never been done before. I rallied them to the cause. If we learned this material, we would do something that no local team for a Chinese firm had ever achieved. We would become independent and the most capable local team in the company.
It paid off. Within three months, the team was operating at full gear. Through my position in China, I was able to negotiate control over the budget and how to share responsibility with China based teams. We built collaboration mechanisms and calls around smaller teams, and we pushed each small team to become goal oriented by competing against each other. We overachieved our targets.
Only one thing, I didn’t sound like a deputy.
Managing Up
In both situations, I kept near daily communication with my boss. If we didn’t have a call scheduled or we couldn’t do one on short notice, I would write up a long, protracted memo covering almost everything that happened that day.
Too many things usually would happen. Entire initiatives would be thrown out during the day, meaning we needed to stop something we were working on immediately. Compliance team might have a problem with our paperwork, and I spent an entire day reviewing records to explain the situation. Finance might come to me to ask that we slash our budget, and I would need to confirm the preliminary cuts that I had in mind. Or HR might come and ask for the number of new roles we wanted and by when we needed them filled, as well as the logic for why we needed certain roles. Then there were the new strategic orders from the company, handed down in a Chinese language meeting with me as the team representative.
This was the daily grind of being in Beijing.
The hardest part, though, was how to communicate disappointment. There I would be in a meeting being picked on by the leadership for why our team was underperforming, why the numbers were going in the wrong direction, why I hadn’t predicted this. They asked me what our team was going to do about it. I could only say I would check in with the boss so often before I began to look weak.
These often were accompanied by rumors. A reorganization is coming. The company is thinking to get rid of a unit and reprioritize. My boss was on the chopping block.
And lastly, as I ingratiated myself to the teams in China, they shared their true feelings. They felt threatened by the local team, believing that if they did a good job to train the local team they would be out of a job. They began to become less compliant, less invested. I knew too much.
My skip managers felt that I was culturally better to bring my bosses up to speed, but it was never clear if I should share not only the bad news but also the complex sociology of life in the company. I became conflicted on what to say.
When I relayed the level of anger that leadership had toward our performance, I received push back. My bosses couldn’t believe that we would be chewed out over not making progress in such short order. They had never worked in Beijing.
I began to pocket information. Things that felt extraneous or complicated to explain. I began to frame things for my bosses in a way that let them know what they had to do and not necessarily the entire drama of what was going on in China. As I realized this made things easier, I began to pocket other information. Initiatives the company was launching that wouldn’t impact the local team’s life. This included my alternative bets, my side projects geared at saving the team if our local work didn’t pan out.
I didn’t act like a deputy.
Making Enemies
You can’t operate at the intersection of two teams with two completely different attitudes toward work and life without making a few enemies. Especially when the stakes for performance are so high.
It was more frequent to form enemies in China than it was overseas. This was, of course, the nature of a highly competitive and cutthroat environment. The only real check on aggression was the strength of the senior leaders. If they allowed wolves to run wild, it was anarchy. If they required strict discipline, they would bite the heads off people that fell out of line. When I worked at a firm with a relatively pliant leader, the knives were out each day.
I avoided most conflict simply by trying to be of service to the other teams. I would do extra favors to use as chits to make me less likely the target of someone’s blood lust. But sometimes I would be thrown into battle, occasionally at the behest of my boss.
For instance, I decided to make an enemy of the entire engineering, product and design teams on behalf of my boss’s desire to launch a new website. An agency had been found, a design made, and it was once again sitting around as no one had the ability to bring the project across the finish line. Young product managers, kids really, blocked our initiatives based on their personal distaste for the aesthetic. The design team tried to explain how the design didn’t match with some archaic design requirement. It was my boss’s top priority. I had to get it done.
So, I pressed. I grew impassioned. I brought in top brass. I shamed my counterparts. I pissed a lot of people off. We got our new website. I accepted responsibility for any decrease in terms of conversion rate. I already had plans for how to improve it anyhow (see above). They stayed pissed at me for a while. Refusing to collaborate on other projects or asking their teams to slow roll progress.
But one thing I learned while building enemies in China is that everyone saw it as business, no one took it personally. The design director and I are still friends on WeChat. We sometimes joke about our epic fight. We moved on.
Angering folks on the overseas teams, though, was far more emotionally charged. This is of course because they didn’t see it as business is business. For them, criticism or challenge was a personal attack. It made it difficult to address the local team. I tried to be exceedingly careful with my language, but I also couldn’t sugarcoat it: the expectations for performance were very high.
We were working on a critical project that had millions of dollars of commitment from the company. It needed to be executed exceptionally well and we were on a tight timeline. I was receiving frequent scoldings in Beijing about the performance, and so we set up daily check-ins with the local team to carry this over the finish line. For two days, I asked the team for an update on performance and received a tepid response that they hadn’t heard back from our partners. I snapped. I said it was unacceptable and it would put the entire plan and project in jeopardy. Nothing I said was wrong and no threat was leveled, but the local team had never heard someone speak with such fortitude. They recoiled.
A few days later, a letter circulated asking for my dismissal or punishment. Out of a courtesy, someone from senior management told me that such a letter existed but that there wouldn’t be any investigation as no one thought I did anything problematic. If anything, the complaint had won me more points because it showed that I wasn’t timid as a leader.
But my boss grew angry. When we began, the first thing we discussed was how much the team culture mattered. It was his pet project. He wanted a culture built on mutual respect. He rather that we felt together as a unit and failed than succeed as individuals.
I loved the sentiment. It was never going to fly in China.
Success was the only way to have the freedom to build whatever culture you wanted. And it couldn’t wait, it had to happen at China Speed. China speed is needing to make an impact on your first week in the office. It is the idea that failures are tolerated so long as you have another bet ready to launch (or better yet already ran it in parallel). China speed is not resting because if you do, you became prey for wolves.
I had made the one enemy I couldn’t afford to make.
Forced Choice
As the stresses and pressure to perform at a high level across both teams grew, I began to become resentful as well. I felt bitter at my bosses with their better work life balance and great compensation. I sneered at the constant flux and lack of foresight from Chinese teams that seemed to get us in more trouble than not.
I didn’t like how it felt. I wanted out.
I saw only three options. The first was to put my entire faith in local team and move to local. It would mean a slower life with lower ceiling. The other was to demand a new position reporting only to someone in China. I would confront the normal stresses and instability of life in China, but I could be a wolf and didn’t need to work cross-culturally. The last was to quit.
I had built up enough credits in both situations that I could make a request to join a new team. It was a testament to my ability to impress the powers in Beijing even only a half a year after starting.
In the first situation, I asked to be sent to local to work away from HQ. The company was open to it, but with industry headwinds, I was told to hold still for as long as possible. I eventually found an opportunity outside. I left.
When I left, I had a going away party with the small team in China. I tried to give a speech, but I couldn’t. I just cried. I don’t know if I was reflecting on how much burden I wore over those months. Or maybe I felt bad about leaving the team to fend for themselves.
In the other situation, my skip manager asked me to be patient. He said there might be a new project, one more ambitious and in some ways a better fit with a clearer reporting structure. It would be a mini promotion of sorts. I would have the same role as my current boss but for a different region. He did warn me, though. If I took this new position, I had a very tight window to be amazing. Management’s preferences was to hire someone with deep industry experience that could demonstrate they were serious. The current situation might repeat itself.
I waited for it and when it was finally offered, I took it. It was a race to move faster than the hiring process. I felt I could run. I also felt, quite honestly, that this was the best for my boss.
I was not the easiest employee. I was ambitious. I was assertive. It must have challenged my bosses to manage me. I felt it was unfair to them. They didn’t pick me as their deputy. They were stuck with me. Leaving gave my bosses a chance to establish their leadership. It gave me a chance to focus on my career.
Did I get my boss fired?
In both situations, my boss left before I did. In the first, she quit, though I imagine it was somewhat mutual as both sides had bad blood. The second was less consensual.
After less than a month working in my new role, I was told by my skip manager that I needed to go back to my old team to take over for my boss that was being let go. I didn’t return as a hero. To reassert authority, my old boss soiled my reputation, forcing me to break the ice with those that rejoiced in my departure. It was a different challenge, and after some growing pains things improved, somewhat.
I think about these experiences a lot. I play each major decision over in my head, wondering if there was something I could have done that would have prevented this scenario from happening. What if I had played dumb? What If I let the wolves run wild? Would that have been a better situation for everyone involved? Or am I feigning humility even now? Maybe I wanted their job. I knew I was more determined, more capable. Did I contribute to the impossible rift between my boss and their boss that led to their departures?
I don’t know. I didn’t choose to be in such an impossible situation. We had a job to do. I was going to do it. If not for my own sake than for the people on our team. I wanted them to be tougher. I wanted them to demand more of themselves. I wanted to teach them how to survive so that they could outlast reorganizations and layoffs. I wanted to teach them how to win at the Chinese tech game.
I guess I needed to muddy the waters.
I don’t regret the experiences. I learned a lot. Not just about how Chinese companies operate, but also how to motivate teams of different cultural backgrounds. I learned how to bridge cultures. I learned how to be a leader. I learned that I had an indefatigable thirst for work.
I learned to survive chaos.
Postscript
A more charitable reading of my experience might concentrate on me as the leader that made all of these decisions. I have yet to meet a foreign manager at a Chinese tech firm that has a similar track record bridging the divide between China and overseas. I have implied this in the past, and it is indeed “my story” in trying to declare myself an expert on Chinese tech.
But it wouldn’t be the whole story. It is why I have given you this alternative angle with a less sympathetic version. It demonstrates the ways in which I adapted to the world I lived in. It provides more of the inner turmoil that I faced as I made the decisions I made. And in some ways it turns me into a tragic character, at the mercy of a system that couldn’t change.
My feeling toward Chinese internationalization projects is mixed. For brief moments when I could coalesce enough authority and resources, we demonstrated that empowering local teams with actual power to become independent was possible. We did not need to rely on Chinese managers. Local managers could be incubated to become as good as what we found in China (or good enough to increase our overall efficiency).
But just as quickly, the situation could destabilize, my relationship with my boss sour, or the prioritization from China shift. Indeed, there was never a long enough horizon for local teams to be successful before the assumption was that all power needed to devolve back to China to assure effective attainment of objectives.
I suppose this is why firms like Temu eschew from hiring overseas teams. Afraid that it would create the kind of culture clash mentioned above. Maybe they are right, but they are mistaken that it will allow any real and deep entry into markets. At a certain point, you can’t work nights anymore, or find enough bodies willing to do the same. You will make mistakes. At a certain point, you need a local team that can hasten market penetration.
ByteDance remains the most capable in this regard. But I also know that despite all their efforts to hire away talent from big tech, these leaders have discovered how woefully unprepared they are for the battle that is working at a Chinese tech. It isn’t on the brochure.
Not so long ago, I was offered a job for another Chinese firm where they told me that they had not yet hired the CEO of this new business unit. I would report to him or her once they were hired. I respectfully declined. The situation sounded too familiar.
Are Chinese firms willing to change how they think about talent? Can they hire leaders, give them the proper training to be successful, and then space to be effective? Can they rewire how they think about themselves?
I decided not to name the companies or the people in this post. First, I don’t think the drama is about them and I don’t want to call attention to individual people. It is about fast growing Chinese firms getting into trouble by going abroad. And in some ways how my existence challenged this even more, creating an opportunity for scaling that didn’t exist before. There are very few people that I disliked in my time working, even the wolves. I grew to respect them and they me. I think it isn’t worth shaming anyone openly. I also want the most likely villain of the story to be me. I could see this as a ‘fair’ reading of