Orders of Magnitude

While going through airport security in Sydney, Australia on my way to Shanghai, I finally got my membership in the 21st Century Travelers Club. My briefcase had to be sent through the x-ray machine three times because all of the adapters and cords for my electronic devices made it impossible to completely see through the bag.

I thought about that incident during a long walk through Pudong, a thriving suburb on the outskirts of Shanghai. If Pudong is the new China then there’s a lot to like—modern new high rises, gleaming office towers, enormous traffic lanes for bikes and those electric scooters that seem to be everywhere. But you have to multiply everything by at least a couple of orders of magnitude when you’re in China. For example, I had to walk for an hour before finding a place to buy a soda. Where does everybody go to shop for groceries?

All that time going nowhere fast gave me plenty of time to check out my surroundings, to look beyond the glossy veneer of a new suburbia and take a peek into the future.

As I passed a humongous new high-rise housing complex, replete with a high fence, security guards, and newly planted gardens, I looked up and noticed that almost every porch had clothes hanging to dry. Either the emerging upper class of Chinese society is being particularly energy conscious or they don’t have clothes dryers. I’m betting on the latter. And it seems like only a matter of time before “keeping up with the Joneses” injects even more uncertainty in world energy prices.

China’s road to the future is full of speed bumps, has no guardrail, and can’t be shut down for repairs because everybody’s driving over the speed limit twenty-four hours a day.

It holds an increasing portion of total global debt, produces the most manufactured goods, has the biggest population, holds the dubious distinction of having 16 of the top 20 most polluted cities in the world, and has to build a city twice the size of Houston, Texas every year just to accommodate the largest migration of people from rural areas to cities that has every occurred in the history of the planet.

I just hope China’s leaders know how to drive.

Leapfrogging With Humility

If you want to see how intent the Chinese are to be a major player on the world stage look no further than CELAP, the Chinese Executive Leadership Academy Pudong. Located just outside of Shanghai, CELAP was opened in early 2005 to provide training to senior government officials, executives of state-owned businesses, and military officers, and has already seen over 11,000 current and future leaders from across China pass through its doors.

The official theme for a conference that I recently attended there was Innovation, Transition, and Leadership. I think a more accurate title would have been Leapfrogging With Humility.

It seems like everyone in China is studying what really works in business and government, why it works, and how to put a uniquely Chinese spin on it. Their search starts in the developed countries of the West but, in reality, they don’t care where the ideas come from as long as they work. While the rest of the world is innovating around the edges to refine what’s already been proven, the Chinese are trying to create whole new models.

For example, what is leadership in a world where your primary interaction with employees is through e-mail, Skype, and a company wiki? When the number of nationalities, religions, and languages in your company rivals a United Nations summit? And where do you start when there is not a single book on leadership, among the thousands listed on Amazon.com, that is integrates the distinctly different leadership philosophies of East and West?

One of the most interesting presentations of the conference, by Dr. Xuezhu Bai, CELAP’s Chief Coordinator of International Courses, focused on just that question. The Australian-educated Bai attempted to create a “unified theory” of leadership, taking the teachings of eastern philosophy, represented by ancient texts such as the I-Ching, and relating them to the more scientific and mechanistic definitions of leadership derived primarily in the United States. Given the even mix of Chinese and English speakers in the room and the gulf separating our two cultures, we all probably understood about half of the material about half of the time. But one thing is for sure…globalization “on the ground” will be one of the great management challenges of our time.

And I wish I had a dollar for every time Dr. Bai and many of his Chinese colleagues during the conference declared how far behind they are compared to Western economies, technologies, and management development. They may be behind now but the gap is narrowing and I’m pretty sure they won’t slow down if it looks like the pace of progress in the West can’t keep up.

Competition is good. It forces the world’s current and future leaders to keep raising their game. This conference has convinced me that if there’s one characteristic that all future leaders will need to have, it’s the ability to think big and act small.